the Church’s purportedly un-scriptural ornate clerical vestments, smacked of popery (a pejorative that frequently recurs in colonial American thought). By not excluding the self-evidently wicked from their communion, the Church of England was courting the corruption of the spiritually pure, imperiling their immortal souls. If even its ministers were worldly sinners, it was said, what hope could the Anglican Church offer the humble parishioner?
The English Puritan John Field (1545–1588) had defined a church as “a company or congregation of the faithful called and gathered out of the world by the preaching of the Gospel, who following and embracing true religion, do in one unity of Spirit strengthen and comfort one another, daily growing and increasing in true faith, framing their lives, government, orders and ceremonies according to the word of God.” Puritans like Field endeavored to form churches of “visible saints”: voluntary associations of the holy, predestined for salvation. Such a spiritual community would admit only those of manifest probity; the faith community would be characterized by a rigorous discipline enforced by admonishment, censure, and excommunication.
A growing number of Puritans interpreted seventeenth-century England’s economic and political troubles as a sign of divine displeasure. This led to further reflection on the appropriate origins and organization of churches. Some sought greater reform of the Church of England. A cohort of more radical Puritans called for separation. Among them was Robert Browne, who in 1581 went so far as to declare the Church of England to be a false church, organized with utter disregard for biblical principles. Brown called for assemblies of the godly to establish new churches on Biblical principles. The Puritans who made landfall in Massachusetts, first at Provincetown (in whose harbor they drafted the Mayflower Compact of 1620), before settling at Plymouth, established the first separatist Church in what they called “New England.”
Many more – separatist and non-separatist alike – would follow, especially after the Anglican leadership moved to forbid Puritan liturgical practices and harass nonconforming ministers. Beginning in 1630, a “Great Migration” of seven hundred Puritans, including John Winthrop, aboard the Arbella, resettled in North America and founded the Massachusetts Bay colony. In doing so, they imagined their migration to the New World as a biblical Exodus of world-historical significance: on those distant shores they would found a “New Israel” rooted in Christian governing morals and ideals.
Notwithstanding that many settlers of the American colonies came simply to make a livelihood, or even as punishment for crimes, the providentialist and exceptionalist idea of the United States as “the redeemer nation” (Ernest Tuveson) – a recycled idea many of them had formerly applied to England – started early, and here. Ever since Winthrop described the Puritan settlement of Massachusetts Bay “as a city upon a hill” with the eyes of the whole world watching, many Americans have understood the United States as God’s chosen country, with a divinely ordained mission in the world. For good and for ill, Americans throughout their history have exhibited a marked tendency to imagine their nation’s historical and political trajectory as a religious drama. And, not infrequently, especially in times of crisis – or perceived crisis – they have shown a tendency to script that drama in apocalyptic terms: as an epic, God-haunted battle of Good versus Evil, with Satan’s snares perpetually tempting, and eternal damnation an impending threat.
The pietist strain of American political thought took strongest root in New England, where Church and State were most densely intertwined (church membership, for instance, was required to vote). The American Puritans set up distinctive governing structures anchored in their religious principles and codes. Although fleeing persecution based on their religious practices and beliefs, the American Puritans did not institute religious toleration. As they saw it, in migrating they had sought the freedom to establish their own self-governing communities where they could live according to their faith. As such, Puritans in America meted out severe discipline to those who spurned or transgressed against the community’s theological convictions. America’s early Puritans were aggressively moralistic. They expected community members to live up to the highest moral standards, and were quick to ferret out and punish immorality. Puritans like Winthrop spoke frequently of liberty. But they did so by the lights of the distinction they drew between a dangerous “natural liberty” (anarchic license) and a virtuous “civil liberty” harmonizing with just and legitimate authority. For a community and the individuals who comprised it to live according to just, legitimate, and true laws, both temporal and moral, as discerned and 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
