*chuckle. Appreciate the history, but there are a few new kinds of challenges now.
Makes the blood boil to think of those who sacrificed for freedom of expression just so this gdawful sign could be erected in Boston.
Posted on 11/25/2009 6:39:16 AM PST by Kaslin
As American families sit down to their traditional Thanksgiving feasts they will naturally recall the familiar story of the Pilgrims taught to every school kid and, in the process, distort the true character of the nation’s religious heritage.
Most children learn that the Mayflower settlers came to the New World to escape persecution and to establish religious freedom. But the early colonists actually pursued purity, not tolerance and sought to build fervent, faith-based utopias, not secular regimes that consigned religion to a secondary role. The distinctive circumstances that allowed these fiery believers of varied denominations to cooperate in the founding of a new nation help to explain America’s contradictory religious traditions – as simultaneously the most devoutly Christian society in the western world, and the country most accommodating to every shade of exotic belief and practice.
Concerning the Pilgrims who celebrated the First Thanksgiving in 1621, they didn’t travel directly from their English homes to the “hideous and desolate wilderness” of Massachusetts. They sailed the Atlantic only after living for twelve years in flourishing communities in Holland—the most tolerant and religiously diverse nation of Europe. They left the Netherlands not because that nation imposed too many religious restrictions but because the Dutch honored too few. The pluralism they found in Amsterdam and Leyden horrified the Pilgrims. They were separatists who considered themselves “a people apart” and who preferred isolation on a distant shore that facilitated the building of a unified, disciplined, strictly devout commonwealth, not some wide-open sanctuary for believers of every stripe. The famous Mayflower Compact defined their purpose explicitly as “the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith…”
The like-minded Puritans who followed them (and whose much larger settlement of Massachusetts Bay annexed the Pilgrims’ Plymouth in 1691) showed similar determination to build a model of single-minded religious rigor. The leaders of this idealistic venture were in no sense the victims of oppression back home, but rather counted as wealthy and influential gentleman who wielded considerable political influence. Even after their fellow Puritans won total power (and executed a king in 1649) the Massachusetts colonists chose to remain in their “city upon a hill” in the New World rather than to return to the compromises and complications necessitated by the fractious politics of England. The famous shipboard sermon by which Governor John Winthrop inspired his flock for the challenges of their “errand into the wilderness” declared that “when God gives a special commission he looks to have it strictly observed in every article….to serve the Lord and work out our salvation under the power and purity of his holy ordinances.”
Beyond the four New England colonies (which each began as energetic theocracies representing various strands of Puritanism), other major settlements took shape according to the dreams and dictates of other denominations. William Penn and his fellow Quakers followed their “inner light” to establish Pennsylvania as a “holy experiment,” while the aristocratic Calvert family set up Maryland as a refuge and a base of operations for devout British Catholics. Even the less explicitly religious colonies, where early settlers seemed to care more about finding gold than finding God, received royal charters that declared their underlying mission of spreading the faith. Virginia’s charter described a mandate for the “propagating of Christian Religion as such People as yet live in Darkness.” At the first landing of the original Jamestown expedition (April 26, 1607), Captain Christopher Newport took it upon himself to erect the colony’s first structure: a large cross at Cape Henry to mark their arrival.
How, then, did these enthusiastic true believers with their often uncompromising standards ever manage to join together in a new nation in 1776 – a nation that has been characterized ever since by a religious diversity and inter-denominational cooperation altogether unprecedented in human history?
The Revolutionary struggle forced their hand, with soldiers from more than a dozen Christian traditions and sects (as well as a disproportionate representation of the colonies’ tiny Jewish minority) fighting side by side in the Continental Army. When General Washington ordered “divine services” to build morale among his weary troops, he made some effort to avoid excluding New England Congregationalists or Virginia Baptists or Carolina Methodists or, for that matter, the random Catholic or Mennonite. In the eight year struggle, Massachusetts soldiers served willingly under the brilliant Quaker General Nathanael Greene – even though their Puritan forebears might have been among those who order the occasional hanging of his co-religionists in the previous century.
Violent struggles had broken out from time to time in the past among various faith communities—with Puritans challenging Catholics for control of Maryland, for instance, and fighting the bloody Battle of the Severn in 1655. But for the most part the wide open spaces of the new continent allowed even the most impassioned theological enthusiasts to build their own spheres of influence without confronting or oppressing their potential rivals in far flung neighboring settlements. The constant threat of Indian violence and the even more dire menace of British suppression made some level of mutual respect a practical necessity, even for localities that bitterly disagreed.
The First Amendment to the Constitution ratified this arrangement of uncontested local authority with its careful wording: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” The Constitutional formulation limited the power of the federal government to impose a single national faith, and to provoke the dangerous battles accompanying such an attempt, but did nothing in the eyes of the zealous founders to interfere with the established churches (that received direct government funding and endorsement) on the state level. The esteemed liberal scholar Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School writes: “A growing body of evidence suggests that the Framers principally intended the Establishment of Religion Clause to perform two functions: two protect state religious establishments from national displacement, and to prevent the national government from aiding some, but not all, religions.” With this understanding in mind, religious voting restrictions (limiting the franchise to Trinitarian Protestant Christians, for instance) continued in several states for more than forty years under the Constitution.
The Pilgrims and their spiritual descendants never had to retreat from religious fervor or Biblical demands to join the new Republic, thanks to the continued existence of more or less autonomous, localized refuges and enclaves. No one can suggest that our Founders embraced secularism or relativism, but they did come to accept the notion of separate faith communities following their own distinctive rules while managing to live side-by-side and to cooperate where necessary.
Thanksgiving in that sense doesn’t celebrate religious freedom, but rather coexistence. We remain a nation of impassioned, fiercely committed, openly competing believers who have nonetheless established a long tradition of letting other faith communities go their own way. We can be pious and uncompromising at our own Thanksgiving tables, without menacing, or even questioning the very different proceedings in the home next door. The limitless boundaries and vast empty land of the fresh continent, plus the challenges of a long Revolutionary struggle, gave the faith-filled fanatics of the founding the chance for a freedom more profound than mere religious tolerance: the right, in their own communities, to be left alone.
The leaders of this idealistic venture (Puritans) were in no sense the victims of oppression back home, but rather counted as wealthy and influential gentleman who wielded considerable political influence.
The King, Charles I, did everything he could to shut down the Puritans. Ministers were ejected from their livings, fines were levied for non-attendance at Anglican church services, those who wrote Puritan tracts were imprisoned, even had their ears cut off, etc.
It is true wealthy and influential Puritan country gentlemen and merchants were somewhat sheltered from the worst of the oppression, but they didn't have it easy. They also had every reason in the world to expect things to get worse.
True, but the death rate that first winter wasn't due to the communism. They arrived in November and had no chance to grow food anyway.
The minimal crops they harvested in 1621 and 1622 were due to the attempt at communism, though of course weather and other factors may have played a part.
Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1623, when a bumper crop was celebrated after they gave up the common storehouse.
The Pilgrims were wet blankets who didn’t celebrate Christmas. Give me Jamestown any day of the week.
*chuckle. Appreciate the history, but there are a few new kinds of challenges now.
Makes the blood boil to think of those who sacrificed for freedom of expression just so this gdawful sign could be erected in Boston.
Seems to me that communal living is a necessity for small isolated communities to survive. After all, none of them were going to set up a grocery, mill, or hardware in those first years. They pooled their resources as a means of survival. The nearest resupply was months away if at all. Anyone found to be hoarding as others starved would likely be stripped of their possesions and shunned leading to their own death.
The emergence of markets comes with the growth of a community. Small communities survive today because they aren’t isolated. Today you can trade with someone on the other side of the planet let alone next door.
By the way, today's godless Massachusetts was one of the strictest.
Every area of early settlement had their helpful Indian or Indians. In my area of southwestern PA near the forks of the Ohio, my ancesters relied on Indian Peter, a Mingo Indian, to tell them when to hide from native American raiding parties and to advise about local planting traditions. Peters Township and Peters Creek were named after this historical figure. We also have a Mingo Creek state park.
Your statement is very true, I was engaging in some very dark humor about the Pequot. Some of the earlier declared days of Thanksgiving celebrated the killing of the Pequot, who were hostile to the settlers.
There is an old Russian Saying: Scratch a Russian and there is a Peasant underneath. What do you find if you scratch an American? I believe you find a Puritan with buckle shoes, blunderbuss and Bible. Like the Puritans we are not a Tolerant People and we think we are always right (many times we are). We must embrace our Puritan Past if we are to survive the coming times and their troubles. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
The King, Charles I, did everything he could to shut down the Puritans.When the Puritans first left Britain, these events you described were not yet happening. John Winthrop was an aristocratic landowner and was well stituated where he was. He left England at great sacrifice of his standing and future, which was not yet at risk due to his religious beliefs. Certainly, the Church of England was not receptive to "puritan" demands for reform, and, indeed, there was some suppression, but it was nothing like what came later.
Migrants flowed to the early colonies based on their success as separatists with no competing, unacceptable churches, and not because of repression in England (a primary motive for leaving Amsterdam was for fear of the corruptive influences of Dutch tolerance on their young). The pilgrim goal was to reform and purify the Church of England of any Roman vestiges. The colonial goal was to build a proper church in the New World, then re-export it back to England.
When events turned sour in England, and as the real oppression of religious dissent commenced, there was a flow of migrants to Massachusetts, but as the Civil War commenced and with the defeat of Charles I, the Puritans left Massachussets in numbers, while the inflow of migrants halted. They went back to England because they thought it was their opportunity to remake the Church of England.
The article, and my comments, was discussing the Puritan migration, which started in 1630, not the Pilgrims, who landed in 1620. The Pilgrims were Separatists who wanted to withdraw from the C of E and run their own church, not Puritans who wanted to “purify” the C of E.
In 1620 the persecution by the king of the Puritans hadn’t really got going, as you say. We’d be outraged today by what was happening, but it was pretty minor for the times.
In 1629 events in Parliament and elsewhere led the Puritan leaders to see where things were headed. As a result the Great Migration started in 1630.
From a historical standpoint, the Pilgrims, while forerunners, were pretty unimportant. Their numbers were too small to really have much impact in North America. By 1630 there were around 300 living in Plymouth Colony, a pretty marginal operation.
In the Great Migration from 1630 to 1640 more than 20,000 people came to Massachusetts, enough to change the whole human equation of the area.
BTW, I can find examples of each of the types of persecution I mentioned prior to 1620. They were small in number compared to later, but they did happen.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.