The defense of religious liberty (including the liberty to have no religious beliefs or practices) is a value deep in my family and faith traditions. I loved seeing the diary on the Quaker, Robert Barclay. There are many heroes and heroines in this struggle I could highlight, from the Anabaptist Balthasar Hubmaier, who wrote the treatise On Heretics and Those Who Burn Them (1524) and when he was burned at the stake himself, mocked those preparing his pyre with gunpowder by saying, “Oh, salt me good!” to Roger Williams (founder of Rhode Island) to Elder John Leland (Baptist leader in colonial Virginia) who argued that the state had no power to restrict the religion even of witches (which is remarkable in an era when no one thought of gentle Wiccans with henna tattoos in Berkeley, CA, but believed that Satan actually possessed women for evil magic!).
But I decided, instead, to celebrate the life of Anne Marbury Hutchinson. Anne was a Puritan woman who lived from 1591 to 1643 and who played a significant role in the “Antinomian Controversy” in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony and whose tragic fate was a step on the way in this country to religious liberty and to the recognition of the spiritual equality of the sexes.
Anne was the daughter Alford, Lincolnshire, England, the daughter of Anglican cleric, Francis Marbury, who was also a schoolteacher and gave Anne a better education than most girls and women of that era had. Anne married a childhood friend, William Hutchinson, and the two of them eventually had 15 children. (I’m so glad reliable birth control is now a thing!) She was well sought after as a skilled midwife. William and Anne became followers of a dynamic young Puritan minister named John Cotton.
When England became more repressive toward “Nonconformists” (i.e., anyone whose religious views and practices did not rigidly conform to that of the Church of England, especially the high-church, “Anglo-Catholic” version of Anglicanism rather than the more Protestant version “purified” of “Romanist” views and practices, Cotton, like so many dissenters, had to leave for the New World. The Hutchinsons and their (by that time) 11 children followed him and took up residence in Boston, Massachusetts’ Bay Colony.
Today, MA is one of our most liberal states in the United States. It’s also heavily Catholic. Neither of those things were true in early Colonial America. By the time we get to the run up toward the Revolutionary War, Boston is already becoming liberal, with Deist and proto-Unitarian views becoming common and revolutionary fervor in the air. But the Boston which the Hutchinsons encountered was very conservative and very repressive. It was NOT a haven for individual free thought.
The Puritans who founded Massachusetts Bay Colony sought religious freedom for themselves, but NOT for others. Their vision was rather that of a “City set on a Hill” a shining example of a society that was as close as they could make it to a pure biblical orthodoxy (as they understood it)—in a very real sense, a theocracy. If they could forge such a righteous society, they believed that it would usher in the fullness of the Kingdom of God. So, as Anne (and later, Roger Williams, and some visiting Quakers, Jews, etc.) would soon discover, Boston was hostile to those with their own opinions about God, righteousness, and their own biblical interpretations.
Anne was not radical enough to argue for the ordination of women or to start her own church. But she was a sensitive spiritual soul and an educated (for the day) woman and she was not intimidated by the orthodox preachers she was hearing. She believed they were preaching a “covenant of works” where one’s actions would earn (or not) one’s place in the Kingdom of God. She argued, instead, for a “covenant of grace” whereby salvation was full and free to those who responded to grace with faith and that any righteous behavior would flow from that changed life. Nor could mere humans judge others’ actions as to whether or not they were sinful—only God could do that.
Anne began holding meetings for women in her home (today we’d call them prayer meetings or home Bible studies) where she would read Scripture with them and expound her views. She was careful, at first, that these were single sex meetings, not “mixed” or “promiscuous” meetings with both sexes (something considered shocking then—and still shocking to Mike Pence, today). But the women were so taken by Anne’s teaching that they talked to others, including their husbands. Soon, some men began attending these meetings. Some were impressed with her wisdom. Some were not and some were simply outraged that a woman thought herself capable of interpreting Scripture for herself—never mind criticizing the learned ministers of the town and colony!
Eventually, Anne is accused of “Antinomianism,” that is, of teaching that one can sin without worrying about it because of cheap grace. This was a distortion of her message, but the authorities were at least as outraged that she HAD a message as anything else. They hauled her before the courts (there being no separation of church and state in Colonial Boston) and put her on trial for heresy in 1638. She was found guilty and ordered to be silent. She refused and so was condemned to be exiled “into ye howling wilderness” with her whole family. The Hutchinsons were driven into the wilderness in the middle of winter. Initially, they survived, In fact, they were invited to Rhode Island where Roger Williams and followers, themselves driven from Massachusetts, were founding a new colony based on religious liberty. The Hutchinsons and their followers founded Portsmouth near Williams’ own Providence.
After William Hutchinson died, and before Roger Williams had secured a royal charter for Rhode Island, Anne felt that there was a very real threat that the govt. of Massachusetts would take over Rhode Island and place her back under their restrictive rule. Her older children either returned to England or stayed in New England, but she moved outside of English-settled America with her younger children to an area controlled by the Dutch—an area now known as The Bronx, New York. There, sadly, Anne and her children were slaughtered by Siwanoy Native Americans who were trying to repel the Europeans displacing them. The only survivor of the massacre was Anne’s daughter, Susannah.
But Anne Hutchinson’s long, verbal defense of her teachings, and her right to interpret Scripture and decide her views for herself has come down through the ages and is a precious document in the struggle for religious liberty. She started a revolution that would change what America would become.
Happy Religious Liberty Day, everyone. Here’s to Anne Hutchinson—no physical kin to me, but a spiritual ancestor for sure.