Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  HUTCHINSON: But put the case, Sir, that I do fear the Lord and my parents. May not I entertain them that fear the Lord because my parents will not give me leave?

  WINTHROP: No but you by countenancing them above others put honor upon them.

  HUTCHINSON: I may put honor upon them as the children of God as they do honor the Lord.

  WINTHROP: We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex but only this: you so adhere unto them and do endeavor to set forth this faction and so you dishonour us….By what warrant do you consider such a course?

  HUTCHINSON: I conceive there lies a clear rule in Titus that the elder women should instruct the younger and then I must have a time wherein I must do it.

  The similarity, in tone, wit, and degree of certainty, between Hutchinson’s testimony and that of her father in London nearly sixty years earlier, is unmistakable. Later in the trial, after a long examination about her beliefs regarding the role of grace and good works in salvation, Hutchinson replied unequivocally, “Now if you do condemn me for speaking what in my conscience I know to be truth I must commit myself unto the Lord.” One of the examiners (all, of course, were men) asked her how she knew the true spirit of the Lord was speaking to her. “How,” Hutchinson replied, “did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?”5

  This is the voice of a religious zealot—but a zealot who, like many other dissident Protestants, wished to create conversions or, as the Quakers put it, “convincements” through argument and persuasion rather than coercion. However, Hutchinson was certainly arrogant enough to think that anyone who had devoted sufficient time and thought to the study of the Scriptures could not fail to be convinced of her point of view. The only unusual aspect of this religious arrogance was that it emanated from a female. Hutchinson was convicted of heresy—an outcome that was never in doubt, given the biases of the judges—and sentenced to exile.

  The final exchange between Winthrop and Hutchinson says it all. “I desire to know wherefore I am banished?” she asked Winthrop, whose closing peroration had simply ordered her expulsion because she was “a woman not fit for our society.” Winthrop replied, “Say no more, the court knows and is satisfied.”6

  •

  A year later, after being formally excommunicated by the church, Hutchinson moved to Rhode Island at the invitation of Williams, settling on land purchased from the Narragansett Indians. After her husband’s death, in 1642, Hutchinson moved on, first to Long Island and then to the Dutch colony of New Netherland proper, in what is now the Bronx. (She may have left English territory because she feared that Massachusetts authorities might renew their pursuit of “heretics” who had fled their immediate domain.) Unfortunately, Hutchinson and her six youngest children, who had excellent relations with the Narragansett tribe in Rhode Island, walked straight into a conflict between the Siwanoy Indians and the Dutch. In August 1643, they were attacked and all were scalped, with the exception of the youngest daughter, Susanna, who was just nine years old. She was kidnapped but eventually ransomed by the Dutch. The fate of Hutchinson and her family was naturally greeted by many of her former judges in Massachusetts as God’s verdict.

  It has often been pointed out that it would be anachronistic to view Hutchinson (like Margaret Fell) by today’s feminist standards, as a heroine fighting a male theocracy determined to crush her because, and only because, she was an uppity woman. Though it is certainly true that some of Hutchinson’s theological views would have drawn negative attention from the rulers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had she been a man, it is impossible to read the transcript of the civil trial, or of the church excommunication proceedings that followed, without seeing strong evidence that her offenses were compounded by her sex. “We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex,” said Winthrop, who passed final judgment on Hutchinson as “a woman not fit for our society.” Hugh Peter, a Salem minister who played an important role in the interrogation leading to her excommunication from the church, declared that Hutchinson “had rather bine a Husband than a Wife. And a Preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject.”7 We have no evidence of whether Hutchinson would have preferred being a husband to being a wife (although even then there were ways to avoid having fifteen children if you were an unwilling wife), but it is probably quite true that she would rather have been a preacher than a hearer, since she was a preacher throughout much of her adult life. Precisely because Hutchinson was not a man eligible to be a civil magistrate, we can never know whether she would have been as devoted to liberty of conscience for others as she was to her own liberty. Certainly, if one reads only the Mayflower Compact and Winthrop’s “city on a hill” speech (so beloved by recent American presidents), one would never suspect that the religious separatists who had settled Massachusetts turned out to be just as intolerant as the English rulers they left behind.

  But Hutchinson’s story resonates throughout American religious history precisely because of its highly individual character. Her reshaping of orthodox Puritanism to fit her own confident and, yes, abrasive intellect as well as her aggressive femininity was a precursor of the “religious marketplace” that would emerge in the United States. Long before Thomas Paine wrote, “My own mind is my own church,” in The Age of Reason, Hutchinson was acting on that principle and insisting that it had a place on the continent to which she had immigrated.

  I cannot remember from my school years whether I (or my teachers) had any idea of what Hutchinson actually did; I only remember that her name was always in the history texts. Hutchinson’s importance was underlined, ironically, in an ideological battle over Texas textbooks in 2009, when right-wing religious leaders proposed that her name be removed from a fifth-grade history syllabus. Far-right academics conducting a curriculum review objected to a section in the syllabus asking students to “describe the accomplishments of significant colonial leaders such as Anne Hutchinson, William Penn, John Smith, and Roger Williams.” The reviewers, who included the Reverend Peter Marshall, a right-wing evangelist who believes that Hurricane Katrina was the result of divine wrath against American liberalism, and David Barton, another minister, who asserts that the separation of church and state is a myth, stated that Hutchinson “does not belong in the company of these eminent gentlemen. She was certainly not a significant colonial leader, and didn’t accomplish anything except getting herself exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for making trouble.”8 Making trouble. It is certainly true that Hutchinson made trouble for Puritan theocrats, and that she did not, like Penn and Williams, found a colony. It probably would have been better to classify her as an important figure in the history of the battle for religious liberty. However, the people rewriting Texas’s science and history curricula are interested not in religious liberty but in religious power, and they also object to the use of the word “theocracy” to describe Puritan Massachusetts—understandably so, since they want children to be taught that America actually was founded as a Christian nation. In any case, the Texas Board of Education decided to delete Hutchinson’s name from the colonial section. The only mystery here is why Penn and Williams were not also deleted, since their views, by modern right-wing fundamentalist standards, were even more heretical than Hutchinson’s. In any event, Hutchinson would surely have found herself in jail for a considerable amount of time, as Fell did, had she conducted her meetings in England. She would also have avoided being scalped.

  The true importance of Hutchinson, Penn, and their kind lies in their contribution to the religious pluralism evident, before the outbreak of the Revolution, in colonies from New York to Virginia. The development of religious toleration during the colonial period was certainly uneven, for reasons that were in some respects similar to and in others very different from the progression of limited toleration in seventeenth-century Europe. The Salem witch trials, for example, took place more than a half-century after Hutchinson’s trial and led to a fatal outcome for those accused of witchcraft. Ye
t the Salem hysteria, while often viewed as the epitome of conservative religious intolerance and superstition in American history, may be seen more accurately as the last gasp—or, at the very least, the onset of a final illness—of the theocracy that put Hutchinson on trial. The port town of Salem, like the colonial capital Boston, was increasingly cosmopolitan in its population, views, and diversions (including an array of decidedly nonreligious entertainments characteristic of all ports). The hold of the church was slipping even though large numbers of people still believed in superstitions ranging from hellfire and damnation to witchcraft and demons. (Hellfire and damnation were regarded not as superstition but as Christian truth; the distinction between Christian “wonders” and non-Christian occultism or magic played an important role in Puritan thought.*1) Yet severe criticism of the government’s and church’s role in the witchcraft trials, followed by official apologies, came within a decade—not a vast amount of time, as such controversies unfold, when one considers the centuries it took for the Catholic Church to apologize for its role in stimulating anti-Semitism, or the Lutheran Church to apologize for persecuting Anabaptists. Samuel Sewall, a Harvard graduate who wielded great power as the man in charge of the Governor’s Council printing press for the colony, played an important role in bringing about the Salem convictions as a member of the court. Sewall’s personal diaries reveal almost no regret about his role, but in December 1696, he publicly apologized for his part in obtaining the convictions. Every year until his death, he set aside a day of fasting and prayed for forgiveness for his sins in the conduct of the trials. John Calvin, by contrast, was proud of his role in helping to engineer the indictment and eventual execution of Servetus.

  Both the persecution of Hutchinson and the Salem witch trials underline the diversity of doctrinal opinion within specific faiths that has marked American religious history as extensively as the existence of so many different denominations. Such intra-denominational conflicts existed in Europe, too, but they could not be resolved by the handy expedient of packing off a dissident or dissident group to unoccupied land.

  •

  A different route to the new, and often conflicting, models of religious expression in the colonies was emerging in what would become New York City—first settled by the Dutch in the 1620s as New Amsterdam, and taken over by the British in 1664. By the time the British arrived, the island of Manhattan was host to all the religious groups represented in the tolerationist city of Amsterdam, on the other side of the ocean. This was so in spite of the well-known prejudices of the Dutch director general, Peter Stuyvesant, who sought permission from authorities in the Netherlands to expel the first Jews arriving in New Amsterdam, from Brazil, in 1654. When Portugal had reconquered Brazil after a war with the Dutch, all Brazilian Jews were expelled—one of the many instances of the Inquisition’s following Iberian Jews to the New World. Most returned to the Netherlands, but twenty-three decided to settle in the colony of New Amsterdam. For Stuyvesant, that number was twenty-three Jews too many. But the director general’s request to expel the Jews from their new home was denied by the Dutch West India Company—bearing out Spinoza’s observation about business and trade as the bases of Dutch religious toleration. Stuyvesant did not give up easily. He prohibited Jewish men from standing guard duty in the city and then tried to impose an extra tax on them for failing to fulfill the military obligations from which they had been barred by none other than the governor himself. Once again, the metaphor of a child who kills his parents and pleads for mercy on grounds that he is an orphan comes to mind. In any event, the Dutch West India Company and government overruled Stuyvesant again and the Jews were allowed to stand guard.

  Stuyvesant loathed not only Jews but also nonconformist Protestants. His animus toward Quakers led to one of the most remarkable documents in American history, the Flushing Remonstrance, issued in 1657 by the leaders of the town of Flushing (in what is now the New York City borough of Queens). Stuyvesant had publicly tortured a twenty-three-year-old Quaker convert and pushed through a law making it a crime for anyone to harbor Quakers. No, said the citizens of Flushing, we will not obey this unjust law.

  The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks, and Egyptians, as they are considered the sons of Adam, which is the glory of the outward state of Holland, so love peace and liberty, extending to all in Christ Jesus, condemns hatred, war and bondage….Our desire is not to offend one of his little ones, in whatsoever form, name or title he appears in, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker, but shall be glad to see anything of God in any of them, desireing to do unto all men as we desire all men should do unto us….We cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them, but give them free egresse and regresse unto our Town, and houses, as God shall persuade our consciences. And in this we are true subjects both of Church and State…. This extraordinary document, long buried in the historical records of New York State, was discovered by the newspaper *2

  By 1663, the West India Company’s directors had had enough of Stuyvesant’s religious intolerance and sent him an irate letter. The directors said they wished that dissenting Protestant sects were not to be found in New Amsterdam, but they acknowledged, “Yet as the contrary seems to be the fact, we doubt very much if vigorous proceedings against them ought not to be discontinued, except you intend to check and destroy your population; which, however, in the youth of your existence ought rather to be encouraged by any possible means.” Furthermore, the directors declared firmly, “the consciences of men, at least, ought ever to remain free and unshackled.” Moderation had always guided the rulers of old Amsterdam, “and the consequence has been that, from every land, people have flocked to this asylum. Tread then in their steps, and, we doubt not, you will be blessed.”9 Tread not in their steps, the directors might as well have written, and you will be damned. Or you may at least lose your job, for you serve at our pleasure.

  Since Stuyvesant had apparently acted imperiously in many matters having nothing to do with religion, he was unpopular enough by the time the British took over that his very absence eased the way for accommodation between the old Dutch and new English settlers. And although the Church of England became the established religion when the British assumed control of New York (and eventually all of the areas once occupied by the Dutch in the region), England’s colonial governors were generally careful not to interfere with existing habits of religious toleration.

  In fact, British authorities generally maintained a hands-off policy toward both tolerant and intolerant religious practices in all of the colonies. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, where the Calvinist-influenced denominations had established Puritan theocracies, British colonial rulers did not attempt to impose Anglican ways on the populace. In Williams’s Rhode Island and Penn’s Pennsylvania, the authorities did not attempt to suppress nonconformist Protestantism, as bureaucrats devoted to the established Church of England did in the mother country. In Maryland, with a large Catholic population that would include the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll, Roman Catholics practiced their religion with a freedom they had not been able to exercise in England since the early reign of Henry VIII. And they did so without (on the whole) suppressing the rights of Protestants.*3 This was true even though the one prejudice uniting all Protestant denominations, regardless of their degree of theological liberality or conservatism, was anti-Catholicism. (By the time of the Revolution, the question was largely moot in Maryland, since Protestant settlers had long outnumbered the founding Catholics. Although Maryland Catholics continued to exercise considerable financial and political influence, they did not control the exercise of religion in the colony.) American colonies were simply too far away for “established” religion to mean what it meant in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain, much less in France, which would contribute so many Americans of persecuted Huguenot ancestry to the revolutionary cause.

  The mid-Atlantic colonies, notably Pen
nsylvania and New York (after Stuyvesant’s desire to found a Calvinist theocracy was squelched, first by his countrymen and then by the British takeover), would serve as the real template for the American religious future. Especially in their largest cities, the mid-Atlantic colonies possessed a more ethnically and religiously diverse population than either New England or the South, the latter with its great divide between white and black, between slaveholders and the enslaved. As the historian Jack Rakove notes, the mid-Atlantic area “was also a region where a modern vision of economic development was already taking hold.”10 In New England, the subdividing of limited land to provide farms for the sons of large families took place throughout the seventeenth century and, in the decades before the Revolution, was already producing migration westward. But New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania depended on the immigration of many groups—from Europe and the other American colonies—to build trade based not only on agricultural exports but on the products of skilled labor. The various groups in cities like New York and Philadelphia had to get along with one another for the economy to function (something the Dutch West India Company had tried, with little success, to impress on Stuyvesant).

  Nothing would demonstrate the results of the English policies more vividly than a grand ecumenical event approximately a century after New Amsterdam became New York. In August 1763, His Britannic Majesty’s colonial governor of New York proclaimed an official day of thanksgiving to express gratitude to God for England’s victory in the French and Indian War. There is nothing extraordinary in the history of violent human conflict about the winning side’s thanking a deity for a glorious victory. What was extraordinary, given the bitterness of the religious tensions still prevailing throughout much of Europe, was the degree of religious pluralism and civic harmony in evidence as church bells rang throughout lower Manhattan on that day. Thanksgiving services were held in Episcopal, Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, French Huguenot, Baptist, and Moravian churches. More remarkable still, Congregation Shearith Israel, representing the city’s small community of Jews, was also a full participant in the celebration. In Europe at that time, there was no country—however religiously tolerant or intolerant—in which a synagogue would have been placed on the same footing as a Christian church for purposes of an important civic event. The Jewish thanksgiving sermon was based on Zechariah 2:10, “Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion: for lo, I come, and I will dwell in the midst of thee, saith the Lord.”11 Roman Catholics were not represented in the official thanksgiving ceremonies; there were not yet enough Catholic immigrants to form an effective political pressure group in a city filled with religious denominations that hated the Church of Rome. The first Catholic church in New York, Saint Peter’s, was not completed until 1786.*4