The Wordy Shipmates

by Sarah Vowell

  In 1630, however, the truth that all men are created equal is far from self-evident. Winthrop is saying the opposite—that God created all men unequal. To Winthrop, this is a good thing, especially since he’s in charge. The beauty of this inequity, he claims, is “that every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection.” To a modern reader, this social theory smacks of “I need you to mow my lawn and you need me not to report you to Immigration.” But to Winthrop, the societal food chain is more sentimental. More than anything, “A Model of Christian Charity” is a declaration of dependence.

  One of his shipmates on the Arbella, budding poet Anne Bradstreet, would echo Winthrop’s sentiment later on to the extent that it might be proof that someone on the boat actually heard him. She wrote, “As it is with countries, so it is with men: there was never yet any one man that had all excellences,” and so “he stands in need of something which another man hath. . . . God will have us beholden one to another.”

  Because of the “city upon a hill” sound bite, “A Model of Christian Charity” is one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America. But dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It’s called Canada.

  Every settler on the Winthrop fleet automatically became more important, more necessary, just by leaving England. That is true for Winthrop most of all. In Massachusetts, he will be governor—the highest authority in the land. In England, he is at best a middling sort—an average member of the landowning gentry. He is a justice of the peace in his run-of-the-mill county in East Anglia; he keeps having to divvy up amongst his sons the estate his father acquired from Henry VIII after Henry booted all the Catholic monks from their monasteries; he travels frequently to London for his job as a workaday real estate attorney at the king’s court; he is only friends with Members of Parliament, not a member himself, and if he had ambitions to become an MP, they were surely dashed when Charles I scrapped Parliament altogether.

  Winthrop’s friends in the Massachusetts Bay Company were shrewd talent scouts who saw something in Winthrop, some potential greatness, and recruited him to emigrate and become their CEO. Winthrop sees the faith of his peers as a revelation of God’s calling. It is, to him, a promotion. And not just an upgrade in social status. The governorship is an opportunity to better serve God. “When a man is to wade through a deep water,” wrote Winthrop when he was mulling over the move, “there is required tallness.”

  This contradiction—between humility before God and the egomania unleashed by being chosen by God—is true of both Winthrop and the colony of Massachusetts itself. This man hopes for tallness for himself as well as for his future city, pitched, in his mind, above sea level, on yonder hill.

  It is no accident that Winthrop speaks of “God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence” at the sermon’s start. The English Puritans were obsessed with the idea of providence, and that word is more ominous to them than it sounds to us. It means care, but it also means control. It does not just mean that God will provide. It means that God will provide whatever the hell God wants and the Puritans will thank Him for it even if He provides them with nothing more than a slow death in a long winter. It means that if they’re scared and small and lowly enough He just might toss a half-eaten corncob their way. It means that the world isn’t fair and it’s their fault. It means that God is the sovereign, the authority. It means manna from heaven, but it also means bow down.

  The Puritans live and worship within a specific subset of the Protestant Reformation—Calvinism. After Mary Tudor assumed the English throne in 1553, she reinstated Catholicism as the state religion and persecuted Protestants. For this the queen acquired the nickname “Bloody Mary.” To avoid being burned at the stake, many English Protestants fled to Europe, especially to John Calvin’s church in Geneva. There, a committee of them wrote, edited, and revised a new version of the Bible in English, published in 1560. Its margins were annotated with especially Protestant interpretations of Scripture. For example, the note to Revelation 11:7 claims that the beast in the bottomless pit mentioned in the verse is “the Pope, which hath his power out of hell.” Or the note on Revelation 17, which claims that the woman wearing scarlet riding a scarlet beast is “the Antichrist, that is, the Pope, with the whole body of his filthy creatures.”

  The Geneva Bible was in fact the inspiration for the King James Bible, the version authorized by that monarch in 1611. James was infuriated by the notes in the Geneva Bible because he thought they undermined belief in the divine right of kings. He especially hated the note in the first chapter of Exodus, in which Hebrew midwives defied the king’s mandate to kill all male Hebrew babies. The Geneva note claimed that the midwives’ “disobedience was lawful.”

  Even though the King James Version was available to them, the Geneva Bible is the one the Calvinists on the Mayflower and most travelers in the Winthrop fleet carried with them to America.

  Winthrop and his fellow Calvinists believed in the doctrine of predestination. Since God decides everything, God decides whether a person will end up in heaven or hell before the person is even born. The people who are going to heaven are called “the Elect.” This is God’s own aristocracy. And if that sounds like some frolicsome foxhunt, understand that to be a Calvinist is to be the Duke of Discomfort or the Duchess of Fear. Because here’s the thing: How does anyone know? How does anyone know if he’s saved? He can’t. What he can do is work, try, believe, repent, love God, and hate himself. The diligent, hardworking, and pious are the “visible saints.” If a person seems saved, odds are he is saved. Thus, he will spend every waking hour trying to seem saved, not just to others but to himself. Because if he says or does or even thinks heretical things, isn’t that just proof he was never saved in the first place?

  Let’s hazard a guess that some people are not going to be up for this. The constant uncertainty—is it streets of gold for me or am I merely lighter fluid for the flames of hell?—weighs on the believer. Even John Calvin himself, the French theologian who popularized this school of thought, wrote the following in his last will and testament:

  The will I have had, and the zeal, if it can be called that, have been so cold and sluggish that I feel deficient in everything and everywhere. . . . Truly, even the grace of forgiveness [God] has given me only renders me all the more guilty, so that my only recourse can be this, that being the father of mercy, he will show himself the father of so miserable a sinner.

  So if John Calvin doubts he’s a good enough Calvinist—which is of course the most Calvinist thought he could have—imagine the jangling nerves of John Q. Puritan. In his journal, Winthrop writes the following about an acquaintance who was driven mad by spiritual doubt and took action to decide her fate once and for all:

  A woman of Boston congregation, having been in much trouble of mind about her spiritual estate, at length grew into utter desperation, and could not endure to hear of any comfort, etc., so as one day she took her little infant and threw it into a well, and then came into the house and said, now she was sure she should be damned, for she had drowned her child.

  That’s how heavy the weight of Calvinism can be—that a mother would seek relief in murdering her own offspring.

  But for John Winthrop and the men and women like him, this way of life is a stirring challenge, a thrilling project, and sometimes even a joy. Tallness! Get up early! So much to do! Never bored! Reflect! Overthink! Repent!

  In his sermon “A True Sight of Sin” Thomas Hooker revels in the effort of self-examination. A half-hearted Christian sits in a comfortable chair and peruses his own sins “by his fireside and happily reads the story of these in a book.” A true Calvinist, on the other hand, is a kind of war correspondent on the move, one who has “passed through many countries” of “barrenness and meanness” an
d witnessed “ruin and desolation.” By going to the trouble of taking a hard look at his own crimes against God, the Calvinist knows “what sin is and what it hath done, how it hath made havoc of his peace . . . and made him a terror to himself.” Which, to these people, is a good thing. This is the terror that keeps the sinner awake to his own shortcomings. And with fear comes adrenaline.

  In the spiritual diary Winthrop started keeping in 1606, he wrote a pious to-do list on May 23, 1613. He was twenty-six. He pledges to God that he will “carefully avoid vain and needless expenses.” He promises to “diligently observe the Lord’s Sabbath.” To try and keep his mornings “free for private prayer, meditation and reading.” He “will flee idleness and much worldly business.” He “will often pray . . . with my wife.”

  The first time I read that I wondered where I had seen it before. Then I realized it was at the end of The Great Gatsby, the great novel of ambition. After the striving title character meets his tragic end, his father arrives from Minnesota for the funeral, bringing with him a book in which his son had inscribed a list of his ambitions as a youth. There is a rigid schedule that begins with getting up early, and filling the day with work, exercise, and study. From five until six p.m., he is to “Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it.” Then, in a list of “general resolves,” he orders himself to quit smoking and wasting time, “read one improving book or magazine per week,” set money aside, and “be better to parents.” Gatsby’s father tells Gatsby’s friend the list proves that his boy “was bound to get ahead.” Sure, his son had just died in a swimming pool, but at least it was a very fancy pool.

  The ambition and toil Calvinism requires will lead the economist Max Weber to coin the term “Protestant work ethic” to describe the Puritans’ legacy of rolled-up sleeves. Tireless labor and ambition in pursuit of salvation, he opined, led to a culture of tireless labor and ambition and a new religion—capitalism. No wonder a German historian dubbed John Calvin “the virtual founder of America.”

  It makes sense that Winthrop, a man accustomed to setting lofty goals for himself, would then set lofty goals for the colony he is about to lead. “A Model of Christian Charity” is the blueprint of his communal aspirations. Standing before his shipmates, Winthrop stares down the Sermon on the Mount, as every Christian must.

  Here, for example, is Martin Luther King, Jr., doing just that on November 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the “loving your enemies” sermon this way: “So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you, ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”

  Go ahead and reread that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

  The Bible is a big long book and lord knows within its many mansions of eccentricity finding justification for literal and figurative witch hunts is as simple as pretending “enhanced investigation techniques” is not a synonym for torture. I happen to be with King in proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount’s call for love to be at the heart of Christian behavior, and one of us got a Ph.D. in systematic theology.

  “Man,” Winthrop reminds his shipmates in “Christian Charity,” is “commanded to love his neighbor as himself.” In the Semon on the Mount, Jesus puts the new in New Testament, informing his followers that they must do something way more difficult than being fond of the girl next door. Winthrop quotes him yet again. Matthew 5:44: “Love your enemies . . . do good to them that hate you.” He also cites Romans 12:20: “If thine enemy hunger, feed him.”

  The colonists of Massachusetts Bay are not going to be any better at living up to this than any other government in Christendom. (Just ask the Pequot, or at least the ones the New Englanders didn’t burn to death.) In fact, nobody can live up to this, but it’s the mark of a Christlike Christian to know that he’s supposed to.

  Winthrop’s future neighbors? Not so much. In fact, one of his ongoing difficulties as governor of the colony is going to be that his charges find him far too lenient. For instance, when one of his fellow Massachusetts Bay magistrates accuses Winthrop of dillydallying on punishment by letting some men who had been banished continue to hang around Boston, Winthrop points out that the men had been banished, not sentenced to be executed. And since they had been banished in the dead of winter, Winthrop let them stay until a thaw so that their eviction from Massachusetts wouldn’t cause them to freeze to death on their way out of town. I can hear the threatening voice-over in his opponent’s attack ad come the next election. John Winthrop: soft on crime.

  This leads us to something undeniably remarkable: “A Model of Christian Charity” was not written by a writer or a minister but rather by a governor. It isn’t just a sermon, it is an act of leadership. And even if no one heard it, or no one was listening, it is, at the very least, a glimpse at what the chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony believed he and this grumpy few before him were supposed to shoot for come dry land. Two words, he says: “justice and mercy.”

  For “a community of perils,” writes Winthrop, “calls for extraordinary liberality.” One cannot help but feel for this man. Here he is, pleading with Puritans to be flexible. In promoting what he calls “enlargement toward others,” Winthrop has clearly thought through the possible pitfalls awaiting them on shore. He is worried about basic survival. He should be. He knows that half the Plymouth colonists perished in the first year. Thus he is reminding them of Christ’s excruciating mandate to share. If thine enemy hunger, feed him.

  Winthrop tells them that even if they have next to nothing, their faith commands them to give away everything. “If your brother be in want and you can help him . . . if you love God, you must help him.”

  When John Cotton’s grandson, Cotton Mather, wrote his Ecclesiastical History of New England in 1702, he told a story about Winthrop that I would like to believe is true. In the middle of winter, Boston was low on fuel and a man came to the governor complaining that a “needy person” was stealing from his woodpile. Winthrop mustered the appropriate outrage and requested that the thief come see him, presumably for punishment. According to Mather, Winthrop tells the man,

  “Friend, it is a severe winter, and I doubt you are but meanly provided for wood; wherefore I would have you supply yourself at my woodpile till this cold season be over.” And [Winthrop] then merrily asked his friends whether he had not effectually cured this man of stealing his wood.

  If Mather’s story is to be trusted, perhaps Winthrop was winking at Giles Tilleman. Tilleman is the “Cutler of Brussels” Winthrop mentions in “Christian Charity,” along with other “forefathers in times of persecution” he would have heard of while reading John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a popular compendium of the lives of Protestants who had been burned to death by Catholics for their beliefs. According to Foxe, when Tilleman saw the large pile of kindling that was to be used to burn him alive, he asked his executioner if most of the wood “might be given to the poor, saying, ‘A small quantity will suffice to consume me.’ ”

  In “Christian Charity,” Winthrop asserts, “ There is a time also when Christians . . . must give beyond their ability.”

  Winthrop asserts, “ There is a time when a Christian must sell all and give to the poor, as they did in the Apostles’ times.” (It is so curious that this sermon, in my lifetime, would become so identified with the Communist-hating, Communist-baiting Ronald Reagan, considering Winthrop just proclaimed that a follower of Christ must be willing to renounce property. Utter Commie talk.)

  After the Old Testament Israelites, the colonists’ second-favorite biblical role models a
re the first-century churches founded by Christ’s apostles and the missionary Paul. The small, local nature of churches such as those at Corinth and Ephesus is where the Puritans get their Congregationalist critique of Catholicism and the Church of England’s Catholic power structure, in which local parishes are beholden to the dictates and whims of faraway bishops. In a Congregationalist church, the church members are answerable only to one another.

  Winthrop quotes Corinthians. Which is to say, he quotes Paul’s letter to the Corinth church admonishing the congregation to stop its bickering and heed Christ’s words of love. Winthrop surely knows that the men and women before him heading to the boondocks of English territory are at least as capable of squabbling as any congregation in the provinces of Rome.

  “Christ and his church make one body,” Winthrop says, paraphrasing Paul (1 Corinthians 12:13-14: “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body. . . . For the body is not one member, but many”). Furthermore, claims Winthrop, “The ligaments of this body which knit together are love.” Then he quotes Paul’s letter to another church, in Galatia, “Bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.”

  This body of Christ, connected with the ligaments of love, is not merely pretty poetry or spiritual mumbo jumbo to Winthrop and his people. It is a “bond of marriage between Him and us.” Which is to say it is a contract. Remember, Winthrop was a lawyer. That might be why the final paragraphs of “Christian Charity,” the ones that will be the most quoted later on, are the most profound. Given the task of outlining a binding legal pact between Massachusetts and God, Winthrop comes alive. “We are,” he writes, “entered into covenant with Him for this work.”