by Simon Schama
At the end of the church there was neighborly chatting and greeting, from which, without any warning, suddenly arose the skirling: “Day and night, the lambs are crying…come, good shepherd, feed thy sheep.” This went on, over and over for a good ten minutes, the voices seldom rising or falling much but keeping to their hypnotic drone, words alone sounding the emphasis. Apparently, so one of the Brothers told me, they had had a visit from a Catholic woman who, on hearing this same chant, asked, “Are you Jewish? The last time I heard this was at the Wailing Wall.” “Well,” said the Elder, “we claim to be the Spiritual Jews, so maybe she had something.” This wasn’t as improbable as it sounds, for I, too, had been put in mind of chants I had heard in remote synagogues, far away from Ashkenazi operatics; songlines crossing time and space in unexpected dissonant weaves of music.
A visitor had come from a sister church: a nervous young man in the regulation long-sleeved white shirt, Brother Craig, who out of courtesy was offered the first chance to speak and did so with becoming diffidence, without any of the vocal confidence that heralds a powerful sermon. “God smote me in the year 2000,” he said, looking neither happy nor unhappy with the fact, but merely acknowledging somehow his draft call. Like everyone else who spoke, Brother Craig was gently anxious about whether he was, in fact, worthy enough to be the instrument of the Lord’s will and whether he would in time be saved from his “vile body.” Poor thing, he had all the worry and none of the displaced urge to acquire trophies to assuage the anxiety. He was Max Weber’s thesis about Calvinism minus the capitalism. Someone understood how Brother Craig, or possibly God, was feeling about this uncertainty for at one particularly sorrowful moment a wild cry went up from a dainty silver-haired woman in her seventies sitting a few feet from the reading desk. “GLORY BE!” she wailed, “GLORY BE TO GOD,” her voice breaking into a possessed ululation, at which point the women around her delivered the soothing hug and gentled her back to silence.
These mountain people touched each other, and us. A lot. Literally. In midsentence, mid-spate, a Brother would suddenly extend a hand and give the handshake of Christian fellowship to anyone he felt needed it, or who might not need but would welcome it all the same. At other moments, the whole service would simply break up to allow the congregation to wander about the chapel offering hugs and neck kisses to all and sundry within reach, and if anyone was not within reach they would venture up the aisle until they were, pushing the benches aside. “Good MORNING,” they would say as they reached for a shake or a hug. “Good MORNING,” I responded, dimly remembering a description of precisely the same practices by English Baptists and Quakers in the seventeenth century. There was constant body motion among the No Hellers, walking, singing, embracing, chatting. This is how it must have been, I thought, before Protestantism turned, irrecoverably, into an expression of the social order; the hierarchy of pews, the imposition of decorum; silence until bidden to sing, stand, pray, kneel, leave. The No Hellers, on the other hand, were living relics of radical Protestantism in its earliest purity; all tender sweetness, and nervous, neighborly joy; the kind I had only read about in books by Christopher Hill. Compared to them the Methodists with their Wesleyan Love Feasts were vulgar upstarts.
A series of mindful speakers pronounced, but everyone was waiting for the man who seemed most dependably to be taken by the Spirit and who had the Voice: Farley Beavers. Farley was a slight, bony soul, angular and awkward, in his late sixties or early seventies (the humble age fast in coal-stricken Appalachia). But Farley had the Gift. When Farley uttered, it began as it did with all the brethren, with a low and quiet pitch, lamenting the passing of brothers Willard, Curtis, and Melvin who “will stand at the right hand of Jesus,” but then Farley got into his stride, intensifying pace, passion, and volume, cantering through a recitation of unworthiness and affirmation: HE formed the peace in the darkness, WHOAH, there was no hell only trib-u-lation down here, and why how could there be seeing that the Lord was a kind and tender lord and, WHOAH (sounding this as a rhythmic, punctuating moan), He would not wish any terror or dismay on his people, WHOAH no for He was full always of loving-kindness (wail from the silver-haired lady, Glory BE!), and now Farley Beavers was galloping along, full tilt, auctioneer speed, so fast I wasn’t sure whether he was proclaiming the coming of a day in which “I” (the Lord) “will smite every horse with astonishment” or whether it was whores would be smitten if they were not already, but anyway, WHOAH, He wanted us all to think well of each other (handshake handshake, walkabout, handshake) and if there were bad things among men in power, well, WHOAH, we had the good power to change all that with God’s Blessing and, WHOAAAH, peace be upon all of us…for are we all not brothers and sisters and are sent to care and love each other…? And eventually Farley Beavers climbed to the summit and his bony little head looked out at all the No Hellers, and slowed right down, a sign of the Spirit’s so-long valediction this particular Sunday morning in the Appalachians, and so it was time, of course, for another walkabout and mass hug.
All of this was a small miracle; not the kind Brother Farley might have been apprehensively waiting for, but a miracle of survival against the odds anyway. Whatever the opposite of a full-service megachurch was (a microflock?), this was it, and the brethren and sisters of Macedonia, Raven, were happy to leave it that way. No Church on the Street for them. Toward the end Farley had said something, on the face of it bizarre, flying on the wings of his free associations. The dead brothers, Willard, Melvin, and Curtis, would all, he said, “meet the Lord” along with the rest of the No Hellers “in the air.” Which led him, right away, to think about those who took to the air in pursuit of power and money and the vain glories of the world, the creatures of false doctrine…Not for us, said Farley,” ‘we don’t go out and deceive people, buy a big ay-ro-plane…but that’s good ’cause then they leave us alone.” That’s the real miracle, I thought, that they can indeed be left alone; at liberty to say whatever the Spirit prompts, and that thanks to the peculiarly American bargain between faith and freedom, the No Hellers could wail and drone unmolested on the dark Virginia hillside.
16. Providence
Roger Williams sat on the frozen dirt in the winter of 1633 amid the Pokanoket Indians trying his best to make out what they were saying. “God was pleased,” he later wrote, “to give me a painful, patient spirit to lodge with them in their filthy, smoky holes even while I lived at Plymouth and Salem, to gain their tongue.” The accommodation may have been poor, but Williams was not scornful of the Pokanokets and the Narragansetts. “My soul’s desire was to do the natives good,” he wrote, and it could not have hurt his ambition to win their trust that, unlike almost everyone else in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he believed the Indians were the legitimate proprietors of the land, and claims made by the Crown and its charters to freely dispose of it were patently false. Only those contracts made directly between the Indians and newcomers (such as he himself would draft) could properly transfer that land. The chief reason for learning their language was of course to lead the Indians out of pagan barbarism (as he saw it). But Williams already also knew that no church, certainly not his, could prescribe the right way to Christ. That, the natives would have to seek on their own. He could but lead them to the opening in the trees.
It was for thinking such things and, much worse, not keeping them to himself, that Roger Williams had got into bad odor with Governor John Winthrop in Boston and the Great and General Court that had care of bodies and souls in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Sometimes their indignation puzzled him. He was, he thought, no agitator and certainly no Anabaptist rejecting the sway of all earthly princes and powers. Had he not always granted to the magistrates their power to rule in matters of “bodies and goods”? It was the remainder of a man’s life (the part, he would have conceded, if pressed, that most mattered) over which no prince on earth could have jurisdiction. And no church either, for, whatever their claims, they were all unregenerate, contaminated by worldly governance, and would r
emain so until Christ’s second coming, in expectation of which Williams had the liveliest hopes. In the meantime the best a true Christian could do was to separate himself from those false churches, and what he called “soul liberty,” with his utmost strength.
There was little in Roger Williams’s upbringing to make him purer than the Puritans. His father was a London merchant tailor, but must have moved in powerful circles, for the precocious Roger became adept at shorthand transcriptions of sermons and speeches for Sir Edward Coke, chief justice of the King’s Bench and the sharpest thorn in the side of King James’s assertions of divine-right sovereignty. Coke was impressed enough to become Williams’s patron, sending him to school at Sutton’s Hospital and then on, through the school’s bursaries, to Pembroke College, Cambridge. But Coke’s resistance to Stuart absolutism was legal rather than theological, based on the “immemorial constitution” vested in the common law. Williams was to go altogether another way. The history that spoke to him was not Magna Carta, but what had happened to the “visible church” when it became entangled with, and corrupted by, earthly power. The date that church historians routinely celebrated as a triumph—AD 313, the edict of Milan promulgated by the convert Emperor Constantine, making Rome a Christian empire—was, for Williams, a calamitous fall from grace. “Then began the great Mysterie of the Church’s sleepe,” he wrote, more than a millennium later: a usurpation of God’s provision for history, and still more heinous, the coercion of souls, the “sword of stele” that Christ had expressly rejected. Had not Jesus said “my kingdom is not of this world?” But he had been disregarded by those who claimed to be his apostolic heirs, who had erected a government. That the Roman Church should seek to enforce its authority was no surprise; what distressed Williams was that Protestant churches, including the one into whose service he was supposed to be ordained, had, since King Henry VIII, claimed similar powers of conformity and brutally punished those who resisted it. Williams was unmoved by the argument that such measures were needful to stop apostasy or heresy in its tracks, for no man could find his way to Jesus except through his own free will, and to usurp God’s own authority was worse than subjection under Rome. A great disentanglement was needed if true Christians were ever to find their way to salvation. Holiness, which he compared to a garden, needed “a hedge or wall of separation” enclosing it off from worldly matters if it was to hold sway in the hearts of men.
Williams must have been on the edge of these convictions rather than over it when he graduated from Cambridge in 1627 for, as planned, he was ordained into the Church of England, and accepted a chaplaincy with the Puritan Member of Parliament, Sir William Masham. What might have been the beginning of a settled life turned into the opposite. A rejected courtship sent the young chaplain into a sickly fever from which he was nursed by a member of Masham’s household, Mary Barnard, whom he married in 1629. But the church whose ministry he was supposed to profess, was falling into the hands of Archbishop Laud, whose reforms were, for the Puritans, tantamount to Catholic Counter-reformation. Lord Chief Justice Coke happened to have an interest as a venturer-investor in the American colonies, so it might well have struck him that the best place for his free-speaking protégé might be the other side of the Atlantic. In December 1630, Roger and Mary sailed on The Lyon, arriving at Nantasket Harbor just south of Boston in the first week of February 1631.
Perhaps it was on the long sea voyage that Williams made his own journey of revelation, for he wasted no time in making trouble for himself. Welcomed in Boston, Williams protested that he could not serve a church that had insufficiently renounced and separated itself from the impious Church of England. For the moment Governor Winthrop was prepared to countenance the young man’s eccentricities and sent him north to Salem to serve as teacher and preacher with an older minister. But what Williams began to teach and preach was intolerable. Oaths administered to the “unregenerate” in court, or routinely as an act of allegiance, he said, were blasphemous, since no earthly authority could invoke God’s name; he claimed that the Great and General Court could regulate matters threatening civil peace but in no circumstances could prosecute those deemed heretic, much less punish them with flogging as was the prescribed penalty. Representations from Winthrop, who had initially greeted Williams as a likely “godly minister,” failed to have any effect. By 1633 Williams had joined a godly community who called themselves Seekers and who believed that since all churches were corrupt, membership must always be voluntary. That suited Williams, who went south in search of just such a loosely organized gathering at Plymouth. It was there that he took himself off to the Indians, and by the time he returned to Salem the following year as its minister, his conviction that no part of “soul liberty” should ever be surrendered to those who had usurped Christ’s own lordship had only hardened.
For Winthrop (who still professed to like him) the impossibly pure Williams had become a threat, a sower of discord. He was duly arraigned before the General Court on 1 October 1635. The gravest accusations were Williams’s claim that the government of the colony had no right to punish infractions of the first four of the Ten Commandments and that oaths sworn on the Bible and in the name of God were blasphemous. He freely confessed that he believed no man ought to be obliged to maintain a church establishment whose beliefs he did not share. The sentence was banishment, and constables were sent to his house in Salem to enforce the writ and escort Williams to a sloop that would take him back to England. But he had already fled.
“I was sorely tossed for fourteen weeks in a bitter winter season,” he recalled, “not knowing what bread or bed” he could expect. It was almost certainly his familiarity with Indian languages that saved him, for it was the natives who provided food and shelter when Williams most desperately needed it. Paddling a canoe up and down the Seekonk and Moshassuck rivers, Williams gradually emerged into the New England spring and in June 1636 did what he bid others, by entering into a direct agreement with the sachems, in this case of the Narragansett tribe, for the purchase of land “upon the fresh rivers of the Mooshausic [Moshassuck] and Wannasquatasket [Woonasquatucket].” It was there that Williams established Providence Plantation, out of the sight and jurisdiction of Massachusetts. From the beginning Providence was to refrain from any acts of forced conformity, nor was it ever to impose tests for the holding of office. It was not just the first American settlement to embrace such freedom of conscience, it was the first in the Western world. Massachusetts would in fact retain some of the moral and religious laws on its statute books until well into the twentieth century. But it had long since ceased to matter. It was the renegade Williams whose views had—eventually—come to prevail.
For some years, Williams spent his time “day and night, at home and on the water, at hoe and oar for bread,” his children given names like Mercy and Providence. A small community of the persecuted clustered in and around the settlement and at Newport, where the minister John Clarke had opened his doors in the same fashion. But both of them realized their colony of conscience would not survive the hostility coming from Massachusetts unless they could get authority for it from England. As luck—or as Williams certainly assumed, providence—had it, Clarke and he arrived there just after the outbreak of the war between Parliament and the king, the quarrel not least being over grand matters of religious coercion. With the authority of the Church of England crumbling, Williams went to see one of the parliamentary leaders, Sir Henry Vane, whom he had met in Boston in 1635 and who, notwithstanding a more orthodox view, was himself a believer in toleration and the disestablishment of a national church. Vane saw no reason not to assent to Providence becoming a place where freedom of beliefs could be absolutely protected. Given the ordeal that England was undergoing, he might well have agreed with Williams’s assertion in The Bloudy Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, that “God requireth not a uniformity of Religion to be inacted and inforced in any civil state, which inforced uniformity (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civill wa
rre, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants and of hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.” In 1644 Vane persuaded Parliament to authorize “an absolute charter [of liberty] for those parts of his [Williams’s] abode.” In 1651 Williams returned to England to have that charter confirmed, and stayed with Vane at his grand country house and was introduced to the Latin secretary to Cromwell’s Council, John Milton, to whom he gave Dutch lessons. Vane had become one of the powers in the land, commissioner for the army and navy, and an intransigent opponent of Cromwell’s attempts to browbeat and purge Parliament. That resistance would see him imprisoned, but not before he had managed to extend the life of Williams’s colony, the only government Vane could have found ideal.