American Political Thought. Ken Kersch
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enforced by a legitimate governing authority, was to be truly free. Liberty, for Puritans, meant living by the commands of biblical (Christian) teaching under the authority of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Puritans practiced – indeed, helped pioneer – government by consent in the way they organized their churches. As explicated by Winthrop and John Wise, among others, Puritan churches – in contradistinction to both the Church of Rome and the Church of England – were voluntary associations of “visible saints,” organized by mutual consent through covenants. As such, Puritan church governance reflected proto-democratic instincts about self-government that foreshadow important elements of later democratic thought. In a plea for forbearance for his human foibles and errors, as well as a reminder of his high authority, Winthrop reminded those who had entrusted him with governing power that “It is yourselves who have called us to this office, and being called by you, we have our authority from God.” Given the organization of their churches, by the standards of their time – again, as compared with the organization of the Church of Rome and the Church of England – this allowed for considerable diversity. By the standards held by most in our own time, however, that diversity looks tightly circumscribed: it had sharp, and sometimes harshly (and even cruelly) enforced, limits.
These limits were perhaps most dramatically tested by the case of Roger Williams, a Puritan separatist critical of the decision of the Massachusetts Bay colony founders to retain their ties to the Church of England. Stubbornly hewing to his own inner light, Williams persistently antagonized his religious community, to the point where he was banished from the colony. Williams moved south, first founding the city of Providence (1636), and then securing a formal charter for the new colony of Rhode Island (Providence Plantations) (1644). Chafing at Massachusetts Bay’s Congregationalist structures and strictures, Williams became a Baptist.
In the Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644), Williams penned one of the first arguments in English (following some Dutch predecessors) for both religious toleration and the total separation of Church and State. Williams’s arguments for both were foundationally, if not exclusively, theological. Coerced or compelled faith, he argued, was not genuine faith. As such, it was contrary to Scripture. Persecution for alleged error made a travesty of the teachings of Jesus Christ (Williams called it “soul rape”). It was, moreover, a menace to civic peace. Williams additionally argued that the Bible itself had firmly distinguished the realms of Church and State. In uniting them, Massachusetts Bay had flouted the commands of Holy Scripture. The Bible, he elaborated, had commanded that worldly government should be secular. Being a good Christian and a good magistrate or citizen were separate matters. Any attempt to establish a purported “Christian Commonwealth” in this world would end by afflicting the faith, and the faithful: to the extent it got involved in worldly politics, the Church would find itself complicit in, and corrupted by, worldly politics. Williams championed the view, later enshrined in the US Constitution (Article VI, Cl. 3), that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”1
Williams’s arguments for toleration and the complete separation of government and religion evinced a profound concern for the claims of individual conscience. Williams considered an individual’s conscience man’s most valuable, God-given possession – and, indeed, responsibility. Williams’s arguments left a strong imprint on American political thought. Claims on behalf of the individual’s self-discerned inner moral light of conscience found a sustained life in what some have called the nation’s alternative “dissenting tradition,” which held obedience to conscience to be both a requirement of the soul and a pillar of political liberty. It was palpably in evidence, for instance, in Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay his taxes that supported an immoral war (the Mexican-American War, 1846–1848), and in Thoreau’s, and others’, refusal to lend any sustaining support for chattel slavery.
Many contemporary scholars have argued that Williams’s theological arguments on behalf of Church–State separation, which became rooted, if uneasily for some, in the United States, at least at the national level, underwrote the US’s exceptional religiosity. As compared with a secularizing Western Europe, where established churches ended up shouldering the blame for the decisions and behaviors of the worldly politicians with whom they had publicly and closely associated themselves, Church–State separation in the United States, such as it was, reinforced, it has been said, the purity of the Church. A separation, moreover, in which the state showed no favoritism toward any of the country’s competing religious sects – gradually adopted by all of the American states by the early nineteenth century – proved especially conducive to the liberty of conscience. Some have latterly argued, moreover, that non-establishment and the wide scope given for a multitude of competing religious sects spurred competition among churches to effectively meet the needs of their current and potential congregants, strengthening the churches, and promoting Christian evangelization.
New England’s Puritan churches were notable, and precedent-setting, exercises in self-government, offering clear models for secular political rule. Each church was independent of every other church. As its own independent, self-governing faith community, each church selected its own minister, who served at the congregation’s pleasure. (The congregational structure instituting self-government in ecclesiastical matters was codified in the Cambridge Platform of 1648.) While there were strong elements of what Alexis de Tocqueville later called “individualism” in these new departures, the colonial Puritan congregations were nevertheless intensely communal: the emphasis was on the collective spiritual, moral, and temporal needs of the group over and above those of the individuals who comprised it – an emphasis explicated in John Winthrop’s speech “Modell of Christian Charity” (1630), delivered shipboard during the Arbella’s Atlantic crossing. New England’s Puritans understood their communities as organic wholes: their individual members were the organs and limbs of a single human body, inextricably joined and sharing a common fate. Winthrop enjoined his flock on the Arbella that to “love one another with a pure heart fervently we must bear one another’s burdens, we must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren.” He called for common devotion to mercy and charity. Notably, Winthrop’s injunction to communal duty and care was directed toward the “private” institutions of “civil society” (here, churches), rather than toward the “public sphere” institutions of (secular) government. Concern for the needy was considered a matter of divine Christian obligation.
The Christian communions that formed churches made no claims to universal inclusion. The “people” with the authority to enter into the covenant organizing a church was a highly circumscribed class, in accord with the stringent purposes that had motivated the association in the first place. Full membership was limited to saints. And claims to sainthood required proof – visible evidence of having had a conversion experience, of being “Born Again.” A 1646 Massachusetts law mandated that all within a township attend its church. But only full members of the church were afforded governing privileges. In time, however, this orthodoxy began to clash with the more casual inclinations of others, who may not have been able to provide personal evidence of religious conversion.
As the Protestant theologians were often deeply learned men – educated, for instance, at England’s Cambridge University – their understandings of the proper government of churches were not fashioned from Christian sources alone. Puritan theologians in the colonies were also informed by ancient and modern texts of political philosophy, from Aristotle to (in time) John Locke. John Wise’s reflections on church governance, for example, drew upon Aristotle’s consideration of the virtues and debilities of rule by the one, the few, or the many (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy), and the possibility and potential of mixed political regimes. Wise was also persuaded by his near contemporary John Locke’s theories of government by consent, arising out of the state of nature. These understandings were disseminated in the American colonies not only in books and pamphlets, but also from the pulpit. As such, in their concern with questions of natural equality, the relationship of the individual to the community, the claims of conscience, of self-government, and significance of the individual’s voice in directing the affairs of the community – and, indeed, of political liberty – Puritan thought anticipated and informed colonial thinking concerning fundamental questions of (secular) American political