Puritans

"[the Puritans] were united by their opposition to and the persecution experienced from the Church of England...the removal to New England effected for the migrating Puritans that same lost. There was no persecution, no heretical church to oppose."

In this light the Puritans were no set of outstandingly righteous people. They weren't necessarily united by common spiritual beliefs, but were by the fact that they were targets for persecution in England because they were different from everybody else, yet not necessarily different in the same way. This created immense problems in trying to create their own cohesive society in the New World. Once the persecution was removed, they had nothing to bond over and thus they were uncertain as to how to act as a society and which direction they wanted to take their settlement. The result was a community which strict behavioral rules which were rooted in fear. I think the Puritans, after having experienced persecution, had a genuine fear of each other and how each individual would be received by the community as a whole. Relating to their belief of predestination, their strict society was set up so that each individual had to prove his placement, not that he/she was worth of their predetermined place in heaven (because they're already placed, their placement cannot be changed, as is the definition of "predetermined"), but they wanted to appear to their neighbors as they had been placed into the kingdom of heaven for fear that if they did not show this through their actions, their neighbors would judge them. Ultimately this society based on fear could never survive, because the focus was so much on the individual and his or her spiritual rank that they never considered it necessary to cooperate and interact with one another as a true community.