On November 21, 1620, a ship bearing a group of people we know as the Pilgrims, dissenters against the Church of England, arrived in America. After surveying the situation for a month, they settled on a spot near present day Plymouth, Massachusetts on December 21st and founded their colony in the New World. They came to escape the religious persecution they had suffered in Europe. It's impossible for a child to go through the American education system without learning the story.
But there were other things we weren't taught, and apparently haven't learned.
This is a repost, with some additional anecdotes and minor re-writing, of a diary I originally posted in 2007 (original here). Since there still seems to be a sizable segment of the population that has trouble with the whole "Separation of Church and State" concept, I thought it would be a good time to dust it off and give it another go-round. Happy Thanksgiving!
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A priest administers last rights to "heretics" hanged during the Thirty-Years War. |
One thing that wasn't mentioned in the history I learned when I was in school is that when the Pilgrims landed in what is now Massachusetts, Europe was embroiled in the third year of a conflict that would last another 27 years. Before it was over, the
Thirty Years War would result in the death of perhaps as much as a third of the population of continental Europe. Historians still debate the root causes and precise nature of the war, but a key cause of the war was undeniably religious, an attempt to rein in the century-old scourge of Protestantism. Or to preserve the religious freedoms gained during the Reformation. Depending on your point of view.
Soldiers Plundering a Farm during the Thirty Years War by Sebastien Vrancx (1620) |
Seven years after the Pilgrims landed in America, back on the other side of the ocean in a little farming village on the outskirts of the city of
Minden, Germany in the then-state of the same name, my seventh-great grandfather was born, the earliest known ancestor in my surname line. Two years before his birth, pro-Catholic forces invaded and occupied the state of Minden. Though small and not particularly important strategically, it was not an insignificant victory for the Catholic side. Prior to embracing the Reformation in 1526, the state of Minden had been a
Bishopric, a Church-owned
ecclesiastical state, and its peasants -- including my ancestors -- bound to the local monastery. And the Church wanted its property back.
The history text I read in college four decades ago says of the effect the Thirty Years War had on the common folk, "...[T]he peasants, murdered, put to flight, or tortured by soldiers to reveal their few valuables, ceased to give attention to farming; agriculture was ruined, so that starvation followed." In the village of my ancestors a local history relates that in the spring of 1627, the year of my seventh-great grandfather's birth, the despondent peasants had to be driven into their fields at point of arms to plant their crops. Finally, in 1634, Swedish forces drove out the Catholics and returned Minden to Protestantism, holding the former bishopric until the end of the war, when it was given to Brandenburg (later Prussia) in a land swap as part of the Treaty of Westphalia.
Roger Williams banished from Salem colony |
Back on our side of the ocean in 1635, the year following my ancestors' liberation by the Swedes,
Roger Williams was banished from Salem Colony. The religious freedom sought by the Puritans who came to America, it seems, meant only the freedom for
them to practice
their religion, not for others to practice other religions, or to hold beliefs the Puritan leadership found "heretical". Williams went on to found the city of Providence, present-day Rhode Island, as a haven for free religious practice. In other colonies in the New World, Anglicanism, Puritanism, Calvinism, Congregationalism, Catholicism, and any number of other
Christian beliefs were practiced, with non-adherents granted varying degrees of tolerance, or intolerance, as the case may be.
Mary Dyer being marched to her execution. |
Williams, at least, knew when he wasn't welcome. Others were more persistent. In 1660, Mary Dyer, a Quaker and friend of Williams, after being expelled from Massachusetts four times and returning each time, was hanged in Boston Commons for preaching heresy. Given what the Puritans were doing to Quakers, the
fates that befell people suspected of practicing more extreme beliefs is not at all surprising.
Accused witches hanged at Salem |
Although the Thirty Years War is considered the last of the European religious wars, that is not to say religion did not enter into later conflicts. In 1661, scarcely a dozen years after the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War, Catholic French forces invaded the Minden area. At the Evangelische church my ancestors attended, the French dragged out all the furnishings and church records and made a bonfire of them. What we know of the paternal line of my family stops at that year, the recording of my seventh-great grandfather's death in 1684 at the age of 57 years being the earliest surviving record of that branch of my ancestry. In those days in Europe, the church was often the only keeper of records about the peasantry, and in the home of my ancestors at that time, it was the vehicle of governmental administration.
Less than two decades later, the French army returned again, occupying the countryside around Minden as it lay siege to the city. In the village of my ancestors, they demonstrated their evolving respect for Protestant religions by dragging down the bell of the village's little chapel and melting it down for cannon balls.
Mennonites being burned at the stake in Europe following the Reformation |
Four years after the French converted my ancestors' church bell to ordnance, the first of the
Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonites emigrated from Europe to Pennsylvania. The term "Pennsylvania Dutch" was loosely applied to a variety of groups over the years, in this case to Swiss-German Anabaptists who settled on what was then the Pennsylvania frontier. One of these groups, arriving near Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the early 1700's included ancestors in one of my mother's lines. Persecuted in Europe for their "heretical" doctrines such as adult baptism, the complete removal of the church from government, and renunciation of the oath, they came to America, to the colony the Quaker William Penn created as a refuge for religious dissenters (Although it should be noted that Penn's refuge was open only to believers in
monotheistic religion.)
In 1712, the colony of South Carolina passed Sunday Laws requiring all residents to attend church on Sunday and forbidding labor, the conducting of business, travel by wagon or horseback, and anything else that might "disturb" worshipers. Violators earned fines and time in the stocks.
At the time of the American Revolution, the founding fathers were well aware of these all-to-recent religious conflicts. The arguments over the place of religion in the emerging nation are sufficiently numerous to fill an encyclopedia, let alone a DailyKos diary. I won't attempt to lay them out here, but here's a starting point for further reading.
French cartoon in the years before the revolution, with clergy depicted in league with the aristocracy in oppressing the commoners. |
As the founding fathers sat down to revamp the false start of the Articles of the Confederation, across the ocean our erstwhile ally France ground inexorably toward a day of reckoning. As the bloated and corrupt regime stumbled cluelessly towards its demise, it was supported in its disregard for the common people by the clergy of the major cities. While the priests of the small rural villages tended to side with their parishioners, the
higher clergy ensconced in positions of power in the French church lived lives of opulence funded by the tithes of the common people. In France, as in much of Europe, the church leadership acted as apologists and supporters of the aristocracy. It was a well-known history that informed our founders' viewpoints and prompted
Thomas Jefferson to say, "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot."
In 1834, a mob of angry nativist Protestants stormed the Ursuline convent in Charleston, Massachusetts, forcing the largely Irish nuns and students to flee for their lives. The mob set the convent on fire and burned it to the ground.
By the early years of the new Republic, the area around Lancaster, Pennsylvania was becoming over-populated. A group of Mennonites began a westward migration that would take them through Virginia, Ohio and Indiana over a the next few generations before a group of them, including my mother's great-great-grandparents, arrived in a near-wild central Illinois in the mid-1830s.
The murder of Joseph Smith |
A decade after my ancestors' arrival, a long-simmering feud between locals and
Joseph Smith and his followers in the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reached a boiling point. After being expelled from Missouri (with Smith being imprisoned for a time on charges of treason), the Mormons had migrated back across the Mississippi to the town of Commerce, Illinois, elected themselves to control of the town government, established local municipal courts and a local militia under their control, renamed the town Nauvoo, and generally took over the place. In 1844, in response to anti-Mormon dissent, the Mormon-controlled city council ordered the city marshal to destroy the press of a critical newspaper published by disaffected former Mormons. The action enraged local citizens and set off a round of escalating tensions that resulted, two weeks later, in a mob storming the county jail where Smith was being held and murdering the Mormon leader.
The Kensington Riot |
Back in Pennsylvania at about the same time, in the Philadelphia suburb of Kensington,
riots broke out between nativist Protestants and Irish Catholics over the practice of reading Bible verses in the public schools -- not over
whether Bible verses would be read, but rather in protest of a (false) rumor of a decision to allow Catholics to read the verses from the
Douai version of the Bible instead of the Protestant
King James version. At the height of the disorder, rioters were
exchanging cannon fire with the militia sent in to quell the rioting. They stand as the worst religious riots in American history, leaving a disputed number of dead and wounded and several churches and neighborhoods burned to the ground.
In 1847, three years after the Kensington riots and the murder of Joseph Smith, two of my great-great-grandparents on my mother's side were married at the Episcopal church in Spaulding, Lincolnshire, England. Now, on the surface this doesn't seem particularly unusual or unexpected -- until you consider this: my great-great-grandparents were Baptist. Why, then, were they being married in an Episcopal church? Because in England, then as now, the Episcopal church was the official state church; other denominations such as Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, and others were considered "non-conformist", tolerated, but with no legal standing. In England at that time, if you wanted your marriage recognized by the state, if you did not want your children to be considered bastards in the eyes of the law, you had to submit to the humiliating, supplicative act of being married in a church whose rituals you did not practice and in whose doctrines you did not believe.
Two years later, in 1849, the ship Sarah Sands arrived in New York from Liverpool, England, bearing among its passengers a large family group that included another great-great grandfather on my mother's side. They were part of a group of immigrants from the area around the Wash in eastern England who migrated together, eventually arriving in central Illinois in the mid-1850's. Three years after their arrival in America, a great-great grandfather -- this one of my father's maternal line -- immigrated to Illinois from Devon, England. He also immigrated with a large group of neighbors and relatives from Devon, many of them eventually buying railroad land in the late 1850's and early 1860's near the small rural town where I was raised and still live.
These two groups -- the Lincolnshire / Cambridgeshire immigrants from the area of the Wash, and the Devon immigrants -- settled within just a few of miles of each other near the little town where I live, some of their farms even intermixed with one another. Yet for better part of the next hundred years they socialized and married largely within their own group. Both groups were of English origin, both were white, both spoke the same language, both farmed -- they were alike in almost every way. Except one. The Devon immigrants were mostly Episcopalian -- Church of England in the "old county". The Lincolnshire / Cambridgeshire immigrants were predominantly Baptists and Methodists -- Non-Conformists, as they were known in England. And whether that alone was enough to keep them apart for nearly a century I don't know, but keep apart they did.
A nineteenth century anti-Catholic political cartoon by Thomas Nast (1871) |
In 1880, the man who would adopt my orphaned maternal grandmother a decade later began a journal on the day he proposed to his wife-to-be. Found in my grandmother's safe-deposit box after her death, it is one of those sparse, matter-of-fact journals common to midwestern farmers in that era, recording the planting and harvesting of crops, prices received at sale, and his attendance at various church, community, and social functions. Throughout the three decades covered by the journal, my adoptive great-grandparents -- he of Puritan descent but by then converted to the Baptist church and she one of the Lincolnshire non-conformist immigrants -- attended dozens of funerals, weddings, holiday celebrations, and other social functions. And yet, in those thirty years covered by the journal, I have found only
one instance where they interacted with any Catholic individuals, that at the funeral of a prominent Catholic townsman.
Our family farm, still operated by my father's brother, recently attained "Century Farm" status, a designation the state awards to a farm that has been owned and operated by the same family for over a hundred years. However, how my family came to be on that farm is hardly award-worthy. In 1904, the story goes, my great-grandmother, appalled that her daughters were attending school in a one-room schoolhouse in a rural school district heavily populated with Irish Catholics (who had settled in the area a half-century earlier, at about the same time as her own family) insisted that they sell the farm she had inherited from her first husband and buy another in a neighboring, Catholic-free district.
The lynching of Leo Frank |
A decade after my great-grandparents moved to their new farm, the
revival of the Ku Klux Klan began, fueled in part by the D. W. Griffith's film
Birth of a Nation and steeped in Antisemitism fired by the trial and subsequent mob lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager accused (possibly falsely) of the rape and murder a white female employee.
A German-American farmer tarred and feathered amid anti-German hysteria during World War I. |
By the time of the first World War, descendants of my Mennonite ancestors had long-since converted to other religions. Those who adhered to the old religion, however, saw that faith tested during the war hysteria. Refusing conscription on religious grounds and having a Germanic background, they incurred the suspicion and wrath of fellow citizens.
Mob violence was not uncommon, and unknown numbers of Mennonite families - possibly as many as two thousand or more - fearing for their safety, fled to Canada.
My paternal grandfather, the American-born son of German Lutheran immigrants, came home from the army at the end of the Great War and a couple of years later married the daughter of descendants of the Episcopalian immigrants from Devon, England. A few years later, in the house to which her parents had moved to protect her from being "contaminated" by Catholics, my father was born. When he, in turn, returned from another war twenty years later, he married the daughter of descendants of Baptist Lincolnshire immigrants, theirs being first generation in which descendants of those two groups of English neighbors appear to have intermarried freely to any large extent.
So that is my Christian heritage. The elements of the Christian Right who want to infuse Christianity into our public institutions are fond of pointing out that America was founded by Christians. As I hope is obvious from my story, while that may be true, they were Christians who, to a large extent, distrusted, despised, and even hated each other. The divisions among the various denominations of Christianity in those days were as deep and profound as the divisions among Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists today.
We are, in a sense, victims of our own success. Ecumenical movements in the twentieth century enjoyed a great deal of success in defusing tensions between the various Christian denominations and fostering an atmosphere of unity and cooperation. Most people today have never experienced the bitter, divisive enmity that permeated the religious world our founders knew.
But those divisions and that animosity still lurk, slumbering below the surface. The plain fact is, people tend to take their religions seriously -- what's the point of having one if you don't, after all? All that's needed to awaken a ferocious religious partisanship is for one of those other religions or denominations to gain a perceived position of privilege over ones own. Even another Christian denomination. I suspect we'd find we're not so much one big happy Christian nation as we'd like to think.
The founders of our nation -- whose own grandfathers' fathers and grandfathers had sought to kill each other over religious differences -- knew what they were doing when the resolved to keep religion out of government and government out of religion. We tinker with that division at our peril.