Arthur Miller's The Crucible is remembered as a play about naming names. It opened on Broadway in January 1953, when Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist hearings were destroying careers on unproven accusation, and Miller has always been open that the parallel was deliberate. What gets less attention is the church he built the whole machine inside.
The play's minister, Reverend Samuel Parris, was not invented. Salem Village had a real Parris, and the actual church book he kept survives, held today in a university library archive. It opens with a covenant "agreed upon and consented unto" on November 19, 1689, and it lists him plainly: "Samuel Parris, Pastor." That congregation is the direct ancestor of a church still standing today, and its own record names it what it was: Congregational.
That detail matters because it means The Crucible is not set in a vague, generic Puritan past. It is set inside a specific kind of church government, one where a gathered congregation examined its own members, extended and withdrew fellowship, and could turn accusation into expulsion without a bishop or a distant court to overrule it. The real church book even documents what happened after 1692, when members of Parris's own congregation turned on him for his conduct during the trials and forced a reckoning inside the same self-governing structure that had made the trials possible in the first place.
Miller was writing about 1950s America, not defending or attacking Congregational church polity as such. But the shape of the crisis he chose, a community judging its own from the inside with no outside authority to appeal to, was not a generic Puritan detail. It was the actual governing structure of a real Massachusetts church, and its own records are still there to check.