Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (122 page)

The rhetoric of this emigration sprang out of Puritan and Reformed themes which had sounded from English pulpits since the 1560s. Naturally, the idea of covenant, first proclaimed in Zwingli's and Bullinger's Zurich (see pp. 620-21), was prominent. A highly influential book,
Seven Treatises called the practice of Christianity
, by one of East Anglia's principal Puritan ministers, Richard Rogers, was published in 1603; by the time the Massachusetts venture was launched, it had gone through eight editions. One of its highlights was a description of how, twenty years before, Rogers had made a solemn agreement - covenanted - with those of his people in his Essex parish of Wethersfield who were prepared to separate out from the temptations of the world. Their covenant had endured ever since. This was a potent image, and the communities set up in New England were prompt to covenant for their future.
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They were a chosen people, making a treaty with God and with each other. Other words besides 'covenant' also inspired people as they leafed through their Bibles in meditation on the cramped and stinking ships of the Atlantic voyage or amid the deep snow of a New England winter. They found themselves in a wilderness, like the Children of Israel, but was this any worse a wilderness than the Church of England under Laud's leadership? Might they rather be re-entering an Edenic garden, as their home communities had once been, to tend and bring to order and peace? So they named their new settlements Boston, Dedham, Ipswich, Braintree, to begin cultivating and replicating these gardens of godly England which they had lost to the weeds and pollution of Charles I's religion.

Although the New England settlers made their commonwealth much less like Old England than Virginia was intended to be, it is important to re-emphasize that the vast majority were not separatists but Puritans. They wanted a truer form of the established Church, which somehow (perhaps uncomfortably and untidily, like Rogers's Wethersfield) would also have the characteristics of a Church of the elect. The New England venture was more than wilderness or garden: it was (in the words of Governor Winthrop as his party prepared to sail out from Southampton) 'a city upon a hill'. This quotation from Matthew 5.14 has become a famous phrase in American self-identity, but Winthrop did not intend to confer a special destiny on the new colony. He meant that like every other venture of the godly, and as in the quotation's context in Matthew's Gospel, Massachusetts was to be visible for all the world to learn from it. At such a moment of crisis, with England's Protestant Church in disarray, those leaving Southampton should be conscious that the eyes of many in England, and perhaps as far away as Transylvania, were upon them.
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The form assumed by the Church of Massachusetts was therefore the paradox of an established Reformed Church with an all-embracing system of parishes like England, but run by local assemblies of the self-selected godly - a form of Church government which was 'Congregational', a Latin-derived word first given currency by John Cotton, one of the Church's early ministers. The early foundation of Harvard College meant that Massachusetts was unique among the North American colonies in never being short of ministers to serve its parishes, and that made establishing a single dominant Church all the easier. The clergy ministered to a federation of parishes made up of laity who were devotees of the Religion of the Book, possibly the most literate society then existing in the world. They felt as keenly as any godly congregations in the worldwide Reformed Protestant family that they must fulfil the hopes of a century of Reformation; they kept in close touch with like-minded congregations in England throughout the century and beyond, and were very conscious of their international heritage.
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Technically this was not a theocracy, a state run by the Church, but the Church's government functioned side by side with secular government, as in Geneva. The elect were in charge of the Commonwealth; they were nevertheless still a minority of the population, particularly as children were born and grew up without having experienced the excitement of committing to emigration and a new life. Winthrop and his fellows were in any case conscious that not all who had crowded the Atlantic migration boats were pure in heart or sought godliness, and that some might have murkier reasons for fleeing England than objections to Laud's sacramental theology. Such people should not be allowed to pollute the purified Church and should be excluded from government. In 1631, the franchise for the colony's assembly was limited to Church members. Still it was compulsory for everyone to go to their parish church (known in New England simply as a 'meeting house'), and the Massachusetts government tried to stop people settling beyond a certain distance from the meeting houses so that they could be properly supervised.

In the Interregnum after 1649, government back home in England came to look pleasingly more like the Massachusetts model, and many New Englanders returned across the Atlantic to help out the new regime. However, the return of Charles II in 1660 threatened to bring everything to ruin on both sides of the ocean; the flow back to England abruptly dried up.
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As the leadership argued about how to preserve the delicate balance of their polity, they evolved a compromise which ingeniously built on their favourite notion of covenant. In 1662, after every congregation had voted on the issue, they agreed on establishing a 'Half-Way Covenant'. Some could remain members of the Church by virtue of their baptism only, but the fully committed would have to offer proof of repentance and lively faith to gain the full Church membership which allowed them to receive communion at the Lord's Table.

Thus godliness, a wide franchise in the Massachusetts Assembly and an established Church could all be preserved. New England's Congregationalism faced many challenges: the arguments around the 'Half-Way Covenant' proved very disruptive of the ministers' authority as rival clergy lobbied the congregations against their opponents. After royal intervention in the 1680s there was the extra annoyance of governors appointed by the Crown who were rarely sympathetic to the Congregationalist ministry, and who even encouraged the indignity of an Anglican church built in the middle of Boston (worse still, in 1714 it acquired that engine of popery, a pipe organ, the first in New England).
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Nevertheless the Congregational establishment continued to rally its support in the legislature in the name of independence from outside interference. It retained its dominant position until challenged by the disruptive religious enthusiasms released in the eighteenth-century 'Great Awakening' (see pp. 755-65).

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, self-consciously a protest against King Charles's Church, in turn experienced religious dissent. As early as 1635 an independent-minded Boston woman called Anne Hutchinson horrified the leadership by challenging the whole framework of Puritan piety established by covenant theology. An exponent of one version of antinomianism, that recurrent Protestant neurosis (see pp. 652-3), she criticized the way that Puritan theology constantly forced the elect to prove to themselves that they were growing in holiness. Worse still, she asserted her authority by holding her own devotional meetings and claiming special revelations of the Holy Spirit. The ministers of Massachusetts were split as to whether her charisma was from God or from the Devil, and all sorts of personal clashes became mixed up in the dispute.
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After two years' tense confrontation, Hutchinson was banished, and travelled south to join a scattered set of coastal communities called Rhode Island. This had been set up by Roger Williams, a strict separatist minister, who had himself fled Massachusetts to escape arrest for his religious views in 1636; it soon became a haven for an intimidating variety of the discontented, and the fastidious godly of Boston looked on it as the 'latrina of New England'. As Williams struggled to create order out of chaos, any thoughts of a single Church of God quickly disappeared. He came to embrace complete religious toleration, even including Jews and 'Turks' in his envisaged freedom (Rhode Island was then likely to be short of Turks, but it was a striking rhetorical gesture). Calvinist that he still was, Williams believed that all the non-elect would go to Hell, but it was not his responsibility to make matters worse for them in this life. In 1647, his Rhode Island towns proclaimed that 'all men may walk as their consciences persuade them, every one in the name of his God'.
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Massachusetts still begged to differ. Its leaders were responsible in 1651 for whipping a Baptist who had organized private worship, and worse was to come.
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Quakers arrived in 1657, determined to spread their ecstatic message of freedom and inner light, apparently spoiling for martyrdom, and raising bitter memories of Anne Hutchinson as they encouraged women to preach. The Friends' wilful separation from secular life aroused even greater fears than in England; after all, the Commonwealth was still no more than a quarter-century old, and bound together socially as well as in religion by its covenants. Quakers were publicly flogged and had their ears cropped; then, between 1659 and 1661, four were hanged for missionary activities - one of the victims was a woman, Mary Dyer, who had deliberately returned from banishment to see her previous sentence fulfilled. This caused a sharp reaction of protest both in New England and in the home country. Charles II ordered the executions to stop, even though his government had little time for Quakers and was itself imprisoning them; it was ironical that a royal regime so like the one from which the Puritan settlers had fled should now restrain their zeal for persecution. The executions exercised many New Englanders as to whether even the religiously obnoxious ought so to be treated. Pointedly, Rhode Island respected the Quaker commitment to pacifism by exempting them from military service. This unprecedented concession survived even the dire crisis of native all-out war in 1676, while still allowing Quakers a say in the government of the colony, which included decisions about war.
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Roger Williams was one of the few early colonists to think of making an effort to spread Christianity among the Native American population, taking the trouble to learn and analyse their languages and publish a guide to them. However, he too came to let this part of his ministry lapse, and the work awaited the personal decision of one New England minister, John Eliot, before it was taken up again. The early English Protestant neglect of evangelizing among indigenous peoples makes a curious contrast with the precocious Spanish attention to converting native peoples in South and Central America, or French efforts to the north in New France. It cannot simply be accounted for by the early difficulties of the colonies in surviving at all, or the tensions and cultural incomprehensions between the two societies. Elizabethan writers who published propaganda for founding colonies, principally George Peck-ham, Thomas Harriot and Richard Hakluyt the younger, had stressed the importance of bringing Christianity to the peoples of America.
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This makes it all the more surprising that actual colonists were so slow to take up the work, and undermines the message of the noble image on the first seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company: a Native American pleading, in the words of Paul's missionary vision (Acts 16.9), 'Come over and help us.'

The explanations are probably theological rather than the result of inertia or straightforward racism, both of which Iberian colonists had also exhibited in generous measure. The considerations of natural law which troubled Spanish consciences through the Thomism of Las Casas or Vitoria cut little ice with Reformed theologians, who would be more inclined to seek the will of God embodied in specific commands - one of which, the stark order to Adam to 'fill the earth and subdue it', was another echo of Eden. Puritan covenant theology may have inhibited the idea of mission: believers in covenant theology might well feel that natives should prove their status as part of God's elect by spontaneously showing an interest in and making an effort to imitate the Christian beliefs of their neighbours, without any artificial effort on the colonists' part. Roger Williams and John Cotton were also affected by their longing for the imminent arrival of the Last Days, because they both shared Oliver Cromwell's biblically based belief that this event must be heralded by the conversion of the Jews (see pp. 773-4). Logically, therefore, that should happen first, and any conversion of new Gentile peoples would form a later stage of God's plan.
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Like their counterparts to the south, North American natives died in horrific numbers from European diseases; equally, that suggested to some commentators that their bodies had been created inferior to Europeans by God, for reasons wrapped up in his inscrutable will, and their idleness when introduced to European farming suggested a connection to the failed farmer and first murderer Cain.
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It took Eliot's generous imagination to overcome such theological or psychological barriers. Beginning work in 1646, by 1663 he had produced the first Bible of any language to be printed in America, in a dialect of the Native American Algonquin language now extinct, and composed a catechism in the main local language. His intensive work produced thousands of Indian converts, organized in 'prayer towns' next to English-cultivated territory, governed by the natives themselves, but imitating as far as possible English models of life. Few settlers displayed Eliot's spirit of openness. As the colonies expanded in numbers and territorial ambitions through the century, such settlements were generally destroyed by warfare and colonial betrayal: a beginning of a long-drawn-out and wretched story of suffering for the indigenous people of North America at the hands of Protestant Christians. English Anglicans formed a missionary society in 1701, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, but it was at first largely intended to rally to the established Church white settlers in America (and their slaves), despite a good deal of rhetoric presented to early subscribers.
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