To the Puritans, the dangers and benefits of establishing themselves as a covenantal community in the biblical mold would have been taken for granted. This is perhaps one reason why Winthrop’s sermon, regarded as immortal now, seemed to its immediate audience less than memorable. It is telling that, though today the phrase “City on a Hill” is synonymous with the Massachusetts Bay Colony and all that came after it, the sermon that marked its birth did not receive much notice at the time. “A Model of Christian Charity” was not published until more than two centuries after it was written. As recent biographers have noted, only a single mention of the sermon can be found among contemporary documents related to the colony’s origins. While Winthrop hoped his settlement might be seen by all as a moral exemplar, it would take centuries for this to come to fruition—perhaps because it took that long to forget the realities the Puritans faced. If a city upon a hill is a place one might look to as a prototype of a peaceful, upright, and successful community, it does not seem that Winthrop’s colony was viewed as such by anyone living there at the time.
The sermon so commonly invoked as a statement of the singular purpose of those who came across the ocean to settle a new land was actually concerned foremost with the problem of variation. Not only did Winthrop begin with a three-part explanation of why God would make a world in which humanity would find itself divided along economic and religious lines (in part because God is “delighted to show forth the glory of his wisdom in the variety and difference of the creatures”), he describes a covenantal system of governance built on difference, so long as it is tightly controlled. While mankind would always be split into rich and poor, and between those who are “high and eminent in power and dignity” and “others mean and in submission,” he notes, nonetheless they were called to create something together. “The work we have in hand… is by a mutual consent, through a special overvaluing providence and a more than an ordinary approbation of the churches of Christ, to seek out a place of cohabitation and consortship under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical. In such cases as this, the care of the public must oversway all private respects, by which, not only conscience, but mere civil policy, doth bind us. For it is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.”
Winthrop likewise ended with a note concerning difference, this time a warning about the hazards of straying too far from the communal religious norms. In a surprising turn given the widespread assumptions about Puritan religious uniformity, he quickly segued from reminding the founding inhabitants of the colony of Massachusetts that “the eyes of all people” were on them to warning against worshipping “other gods”:
But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.
The gods Winthrop had foremost in mind at the time were “pleasure and profits,” by which he meant not merely the pursuit of such things but individual longing at the expense of the communal need. To have other gods in the context of the Puritan covenant was to ignore that crucial commandment that “care of the public must oversway all private respects.” However, given that neither pleasure nor profit had been found in either public or private abundance in English America by that point, it is likely that Winthrop was concerned with other actual divinities as well.
He should have been. Not only were he and his people intending to establish a univocal faith in a land already filled with a cacophony of religious voices, in short order the Puritans themselves would discover that even they, though they are remembered foremost for their strict adherence to doctrine, were in fact seething with spiritual discord. Winthrop’s own fixation on difference as a divine creation suggests that this was perhaps inevitable. After all, he and those he led to Massachusetts were spiritual descendants of the disruption that had come to define the civilization from which they came, and would continue to influence the one they hoped to build.
New England’s Puritans were the grandchildren of the Reformation. Just as the conquests of the southern coast of North America can be seen as born of the ancient religious disputes of the Iberian Peninsula, the settlement of the English colonies should be considered in the context of the equally tumultuous atmosphere of northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the very years Mustafa Zemmouri was wandering through Texas transforming himself from a slave to a healer to a god, another shape-shifting religious figure was transforming the Christian faith—his own and eventually the world’s—thousands of miles away.
By the 1530s, the French theologian John Calvin had begun his work of pushing the revolution started a generation before by Martin Luther toward its logical conclusion. The Protestant Reformation, which had begun as a challenge to papal authority when Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses to the door of a Wittenberg church in 1517, had left unanswered the question of what should fill the void if Rome no longer served as universal arbiter of divine intentions. Luther’s creed of sola scriptura—by scripture alone—was fine as far as it went in shaping individual relationships with God, but it was less effective when it came to keeping the trains running on time. Calvin solved this problem, or attempted to, by offering an understanding of the relationship between religious and civil authority that eventually took concrete form in a theocratic government established in his adopted city of Geneva.
If one wants to find the true founding city upon a hill in American history, Calvin’s Geneva might fit the bill better than Winthrop’s Boston. Long before the Arabella or even the Mayflower set sail, it was Geneva that gave refuge to a group of Protestants from England, fleeing the reign of the Catholic queen Mary Tudor in 1553. These so-called Marian exiles drank deep the waters of Calvin’s theocracy, and when they returned to England a few years later they sought to replicate his unrelenting approach to reform. The Anglican Church remained, in their estimation, too much like the Catholic Church in its beliefs and outward devotions, and so they hoped to purify it of any trapping that seemed unaffected by the transformation of the faith Luther and Calvin had achieved. Finding this impossible, and making few friends through the effort, followers of Calvinist ministers including John Cotton, as well as laymen like John Winthrop, took the extreme step of sailing into the unknown with scripture as their map and Geneva as their blueprint.
They would have done well to note the darker moments in the history of Calvin’s city on a hill, however. A scourge of the papacy (the Roman pontiff, he wrote, “is the leader and standard-bearer of an impious and abominable kingdom”), Calvin nonetheless came quickly to be derided and feared as the “Pope of Geneva.” In that mold, he allowed his theocracy to mimic the worst excesses of Rome, including the execution of the Spanish physician, theologian, and literal Renaissance man Michael Servetus as a heretic for his questioning of the Trinity. As a follower of Calvin lamented, Servetus’s ideas posed a risk because they “infected both heaven and earth.” After Servetus was burned at the stake, Calvin faced criticism from some fellow reformers, and responded as Torquemada might have in the previous century, with the threat of a widened net: “Whoever shall now contend that it is unjust to put heretics and blasphemers to death will knowingly and willingly incur their very guilt.” Like many reformers before and since, Calvin was apparently chagrined not to be the final advocate of change.
So too in New England. No sooner had Winthrop’s Puritans established their new godly community than they discovered that the Reformation that had made them began to repeat itself in miniature. Only now, the reformers were the ones desperately trying to maintain the status quo. An indication of this can be seen in the words of a minister who had arrived in Massachusetts shortly after Winthrop. In his preface to a 1644 pamphlet on the spiritual errors at large in the colony, Thomas Weld succinctly told the history of the tumultuous fifteen years since the colonists’ departure from Englan
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After we had escaped the cruel hands of persecuting prelates, and the dangers at sea, and had prettily well outgrown our wilderness troubles in our first plantings in New England; and when our commonwealth began to be founded, and our churches sweetly settled in peace (God abounding to us in more happy enjoyments than we could have expected), lest we should now grow secure, our wise God (who seldom suffers His own in this their wearisome pilgrimage to be long without trouble) sent a new storm after us, which proved the sorest trial that ever befell us since we left our native soil.
The new trial was this: Within the first year of the colony’s existence, there began to appear among the orthodox believers people who were judged “full fraught with many unsound and loose opinions.” Some of these troublemakers had brought their dangerous ideas with them like stowaways across the sea; others seem to have reacted to the unimaginable freedom of being separated from England by developing new notions in response to their environment. No matter where their notions came from, Weld writes, soon they “began to open their packs and freely vend their wares to any that would be their customers.”
These were not a few isolated cranks out to cause a stir but, in Weld’s telling, the beginnings of a movement: “Multitudes of men and women, church members and others, having tasted of their commodities were eager after them and were straight infected before they were aware, and some being tainted conveyed the infection to others.”
Just as the Spanish feared the spiritual contamination of Muslims and Jews in the New World as early as the fifteenth century, and the Calvinists of Geneva had feared Servetus had “infected both heaven and earth” in the sixteenth, now the English Calvinists feared, and likewise identified as “infection,” difference of opinion over such foundational Christian issues as the nature of salvation and grace. “Thus that plague first began amongst us,” Weld wrote. “Had not the wisdom and faithfulness of him that watcheth over our vineyard night and day, and by the beams of his light cleaned and purged the aire, certainly we haf not have been able to have breathed there much longer.”
Though remembered too simply today as a community unified by the strict enforcement of belief, the Massachusetts Bay Colony thought of itself from the very beginning as beset by a plague that today we might simply call religious difference. John Winthrop’s journal, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, is anything but the account of religious uniformity the label “Puritan” calls to mind. Its pages are full of accounts of spiritual disagreement and increasing hostility toward established ecclesial authority. On December 13, 1638, for example, Winthrop writes of the elders of the community calling for a general fast. “The chief occasion was,” he writes “the much sickness of pox and fevers spread through the country” and “the apparent decay of the power of religion.”
This decay could be readily observed in two ways: The very persistence of sicknesses such as smallpox was taken as evidence that colonists’ prayers had become less efficacious, no doubt because of their own sinful nature; and the power of religion also seemed to suffer decay in its ability to inspire and regulate uniform belief among the members of the community. Judging from Winthrop’s journal, uniformity was not nearly taken for granted by Puritans themselves, regardless of how they have come to be viewed in history.
“The devil would never cease to disturb our peace, and to raise up instruments one after another,” Winthrop wrote. These instruments, more often than not, were threats to religious authority and the homogeneous practices and beliefs upon which authority rested. Winthrop describes one woman from Salem—five decades before the troubles for which that town would become best known—“who had suffered somewhat in England for refusing to bow at the name of Jesus.” The woman, named only as the wife of a man named Oliver, repeatedly makes a nuisance of herself by disregarding accepted doctrine while demanding that she still be given the same right to attend meetings as other community members. She might have been more of an “instrument to have done hurt,” Winthrop notes, “but that she was poor and had little acquaintance.”
This unnamed dissenting woman seems to have been absorbed back into well-ordered Puritan society without further incident, but others followed the path of spiritual nonconformity into social mayhem. To cite an infamous example: Though she was known for her “good esteem for godliness,” Dorothy Talbye began claiming to have visions distinct from church teachings. Cast out of her Salem congregation because of these visions, she was driven mad by “melancholy or spiritual delusions” and ultimately murdered her own child so that “she might free it from future misery.” We would surely take it as a warning sign today that Talbye had named the three-year-old girl “Difficult.” This word also captured the short life of the mother, who was hanged in 1638. While her crime was murder, the pastor of the community from which she had been exiled used her in a subsequent sermon to warn his congregants of the dangers of excommunication and the temptation of heeding revelations received outside the church.
If the seeds of spiritual disruption were not present at the landing of the Arabella in 1630, they were not long in arriving. In February of 1631, at a time when “the poorer sort of people,” as Winthrop wrote, “were much afflicted with the scurvy, and many died,” another ship dropped anchor in Boston’s harbor. This ship, called the Lyon, carried a cargo of lemon juice to help those afflicted, who “lay long in tents” through the winter. Also on board was a twenty-eight-year-old preacher by the name of Roger Williams, who would soon put a sour taste in the mouths of the Puritan elite, even while providing a jolt of the kind of spiritual vitamins necessary for the English community to expand beyond its parochial limitations.
Williams was pronounced an appropriately pious man by Winthrop not long after he stepped off the Lyon, but the governor of the neighboring colony of Plymouth was perhaps more accurate when he said that this new arrival was “a man godly and zealous, having many precious parts, but very unsettled in judgment.” His judgment was, in fact, a constant work in progress. A separatist from the Church of England, Williams refused to be associated with Winthrop’s own Church of Boston, preferring the more austere community that had been established in Salem. Even there, though, Williams ran into trouble by questioning the role of religion in civil government, a crime that had more than once been punished by torture in Calvin’s Geneva.
When Williams was called before the general court to answer for his “divers opinions,” it was ruled that “the said opinions were adjudged by all, magistrates and ministers… to be erroneous, and very dangerous.” Showing “a great contempt of authority,” Williams was charged with proposing that “a church might run into heresy, apostasy, or tyranny, and yet the civil magistrate could not intermeddle.” This to the Puritans sounded like nothing so much as anarchy. For these infractions against Calvinist orthodoxy, Williams was driven from the colony. He avoided deportation to England only by slipping off into the wilderness of southern New England, a region still peopled by the Wampanoag and Narragansett Indians, where further lessons in religious difference awaited him.
Leaving Winthrop’s colony, Roger Williams set off on his own errand in the wilderness, specifically in the woodlands between Boston and the future site of the city of Providence, where he lived for a time among the Narragansett. From the outset, Williams attempted to make sense of their place in his theologically informed understanding of history, while taking their own beliefs into account. “From Adam and Noah that they spring, it is granted on all hands,” he wrote of his native hosts. “But… they say themselves, that they have sprung and growne up in that very place, like the very trees of the wildernesse. They say that their Great God Cowtantowwit created those parts.”
Williams at first attempted to understand the Indians in terms of another preexisting difference. While some Spanish explorers had once seen the shadow of Islam wherever they looked in the New World, it seems a certain variety of English clergyman was predisposed to look upon Indians and believe he was seeing Jews.
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��Others (and myselfe) have conceived some of their words to hold affinitie with the Hebrew,” Williams wrote. “Secondly, they constantly anoint their heads as the Jewes did. Thirdly, they give Dowries for their wives as the Jewes did. Fourthly, (and which I have not so observed amongst other nations as amongst the Jewes, and these) they constantly separate their women (during the time of their monthly sicknesse) in a little house alone by themselves foure or five dayes, and hold it an Irreligious thing for either Father or Husband or any Male to come near them.”
In other ways, however, Williams found the Narragansett to be nearly Christian, particularly in their reverence for one prophet above all others. “They have many strange Relations of one Wetucks, a man that wrought great Miracles amongst them,” he wrote. Making particular note that this Wetucks was known for “walking upon the waters,” Williams proposed that this was an indigenous spiritual figure “with some kind of broken resemblance to the Sonne of God.”
In fact, this resemblance was more than broken. The story itself may well have been a native response to Christian efforts to lead the Indians to the Bible, which after all had been ongoing for generations by then. In one version of Wetucks’s infancy narrative, for example, it was said that his birth must have great significance because he was born to a woman well past childbearing years, making him a parallel for biblical figures including John the Baptist, born of Elizabeth, who was “well stricken in years,” and Isaac, whose mother, Sarah, was ninety. Moments in Wetucks’s later life meanwhile seem taken straight from the Gospels: He disappears for a time, not to the desert but to the sea, and during his absence his true power is revealed. While still a boy he calls the elders around and teaches them. He instructs them in healing and ritual and is generally the father of all their sacred traditions.
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