As we’ve seen, Christian nationalism operates like a ratchet or a noose; once the separation of state and church is violated, it tightens its hold and the violation becomes nearly incurable. It is then used to justify other violations, which has happened here. Congress ignored sound legal analyses and did what it was accustomed to before state and church were separated. Currently, Congress pays close to a million dollars a year for two clergymen and their staff, whose only job is to pray once a day over their proceedings.35 This is unconstitutional, as the only framers, including Madison, Father of our Constitution, to offer a legal opinion on government prayer argued.
ALTHOUGH IT IS QUITE POPULAR, the second Christian nationalist argument from America’s colonial history is somewhat convoluted and rarely spelled out. The Pilgrims and the Puritans are often conflated into one sect, when in fact they were two distinct groups. The Pilgrims established Plymouth in 1620, having first fled to Holland. John Winthrop and the Puritans established Boston and the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. In 1691, the colonies were combined. As historian Nancy Isenberg has explained,36 our popular conception gives these two colonies disproportionate weight largely because New England historians dominated the nineteenth century and shaped the American myth-making by focusing on their genetic and geographic neighbors. The Christian nationalist claim gives these colonies even more weight and goes something like this:
1. Christian settlers came to North America seeking religious freedom and established Christian governments—Christian nations—to protect that religious freedom;
2. The United States also has religious freedom;
3. Therefore, America is a Christian nation with a Christian government.37
The Christian nationalists are arguing that a Christian nation is the basis of religious freedom—that a Christian nation is not only compatible with religious freedom, but also a prerequisite. In truth, religious freedom is not possible in a Christian nation or any other theocracy. The concepts are mutually exclusive; each destroys the other.
The danger a Christian nation poses to religious liberty is exemplified in an aspect of America’s religious colonial heritage that is often warped and misrepresented. Many Americans, not just Christian nationalists, romanticize the continent’s first European colonists, claiming that they fled persecution in England in search of religious freedom.
This is not quite true. Fleeing religious persecution is not the same as seeking religious freedom.
The Plymouth Pilgrims and the Massachusetts Puritans were not seeking religious freedom. They were seeking the ability to form a government and a society dedicated to their particular brand of religion. This distinction is crucial. Religious freedom allows citizens to practice any religion so long as it doesn’t infringe on another’s rights. The Mayflower settlers were looking for a place to practice their religion and force others to practice it too. That is not freedom. It is dissent from the ruling religion and a desire to impose your own. They wanted a theocracy. As Jefferson explained 150 years later, the first English settlers may have been fleeing persecution, but when they gained power “they shewed equal intolerance in this country.”38
This distinction is underscored by the Pilgrims’s path to Plymouth. The Pilgrims—Church of England Separatists—left England and fled to Amsterdam and then Leiden in several waves between 1608 and 1609. They spent more than a decade in Holland, and most stayed for good. Some sailed for the new world aboard the Mayflower and the Speedwell and founded the Plymouth colony in 1620 (leaks forced the Speedwell to quickly return to England, never to sail again).
The Pilgrims had religious freedom when they settled in the Netherlands after fleeing persecution in England. James Madison described Holland’s civil relationship to religion well: “Holland ventured on the experiment of combining a liberal toleration, with the establishment of a particular creed.”39 This is not the freedom we would expect today, but at that time, the Netherlands was the most tolerant, religiously diverse country in Europe. The Pilgrims selected Holland for the freedom it promised.40 It was where the oppressed fled and were welcomed. Spinoza, Locke, Pierre Bayle (“atheism does not necessarily lead to the corruption of morals”41), Descartes, Hobbes, and Baron d’Holbach all found a Dutch haven from religious persecution, or Dutch printers willing to publish their revolutionary ideas. During the 1600s, the Netherlands published about half of all books produced worldwide.42 Bertrand Russell found it “impossible to exaggerate the importance of Holland in the seventeenth century, as the one country where there was freedom of speculation.”43 Freely practicing, or not practicing, one’s religion was a right the Dutch extended to all. This freedom meant that the Pilgrim elders could not enforce their beliefs with the help of civil law. And living with ungodly non-Pilgrims degraded their followers’ faith. They wanted religious uniformity, not freedom. They wanted a government based on their god, on their religion, and to meld the civil and religious authority into one alliance. They wanted theocracy—they just wanted the “right” theocracy.
The dichotomy between religious freedom and a religious government is conspicuous in the history of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans too. They banished Roger Williams—who would go on to establish the Rhode Island colony, which actually practiced tolerance—and Anne Hutchinson, among many others, for theological disagreements. Hutchinson was banished for believing in salvation through grace when orthodox doctrine claimed salvation through works. Such disagreements can be fatal under a religious regime. The Puritans executed Mary Dyer, William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, and William Leddra on Boston Common for the terrible crime of being Quakers. The Puritans also waged a holy war on the Pequots, setting fire to a village on the Mystic River, killing 700 Native men, women, and children. The survivors were sold into slavery. The genocide was like something out of the Book of Joshua. And indeed, the Puritans saw it that way. They saw themselves as instruments of their god’s holy will: “Such a dreadful Terror did the ALMIGHTY let fall upon [the Natives’] Spirits, that they would fly from us and run into the very Flames, where many of them perished.”44 According to John Mason, the Puritan militia commander, his god laughed while he murdered: “But GOD was above them, who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven…. Thus did the LORD judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies!”45
When religion, the Christian religion included, unites with the civil power, this kind of violence is typical: a recipe for genocide, land theft, and consigning the enemies of a god to a “fiery Oven.” A tendency toward theocracy is also a tendency toward violence.
Christianity used fire and the sword to purify citizens elsewhere in colonial America. In 1565, Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, founder of St. Augustine, Florida, and his zealous Catholic missionaries slaughtered 111 French Huguenots on the Florida coast for refusing to convert to Catholicism. Two weeks later, Menéndez slaughtered another 134 Huguenots, again for refusing to convert. Lest anyone doubt the religious motives of the murderers, Menéndez hung the corpses from trees with a sign proclaiming that they were killed, “not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.”46 Pope Pius V personally commended Menéndez for doing “all that was requisite” to extend “our Holy Catholic faith, and the gaining of souls for God” and also for converting “the Indian idolaters.”47 In the American Southwest, conquistadors and Franciscan monks forcibly converted thousands of Natives while trying to extend the “Holy” Catholic faith by extirpating the Native religion. European settlers were not practicing religious freedom, but religious violence.
WHEN THE PURITANS AND PILGRIMS FLED LEIDEN, they escaped the liberalizing effects of Dutch tolerance, but not completely.48 Two hundred miles south of their new Massachusetts home, the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, which would become New York, was thriving. John Adams observed that the Netherlands—which gave the fledgling, newly independent colonies their first loan in 1782 thanks to Adams’s hard work—and America were two republics “so much alike, that
the history of one seems but a transcript from that of the other; so that every Dutchman instructed in the subject, must pronounce the American revolution just and necessary.”49 The principles Americans are so proud of today have far more in common with the liberal Dutch colony that would become New York City than with the Puritans, the Pilgrims, Menéndez, the conquistadors, and their religious intolerance. In particular, two American principles that contrast severely with Puritan ideals can be traced to Dutch liberalism: diversity, and freedom over intolerance.
The Puritans’ “grim theocratic monoculture,” to borrow a phrase from historian Russell Shorto, was the antithesis of the thriving, diverse Dutch communities farther south.50 New England’s enforced uniformity stood opposed to what would become an important American principle: strength through diversity. Manhattan, on the other hand, was America’s first melting pot. Shorto’s Island at the Center of the World (2005), a history of the Dutch colony on Manhattan, eloquently recaptures an era that was lost when the less progressive English took over in 1664. Amsterdam was the most liberal and tolerant city in Europe, perhaps the world, and New Amsterdam, renamed New York by the English in 1664, took after its parent city. It was liberal and diverse, a character it has maintained. A marker of the city’s early diversity is that in 1646, one observer counted at least eighteen languages while strolling the streets.51
Religion in the city was as varied as nationalities and tongues. A later English governor, Thomas Dongan, listed fourteen denominations in the newly English colony, including “Singing Quakers, Ranting Quakers, Sabbatarians; Antisabbatarians,…Jews, [and] Independents.” He concluded his list by observing, “of all sorts of opinions [denominations] there are some, and the most part of none at all.”52 In stark contrast to New England’s rigid homogeneity, most of Manhattan was nonreligious.
Pride in American diversity was enshrined in America’s de facto original motto, E pluribus unum, “from many, one” or “out of many, one” (see page 274). From many people, one nation; from many colonies, one country. That melting pot became an American ideal. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, an author and French émigré, wrote about this in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), asking,
What then is the American, this new man? He is…[a] strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.53
(Crèvecoeur also approvingly observed that American children were “more indifferent in matters of religion than their parents. The foolish vanity, or rather the fury of making Proselytes, is unknown here; they have no time.”)54
Melting pots require toleration or they boil over. Captain William Byrd of Virginia traveled to New York in the 1680s and seconded Dongan’s observations on the absence of religion. He found it remarkable that the citizens were “not concerned with what religion their neighbor is, or whether he hath any or none.”55 This is not to say that Holland or New Amsterdam reached the modern ideal of religious freedom. But even a “grudging acceptance” from the authorities was hard to come by anywhere else.56 The distinction between tolerance and true freedom, neither of which the Puritans practiced, is another important one. But the distinction did not exist until America became the first country to separate civil government from religion. That invention is the key to genuine religious freedom.
Both tolerance and intolerance claim the power to crush dissent and heresy. Intolerance wields that power, tolerance does not. But claiming to have this power, even if the powerful hand is stayed, is problematic. Thomas Paine explained this in The Rights of Man:
Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the Pope, armed with fire and faggot, and the other is the Pope selling or granting indulgences. The former is church and state, and the latter is church and traffic [as in trade or commerce].57
George Washington expressed the same thing in his 1790 letter to the Touro Synagogue in Connecticut. This letter is justly famous for Washington’s declaration that “the Government of the United States…gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” But Washington also noted that that government cast aside “toleration” in favor of a natural right: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”58 True religious freedom comes only when state and church are completely separate, when the government has no power over the human mind at all, neither to prohibit nor to allow thought.
Intolerance looks like the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay theocracies. A government practicing tolerance might look like New Amsterdam or Roger Williams’s colony at Rhode Island. Calvinism technically governed New Amsterdam. But Shorto explains that “in the records of the colony expressions of piety are overwhelmed by accounts like that of a woman who, while her husband dozed on a nearby chair, ‘dishonorably manipulated the male member’ of a certain Irishman while two other men looked on. Excessive rigidity (of the moral kind) was not the sin of New Amsterdam’s residents.”59 And of course, when tolerance waned in New Amsterdam, “Religion was the root of it: [Governor Peter] Stuyvesant despised Jews, loathed Catholics, recoiled at Quakers, and reserved special hatred for Lutherans.”60 When Stuyvesant tried to prevent twenty-three Jewish refugees from entering the colony because they were part of a “deceitful race” that would “infect” the island, his superiors back home overruled him, enforcing tolerance and requiring that “each person shall remain free in his religion.” 61
Although tolerance might be adopted as a Judeo-Christian principle in some enlightened circles, religious freedom cannot be. Religion at its heart is a claim to hold the ultimate truth. Christianity holds that truth to the exclusion of all others, with an eternal reward if you accept the truth, and eternal punishment if you do not. Such a worldview can never coexist with true freedom. It will always use its power to promote its truth claim either by the stick (Paine’s “fire and faggot”) or the carrot (Paine’s “traffic” or indulgences).
The Puritans’s founding principle was intolerance, not tolerance, let alone religious freedom. They understood and even admitted this. One Puritan preacher, Urian Oakes, later president of Harvard, called toleration the “first-born of all abominations.”62 Another, Thomas Shepard Jr., preached that it is “Satan’s policy to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration.”63 John Cotton helped banish the heretics Anne Hutchinson, who was once Cotton’s acolyte, and Roger Williams. In 1647, Cotton published The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe as a response to Williams’s 1644 book The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience, which had called for a “hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” Cotton claimed that “it was toleration that made the Church anti-Christian and the Church never took hurt by the punishment of heretics.”64 This from a man who fled England because Charles I was persecuting Puritans like himself.
The Pilgrims of Plymouth were no better. The Mayflower Compact is often used to show America’s Christian principles, but it actually shows Christian intolerance.65 The Separatists aboard the Mayflower referred to themselves, with no apparent vanity, as “Saints.” The original Mayflower Compact is lost, but historians have reconstructed it from several copies. Rendered in modern English, it makes evident that the Pilgrims’ monolithic religion was foremost in their minds and their purpose. Unlike the United States’ godless Constitution, the Compact begins with a mention of the “Saints’” god; their god or their religion is mentioned a total
of six times in the Compact’s four sentences:
In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, &c. Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith and Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick.66
The Puritans and the Pilgrims wanted—and got—Christian nations. They established pure theocracies: strongly religious governments able to stamp out heresy, execute schismatics, and banish all but the meekest.
Few settlers wanted to permanently join this harsh monoculture after experiencing it. One of the pillars of the Dutch settlement at New Amsterdam, a young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, wrote about an English refugee, a clergyman, who “came to New England at the commencement of the troubles in England, in order to escape them, and found that he had got out of the frying pan and into the fire. He betook himself, in consequence, under the protection of the Netherlanders, in order that he may, according to the Dutch reformation, enjoy freedom of conscience, which he unexpectedly missed in New England.”67
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