The Wordy Shipmates (23 page)

Anyway, I remember whining, “Why do we have to go to church?”

My mother answered, “We don’t
have
to go church.”

“Great!” I said.

“We
are
going to church,” she said. She said we go there “for fellowship” and to learn and pray. But she also said that all one needs to be saved is to believe in Jesus and accept him into your heart. Then she quoted John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

From the perspective of catching the beginning of
Char-lie’s Angels,
her saying we were still going to church was bad news. But the rest of what she said was a source of self-determination and responsibility all at once. What I took from this revelation was that no one else was responsible for my salvation—that no church, no preacher, not even the Bible, come to think of it, had power over me. My highest authority was the spiritual presence within.

Compare that to standard theological procedure in Massachusetts Bay. Hutchinson’s creed—like my mother’s, of privileging a personal relationship with God over everything else—writes Morgan, “threatened the fundamental conviction on which the Puritans built their state, their churches, and their daily lives, namely that God’s will could be discovered only through the Bible”—a Bible dissected and interpreted by two ordained ministers, the teacher and the pastor, in church services with mandatory attendance.

Hutchinson’s second error, according to Winthrop, is that according to her, “no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification.” In other words, she rejects the Puritan conclusion that a member of the Elect is a visible saint who seems like a member of the Elect.

Hutchinson and her accusers would agree that one of the basic gists of Puritanism is an argument against a covenant of works, which is to say Puritanism denies everything that’s nice and comforting about Catholicism. Giving alms to the poor? Confessing one’s sins to a priest who suggests the sinner repeat prayers memorized by rote—the “Hail Mary,” for instance—and then feeling better? None of that for the Puritans. Oh, every Puritan is welcome, even required, to do good and be good and show up at church and help the needy—the Bible tells them so. But those actions alone do not admit a believer into heaven. Only God does that, through the grace of His salvation, hence the name covenant of grace. Which, as we have noted, God only doles out to a select few individuals, none of whom are ever entirely certain they have made the cut.

The difference between Anne Hutchinson and her accusers is that Hutchinson believes that anyone, even a nonbe liever, can
seem
saved. The only way to know one is saved is when one
feels
saved. Puritans, however, are suspicious of feelings, especially the feelings of a woman without proper theological training from Cambridge University.

“There joined with her in these opinions,” Winthrop writes, “a brother of hers, one Mr. Wheelwright, a silenced minister sometimes in England.” The fate of John Wheelwright, who is married to Hutchinson’s sister, is entwined with Hutchinson’s, partly because he and Cotton are the only clergymen Hutchinson approves of, the only ministers she condones for preaching about the covenant of grace instead of the covenant of works. The other reason Wheelwright is caught up in the momentum of Hutchinson’s controversy with the Bay Colony officials is that she inspires her followers to demand that Wheelwright be put on the payroll as a minister of the Boston church.

That is Winthrop’s own congregation. On October 30, 1636, he writes in his journal, “Some of the church of Boston, being of the opinion of Mrs. Hutchinson, had labored to have Mr. Wheelwright to be called to be a teacher there. . . . One of the church stood up and said, he could not consent.”

This anonymous “one” was most likely Winthrop himself, who goes on to describe the man’s reasoning: “because the church being well furnished already with able ministers, whose spirits they knew, and whose labors God had blessed in much love and sweet peace.” I.e., they’ve got Cotton, they’ve got Wilson; so, minister-wise, they’re all set. Wheelwright, however, is still well within the traditional Bostonian being-talked-out-of-one’s-questionable-opinions grace period, and it is suggested that perhaps he could lead a congregation in nearby Braintree.

The word Winthrop uses to characterize Hutchinson and Wheelwright’s thought is “antinomian,” which means “against the law.” This period is often called by historians the “Antinomian Controversy.” Winthrop, as a magistrate, is on the side of the law.

Like a lot of Puritan disagreements, this one is tricky. Winthrop is by no means opposed to the covenant of grace. He actually shares Hutchinson’s admiration for Cotton, and nurturing the covenant of grace is Cotton’s specialty. Recall that Winthrop praised Cotton for having such a talent for waking lackluster believers from spiritual slumber that the Boston church underwent a boom of enthusiasm after Cotton came to town. Even Winthrop, in the middle of the Antinomian Controversy, admitted to such an awakening, calling it “the voice of peace.”

Anne Hutchinson is merely taking Protestantism’s next logical step. If Protestantism is an evolutionary process devoted to the ideal of getting closer and closer to God, it starts with doing away with Latin-speaking popes and bishops in favor of locally elected but nevertheless highly educated, ordained clergymen, and Bibles translated into the believers’ mother tongues. This is the “New England Way.”

Hutchinson is pushing American Protestantism further, toward a practice approaching the more personal, ecstatic, anti-intellectual, emotional slant now practiced in the U.S.A., especially in the South and Midwest. We call that swath of geography the “Bible Belt,” but that would have been a more accurate description of bookish seventeenth-century New England. While modern evangelicals obviously set store in the Bible, their partiality for alone time with their deity means that a truer name for what we now call the Bible Belt might be something along the lines of the Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ Belt, or the Filled with the Holy Spirit Basket of America.

Protestantism’s evolution away from hierarchy and authority has enormous consequences for America and the world. On the one hand, the democratization of religion runs parallel to political democratization. The king of England, questioning the pope, inspires English subjects to question the king and his Anglican bishops. Such dissent is backed up by a Bible full of handy Scripture arguing for arguing with one’s king. This is the root of self-government in the English-speaking world.

On the other hand, Protestantism’s shedding away of authority, as evidenced by my mother’s proclamation that I needn’t go to church or listen to a preacher to achieve salvation, inspires self-reliance—along with a dangerous disregard for expertise. So the impulse that leads to democracy can also be the downside of democracy—namely, a suspicion of people who know what they are talking about. It’s why in U.S. presidential elections the American people will elect a wisecracking good ol’ boy who’s fun in a malt shop instead of a serious thinker who actually knows some of the pompous, brainy stuff that might actually get fewer people laid off or killed.

 

 

 

B
y December of 1636, tensions between the two factions of Hutchinson/Wheelwright versus Winthrop/ Wilson (with John Cotton in the middle), take their toll on at least one Bostonian. Winthrop writes in his journal that at a meeting of the magistrates, Henry Vane claims he needs to resign as governor and return to England for “reasons concerning his own estate,” the seventeenth-century version of a politician’s resignation made in the name of spending more time with his family. As this is “a time of such danger” due to the ongoing Indian troubles, Vane’s colleagues chew him out for even considering abandoning a colony in need. He agrees to stick around, but he complains of foreseeing “God’s judgments to come upon us for these differences and dissensions, which he saw amongst us.” Then Winthrop writes that Vane “brake forth into tears.”

In earlier paragraphs devoted to the Pequot War, I have mentioned that Winthrop records that on January 20, 1637, “a general fast was kept in all the churches,” a punishment meant to appeal to God to help the colony with its Indian troubles and “the dissensions of our churches.”

John Cotton preaches a Fast Day sermon meant to scold the colonists for their bickering. He quotes from Isaiah 58:4: “Behold, ye fast for strife and debate.” Then, John Wheelwright asks to preach and, in the spirit of reconciliation, Cotton lets him.

“The only cause of fasting of true believers,” remarks Wheelwright, “is the absence of Christ.” This is a serious accusation. Remember that in Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity,” of seven years earlier, he supposed that in New England, God “will delight to dwell among us as His own people.” But Wheelwright continues that if Christ “be present with his people, then they have no cause to fast.”

Then Wheelwright, clearly alluding to his and Hutchinson’s beleaguered little faction, proclaims that “the saints of God are few, they are but a little flock.” Then, alluding to Winthrop’s side, he continues, “Those that are enemies to the Lord, not only paganish, but antichristian, and those that run under a covenant of works are very strong.”

With this sermon, Winthrop writes, Wheelwright “stirred up the people . . . with much bitterness and vehemency.” Hutchinson’s followers start “frequenting the lectures of other ministers” to “make much disturbance by public questions, and objections to their doctrines.” Thus the Hutchin sonians from Boston become an irreverent peanut gallery, traveling the colony to interrupt the sermons of other towns’ ministers. Such outrageous questioning of authority is an obvious violation of the Fifth Commandment, as it dishon ors church fathers.

At the next meeting of the General Court, Winthrop writes that Wheelwright is found “guilty of sedition, and also of contempt, for that the court had appointed the fast as a means of reconciliation of the differences . . . and he purposefully set himself to kindle and increase them.”

Vane, who is still governor at the start of the meeting, protests in vain. Wheelwright’s sentencing is postponed until the next court in May, though it will be postponed again. By the end of the meeting, Winthrop is reelected governor, which is a rebuke of Vane, and, by extension, of Wheelwright and Hutchinson.

Also in May 1637 the court issues an order, writes Winthrop, “to keep out all such persons as might be dangerous to the commonwealth.” And who will be the arbiters of which persons are or are not dangerous? The magistrates, of course. This outrageous immigration policy is meant expressly to bar the Hutchinson and Wheelwright camp from importing supporters to their cause. Vane, who was voted out as governor but remains as one of the deputies (and one of Anne Hutchinson’s best friends), is infuriated by this policy. After Winthrop defends it, Vane writes in response, “This law we judge to be most wicked and sinful.” Among his objections to the law, Vane includes the fact that it gives the power “to expel and reject those which are most eminent Christians, if they suit not with the disposition of the magistrates.” Vane’s point is dangerously close to Roger Williams’s recognition that Christianity is inherently divisive and when it is the state religion, the Christians in power tend to persecute other kinds of Christians with whom they disagree. One of Vane’s more basic, and legally correct, arguments against the law is that it could theoretically bar the king himself from setting foot in this part of his own kingdom. Which is a violation of the Charter’s charge for the colonists to make no law “repugnant to the laws of England.”

The Bay Colony’s reactionary immigration legislation is not unlike reactionary immigration legislation throughout history: it exposes a people’s deepest fears. For example, the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903, passed by Congress to bar anarchists from the United States after an anarchist assassinated President McKinley. Or the not particularly Magna Carta-friendly clause in the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowing for illegal immigrants to be detained indefinitely and without legal counsel for up to six months if they are suspected of terrorism, or simply have terrorist “ties.”

Behind every bad law, a deep fear. And in 1637, the two things panicking the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony the most are the Pequot and Anne Hutchinson. After the Pequot are burned alive in May, Winthrop and his fellow magistrates have one down and one to go.

In August, Vane sails home to England for good. It must have been a relief to go where an Englishman is generally allowed to just show up unannounced, without court approval.

In the years to come, Vane will stand out as a rare man during the English Civil War, an actual moderate. He is in the minority of Puritan Members of Parliament who argue against beheading Charles I, writing later that the king’s execution “will be questioned whether that was an act of justice or murder.” (“The most interesting thing about King Charles I,” reports Monty Python, “is that he was 5 foot 6 inches tall at the start of his reign, but only 4 foot 8 inches tall at the end of it.”)

Vane’s friend Oliver Cromwell had commanded his army to defeat a king in the name of Parliament only to then make himself Lord Protector and dissolve Parliament like the king before him. Vane becomes such an outspoken critic of Cromwell’s despotism that Cromwell is said to have cried, “ The Lord deliver me from thee, Henry Vane!”

Forced to retire from public life during Cromwell’s dictatorship, Vane takes to writing. Like Roger Williams, Vane believes in religious liberty, gently insisting that when freedom of worship is denied, people “are nourished up in a biting, devouring, wrathful spirit, one against another, and are found transgressors of that royal law which forbids us to do that unto another which we would not have them do unto us.” In other words, required membership in one religion, like that in Massachusetts Bay, is a violation of the golden rule called for by Jesus, the King of Kings, in the Sermon on the Mount.