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.84 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.85
It was in Holland, where religious diversity and freedom flourished, that Castellio’s work gained the widest acceptance.86 And it was to Holland that the first English Baptists fled in 1608, after suffering persecution in their own country.87 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: AN EARLY BAPTIST ADVOCATES THE TOLERATION OF MUSLIMS AND JEWS IN LONDON, 1612
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.88 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.”89 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.90
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.91 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:
Our lord the King is but an earthly King, and he Hath no aucthority as a King but in the earthly causes, and if the Kings people be obedient and true subjects, obeying all humane laws made by the King, our lord the King can require no more: for mens religion to God is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answere for it, neither may the King be jugd betweene God and man.92
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.93 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.94 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.95 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,96 in full awareness of “the cost and danger” his beliefs still held for him.97 Though he probably was never able to present his work to King James personally as intended,98 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.”99 Indeed, shortly after his return, Helwys was thrown into Newgate prison, never to regain his freedom. He died there sometime between 1614 and 1616.100
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.101 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:
That the magistrate is not by virtue of his office to meddle with religion or matters of conscience, to force or compel men to this or that form of religion or doctrine, but to leave Christian religion free to everyman’s conscience, and to handle only civil transgressions (Rom. xiii), injuries, and wrongs of man against man in murder, adultery, theft, etc., for Christ only is the king and lawgiver of the church and conscience (James iv.12).102
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.103
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.104 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 conscienc
e 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.105
ROGER WILLIAMS AND MUSLIMS: “SOUL LIBERTY” AND THE SEPARATION OF RELIGION AND STATE IN NORTH AMERICA, 1644
Roger Williams (c. 1606–1683), who had forsaken the Anglican Church for Puritanism while at Cambridge University, had become a minister before leaving England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631. But four years later he would be banished, having run afoul of the Puritan establishment there. He’d demanded that all Puritan ties to the Anglican Church in England be severed, and he also rejected Puritan claims to land he believed rightfully belonged to Native Americans.106 More provocative still, he insisted that the Puritan theocracy of Massachusetts Bay did not have the right to enforce their will over individuals in religious matters.107 Like Helwys and the early Baptists, he believed only the second, civil tablet of the Ten Commandments to be the proper purview of the state.108
Williams’s exile in 1635 occurred during a bitter New England winter, and he sought refuge among the Native American Narragansett tribe to the south.109 In 1636, he purchased land from them, founding a town he called Providence in thanks for his deliverance.110 In 1644, just over thirty years after the Baptist Helwys’s bold proposal, Williams wrote a treatise of his own. No doubt influenced by the early Baptists, Williams condemned the role of Calvin in the martyrdom of Servetus in Geneva. He may well have read Castellio’s work too.111 Like Menocchio, Castellio, and Franck before him, Williams had much to say about the rights of Muslims and Jews, but unlike Menocchio and Franck, he believed Christianity to be superior, as had Castellio and Helwys.112
As noted in the previous chapter, Williams was aware of Islam’s basic premise regarding the Prophet as final messenger in a continuum that included the Hebrew prophets and Jesus. But he rejected this understanding utterly, condemning the Prophet to hell as an impostor who had misled his followers.113 Contrary to Menocchio and Franck, there would be no salvation for Muslims in Williams’s theology. However, he did not deny the right of Muslims to believe, even in what he defined as their “false” faith.114 Instead, he defended their liberty of conscience, along with all other believers, from state interference. Williams’s banishment of government from spiritual matters thus extended even the individual’s right to profess a creed that he personally vilified, his own prejudices trumped by the innate rights of any person to adhere to their faith. Needless to say, this was an unpopular idea in Protestant America, and in Providence its feasibility would be put to the test.
A man of deep faith who distrusted organized religion, Williams recognized the moral sensitivity of all individuals as an aspect of their universal humanity.115 He had disavowed attempts at forced conversion, and now he offered protection to those suffering sometimes violent persecution at the hands of fellow Christians. Although essentially elaborating views that Baptists like Helwys had already expressed, he became the first to put such theories of “toleration,” a word he used frequently but apparently disliked, and what he termed “soul liberty” into practice, eventually to be regarded as the nation’s “first great defender of natural and religious liberty.”116 And within his espousal of universal toleration, he included numerous explicit references to Muslims and Jews.117
Williams’s protest against his treatment in Massachusetts, The Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, was published in London in 1644, when Williams returned there to claim a parliamentary charter for territory in what is today the state of Rhode Island. Taking the opportunity to become friendly with the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, and the poet John Milton, he hoped to press his case for freedom from state interference in all spiritual matters on both sides of the Atlantic by addressing his treatise to Parliament.118
Cast as a dialogue between Truth and Peace, Williams’s Bloudy Tenent is rambling and repetitive, yet full of unique insights. It so horrified readers in England that it was publicly burned a month after its publication, but Williams returned to his Rhode Island colony with many copies, intending that it not be ignored, especially in the Massachusetts colony from which he had been expelled.119 The word “bloudy” in the title meant “intractable,” but also alluded to Williams’s painful recollection of violent religious persecution in Europe: “the blood of so many hundred thousand soules of Protestants and Papists, spilt in the Wars of present and former Ages, for their respective Consciences, is not required nor accepted by Jesus the Prince of Peace.”120
Bloudy Tenent focused on Christian political and religious fanaticism, but there are also numerous strategic references scattered throughout the treatise—thirteen in all—to the toleration of Muslims. Most notably, in his introduction, when he enumerated the first twelve theses, Williams ranked as sixth the prohibition of violence against non-Christians, in- cluding Turks or Muslims:
It is the will and command of God, that (since the Coming of his Sonne, the Lord Jesus) a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships, bee granted to all men in all Nations and Countries: and they are onely to bee fought against with that Sword which is only (in Soule matters) able to conquer, to wit, the Sword of Gods Spirit, the Word of God.121
Like Castellio, Williams here appeared to retain hope for the peaceful conversion of non-Christians, yet his eighth and ninth theses propose that in matters of the soul or conscience the individual should not suffer violent coercion by the state, an early plea for religious freedom from civil control. Later, however, Williams appeared to reject even persuasion in the conversion of Jews and Muslims. Instead, he pled for an end to “our desires and hopes of the Jewes conversion to Christ,” in terms that implicitly included such “hopes” for Muslims as well.122
Williams’s linkage of Turks, Jews, and pagans (by which he meant Native Americans) became a consistent triad in his work “against the bloody Doctrine of Persecution for cause of conscience.” More than one historian has argued that Williams’s repeated enumeration of Jews with Turks and pagans betrayed only an intention to place the former among “the stereotypical alien outside the pale of Christianity.”123 But Williams’s main message makes clear that no one is to be excluded from the universal rights he proposed: liberty of conscience and freedom from persecution. Muslims and Jews, he argued, both deserved what all Christians enjoyed, and the onus for this social change rested upon the Christian majority:
Two mountaines of crying guilt lye heavie upon the backes of All that name the name of Christ in the eyes of Jewes, Turkes, and Pagans.
First, The blasphemies of their Idolatrous inventions, superstitions, and most unchristian conversations.
Secondly, The bloody irreligious and inhumane oppressions and destructions under the maske or vaile of the Name of Christ, &c.124
In Williams’s view, religious error did not prevent non-Christians, including Muslims and Jews, from being loyal subjects, and hence represented no basis for state coercion, whose proper purview was civil order and peace:125
And I aske whether or no such as may hold forth other Worships or Religions (Jews, Turkes, or Antichristians) may not be peaceable and quiet Subjects, loving and helpfull neighbours, faire and just dealers, true and loyall to the civill government? It is cleare they may from all Reason and Experience in many flourishing Cities and Kingdomes of the World, and so offend not against the civill State and Peace; nor incurre the punishment of the civill Sword …126
In Williams’s words may be heard references to tolerant precedents. Calling non-Christian neighbors “peaceable” but also “loving and helpful” echoes the Golden Rule, while “reason and experience in many other flourishing cities and kingdoms” may allude to Holland, where religious toleration for all Christians, including Jews, had been noted in England as a directly positive contribution to their national success in trade and commerce.127
Williams’s treatise challenged the ve
ry basis of the Massachusetts Bay theocracy that had expelled him, in particular the minister John Cotton (d. 1652), whose religious authority helped enforce Williams’s political exile and to whose refutation Williams dedicated his effort.128 Five years earlier, in A Discourse about Civil Government, Cotton warned of the dangers of allowing “heretics” and Muslims to interfere with the established Puritan religious and political order.129 Insisting that only those in complete spiritual accord with the Commonwealth’s Puritan faith should be allowed to govern, Cotton asserted that this same principle undergirded Muslim rule in the Ottoman Empire: “Yea, in Turkey itself, they are careful that none but a man devoted to Mahomet bear publick Office.” What Cotton believed essential in his Christian Commonwealth (and all others) was a “form of Government as best serveth to Establish their Religion,” as the only one “Established in the Civil State.”130 Williams by contrast saw no necessity, only harm from this fusion of the spiritual and the civil function of government.
Citing the Gospel of Matthew, Williams argued that it was not for humans to decide upon uprooting the “tares,” or weeds, from the garden. He argued that Christ himself condemned the destruction of Christian heretics and non-Christians as tares among the Christian wheat, and that the only legitimate judgment would be made at the Second Coming, which he believed to be imminent: “Christ commandeth to let alone the Tares and Wheat to grow together unto the Harvest Mat 13.30.38.”131 Williams does not subscribe to the heresy that all can be saved, regardless of their faith, believing the prospect of non-Christian salvation grim, but he insists that the fate of Christian and non-Christian alike will be decided on the Day of Judgment. And meanwhile, Jesus’s example would remain the best argument against religious persecution on earth: “Christ calleth for Toleration, not for penall prosecution.”132 Williams, unlike his predecessors, frequently used the word “toleration,” though he emphasized the sanctity of conscience, as had the early Baptist Smyth.
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