Protestant
From the word ‘protest’, Protestants are Christians who initially sought to reform, but who by the 1500s began to deny the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Protestants rejected the doctrine that the Pope was the divinely-appointed and infallible earthly head of the Christian church. They also rejected the authority of priests to forgive sins, believing God alone held this power. Protestants in general elevated the authority of the Bible above that of individual priests and other clerics. Members of the Protestant sects who settled in New England were in general a ‘hotter sort of Protestant,’ devoted to purging their faith practices and rituals they believed inappropriate or sinful. Such people earned the derisive term Puritans from less fervent contemporaries.