by Sarah Vowell
Five months later, the magistrates summon Williams to explain why he was preaching in Salem that they should not administer an oath to a “wicked” man. Oaths—loyalty oaths to the colony and testimonial oaths before the court—were a sacred tool of justice to the magistrates. Williams argued that an oath is a promise in the eyes of God, and a wicked man making an oath is a violation of the Third Commandment, causing the sinner “to take the name of God in vain.” Now, that is what I call creative commandment interpretation.
Let’s pause here and try and look past Williams’s seemingly teenage behavior—past his tendency toward fussy and abrasive theological scrutiny, past his loopy Christian navel gazing, past his grating inability to make any of the small, charitable compromises involved in getting along with other people. Williams’s greatness lies in his refusal to keep his head down in a society that prizes nothing more than harmony and groupthink. He cares more about truth than popularity or respect or personal safety. And while his pursuit of truth leads him to some eccentric, if not laughable, applications of the Ten Commandments, his quest also leads him to some equally eccentric beliefs about racial equality, self-determination, and religious liberty that good people now hold dear. In his tormented, lonesome, obsessive, Calvinist way, he is free. I find him hard to like, but easy to love.
Until scholar Perry Miller took a hard look at Roger Williams in the 1950s, Williams enjoyed a reputation as a sort of proto-Thomas Jefferson. A Williams biography published in 1940 was entitled Irrepressible Democrat. I can see why. Even though there is no evidence Jefferson ever read any of Williams’s tracts, Williams’s writings do occasionally prefigure Jefferson’s to an eerie degree. Williams’s description of what he sees as England’s crime of stealing American Indians’ land as a “national sin” sidles up to Jefferson’s line about “the original sin of slavery” in the United States. In his 1802 letter to Connecticut’s Danbury Baptist Association, Jefferson called for a “wall of separation” between church and state, an oft-mentioned endorsement of the establishment clause in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But Jefferson was not the first person to use that phrase—it was Williams, bemoaning that the state-sponsored church “opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” Williams wanted to rebuild that wall, replant that hedge to keep out the state. Williams wanted to protect believers from their government. So he’s not so much the proto-Jefferson as the un-Jefferson, a man who devotes his life to keeping government out of the church—not the other way around.
Still, as an American citizen whose only religion is the freedom of religion, I’m cheered to follow along as Williams exercises his First Amendment rights 156 years before the First Amendment gets ratified. In the United States, the story of the freedom of religion starts, obviously, with religion—with Roger Williams’s (and later, Anne Hutchinson’s) war of words with the court and clergy of Massachusetts Bay in general and with John Winthrop in particular.
Winthrop and Williams personify not just the conflict between orthodox Massachusetts and what would become madcap Rhode Island, the freewheeling colony Williams is about to found. They personify what would become the fundamental conflict of American life—between public and private, between the body politic and the individual, between we the people and each person’s pursuit of happiness. At his city-on-a-hill best, Winthrop is Pete Seeger, gathering a generation around the campfire to sing their shared folk songs. Williams is Bob Dylan plugging in at Newport, making his own noise.
From this end of history, Roger Williams’s specific gripes with Winthrop and Co.—denouncing the blasphemy of ungodly persons swearing oaths, taking issue with magistrates prosecuting Sabbath breakers—seem like ridiculous, antiquated quibbles. But Williams’s larger project is to guard against any intrusion of the civil sphere into the religious sphere. He’s after the thing free people always enjoy, yearn, or fight for; he calls it “soul-liberty.”
In 1635, Williams’s surging obsession with his wall of separation between church and state turns him into a bricklayer straight out of Poe—barricading himself into his lonely little garden until no other person gets in, not even his wife. Winthrop’s journal notes that one of Williams’s half-baked notions du jour is that visible saints should only pray with other confirmed visible saints to the exclusion of all others, even if said others include his wife and child. How did that go over chez Williams? Sorry, honey, you know I love you guys, but if you want me to say grace over this bowl of mushy corn, you and the kids are going to have to leave the room. John Cotton later reveals his compassion for poor Mrs. Williams, a woman “of meek and modest spirit” who suffered Williams’s “offensive course which occasioned him for a season to withdraw communion in spiritual duties, even from her also.”
Once, Roger Williams was away from home and got word his wife was seriously ill. He wrote her a letter, later published as the pamphlet Experiments in Spiritual Life and Health, that gives a reader an inkling of what it must have been like to be married to him.
He addresses Mrs. Williams as “My Dearest Love and Companion in This Vale of Tears,” a pleasant enough start. “I now send thee that which I know will be sweeter to thee than honey,” he writes, “and of more value than if every line and letter were . . . gold and silver.” And what is this gift a girl wants more than jewelry? A sermon on proper Christian behavior, of course.
“For as the Lord loveth a cheerful giver,” he points out, “so he also [loves] a cheerful preacher.”
Flowers would have been nice. Can’t go wrong with flowers. Oh, but that’s exactly how Williams sees this how-to manual—as a bouquet. “I send thee (though in winter) a handful of flowers made up in a little posy for thy dear self, and our dear children, to look and smell on, when I as the grass of the field shall be gone, and withered,” he writes. See? This is better than regular flowers. Regular flowers can’t boss her around from the grave. “All my flowers shall be some choice example, or speech of some son or daughter of God, picked out from the garden of the holy Scriptures.”
This charming, romantic get-well card includes this recurring image of a repeat sinner: a dog vomiting, then lapping up its own vomit. There is the comforting reminder that Mrs. Williams should regard her bout of the sniffles as a “warning from heaven to make ready for a sudden call to be gone from hence,” i.e., as good practice for death. There is the section in which the women sleeping with biblical men try (and fail) to distract their men from devotion to their Creator: “Hence Job in his great passions and cursings could not be brought (no not by his wife) to speak ill of God.” Or: “Samson, though carried away first by a Philistine wife, and then by a Philistine whore, yet can he not be carried away so from the God of Israel.” There’s the part where Williams invites his wife on a sort of weekend getaway “into the valley of the shadow of death,” holding hands perhaps as they “view the rotten skulls of so many innumerable thousands of millions of millions of men and women, like ourselves, gone, gone forever from this life.”
“Between a loving couple,” writes Williams, “it is not easy to keep in the first flame of love . . . although the fire of the truth and sincerity of marriage love never die, or be extinguished.” While that statement is in keeping with the not-so-hot-and-bothered sweet nothings of this document, it’s worth noting his reference to the “first flame of love.” Apparently, there was one once.
The United States is often called a Puritan nation as a lazy way of saying Americans are sexually repressed. Which seems true, because we all read The Scarlet Letter in ninth grade. The Puritans were troubled by adultery, and who can blame them? It is, at the very least, a lapse of common courtesy. But the Puritans were actually quite gung-ho about sexual intercourse for married couples because they believed God came up with it. In fact, a handful of colonial New England women successfully sued for divorce on the grounds of impotence, including Anna Lane of Massachusetts Bay, who accused her husband in 1658 of failing to perform �
��the duties of a husband,” a detail not disputed by Mr. Lane. And speaking of marriage, in colonial New England weddings were “a civil thing,” civil unions one might say, performed by magistrates, not clergy. Because a wedding wasn’t trumped up as the object in life that saves one’s soul—that would be God—but rather more like what it actually is, a change in legal status, an errand at the DMV, with cake.
So marital intercourse for Puritans was perfectly permissible and necessary, but every Puritan’s heart belonged to Jesus. Spiritual passion is the one area in a Puritan’s life in which he or she is allowed out-and-out abandon. We’re talking outpourings of ardor bordering on smut.
Even John Winthrop, upstanding pillar of the community, was not above soft-core mash notes addressed to the Lord inspired by the Song of Solomon. “Draw us with the sweetness of thine odors,” he asked Jesus, “that we may run after thee, allure us . . . that thou may possess us as thine own . . . in the love of marriage.” He continues, “Let us hear that sweet voice of thine, my love, my dove, my undefiled: spread thy skirt over us and cover our deformity, make us sick with thy love: let us sleep in thine arms and awake in thy kingdom.”
“God’s children,” Williams tells his wife, “like true lovers, delight to be private, and fervent with their heavenly father and husband.”
Williams’s attraction to Jesus inspires him to write the lyrics to hackneyed pop songs, including, “Let Him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for his love is better than wine.”
Williams in Salem is such a myopic researcher of biblical truth he doesn’t care who gets hurt. His intellectual fervor, coupled with a disregard for practical consequences, reminds me of nuclear physicist J. Robert Op penheimer, running his secret Manhattan Project lab in Los Alamos with single-minded zeal, then quoting the Bhagavad Gita as the first test of his atomic bomb lights up the desert. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Bay General Court and John Winthrop are trying to keep their precarious little world intact. Williams’s singular rhetoric has become too disturbing to the public peace.
Williams finds the kind of civic harmony Winthrop strives for to be overrated, a “false peace” that is no measurement of a society’s godliness. In The Bloudy Tenent he writes that even American Indians and “the wildest pagans keep the peace of their towns or cities, though neither in one nor the other can any man prove a true church of God in these places, and consequently no spiritual and heavenly peace.”
Williams goes on to remark that it is the state that is guilty of true disturbance of the peace by inflicting corporeal punishment on people who question the state. He writes, “Such persons only break the city’s or kingdom’s peace, who cry out for prison and swords against such who cross their judgment or practice in religion.”
Williams would concur with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assertion in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” that “I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ ” Williams is up for verbal battles and argumentative civil wars in lieu of physical violence and corporeal punishment.
The tragedy of Williams is that he was born about 350 years too early to pursue his true calling—television punditry. What he needs is his own show on cable news. That’s essentially how he acts before the General Court of Massachusetts Bay, as if he and Winthrop and Dudley are squabbling around some big round table on a Sunday-morning show and when they unhook their contact mikes at the end of the broadcast, they’ll all go out for a gentlemanly brunch.
Williams will later write that the Massachusetts Puritans’ disagreements with him are reminiscent of the very disagreements those Puritans had with the Church back home, disagreements that led them to the extreme measure of emigrating to the New World. He poses the question of how can they expect him to tow their party line when they came here because they were unwilling to do the same for Bishop Laud? Williams points out, “Alas, who knows not what lamentable differences have [they had with] the same ministers of the Church of England,” causing them to abandon “their livings, friends, country, life, rather than conform?”
Williams takes this logic a step further, putting his conflict with the settlers of Massachusetts and their conflict with the Church of England within the larger context of the history of Christianity from its beginnings. He points out that the apostles’ preaching caused “uproars and tumults wherever they came.” When the Protestant Elizabeth I succeeded the Catholic Bloody Mary, Williams notes that Catholics were suddenly out of fashion and out of favor: “The fathers made the children heretics and the children the father.”
Williams asserts that disagreement is inherent in religion. The state has jurisdiction over violations against persons and property but not over the soul. He figures that sinners and unbelievers will get more than what’s coming to them at world’s end, when angels “shall bind them into bundles, and cast them over the everlasting burnings” of hell. But until then, he posits, let’s just try not to kill each other:
God requireth not an uniformity of religion to be inacted and enforced in any civil state; which enforced uniformity (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in His servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.
Is it just me, or is this point still worth lingering over? It’s one thing for nonviolent nonbelievers to throw up their hands at the way the faithful of various religious faiths seem to come to blows over dogma. But Williams, a diehard zealot, is unflinching in his recognition that other diehard zealots are equally set in their ways. And while he would happily—happily!—harangue any other persons of faith for days on end about how wrong they are, he does not think they should be jailed or hit or stabbed or shot for their stupidity, the eternal flames of hell being punishment enough.
Stranger still, Williams does not mean that a civil state should allow merely all the variations of Christianity, from Catholicism on down. He means that a civil state should permit all forms of religion, including “the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish [Islamic] or Antichristian consciences.” These forms of worship should be legal for “all men in all nations and countries.” Not that Williams will be hosting any interfaith prayer breakfasts. He insists other religions should be “fought against.” It’s just that the only weapon used to fight them should be “the sword of God’s spirit, the Word of God.”
According to Winthrop’s journal, on July 8, 1635, the court summons Williams to New Town to explain his “dangerous opinions” to “the magistracy and the churches.” They grill him on the following beliefs: the notion that magistrates “ought not to punish the breach of the first table” of the Ten Commandments; that oaths should only be administered to visible saints; that visible saints should not pray with the unclean, even their own wives and children. The court also discussed admonishing the church of Salem for once again calling Williams to be its teacher. Winthrop notes:
The said opinions were adjudged by all, magistrates and ministers, (who were desired to be present,) to be erroneous, and very dangerous, and the calling of him to office, at that time, was judged a great contempt of authority. So, in fine, time was given to him and the church of Salem to consider of these things till the next general court, and then either to give satisfaction to the court, or else to expect the sentence; it being professedly declared by the ministers, (at the request of the court to give their advice,) that he who should obstinately maintain such opinions . . . were to be removed.
There is a lot going on in that passage. For starters, the ultimatum, obviously, that unless Williams recants by the next court he will be banished. Notice they are in no hurry to carry out this sentence. Williams is not some outsider mope like Philip Ratcliffe. Williams is one of them, a visible saint (albeit an exasperating one). So they give him the seventeenth-century equivalent of a time-out to think through his opinions and come around to theirs. As Winthrop put it in “Christian Charity,” they remain “knit together in a bond of
love.”
Notice also that in Winthrop’s description of the hearing, when he brings up the presence of the ministers, he makes it clear that they were invited, and that their role is purely advisory. The colonists actually agree with Williams on the separation of church and state—kind of. It’s just that Williams wants a wall between them and Winthrop is happy with a wisp of velvet rope. Massachusetts Bay is not a true theocracy in that the colony would not dream of letting the ministers hold office. Winthrop and his shipmates came here to get away from Bishop Laud, not create another one, and Laud’s recent attacks on the Charter only confirm that clergymen should not moonlight as magistrates. The assistants make their decision in consultation with the ministers, but the ministers’ advice is not legally binding. Cotton and the others act as a human law library, a source for interpreting the Bible’s legal instructions. To Williams, however, this liaison means the ministers are dragging the snow-white robes of Christ through the wilderness muck of government; that’s probably why Cotton, more than any of his other Boston critics, becomes the object of Williams’s lifelong scorn.
Winthrop writes that at the same meeting some Salem residents petitioned the court for the deed to “some land in Marblehead Neck,” near their town. The court refuses them because, says Winthrop, “they had chosen Mr. Williams their teacher, while he stood under question of authority, and so offered contempt to the magistrates.” On its face, this retaliation is just plain petty. But the court also displays a troubling disregard for one of its own deeply held principles. Namely, that a Congregationalist church is its own authority and therefore is not beholden to magistrates in their own or any other town. It is an abuse of power for the court to strong-arm a town because said town’s congregation picked its own minister—a congregation choosing its own minister being the definition of a Congregationalist church. Recall that the court had pulled this four years earlier, when Salem first tried to hire Williams. Salem backed down back then, but at some point the townspeople got the nerve to protest. Winthrop notes that the court’s decision prompts the Salem church to “write to other churches, to admonish the magistrates of this as a heinous sin.” Out of spite, then, the magistrates bar John Endecott and the other Salem men from the next court “until they should give satisfaction about the letter.”