Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (11 page)

Words supporting tolerance were even harder to find in Calvin, because he consistently considered heresy treason, worthy of the death penalty.
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But Castellio managed to find one example of a more tolerant attitude. In 1536, Calvin declared an apparent limit to his motivation to kill unorthodox believers as well as nonbelievers: “we should try by every means, whether by exhortation and teaching, clemency and mildness, or by our prayers to God, to bring them to a better mind that they may return to society and unity of the Church.”
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This approach, argued Calvin, should be applied to “even the Turks and
Saracens and
other enemies of the true religion.”
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How, Castellio argued, could the Calvin who wrote of such restraint and nonviolence toward non-Christians, then put a fellow Christian like Servetus to death as a heretic?
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Like Luther’s, however, Calvin’s support for tolerance toward Muslims and Jews was ephemeral, appearing only in the first edition of his most important work,
Institutes of the Christian Religion.
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There is some debate over whether his later removal of this statement signaled a return to a less tolerant and more violent feeling about Muslims and Jews, or instead reflected his view of their collective irrelevance to what had become his more pointed discussion of Christian theology.
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Unlike Luther and Calvin, the Protestant
Sebastian Franck (1499–1542 or 1543) expressed ideas about Muslims that the miller Menocchio seemed to share almost fifty years later. Franck, too, argued that God did not play favorites among religions.
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Castellio included in his compendium many
of Franck’s ideas about tolerance toward Muslims. A former Catholic priest, and Lutheran convert, Franck finally cut his ties with any organized religion, endorsing ideas in print that included
religious tolerance and freedom of speech, for which he would be imprisoned, then banished from Strassburg in 1529. Despite the popularity of his writings, they were ultimately banned.
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Banished from other cities for his views, which included sympathy for the heretical Anabaptists, he was forced to move frequently, taking on the manual labor of soap making, while continuing to write theological works.
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He died in Basel, in his early forties.
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Refusing to accept the labeling of fellow Christians as heretics by either the Catholic Church or Protestant authorities, he proclaimed that all those killed as unbelievers were actually “all true Christians.”
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He reviled persecution as a dark human trait.
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For Franck, individual free will and religious belief were gifts of God, not to be coerced by violence: “Where the Spirit of God is, there is freedom—no constraint, tyranny, partisanship, or compulsion, that He should drag anyone to heaven by the hair or push anyone into hell and deprive him of the grace which is extended to all men. Man alone deprives himself of it.”
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Franck had much to say about the
Turks, but without the malice of most of his contemporaries.
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He was not unfamiliar with Muslim
beliefs and practices, having translated a fifteenth-century Christian account of the Turks in 1529.
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Far from condemning Muslims, he proposed that “one of the marks of their superiority was their refusal to force anyone to the faith,” accurately referring to the Qur’an and Ottoman imperial practice.
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The Ottoman practice of toleration was also cited by a French Catholic clergyman in a 1554 treatise.
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In both Protestant and Catholic sixteenth-century contexts, then, the Islamic precedent for religious tolerance was used to critique more immediate denominational differences between Christians.
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Franck’s tolerance for Christians as well as non-Christians amounted to a form of “universal theism.”
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Most of his contemporaries must have been astonished by his claim, “The Turk and the heathen are made in the image of God as much as the German, and the nonpartisan God has written His law and word in their hearts.”
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Franck insisted:

And so, believing that all the “children of Abraham” could be saved, regardless of their religion, Franck became another perpetrator of the heresy of Origen.

Finding their way into Castellio’s treatise, Franck’s ideas circulated in print in Latin, French, and German translations. Harsh criticism was immediate. A colleague of Calvin’s in Switzerland quickly issued a refutation, blasting the book. Disputes about Castellio’s work arose in France, Germany, and Italy.
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It is possible that through Castellio’s publication, Franck’s ideas influenced Menocchio’s later views of Muslim tolerance and salvation, which were so similar, but this remains unproven.
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It was in Holland, where religious diversity and freedom flourished, that Castellio’s work gained the widest acceptance.
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And it was to Holland that the first
English Baptists fled in 1608, after suffering persecution in their own country.
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When one of these early refugees eventually returned to his native land, he would endorse a state policy of toleration toward Muslims. And so though Castellio’s work had no
direct influence in seventeenth-century English thought about toleration toward Muslims, it made itself felt indirectly. This English thought in turn would become the most direct influence on similar American ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Thomas
Helwys (c. 1575–c. 1614), one of the first
English Baptists, was forced to leave home in 1608 because of his religious beliefs. In Amsterdam in 1612, he published a treatise,
The Mistery of Iniquity
, a protest against the injustice of English religious persecution.
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His was the earliest English-language defense of universal religious toleration to include Christian heretics along with Muslims and Jews, and although this combination was not new, the degree of toleration he proposed as government policy surpassed anything discussed on the Continent. Helwys declared, “Let them be heretikes, Turcks, Jewes, or whatsoever it apperteynes not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.”
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He returned to England with his book shortly after its publication.

As a Baptist, Helwys had already been branded a heretic by his sovereign and the majority of his fellow English Protestants. He had sacrificed a comfortable life for his religious beliefs. The son of a leading country gentleman, he’d studied the law, married, and sired seven children. But it was his association with
John Smyth (d. 1612), the first English leader of the Baptist movement, that led him to break from the Church of England and espouse the idea of the baptism of adult believers, which resulted in the imprisonment of early Baptists in England. When Helwys left for Holland, his wife, Joan, remained behind and suffered imprisonment for her beliefs.
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Helwys believed Christianity to be the best religion, while all others were full of grievous errors, a position like Castellio’s. But like Castellio again, he also rejected government coercion regarding faith. Both wished non-Christians to be converted, but by peaceful means.
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The state, Helwys declared, had no right to use violence to persuade, whether Christian dissenters or non-Christians.

His defense of the religious freedom of Muslims involved two interlocking new principles: the separation of the state from control over religious practice, and the individual’s complete liberty of conscience.
He knew that without the first established as government policy, there would be no guarantee of the second. On his return to England in 1612, Helwys would find out quickly how untenable his proposals were.

Helwys addressed his plea directly to King James I (r. 1603–25), reminding the sovereign that he had only civil, not spiritual, authority over his subjects:

To the end of this bold statement, Helwys added his judgment that so long as his subjects remained law-abiding, the sovereign had no right to interfere in their spiritual lives, even if they professed Islam or Judaism.

At the time, Muslims from the Ottoman Empire and North African powers visited London on diplomatic and trade missions, but none were counted as inhabitants of the realm.
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There had been fewer than four thousand Jews when they were officially and completely expelled from England in 1290. Although a few had fled to London from the
Spanish Inquisition in the mid-sixteenth century, by the time Helwys wrote his treatise that small group had disappeared.
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To mention these hypothetical populations, then, was more a symbolic gesture in the larger attempt at truly universal religious toleration. Indeed, after making his case for the protection of heretics, Turks, and Jews, the Baptist added, “or whatsoever,” to demand toleration for everyone of every faith without exception, including even the most feared and detested non-Christians.

Helwys’s proposal of universal religious toleration as official policy was certain to offend James I, who as king was also supreme head of the Church of England. Helwys’s words thus made him not just a heretic but a traitor. Even more subversive than his idea of the toleration of Muslims, Jews, and Christian heretics was this Baptist’s call for an end to the persecution of English Catholics.
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On November 5, 1605, during the reign of the Protestant King James, Catholics disgruntled at the exile of their priests plotted unsuccessfully to blow up Parliament. The conspirators were executed. Helwys would have condemned such lawlessness from anyone of any faith, but Catholics at this time were
nevertheless not only numerous in England but universally suspect, and as such did not enjoy full civil rights.

Also on his return to England, Helwys founded the country’s first Baptist church in London,
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in full awareness of “the cost and danger” his beliefs still held for him.
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Though he probably was never able to present his work to King James personally as intended,
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he evidently understood the royal wrath, writing that “our lord the king is but dust and ashes as well as we.… Yet though he should kill us we will speak the truth to him.”
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Indeed, shortly after his return, Helwys was thrown into Newgate prison, never to regain his freedom. He died there sometime between 1614 and 1616.
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Nevertheless, Helwys’s insistent call for the separation of government from religious affairs made a unique and resonant contribution to the scope of an idea that would not die with him in England.
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Following
John Smyth, Helwys had defined the proper sphere of government influence as purely civil, based on the division of the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. The first tablet, observed Smyth, concerned commands about the worship of God. They pertained to “matters of conscience,” as Smyth defined them. He claimed that the second tablet contained five injunctions that were strictly for civil enforcement:

Smyth had limited the king’s (or magistrate’s) interference into religious matters to Christians. Helwys expanded the scope into a form of universal toleration, which included not just Christian heretics but also Muslims and Jews.
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This momentous inclusion of Muslims in defense of religious freedom would not go unnoticed by Roger Williams, an Englishman who would challenge the Puritan theocracy in Massachusetts. He objected to the idea that “Christian liberty” entitled the colony to persecute, jail, or kill Christian dissenters, including Baptists, Quakers, Anglicans, and Catholics, as well as all non-Christians.
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In devising an
alternative for his Rhode Island colony,
Williams, briefly a Baptist, would attempt the first experiment in “soul liberty.” His settlement would be a refuge where the rights of conscience and religious freedom would be safe from government control for the first time in seventeenth-century America. He would welcome to his colony any who had been persecuted for their religious beliefs, including Muslims.
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