Part 3: Freedom and Religion, a Love-Hate Relationship

This is a condensed English version of the Dutch essay Deel 3: Vrijheid en godsdienst, een haat-liefde verhouding.

To understand what the human right called ‘freedom of religion’ is really about (NB: it is not about the right to display your religion always and everywhere in public – that is not the issue), we must go back in time once more. Man is a thoroughly historical being, and so are the epiphenomena he creates: culture, religion, society. Only by this genealogical route can we try to find out what it is, or was, really about.

Well then: the right to freedom of religion dates from a time when religion was still omnipresent – everywhere and nowhere, inescapable and all-powerful. One senses at once that this right was first and foremost a matter of being delivered from the pressure that an omnipresent religious institution, propped up by state power, exerts on a person or a group. It was among persecuted minorities that the insight first took hold that ostracism is bad for society, for everyone. There the idea began to take root that the religious question might have to be solved otherwise than through an alliance of church and state, single or plural. The thought of a wall of separation was born. The element of liberation – from an overbearing religious institution that, by way of state support, meddles with everything: the established religion – is in my view essential to grasping the spirit of this right, and to preventing the letter of the law from stifling its spirit (which is what I see happening). In this chapter I try to evoke that intense feeling of liberation which belongs to the birth of religious freedom.

Away, away from here…

So I invite you to come back in time with me. First we must feel what it means when one ‘religious language game’ is dominant – when one religious institution shapes your whole view and experience of life, individual and collective, without your even noticing. How pleasant that was (and is?), and at the same time how suffocating. The leitmotiv of this chapter is ‘exodus’. Away, away from here… You may think of Franz Kafka’s little text Der Aufbruch (“Weg-von-hier – das ist mein Ziel”). But you can also hear it in the emotional charge of biblical language: Exodus is the name of the second book of the Bible, the story of Israel’s departure from Egypt under Moses. At the same time it is a cipher, a metaphor for an existential condition central to Jewish and Christian religious experience: liberation, deliverance, salvation. Listen:

It is 6 December 1716, the second Sunday of Advent. In the castle church at Weimar the court prepares for the Sunday cantata. In the gallery, high above the congregation, a small group of musicians – four singers, three instrumentalists – begins to play. The court poet Salomon Franck has turned the Gospel of the day (the coming of the Son of Man in glory, and that we must always be ready) into a singable text, a kind of rhymed mini-sermon. ‘Watch, pray’ is the call that first descends upon the churchgoers. Then the alto asks with suspense: ‘When will the day come when we may go out from the Egypt of this world? Ah, let us flee Sodom quickly, before the fire overtakes us…’ The composer on duty was the young Johann Sebastian Bach; the piece is catalogued as BWV 70a, Wachet, betet.

For those not versed in the Bible the rhetoric may not be immediately clear, but for the average churchgoer of the time it was as familiar as Jay-Z’s idiom is to today’s hip-hop fans. The faithful in Weimar (NB: only the courtiers) knew what they were supposed to think of, and Bach knew exactly which feelings to evoke. They know what ‘Egypt’ stands for, what ‘Sodom’ refers to and which ‘fire’ is meant. And however concrete the call to leave and flee may sound, nobody will actually set out on a journey. Faith was lived in a linguistic field where biblical stories were blueprints for the spiritual life and geographical places referred to spiritual states of affairs.

Exodus

In the Bible ‘Egypt’ is the land of slavery and oppression from which God freed his people ‘with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm’, led by Moses – a story still recited every year by observant Jews at the Passover meal. That quasi-historical reference was not essential for Bach’s contemporaries, and that there were still real Jews celebrating Passover even less so. They had been trained to understand Egypt spiritually: it symbolises ‘man’s slavery under sin’. For such a story the rule is: read what it says, but remember that it is about something else. Better still: realise that it is surely about you. Tua res agitur is a favourite turn of phrase in many a biblical meditation. The exodus then points to the deliverance from the power of sin that Christ brought about when he rose from the dead (Christian Easter). It is no coincidence that Jesus’ Last Supper was a Passover meal, and in Bach’s time people never tired of drawing the parallels.

What mattered most, though, was the appropriation of that meaning through faith, entirely in Luther’s spirit, through word and music. What the intellect was to believe received support from the heart, played upon by the music. One’s outlook on life was coloured in biblical hues and one’s own life story was told with biblical templates. Stories of faith admonished, enlightened, revealed, confronted, gave hope, set examples. Anything was possible, as long as it was edifying. That was nothing new: the church had always done it this way, and the Bible itself gives the tip (2 Timothy 3:16). Christians still read it like this, and new applications keep appearing. When, centuries after Bach, Dr Martin Luther King urged Black Americans to claim their rights, they sang about Moses being sent to Pharaoh: Go down, Moses… Let my people go! They did the same as Salomon Franck, only with a different application.

The same goes for ‘Sodom’, which together with its twin city Gomorrah is the epitome of abhorrent sinful behaviour. Any place, any society can become a ‘Sodom’. That a film and TV series about the Naples mafia is called Gomorrah is, besides a pun on ‘Camorra’, a late example of how this story has been read for thousands of years as a mirror, acquiring ever new meanings. In the story itself it is not very clear what exactly is wrong in the city, except that it must be very bad indeed – and that is precisely its strength. With ‘the sin of Sodom’ you can go in any direction, and people have. One of the most dubious interpretations even made its name as a term in criminal law: sodomy. God is so outraged by the injustice people inflict on each other there that he decides to destroy the cities with fire and brimstone. Abraham pleads for clemency, but in vain. Warned by two young men (angels), Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family flee just in time. Lot’s wife looks back once more – nostalgic? curious? fascinated? fill it in yourself – and pays dearly: as with Orpheus and Eurydice, the rescue came with the condition ‘don’t look back!’. She turns into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19). With this short aria, through Egypt and Sodom and helped of course by Bach’s music, Franck drove home the urgency of being ready for the coming of Christ.

Stories in a holy book: no ordinary texts

Neither biblical story is a factual report of historical events; both are stories that, in the retelling, have grown ever richer in meaning. Their words and images have become ‘thick’ words. The stronger the story and the longer it is retold, the more layers of meaning attach to it and the more complex its links with other stories of the same tradition. I have not given this example only because the exodus will keep returning in this chapter. In the search for ‘what religion is really about’, it is essential to sense what it means when people call a book a ‘holy book’. That has great consequences for hermeneutics and for the way people construct their identity. For Christians the Bible is something other than an ordinary text. The literal historical reference is not what most believers are primarily interested in; what matters is that these stories are inspired, ‘charged with spiritual meaning’. One expects something of these texts. And if that spiritual meaning does not appear at first reading – which happens rather often – that is not a signal to write the Bible off, but a spur to read better, differently.

That is why allegorical exegesis flourished so within Christianity, transmitted together with the texts since antiquity. Allegory means that something actually says something other than it seems to say. Ordinary-looking things – numbers, names, places, animals – stand ‘for something else’. All those battles between the kings of Israel and the Canaanites, Midianites or Amalekites: if they are mere historical reports, why should we read them? And before you know it they become descriptions of the battle between good and evil, Lord of the Rings-style, or allegories of the struggle in every human soul. Many of these stories are already told in such a way that a more-than-literal reading lies ready to hand. Anyone with a feeling for language senses that the exodus story – departure, crossing of the sea, journey through the desert, trials – is a mirror story: look into it and learn about life and yourself. Typological readings were just as useful: a story set in era A reveals its real meaning in era A′ or A″, with Christ, of course, always in the key role. What happens to David ‘foreshadows’ what happens to ‘the great Son of David’. A medieval Biblia pauperum, or the religious paintings of many centuries, cannot be understood without a thorough knowledge of this creative way of reading.

Before Luther bound doctrine to the Bible with his Scripture principle, this hermeneutical inventiveness was highly valued: the more inventive the better. Bernard of Clairvaux is admired to this day for his allegorical sermons on the Song of Songs, in which he reads a collection of worldly love songs with a strong erotic charge as mystical texts explaining in code what wonderful things can happen when Christ is the bridegroom of the soul. “I did not try to give an explanation,” he said of this method, “but I sought and found an occasion to say what gladdens the heart.” For theology it did not really matter what meaning you found in a story; doctrine was fixed anyway, and contained the full content of revelation. The Bible could only illustrate it. The criterion of good exegesis was not literary-historical correctness, but conformity with church doctrine – and ‘whether it worked’.

But once Luther raised the Bible to the sole source and norm of faith, things looked very different. Exegesis now had to bring to light the truth about God and test the opinions ventilated about him. It had to generate the true doctrine, and no other. No room for arbitrariness: methodical rigour and a consistent hermeneutics were suddenly needed, otherwise how could you separate the wheat from the chaff? The battle for the one correct interpretation began here and has never ended. Farewell, then, to the infinitely rich, many-coloured, polysemous allegory; univocity and clarity were the watchword. Here lies the root of biblicism, and a great boost for historical and literary Bible research. But without spiritual meaning, many Old Testament stories rapidly lost their importance: they became ‘historical stories’ about other people in another time. The miraculous elements began to stand out and became increasingly problematic. In an allegorical reading it does not matter whether the sun stands still so that the enemy can be defeated – on the contrary, it offers a fine application (‘See how merciful God is: even when everyone says it is too late, He gives you extra time, time of grace…’). In a factual report such details are disturbing, certainly once the historical and natural sciences begin to unfold. Yet it was the loss of meaning that was felt most strongly; the ‘Old Testament’ threatened to become an old book of another people and another religion (which, of course, it also is). In practice, though, the heart has its reasons: preachers who had to keep a congregation occupied for an hour every Sunday soon brought the allegorical method, shown out of the front door by Luther, back in through the back door. Bach’s cantata texts bear witness to it.

Still, when it came to determining the true doctrine about God or answering the essential questions of life, the Bible was expected to provide clarity. Exegesis therefore had to be verifiable: the interpreter had to show, in a systematically accountable way, which doctrine the Bible produces (on the sacraments, say, or church government), and at the same time test and refute deviations against that same Bible. Scripture was both the content of revelation and the criterion to separate truth from falsehood. As I tried to show in the previous chapter, the Reformation got stuck in this circular reasoning almost immediately. The claim was too high for the Bible: a collection of 66 (or 72) books that needed an enormous amount of interpretation even to be understood as a consistent whole. Much human work, hence much room for disagreement – not to mention the logical tension in the thesis that one and the same text must be both source and norm of its own meaning. Be that as it may, ‘the Reformation’ at once burst apart into countless currents, each with its own internally consistent doctrine, based of course on the book, just like that of its opponents. Nobody had a criterion that could not itself be challenged on the basis of the same holy book. Nicolas Boileau quipped, not without reason:

Alors n’admettant plus d’autorité visible
Chacun fut de la foi, censé juge infaillible
Et sans être approuvé par le clergé romain
Tout protestant fut pape, une Bible à la main.

Once no visible authority was any longer acknowledged, everyone became an infallible judge in matters of faith – and without approval from the Roman clergy, every Protestant became a pope, with a Bible in his hand. (Boileau, Satire XII, sur l’équivoque)

After Luther, ordinary believers had more ‘doctrinal freedom’ than any pope ever had.

Divided by Faith

Those who realised this, and tried to make that insight fruitful for church practice, were exceptions. Critics of ‘extreme’ views (i.e. interpretations that were not mainstream) were convinced that they interpreted the Bible correctly, unlike the others. Almost everyone thought it was a matter of studying, reasoning and debating until you were blue in the face; then the others would surely see that they erred and we were right. The reverse was theoretically possible, but rarely happened in practice. If it didn’t work, the conclusion could only be that the others were wilfully blind – and the devil might well be behind that. The voices of people like Sebastian Castellio and Dirck Coornhert, to name two well-known sixteenth-century voices of protest calling for moderation and acceptance of internal plurality, remained voices crying in the wilderness (to use yet another biblical metaphor). They sensed that fundamental disagreements about ‘what God really wants’ and ‘how to shape the service of God’ were not due to a lack of Bible study, but were activated by it – and that more Bible study would not resolve them but reinforce them. In vain. Religious identities closed themselves off, sought and found support from political rulers, and entrenched themselves theologically in scholastic bulwarks. Thus the interpretation of Christianity became the dividing principle of Europe: Divided by Faith, as Benjamin Kaplan’s well-known book is called, or in the same vein Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation: Europe’s House Divided.

By the end of the wars of religion church and state were more tightly intertwined than before; only now there were two options for the one church. Nominally everyone in Europe was still a Christian (unless you were a Muslim or a Jew), but from now on you were Roman Catholic or Protestant, and among the latter a further fork appeared: ‘Evangelical’ (Lutheran) or ‘Reformed’ (Calvinist). Real peace there was not – the theologians’ war went on, minus the armed variant – and it was not very satisfying either, spiritually or intellectually. Confessing every Sunday that ‘the holy church is one’ while it evidently is not, is a little embarrassing. Add to that the experience that what now called itself ‘the holy Church’ continued to fall short of the ideal. Especially every new Protestant church that had itself become the established church (the technical term for the privileged church in a territory) ran into this. Internal contestation followed; the break kept repeating itself, and the harder one resisted, the worse it got. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, protesting Christians appealing to the Bible had set in motion a process they could no longer stop. People went out ‘from Egypt’ and felt liberated, but often not for long. The new leaders – bishop, minister, pastor or brother, it made no difference – turned out not to be immune to honour and power, and the ‘brothers and sisters in the Lord’ of the new ‘communion of saints’ were ordinary people after all, with their large and small sides. Most eventually resigned themselves to the status quo, whether or not longing for the ‘fleshpots of Egypt’. And you could be sure the unrest would wake again. Once the Bible has divine authority within a group and you hold that its content can in principle be understood by every member (Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, remember, Alister McGrath), the community gathered round that book will be unsettled by it. Life can always be better, and texts can always be read otherwise, framed otherwise, linked with other texts or played off against them. Textual interpretation has no end. The personalisation of the relation of faith, inspired partly by Luther’s strongly autobiographical rendering of what he saw as the heart of faith, gave such debates an existential character, greatly increasing the risk of schism. Any detail could become a ‘shibboleth’ distinguishing the true from the false church: the mode of baptism, the minister’s clothing, the hymns sung (or not sung), the furnishing of the church, room for new revelations, the role of women. It was by no means always a theologically complex issue like predestination, in which the young Reformed church in the Netherlands became entangled early in the seventeenth century. That was rather the exception.

Tolerance when there is no alternative

In a Europe that since Augsburg (1555) sought pacification by dividing itself into mono-confessional states and statelets, larger movements that found the official church – of whatever stripe – once again wanting got little room. Whoever thought their Protestant church was not yet ‘truly reformed’, or not reformed enough, and said so openly, faced stiff repression. Even if the secular power was not always eager to do the bidding of the spiritual power, the latter usually got its way: rulers wanted social peace and could do without church quarrels spilling into the street like a toothache. Church leaders and civil authorities thus often joined forces to neutralise ‘malcontents’ and ‘troublemakers’, as they liked to call dissenters. Believers who would not be cowed eventually sought their salvation elsewhere: in conventicles, small circles of the devout striving for conversion of the heart, churches within the church. Indifference also grew: by the mid-seventeenth century fewer than half the inhabitants of parts of Holland and Utrecht belonged to the Reformed church. On the Continent conflicts mostly remained internal church quarrels, sometimes fought out to the bitter end. Theologians especially excelled in relentless reasoning, with school- and party-formation as the result, and because it concerned ‘God and eternal weal and woe’ they did not shy away from big words. Rabies theologorum is the name of that occupational disease: it breaks out when great rational power is let loose on a subject matter that is by definition not rational.

After 1648 the state hoped to have tamed the restless side of the religious impulse: territorialisation, one region, one religion, and the rest keep quiet – a pacification imposed from above. The ruler subjected the church to his will; if he was Lutheran, so were his subjects. Except in the Dutch Republic (and France until the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685), you could only have civil rights in Europe if you followed the ruler’s religion, which often meant compulsory participation in worship. Freedom of conscience was the most that could be salvaged in 1648: on the forum internum one was free – one could even curse God in one’s heart – but on the public forum one had better not say such things; the punishment for blasphemy was not mild. The same went for those of other faiths. In time they were usually left alone, even when they began to meet and hold secret services, as long as it stayed indoors, invisible and inaudible from the street. ‘Connivance’ (oogluiking, turning a blind eye) was the name of this practice. Even in the Dutch Republic, with a privileged but not compulsory religion, toleration was limited at first. The Lutherans, former comrades-in-arms against Rome, got hardly any room: in 1680 the Lutheran church built in Franeker had to be pulled down stone by stone after a complaint, on the orders of the Provincial States. And Roman Catholics had to worship ‘Our Lord in the attic’ – the famous Amsterdam clandestine church, a church inside, an ordinary house from the outside. In most Catholic countries, such as the Southern Netherlands, even that was usually too much. Only in the woods of Flanders, in the ‘Geuzenhoek’, were Protestants eventually allowed to put up a building, far from the public road and unrecognisable as a church (Maria-Horebeke). Those of other faiths were marginalised; dissenters within the privileged religion were dealt with harshly.

The Great Migration

In England this last point got completely out of hand in the seventeenth century: contestation of the established church grew so fierce and massive that it ended twice in armed conflict. The second time (1688–1690) was settled fairly quickly: James II, who had become Roman Catholic, had to make way for the good Protestant stadholder of Holland, William III – the Orange marches in Ulster still recall this ‘Glorious Revolution’ (the winners’ term). The Civil War of 1642–1651, however, tore the country apart for years. Of course there could only be one church in England too: the Church of England, Ecclesia Anglicana – either loyal to Rome or organised independently of Rome, but then de facto Protestant. How it changed camps several times in the sixteenth century is well known (Henry VIII), as is the bloodshed that went with it (Bloody Mary). Terrible, but – alas – not exceptional in the European story: if the colour of the national church must coincide with the religion of the ruler, every succession can make the whole church change sides, and that never happens without a fight. One does not change religion like a coat. By the early seventeenth century (under James I, the man of the Bible translation) it was clear that the Church of England would remain separate from Rome and continue as a Protestant church. Paradoxically, the same king chose to leave the liturgy and church order virtually unchanged – ‘catholic’, at least in appearance. That bishops, archbishops and kings went on behaving as autocratically within this ‘reformed church’ as before made many believers doubt whether it was really reformed at all.

Dissenters and the Pilgrim Fathers

When protesting ministers – later called dissenters – were intimidated, dismissed and even imprisoned, many had had enough. Such a church, neither fish nor fowl, was intolerable, certainly to the ‘Puritans’. As the name suggests, they strove for a church pure in doctrine, pure in liturgy and holy in conduct. Doctrinally they were not particularly extreme: Calvinist sympathies, good relations with the Dutch Protestants, and a preference for church government from below, in which the local congregations themselves held spiritual authority (hence ‘congregationalism’). Given the peculiar English situation, the liturgy became the breaking point: must a minister lead worship by the officially approved Book of Common Prayer, in prescribed vestments, with obligatory gestures, written prayers and fixed readings – or may he simply read and expound the Bible as it comes and pray ‘as the Spirit gives him utterance’? When Archbishop William Laud imposed the Prayer Book with all its trappings on pain of deprivation, the bomb exploded. Many ended up in prison (heretics were no longer really burned; as the century went on, attention shifted to witches), some did not survive, and even more ordinary believers dropped out – literally as well: indifference to church affairs reached unheard-of proportions in England.

For those who took the church seriously, England – church and state – was a new ‘Egypt’. Like Israel they cried to God for deliverance from slavery, and the word ‘exodus’ acquired a new, realistic ring. Some really left. A first group settled in the Dutch Republic (Leiden) but could not settle in there either: they found the Dutch Calvinists too lax and society too liberal. In 1620 they moved on to the ‘New World’. When they landed at Plymouth, it was as if they had arrived in the Promised Land: there at last they would be free to serve God. By far most dissenters, however, emigrated not literally but ‘spiritually’, estranged from the state church while remaining nominal members. How widely the criticism was shared became clear when the king, in 1640, recalled the Parliament he had dissolved in 1629, because he needed money (taxes). Democrats and Puritans promptly joined hands against king and archbishop. Civil war broke out; after a long series of battles came a coup, the archbishop went to the scaffold (1645) and the king followed (1649), condemned for high treason. When religion and state are one, a sin against the one is always treason against the other. England became a republic, like that other great Protestant sea power, the Netherlands, for eleven years (1649–1660), with the Puritan Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector. Not long after his death everything was reversed: the monarchy restored, the Prayer Book – by now sacrosanct through having been fought – made compulsory again, and the Puritans persecuted in their turn. Whatever one thinks of the period, it produced two masterpieces of English literature: Paradise Lost (Milton’s highly personal exegesis of parts of Genesis) and The Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan’s allegory of the pitfalls and challenges of an ordinary Christian life, written in prison).

A new world, a new chance

The peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon variant of the permanent ecclesiastical identity crisis caused by the Scripture principle is that those who escaped to the New World found themselves in a completely new situation. London was far away, and Canterbury too. The burden of centuries of tradition could be thrown off; the church had to be built on the spot, literally and figuratively. The first Puritans seized that chance in 1620/21 and began to experiment, civilly as well as ecclesiastically. The settlers made a covenant with one another, sealed in a ‘compact’ (a sort of municipal constitution), in which they promised to keep God’s commandments with one accord and to build society on that basis, from scratch. Surprisingly, it is from this group of Puritans – whom we would today call radical and fundamentalist – that someone soon emerged who pleaded for total freedom of conscience and religion, affirmed the rights of the Indians to the land (against the English king’s claim), and campaigned all his life for a complete separation of church and state: Roger Williams (1603–1683), hardly known in Europe, a national hero in the United States. It is worth zooming in, because here we find lines of thought and formulations that ended up in the American Bill of Rights and indirectly still shape our view of religious freedom as a ‘human right’.

The historical context sheds a surprising light on common opinions. The call for separation of church and state was, in its original form, not motivated at all by resistance to an excessive influence of religion on society and politics (that may well be a typically European distortion of perspective), but by the opposite. According to Williams separation is necessary to protect the church against a meddling state, because otherwise the church will be irreparably damaged. If churches seek government support, that is, according to this Puritan, the death blow to what religion is really about. For Williams religion is a precious treasure, but also very vulnerable and above all very personal: the government must keep its hands off it. Mix religion with politics and religion is soon finished – only politics remains. As I said: they can be radical, those Puritans. Their story, which is also one of the birth stories of Western thinking about religious freedom, can be told through the founding of three settlements: Salem, Providence and Philadelphia.

Salem: the Puritan experiment

Life on the northeast coast of America was hard. Until the Puritans came there were only a few small settlements, bases for pioneers trying to survive on fishing, beaver hunting or logging. After difficult negotiations with the government – understandably, given why they had left – the first group of Puritan emigrants, often called by the romantic (nineteenth-century) name Pilgrim Fathers, managed to have their settlement officially recognised as a colony. As the basis for their community they drew up a kind of ‘social contract’ in which, as free citizens, they would govern their internal affairs themselves: the Mayflower Compact, named after their ship. The list of signatories coincided with the list of church members: 41 men, free citizens, out of 102 persons. Through this compact they formed a ‘civil body politic’ that would take valid decisions by majority vote. The body social, the body politic and the body of Christ thus coincided once again, as in medieval Western Europe and afterwards region by region. However small-scale, they did not do things by halves: the community would function literally on a biblical foundation. They felt themselves ‘God’s people’ in the land God had given them, a ‘new Israel’. The elders watched carefully over what was taught in church, and the governor (chosen from their midst, but recognised by the English king) was mandated to keep order on the basis of the Compact.

In October 1621, when all was arranged, the colonists who had survived (fewer than half!) held a great feast to thank God for the privilege of being allowed to build their lives entirely according to the Bible: Thanksgiving. To avoid the mistakes of ‘old Israel’ there was much Bible study, long sermons, introspection and brotherly admonition to keep the whole community on the straight and narrow. Only through such self-discipline could they meet the standard they had set themselves – or rather, that they had applied to themselves from the Bible. Gradually more refugees for faith arrived, and new settlements regulated themselves with ‘compacts’ too – civil variants, incidentally, of the church orders that had sprung, less than a century earlier, from the brain of the French jurist Jean Calvin, giving congregations the means to function without episcopal oversight.

We are still a long way from general religious freedom here. These Puritans were interested only in freedom for their own religion: room to shape their vision of how God must be served, unstained and pure. Church discipline covered all of life, inner and outer, faith and morals, private and public. In form democratic (majority vote), in content theocratic (God’s will is law, and that law is the basis of all human legislation). In Europe people said that too, in theory, but there centuries of tug-of-war between secular and spiritual authority had produced a complicated division of power, and canon law itself had become highly formalised. As long as the communities around Plymouth stayed small, village life and social control sufficed. The system was severely tested, however, when from 1629 – the year the king dissolved Parliament and, together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, drew all power to himself – large groups began to leave England in search of ‘the promised land’ across the ocean.

To prepare this great exodus, some far-sighted minds had made a pact with the settlers in and around Massachusetts to bring the existing settlements into a new colony with a new charter. The Massachusetts Bay Company was founded, and the largest settlement, until then bearing the Indian name Naumkeag, was renamed ‘Salem’ – from the Hebrew shalom, and short for ‘Jerusalem’, the holy city where God dwelt among his people in the time of the temple. You get the point. A group of well-to-do Puritans in England financed the whole operation and saw to it that the king ratified the charter – not a moment too soon. Large groups of Puritans had given up hope that the Church of England would ever be truly reformed; they wanted out of ‘Egypt’, to a land where they could serve God in freedom. The call to ‘leave the house of bondage’ and set out for the promised land rang from many a Puritan pulpit. The Company chartered eleven ships at Southampton. A first contingent left in 1629; the largest group waited for spring and sailed in April 1630. The Great Migration, the English history books call it. On the day of departure a great crowd saw them off. Emotions ran free: those who stayed behind often wondered whether they should not go too; those who went were uncertain what awaited them, afraid of the dangerous voyage and the ‘wilderness’ beyond.

John Cotton’s farewell sermon

Among those taking leave was the Rev. John Cotton of Boston (Lincolnshire), a celebrated Puritan preacher, Master of Arts and Bachelor of Divinity of Cambridge, who – against the archbishop’s express command – had laid aside the Prayer Book, hung his surplice in the wardrobe, omitted the genuflection at the altar and introduced his own reading schedule. He wanted to encourage the emigrants, and he would not have been a true Puritan had he not addressed them earnestly from the Bible, admonishing and encouraging. They should not doubt their decision: God himself was sending them; he would bless their ‘plantation’, as the settlements were called. He gave them the promise of 2 Samuel 7:10: Moreover I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more. In the sermon style of the day – points and sub-points, rhetorical questions and answers, a round dance of Bible texts and images loosely strung together – he unfolds the thought that the plantation is not so much their work as God’s. That means great responsibility, but also enormous assurance: what God has planted, no one can uproot. Their only task is to see that what they do is grounded in God’s commandments. After a humble request not to forget ‘our Jerusalem’ once arrived in Salem (‘Pray for the peace of Jerusalem’, Psalm 122), he sends them off. The sermon soon appeared in print as Gods Promise to His Plantation. Cotton was – need I say it – a close friend of the great man behind this exodus, John Winthrop, a driving force of the Company, who himself made the crossing with his family.

John Winthrop: A Model of Christian Charity

Winthrop, also a Cambridge alumnus (law), though a layman – which was precisely one of the striking points of difference – did Cotton’s sermon over again, probably just before landing. That text, too, was published at once but long thought lost; rediscovered in 1830, it was almost immediately added to the ‘canon of American culture’, and many a president has referred to it in good and bad days. Winthrop dreams of a whole series of new settlements, each a ‘city of God’, peopled by men and women who hold together in joy and sorrow as if they were one (knit together as one man). The bond is Christian love (caritas): we must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labour and suffer together, always remembering that we are members of one body – an allusion to Paul’s image of the church as the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12). Thus each Puritan town would become ‘a city upon a hill’ that cannot be hid, a light to the world (after Jesus’ image in the Sermon on the Mount). At the same time, he impresses upon the colonists, ‘the eyes of all people are upon us’. Should their mission fail, they would not only become a byword in the whole world, but God would withdraw his support. At the end Winthrop steps fully into the role of Moses at the border of the promised land: ‘I have set before you life and death… therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live’ (Deuteronomy 30). You cannot raise the demands, nor the expectations, any higher.

By the end of 1630 all eleven ships had sailed and more than a thousand Puritans had landed at Salem. From there they moved on to found a new town: Boston. A few years later there were some five thousand – small numbers to us, but by the standards of the time a mass immigration, especially in thinly populated New England. Winthrop became governor of Massachusetts Bay and tried to keep control over the individual communities. That was not simple, since rejecting all hierarchical authority was one of the essential marks of the Puritans. Winthrop proved a strict but fatherly leader, re-elected year after year.

Anne Hutchinson

Soon, however, the identity instability inherent in churches built on the Scripture principle became visible in the ‘closed cities’ of the Puritans too. In 1634 Anne Hutchinson arrived in Boston with her family. In the English Boston she had been a follower of John Cotton, who had meanwhile also emigrated. Anne – understandably – drank deep of the freedom that reigned there: at last she could live as God wanted and speak freely about what really mattered. She proved gifted with rhetorical and leadership talent, organised women’s meetings and sermon discussions, which drew great interest, even from some ministers and magistrates. Her analyses were sharp; local ministers were regularly taken to task for valuing the letter of the law too highly and expecting too little from the spirit of the gospel. Governor Winthrop was not amused: Anne caused unrest and sinned against the biblical command to honour one’s ministers. She defended herself by saying she simply spoke the truth and that the Bible proved her right, displaying a biblical knowledge that occasionally left even learned opponents speechless. At her trial she was not lost for words either. Civil regulations, she held, were always subordinate to God’s Word, and – asked about her own authority – she let slip that God spoke to her too, that she knew herself literally called by him; she had heard God’s voice. And it was that inner voice in the heart that mattered in the end, whether in a man, a woman, a minister or a cobbler. That was too much for the city fathers of young Boston. Anne was banished and moved with her family to Rhode Island, outside New England. There was room there for people with deviant opinions, for there was no law and no church. Yet there was no anarchy, nor was it no-man’s-land any more: a particularly headstrong Puritan minister had settled there after buying the land from the Indians, had deliberately not founded a church, but had decided to wait and see how Christ himself would set things in order in the New World – meanwhile welcoming anyone who came, regardless of origin, belief, sex or race.

Providence: Roger Williams and the wall of separation

Roger Williams, yet another Cambridge-trained English Puritan (Cambridge was indeed a hotbed of Puritan theology), had seen at close quarters how the king drew all power to himself and, through the Archbishop of Canterbury, tried to bend the church to his will. As a young factotum he had assisted the great jurist Sir Edward Coke, who in the 1620s threw every legal means into the fight against the king’s usurpations. In vain. Even after becoming a minister he remained a familiar figure in Parliament, and when the king put Parliament ‘on hold’ in 1629, he too chose the safe course and left England. In 1631 he arrived in Boston. His reputation preceded him and Winthrop knew him from England; the Boston church at once offered him a ministry. To everyone’s astonishment Williams declined the honour. The Puritan church of Boston, he explained, fell short in its devotion to God – it was not pure enough. He meant not a theological matter, nor religious or moral zeal, but a fundamental organisational defect: the Puritan churches in the New World had not severed their bond with the state. They still relied on the support of the civil authorities. Williams found that unforgivable. Was that link with state power not precisely the English disease that had afflicted the church in the mother country unto death, the very reason they had had to flee? Had they not seen how disastrous government interference was for the spiritual life of believers? A church can only become truly ‘church’ if it resolutely cuts all ties with the government; only then is it free to serve the Lord with heart and soul. The government must keep away from everything that has anything to do with man’s relation to God, and the church must not let itself be co-opted, not even by a government well disposed to it. It must not be opportunistic about this: that costs it its soul. Williams touched a raw nerve. The Puritan project in Massachusetts, so carefully designed by Winthrop and Cotton, was built precisely on the cordial cooperation of the civil and spiritual authorities. Only thus could the ‘city upon a hill’ shine so brightly.

Trial and flight

Because Williams did not exactly hide his views, Boston grew restless and he had to leave. He found shelter in Salem, where they let him be; the church gave him no official post but made informal use of his services. When he could not hold his tongue there either, a case was brought against him before the court of Massachusetts Bay, which decided on banishment. It was 1635; Williams was ill and winter was coming, so the court mercifully granted a delay until spring. In early January, however, it sent soldiers to arrest him after all – Williams had recovered and once again had not been able to keep quiet. Winthrop foresaw that Williams would then be deported to England, where death probably awaited him. However much he disagreed with him, Williams did not deserve that, and Winthrop had him warned. Williams did not hesitate: he put on his warmest clothes, stuffed his pockets with parched corn (a trick learned from the Indians) and left his house. The winter was severe. Writing about it thirty-five years later, he says he can still feel the pain in his almost frozen feet. He had ‘neither bed nor bread’, and had ‘the ravens’ not fed him, he would surely have died – a biblical allusion to the prophet Elijah, hiding from the furious King Ahab and fed by ravens, here referring to the Indians who knew him as a reliable trading partner and gave him shelter. He was now in no-man’s-land: Rhode Island had not yet been claimed by any European nation. He bargained with the Indians he found there until they agreed on a price for a piece of land. Feeling that God had led him there, he called his settlement ‘Providence’ – and, he added, it was his deepest wish that this place might become ‘a shelter for persons distressed for conscience’. Soon his family joined him, with some twelve other families, mostly people from Salem who shared his views on church and state, among them some Baptists (believers in adult baptism) who had been driven out of Massachusetts Bay as heretics.

Separation of church and state in Rhode Island

Williams in turn now began a holy experiment. He too drew up a ‘compact’ for Providence. The land he had bought he put into the common pot: each adult man received a share large enough to cultivate, the rest remained common property. He restricted the competence of the civil government to ‘worldly matters’. The most remarkable thing about the ‘constitution’ of Providence is therefore what it does not say: there is no reference to God in it at all. The government has no task whatsoever with regard to any church; it must only maintain public order and work for the common good. By signing, the citizens promise obedience to this secular government – and, as if to avoid all misunderstanding, they add that this obedience concerns ‘civil things’ only. In the eyes of nearly all his contemporaries, in the Old World and the New, this must have sounded absurd: a government without legitimation outside itself. Everywhere else in the Western world government legitimised itself by reference to a divine institution, usually symbolised by a dynasty ruling ‘by the grace of God’. The Puritans had done something similar: their mandate from the Bible to build a ‘city of God’ – Cotton’s sermon spoke volumes – was the legal ground of their compact. Williams reasoned that the legitimacy of any worldly ruler rests not with God but with the people over whom he rules, who granted him that power and can take it away again, and to whom he is accountable. Williams was consistent: church and state were kept completely apart. Like God, the word ‘church’ did not even appear in the compact.

When some years later he had to defend the independence and legitimacy of what had become Rhode Island in England – the colonists of Massachusetts were claiming his territory – he lashed out at his former allies. He accused them of hypocrisy and egocentrism: they had fled England because they would not conform to the state church, and now they demanded that everyone settling in their land conform to their church. Then came his world-famous image. The true church of God is like a beautiful garden, unstained and pure, like the garden of Eden; life in the world is like life in ‘the wilderness’. Whenever people made a gap in the hedge or ‘wall of separation’ between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God broke down the wall, removed the candlestick (biblical image of his presence) and gave his garden over to the wilderness. If you allow the state to meddle in matters of faith in any way, Williams argued, the church will end up as just another worldly institution. He won his case and returned with legal recognition: first a parliamentary patent (1644), later – after the Restoration – a royal charter from Charles II (1663). In Providence Plantations he could experiment with popular sovereignty, while it officially remained part of the English realm. Of the Church of England no trace in that charter. Instead we read: “No person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinion, in matters of religion, who do not actually disturb the civil peace of our said colony.” Do you hear how far ahead of his time Williams was!

The safeguard against anarchy lay in Williams’s view that the state must confine itself to the ‘second table of the law’ (the last six commandments, concerning morals and public life) and not meddle at all with the ‘first table’ (worship of the true God, rejection of idolatry and image worship, keeping the sabbath). On those points people may believe what they like, because any coercion there leads at best to hypocrisy (outward conformity, inner absence) and at worst to harm to the individual soul. ‘Soul liberty’ and the inviolability of conscience were for Williams the highest values. All this he achieved while in England the civil war raged, in Germany the Thirty Years’ War entered its last phase and in the Netherlands Dutch and Spanish troops were still fighting each other. Enforced worship, he says, ‘stinks in God’s nostrils’. I can’t help it: Williams speaks the ‘language of Canaan’, always concrete and vivid, and this way of speaking goes back to the Bible itself: an acceptable sacrifice rises as a ‘sweet savour’ to God (Ephesians 5:2), and vice versa. Forcing people into a religion is a ‘service of God’ that does not please God – and yet that is exactly what Europe had come to. Not only recently, says Williams, but from the moment Christianity became the state religion under Constantine. That was the fall of Christianity, and it happens again every time a European ruler changes religion. Religion under compulsion he calls a ‘soul rape’. In his later writings he goes beyond merely ‘tolerating dissenters’ (all right then, as long as you keep quiet) and pleads for complete toleration, even of what goes against the Christian religion: all people in all nations should be granted the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish or antichristian consciences and worships. He even tries to show that the Bible – or at least Jesus – wanted this; his favourite text is the parable of the wheat and the tares, which must grow together until the harvest, lest the wheat be uprooted with the weeds. For hundreds of pages (The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution) he walks through all the classical arguments for the divine legitimation of state power and the whole of church history, using the Bible systematically against ‘Christendom’ to unmask it as a perversion of Jesus’ message. Not a difficult exercise, done before him (Luther, for one) and daily since. It will have changed few minds.

To his contemporaries and former comrades Cotton and Winthrop, Williams had gone completely off the rails. His colony was not taken seriously either: a ‘disorderly lot’, a strange collection of malcontents, a refuge for all sorts of groups not welcome elsewhere – above all the Baptists, in those days about the most hated ‘sect’ in the world. They found a safe haven with Williams, and it is they who preserved his legacy and kept the separation of church and state for the sake of the church high on their agenda. The Rhode Island charter itself, however, played hardly any role in the further development of religious freedom. As popular as Williams is now, so marginal was he in his own time. Not that Cotton and Winthrop won the day – on the contrary. From a wholly unexpected quarter yet another ‘holy experiment’ was set up, in which religious freedom was central but the exercise of living together also stood high on the agenda: Pennsylvania, where the Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, set the tone. We are in the second half of the seventeenth century, in Philadelphia, the first American city built to an urban plan.

Philadelphia: William Penn’s holy experiment

“My company on board consisted of all sorts of people. There was a doctor with his wife and eight children, a French captain, a Low German pastry cook, an apothecary, a glassblower, a mason, a smith, a wheelwright, a joiner, a cooper, a hatter, a cobbler, a tailor, a gardener, farmers, seamstresses, etc., about eighty persons in all, not counting the crew. They differed not only in age (our oldest woman was 60, the youngest child only 12 weeks) and in trade, but also in religion and way of life, so that I might not unfittingly compare the ship that carried them here with Noah’s ark – except that there were more unclean than clean (rational) animals in it. Among my fellow travellers are those who hold with the Roman, the Lutheran, the Calvinist, the Anabaptist and the English Church, and only one Quaker.”¹

Thus the German jurist Franz Daniel Pastorius describes his crossing from Europe to America in 1683. The report is meant for family and friends at home, and above all for the ‘Frankfurt Land Company’, on whose behalf he had bought land to found a new community. The seller was William Penn, Quaker and recently governor and owner of an immense, wooded but fertile territory in the New World. But first a word about the image Pastorius uses for the religious mix on board: Noah’s ark. There, one specimen (male and female) of every living creature was saved, to start again after the flood as if it were the first day of creation. So on this boat sit people of every background, every trade and every possible denomination – even a Catholic. They live together peacefully on board and all hope, once arrived in Philadelphia, to begin building a new life.²

In a later report Pastorius gives an impression of church life in Pennsylvania – a picture that looks very familiar to us now, but must have been unique then. The Indians, he says, have ‘no articles of faith’, only traditions and customs they pass on to their children; he sees little harm in that, though some instruction in Christian doctrine might help them along. There are two Calvinist churches, one for the Dutch and one for the English. The Quakers in Philadelphia are ‘known to William Penn’; having no strict organisation, there is not much more to say about them. Then there are Swedes and ‘High Germans’, who are Lutheran and have their own minister, Fabricius, of whom he must sadly report that he is much given to drink but has no eye for the needs of the inner man. He himself has seen to it that a small church was built in Germantown, but attaches little value to externals: people are the real building stones of the church. He ends by inviting ministers at home to consider the crossing – provided they are more oriented to theologia interna than to outward things.³

The recipients of these letters around Frankfurt must have been jealous. That this was possible – that these groups simply lived peacefully side by side, and that the master of the land permitted it, was even proud of it! How different things were in the German lands, where the Lutheran church – the only one allowed – was torn by a struggle between ‘orthodox’ and ‘pietist’ theologians. And when I tell you that Philipp Jacob Spener, the leading pietist theologian, was senior pastor of the church of Frankfurt, you know enough. That was why Pastorius had gone to America. Many pietists had hoped that the ‘reformation of doctrine’ would be followed by a ‘further reformation’ – that of the heart – and longed for a more mystical, intimate, collegial form of worship. They met much resistance from the orthodox side, and their own initiatives (meeting in groups) were viewed with suspicion. That is why some of them had founded a land company and sent Pastorius to America to buy land where those who wanted to escape the stifling ecclesiastical climate of Western Europe could lease a plot and build a new life. It was William Penn himself who had sown the seed of this migration a few years earlier, on a journey through Europe that took him to Holland, the Krefeld region and Frankfurt.

William Penn

Penn is another odd man out, atypical of the milieu he represented and made great. He belonged to the English aristocracy, son of an admiral, a personal friend of the king and the heir to the throne; yet he became the figurehead of a movement that recruited not from the upper class but from ‘the ordinary hard-working man’. Needless to say his life has a break in it, a ‘conversion’ – which, as conversions go, did not come entirely out of the blue. As a student at Oxford he had already turned his back on the Church of England, whereupon the university struck him off for religious nonconformity and his father nearly disinherited him. After a European tour that included study at Saumur, he returned to England and crossed the path of an itinerant preacher, Thomas Loe, through whom he joined the Society of Friends, the ‘Quakers’.

These were people who, one and all, expected nothing more from any established church. Some had walked the whole road from Anglican via Puritan to Baptist. This produced one of the most underestimated phenomena in European church history: people who no longer ‘know’ about God and either give up or go on searching desperately. In England these disappointed ones found each other in loose groups that called themselves, very aptly, Seekers. They expected no salvation from any external form of religion; they were ‘separated’, outside the church circuit. Sacraments, baptism, the Bible – fine, been there, done that, and I am still spiritually hungry. When Seekers meet, they say nothing; they wait for God to reveal himself. Sometimes someone feels, from within, that he (or she) must say something, and speaks. Slowly the awareness grows that every person has an ‘inner light’ connecting the soul directly with God – and that this light can do its illuminating work perfectly well without creed, clergy, sacraments, indeed without church. More and more often people feel during meetings that God does want to say something to them (or rather: through them). Sometimes they begin to tremble, as happens under great emotional tension seeking an outlet – hence their nickname, Quakers. A later offshoot even began to sing spontaneously and developed a ritual collective dance: the Shakers. On principle the Quakers developed no doctrine. They gladly read the Bible, but the inner light allows them to be selective there too. All outward form is pragmatic and provisional. What matters is meeting together, in shared experience and/or consultation – or in silence.

The Quakers had spectacular success in England in the 1650s, growing within a few years to more than 50,000. The Puritans were not amused; the Quakers were persecuted. When the king returned in 1660, nothing changed for them except that there was now another persecutor – and they sometimes shared a cell with their former one. They chose a simple lifestyle; for the rest it was Jesus first and Jesus last. Had Jesus said you should not swear an oath, but let your yes be yes and your no be no? Then so be it: they refused the oath in court, and went to jail. They refused to pay tithes (a church tax for a church that is no church – why would you?): jail again. They refused to attend official services: off to the cell. They met despite the ban: jail. And, stranger still, when they were arrested, beaten and humiliated, they let it happen without resistance. Had Jesus not said something about turning the other cheek, and that all who take the sword shall perish by the sword? So, as a matter of course, they became pacifists. And it gets crazier: women too were created by God, and their subordination to men was, according to one of the most influential Quakers, George Fox, not essential but incidental, a consequence of the Fall – which Jesus had atoned for. Ergo, Christ had restored woman’s original dignity: she too shares in the inner light and participates on equal terms in Quaker communities. Because they saw personal divine inspiration as fully in line with the written record of earlier inspirations, they spoke of God with great boldness. Besides their very personal, intimate relation with God they were strongly socially minded – they must love their neighbours too; they are not called Society of Friends for nothing. They imposed nothing on anyone in matters of faith, though of course they did try to convert everyone. Their criticism of the established church was blunt. They were kind, but certainly not neutral.

In 1666 Penn joined this group and promptly became their top propagandist, especially when he – the king’s friend – was arrested while preaching in the streets of London and had to appear in court. His trial became a turning point in the public appreciation of the Quakers. Calmly and cleverly Penn defended what he had done, why, and why the charge was unsound. A jury acquitted him although the judge wanted him convicted – a first in Europe. For the first time lawyers too began to wonder whether they were on the right track. In 1677 he travelled through Holland and Germany to let his inner light shine in as many places as possible and kindle it in others – or, less patriarchally: to bask together in each other’s inner light. He visited the Baptists in Krefeld and the pietists in Frankfurt, and made special time for the Labadists in Friesland, because he absolutely wanted to meet Anna Maria van Schurman, the most learned woman of Western Europe, who had withdrawn from the world and lived in a commune at Wieuwerd. What all these people had in common was that they had separated from the standard church and thereby partly stood outside ordinary life. On this pastoral propaganda tour the seed was sown for the crossing of Pastorius and his people from Frankfurt and Krefeld in 1683.

Philadelphia

Since it was soon clear that Quakers were unwanted in England, many went to the New World, hoping to find freedom there to let their inner light shine or to help others find theirs. In sparsely settled areas (around New York, for instance) that worked fine, but under Puritan government they found the New World a carbon copy of the Old: the death penalty was pronounced even more readily than at home, and sometimes carried out. In Rhode Island they fared much better: Roger Williams welcomed them warmly, even though he disagreed with their views. He had, by the way, something of a Seeker himself. They really got the wind in their sails, however, when William Penn began his ‘holy experiment’. By a stroke of fortune he was handed a piece of the New World. The king owed Penn’s late father an enormous debt, and in 1681 Charles II paid it off in one go by granting the son a vast territory not yet taken possession of. The charter refers to Admiral Penn and uses the term ‘sylvania’ (woodland): Pennsylvania was born. A little later the Duke of York added Delaware. Penn drew up a constitution, went to America, negotiated with the Indians living there on how best to settle property rights, and had surveyors stake out a favourable site on the Delaware River where Philadelphia was to be built.

The Frame of Government Penn designed breathed the Quaker spirit. In Pennsylvania – as in Rhode Island – there would be total freedom of conscience. The Indians were not just paid off and then ignored: in a series of treaties he built good relations with the Lenni Lenape, the main people of the region, and those who wished could take part in his project as full citizens. His view of legislation he summed up in one sentence: rulers must never become so powerful that the will of one man could hinder the good of a whole country. Back in London he continued his campaign for religious toleration while his ‘holy experiment’ got up steam. And unlike Rhode Island, Pennsylvania made history. The whole world heard of it (Penn handled his publicity well and had ‘agents’ throughout Europe with whom one could take options on land). Germans especially found their way there. Today a district of Philadelphia, around 1700 Germantown was a household word in Germany and the Netherlands. Pastorius – a jurist by training, a classicist and a not undeserving poet – was soon elected its mayor. Above all Anabaptists went there (Mennonites, but also the followers of the Swiss Jacob Amman, the Amish), later also the Schwenkfelders (kindred spirits of the Quakers, whose roots go back to the early Reformation). Sometimes they transplanted their own church, sometimes they joined a related one, but very often they became rather ‘diffuse’ in their church boundaries. The special thing about Pennsylvania is that, organisationally, everything is allowed and nothing is required. Even ‘belonging to’ loses part of its meaning. Hard, closed group identities blur by themselves in a land whose laws attach neither advantages nor disadvantages to them, and where instead you are constantly appealed to for your personal engagement. About Pastorius himself – a Lutheran with pietist and mystical leanings when he left – there is uncertainty to this day as to what he believed exactly and which church or community he joined. Meanwhile he had everyone’s trust and was mayor of Germantown for years. He kept social life running like clockwork, pioneered agriculture and horticulture, tried to persuade German winegrowers to come over, founded schools (writing the textbooks himself when needed), cultural societies, libraries, hospitals and poor relief. In his many letters home – which also served to attract new immigrants – he was honest about problems and dangers (unlike Penn, who painted everything in rosy colours), full of practical tips for the crossing, and his descriptions of landscape, flora and fauna, the life of the Indians and his huge collection of local sayings are still a treasure trove for researchers. With him too we meet the by now familiar biblical rhetoric: whoever does not fear the hardships of the crossing may ‘go out of the European Babylon in the name of the Lord’ – but not like Lot’s wife, who left with her feet while her heart and mind stayed behind in Sodom with her comfortable household goods, and looked back, which, as you know, did not agree with her.

Penn and Pastorius were pious men, but unlike the Puritans not at all afraid of those who thought or believed otherwise. Penn did not want Philadelphia to be a ‘city upon a hill’, accessible only to those pure in doctrine and blameless in conduct, but a Society of Friends, a brotherhood of men. (Philadelphia is also the name of one of the seven churches of Asia Minor to which a letter is addressed in the Revelation of John – the only one of the seven about which only good things are said.) Not a closed but an open city. Pastorius cannot stress enough in his letters how truly everyone here is equal before the law and can count on fair treatment. No surprise, then, that in 1688 his name appears, with those of three other inhabitants of Germantown, under a petition for the equal treatment of Black people – at the very moment slaves were first being brought to Pennsylvania from the Caribbean – to be discussed at the Quakers’ monthly meeting. It is the first official document in American history to argue this simply and clearly. Its core text is a word of Jesus: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The rest unfolds this principle. Clear, isn’t it?

Because Penn declared the ecclesiastical fence irrelevant and addressed every person in his or her unique humanity (the inner light), the social side of the religious impulse could finally come to light. The mutual bond that religion creates, but which usually stays limited to one’s own group (us and them, in-crowd and out-crowd), could now unfold society-wide – or at least, a start had been made. Reality, of course, is a good deal more stubborn.

Freedom of (the) religion

This journey through three cities makes a few things very clear that proved fundamental to the further development of religious freedom, in America and in Europe. The ‘holy experiment’ concerned the regulation of one particular religious variant of Christianity, the Protestant one, which of course determined the options people could think of. As explained at the end of Part 2, the centre of gravity of the Protestant concept of religion lies in the correct formulation of the ‘set of beliefs’, the decisive mark of the ‘true church’, closely tied to the interpretation of the holy book. So much so that I have imperceptibly begun to speak more and more of ‘faith’ instead of ‘religion’. And I have filtered out almost all the real theological jargon – otherwise this would have sounded like abracadabra, readable only by theologians and scribes, and you would not have recognised yourselves in the people who passed by. Now, I hope, you did. They are not so strange, those people of long ago.

Religious institutions are against it

Disagreement about the ‘set of beliefs’ inevitably led to schisms, because an established church clung to its monopoly and could enforce it with state power. Dissenters were eventually thrown out, regrouped – often, not always – and then saw themselves as the manifestation of the ‘true church’. The repeating break this produced has, I hope (fear), become clear. It only came to a halt when it could go no further: at the faith of the individual. With that, religion in the Protestant tradition definitively became an individual and personal matter, often in tension with the institution that officially represents that faith (or another version of it), including one’s own institution. The importance of this observation can hardly be overestimated. The first and fiercest opponent of religious freedom is the institution of the established religion – in Christianity, ‘the church’. Luther collided with the Roman church; the Anabaptists, the ‘enthusiasts’ (pejorative label for those who expected more from inner than from doctrinal renewal) and all the other now half-forgotten currents of the sixteenth century met repression from Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed churches alike – which sometimes even parked their mutual disputes to nip these dreadful ‘heresies’ in the bud. Ask the Anabaptists – and not only that one time in Münster, when out of sheer despair they proclaimed the Kingdom of God. Every current that is not mainstream is the first victim of the intolerance inherent in institutionalised religion.

Individuals benefit from it

Within the Protestant world, with its doctrinal view of religion, the ‘inward turn’ that goes with the individualisation of faith could thus open the way to religious tolerance. You would not expect it: at first, personalisation increases the weight of the religious question and hardens positions – there is, after all, only one truth. The debates were incredibly fierce, the pamphlets populist: demonisation everywhere. Religion now determines not just the community (group identity, the medieval church in which one could still blend in rather anonymously) but above all personal identity; the ‘nominal Christian’ becomes a term of abuse. We saw it happen in England: whether one serves God rightly becomes a matter of life and death, worth prison and (voluntary) exile. That tension led to the Puritan experiment of leaving sinful England to found a ‘holy city’ elsewhere – and drove the tension so high that the whole thing blew up in the experimenters’ faces. From that explosion emerged individuals who in the end were content not to be hindered in their own religion and therefore granted others the same, even though their deepest conviction was different. Most formed their own alternative true church; some let go of the concept of ‘church’ altogether. In the New World Roger Williams was the first example: waiting for God himself to gather his sheep in his own way and time, he left everyone in Providence free in their innermost convictions – and, an important addition, free to organise around them or not. The civil government may no longer interfere: a wall of separation. In England the Seekers adopted the same waiting attitude, and there too it began to glow ‘inside’. Though the church and political authorities did everything to extinguish that inner light, they could not control the counter-movement. For the Society of Friends the inner self is where it happens; in Pennsylvania that soul received constitutional protection. Meanwhile the question of truth was debated as fiercely as ever, by the Quakers too – but it seems that among people who disagree on it and at the same time acknowledge that nothing can be achieved here by external means, religious freedom is possible. A conditio sine qua non is that the government stays completely out of it.

Juridification: living apart together, or a cohabitation contract?

This model of religious freedom (an individual right) rests on a double separation. Believers have often separated themselves from the established churches: no established church. Then various separated groups live together in one region without sharing their ‘innermost conviction’; it is the mutual recognition of having been discriminated against by the established church that makes them grant each other the light of day. The deeply felt religious impulse may be shaped as one wishes, with one’s own means: free exercise of religion. There we have the two central clauses of the First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights: non-establishment and free exercise. Precisely because this is a formal right, and therefore empty of content, it says nothing yet about the practice of living together. The religious impulse may go its way freely, but within a legal frame – and ‘religion’ is nowhere defined. Rightly so, since a definition would already restrict free exercise. But will that not come back to haunt us? To judge whether free exercise is being violated, you need some idea of what it is about. The last part of this series will deal with that. In the young federation of states it was not yet a big problem, because virtually everyone implicitly carried a Christian, Protestant-type notion of religion.

Another aspect: this legal freedom carried no ecumenical task. In matters of religion such a society could easily become a LAT society – living apart together – with the risk of falling apart (living not together, but side by side). That risk had already been countered by the assumption that there was no disagreement about the ‘second table of the law’, the social-moral commandments, which happened to coincide with ‘natural law’, so that on social and moral questions everyone was more or less on the same page. As long as all dominant ‘sects’ were Christian currents, that could more or less hold: people shared a Christian civic morality. Yet William Penn evidently sensed that assent to the commandments of social life should be not so much theoretical as practical, concretely built and shaped. That is what makes his ‘holy experiment’ so interesting. From his Quaker faith Penn downplays the importance of the ‘set of beliefs’ and its accompanying acts; he debates them, but makes no point of them. He allows a LAT relationship in matters of worldview, but to live together there must be more: so he calls everyone who wants to live within his frame of government to roll up their sleeves and build a society on a ‘friendly’ basis, the Quakers setting the example. Without idealising the experiment, I think this social complement is one of the reasons why Philadelphia endured and later served as an example when the debate on the legal anchoring of religious freedom in the new US Constitution began. Alongside religious tolerance (guaranteed by the rejection of government interference and freedom of self-organisation) comes a shared social engagement. Together they offer perspective.

Separation of church and state

Finally, it seems important to retain that in the New World the call for separation of church and state came neither from the state nor from the established church(es), but was rather a cry of distress from people who found religion too important – for themselves and others – to leave its management to politicians. Put sharply, they wanted the government to keep its hands off everything to do with people’s convictions of faith. They had only bad experiences with it: matters of faith were too precious and too vulnerable to be exposed to political manipulation.⁴ In such cases politics always embraces – or runs off with – the forms of the religious impulse that suit it, and tries to obstruct or clip the wings of the less welcome ones. Bluntly: a state at war loves the reinforcing formula ‘for God and country’, but will tend to silence pacifist prophetic voices. The best way both to reduce the former to ‘an opinion’ and to give the latter a hearing too is to make sure the government cannot touch either. That believers were the asking, and later demanding, party when it came to legal separation of church and state is worth holding on to when we put our European glasses back on. In Europe history went exactly the other way: there too the call to separate church and state was heard, but mainly to push back church influence in public life and political decision-making – or, more simply, to untangle the knot in which both powers were entwined, and cut it if need be, as if it were a Gordian knot.

God, natural law and the rights of man

How, then, did the American struggle for religious freedom end? It was settled in trend-setting fashion in the Bill of Rights added to the Constitution in 1791, whose first article concerns freedom of religion (the First Amendment). An opening shot, however, had been fired in 1776, when a number of English colonies joined together and declared independence, appealing to ‘certain unalienable Rights’ given to man by God. Both texts deserve attention, because they reveal the thought pattern to which today’s human rights are indebted, at least in their wording.

The Declaration of Independence

If you want to rise against a king who, by common consent, reigns ‘by the grace of God’ and to whom you owe obedience by law, you need good papers and strong motivation. The Americans laid down their justification in the Declaration of Independence. You can hardly avoid God in it, since you must ‘trump’ the king’s legitimation. The reference to God remains in very general terms, however – logically, since Thomas Jefferson, its principal author, was a deist: he firmly believed that God is behind everything, but just as firmly that God now lets the laws of nature take their course and has de facto entrusted the management of creation to man. It is in such terms that ‘religion’ appears in the Declaration, starting with the opening, which refers to ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’ – a fine formulation of the belief that natural law is God-given.⁵ Nature and God are almost interchangeable here: Deus sive natura. If human action accords with the laws of nature (and of God), it is fine; all that remains is to show that nature (God) grants you the right to revolt, and you can sign with a clear conscience – and the war that follows is in principle justified too. That such a legitimation always has something of an incantation about it, nobody will deny. The two other references to God serve mainly a moral function: the rectitude of their intentions may be checked by the Supreme Judge of the world, and they rely on the protection of Divine Providence. Good for morale, let’s say. Where the Declaration speaks of the rights of man, the legal ground for the revolt is being formulated, so big words are in order and God’s role is emphasised. The wording made history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

So one of the first formulations of human rights – held to be universally valid – is indebted to the Christian doctrine of God as Creator and the doctrine of natural law based on it. Jefferson took his cue from John Locke, for whom there are ‘laws in nature’ coinciding with the laws of God the Creator, who as it were ‘created them into’ nature: universal (what holds for one holds for all) and inherent (you cannot and may not detach them) – hence ‘unalienable’. Locke linked this to the view that a state forms when people freely unite in a political community: the idea of the social contract, which we already met in the compact Roger Williams drew up for Providence. What interests us is the appeal to God the Creator, who would have made man such that these rights belong to his nature. Jefferson could evidently assume in 1776 that nobody in America would disagree with this legal ground, and could think of no other. Not surprising: at the end of the eighteenth century God as Creator was still self-evidently present behind the world. Before Darwin you could theoretically be an atheist, but you had no alternative explanation for the origin of life, so you almost had to postulate some kind of ‘god’. The deists were minimalists: God as the watchmaker who ‘set things going’, the designer of the laws of nature – that’s all; the rest he left to nature and its management to man, whom he had well equipped with a keen mind, an enquiring spirit, a conscience and, according to many, a sense of God. You feel we are back where Part 1 ended. Most of the Founding Fathers, such as Jefferson and Madison, were deists. The idea that human rights are ‘built into human nature’ dominated the debate long after Jefferson. The French Déclaration des droits de l’homme still mentions God in its preamble – no longer as the basis of natural law, but, curiously, as witness: En présence et sous les auspices de l’Être Suprême. Only in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 did God disappear from the text, though it was hotly debated in the preparations. The suggestion of universality was kept, while its ‘ground’ (natural law, God as Creator) was dropped.

Is that a problem? Do human rights lapse once people no longer believe that ‘man’ was so created by God? Some Christian authors take a certain pleasure in hammering on this point: look at man through the glasses of science and you see only ‘selfish genes’ (Dawkins); psychology and neurology find little that underlines ‘human dignity’ – so if you want to grant people rights, you must ‘believe in something’: either in God the Creator (solid ground) or in ‘man himself’, but then on what do you base those rights, and why these and not others? Pure arbitrariness, wishful thinking, projection. The wisest reaction seems to me to stay friendly, nod in agreement and say: OK, you’re right, I admit it. I base them on nothing, but I think they are good and I am willing to grant them to every human being, including you. And I hope you will grant them to me. Shall we agree to try to win as many others as possible for these rules? Legitimacy can also be found in agreements made between people. Why not? Why should law not simply arise from relations and interactions between people? In any case, once the reference to the order of creation or ‘nature’ is no longer valid for everyone, little else remains than to agree to accept gratefully the inheritance of the past – in Western Europe: parliamentary democracy, constitution, separation of powers, secular society – however it arose and however it was legitimised at the time. Meanwhile it is wise to realise that these human rights are part of our Western culture and that, when push comes to shove, all legislation, however absolute it sounds, is ultimately ‘man-made law’.

There is a catch, of course. Human rights in their present wording are a product of Western culture, so one may doubt the claim that they are ‘objective and universal’. They can become so, certainly. And because they stem from natural law they are rather absolutely formulated: posited, not argued – fitting for an age that held human law to be grounded in divine law, which implies that the true nature of something (of ‘man’, say) can be known and is normative (man is ‘endowed with certain rights’). A very powerful legitimation, as long as everyone roughly agreed. After such a preamble, in which human rights seem to come straight from God, you cannot answer ‘So what?’. This gave human rights not only the appearance of objectivity but also great authority to the rules derived from them – which of course was precisely the intention. But it is only appearance. The Universal Declaration too is ‘man-made law’, and the confident wording (‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ – well, that is rather disappointing) must be understood as a rhetorical legal figure of speech. It is pointless to go on debating within the frameworks of that time – ‘is equality really created into nature?’, ‘and what exactly is that nature?’. That way of grounding laws has been definitively taken from us by the insights of the life sciences; nothing to be done about it. Every person therefore has the right to doubt whether the formulations and the deductions from them are correct. In the world of man-made law nothing is eternal. But it is part of the game (of its rules) that such fundamental legislation is touched as little as possible, given the weight our culture attaches to precisely these formulations. And, as with every law, they apply not because we agree with them, but because they were once ratified.

The Bill of Rights and the First Amendment

When, after the Declaration (during the war), the states breaking away from England had to discuss new constitutions, religion was of course on the table. The Church of England (usually Anglican – Episcopalian in the US – sometimes Presbyterian) had been the established church, financed by taxes under English rule, much to the annoyance of those who did not belong to it and had to fend for themselves (if the law even allowed them to, which varied by colony). Now the question arose in full: how do we regulate this after the American Brexit? Two options competed. A system of multiple establishment (based on the idea of religious tolerance), or the model of the seventeenth-century charters of colonies like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, where no church enjoyed government support and everyone had to take care of their own church-building: disestablishment of all religion (based on the idea of individual religious freedom). James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, two of the most influential Founding Fathers, favoured the latter, under the slogan free exercise of religion for all, combined with a ban on using public money for anything to do with religion. General George Washington thought this went too far: why not support several religions at once? Religion was a good thing, wasn’t it – it gives social cohesion and helps keep people in line. A common line of thought then, and one you still regularly meet in the debate on religion and society; it is also what gives Michel Houellebecq’s fable Soumission its plausibility. Formulated the other way round it worked even more strongly, and this was the rhetoric of the established churches: without the church, society degenerates; religion guarantees the moral and social order – for Christians, the second table of the law, which nearly everyone then (from deist to Baptist) took to coincide roughly with natural law. How convenient! Consensus. So why not subsidise that good religion with public money?

That the American discussion nevertheless came down on the other side is, in this light, quite surprising. Decisive was the debate in Virginia in 1784–85. The local hero of the revolution, Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty, or give me death”), had proposed a bill to support religious groups with public money – multiple establishment of a series of (not all!) Protestant churches. The old church tax would be reintroduced, but the cake divided; taxpayers might even indicate which church should receive their ‘tithe’, or choose another ‘edifying’ purpose. All religions might organise freely, provided they believed in one God and the Last Judgement. Jefferson and Madison fought it fiercely, demanding a complete ban: tax money must not be used for ‘any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever’ – formulated, principled but also cleverly, as a plea for complete freedom of religious exercise. They were supported by leaders of several Protestant groups, especially the Baptists, who remembered all too well that Presbyterians too could discriminate quite effectively. In Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance against Henry’s bill, religious freedom is formulated as a human right: an unalienable right of every individual. Practically everyone joined in thinking and debating: petitions, motions, meetings. Besides the Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians and part of the Presbyterians (who would themselves have qualified for subsidy) eventually supported Jefferson’s bill. Very popular in evangelical circles was this syllogism: Christians managed for the first few hundred years without government support, and the church grew; then Christianity became the state religion under Constantine, and decline set in; ergo: ‘religious Establishment has never been a means of Prospering the Gospel’, as the petitioners of Cumberland County wrote.⁶ We hear a clear echo of Roger Williams. The counter-argument – that formal religious freedom would also admit heathen religions and, worse, bring the Madisons and Jeffersons (no orthodox Christians but deists, the most common form of Enlightenment thinker then) to power – was countered with an optimistic prophecy: abolishing state support would not make deism triumph but true religion, for the ministers would no longer be slack ‘government servants’ (‘hirelings’ in biblical language) but true pastors, shepherds whose lives were examples of faithfulness and whose preaching was full of God’s Spirit; deism would soon be put to shame.⁷ Pennsylvania was regularly cited as having shown for decades that it works – and works well.

Legal minds also realised that there are in fact no objective criteria to distinguish a ‘good religion’ from a ‘not-good’ one. Which doctrine? Only Protestant, or Catholic too? Must you believe in the Trinity, in infant baptism – or precisely not? Which practice belongs to it? As Madison put it in 1784: ‘What is orthodoxy? What heresy?’⁸ The criteria are always arbitrary, always exclude some citizens in the exercise of their religion while favouring others. George Washington, initially in favour of multiple establishment, changed his mind: he foresaw that the question which religions would qualify could lead to bitter disputes and stifle the young state. When the vote came, in January 1786, Jefferson’s bill was adopted by 74 votes to 20. State support for religion was outlawed, while freedom of worship was guaranteed for all religions (not only Protestant or Christian ones). The political alliance between deist politicians and evangelical communities (who in their preaching fought the deist position tooth and nail) lasted until Jefferson’s election as president in 1800. It is also the background of Jefferson’s much-quoted letter (1802) to the Danbury Baptist Association, who feared that the dominant denomination might push them aside in the new federation, as they had experienced in colonial times. Jefferson solemnly assures them that the First Amendment builds ‘a wall of separation between Church & State’.⁹ An interesting detail: Massachusetts, the colony founded by the Puritans to escape the state church, was the last state to keep an established church; it abolished it only in 1833.

What exactly does that famous First Amendment say? The text comes from Madison and was amended several times in Congress until it read:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.¹⁰

During the debate several attempts were made to use more precise terms than ‘religion’ – ‘religious doctrine’, or ‘articles of faith or modes of worship’ – and even multiple establishment came back to the table. All were rejected. Madison’s formal concept of freedom of religion tout court stood, and in its condensed form comes out even more strongly than in the original draft. Jefferson’s image of a ‘wall of separation between church and state’ actually does not do justice to the radicality and comprehensiveness of this prohibition. The government may not only refrain from setting up a national church (disestablishment); it promises to abstain from all interference with religion ‘whatsoever’. The most common error in applying this rule is to equate ‘religion’ again with a religious institution (church). That is not what it says, nor what was intended. Free exercise of religion is not an institutional right but an individual human right; only derivatively is it also a group right. Discussions on religious freedom are often hopelessly sloppy on this point.

For our search into ‘how religion works’ it is important to note that the amendment says several things at once. It honours the diverse and very vital religious world of the late eighteenth century as it had developed in colonial times – nowhere else could one find such a broad spectrum of religious currents. The young federation knew real spiritual pluralism, and the federal government promised to keep its hands off it. The religious impulse could develop freely and show what it was worth, for individual life and for society, the government trusting that this would benefit the country. That rival factions would coexist, sometimes uneasily, it took for granted. People trusted people, and the example of Pennsylvania – where the ‘noblest ministers’ rose to the top and society flourished socially and economically – evidently gave citizens courage. Roger Williams and William Penn could be content: they had got their way.

This amendment made history. It separated religion and state in a way never seen before, in the Old World or the New. Free exercise of religion was guaranteed not for one group, nor for a privileged selection of religious groups, but for all individuals, regardless of the content of their religion. People thought mainly of Christian currents, but others could appeal to it without difficulty. Self-regulation was to be the rule; in conflicts, general legislation should provide solutions. The Founding Fathers surely suspected it would not be so simple, but on principle they wanted it no other way: rather a highly strung freedom than a minimum of coercion. The second half of the First Amendment – freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly and of petition – would give all parties enough means to plead their case if tensions boiled over. Congress would not play referee; at most it would intervene on formal grounds if someone found a fundamental right violated, judging not opinions but deeds. In the final part (4) I return to this, because in the US the Supreme Court has recently had to decide in very interesting cases what does and does not fall under free exercise of religion. The judges thus sat in the theologian’s chair – precisely what Madison wanted to avoid, for the simple reason that by the nature of the case it cannot be done.

Meanwhile in Europe: Alexis de Tocqueville

In Europe the road to free religious life ran along very different paths. While a democratic republic with the religious freedom just described was already functioning in the US, Europe was still chasing away the ghosts of the Ancien Régime with its intense entanglement of church and state power. Legislation had become more liberal (edicts of toleration), but in practice things did not really move: at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was no real free exercise of religion. It was – as might be expected – mainly the established churches that obstructed it. The best organised of them, the Roman Catholic Church, made the fight against free thought, democracy and religious freedom one of the spearheads of its church policy, which, as mentioned in Part 1, it only really gave up in the 1960s (Second Vatican Council) – not coincidentally with an American, the Jesuit John Courtney Murray, playing a crucial role in the decree on religious freedom. The idea of freedom and the way the religious impulse had taken shape in Europe (in established churches) evidently could hardly coexist. The stories from America, where things were so different, fascinated and puzzled Europeans – just as Europeans still find it hard to deal with the very different way public and private religious discourse runs in America. Two things in particular astonished them. How was it possible that religion seemed to flourish in a state where the government gave not one dollar cent to any religion? The established churches in Europe had always maintained that state support was necessary, lest people follow their ‘worldly impulses’ and behave godlessly. And how could a democratic country (also unique at that moment) in which religion was entirely free not have collapsed into political chaos within a few decades?

On 8 April 1831 two young men, Gustave de Beaumont (28) and Alexis de Tocqueville (26), boarded ship at Le Havre. Officially they were to study the American prison system (then far ahead of its time and remarkably humane); in reality they wanted to see at close quarters the revolutionary democratic experiment that had been going on in the United States for half a century – to experience what it is like to live in a society where everyone is ‘equal’ before the law and religion is free. The Ancien Régime was dead and buried, but a stable new form of government would not get off the ground, certainly not in France: the tug-of-war between revolutionaries and conservatives had no end, and every upheaval carried the seed of its own downfall. On 11 May they arrived in New York, and for nearly ten months they travelled through the then literally boundless territories of the continent. They sailed the Hudson by steamboat, tasted – literally too – the local cultures, marvelled at many a building, combed archives and held endless conversations with Americans of every rank and station: from presidents (John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson) to Black slaves, hunted Indians and adventurers heading for the Wild West. Gustave was very sociable, could start a conversation with anyone and made a drawing when needed; Alexis listened, observed and filled whole notebooks. In the spring of 1832 they returned to France and wrote a substantial report on the US prison system. More importantly, both worked their impressions into a book: Gustave a novel denouncing slavery and racial segregation (Marie, ou l’esclavage aux États-Unis, 1835), Alexis a political bestseller: De la démocratie en Amérique.¹¹

In form it is a report of what he observed in the New World; in content a socio-political manifesto for the Old. In the US Tocqueville saw democracy in action and was enthusiastic about how the people were mobilised to ‘govern themselves’: everywhere citizens of all ranks – all equal before the law – organised themselves in a thousand and one associations for as many purposes. The social capital present in society had been activated. The secret of American democracy, for Tocqueville, lies in its being both fully participatory and representative, which makes it vital and at the same time armed against the ‘tyranny of the majority’ (the party or president who uses half plus one to seize all power), which Tocqueville and many Europeans feared. Whether his analysis is correct I leave to the many sociologists, philosophers and political scientists who disagree about it to this day. What interests me is how Tocqueville brings religion into this framework. He saw a vital religiosity, present almost everywhere, which to his amazement nowhere obstructed the building of a free democratic society – on the contrary. Religion and democracy went hand in hand, and he could not stop thinking about it. It was a breath of fresh air compared with France, where the Catholic Church had lost its direct political power with the fall of the Ancien Régime, but where during the restoration the old positions had soon been reoccupied and the tug-of-war between church apparatus and secular government over people’s lives had flared up again, more fiercely than ever: conservative forces leaned on the church, progressive republican forces were strongly anticlerical. That struggle, Tocqueville felt, paralysed political thought and blocked real democracy in Europe. He was pleasantly surprised that it could be otherwise, and that religion could even play a positive role in public life – be a ‘political institution’, as he explicitly calls it – leading not to bitter power struggles but to the building of society. Religion and freedom could be mutually supportive instead of mutually destructive. How did those Americans manage it?

Religion and freedom as allies

When he arrived in the United States, Tocqueville writes, it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck him.¹² Religion was truly everywhere – but quite differently from Europe. At home he had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty almost always march in opposite directions; here he found them intimately joined, reigning together over the same soil. This sounded so unbelievable to European ears that Tocqueville shows his readers step by step how he reached it. He too had not believed it possible that religion could ‘be everywhere’ without threatening freedom. Here his European perspective already shows: the American perspective on the same state of affairs would be put the other way round – how can ‘religion be everywhere’ while there is at the same time freedom of religion? He first points, of course, to the legal separation that prevents church and state from flying at each other’s throats as in Europe. He clearly describes that this does not mean the church stays out of the public space. On the contrary, the churches are very prominently present there, but without any state support; they enter it on the basis of freedom of association and opinion, and insofar as they do so as a group (church), it is still a form of ‘self-organisation of free citizens’. The wall of separation did not so much ‘put religion in its place’ or tame it, as most European Enlightenment philosophers intended when arguing for such provisions; it gave religion every chance to flourish. Protected by it, religion comes into its own. Tocqueville saw this with his own eyes in religious gatherings and conversations with members and leaders of the most diverse communities: freed from its liaison dangereuse with state power, religion blossoms and bears fruit, personally and for society.

Religion inevitably concerns itself with how people live: preachers proclaim certain values, castigate others and try to influence public debate. Taking part in public debate is even desirable for the state, Tocqueville concludes from what he saw in America: democratic freedom and religion reinforce each other; they are allies. In a marginal note he puts it in a splendid image: ‘La liberté est née dans le sein de la religion et est encore soutenue dans ses bras’ – American liberty was born in the bosom of religion and is still sustained in its arms.¹³ The church leaders he spoke to told him they had experienced separation not as a step back but as a step forward. They do not try to bend society or knead consciences with the ‘artificial power of laws’, but they are very interested in public life and want to influence it by touching people’s souls – not by imposing laws, but by educating them into morally conscious citizens, by teaching them mores. In Tocqueville’s eyes – and to what extent he mistakes his wish for reality I leave open – that is precisely the essence of religion: a moral power source, giving hope and protecting people from misusing their freedom. The differences between the various currents of Christianity are reduced to ‘details’, still hotly debated, but not touching living-together itself. The contrasts between denominations were no smaller than in Europe – the Protestant ‘sects’ (in the nineteenth century still a neutral word: ‘currents’) are innumerable and by no means agreed on theological matters. But by granting all equal freedom to practise their religion, they had all accepted that none of the quarrelling groups had been assigned the position of established church. Tocqueville idealises a little here, but pour le besoin de la cause: for his French readers, mainly interested in the Catholic Church, he argues that even the Roman Catholic ‘sect’ – grown considerably through Irish immigration – had fitted into this essentially Protestant model, and successfully. All these sects preach different dogmas but teach the same morality.

Without any hesitation, therefore, he calls religion ‘the first of their political institutions’ – though it is entirely independent, not institutionally connected with the government. Religion as people’s educator number one: it teaches the people how to handle freedom. Without religion (he means its moral component) they would misuse their freedom and it would soon be over (a tyranny of the majority would install itself). Religion also bridles the imagination about what one might individually do with freedom, so that people do not invent extravagant things – or, if they do, at least dare not carry them out. Just as well, says Tocqueville, otherwise people would soon ruin themselves and society. In Tocqueville’s realm of freedom there would be no place for the Marquis de Sade.

We recognise the age-old view: religion as guarantor of the moral order, with the subtext that without religion man degenerates and becomes worse than a beast. In Tocqueville’s defence: many Enlightenment thinkers agreed, John Locke for one. This pragmatic-utilitarian valuation of religion was dominant in classical antiquity, and we saw it surface in Part 1 when the Jesuits tried to make sense of Chinese culture and religion: civil religion, a general morality anchored in some form of belief in God. If that were the deepest social meaning of religion, things would be sorry indeed. For such use of religion no religious engagement is required at all; conformism suffices. A society based on it is marked by institutionalised functional hypocrisy. That at least is what Roger Williams in Providence would have called it, before turning in his grave. He had understood better than many political philosophers after him that if you look at religion this way, you not only instrumentalise the religious impulse but in the end systematically discriminate against those who profess no religion: by qualifying religion as the guardian of morality and the educator of the people par excellence, you disqualify the non-religious or atheist person in one go as amoral or immoral. Where Williams had it written into the laws of Rhode Island that ‘a simple promise to tell the truth’ sufficed in court (equal to an oath sworn on the Bible) precisely to avoid that discrimination, Tocqueville notes having read a newspaper report about a judge in Chester County (New York) who refused a witness’s testimony in advance because the witness declared he did not believe in God or in the immortality of the soul. The papers reported it without comment, Tocqueville says, to show how much Americans experienced democracy and the Christian religion as one indivisible whole. That was certainly the strength of the country, but Tocqueville does not find it entirely normal either.

Religion is thus indispensable, for Tocqueville, precisely because America is a democracy. What he really means, though he shies away from that level of cynicism, is that you can make people into good citizens far more easily through the religious undercurrent than by seeking out the real sources of morality. Religion is a kind of shortcut to morally desirable behaviour. The real sources of morality exist, and for Tocqueville they do not coincide with religion, but they are much harder to reach. This suspicion is confirmed by one of his most contested bons mots: despotism can do without religion, but freedom (read: democracy) cannot. Despotism can impose the desired morality; democracy cannot – it has to persuade people, win them over, and for that religion is a very efficient means. Religion is useful, an insight, says Tocqueville, shared by all great statesmen of all times. That religion is being instrumentalised here is clear enough.

Les habitudes du cœur et de l’esprit

Were this all Tocqueville had to say, I would close on this critical note and continue the line of thought on my own. But it is as if Tocqueville sensed that his analysis might be read very flatly, so he inserts a passage – just one paragraph, preceding the long exposition on the importance of religion for American democracy – explaining what he means by ‘mœurs’ (mores in the English translation): not only morals and customs in the strict sense, ‘les habitudes du cœur’, but also the various notions people possess, the opinions current among them and the whole of ideas from which ‘les habitudes de l’esprit’ are formed – in short, ‘tout l’état moral et intellectuel d’un peuple’. Habits of the heart and habits of the mind. This whole – this interplay of head and heart, this moral and intellectual sensibility deposited in a certain self-evidently shared behaviour – could, I think, also be called culture, or, more old-fashioned, civilisation. By this I mean (see Part 1) everything man ‘adds’ to the natural impulses arising from his physical existence as Homo sapiens, with which he does not so much embellish his life as give it a human character. So even in America, so hyper-individualistic in its experience of faith and with legislation that formally keeps state and religion apart, we again come up against the phenomenon that cult and culture are so closely bound up that they cannot be seen apart. Given the prominence of religion in public space and civil society at the time of Tocqueville’s visit, it was hardly possible even to distinguish them. Typical of this ever-recurring aspect of religion is that it is so hard to put your finger on, mainly because for many believers it is not the core of religion. Believers say it themselves: oh, that’s not what it’s about, those are side issues. But for society it is again and again these side issues, the side effects of religion, its peripheral sensibility, that seem of great importance for stability: habits and customs expressed in particular behaviour (the roles of women and men, views on property, ideas on clothing, work and leisure, the value placed on play and sport, attention to education, social engagement) – in short, the habitudes du cœur et de l’esprit that grow through time (culture as cumulative evolution). They are of fundamental importance for the survival of a society as a society, a living-together. Where there is a shared culture, people can apparently safely disagree about the articulation of the core of faith; their living together as human beings is not threatened by it.

One more remark. The religion Tocqueville found everywhere in America – about whose depth he declines to pronounce – consisted almost entirely of variations of the Christian religion, and in large majority with a Protestant twist. So we must beware of generalising the way ‘the religious question’ was settled there to ‘all forms of religion’. The warning at the end of Part 2 returns. For religious currents with a Protestant-Christian profile, the combination of free exercise and no establishment seems to have neutralised the potential for violence inherent in conflicting ‘sets of beliefs’. Whether religious expressions of an entirely different nature are helped by it is another question. I am thinking of more communal-ritually oriented forms, as often characterise Roman Catholic spirituality, not to mention Eastern religiosity. And what of the expressions of free exercise of religion based on Islam that cause such a stir in the Western world? Or must all religiosity be pressed into the mould of the Protestant concept of religion, as is constantly done today without much thought? If the mould does not fit, it becomes a Procrustean bed – and, detonating the metaphor, the parts that are chopped off will start leading a life of their own. That does not seem wise to me.

Looking ahead

At the end of our search for ‘religion’ and how it relates to freedom, the question ‘what is religion and how does it actually work?’ has still not been answered. That was not the intention. But I do think a number of characteristic elements have emerged that deserve our attention when we talk about religion today. They concern two large clusters of questions. The first is a question of society: how do people with strongly differing worldviews live together peacefully and constructively? This problem seemed settled by ‘freedom of religion’, which, anchored in constitutions (or human rights), would protect the plural society by ‘taking the fuse out of the powder keg’. In fact this has proved problematic. Religious signs in society continue to cause tension. People try to deal with it through ‘more legislation’, a further legal regulation of religious matters – trying to control, manage or at least rein in religion, while claiming to guarantee its freedom. There is some tension in that, as the many appeals to supreme courts show. Second, we kept coming up against the deep intertwining of ‘religion and culture’, and in my view the tension just mentioned has everything to do with it. The rights of freedom regulated a plurality of worldviews of a particular type (the ‘Protestant-Christian’), not of just any religion – and beneath that religious plurality lay a shared culture. That fed the sense of community, so that religious strife could no longer cause deep division; the non-religious shared that culture too. Since globalisation, and especially since the various waves of migration, that cultural floor beneath the diversity of worldviews has disappeared. That means there is also simply a lot of cultural friction in society. Declaring the multicultural society bankrupt, as has been done with much fanfare, does not get us much further: then an alternative will have to come, because the tensions are still there. And – as our analysis suggests – because religion and culture are so closely interwoven, a cultural tension can easily take on a religious tinge and vice versa (the headscarf, the nativity scene). A clash of cultures fought out with religious zeal is the last thing we need. Time, then, for a contemporary exercise in thinking about religion in our society, with special attention to the rights of freedom and the cultural embedding of religion.

© Dick Wursten – fair use policy: all use permitted, provided the source is acknowledged.