The Rise and Fall of Religious Liberty in America
By C. M. S.
FREEDOM of choice is the key-note of the gospel. The gospel invitation is the very antithesis of force. “Come unto me,” is an invitation, not a command; and what Jesus would not compel, he has given no one authority to compel for him. We have seen in these studies how he himself first proclaimed the doctrine of religious liberty in these words: “If any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not.” He found a condition of religious intolerance and a united church and state, and his teaching was a rebuke to it. He was lifted up upon the cross, a victim of the intolerance of his times. His followers were hunted in every country as the legal prey of the intolerant system. A time came when their increased numbers made them respected. That was the hour of the church’s great temptation. The organized body yielded, as did Eve in Eden; and the great deceiver accomplished by stratagem and temptation what he could not accomplish by open threat and force. He induced the church as an organization to deny her Lord. She became an oppressor not of the heathen only, but of the true followers of the Lord she professed to serve, putting them to cruel deaths in his name. Constantine’s Edict of Milan, granting religious freedom to all, was repudiated by his sons in their acts, and the church he established relegated it to oblivion, so far as her interest in the edict’s perpetuation was concerned. For fourteen hundred years the principles of that edict and the principles laid down by Jesus Christ found expression only among the scattered flocks of our Lord’s fold in the mountains, the deserts, and the wilderness. The Reformation broke the power of the papal church to a large extent, but the lessons of intolerance which Luther and Calvin had learned in the school of the Catholic hierarchy they practised upon those who differed with them when they had the power so to do. They left the church as they found it, in unholy wedlock with the state, and forged new fetters to bind the consciences of men. This is demonstrated in the persecution and death of those who perished with their sanction or by their orders. In spite of bitter persecution, in spite5of death itself, there persisted, during all that dark time, a little band who would not yield their faith at the command of any earthly power. They were the Paulicians, the Albigenses, the Waldenses, and the Anabaptists. The first three named suffered all things at the hands of Rome, while the last named were the special object of attack by the established churches of the Reformation, as well as by the Catholic Church. It was these Anabaptists who became the real apostles of religious freedom for both the Old World and the New. Their blood flowed like water in Europe because they insisted on an unshackled conscience. That they were not exterminated in all Europe, as in Germany and Switzerland, was due to the championing of their cause by Prince William of Orange. In 1647 the Westminster Confession of Faith was adopted, which authorized officials of the English church-and-state system to do all that Rome could have asked the state to grant her permission to do. In 1689 came the Toleration Act of William and Mary, which granted toleration to Quakers and Protestant dissenters, but left Catholics and anti-Trinitarians outside the scope of its beneficence. But for even this small measure of toleration we are indebted to the persistent agitation of the Anabaptists, many of whose tracts were written in prison. To these people we are indebted for the declaration that every man’s worship should be in accordance with “the dictates of his own conscience.” Through them the doctrine of religious liberty was transferred to America, and through their oppressors came the opposite principle in superabundance, so that in every colony save Rhode Island and Maryland the heavy hand of religious oppression was felt. Both men and women were whipped, fined, imprisoned, and killed on the soil of the New World for exercising liberty to believe the Word of God and practise its teachings. The state established the church, supported it by general taxation, and compelled the people, under pain of fines and imprisonments, to attend its services and accept its teachings. All religious instruction not authorized by the established church was put under the ban, and all unauthorized teachers of the Word were criminals, to be dealt with by the state. In spite of these forbidding circumstances, the leaven of better things was working in all the colonies. Where existed a system denying religious freedom to all save those of the established church, there was to be established a system that would recognize the freedom of the soul from the control of the civil power. Like the persecutions in the time of the apostles, the New England persecutions only served to spread the doctrine it condemned. The banishment of Roger Williams in 1635 planted a State which stood for the principles that caused his banishment. The history of all the different colonies where church and state were united reads very similarly in respect to religious intolerance. Though the manner of punishment for dissenters differed, the institution that fostered it was the same, and the church that persecuted dissenters in one colony had its own members persecuted in another. In each colony the fact was demonstrated that wherever a church is established by law, conscience is made an outlaw. In the midst of such travesties on true religion Roger Williams and his compatriots were making a “livelie experiment” which is still living, and the influence of which will never die. In the constitution, or charter, of Rhode Island we find the church disestablished, the principles of republicanism and the equality of man established, and the prohibition of all religious tests for the holding of public office—principles later incorporated into the Constitution of the United States, but logically lacking in the charters and constitutions of all the church-and-state colonies. The uneasiness of souls in bondage, the leaven of a spiritual unrest, the persistent teachings of such believers as the Quakers and Anabaptists, and the inhuman punishments inflicted, were having their effect in all the colonies. The people were drifting away from their oppressive leaders. In New England the arrogance of the hierarchy was such that it resulted in its own downfall at the hand of the king of England, and the revocation of the colony’s charter in the year 1685. In 1691 a new charter was granted to Massachusetts, which guaranteed religious liberty to all “except papists.” But it was not until 1833 that church and state were finally separated in that State. The same struggle went on in Virginia, where Baptists, Quakers, and Presbyterians felt the heavy hand of the established church. Not until 1774, two years before the Declaration of Independence, did light begin to break in Virginia. With the dawn of the Revolution came better days for the oppressed Christians of that commonwealth. The same year that the Declaration of Independence was adopted, the Virginia Convention adopted its famous Bill of Rights, whose sixteenth article declares the principle of religious liberty. The downfall of British rule in the United States was practically coincident with the downfall of the established church in Virginia. The great majority of the State constitutions, while containing many of the grand principles of the national Constitution, contained also some of the principles of church-and-state union. Some seeds of the old order of things were left, and are bearing evil fruit to-day. The opponents of religious freedom in the days of the Constitution’s adoption have never lacked successors. An attempt was made in 1829 to have Congress committed to a career of religious legislation. The effort was brought to naught by the master defense of Col. Richard M. Johnson; but in the year 1864 the forces opposed to the freedom of conscience began an active, systematic campaign to re-establish religious thralldom in this country. That organization, the National Reform Association, has called to its aid the American Sabbath Union, the W. C. T. U., the labor unions, the Lord’s Day Alliance, the Roman Catholic Church, and numerous State organizations, to insure the enactment of laws for the enforcement of a religious ordinance—the Sunday sabbath—the entering wedge to a union of religion and the state. These organizations, banded together for the accomplishment of that purpose, must be looked upon as one in spirit, actuated by one motive. That motive has been forcefully expressed by the prime movers in the undertaking. It is that religion shall be established by law; that the hand of oppression shall be laid upon non-conformists again as in colonial days. In 1888 Congress was besieged again by the same forces for the same purpose, and found an able champion in Senator Blair, of New Hampshire. In 1892 came the Supreme Court dictum that “this is a Christian nation,” and the forces of retrogression and soul-thraldom had won a victory that meant much for them. Since that pronouncement, those forces have taken new heart, and redoubled their efforts to re-establish a censorship over religion in America. To assist in the work outlined by the instigator of the undertaking—the National Reform Association—the various organizations named have pledged themselves. The most forceful and efficient ally of that organization is the Catholic Church—always and everywhere the foe of religious freedom. That the Catholic Church sees in this backward movement the abandonment of Protestant principles is plainly evident. That she plans eventually to lead the undertaking is shown in the recent declaration of her purpose to build here an enduring edifice “upon the ruins of decaying Protestantism.”6 Seeing in such movements as the National Reform Association has inaugurated an unmistakable evidence of an abandonment of Protestant principles, and seeing the success of that organization in winning other so-called Protestant organizations to its standard, the Roman Church rightly argues that Protestantism is no longer a power to be dreaded, but a force to be guided; and she, the Roman Church, will act as the guide. She declared her intention of being that guide when she declared that “all Catholics should do all in their power to cause the constitution of States, and legislation, to be modeled on the principles of the true church.” This religio-political combination, which already professes to hold the Congress of the United States in its hands, is even now beginning to come under the leadership of Rome. When that combination through its increased power and influence shall have actually accomplished what it now professes to have already accomplished, and when Rome accomplishes her purpose to be the leader of the combination, as she confidently expects to do, it is not difficult to foretell what the character of the nation and its legislation will be. The activity of the hierarchy in this country portends no good for the country; and the rapid abandonment of Protestant principles by professed Protestants is making Rome’s victory easier with every new day. If Americans value civil liberty, if Christians value freedom of conscience and of worship, there is no more opportune time than now to let the fact be known. Religious liberty, without which all other liberties are valueless, is being attacked in front, flank, and rear—yea, even within its own citadel, by its professed defenders; and the horrors and hypocrisies of medieval and colonial days are in a fair way toward repetition in this country, so blessed of heaven, so forgetful of history.