The Book of Books (42 page)

The ‘uneducated' proved swift to learn. Thwarted and rendered frustrate by the bits of Latin that were whispered at the high altar, they now had meat. Christopher Hill notes: ‘the Biblical sophistication of the lower class Marian martyrs [Protestants burned at the stake by the Catholic Queen Mary and her government in the middle of the sixteenth century] is one of the most remarkable things about them. They took on bishops and scholars, out-argued and out-texted them. The memory of this did not die easily.' The Catholics warned against this rampage of the peasants. In 1554, John Standish expressed Roman Catholic fears when he wrote that uncontrolled Bible reading ‘would set man against wife, master against servant and vice versa. Women have taken upon them the office of teaching: servants have become stubborn, forward and disobedient to their masters and mistresses.' A decade later, Anthony Gilby complained that soldiers and serving men can talk so much Scripture that they ‘are no longer respectful to their betters'.

This was the first great fissure in the medieval Church-state's grip on power. And it came from the translated Bible which not only gave an intellectual landscape common to all, but provided ammunition for arguments. These arguments pierced the pomps and ceremonies and above all the claims to sole and unique authority of the establishment, at first in the Church but quite soon to follow in the state as well.

It is significant that the defenders of the status quo feared the overthrow of previous hierarchies in the everyday workings of life, man-wife, master-servant. It was in at the roots, and this was the
evidence of the real danger. The plague of learning had got among the people, had reached to the bottom of the barrel, had got into the foundations and was gnawing away. ‘When God gave Adam reason,' wrote Milton, ‘he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing.' Through the translated Bible the great blessing of being able to decide for themselves now reached the people: they used it to choose. And it was in Protestant England that this was put to the test, in the Civil War.

So central was the use of the Bible in the Civil Wars, in pamphlets and meetings and among the numerous preachers, that when Charles II reintroduced monarchy in 1661 he passed an ‘Act for the Safety and Preservation of His Majestie's Person and Government against Treasonable and Seditious Practices and Attempts'. This attempted to outlaw what the Restoration government saw as a prime cause of the Civil Wars – the religiopolitical tracts and sermons which had led to the case being made against the King. It was intended to make the King yet again unassailable. The Act was passed but a generation later, when James II attempted to reintroduce Catholicism he was swept away in the ‘Glorious Revolution'. The subsequent ‘Bill of Rights' established a landscape of discussion – rooted in the Civil War – which legitimised the trek towards a more democratic state.

The early democratic dialogue was fed by the pull between two ideologies. One was that of the Divine Right of Kings, vigorously claimed by James I and fatally held on to by his son Charles I. Opposed to that was the ideology of John Calvin and other nonconformists where anyone with the blessing of God and under proper authority can oppose tyranny and therefore any government perceived to be unjust can be brought down. The people could be God-supported in challenging an ungodly government and with God on their side and not on the side of the King or tyrant, where was the firm ground of government? It spread into
calls for freedom of speech and, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attempts to give a place in the political world to the common man (and much later woman) on a par with their equal place in the intersecting sphere of religion. For religion in those centuries was the language and the arena of politics.

The strongest flavour of the roots of the democratic flowering comes from a debate in a church, St Mary the Virgin, in Putney, now a rich suburb of London. In 1647 it was a country village just two or three miles up the Thames from Parliament. What were known as the Putney Debates began on 28 October 1647 and lasted until the 11 November.

They were initiated by the Puritans' New Model Army in its cavalry regiments. It was here that the fervent Puritans were at their most radical and determined. They demanded ‘one man, one vote'; that Authority be invested in the House of Commons and not with the King. Certain rights they called ‘native' and these were to be inalienable: freedom of conscience and equality before the law. Thomas Rainsborough spoke for all of them, ‘for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he . . . and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.' The Bible in English had given these men equality before God; now they wanted equality before government. The democratic game was afoot.

The Chairman of these Debates was Oliver Cromwell, who would not at that stage agree that the King should be removed. His son-in-law, Henry Ireton, spoke for Cromwell and others on his side and argued that only landholders should have the vote. He said ‘no man hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of this kingdom . . . that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.'

In 1647 Cromwell and Ireton's view prevailed.

But the fuse had been lit and that simple phrase ‘the poorest hee . . . hath a life to live as the greatest hee' became the spark that was to light the fire which eventually razed centuries of tyranny, monarchy, feudalism and oligarchy. From now on the search and the fight for a new space for democracy was on. And behind it was the authority and confidence given by having the Bible in their native tongue.

In America, the first colonists held their first assembly also in a church. As time went on, the colonists claimed more and more religious freedom. The church assembly was the model which guided them towards greater political freedom. Nowadays, in a secular society, it seems easy to diminish the part played by religion in the reorientation of the modern world. But in the journey towards a full democracy there can be little doubt that the experience of a religion which grew out of the wide reading of the King James Version was the defining condition, the initiative for most people and certainly for most activists.

Having discussed and even disputed the Sacred Scriptures, the state held no ideological fears for these activists. In the Declaration of Independence, 1776, seen to mark the formal arrival of democracy in America, the words ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights' took the roots back to God and the Bible of the founding Puritans.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the French essayist, Alexis de Tocqueville, was to write: ‘the Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this connection does not spring from that barren traditional faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.'

It had been a determined journey to arrive at the condition
described by de Tocqueville. Noah Webster, whose Bible-based educational books had such a widespread influence, wrote that ‘our citizens should early understand that a genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible, particularly the New Testament, and the Christian religion.' That early understanding was clear to the first colonists. Their numbers swelled greatly, with the Great Awakening, which has already been referred to.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards was dismissed from his church in Northampton, Massachusetts, for ending his grandfather's policy of open (i.e. general) communion. Edwards instead favoured and emphasised personal (individual) communion, personal salvation, an individual and not a community decision. Furthermore, individuals could choose between different Churches. The idea of the individual as the hub of society was beginning to replace the still prevailing notion of the Church as the community. Once the individual was given authority, herding and mass control were not so easy to take for granted and the voice of a single person had to be heard.

Edwards was a key player in the Great Awakening of the mideighteenth century. Its transforming effect on the religious lives of the hundreds of thousands who came to hear the charismatic preachers was a prologue to its eventual effect on their sense of themselves in the politics of the day. Though the message of the Great Awakening was biblical, it was also egalitarian and emphasised that the grace of God could fall on anyone who sought salvation. Salvation became independence, and independence sought the entitlement to a vote. Now you had a place on earth equal to the place provided by the grace of God in heaven.

Edwards clarified and changed the emphasis of the Christian message. He moved it back to the ways of the original Apostles as many progressives failed to do. It was its own version of the
Renaissance, the rediscovery of the past in order to energise and re-order the present. As has been mentioned, Edwards was foreshadowed by the Wesley brothers and by George Whitefield, who were also key influences in the devolution of the Church.

Now it took only the conversion of the ‘heart' to take the soul into the Kingdom of Heaven. This reinforced almightily the shift to the individual being the determinant of his or her own fate. It reached to the poor and marginalised as never before. Following the literate preachers, hitherto the theological masters of the universe, there grew the army of the poor and the marginalised who now had a status. Democracy was creeping in, a part of salvation.

Thomas Paine was an Englishman, a radical, a democrat but not a Christian. Yet, in the crucial year 1776 he published, in America, a pamphlet,
Common Sense
, which quoted extensively from the Bible. For example, he writes:

In the Bible the non-religious Tom Paine found a template for revolution. He picked out the positive points of the embryonic nation of America like an archer arrowing into the dead centre circle again and again. If the Jews were under a ‘delusion', then the Americans were not alone; indeed they had venerable forebears and examples to follow. The Bible fed his hunger for democracy.

The Almighty was given due omnipotence. Christians were secure with that. The phrase ‘a kind of republic administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes' was a canny perception of the state of a country with its eyes beginning to open to the possibility of a republic. This was in step with its ‘judges' and its nonconformist assemblies run by ‘elders'. ‘Idolatrous' was good, the king to be associated with the graven image, would bring onside those who believed ‘thou shalt not worship any graven image.'

The phrase about the Almighty ‘ever jealous of his honour' spoke both to an often expressed characteristic of the Old Testament Jehovah, god of vengeance and to the ideal of ‘honour' which took the curse off any possible offence.

Paine's adoption of passages in the King James Version as a means of communication was successful beyond any expectation: 150,000 pamphlets sold within a few weeks, and
Common Sense
was exported to London and Paris where it caused an equal sensation and set Paine on the road to be the world revolutionary-threat-in-chief.

Abraham Lincoln though possibly a Christian was never a Church member. But he, too, like Paine, used the language and drew on its reserve of history, suffering, struggle and its triumphs. Perhaps he was essentially closer to it than Tom Paine, as when, in his Second Inaugural Address in the middle of the carnage of the Civil War, he refers to both sides in that war as appealing to the same Bible and praying to the same God. He might have added that they were instructed by an almost wholly identical cohort of nonconformist divines. And he appealed to prayer, a central Christian instrument. ‘Finally do we hope – fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war might pass away.' That their President was praying alongside them would have mattered greatly to the many Christians embroiled in that conflict. Lincoln's speech was approved in Europe as well as in America. The theologian Philip Schaff wrote at the
time: ‘I do not believe that any royal, princely or republican state dreamt of recent times can be compared to this inaugural address for genuine Christian wisdom and gentleness.'

George Washington took up the song. ‘Of all dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports . . . 'tis substantially true that virtue or morality
is a necessary spring of popular government
' (my italics).

In Britain the road to democracy was not marked out by quite such vivid and enthusiastic figures. But movements for social reform were far more often than not lit into life by those whose theory came out of the New Testament. Political developments – notably the trades unions and the birth and growth of the Labour Party – owed more to Methodism than to Marxism.

And underneath it all were the two pillars of wisdom: the first was the Reformation which demanded freedom of thought on what were then the most pressing and awesome issues of the day – the teachings of the Bible. The second was the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, which happened in many countries but in Britain resulted in a book which became the university for those who were barred from them, the education for those who had hitherto been denied it, and the national book giving access for all to the high table of debates on life and death and eternity. The King James Bible is a book which has informed and enriched two English-speaking empires over 400 years and carried many of its messages around the globe. It set off consequences no one could have imagined in 1611, nor, in many cases, would they have approved. It has been well used and abused. It has been a transforming force, often making our world a better place.