City on a Hill
What are we fighting for?
“We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” John Winthrop Senior, 17th Century
John Winthrop Senior was the new governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony when he made this statement. His ship was about to sail for the new world carrying the Great Migration, a set of people fleeing a mandatory state religion that persecuted them. However, when he arrived, they set up a new mandatory religion they thought better represented truth. They punished dissenters mercilessly, eventually even hanging Quakers like Mary Dyer. John Winthrop’s primary invention was not to state where the investors in the colony would meet to run the colony in the charter they got the king to sign — once out of town he was the first to have the investors meet in the new world. That is how the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first to passively resist control by a King. We Americans are not ruled by a king.
The rest of what the Massachusetts Bay Colony stood for is not necessarily to be emulated. Sure, they were Christian. However, they mistook what is in the Bible a spiritual light emanating from God’s called people for a physical city in a fallen world. They punished aggressively anyone that didn’t agree with them, including Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. They were the first people north of the Chesapeake Bay to import African slaves, and they did this in return for indigenous people they had exported to the Caribbean because of their defense of their own way of life, the way of life that existed before the English arrived. They come as close to being an ISIS-like version of Christianity as I hope any will ever come.
It took the next generation of colonists to begin to correct the situation. John Winthrop Junior established in Connecticut a religious freedom that still enabled an established state religion, while his peer Roger Williams set up Rhode Island based on the principle of toleration of anyone not disrupting civil peace — with no established state religion and no requirement to be religious.
Roger Williams’s version of religious freedom is what made it into the Bill of Rights. All the experiments in freedom that included a sanctioned form of religion were discarded as in practice, there was still a class system shunning dissenters from the established religion. What Roger Williams knew, that John Winthrop Senior and John Cotton did not seem to, is that the light shining from the Christian City on a Hill is spiritual. The city is not in this fallen world, though we can see glimpses from it in the hearts of Jesus followers.
When we masquerade as Religious Freedom establishing in the law a particular conscience, we discriminate like the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the worst case, and like the Connecticut of John Winthrop Junior in best case. Codifying into law a practice that we know a significant number of upstanding people do not share should not be what we’re fighting for. Both polarized establishments are guilty. The Democratic party currently in power wants to require people to pay for things that are against their conscience. It proposes to substitute for the stockades a punishment by removal of federal funding to any state that disagrees. The right wants an established religion of marriage as one man and one woman only, even though they know it is a contested concept. Neither case makes a complete accommodation (yet) for people with alternate consciences that are respecting the civil peace.
An individual with a conscience that will not let him support (via dollars, signature , etc. ) either contraception or gay marraige should be respected. However, the individual that seeks the currently legal contraception or gay marriage must be accommodated, by another individual that does not have the conscientious objection. What is lacking is the notion of accommodation and toleration. It is a travesty that corporations are taking sides about which conscience is correct based on marketing opportunity instead of requiring accommodation from all. The highest class corporations have for years found ways of letting Christians be salt and light while respecting LGBT community members. We know how to do this.
Both of these issues stem from technology that makes the consequence of what the Bible defines as serious sin less impactful in first world life. Both may take generations to sort out heresy from innovation, as we see consequences roll out in subsequent generations.
Toleration is what Roger Williams stood for, assured that the gospel message would resonate with called hearts in a free and fair debate. He had no doubt his concept would dismantle the establishment of his day, and was aiming to dismantle a system in England by the success of his experiment.
Unfortunately we seem to need the establishment dismantled once again. The current left and right are too busy championing intolerance. You can learn the story of how Roger Williams escaped the City on a Hill to form a foundation of the United States of American in my book, Rekindled. We should know this story, and we should not want to repeat it.
I’ll let Ronald Reagan close this piece with his view of our earthly City on a Hill, one that I contend is more like Roger Williams’s vision than John Winthrop Seniors’s Massachusetts Bay Colony.
