Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but

corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories....

Puritanism...was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville,

Democracy in America, I, ii

Recall that I began the last chapter with Luther's accusation that the Roman Catholic papacy had become a polity. Not surprisingly, many raised as Catholics (like de Tocqueville) will see at least as much politics in Protestant sects. Although de Tocqueville exaggerates the "democratic" aspect of many Puritans, what he says seems valid. Yet as the previous chapter made clear, full truth would apply as much to the anti-republican history of sects which are episcopal, which keep appointive bishops for centralized or descending religious control. I now shift to sects which reject that form, turning decentralized parishioner voting as the fount of ascending authority.

A set of faiths, variously called Reformed, Presbyterian, Congregationalist and Particular Baptists, all have roots in the theology of John Calvin, a French Protestant who emigrated to the city-state of Geneva. From there he sought to become the main leader of at least the French-speaking adherents of the Protestant Reformation.

Continental or Reformed Church Calvinism. Although the family name may originally have been Cauvin, John Calvin (1509-64) was born in Noyon, in northern France, a younger contemporary of Martin Luther. His father was an administrator for the Roman Catholic church. Calvin himself studied philosophy, law and literature at the universities of Paris, Orleans, and Bourges, but grew interested in the new ideas of Reformation. When his friend, Nicolas Kop, of the University of Paris was arrested for heresy in 1533, Calvin grew worried, since Protestants were subjected to recurrent waves of persecution in France. In such Roman Catholic dominated areas, this could extend to being burned to death with a brass ball in the mouth to prevent any dying utterance of heresy. Sometimes by means of a chain heretics were raised and lowered over the fire to prolong their agony. Yet in 1534 Calvin at Noyon renounced the Roman Catholic faith and slipped into exile to Basle and then Geneva.

Calvin put his thoughts into a work which he would later revise and enlarge, his Institutes of the Christian Religion (first French edition 1541). With reference to the importance of Aquinas' Summa theologica to Roman Catholic orthodoxy, Ferdinand Buisson says of Calvin's Institutes, "it is the Summa of reformed Christianity" (Buisson, 1892, 98). Calvin's dedication of the first edition to the Roman Catholic King Francis of France shows his vain hope that the French would cease persecuting their Protestants (detractors called them Huguenots). In his century that was not to be.

Geneva was then an autonomous city of some 10,000-20,000 people which had become Protestant before Calvin's arrival. Also before then, Geneva had severely persecuted all kinds of heretics. Continued persecution would include execution of 58 of them 1542-46 (Durland, 1975, 131) Servetus, who denied the validity of infant baptism as well as the doctrine of the Trinity, fled France toward a refuge in Italy, but was arrested at a church service in Geneva. Calvin had much earlier written to the old Genevan pastor Guillaume Farel, "If Servetus were to come to Geneva, to the extent that I have any influence, I would never let him leave alive" (Buisson, 1892, 336). The Genevan Reformed church did not itself execute heretics but followed Roman Catholic practice of handing them over to secular authorities, once condemned. Calvin favored the heretic's execution, but preferred that it be by the blade, not fire. If Servetus was in 1553 nevertheless burned at the stake with his offending book, at least the Genevan authorities heeded Calvin's request that Servetus' tongue not be cut out, then often done as another way to prevent dying utterances of heresy. Outside of Geneva, Roman Catholics were just as eager to get their hands on Servetus. The execution of Servetus was the stimulus for the writing in Basle of the first really principled defense of religious freedom, Sebastian Castellion's Concerning Heretics, which appeared in 1555.

Political authority in Geneva restricted citizenship, making it difficult for non-native Genevans called Habitants to become naturalized. Citizens were eligible to attend an assembly called the General Council, but it had limited actual authority. Agenda items were sent to the General Council from the more powerful Small Council, which eventually came to be dominated by supporters of Calvin, notwithstanding an earlier episode of his brief exile to Strasbourg.

Calvin himself held no political office, even if he was to exercise much influence from the church role entitled Moderator. With close backing from Theodore Beza, Calvin was associated with the Consistory, the Genevan Reformed Church's formidable censoring and disciplinary body (6 clergy including Calvin, 6 laity or church elders, and a Presiding Syndic --one of the four chief magistrates -- from the Small Council of the government of Geneva). Beyond censure and recommendations of more severe punishments, functions also included acceptance of church members as well as their formal ouster, i.e., excommunication.

Calvin's personality influences a movement. When contrasted with Luther, Calvin was much more serious, uptight, didactic, and legalistic. He was seized by a love of law more than Luther's law of love. Also, while Lutherans viewed the New Testament as a Covenant of Grace largely superseding the old, Calvin saw it rather as reaffirming the Old Testament, even beyond the Ten Commandments (Skinner, 1978, 235-6). But Calvin, like Luther and other reformers, understood himself as striving to return religion to the more authentic practices of the early church. He continued to like the word "Catholic," which meant universal, since the term Protestant was not yet in use. Even though a theologian, he was also much interested in the current science of his time. He did not think it would challenge the Biblical account of the world.

Recall that Luther had been an Augustinian, much impressed with The Fall and our Original Sin. That applies as much or more to Calvin, who once said of our fallen or second nature that "men are of so perverse and crooked a nature that everyone would scratch out his neighbor's eyes if there were no bridle to hold them in" (Walzer, 1970, 33). Calvin's bleak view of our kind has consequences both in theology and politics.

In his theology, our Original Sin made us weak relative to Satan as well as God. Calvin did not accept the Roman Catholic emphasis on strong free will to avoid temptation and to do good works. Rather, he believed that everything which comes to pass is foreordained and foreknown by God. God hence knows those whom he has Elected or Predestined for salvation. Calvin may have thought that as few as a fifth of all of us were thus Predestined for Grace, and we could not on our own shape our posthumous chances (Erikson, 1962, 40). In Luther, God extended his Grace to all, and it depended on the will of the individual to accept it and retain it, since Grace could be lost. But Calvin rather emphasizes the majestic and even arbitrary will of God in Predestination, and Election cannot be lost once attained (Troeltsch, 1931, esp. 581-90).

As suggested in Chapter 2, perhaps the practical impulse of Predestination was to rationalize limited access to both church and state voting once power is no longer lodged with Pope and bishops or with unchecked hereditary monarchs. A possible exception is Presbyterian practice in Scotland, which permitted even the Unregenerate to vote in the churches but debarred them from communion. In any case, Max Weber argued that a consequence of the doctrine is that it made even those accepted as Regenerate for church membership highly anxious about whether or not they were really Elect (Weber, 1958). In a religion of authority such as Catholicism, being left to decide for oneself would cause anxiety, but they escape it because the most zealous believers have a redoubled commitment to follow all teachings of the unquestioned authority (Buisson, 1892, 206). Many Lutherans took solace in their baptism and regular participation in communion, which was strongly emphasized by Martin Luther but de-emphasized somewhat by Calvin. The Calvinist anxiety, in Weber's view, was rather discharged in economic activity, since prosperity could be taken as a sign of God's Election. Hence the Protestant Work Ethic.

Be that as it may, it has been shown that Calvin's economic views were by no means ardently capitalist, but on the contrary were quite critical of the rich. Not unlike Roman Catholic moralists, Calvin was especially critical of speculating grain merchants and others who were too greedy and insufficiently charitable. Calvin apparently approved of the more egalitarian Genevan practice of dividing inheritances evenly among children rather than the French practice of bestowing the estate on the eldest son only (primogeniture). But in favoring less Luther's agrarian economy than a commercial one, Calvin wanted policies to limit luxury consumption, ease unemployment, provide an almshouse with medical care for the poor, and regulate interest rates with a 5% ceiling and provision for no interest at all in some loans to the poor (Graham, 1971). But he expressly rejected the medieval Roman Catholic idea that rent on land was different from and more acceptable than interest on money (Walzer, 1970, 43-44). Calvin believed that Scriptures provided much guidance for organizing the Visible Church of earth, and it required a strongly disciplinarian format. Viewing God as a stern schoolmaster to all of us, Calvin believed that the clergy had a role along with secular authorities in the encouragement of godliness in all, including those not accepted as church members but required to attend church and abide by its rulings. Zealous mutual surveillance was needed, even by the magistrates, for "discipline is like a bridle to restrain and tame those who rage against the doctrine of Christ..." (Institutes, IV, XII, 1) If for Luther, maintaining order was mostly an outward thing, ultimately involving government coercion of sinners who need it, Calvin wants order to be an inward as well as outward thing, lessening the need for force through better self-control.

It is interesting that the rise of Protestantism goes with a discounting of Roman Catholic emphases on the Virgin Mary, the good angels, and human saints, while also giving more attention to the Devil, bad spirits such as witches, and wicked exemplars of human beings. While I know of no compelling and comprehensive explanation for such shifts, anxiety about social control must be present.

Beyond the Consistory, the Company of Pastors in Geneva prescreened those who wanted to become clergy, and their approved candidates also had to be accepted by the Small Council. The system was effectively co-optative, even if the public was to ratify results with its consent. A somewhat similar pattern applied to the selection of church Elders, who, at Calvin's death, were nominated by the Company of Pastors and subject to annual election by the Small Council.

Geneva became a kind of Protestant equivalent of the Muslims' Mecca, or the Stalinist era Communists' Moscow, attracting Protestants persecuted elsewhere yet not fearing the fate of Servetus in Geneva. It has been suggested that in many ways Lenin became a kind of "Protestant Lenin" who launched a "Protestant International" (Walzer, 1970). While Luther had been more otherworldly, less engaged with politics, Calvin and his followers were far more engaged in this-worldly politics. In Luther, God's grace had been provisionally offered to all, but it is the sinners who reject his love, or, upon accepting may reject it again. In Calvin, by contrast, God with more finality simply rejects the unregenerate (Troeltsch, 1931). In part this may reflect Luther's view of God as a figure of love and forgiveness, compared with Calvin's view of God as a power and source of rigid law. But as I have argued in Chapter 2, for many Calvinists the practical problem of excluding riff-raff from voting in more popular ecclesiastical and political institutions probably gave rise to that theology of rigid exclusion.

Calvin's view of our wickedness makes him reject any notions of anarchism, as espoused by some Anabaptists of his time. But it also made him oppose any vision of wholly unconstrained monarchy. Luther, apparently assuming only monarchical rule, had seemed almost indifferent to the question of the best form of government, but it does interest Calvin. He professed his support for a political system of "aristocracy bordering on democracy," which sounds something like the public image of Geneva. But he makes clear enough that the people need leaders, and that the office of magistrate is a high calling ordained of God.

Could subjects sometimes resist bad magistrates? Luther had allowed anyone to spurn the authority of the Pope, and at least the Electors could challenge the authority of the Holy Roman Emperors of his time, but no one could actively resist kings. Calvin goes further: Although secular rulers -- even tyrannical ones -- were normally to be obeyed by private individuals, sometimes God has certain "magistrates of the people" comparable to the Spartan ephors or approximated by modern parliaments which could authorize the overthrow of a wicked (presumably non-Calvinist) monarch. This doctrine had a radical potential, yet Calvin himself never called for the overthrow of a specific king. As Friedrich Heer writes, "Geneva was to be a model cell for a total world revolution" (Heer, 1968, 93). But Calvin wanted most to succeed back in France, where Protestantism would largely fail. Protestants, as earlier noted, were subject to irregular persecutions there. Only eight years after Calvin's death, in 1572, King Charles IX ordered the assassination of French Protestant leaders in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and many Catholics took that as warrant to slaughter any Protestants they could catch. Thus Peter Ramus, a noted anti-Aristotelian logician of congregationalist tendencies was shot and stabbed while at prayer in Paris. After his body was hurled from an upper story to the street, a mob mutilated it and threw it yet palpitating into the Seine (Kingdon, 1967, 111-12). After more religious warring, the Edict of Nantes in 1598 was supposed to protect Protestants. But the Edict was later subverted by Louis XIII and Louis XIV and then finally revoked in 1685. Attempted forced conversions led some French protestants into mass exile. Some settled in Canada as Acadians, a term corrupted to "Cajuns" when the British resettled them to Louisiana. Yet France in our own time does have a Protestant minority, many in a Reformed Church of France. That faith has produced a leading lay thinker in Jacques Ellul, a Professor at Bordeaux who criticized modern technology and urged that we "Think Globally, Act Locally" toward reforms. There were also threads of Calvinism in eastern Europe, as in Poland or among Hungary's Magyars, but these were eventually overwhelmed by Roman Catholicism.

Calvin's influence would have a more lasting influence down the Rhine valley. In the Reformed churches of German-speaking principalities (e.g., Emden) or in Holland, his influence was intermixed with ideas of other protestant theologians. These included Luther and Martin Bucer, as well as of Huldreich Zwingli and his successor Huldreich Bullinger of Zurich. Often in the German or Dutch speaking world, critics would accuse such Reformed churches of "Calvinism" to imply their alien French influence, and the label tended to stick (McGrath, 1987, 1-68). I will say little about such Rhineland churches, although the Dutch Reformed would take root in New Netherlands (New York) before the British replaced the Dutch political authorities in 1664. In classic Dutch Reformed practice, those deemed Unregenerate (no testimony of a conversion experience suggestive of being among the Elect) were permitted to speak at church meetings but were denied voting rights.

But the other vector of Calvin's influence leads into Scotland and England, and thereby to the United States. In Scotland, the equivalent of the continental Reformed was the Presbyterian outlook. In England, Calvinism produced not only more Presbyterians but also Congregationalist currents. These would eventually share the label "Puritan." Usually beginning by working within the Church of England, the Puritans, it will be recalled, wanted to "purify" it of remaining vestiges of Catholicism. In the sixteenth century the term was a negative epithet, but by the late seventeenth century it came to be accepted with pride. Prior to the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre in France (1572), it was already apparent that Calvinism could divide into two broad groups: There were those favoring a tightly controlled church structure, as did Calvin out of improvisation, and as did his successor as Moderator in Geneva, Theodore Beza (d. 1605), who was largely supported in France by Antoine de la Roche Chandieu. Both men were of the minor nobility and disdained the term "democracy" (cf. Kingdon, 1967). The second group, discussed later under the heading of "Congregationalism," favored a looser, more decentralized and democratized church structure.

Presbyterianism in Scotland and England. The more disciplined model, somewhat similar to Genevan Reformed practice, was favored by such thinkers as Walter Travers and his translator Thomas Cartright (who was purged by Anglicans from his Cambridge University professorship in 1572). Eventually the term for British disciplinarian Calvinism, repressed until the 1640s, would be Presbyterianism.

An exile from Scotland, Andrew Melville, had associated in England with early British Presbyterians. Although rejected by British monarchs, their ideal church polity was first fully practiced among the lowlander Scots (Edinburgh was central). But as already apparent, it later was also favored by some of the English, especially London merchants, their lawyers, etc. at the outset of the English Civil War.

In Scotland, the dominant figure of the Reformed outlook was John Knox (c. 1514-72). He was a lowland yeoman farmer's son who was educated at St. Andrews and originally destined for the Roman Catholic priesthood. But both Lutheran and Calvinist Protestant ideas were already circulating in Scotland, brought in by both foreign merchants (especially Baltic) and returning students who had studied abroad at German or French universities. Knox's own mentor, George Wishart, was condemned for heresy, strangled and burned in 1546. This propelled Knox toward his career of angry, impetuous Protestantism. He became a fiery, formidable unofficial power in Scotland as antagonist to the Roman Catholic rulers, Mary of Guise and her daughter Mary Stuart. He had support not only of commoners, especially farmers who paid high rents on Church lands as well as other middle strata who resented the tithes and ecclesiastical dues. Knox was also supported by some gentry, especially those who took over Church lands and resented the alliance with France as likely to lead to French rule in Scotland, which could revoke their Church land titles. But one biographer emphasizes that Knox was never to have much resonance with the higher nobility of either Scotland or England, rather finding his support among the gentry of Scotland (lairds) and the closely associated burgesses who loaned them money or gave them lucrative marriages (Reid, 1974, xiv-xv; 2-3).

The Roman Catholic Church of Scotland was ripe for reformation in being extremely wealthy and quite corrupt.

Even the bishops ignored the Church requirement of celibacy. Thus Cardinal David Beaton had perhaps ten illegitimate children. He was the Archbishop of St. Andrews who had caused Knox's favorite teacher, Wishart, to be killed. Beaton, whom Protestants contemptuously nicknamed "the Loon," was soon murdered in his turn by some gentry (Reid, 1974, 8-9).

Mirthful over the death of Beaton, Knox was soon himself called to preach at St. Andrews. But he soon became the prisoner of French Catholic forces sent to avenge Beaton’s murder. Knox for a time even became a galley slave before his release. Once free again, he preached as a refugee in an Anglican parish in the northern English town of Berwick. But he got into trouble with Anglicans because he said that the example of the seated Christ and his disciples at the Lord's Supper showed that it was improper to kneel at communion. He was also linked to the movement to bolster the Protestant content of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. With the ascent to the English throne of Roman Catholic Mary Tudor, Knox in 1554 was forced to flee to the continent. Not surprisingly, he made his way through France to the greater safety of Calvin's Geneva. His studies there led him to reject Anglican compromises with Catholicism, and he so publicized his views at Frankfurt.

Seeing himself as like an Old Testament Prophet, Knox was inclined to give distorted views of events, and his hyperbole against rivals is legendary. The Roman Catholics were denounced as "Baal-worshippers," "mass-mongers" or "infidels." It was "idolatry" when Roman Catholics had a symbolic sacrifice at the mass. More extreme than Calvin, Knox openly maintained that any ordinary person had not just a right but a duty to kill a Roman Catholic ruler, just like Jehu in the Old Testament. Magistrates had a duty to lead slaughter of even ordinary Roman Catholics.

In any event, Knox maintained that no woman should rule. His The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women was primarily aimed against Mary Tudor (who ruled 1553-1558) of England, who had succeeded the short reign of Edward VI after the death of Henry VIII in 1547. That book raised some difficulties in Knox's later relationship with Queen Elizabeth. He should have anticipated her rule, but he belatedly allowed the exception of her as "judged godly" (Lang, 1967, 82). Knox really thought Elizabeth's Anglicanism was but a "mingle-mangle" of Catholicism and Protestantism, or "a bastard religion" (Lang, 1967, 206). He specifically objected to icons, kneeling at the Lord's Supper, surplices on priests, use of the cross in baptisms, use of the ring in marriage ceremonies, and litanies. As for more radical religious notions to the "left" of his own position, Knox favored the death penalty for Anabaptists as well as for Servetus at Geneva.

When Queen Mary of Scotland was overthrown, she fled to what she mistakenly thought was refuge in Elizabeth's England, where she was placed under detention and eventually executed for allegedly conspiring against Queen Elizabeth. While now able to return to Scotland, Knox was no longer as important to the protestants among the Scottish lords, who seem to have only used him in their own wild struggles for power.

After Knox's death, Andrew Melville was an outstanding figure in designing the Presbyterian structure for the Kirk of Scotland. The main idea was to secure the advantages of central church control but without the Roman Catholic or Anglican appointive episcopal hierarchy. Other leading figures were George Buchanan and Christopher Goodman.

Some gesture of democracy was evident at the parish level in the selection of a council of Elders who would aid clergy in governing the parish churches. As noted, apparently the Scot Presbyterians did not exclude the Unregenerate from voting. Linking a number of parishes, higher councils called Presbyteries mixed some laity and clergy. Then each Presbytery would send 2-3 clergy and 1 layman to the higher level of the Syndic, where extra laity from the boroughs brought a rough parity of representation with clergy. Thus the main idea was to have selection from below of members of (synods) connecting local congregations to regional and even national levels.

Not surprisingly, Queen Elizabeth resisted efforts to have the Church of England restructured along the lines of Scot Presbyterianism, rejecting it in 1569. After she had executed Mary Queen of Scot's, Mary's son by Lord Darnley (Henry Stuart), James IV of Scotland or James I of England would succeed Elizabeth on the throne. The Stuart hostility to Presbyterianism ran strong. Ruling until his death in 1625, King James terminated the Presbyterian structure even in Scotland and would not accept it in England. Presbyterians were part of the parliamentary coalition which would overthrow King Charles I, even executing him in 1649. However, during Cromwell's Protectorship, many of these became so frightened by radical currents of the period that they wanted a restored but constitutionally limited monarchy. Also reflecting their lack of full commitment to liberal ethos of competition in all things, they wanted Cromwell to rebuild the Church of England as the established church, but on Presbyterian lines. Many were intolerant of even rival Protestant faiths. Richard Baxter, e.g., wrote a polemic against the Congregationalists, whose Calvinist theology was quite similar to that of the Presbyterians. The Presbyterian proposal for a law of Parliament requiring prior licensing of books elicited a powerful essay against it, John Milton's Areopagitica (1644).

Eventually many descendants of Presbyterian heritage in England became so uncomfortable with Calvinist beliefs that they gravitated toward Unitarianism, an almost deistic outlook anticipated by Servetus (Bolam, Goring, Short and Thomas, 1968). The Unitarians do not believe in the Trinity, and an old joke holds that they rather believe in one God -- at most. One observer suggests that Calvinism's lasting influence lay through its theological disintegration, since its discipline left a disenchantment with the world, a secularized, rationalistic way of looking at both things and human beings. This could include suppressing natural impulses such as a will to beauty, kindness, or love. Yet in culminated in the struggle for political liberty, too (Heer, 1968, 96-101).

American Presbyterianism. While the early Puritan immigrants were largely Congregationalists (discussed below), especially in the middle colonies such as what became New Jersey many were drawn to Presbyterianism.

Many of these were "Scotch-Irish," angered with all things English: Two monarchs had encouraged lowland Presbyterian Scots to settle in northern Ireland. But as if crop failures there were not hardship enough, these settlers found that they were victims of unfair trade discrimination, blocked from selling their products in the English market. Thus the 1699 Woolens Act favored English manufactures of woolen cloth over the then-growing industry in northern Ireland, which therefore soon failed. Also, land rents were two, three or even four times what they had been led to expect when settling in northern Ireland. Further, being Presbyterians, settlers chafed at having to pay the tithe to support the established Anglican church, while their sons were barred from entry to Anglican colleges. Hence about half the settlers emigrated by the mid-1700s (Sweet, 1942, 26; also, Sweet, 1952, 9). Such old grievances against English authorities led many immigrant Scotch-Irish after 1775 to take up arms favoring the struggle for American independence.

Presbyterians in the New World had no choice but to tolerate neighbors of rival faiths, such as the Quakers within Pennsylvania or New Jersey. The first Presbyterian Presbytery organized in America appeared in Philadelphia in 1706 (in contrast, America's Dutch Reformed settlers remained subordinate to the Amsterdam Presbytery until 1754).

The American Presbyterians eventually split into two wings over the question of revivalism, with the Old Siders preferred traditional rationalism and New Siders more open to enthusiasm. Eventually, in order to train their clergy, the latter wing of the American Presbyterians formed the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), although accepting several Congregationalist heads of that university. Aaron Burr, who eventually shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel, was one famous President of Princeton University. Much later, another such President was Woodrow Wilson, who eventually became President of the United States.

The Presbyterians grew by immigration as well as natural increase, typified in the mentioned Scotch-Irish in the frontier areas of Pennsylvania. Nurturing the aforementioned old grievances against the British monarchy, these embraced the Patriot cause in the American struggle for Independence. Unlike the Methodists and the Baptists, the Presbyterians were like the Episcopalians in not fully joining the great waves of revivalism such as in the 1740's or again in the early 1800's. But while the rational Old Siders were especially cool toward the Great Awakening's religious fervor, more emotional New Siders such as Gilbert and William Tennent led revival in the middle colonies. Emotional religion in open air camp meetings attracted people in the frontier areas.

Frontier Presbyterians tended to support Jeffersonianism as well as later Jacksonianism (Andrew Jackson was himself a

Presbyterian). But they later became divided north and south over the slavery issue, with many southern Presbyterians repudiating earlier church stands against slavery.

Although historically lacking in much proselytizing zeal, and now worried about its membership base, the Presbyterian faith is one of the older sects, and with over 3 million members in two organizations it encompasses about 1.3% of the American population, but a larger percent of churchgoers. If now relatively small, Presbyterianism has contributed a much larger percentage of American political leaders, which may reflect John Calvin's praise of public office as a high calling. After the 1990 elections, the Presbyterians in the U.S. Congress included 9 Senators and 42 (9.7%) members of the House of Representatives. Six Presbyterians have been President of the United States.

Currently the American Presbyterian Church is an imperfect model of democracy. Parishioners do select delegates to local presbyteries, and while these send delegates (presbyters) on to the annual General Assembly (there are also regional synods). But only half the seats go to the laity (who constitute 99% of all Presbyterians), while the other half is reserved to the clergy (the remaining 1%). In its early history that could have made the sect more conservative. But its present impact is wholly the other way, since the Presbyterian clergy are now on average more liberal than their parishioners, which may in part explain the recent losses of membership (Hallum, 1989). But even the church's progressivism had some limits: In the late 1990's, the church, refused the idea of same-sex marriages, notwithstanding vigorous protests of homosexuals and lesbians within the church, some of whom were clergy.

ii: Congregationalism/United Church of Christ

Among continental Calvinists, perhaps the leading voice for a more decentralized and democratized church polity was Jean Morely, a man whom Beza and Chandieu wanted to excommunicate from the Francophone Reformed faith. The author of Treatise of Christian Discipline denounced authoritarian elements in the disciplinarian model, seeing consistories as an unbiblical usurpation of secular functions, he advocated "democracy" in church polity -- elsewhere hinting at its appropriateness in secular politics as well. Vanishing from history about the time of the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre in France (1572), Morely may have been killed. Yet some think he made his way to safety, perhaps through La Rochelle and even into England.

It is not clear whether Morely influenced the evolution of English Congregationalism, a second variant of Calvinist Puritanism. Educated at Cambridge, the seedbed of Dissenters, an early advocate of full local congregational autonomy was Robert Browne. He denounced both Anglicans and Presbyterians, although he eventually returned to the Anglican fold. While the English thus talked of congregational autonomy as a principle, Americans would soon experience considerable parish autonomy as practice: This was a consequence of relative isolation of the new settlements. Commenting on American episcopal churches as well as the Presbyterians, one observer notes that "all colonial churches tend to be characterized by a strong emphasis upon local autonomy and lay control" (Hudson, 1987, 25).

But principled Congregationalism took a variety of other labels which should not obscure agreements on fundamentals. Some of them arose within the bosom of the Church of England and were repressed by Queen Elizabeth. Yet many claimed continued membership of the Church of England, even while hoping for its reform in their own direction. These were the "non-separatist" Congregationalists such as those who settled Massachusetts Bay. Back in England they had been called Independents, due to their insistence that each congregation was independent of every other one, even if they could voluntarily cooperate. By the 1640's in England, such leaders as Oliver Cromwell and John Milton had wanted not only major reform of any established church but also tolerance for a variety of fellow Protestant faiths. One study drawing on contemporary accounts suggests that while Independency in the 1640's in England was like Presbyterianism in having some appeal to sectors of the solid middle class, it also appealed for a time to some people of more humble origins, especially the soldiers in Cromwell's army. But that army also had many Baptists, and many of the poor in England would later prefer the Baptists, Quakers or other more emotional lower class sects (Niebuhr, 1954, 43-46).

A second variant of Congregationalists were early separatists or disestablishmentarians. Unlike the non-separatists or Independents, they no longer thought of themselves as belonging to the Church of England. The Pilgrims at Cape Cod Bay (Plymouth Rock) were separatist Congregationalists. Led by Governor William Bradford (d. 1657), the Pilgrims at Plymouth never secured an independent royal charter for their colony. They were eventually subordinated to the Massachusetts Bay colony, which did have a charter until its revocation in 1684 (renewed 1691 after the Glorious Revolution).

I will further discuss the non-separatists of Boston before describing the separatist Pilgrims of Plymouth. The Boston Puritans were nominally non-separatists but were de facto separatists, shielded by distance from London. To illustrate that variant of congregationalism, I will describe John Winthrop and John Cotton.

John Winthrop. Save for two interruptions, John Winthrop (1588-1649) was perennially re-elected as Governor or at least Lt. Governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony of avowedly non-separatist Congregationalists. He was the son of a relatively prosperous lawyer and country squire in England, although the family fortunes had been waning when Winthrop decided to try his chances in the New World. Of the England of Charles I, Winthrop said, "This land grows weary of its inhabitants."

Securing a charter from King Charles, Winthrop formed a joint stock company of only 11 shareholders, including himself, since he secretly wanted all of them to be settlers in the new colony, with no shareholders meddling from back in England.

As the chair of the board, so to speak, it was only to be expected that he would be the major leader of the new colony.

Winthrop was a family man, who was to marry four times and outlive three wives, having no less than sixteen children (Marty, 1984, 63). He was genuinely religious, with his meticulous journal showing that he could see the hand of God

in even seemingly trivial events. As an example of his observation of God's "special providences" regarding the colony, he thought it significant that a mouse gnawed through his copy of the Anglican's Book of Common Prayer (which Puritans detested) but spared the New Testament.

Yet Winthrop's God worked normally through the natural order rather than apparently against it, as in Biblical miracles. For Winthrop was of scientific temper, even to the point of bringing a telescope across the Atlantic. It was relatively new. The telescope was invented by the Dutch Cippersheim in 1605, improved by Italy's Galileo in 1609. A son's astronomical observations by means of Winthrop's instrument were of later help to Isaac Newton.

But politics was to be less guided by science: When looking for a plan of the Puritan Commonwealth, Winthrop assumed that one should avoid attempting to find any wisdom in "heathen commonwealths," looking rather to the Bible's guidance.

He brought a Calvinist's Augustinian view to his interpretations of Scriptures, impressed with the power of God and relative powerlessness of the fallen to effect their own redemption. Like most Calvinists, he believed that the large majority were Predestined to eternal damnation, while only a minority were among the Elect.

The Elect would set a model for the others, who should follow self-interest only as it accorded with the interest of all, and suffer enough in the sufferings of others to help one another. In his essay, "A Model of Christian Charity," he further held that "particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public." God made us differ in talents so that we would have need of each other, drawing together in one community as if a single manor. Winthrop's essay, given as a speech when crossing the Atlantic, also admonished the colonists that God would be among them, and that other people would be watching, as he put it in his famous phrase: "...we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us."

Yet God intends economic inequalities, and there is no suggestion that mutual aid should occur by political leveling. The appropriate answer to poverty was charity, which he himself could illustrate: When told that a man was secretly stealing from his woodpile, Winthrop saved the man from being a thief by inviting him to help himself (in Bellah, et.al, 1985, 29).

Nor does God intend equality of authority. For one thing, Winthrop was patriarchal in family theory, since a family was viewed by the Calvinist as a model in miniature of the greater commonwealth. The wife was to serve traditional functions. Children were to be reminded of the Fifth Commandment, to honor their fathers and mothers. Children, like adults, were not innocent of sin. Like Calvin's Geneva, Puritan Massachusetts decreed a death penalty for children who, having attained age sixteen, would obstinately disobey their parents (especially the father) or even smite them. There is no evidence that any were ever so executed, and one expects Winthrop would have been more forgiving. In general, Puritan Massachusetts was more lenient than England in property crimes, as in abolishing capital punishment for theft. But the colony followed Biblical precedent toward more severity for moral crimes, including authorizing but not requiring capital punishment for adultery or blasphemy.

The very distinction of the few Elect and the many Non-elect shows the necessity of government. Against Anabaptist anarchism, government was most necessary to prevent savage conflict. As Winthrop puts it, "the care of safety and welfare was the original cause or occasion of commonweales and of many families subjecting themselves to rulers and laws" (Morgan, 1965, 144).

Winthrop thought that the spirit of the Fifth Amendment required a deferential posture toward magistrates, taken as if they were natural fathers. Perhaps fearing that the Unregenerate would get into the game, he thought it would be unseemly for any petitioning of government by other than private individuals, since a public gathering of petitioners could "bring authority into contempt."

Winthrop did not favor an enlargement of the suffrage, which was limited to the Regenerate accepted as church members or "Brethren," who constituted the true "church." These would vote in the same parish "meeting house" depending upon whether the matters under decision were sacred or secular. In 1643 there were only 1,708 citizens in a population of 20,000, a ratio which remained roughly the same over the following three decades (Ziff, 1962, 210). Those not church members and hence non-voters yet had to obey all laws and decrees, including the payment of taxes which were used in part to support the clergy. The unregenerate also were compelled to attend church services, even if they could not share communion.

Winthrop preferred that even citizens ("Freemen") do little more than participate in the annual election of the Assistants, who initially were to elect the Governor and Lt. Governor. But these officers were directly rather than indirectly elected by voters from 1632. After initial resistance from Winthrop, the Freemen also chose two Deputies from each town to the General Court, a term used to this day of the state legislature of Massachusetts. The General Court from 1634 was divided into two bodies, consisting of the Deputies elected two per town in one and the Assistants or magistrates elected at large (including the Governor and Deputy Governor) in the other. By about 1643-44 it became the practice for the two bodies to deliberate apart, with concurrence of both required for any important legislation (that is, each could veto the other). While John Winthrop (as well as an influential clergyman such as John Cotton) thought it appropriate for the Assistants to have such a veto, some more democratic agitators argued that it would be more appropriate for the General Court to vote as whole, with majority rule prevailing. Winthrop opposed that, as well as any tendency for the Deputies to overstep their charge of legislation and meddle with things belonging uniquely to the Assistants or magistrates.

Quite aware of the ancient Athenian extreme, John Winthrop denounced "democracy" as the "meanest" or "worst" form of government with no scriptural support. He preferred a "mixed aristocracy" which would give larger powers to magistrates who would keep some distance from the people, thereby retaining respect while deliberating with cool heads. Winthrop said that the best part of the people "is always the least, and of that best part, the wiser part is always the lesser" (cited in Becker, 1960, 105). For Winthrop there was no need for any sharp limit on magistrates, since both their godliness (they had to be church members) as well as annual elections assured no danger for either the Freemen or the larger population of the unenfranchised. Winthrop himself spurned suggestions that he assume a life governorship (Morgan, 1965, 111).

Yet Winthrop did want considerable discretion for the magistrates in their service as judges, opposing in his last years a project for instituting a written code of law in place of the merely judge-made traditions of common law. Beyond the law itself arose the question of penalties for infractions. For Winthrop, justice required proportionality in punishment, saying that "Justice ought to render to every man according to his deserving, eye for eye, hand to hand, etc" (Morgan, 1965, 149). But cases and persons vary so widely, it is important that the merits of both be flexibly assessed by judges, rather than hazarded to some rigid formula of law. God is less likely to give enough wisdom to lawmakers than to the judges, especially in that not the lawmaker but the judge will face a specific person accused of an offense. While Winthrop concedes that judges can sometimes be corrupted, that is no less so of legislators, and ultimately one must put some trust in elective leaders deemed to be of better grade than mere deputies. Winthrop himself wondered whether a new colony should be strict in punishments to set the example or whether they should be lenient because people would be more inclined to transgress. While he thought the former position was probably right, in practice he himself was rather lenient, perhaps even too soft on Satanism. His preference was to keep issues away from the need for authoritative resolution, persuading adversaries to settle their differences or even accept arbitration of them.

Even when it was clear that he had to consent to a code of law, Winthrop feared any theocratic tendency, and resisted efforts to enact too much of the Old Testament regulations, saying, "though the matter of the Scripture be always of rule to us, yet not the phrase" (Winthrop, 1869, II, 275) While he liked a centrally organized church for better control, he also feared that clergy would meddle too much with politics. But as the religious heterodoxy cases of Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams would attest, he also feared anarchy in the religious sphere.

John Cotton. Another Congregationalist Puritan of Massachusetts Bay was the leading church leader in Winthrop's time. John Cotton (1584-1652), like Winthrop, was the son of an English lawyer, but in this case one of more modest means. Yet Cotton was able to attend Cambridge University (Emmanuel College), which was then a hotbed of Puritanism. Cotton remained on the surface an orthodox Anglican, even gaining skill in their ornate preaching style. But he became tormented with doubts by his mid-twenties, convinced of Predestination and fearing that he might not be among the Elect. This was especially disturbing in that like many of his Puritan contemporaries, Cotton believed that the Second Coming was nigh.

Cotton was ordained as an Anglican minister in 1610, and became Vicar of a church in Boston, Lincolnshire two years later. However, his increasingly famous preaching revealed an ambiguous commitment to the Church of England orthodoxy. During twenty years of preaching, his inclination toward Dissent led him to form a smaller congregation which avoided some of the quasi-Catholic forms of worship, although he courted trouble when some of these special parishioners began to destroy religious icons.

In 1630 Cotton gave the farewell sermon to Winthrop and others leaving for America, praising their project as meaning a gain of knowledge, a better earning of their daily bread, a use of their God-given talents more efficiently, and enjoyment of more religious freedom in abandoning some Popish things yet found in Anglicanism. There is a cruel irony in his added remark that in "sharing" the Indian lands they should "spiritually" repay them with the message of salvation.

While initially remaining behind, Cotton experienced not only malaria and the death of his first wife but also a summons to answer for his religion before Archbishop Laud. Cotton chose rather to slip into the Puritan underground in 1632-33. In the latter year he shipped out to his "Second Boston," on the same ship with Thomas Hooker, the later founder of Connecticut.

Cotton was soon elected as "teacher" of the prominent Boston church. As the fount of doctrine, Cotton was less enamored of modern science than Winthrop and other Puritans, opposing, for example, the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. As for the authority of reason, Cotton was not opposed to citation of ancient Pagan philosophers, provided it was on merely moral questions and not those "divine or evangelical." His paramount authority was the Bible. He accepted the whole of it as valid, although not always in the most literal sense. While faith was important, "zeale is but a wilde-fire without knowledge."

The Biblical account of the fall of Adam and Eve was basic in his view of human nature. Like other Calvinists, he assumed that those not saved from the consequences of original sin were the many, while the Elect were few. All needed society, and God also wills the development of the state, which yet arises only by the covenant among the people as well as with God, to walk in His way.

While it seems to contradict the stern doctrine of Predestination, Cotton's church has the specific end of salvation of souls, so its specific subject is only the inward person. It has no place in exercise of the sword or coercive secular power. By custom in Massachusetts Bay no church official, not even the leading elder, could simultaneously hold a civil office.

Nor should the church judge persons for their merely civil opinions. In Massachusetts Bay, the clergy were in practice forbidden to question a member of the General Court for a speech made at that site. Yet the clergy felt free to chastise the magistrates regarding their handling of religious schismatics.

Cotton's state primarily concerns itself with security of persons and goods, and its specific subject is the outward man or the body. Although its primary function is application of sanctions to both the Regenerate and Unregenerate who may violate law, it is not wholly without religious functions. It shares with the church the end of "God's glory." Cotton apparently disapproved of its use of public funds (then raised at the town level) to pay clergy as well as maintain the meeting houses which served both religious and secular purposes. But the state should request advice of the clergy on all weighty matters, although not uncritically, since that would make the church a "beast." The state should punish dangerous heretics such as the Roman Catholics, extreme Anabaptists, and the "Gortonists" (followers of Samuel Gorton, who later settled into Roger Williams' Rhode Island, causing tensions there).

Cotton's vision was a Puritan commonwealth, or parallel, mutually supportive civil and ecclesiastical structures both framed in the evidence of the Scriptures. As a member of the clergy, however, he would say: "It is better that the commonwealth be fashioned to the setting forth of God's house, which is his church; than to accommodate the church frame to the civil state."

As for forms of government, Cotton opposed the establishment of hereditary aristocracy in the New World. As he wrote to Lords Saye and Sele, if they came to Massachusetts Bay they would enjoy some prestige but otherwise gain no preference for political office. They would have to be accepted as church members and then elected by the voters. While Cotton believed that both nature and scripture support the idea of ranks, such as the distinction of elders from ordinary church members, human authority was not a hereditary right.

Cotton certainly did not want the magistrates to expand secular voting rights beyond the set of persons accepted as church members, since he believed that the ungodly would constitute the majority. While by contrast a majority vote of church members only would be more likely to reflect the voice of God, even they needed higher leaders. Not surprisingly, in his letter to Saye and Sele he commented: "Democracy I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed?" Rather, he expressly endorsed "theocracy," which he understood as "God's rule" rather than the more common sense of putting the clergy atop the state structure.

Cotton thought that the top elected magistrates should be chosen for honesty more than competence and then routinely re-elected, giving them a de facto life tenure. Winthrop's journal records Cotton as saying, "a magistrate ought not to be turned into the condition of a private man without just cause."

Yet all magistrates are to be bound by law. This law, apart form certain ceremonial rules meant only for the Jews, should follow the Mosaic code, even in punishments. While Cotton also gave advice, the actual code adopted in 1641 was largely shaped by Rev. Nathaniel Ward. It tended to have many capital crimes and also many economic regulations, showing subordination of economics to religious as well as political ends (cf. Morgan, 1965, 178-203).

Normally one must obey the magistrates, with zeal when law is good, passively if bad. Cotton's catechism, delightfully titled "Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in Either England," comments thus on the 5th Commandment:

"Question: Who are here meant by Father and Mother?"

"Answer: All our Superiors, whether in Family, School, Church and Commonwealth."

One had no obligation to obey commands clearly contrary to God's law. After all, Cotton himself had disobeyed Archbishop Laud in order to join the divine project of Massachusetts Bay. Yet Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, found John Cotton himself too authoritarian, calling him Boston's "unmitred pope" (Sweet, 1942, 96).

The Puritans had some difficulty in explaining why the Elect should obey any law at all. Largely framed in England by such figures as William Perkins (1558-1602) and William Ames (1576-1633), their "Federal Theology" (from Latin foedus or covenant, hence equivalent to covenant theology) sought to avoid the errors of either Arminianism or Antinomianism.

Arminianism was named after the Dutch thinker Jacobo Arminius (d. 1609), who, in addition to pleading for more tolerance, had rejected Predestination as making God the author of sin and as denying the mission of Christ to offer Grace to all (Jordan, 1936, 323, 325). Arminius seemed to say that by free will and performance of good works one could almost earn one's own salvation (a view not far from Roman Catholicism and some Catholic-leaning Anglicans such as Archbishop Laud as well). However, to the Puritans, Arminianism contained too much of human pride and not enough emphasis on the power of God, which was, after all, the major emphasis of Protestantism.

In the orthodoxy of Federal Theology, Adam was the "federal" representative of mankind in making the covenant with God.

That covenant was violated by the Fall in the Garden of Eden. Due to this original sin, we cannot live without sinning, but God first covenants with the Jews as His Chosen People. But much later he opens the promise to select members of the human race as a whole, for he covenants with himself to use Christ as Redeemer. Some of us are saved by God's free gift of Election, but that Election is like a precious seed which must be nourished. The Elect will in consequence of their Election covenant to live by the Ten Commandments and do good works (cf. Beitzinger, 1972, 38-40).

Against that Puritan orthodoxy, the error of Antinomianism so stressed the importance of God's determining grace in salvation that doing good works and following both divine and human law seemed almost redundant. The very word Antinomianism etymologically meant "anti-law," and before amending his views back toward Federal Theology, Cotton seemed to be teaching absolute Election. Attracted to his preaching, one parishioner was Anne Hutchinson, a married woman who practiced midwifery. She herself became an informal preacher to followers who would gather at her home. Besides being a mere woman not expected to preach, she thus dared to have a parallel congregation. She further threatened many clergy in suggesting that some of the younger Congregationalist clergy lacked a real experience of Grace such as her own conversion, which was an Election no longer contingent upon following the law. In a lengthy special synod, Hutchinson was publicly charged with the Antinomian heresy. Many, even John Cotton, believed that Anne's sins were portentously revealed in the features of a gravely deformed infant born to Mary Dyer, who was Anne's good friend. Upon conviction by the General Court, Anne was banished from the community. Hutchinson claimed that the Spirit of God spoke directly to her, and, as with such earlier figures as Socrates or Joan of Arc, she found that authorities are never fond of those who claim to have a special divine voice which could contravene their own directives.

Unlike his grandson, Cotton Mather (d. 1728), who could tolerate a narrow range of Protestant sects, John Cotton was sharply intolerant, writing in 1635 squarely against an emerging treatise of Roger Williams. He did not accept the idea that repression of heresy was properly called "persecution," which implies "sinful oppression of men for righteousness sake." For "to persecute is to punish an Innocent; but a heretic is a culpable and damnable person." Cotton viewed heresy more gravely if it went with a disturbance of the public peace rather than more quietly held (like some Presbyterians, as well as native Americans, living at Massachusetts Bay). When the church, aided by secular authority moved against other heretics, Cotton says, "It is not lawful to persecute any, till after Admonition once or twice." If the heretic then refuses to admit the error, "if any one persist, it is not out of Conscience, but for sinning against his Own Conscience." Obviously Cotton believed that not only the Elect but the Damned share the same conscience, such that those who did not heed it were either obtuse or hypocrites.

The Puritan elite were under continual pressure to enlarge the suffrage in the church as well as the state. One practical problem was that the older and more affluent families (adults were often Brethren) were being increasingly outnumbered by new immigrants. Infants of the Brethren were baptized, but not even they could join communion unless once matured they could persuade the congregation that they had a conversion experience, which is to become Regenerate (or as now said, "born again"). Those not yet regenerate eventually were allowed church membership by what was called the Half-Way Covenant, but they could only vote with the approval of the regenerate members. In a third tier, those who were neither regenerate (or full) members nor yet unregenerate (half-way) members could neither attend communion nor vote in church matters, even if required to attend church.

The Pilgrims and William Bradford. The Pilgrims were unlike the Massachusetts Bay Congregationalists primarily in their early leaning toward formal separatism or what was called "Brownism." This entailed congregational independence as to forms of worship and even doctrine. Although as noted earlier he would eventually return to Anglicanism, Robert Browne during the reign of Queen Elizabeth wrote a book urging empowerment of parishes to extend the reformation on their own, entitling it Reformation without Tarrying for Any (1582). Since acceptance of the label "separatist" or "Brownist" would have been a liability during the first few decades of their migration and settlement, the Pilgrims backed away from that. Yet no formal declaration was necessary to see their leaning toward more open or avowed "separatism," or severance of local congregations from the established Church of England. They also pushed the Congregationalist church structure to a greater extreme of decentralization: The Pilgrims did not favor even the ad hoc synods (central church councils) sometimes convened in Massachusetts Bay. But renunciation of any higher church authority brought some risks: Their own clergyman, John Robinson, was too frail to join them from Europe, and they had a dismal experience with the clergy who eventually came over. True Pilgrims constituted only a third of the Mayflower passengers, who were two-thirds mere economic migrants, or people looking less for godliness than better livelihoods (Toon, 1973, 28).

The Pilgrims came over with the Geneva Bible of 1560, which had extensive marginalia drawn from Calvin's commentaries on scripture, whereas the Massachusetts Bay Puritans used the newer translation by 47 scholars called the King James Bible of 1611, which lacked such Calvinist commentary. As John Robinson and William Brewster noted, however, the Pilgrims were unlike the French Reformed model in that they had no Consistory where admonitions and excommunications were given before an elite. Any slackers were rather admonished or even excommunicated in public congregation. They were also unlike the French Reformed in that they elected as Elders only those who could "teach" (preach), and made their office indefinite, whereas the French Protestants had short tenures and no restriction by religious capacity. Not unlike other Calvinists, the Pilgrims thought marriage should be a purely civil ceremony, since having clergy officiate was not explicitly supported in the Bible. The Pilgrims also opposed the celebration of Christmas, since the birthdate of Christ was unknown and the choice of the winter solstice followed a pagan holiday. But the Pilgrims were not as dour as some would imagine, and were like other country people from England in their practice of drinking beer in moderation.

Leaving England, the Pilgrims had first turned to exile in Amsterdam, then to Leyden, finally deciding to embark to the New World aboard the Mayflower. Authorized to settle in the northern area of the already established Virginia colony, they were blown off course and ended up at Plymouth, about 45 miles from what would eventually become Boston. Despite recurrent efforts, they were never to obtain their own charter. Although the Pilgrims landed in 1620, a decade before the Puritan landing at Massachusetts Bay, they would ultimately (1691) be merged with the Massachusetts Bay Colony for lack of an independent charter. Lacking many university-educated, permanent colonists, the Pilgrims lacked any important theorists. However, William Bradford (1590-1657) became their Governor after the first year, being re-elected to 31 annual terms. This sole son of a yeoman farmer, who himself took up the trade of weaver in Leyden, kept a journal which became his history, Of Plymouth Plantation. In this account, the Pilgrims are described as folks who "had only been used to a plain country life and the innocent trade of husbandry" (Bradford, 1952, 11).

As for their goals, he described the religious conflict in England as follows: "The one side labored to have the right worship of God and discipline of Christ established in the church, according to the simplicity of the gospel, without the mixture of men's inventions; and to have and to be ruled by the laws of God's words, dispensed in those offices, and by those officers of Pastors, Teachers and Elders, etc. according to the Scriptures" (Bradford, 1952, 6). As he later puts it, they idealized a form of worship like "the primitive pattern of the first churches" (Bradford, 1952, 19) Against such advocates of the primitive were the popish: "The other party, thought under many colors and pretenses, endeavored to have the episcopal dignity (after the popish manner) with their large power and jurisdiction still retained; with all those courts, canons and ceremonies, together with all such livings, revenues and subordinate officers, with other such means as formerly upheld their antichristian greatness and enabled them with lordly and tyrannous power to persecute the poor servants of God" (Bradford, 1952, 6).

Before later adding that their enemies also delayed and robbed them when they sought to emigrate, Bradford says that the popish party much harassed the primitive side: "Some were taken and clapped up in prison, others had their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to flee and leave their houses and habitations, and the means of their livelihood" (Bradford, 1952, 10).

The Mayflower voyage was in large part dependent on assistance from venture capitalists, headed by Thomas Weston, who encouraged addition of other non-Pilgrim passengers to protect their interests (e.g., the soldier Myles Standish or the cooper John Alden). But that experience with capitalism served the Pilgrims badly, since during their time of greatest need, instead of sending the Pilgrims some more supplies, Weston sent another batch of non-Pilgrim colonists who sponged off what little they had left. Eventually Weston himself visited the colony and under false promises of recompense made away with a supply of Pilgrim beaver skins. Because even a trading agent from the community, Isaac Allerton, often fleeced them, it is not surprising that Bradford's journal has more banal business details than accounts of religious enthusiasm.

Intending to live primarily by fishing, the Pilgrims arrived at the end of a growing season and without viable seed for spring planting. And the theft of some seed corn from an Indian cache together with a local history of conflicts with Europeans, may have only encouraged a skirmish with an Indian band, which fortunately had no fatalities. Speaking some English, an Algonkian Indian from Maine, Samoset, visited them and first introduced them to Squanto, who spoke English well from having been a captive on an English ship. Upon escaping, Squanto found that his own local tribe, the Patuxent, had died from a plague. He then joined the Pilgrims as an inestimable adviser until his death. He also assisted a treaty creating a peace with the Indians, which lasted down to the time of King Philip's War.

Having noted the sour experiences of the Pilgrims with cheating under market economics, we should note a much more favorable side. While Bradford had favorably remarked about communal sharing of fish and game, he expressly notes the failure of the Pilgrim experience with what would in our century be called collectivized agriculture. They tried communal farming and found that few were willing to work hard for others. When the corn crop proved meager, they turned to individual farms instead, aiming at a rough equality of the value of lands to all men other than indentured servants. This privatization was to be the dominant American way, more suited to what I have called the Capitalist element of the American political culture. Bradford could not be clearer in rejecting agriculture which would later be called "socialist" or "collectivized":

Yet the paradox was that growing population in Massachusetts and such enhanced productivity encouraged ever larger corn and cattle farms. In later pages Bradford laments that as profit motives dispersed the population it destroyed the parish communities: "This I fear will be the ruin of New England, at least of the churches of God there, and will provoke the Lord's displeasure against them" (Bradford, 1952, 254). Bradford in his old age added a note to an earlier portion of the book about his great sorrow at the demise of the original Pilgrim spirit of community, eroded by deaths, dissipations, and the sly insinuation of "that subtle serpent" -- presumably the devilish sin of selfishness (Bradford, 1952, 33n. 6).

The religiously motivated Pilgrims had from the start been a minority aboard the Mayflower, having had to accept a large number of others who had only sought a better economic way of life. Half the colonists failed to live through its first year, and the colony grew very slowly thereafter. It had only a thin band of arable land around a port which not only had problems with winds but was so shallow that it required offloading of cargo, unlike Boston. As noted, the colony eventually lost its independent existence. But it had long been in close communication with Boston Puritans. Bradford and John Winthrop were friends, and did not regard their variants of congregationalism as incompatible.

The Pilgrim settlement left us the Mayflower Compact, the document which addressed their political views:

The Mayflower Compact is a classic instance of an actual social contract. While otherwise committed to equality before the laws, the colony limited suffrage to the propertied (rather than the church members as in Massachusetts Bay). It developed a unicameral representative government and enacted a law code.

As Bradford himself admits, however, they had a surprising amount of crime for a colony settled by God-fearing Pilgrims. Some of the crime he suspects was caused by Satan's wish to destroy a Godly community, other crime is put down to the diverted channels when their discipline blocked other outlets. Besides, the close mutual surveillance of the Pilgrims meant that more crime was identified than among other places. But he blames much of the crime on later, non-Pilgrim immigrants. Thus a very young man of some 16 or 17 years of age, apparently an indentured servant, was tried, convicted and executed for sodomizing "a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey." In this following the rule of Leviticus 20: 15, all of the animals were first identified, slaughtered before the doomed malefactor, and then buried without being eaten or otherwise used (Bradford, 1952, 320-21).

The Post-Colonial Experience with Congregationalism. Congregationalism in its original non-separatist variant was to create the great universities of Harvard (1636), which became a bit liberal in theology, and Yale, which kept to the Old Light views and conservatism under the influence of Increase Mather (d. 1723) and his son Cotton Mather (d. 1728). Congregationalism in general survived the disruptions of the witchcraft trials of 1692, which resulted in the execution of 19 persons. The faith was to be extremely pervasive in most of New England politics, if challenged by Baptism and Quakerism in Rhode Island. Indeed, the church would not be wholly disestablished in Connecticut until 1818 and in Massachusetts until 1833.

Congregationalism ties into the Great Awakening despite itself. That movement of enthusiasm, which would eventually peak in the 1740s, had its origins in the Raritan valley of New Jersey. But the preaching of Theodore Frelinghuysen, a German pietist who influenced Dutch Reformed congregations there. He also influenced the young Presbyterian clergyman, Gilbert Tennent, who began a similar movement among that faith (Sweet, 1930, 201-5). But for our immediate interest, the current runs through a Congregationalist minister, Solomon Stoddard (d. 1729). Serving in an interior Massachusetts Northhampton congregation, Stoddard abandoned Boston pickiness as to who were admitted as church members, saying "let God do the selecting." He tended toward evangelism, and even his grandson and successor in the Northhampton pulpit thought he went too far in easing church membership. That grandson was Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), whose sermons in Northhampton in 1734 are generally credited with launching the Great Awakening (cf. Reichley, 1985, 68-74).

Edwards never abandoned the classic Calvinist emphasis on the reality of Original Sin and the necessity of the light of God's grace for salvation. Yet he emphasized that God was not only powerful but good, and therefore could be expected to be generous with His Grace. While open to the rationalism of John Locke, Edwards also displayed an impulse of early romanticism, such as emphasis on a place in religion for "holy affections," allowing for some popular warmth as against the cold rationalism of earlier Calvinism. Also, one could draw religious inspiration from nature, and benevolence toward others and being in general becomes a leading criterion of piety. But not all of nature was benevolent toward Edwards. A botched smallpox vaccination brought premature death when he had become President of the then largely Presbyterian Princeton University (cf. Ahlstrom, 1972, 295-313). All of the aforementioned universities eventually became quite secular.

While Congregationalism was to have its New Lighters, its dominant tone remained averse to religious enthusiasm and zealous harvesting of souls. Charles Chauncy, for example, represented the more intellectual Boston Congregationalist clergy who in 1743 condemned the excessive emotionalism of the revivalists, while also warning against Arminian tendencies. Yet even he found Calvinist Predestination a bit much to bear, and he eventually (1782) published an anonymous tract which espoused the lower class Universalist idea of salvation open to all.

Yet many Congregationalist clergy adapted to the emerging Patriot mood. An early Congregationalist of Whiggish views was the Reverend John Wise of Ipswich, Massachusetts, who published more liberal ideas as early as 1710. Such Congregationalist clergy were incensed at the Anglican formation of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (1701) and its dispatch of missionaries to the colonies. Later, Reverend Jonathan Mayhew (an Old Light Congregationalist who disdained the Great Awakening) excoriated the British government for a plan (ultimately delayed until after Independence) to introduce Anglican bishops to the United States. Mayhew (d. 1766) was also part of the agitation against the Stamp Act. Yet the Americans split into distinctive parties, New England Congregationalist clergy often found themselves on the Federalist side, as typified by Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) the crusty grandson of Jonathan Edwards, who became the long-term President of Yale (1795-1817). He also was prominent in the temperance cause.

The Congregationalist faith was weakened by internal cleavages and by eventual disestablishment in New England. Because the faith insisted on college training of its clergy, it was not to share the Methodist and Baptist advantage in using untrained clergy to proselytize. In any event, few Congregationalist pastors wanted the rigors of itinerancy to camp meetings. Also, they could not adapt to the fervent evanagelical style which drew in simple people of little education.

But these churches would eventually join the American Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians among the mainline Protestant denominations of the National Council of Churches. This organization has been identified with the "left" side of modern liberalism, which in the United States alone bears that label now. Not having accepted enough of Edwards' spirit to become a really popular faith, Congregationalism barely held its own, finding that even cooperation with Presbyterians in the 1801-52 Plan of Union for missionary activity in the West tended to advantage the Presbyterians. Since Presbyterians and Congregationalists differed more on church structure than on doctrine, members of each faith tended to join the church predominating in the locality when resettling (Sweet, 1952, 4). In 1957-60, the Congregational Christian Churches merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ. A report combining the United Church of Christ and Congregationalist members of Congress in 1991 included 7 Senators but only 5 (or 1.1%) members of the House of Representatives. Three Congregationalists have been President of the United States.

iii: The Baptists

Many prefer to view the English Baptists as a variant of Puritanism, in part because the wing called the Particular Baptists accepted much of the Westminster Confession of Faith. It was a sort of pan-Calvinist consensus also embraced by Presbyterians and Congregationalists. The Particular Baptists emphasized Predestination, or thought with the Puritans that only a minority would be among the Elect. But the other group called the General Baptists believed that God's grace was potentially open to all.

If the Particular Baptists were initially strongest, it is arguable that most modern Baptists lean rather to this General Baptist outlook. A non-exclusive view of atonement has tended to be favored by popular audiences in the religious history of the United States.

Many Baptists deny any historical influence on the sect of continental "anabaptism." They would see at most some parallel development rather than direct influence. Yet at least the General Baptists can be viewed as linked to that older tradition of lower class and lower middle-class religious radicalism. Anabaptism literally means "no-baptism." For a central article of faith opposed baptism of infants, insisting that Scriptures rather taught the baptism of adults. Some Baptists would later claim without good evidence that earliest Christian churches practiced whole body immersion baptism. To modern history’s baptists, only adults could have undergone conversion experience and be recognized as such before being accepted as church members. But avoidance of infant baptism could also aid proselytization in that the Roman Catholic church could not automatically claim belonging from birth. Opposed not only by Catholics but by other Protestant sects, practicing "rebaptism" was made a capital offense in much of Europe in the 1520s and 1530s. I will return to a more extended discussion of the continental Anabaptists at the start of the next chapter, which also looks at other communitarian faiths.

Although they converged on many similar ideas of parish self-sufficiency and adult baptism only, and while their enemies simply called them "Anabaptists," English Baptists tended for understandable reasons to deny linkage to the sometimes anarchistic and violently subversive Anabaptists of the continent. They prefer to emphasize descent through the shadowy Englishman John Smith (or Smyth) the "Se-baptist," who probably died 1612. He had been exposed to Puritan teaching at Cambridge but became attracted to Brownist or later Congregational Separatist concepts. Although Smith rebaptized himself, perhaps in 1608, he later had baptism performed for what was probably the third time by Amsterdam Mennonites, who clearly stemmed from the pacifistic wing of continental Anabaptism. He supposedly tried to get his followers accepted by the Mennonites. By tradition, he was for some reason rebuffed. Perhaps it was because pacifist anabaptism did not favor proselytization, which could cause too much friction with other sects. Yet Mennonite influence seems behind the development of the "general Baptists" emphasis on salvation open to all, in contrast with the more Calvinistic, Predestinarian "particular Baptists" (Sweet, 1942, 120-22). Earlier Anabaptists, such as Balthasar Hubmaier, too, had opposed the idea of predestined bondage of the will, emphasizing that one could contribute by free will to personal rebirth in Christ.

Unlike the more pacifistic Anabaptist currents by then dominant in the Netherlands and elsewhere on the continent (the more violent Anabaptists were largely repressed in the 1520's and 1530's), many of the English Baptists joined Oliver Cromwell's army. Their ideas were disseminated quite widely because the Independent Congregationalist Cromwell tolerated the expression of their religious views. His working coalition primarily included Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians.

In this again not unlike the continental Anabaptists, egalitarian demands emerged among many English Baptists. Both of them Baptists, John Lilburne (1614-57) and Richard Overton (b. about 1600, death date unknown) were key leaders of the Levellers. Against Cromwell and his son-in-law Ireton, who insisted on continuance of property qualifications, the Levellers advocated manhood suffrage, perhaps excepting household servants. Although his family had been genteel, John Lilburne had been apprenticed to the cloth trade in his youth, and his economic demands concerned an end to monopolies (including the newly constituted patents) and excessive taxation of the poor. While royalists had often allowed pensions for military officers, many Levellers wanted pensions for common soldiers as well. In 1649 Cromwell forcibly repressed the movement among his troops. But Leveller ideas were to remain around in England, influencing Roger Williams as well as much later political radical republicans such as Tom Paine.

Roger Williams. Roger Williams (c. 1600-1683) was never certain of his age. Nor was he sure of where he was born, which was either in a Welsh mountain village or in London.

At least we know that he was the son of a merchant, and that he himself eventually acquired the skill of a shorthand court reporter, working at Star Chamber. A member of the same church as the Williams' family, the jurist Sir Edward Coke saw and admired Williams' work and sponsored additional education for him at Charter House, a charitable institution. With that aid, he was able to go on to Cambridge, graduating about 1626.

After briefly studying law under Coke's guidance, Williams took charge of an Anglican church parish. But he disliked the hierarchical church structure as well as the ritual, and when Archbishop Laud's persecutions of Dissenters became ascendant, Williams decided to ship out to Boston, Massachusetts. Arriving in 1631 before John Cotton, he was invited to be Teacher at the Boston Church, refusing the role because they were not separatists. He twice left for Plymouth, only to twice return to serve the Salem church. The Pilgrim William Bradford liked Williams but also distrusted him, describing him as "a man godly and zealous, having many precious parts but very unsettled in judgment" (Bradford, 1952, 257). Williams was to experience friction with the Salem congregation as well as with the Massachusetts Bay elites over his allegedly heretical teachings. Not even permitting Williams to preach from his home, the Congregationalist oligarchy banished him in 1635. While Williams was supposed to be shipped back to England, someone (perhaps his friend, Governor John Winthrop) forewarned him of the timing of the arrest, and Williams slipped away, in his own words, "exposed to winter miseries of a howling wilderness."

He arrived in Rhode Island, where he would found what is usually regarded as the first Baptist church in what would become the United States. He began his brief Baptist phase by experiencing adult re-baptism, a principle he would never abandon.

He then worked for several years at getting a protective royal charter, aided in that by Henry (Harry) Vane, who when very young was briefly Governor of Massachusetts Bay but later was a Member of Parliament in London. Williams himself was influential on a trip there because he personally knew both Oliver Cromwell and John Milton. Williams brought home his charter in 1644. By 1647 he established what he himself called a "Democratical" form of government, involving majority rule of the free inhabitants. But before addressing Williams' politics, we should first discuss his economics and above all what was more important to him, his approach regarding religious beliefs.

Williams' Economics. While founding Rhode Island, Williams could not accept the notion that whites could steal Indian lands, as if only plowing land could create a title to it. One of the main reasons why Williams was deemed subversive in Massachusetts Bay was that he denied that the King by mere royal patent had any authority to dispose of the land of the Indians without their consent. To Williams the Rhode Island colony was but the equal of another tribe. Williams took pains to learn Indian languages, mediate peace, and see that they were fairly compensated for any land yielded. He did not believe that whites and Indians were of a different nature, and they should be as equal on earth as they would be equal before God. Williams opposed the enslaving of Indians or imported Africans, although both groups could be employed as indentured servants just as were new white immigrants from Europe. Regarding the land, he respected private property but favored a kind of homestead policy so that most could become propertied. After purchase from the Indians, the town proprietors held unfarmed common land until it was sold off in equal allotments to newcomers. As Williams said in 1654, he always favored "liberty and equality, both in land and government" (Brockunier, 1940, 102). He yet did not oppose some degree of unequal accumulation of wealth, whether by hard labor on the land or even by usury (taking interest on loans was judged by him to be spiritually indifferent). He supported taxation for welfare purposes, assuming democratic consent: "There is no man that hath a vote in town or colony, but he hath a hand in making the rates by himself or his deputies." No one could be imprisoned for debt in Rhode Island. Williams also accepted much public regulation of property for public ends.

Church and State. In this not unlike many continental Anabaptists, Williams believed that the New Testament was the Type, succeeding the Old Testament as the Anti-type. Sharply diverging from Calvinists on the matter, Williams held that the secular political content of the Old Testament was meant only for the Jews.

Yet the Old Testament held much that was relevant to church structure, and the New Testament says much about religion and politics, if read in its silences. While Williams was a Biblical fundamentalist, his rule for interpretation seems roughly this: In matters of religion, if it is not expressly authorized in scripture it must be forbidden, but in wholly secular matters, if it is not forbidden by Scripture (e.g., taking interest on loans), it must be acceptable -- at least if accepted by the people.

Williams was at least as impressed as the Calvinists with our sinful nature after The Fall, but he did not endorse the quasi-aristocratic and intolerant conclusions of most Puritans. He concedes that despite our natural sociability, life in a state of nature would have become intolerable. We now need some political order to prevent us from devouring each other as the fishes of the sea. The advantages of the division of labor and the prospect of improved peace precede the covenanting which gives rise to civil society.

But note well his assumption that the purposes of a political order concern only bodily goods, security and property, not salvation of souls: "In its origin, nature, functions and purpose, (the) state is absolutely and completely unconcerned with purely spiritual matters" (Ernst, 1929, 47).

Hence Williams advocated a very thorough separation of church and state. While God intends the civil state, He is not a party to the covenant which creates one. The state is not to enforce any duties toward God, which is to say that it cannot enforce the first table of the Ten Commandments (as done by Massachusetts Bay). But the state should enforce the second table, which concern human duties toward each other. The state cannot establish an official church or practice any inequality in treatment of churches, compel church attendance, punish breaches of the Sabbath (American "Blue Laws" long did so), extend civil disabilities to those excommunicated from a church, financially support churches, administer religious oaths (especially to the Unregenerate), use any religious insignia such as the Cross of St. George on the British flag, or establish religious qualifications for voting or office-holding. In short, by the principle noted earlier, the Bible does not authorize such things, so they must be offensive to God. The purest of the Puritans, Williams even opposed "Popish Festivals" such as Christmas or Easter.

In a similar way, if the Bible does not authorize a highly centralized and hierarchical church, Williams thinks it must be forbidden. Williams' primary motif is separation. As already apparent, he wanted the fullest separation from any government, even a local one. He wanted all congregations to separate from the Church of England or any other established church. And he even wanted congregations to operate in separation from each other. No one would be compelled to join a congregation, which hence entailed the necessity of persuading or "gathering" a voluntary membership.

Dispensing not only with bishops but even formal or informal synodical coordination of congregations, Williams seems to bring the fullest democracy to the church. But that only applies for those accepted as members of the church. Quite reminiscent of the ancient Hebrew Essenes, Williams had a great fear of spiritual "pollution" if he were to worship with the ungodly, as when the Anglicans too easily let Catholics join their parishes.

This made him especially emphasize adult baptism, since only adults could be really screened for godliness. In Williams imagery, the political world was part of the wilderness about it and the church was a garden to be wholly separate from it, and it was extremely important that no "tares" (weeds) should be permitted in this garden.

Note that this view was directly opposed in Massachusetts Bay, where they said that one could only certainly separate the tares from the wheat in the afterlife. Or as John Cotton liked to put it, when two men are followed by a dog, one may not know which is the dog's master until the two part ways. Yet Williams seemed unattracted to the hard Predestinationism of the Presbyterians and Congregationalists. He shared the Baptist tendency to enlarge the role of the individual in working out salvation. Also, if Williams did not want the Unregenerate in his church (actually he was a member of the Baptist fellowship for less than a year), his doctrine of toleration left open the possibility of membership in churches of other sects.

If exclusive regarding church membership, Williams was also afraid of mixing the Unregenerate and the Regenerate in any religious observance. That was the main reason for not wanting the state to have any role in religion. But it also meant that he would go further, opposing not only the sharing of the sacraments with those not church members but also the Anglican practice of having common prayer. One should never pray with those not saved, as in the kneeling at the Lord's Supper commemoration. This applies even if the Unregenerate one could be one's own spouse. Williams eventually abandoned saying grace at meals out of fear that an Unregenerate person could be among the guests. This fear of spiritual pollution led Williams therefore to the final degree of "separatism," he eventually ceased to worship as a Baptist and worshipped all alone in the style of those called Seekers.

Williams' held that the church was not to meddle in things properly belonging to the state, as in wielding the sword in civil penalties affecting bodies and goods. The church should not marry persons, which was a civil concern, nor should it make divorce difficult by applying pressures of the state. Rhode Island made divorce easier. For the church had only the "spiritual sword" of excommunication for its discipline.

Nor should the church ask the state for aid in its opposition to other sects.

Toleration. Roger Williams' The Bloody Tenant of Persecution was published in 1644, the same year as John Milton's Areopagitica (the two men were friends). Going beyond Milton's toleration only of "neighboring differences" in religion, Williams argues that Scripture contains no warrant for religious persecution, and it therefore must be disapproved by God. Williams believed that Christ wanted toleration, that only he would be King over consciences. It would be self-contradictory to urge the Lutheran "priesthood of all believers" where all were to interpret scripture, but then use state force to impose dogma, even as the Romans silenced Christ.

In another argument, Williams held that both reason and experience show undesirable consequences from the arbitrariness of religious persecutions. One set of consequences threatens bodies: He rejects the argument that enforced orthodoxy is a necessary condition of civil peace, noting that some pagan peoples secured order without it. But he also turns the argument around: It is really the zealous persecutors who disturb domestic and international peace, far exceeding any possible disruptions of liberty of conscience. Even heretics tend to obey most laws unless made desperate by the extremes of persecution. He also asserts that persecution is economically ruinous, as evidenced by the backwardness of many Catholic nations compared to thriving Holland.

If persecution thus destroys bodies, it also destroys souls. Force never made a Christian, but it can make "a Nation of Hypocrites and Anti-Christians." The "soul rape" of force may even harden people in their errors. But if the heretic was right (as Williams assumed himself to have been in Boston), the censoring may delay enlightenment of others. Williams sums up key arguments in this passage near the outset of his book:

Over a decade later, Williams reaffirmed that when there are many religions aboard a ship, he would insist that none be compelled to a particular form of worship or be debarred from their own. Yet he would not only grant that the captain has the right to command what is necessary for the bodily interests of the passengers, even if ordering assistance in the defense of the ship. If relevant actions can be constrained, so with advocacy: "If any should preach or write that there ought to be no commanders or officers, because all are equal in Christ, therefore no masters nor officers, no laws nor orders, nor corrections nor punishments; -- I say, I never denied, but in such cases, whatever is pretended, the commander or commanders may judge, resist, compel and punish such transgressors, according to their deserts and merits" (Letter to the Town of Providence, January 1655). Advocacy of anarchism, sometimes favored by past Anabaptist currents, exceeded the bounds of Williams' tolerance.

The "Democraticall" State. If Williams seems quirky in his restrictiveness regarding church membership, he is much more open in his politics. One may understand why a high standard of morals would be required in a self-sufficient, "gathered" church, even when restrictive membership in the church no longer has any relationship to limitation of secular suffrage. Clearly Williams sees no threat of "pollution" by the ungodly in favoring very broad suffrage in the secular state. Writing in his Bloody Tenant (1644), Williams states

While every lawful government is "the minister or servant of the people," he expressly endorsed the "Democraticall" form for Rhode Island. Needless to say, Williams would in his 1647 constitution have a bill of rights which included the fullest religious liberty as already indicated. So many heretics then flocked to Rhode Island that some detractors called it "Rogue's Island" (Marty, 1984, 77).

Williams initially advocated a majoritarian direct democracy which assembled all male heads of families. Even as the population grew, that style continued in the various towns, which were assigned various economic and other functions. While Rhode Island accepted citizens of many faiths, however, it excluded Jews and Roman Catholics from the citizen role (Reichley, 1985, 68).

An unusual practice was a sort of initiative, whereby a majority of the towns could pass a general law, without requiring a majority decision of a central representative assembly. A like majority of the towns could veto an act of the center.

But as already evident, the increased population forced a turn to representation in the central government. In part that was expressed through a unicameral legislature, elected in annual elections. The legislature not only passed laws but could also interpret the constitution.

The Presidency and Deputy Presidency were also subject to annual election. In 1649 Rhode Islanders voted Williams into the Deputy Presidency, but he turned down that office, as he also did the Presidency when offered in 1652. But he did finally consent to be President, serving 1654-58. After his withdrawal from office, he lived quietly in modest circumstances for the last twenty-five years of his life, dying at age 84.

Baptists After Williams. The Baptists by policy traditionally struggled against any strong, central church organizations. But they have had much vitality at the congregational level. If not anti-Indian enough to have as much appeal as Presbyterians at the 18th century frontier, in the 19th century Baptists were to be highly successful in proselytization in the interior and especially across what is now the American south, from the Carolinas across Texas.

Recall that one wing of Baptism, called Particular Baptists, was somewhat Calvinistic like Williams, believing strongly in original sin. They endorsed a modified version of the Westminster Confession, believed in Predestination, insisted that only the regenerate be church members, and appealed especially to Welsh immigrants and the middle colonies and later states.

The other wing, appealing more to the English, came to be called General Baptists, tending more to belief in freedom of the will (Arminianism) as well as greater divine generosity in salvation, and they had a more permissive stance toward church membership. Yet all Baptists saw no tension between rejection of coercive or state religious intolerance and insistence that every congregation as a private body had the right and duty to reject the unregenerate, whether as clergy or as ordinary church members. As one observer notes, "They regarded the world about them as sinful and preferred to withdraw into small and detached spiritual communities which could set up internal safeguards against the contaminating influence of the unredeemed. They held excommunication, which they used freely, to be the purging instrument of the Church, and this disciplinary power was necessarily the exclusive possession of the congregation" (Jordan, 1936, 259-60). But the less exclusive wing (for a time also called Separate Baptists as opposed to Regular Baptists in parts of the southern frontier) was to have a special appeal across the South (Ahlstrom, 1972, 316-21).

John Leland (d. 1841), who sought to allow scope for both predestinarianism and free will in his theology, was one of the most vigorous proselytizers once he came down from Massachusetts in 1776. Another important figure was Isaac Backus (d. 1806), who had been uncomfortable under the Congregational Church of Massachusetts (recall that it remained established until 1833). In Rhode Island, the Baptists erected Brown University to help train their clergy. Leland and other Baptists tended by socioeconomic roots to support Jeffersonianism, although by the age of Jackson a considerable number of Baptists deserted to the Whig Party because the Democrats had become identified with immigrant Irish Catholics.

The absence of any central coordination encouraged schismatic tendencies in Baptism. In our own time, one can speak of African-American Baptists, northern Baptists, and Southern Baptists. While there are some conservative African-American baptists, in a rough way, that array largely corresponds to a left to right continuum among kinds of Baptists. I look at each of the three groups in turn.

Most African-American Baptist churches were arguably closest to the original egalitarianism of Anabaptism and earliest Baptism. They offered what became a central institution of African-Americans, whether living in the South or migrating north. The first black Baptist church was apparently "gathered" in South Carolina in 1775 (Hudson, 1987, 28). By 1840 they had spun off their own liaison organizations out of distaste for the white Baptist defenses of slavery. By 1895 such churches gathered in the National Baptist Convention. Although they were long divided over the propriety of militant civil rights action, the black Baptists, as noted, kept much of the egalitarian tone of the earliest Baptists, and their churches eventually were pivotal organizations in the 1960's civil rights movement. The Baptist preacher Martin Luther King was the most famous example.

In the north, at least a few nineteenth century Baptists such as William Lloyd Garrison followed the antislavery view of Roger Williams and became ardent abolitionists. But many northern Baptists looked away from slavery rather than forthrightly oppose. Even after abolition of slavery, some northern Baptists were ardent defenders of economic inequalities. The Rev. Russell Conwell of Philadelphia, the late 19th century founder of Temple University, was to give his "Acres of Diamonds" speech no less than 6,000 times, inviting us as individuals to get rich. Although not getting rich by consistently following Christian ideals, John D. Rockefeller was also a Baptist. He founded the University of Chicago in expectation that it would be a bastion of Baptist Orthodoxy. However, its seminary eventually became somewhat liberal, and the university has since adopted a secular tone.

If white Baptists even in the north could sometimes become inegalitarian, they have in our century tended to shift toward a less Biblically fundamentalist and more politically liberal outlook. They expressed their views in the American Baptist Convention and by control over the lobbying arm, the Baptist Joint Committee in Washington, D.C. It has defended separation of church and state in the original spirit of the English and Rhode Island Baptists. President Harry Truman was such a Baptist. Bill Moyers, the Lyndon Johnson adviser and now TV commentator, typifies this more liberal variant among white Baptists, as also true of former Republican Senator from Oregon, Mark Hatfield. The American Baptists accept abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy.

In the South, white Baptism defended slavery, forming the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845. After the Civil War and into our century, many adherents defended racial segregation. Much of the leaning of southern Baptists arose from the fact that church members there were largely white and historically of lower income and education than the average members of northern Baptist churches. In that situation, the traditional Baptist congregation’s right to dismiss clergy has tended to oust seminary-trained and more liberal pastors. Southern Baptists of a conservative mind were able to take over the Presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, but they have been less successful in having their views be made orthodoxy at southern Baptist seminaries and at better traditionally Baptist universities such as Baylor in Texas (Finke and Stark, 1992, 173-98). With Southern Baptism becoming more centralized than had been traditional with Baptism, this current keeps its very conservative tone. It remains to be seen whether higher levels of education and personal prosperity will change the conservative tone of Southern Baptists.

While there are exceptions of a politically progressive outlook, such as Bill Clinton, one notable conservative Southern Baptist is his frequent adversary, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina.

In its bibliology, Southern Baptists strongly tend to the fundamentalist doctrine of "Biblical Inerrancy." Among other things, they insist that the Genesis version of human origins is literally true, and that any theory of biological evolution from less complex forms of life is false. Bob Jones, who founded a university bearing his name in Oklahoma, holds such views, but he has not favored more militant political action. But other Southern Baptists or near-relations such as the Independent Baptist Jerry Falwell have turned to conservative activism. Since the 1970's other Southern Baptist activists as Judge Messler, frustrated at their inability to control it, have wanted to defund the Baptist Joint Committee. Southern Baptists carefully monitor the views of their clergy, especially those who teach at their seminaries. Traditionalist in family mores, they have in their convention for the most opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, the ordination of women, and enlarged rights of homosexuals. Many such conservative Baptists have abandoned the original Baptist idea of separation of church and state, calling for prayer in public schools, by a Constitutional Amendment if necessary. A traditionally Southern Baptist university such as Baylor by 1990 chafed under increasing outside interference and looked for more academic autonomy, getting it by reducing the number of Texas Baptist Convention members on their governing board. If the conservative tone of Southern Baptists reflects their predominantly white clientele of growing personal prosperity, it also reflects small-town and rural origins. The fundamentalistic tone is perhaps encouraged because education levels run quite low across the southern Bible Belt. Although 3/4 of Americans aged 25 or over have at least a high school degree, completion of high school is lowest in Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee. Yet more educated migrants to prospering southern cities also seem to like the almost communitarian fervor of Southern Baptist congregations. Southern Baptist congregations in northern or western states now often avoid use of that label in order to be more welcoming to parishioners who are not of southern origins.

In addition to Southern Baptists, the National Evangelicals include the Missouri and Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, the Assembly of God, and the Churches of Christ, among many smaller denominations. Historically, most of their members had been decidedly otherworldly, and they criticized the largely mainline denomination clergy who became Social Gospel activists during the Progressive Era. They largely remained politically quiescent, and in fact often had low voter participation, until the rise of what has been called "social conservatism" in the 1970's. In part they responded to the more mainline liberal political activism of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the previous decade. They also may react to their threatened status and worry about family values. But a surge of late economic development in the South feeds into a conservatism which tends to support ultraright candidates, including a few southern Democrats but increasingly more Republicans. But although independent Baptist Jerry Falwell from his base in Falls Church, Virginia launched his Moral Majority movement, it proved to be more a hope than a reality, in that it was soon clear that majorities of the electorate in many contexts gave both his organization and himself such negative ratings that an endorsement could be a political kiss of death (cf. Wald, 1987, 182-212, 241-42) In 1989 Falwell himself chose to retire the organization, or at least its label. But the evangelicals have outperformed the mainline denominations in recruiting new church members. This may in part explain why clergy of the white mainline churches have tended to retreat somewhat from politics in the past two decades.

In the 19th century, someone said that because a same religion, Buddhism was embraced by people of diverse standards of living, it could not be shaped by class conditions of life. Georgi Plekhanov responded, "...this argument may appear sound only at first glance. Observation has revealed that 'one and the same' religion substantially differs in content depending on the level of economic development of the peoples professing it" (Plekhanov, 1972, 8). Much the same could be said of contemporary Baptists, where the economic policy preferences of Baptist sectarians ranging from poor blacks to affluent, suburban southern whites roughly mirrors their diverse circumstances in life.

While I have noted that there are various kinds of Baptists, in the 1991 Congress there were 12 Baptist Senators and 47 (or 10.8%) members of the House of Representatives. Including Bill Clinton, elected in 1992, there have been four Baptist Presidents.