America's Prophet (3 page)

Among Protestants, Moses was arguably the preeminent figure of the Hebrew Bible. Luther himself was frequently compared to him. As the centenary of Luther’s posting the Ninety-five Theses approached in 1617, an occasion for which Protestants invented the century as a landmark of historical measurement, the German monk was hailed as Europe’s Moses, the man who led the chosen people out from papal bondage. The Pilgrims took the Protestants’ interest in Hebrew Scripture to its ultimate extreme by reenacting Moses’ journey. By foisting themselves across the sea on an “errand into the
wilderness” of America, ordinary citizens could now cast themselves as actors in the greatest drama ever conceived. In effect, everyone could now be Moses. As John Milton wrote in 1644, “The time seems come, wherein Moses the great Prophet may sit in heaven rejoicing to see that…all the Lord’s people are become prophets.”

Title page of the 1560 edition of the Geneva Bible, which depicts the Israelites camped before the Red Sea.
(Courtesy of The Library of Congress)

“Protestants viewed themselves as living in biblical time,” Jim Baker explained as we walked toward Pulpit Rock. “To them, the
Bible represents the original church, and they want to be a part of it. In coming to God’s New Israel, they viewed themselves as re-creating God’s original kingdom that had been occluded by the manmade church.”

For Pilgrims and Puritans who came to America, the Exodus story took on an even deeper resonance because they were breaking away not simply from the Catholic Church but from the Church of England as well.

“There’s very little precedent for what they did,” Jim said, “and they realized that their actions were not going to go over very well with the authorities. Therefore you’ve got to convince yourself—and everybody else—that breaking away from England was a good idea. To do that, you go back to the source, like a lawyer citing precedent. The Bible was the ultimate source, and the Exodus the ultimate example.”

PULPIT ROCK IS
located in a small clearing, surrounded by clover, dandelions, and daisies. It’s a granite boulder that weighs about thirty tons and was deposited here during the last glacier period, when retreating ice ferried down chunks of granite from New Hampshire. Plymouth Rock arrived in the same way. Neither boulder appears in contemporaneous accounts; they were added to the story more than a century after the Pilgrims landed.

Once the men of the Old Colony Club had assembled, a member climbed to the top of Pulpit Rock and began tapping out a tune on a snare drum. He later told me he had played a similar song upon the arrival of the
Mayflower II
in 1957 when the captain sidled up to him and said, “Laddie, could you pick up the pace. We haven’t had a bath in sixty days.”

Then Harold Boyer, at ninety-seven, the senior member of the club, was hoisted to the summit. “Friends of the Old Colony Club,” he said. “When I first became a member, I was attracted by the fellowship, but also the responsibility to perpetuate the memory of the Pilgrims.”

He carefully recapitulated the Pilgrims’ story, from their departure from Holland to their landing on Cape Cod to the dawning of their first day on Clark’s Island. “They were ready to set out the next day, Sunday,” he said, “and seek a permanent place for landing. But Sunday was the Sabbath, so they set aside every other thing and worshiped. The first service in the New World.” He pointed out a carving on Pulpit Rock that said
ON THE SABBOTH DAY WEE RESTED
.

“Today, my friends, Americans have lost connection with the Pilgrims. We have forgotten the biblical faith that they had. We desecrate the Sabbath. We no longer see ourselves as exiles searching for the Promised Land.” He paused.

“My brothers, I may not be here next year with you,” he continued. “So on my last visit to this sacred place, I beg of you to remember the words the great prophet said on Mount Nebo. God has promised us this land. He will make the land flow with milk and honey. But we must remember to give him thanks.”

In the background, the drum began to sound. A bluebird settled on the grass. I could hear waves splashing on the shore. And on Pulpit Rock, Harold Boyer closed his eyes and continued reciting what are among the most oft-cited lines in the Bible, from Deuteronomy 30. They are the words from Moses’ farewell address on Mount Nebo in which the man of choices offers his people the ultimate choice. John Winthrop quoted these words on the
Arbella
in 1630, Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked them the night before he was killed in 1968,
and Ronald Reagan repeated them at the base of the Statue of Liberty on its centennial birthday in 1986:

IN MANY WAYS
, Plymouth was an unfortunate choice for the Pilgrims. While the soil and water were good, the shipping would have been better in Boston, the fishing superior on Cape Cod. Today the town is still stranded between these more attractive neighbors. It has many signatures of New England—white clapboard churches, green copper cupolas, American flags—as well as its share of wry tributes, like Bradford’s Package Store on Route 3A. An eighty-one-foot-tall statue of Faith, known as Forefathers Monument, stands on a hill. A slightly squat cousin of the Statue of Liberty, the female figure rests her foot on Plymouth Rock and holds a Bible.

A few miles away is Plimoth Plantation, a re-creation of the town circa 1627. (The facility uses the original spelling of the name.) The village includes thatched cottages, herb gardens, and dozens of re-enactors in buckled shoes, bonnets, and white lacy collars. Visiting the plantation is like walking into an elementary school Thanksgiving play, except the actors have Ph.D.’s in their pockets instead of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Jim Baker had suggested I meet the park’s premier historian, John Kemp, the author of a book about 1620, who that day was playing the role of William Brewster, the
preacher on the
Mayflower
. He had a gray Vandyke and was tending a fire on his hearth. He offered to show me his Bible.

“Our leader has a phrase he often mutters—Scrutinized Scriptures,” Kemp, er, Elder Brewster, said. “He speaks of the need for each family to make studying Scripture a daily duty.” The Pilgrims even named their children after biblical virtues, he explained. Brewster had daughters named Fear and Patience. He had a son named Love and another named Wrestling, after the Hebrew word
Israel,
which means “wrestling with God.”

But the Pilgrims’ attachment to the Bible goes even deeper, to another idea at the heart of the Moses story: covenant. The Moses narrative is built on two pillars. The first is freedom. In times of oppression, slavery, or pain, the story suggests, humans can cry out and God will liberate them from their distress. “I have marked well the plight of my people,” God tells Moses at the burning bush. “I am mindful of their suffering.”

But freedom alone is not God’s desire for humans. Freedom must be accompanied by the second pillar of the story: responsibility. In the Bible, this notion is captured in the word
brit,
or covenant, an agreement between two parties to perform and/or refrain from certain activities. In Genesis, God makes quasi covenants with Adam, Noah, and Abraham. But the climactic covenant comes at Mount Sinai, when the agreement finally takes written form. Having freed the Israelites from slavery, God now demands that they follow his laws, namely, the Ten Commandments and 613 other mandates. The Bible’s message: There is no freedom without obligation. True freedom depends on
giving up
some freedoms in return for a civil and just society.

One reason the Puritans proved so influential in American history is that they were the first to sear these twin pillars into American life—freedom and law, Exodus and Sinai. A century and a half
later, these parallel ideas would be entrenched in the defining events of American history, the liberation of the Revolution followed by the constriction of the Constitution. In both cases, the language was heavily influenced by Moses.

I was struck during my visit to Plimoth Plantation by how profoundly strict the Pilgrim covenant was. Sinners were whipped in public or placed in stocks. In those early, brutal months, one of the few healthy residents had his hands and feet bound. Later, adulterers were forced to wear an
AD
on their outer garments and a sodomizer was put to death. Bradford justified the punishment by citing verses of Mosaic law. Considering the Pilgrims had traveled halfway across the world, had virtually no food, were surrounded by Indians, and steadily lost family and friends, you’d think they might have relaxed their religious convictions. Instead, they tried to out-Moses Moses. Having just crossed their version of the Red Sea, they quickly implemented their own Sinai.

The Pilgrims’ commitment to covenant began with the Mayflower Compact, signed immediately before they came ashore on Cape Cod, in which they agreed to “covenant and combine ourselves” into a civil body. In 1636, John Cotton presented the commonwealth of Massachusetts with an elaborate legal code based on the books of Moses that included forty-six separate laws drawn from the Hebrew Bible. Though Cotton’s plan was watered down, the commonwealth still adopted laws taken directly from Deuteronomy, including punishing crimes associated with the “first table” of the Decalogue, the first five of the Ten Commandments. These offenses included incest, bearing false witness, even cursing one’s parents. A cage was set up for people who did not honor the Sabbath. Over time, the idea of covenant became part of the fabric of America. The word
federal,
for instance, comes from the Latin
foedus,
or “covenant.”

I asked John Kemp in his role as Elder Brewster why a group of Christians would rely so heavily on Old Testament notions of freedom and law.

“For us, freedom is not as important as you might think,” he said. “We wanted freedom from oppression, and freedom from the bondage of the Church. But what we really wanted was freedom to go back to the Bible.”

“So you didn’t come here to be free?” I asked.

“We wanted to be free from the tyranny of England, absolutely. But we really came to obey God. In reading the Bible, we learn that the true church of God is all his elected leaders of the past, and that includes the Hebrew prophets. Of those, Moses was the greatest. We know that God chose to give the law to him, and through him it comes down to all of us.”

MY LAST STOP
in Plymouth was an exquisite white Victorian house on the grassy shore of the harbor overlooking Clark’s Island. Squint your eyes and double the acreage, and the lawn would be the perfect setting for a game of Kennedy touch football. Only this home belongs to the least likely member of the Old Colony Club and the most unexpected tender of the
Mayflower
flame.

The Reverend Peter Gomes has as much stature as Forefathers Monument and an even firmer grip on the Bible. He’s the preacher at Memorial Church of Harvard University and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals. A former president of the nearly two-hundred-year-old Pilgrim Society, he was named Clergy of the Year in 1998 by the magazine
Religion and American Life
. He’s also black, Republican, and gay. (He later changed his registration to Democrat to help elect the state’s first black governor.) Unable to attend the
pilgrimage to Clark’s Island, he invited me to his home the following day to discuss the Pilgrims and their role in introducing Moses to American life. I arrived to find him wearing slippers and watering gardenias on his porch. He offered me a glass of lemonade, and we settled into rocking chairs.

“It’s one of the great spots in the world, to sit here and look out at this landscape and realize that most of it was quite accidental,” he said in an accent that suggested he could teach the king a few things about the King’s English. “They never would have gotten here had they not wrecked on Clark’s Island.”

“Is there any significance that they took a day off to pray?” I asked.

“I like the notion that ‘On the Sabbath day we rested,’” he said. “They had church. That I can understand. I view Clark’s Island as an anticipation, the point from which a great adventure begins afoot.”

I asked him why this group of radical Christians was so openly motivated by Moses.

“By the early 1600s, English translations of the Bible had been around for almost seventy-five years,” he said. “Biblical metaphors were already ripe and rich. The Puritans saw themselves as a chosen people being oppressed by a great imperial force. Also, Jews had been kicked out of Britain by then, so in the absence of real Jews, it’s possible for everyone to be Jewish. You can hijack their ideology lock, stock, and barrel, which is essentially what they did. I would suspect the Pilgrims didn’t like Jews as persons, but the Exodus is the greatest narrative there is, so you take it and make it your own.”