What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

  Through it all, freedom of thought and belief became a powerful cause in its own right. It had scriptural warrant, which mattered more as translation and printing made the Bible more widely accessible. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul says that whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. A marginal note in the 1560 Geneva Bible, the dissenters’ Bible, says the word faith here is to be understood as meaning conscience. That is, according to Paul there are “matters indifferent.” His examples are eating meat sacrificed to idols, drinking, observing holy days. Such things are neither right nor wrong in themselves, but occasions of sin for anyone who feels such things are sinful to be done or to be omitted. Hamlet, that conscience-burdened man, carries the point too far when he says, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” The obligation to act consistently with one’s conscience, which Paul intends as grounds for tolerance among Christians, had the effect of making the enforcement of religious conformity intolerable. It gave disputes about transubstantiation or auricular confession the highest seriousness for dissidents who could not accept these or any number of other doctrines and practices. Henry VIII, for all his supplanting of the pope, was fiercely determined to keep Catholic worship and teaching intact in the English church. He was just as happy to persecute Protestant dissidents as Catholics, so tensions continued and took on a more political character because the king’s seizure of power was a political act.

  The fact that I focus in this essay on the Anglo-American history with freedom of conscience reflects my own interests and limitations, not any assumption that these cultures were unique in engaging it or that they had a special gift for it. It emerged so potently among them as a fortunate consequence of accident and cataclysm, and of the courage and great learning that was characteristic of the period throughout Europe. Like all the loftiest ideals it has never been realized anywhere in a pure and final form.

  Under Edward VI and his Protector, the Earl of Somerset, no one, Catholic or Protestant, was executed on grounds of religion. Edward (and/or Somerset) attempted to bring the English church into line with the Reformation on the Continent, changing Latin into English, ending priestly celibacy, replacing the altar with the Communion table, and removing icons from the churches and destroying them. Notably, they also more or less ended censorship and suppression of the press. Mary I, Edward’s half sister and successor, reversed all this and launched on her notorious burning of Protestant leaders. Elizabeth I, less notoriously, executed Catholics, but as traitors, skirting the issue of religious persecution while subjecting them to a death much more horrendous than burning. The next regime that could claim to have executed no one on religious grounds was the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell in the mid-seventeenth century. Cromwell was a dissident, a Puritan though with no role in any church, whose government seems in many ways a continuation of reforms begun by Edward VI. He gave England its first written constitution, a terse document outlining the form of government, with a paragraph ensuring freedom of religion—to everyone but Catholics.

  To say that freedom of conscience had and is having a difficult birth would understate the matter radically. For all the turbulence of British religious history, its issues were delimited, in theory at least, by the fact that it was a tempest among Christians, who shared basic assumptions, however passionately they felt their differences. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul asks the new congregation, apparently divided by cultural and ethical differences between its pagan and Jewish members, “Who are you to judge another’s servant? It is before his master that he stands or falls, and the Lord will make him stand.” This is advice meant for members of a community of believers, people who accept servanthood as descriptive of their and their fellows’ relationship to God, and who see this relationship as personal in the sense that God loves where he loves and compensates for his servants’ failings by his grace. Ideally they have accepted a particular obedience, with origins in the Law of Moses, exemplified in the life and teachings of Christ. So much might the apostle see, or hope to see, in the early church. But history tells us that no great effort has ever been required to narrow the circle of those who should be seen as God’s servants, whose errors would be made good by God’s grace and therefore should not be judged. We all know the enormities that have made themselves presentable to the Christian conscience, often enough campaigns of violence against other Christians. Sects and denominations remember the injuries their ancestors suffered long centuries ago, and can become indignant at the thought of them. They might also remember injuries they inflicted, if the comforts of identity were not diluted a little by such ventures into honesty.

  Here is another thing Paul says in the Letter to the Romans, still in the context of his thoughts on tolerance and the authority of conscience: “The faith you have, have as your own conviction before God.” That is, do not judge fellow believers and do not offend them. It may be fair to wonder if this excellent advice has gone unheeded all these years because faith has tended to be a conviction shown to men, who, if we can trust Paul, are a good deal more fastidious than God.

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  I believe in the reality of conscience, having observed it in myself and others. I am a little surprised to find it disappearing before me as I write. Consider the word conscientious. It names a sensitivity to duty and obligation that is very widely felt, the basis of civilization, in all probability. We notice default because it is exceptional. We are all indebted to legions of strangers who show up to work every day and do what needs to be done. If they did not, presumably they would feel guilt or shame in some degree. They align their lives, more or less, with a standard internal to them, and are very worthy of respect in this regard. This fundamental respectability of people in the aggregate is the great resource of political democracy.

  At the time of the English Civil Wars, Cromwell’s formidable army of common men held formal debates to determine the kind of government that should replace the defeated monarchy. What an utterly extraordinary moment. Religious freedom, freedom of conscience, was of the first order of importance to them, dissenters that they were. After the Restoration their disputes and the habits and assumptions that surrounded them came to North America, especially to New England, where the population was already deeply sympathetic to Cromwell, and where he had helped sponsor a colony, Saybrook, in Connecticut. American political thought, which seems so uncannily mature in its earliest expressions, in fact had a long history behind it. The Commonwealth under Cromwell, for all its problems, functioned better, and let England thrive better, than under the royal governments that succeeded and followed it, until William of Orange intervened to end the dynastic incompetence. He landed an army large enough to make his arrival an invasion, if history had chosen to call it by that name. Cromwell’s Commonwealth failed at his death because he had no appropriate successor. William of Orange followed him in establishing the primacy of Parliament.

  So the thousands of refugees and immigrants who came to America, after the Cromwell years and the Restoration, had had the experience of watching or participating in the first modern revolution, and had seen government by a sovereign Parliament as well. And they had felt once again the force of religious oppression. It is customary to look to John Locke and Edmund Burke to find the sources of American political thought. Of course, Locke’s family had been on the side of the Commonwealth and Cromwell in the Civil Wars, which is to say that affinity with his thought can have had as much or more to do with influences shared with him as with the impressiveness of his philosophy. One need not mention Diggers and Levelers, though there is no reason to dismiss them entirely from the less elegant strata of American opinion. And the English Leveler John Lilburne, an early seventeenth-century champion of liberty as a universal birthright, has been quoted in U.S. Supreme Court decisions and is credited with influencing the writing of the Fifth Amendment. No doubt such people had descendants here. As remarkable as the maturity of political thought in the colonies is the readiness with which at least a v
ery significant part of the population accepted the rationale for revolution. This is consistent with the fact that it would have been the reenactment of a deep and defining cultural memory. The American Revolution has been treated by some historians as lacking sufficient provocation. The list of the king’s offenses in the Declaration of Independence is not unimpressive. And the liberalizations that are supposed, by some Burkean process of amiable concession, to have brought England to a place that mooted the colonists’ legitimate grievances are a little hard to discover.

  Influence may have gone deeper still. Wycliffe based his theology and his social thought on the intrinsically sacred human person, just as Thomas Jefferson did his in the preamble to the Declaration. Lovely old ideals, redolent of Scripture, never realized, never discredited or forgotten, having their moment over against the corruptions of, say, plantation life. My theory would account for Jefferson’s fluency and passion in expressing values that he had never lived by, that Wycliffe himself had never seen realized, except, perhaps, in the Pauline brotherhood of some furtive conventicle.

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  While I am on the subject. I find the giant lacuna in American historiography, the colonial side of the Interregnum particularly, so strange as to exceed in interest most subjects upon which learned attention has actually fallen. There are taboos in history, unspeakable opinions. Take, for example, the case of Winston Churchill, the greatest man of the twentieth century, according to a poll I saw recently of American opinion. Did his famous stand against Hitler really amount to more than waiting for the colonies and the United States to step in, as they had done so recently in the first twentieth-century war with Germany? Is it not condescending to tell people, whose maimed brothers were selling poppies in the streets, that though they might lose their sons, there would still be cakes and ale? Has anyone really read the Iron Curtain speech lately and pondered how many of the worst policies for dealing with the Soviet Union in the postwar period are set out in it? And this in 1946, when Russia had not yet had time to reckon its truly staggering losses? Has anyone read up on Churchill’s social policies before the war, with their excruciating severities, to be suffered by those same classes who would fill the ranks of his armies? I know it is rude to raise questions about Churchill, and I think this is interesting, since we flatter ourselves that we are willing to question anything.

  Conversely, it is somehow unrespectable to have an interest in Cromwell, who is stigmatized in a way that makes him a sort of latter-day Albigensian, a religious fanatic hostile to all of life’s pleasures, and an autocrat besides. Stigma is a vast oubliette. Amazing things are hidden in it. Cromwell’s importance to American history, therefore to the history of the modern West, should be beyond doubt. I know that he is of great interest to certain specialists. But their work has not brought him the kind of attention that would make him accepted as a factor in the cultural history of New England, let alone the world at large. The French Revolution was Cromwellian, with certain gruesome elaborations. The guillotine may actually have a kind of melancholy glamour that has helped put the Puritan Cromwell in the shade, historically speaking.

  All this is relevant because it demonstrates the vulnerability of awareness to distortion and omission, not only in individual cases, a commonplace, and not only in the general population but in important fields of scholarship, where exquisite resources have been hoarded to make real and thorough inquiry as possible as such things ever are. I am eager to grant that there is a basic moral competence in people, which makes conscience meaningful. It is entirely consistent with my theology to believe that this capacity for moral self-awareness is the God-given basis for the freedom and respect we owe one another. Yet I hesitate to grant that there is an equivalent intellectual competence that would allow conscience to be appropriately directed. Worse, I am persuaded that seeming failures of insight and understanding are in fact willed, that an active historical or scholarly conscience would not tolerate them. After the Iron Curtain speech angry crowds surrounded Churchill’s hotel in New York. Stalin was not alone in considering the speech a declaration of war—in 1946, for heaven’s sake, before the ashes of the last war were cool. In the speech Churchill proposed the British Empire as de facto encirclement of the Soviet Union, urging Americans to sustain what Britain could not, for the advantage it would give us in a coming atomic conflict. From the side of wounded Russia, encirclement may have looked very like an iron curtain. While Churchill did not foresee all the worst consequences of the Cold War, he did help to make them inevitable.

  Why bother to be fair after all these years? It might be a salubrious exercise that would make us better able to be fair in the future. Perhaps our great investment in the legend of Churchill’s heroic wisdom helps us overlook the possibility that a little wisdom on our part might have helped to spare the world much grief and disaster, present and to come. To consider the possibility would be a significant act of conscience. All this suggests to me that freedom of conscience is more profoundly inhibited by prejudice and taboo, internalized by us all, than it is by laws and institutions. We can see that it is easily manipulated by subrational means, suggestion, and repetition. And it can be inappropriately invested, making us confident when we would be better served by doubt.

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  What do we lose when we ignore early American history and, to the extent that we notice it, mischaracterize it? The stigmatizing word that makes the North fall out of sight is Puritanism. The South seems to have been dominated by the plantation economy and chattel slavery that were typical of British and European colonies in the New World, and to have had no conspicuous peculiarities of thinking that came with New England’s history of settlement. Of course this distinction is too sharply drawn. Distinctions between populations always are. And yet it has never ceased to be true that North and South are different cultures, and that their histories lie behind their differences. Because the relationship between New England and the Cromwell Revolution are not acknowledged or attended to, the meaning of Puritanism, British and American, has been vulnerable to distortion and trivialization. It is not a name the movement chose for itself, for one thing. In fact Puritan translates the Greek word Cathar, that other name for Albigensians. It is striking how similarly they are caricatured, as gloomy religious fanatics who hate life. Early New Englanders are sometimes said to have tried to establish a theocracy. If this were true, it would be hard to imagine how their arrangements could have been more theocratic than the papacy was at the time, or than an Anglicanism that enforced conformity of worship with penalties, including loss of basic civil rights—how it could be more theocratic than the European norm, that is. They were an unusually homogeneous group to begin with because they did emigrate on account of their religion. Later immigrants were on the losing side of a failed revolution that had become, over time, a struggle between religious factions. Cromwell wanted plain, russet-coated fellows in his army, God-fearing men, he said, because they were tough and brave and reliable. So his army became, in effect, Puritan.

  In 1630, twelve years before the English Civil Wars began, John Winthrop famously called the colony he would help to establish at Massachusetts Bay a city on a hill whose success or failure would be known to the world. It would have the world’s attention because it would be a radical community, an experiment, created by covenant among members whose bonds were hoped to be mutual charity—that is, compassion and love. There were already a few places in Europe where traditional rulers had been ousted, notably thriving little republics in Switzerland and the Low Countries. Persecution and exile had made Protestantism strongly aware of itself as an international movement. It made very extensive use of the technology of printing, strongly encouraged literacy, and had important intellectual centers such as Wittenberg and Cambridge.

  Like Cathars and Cromwell, the American Puritans are assumed to have been particularly severe, but in an age when judicial mutilation was commonplace in England and Europe, and where capital crimes were innumerable, evide
nce I have seen suggests that the Puritans were in fact notably restrained. A scarlet letter, however regrettable in itself, is certainly to be preferred to slashed nostrils and cropped ears. I name this famous letter, fictional as I assume it is, because Hawthorne’s novel has served as evidence of an appalling severity, when in historical context it would have been no such thing. The Crucible is about the McCarthy era, of course, but it is taught as a phenomenon that captures the essence of American Puritanism, when witch trials were carried on in Britain and Europe into the eighteenth century. All this should be too obvious to need saying, and yet these two works of fiction lie like a glacier on the history of America’s radical and progressive history, obscuring questions such as why, by the time of the writing of the Constitution, slavery could be described as an institution peculiar to the South, with enslaved populations allowed for in the representation of Southern states exclusively. Recently publicized evidence that slave labor was used in the colonial North demonstrates its economic viability in the North, and that under British law there were no limits to its use. And still in 1789 it could be treated as peculiar to the South.

  This country is in a state of bewilderment that cries out for good history. How are we to account for liberating thoughts and movements, things that have gone well? What has been the thinking behind our great institutions? I have found little help in answering these questions. I hope for a day when I can immure myself in some fine archive and explore them for myself. Early American historiography is for the most part a toxic compound of cynicism and cliché, so false that it falsifies by implication the history of the Western world. To create a history answerable to the truth would be a gift of clarity, sanity, and purpose. The great freedom of conscience would be its liberation from our own cynicism, conventionalism, and narrowness of vision.