Posted on 08/02/2006 2:38:55 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The nature of theocracy in the New England colonies is widely misunderstood. Few recognize that the New England town meeting, the prototype of American institutions of democratic self-government, was nothing more than the governing process of each Congregational (Puritan) church community.
Theocracy is a broad term encompassing many different degrees of religious influence in civil government. Critics of New England Puritanism focus on two aspects: exclusion of non-church members from civil government, and reprobation of moral laxity.
Looking back at Puritanism only through the lens of present-day cultural standards leads most people to conclude that Puritans were repressive and anti-democratic. H. L. Mencken in the 1920s summed up liberal intellectuals' judgment when he declared that Puritanism was a form of neurosis. This is the view taught in public schools and in our colleges and universities.
If one's values extend no further than the adolescence of the Roaring 20s and today's New York Times' advocacy of rudeness, crudeness, and sexual promiscuity that may be an understandable assessment.
If, however, one looks at fundamental matters the picture changes dramatically.
The foundation of our constitutional government – the concept that the source of civil power is the people of the nation, not the king – originated in the 17th century with the English Puritans and their Scottish confreres, known there as Presbyterians. Both groups opposed the luxury and elaborate ritualism of the Episcopalian Church of England, along with its levels of hierarchical authority that dictated to the church members. In civil government they opposed the related doctrine of divine right of kings.
In "Democracy in America," Alexis de Tocqueville noted:
"Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories. It was this tendency that had aroused its most dangerous adversaries. Persecuted by the government of the mother country, and disgusted by the habits of a society which the rigor of their own principles condemned, the Puritans went forth to seek some rude and unfrequented part of the world where they could live according to their own opinions and worship God in freedom."....The general principles which are the groundwork of modern constitutions, principles which, in the seventeenth century, were imperfectly known in Europe, and not completely triumphant even in Great Britain, were all recognized and established by the laws of New England: the intervention of the people in public affairs, the free voting of taxes, the responsibility of the agents of power, personal liberty, and trial by jury were all positively established without discussion."
When James I succeeded Queen Elizabeth in 1603 he brought from his native Scotland an antipathy for Presbyterianism and vowed to suppress Puritanism in England. He also brought his Stuart family's insistence upon the divine right of kings and loathing of "interference" by Parliament.
His harassment of Puritans led some of them to flee to Holland, whence came in 1620 the founders of the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts. Other Puritans, centered in Cambridge University, elected to remain within the Church of England and to work for reforms that aimed to return the church to the simplicity of its founding era under the Apostle Paul, a period without a hierarchy of bishops in which the church members elected elders and deacons from among their local members to administer each church's affairs.
James's son, Charles I, succeeded to the throne in 1625 and became even more abusive of religious and civil liberty than his father. Forced by Parliament to accept the 1628 Petition of Right, one of the fundamental documents of the British constitution, he simply refused to call Parliament into session for eleven years beginning in 1629. During this period he permitted Anglican Archbishop William Laud to employ crown troops to imprison and execute Puritans, making the Court of Star Chamber synonymous with arbitrary injustice.
Puritans led by John Winthrop and others in Cambridge University sorrowfully determined that the possibility of reforming the Anglican Church was too remote for them to remain in England and suffer Archbishop Laud's depredations. They managed in 1629 to purchase the royal charter for the Massachusetts Bay Company, assembled a group of fellow Puritans, and sailed on the Arbella to establish a new church community in more tolerant circumstances.
The English political expression of Puritanism, after the end of Cromwell's Protectorate, was the Whig Party that emerged in opposition when James II became king in 1685 and resumed the earlier civil and religious suppressions of his father Charles II. James II's deposition in The Glorious Revolution of 1689 produced the English Bill of Rights, another fundamental document of the British constitution, and the model for our own Bill of Rights. It also most notably produced the "Second Treatise of Civil Government" by Puritan John Locke, the philosophical foundation, down to the borrowing of phraseology, for our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
The concept of the Biblical covenant is essential in understanding the civil and religious government in Puritan New England. Just as God established through Moses a covenant with the tribes of Israel making them His chosen people, so the Puritans en-route to found Boston solemnly instituted a covenant between themselves and God to establish a church community in the new world that would follow the Ten Commandments and be a "city upon a hill" serving as a model for reversion to the righteous simplicity of the original Christian churches.
As endlessly proclaimed by Old Testament prophets, the covenant between God and his chosen people was a two-way street. God would bless them so long as they remained faithful to His commandments, but would visit His wrath upon them when they strayed. So was the understanding and intent of the Puritan covenant entered upon with the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630.
From this flows what 20th century hedonists construe as repressive intolerance. What they forget is that the peoples of Plymouth in 1620 and of Boston in 1630 voluntarily and gladly accepted the pledge of their covenants, as did all towns (Congregational churches) subsequently founded in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Putting this into a current-day framework, few people would describe General Motors or Citibank as intolerant or repressive because they require all people accepting employment also to accept their rules of conduct or be fired for breaches of those rules.
The Massachusetts Bay Company was in fact a corporation whose charter was owned by John Winthrop's group, the founders of Boston. Thus they had both civil and religious authority, subject to the will of each church congregation, to set their own rules of conduct. Church members became shareholders in the chartered corporation.
For those early Puritan communities, adherence to their solemn covenant with God was regarded literally as a matter of life or death in the harsh conditions of wilderness in the formative years of each church community.
For that reason, when church members were deemed by their local church fellows to have engaged in conduct conflicting with the founding covenant, they were excluded from fellowship until they repented and reformed their conduct. No person coming into a church community was permitted membership in the church without satisfying the church members of his faith in Jesus Christ and his commitment to Godly conduct.
What must be stressed is that, within each church community, subject only to their covenant, the democratic wishes of all members of each congregation was the sole source of religious administration and civil authority. The 1648 Cambridge Platform, the product of the General Court, the colony-wide gathering of elected representatives of each local congregation, affirmed this in explicit detail.
Ministers undoubtedly exercised great influence on both church and civil administration, but that was a consequence of their having been selected and hired by each congregation and their subsequent satisfactory performance in office. No Puritan minister had independent authority to impose any doctrine or judgment upon any New England community. Ministers who attempted it were summarily dismissed by their congregations.
When congregants irreconcilably disagreed with their fellows, they departed and founded new churches. What few people know is that New England towns in the early 17th century were simply church communities. My home, Stamford, Connecticut, founded in 1641 as a split-off from the Wetherfield, Connecticut, church, was the last of those founded in New England.
The Cambridge Platform affirms that the people within each church community were the sole source of authority, subject to the Word of God. They elected their own preachers, teachers, elders, and deacons, each member having an equal vote. There was no external or overriding hierarchical body with the power to gainsay each church's will.
These Congregational meetings became in subsequent years the celebrated New England Town meeting. Puritan Congregational Churches thus were the origin of American concepts of democratic self-government.
Interesting. Would the explicit exclusion of a religious test for holding public office in the Constitution make secularism the foundation of the American Republic?
A very interesting historical view. Thank you for it. While what you have offered is largly true, it is also true that Puritan settlements were often harsh and even cruel in their treatment of both sinners and non-comformists. Some of their punishments for transgressions were, in truth, closer to those of the taliban than to our modern system of legal remedies. I do not intend to diminish the remarkable contributions of the Puritans, but only to add that Theocracies or any governments too closely tied to religion are dangerous to both freedom and to progress.
It is indeed interesting, but the main influences on the Constitution, Monroe, Hamilton, Morris and others hardly fit the mode of the New England patriots like Adams. We have a whole seperate set of circumstances when we look at Pennsylvania (with the most populus city), Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas, none of which historically mimiced the New England Congreagionalist/Puritan/Presbyter history of New England.
Since the Massachusetts Bay Company was not founded until 1630, why are the Pilgrims lumped with the Puritans? The Pilgrims got here in 1620, ten years before the Puritans arrived in Boston. Were the Pilgrims members of the Congregational Church? The Pilgrims did go to Holland, but did they go as Puritans? The members of my family who descended from Gov. Bradford were members of the Church of England, or in this country, the Episcopal Church.
Good post. Congregational Churches were the origin of American concepts of democratic self-government.
I read a good article(sermon)on why congregationalism is biblical and so is democracy and not monarchy (rule by one), oligarchy (rule by a few), aristocracy (rule by the fittest), or anarchy (rule by no one), because of freedom in Christ.
It never ceases to amaze me why some people prefer tyranny (leftism), dictatorship (fascism) and try to have control over democracy (freedom). Maybe that because there are three kind of people, those who have a need to control, those who have the need to be controlled. Then there is the third kind. The people who are free and insist that others are likewise and that this is Biblical Congregationalism.
So we've actually misunderstood the Constitution all these years, and the federal government is supposed to be a theocracy?
I disagree. I believe the federal government was originally intended to be secular, and the "secular" ACLU zealots have corrupted it through the implementation of "secular hunanism" into public policy. What they call "secular humanism" is intentionally indistinguishable from "theocratic humanism". They have not corrupted the system by making it secular, they have corrupted it by making it theocratic, using a theism that is intentionally misrepresented as secular.
Good find!
> Secular ACLU zealots have reversed the meaning of the Constitution 180 degrees, by claiming that the office-holder has no right to express any religious beliefs
Reference, please.
The answer is actually slightly more subtle. Plymount was homogenous. The founding fathers, 150 laters, were too pluralistic to assert any theocracy of that nature, but they had a bolder plan, still, a bold combination of the Natural Law of St. Thomas of Aquinas, the congregationalism of John Calvin, and (okay, somewhat anachronistic) an understanding of the invisible hand of John Locke:
All religions would have access to the public forum, in degrees equivalent to the passion of their people and prevalence of their notions. The prohibition of a religious test is not opposed to the expression of religion, but for the explicit purpose of preventing any given religion, once having a temporary electoral advantage, from dismantling the very free exchange of ideas from which it emerged; the promotion of religion in the public forum requires an absence of government regulation as surely as the promotion of commerce does; a religious test would be just as harmful to religion as government subsidies are to free markets.
later =, oddly, years later.
ARGH! TYPOS ARE INVADING!!!
Plymount = Plymouth. Laters= years later.
The prohibition of a religious test is not meant to prevent the influence of religion over government, but rather to limit the influence of government over religion.
What that would do is undermine the basis for any Constitution or any meaning at all, since in its denial of God it denies the starting point for all truth.
And you'd be left with a "living document" with no fixed meaning at all, only what is politically opportunistic at the moment.
The restriction on Congress passing laws respecting an establishment of religion does that. If that's all there was to it the prohibition on a religious test for holding public office would not be there.
Sounds rather familiar...
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