Accidental Pluralism by Evan Haefeli

Author:Evan Haefeli [Haefeli, Evan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General, HIS036020 History / United States / Colonial Period (1600-1775), HIS015000 History / Europe / Great Britain, REL015000 Religion / Christianity / History
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Part 4

Civil Wars, 1638–1649

Ten

Fragmentation: Rhode Island, Madras, Trinidad, 1638–1643

If King Charles’s emerging empire had a puritan problem, New England had a Rhode Island problem. In 1642, the governor of Massachusetts complained to the governor of Plymouth that Rhode Islanders were not only politically “divided from us, but in very deed they rend themselves from all the true churches of Christ and, many of them, from all the powers of magistracy.” Worse, Rhode Islanders were infiltrating Massachusetts to make “public defiance against magistracy, ministry, churches and church covenants, etc., as antichristian.” They sowed “the seeds of Familism and Anabaptistry, to the infection of some and danger of others.” Massachusetts rejected the idea of “any league or confederacy at all” with Rhode Island.1

The existence of Rhode Island was just one small symptom of the religious and political fragmentation that broke out once the veneer of religious unity collapsed in the 1640s. King Charles and Archbishop Laud had spent the 1630s trying to bring the three kingdoms and their dependent territories into an ideal of religious unity and political obedience. They imagined it as a system of order, submission, and conformity. As long as the Personal Rule lasted, they could delude themselves into thinking they might succeed. Unfortunately for them, their real success was in antagonizing tens of thousands of people in Scotland, Ireland, and England. Starting in 1638, each rose up in turn to reject the Personal Rule, albeit for different reasons.2

As the three kingdoms fell into confusion, Charles’s government lost contact with the overseas colonies, leaving them to work out their futures on their own. This breakdown of authority at the center is a crucial moment in early American religious history, for it allowed colonial American religion to evolve and consolidate without interference from England. Few colonists took advantage of this opportunity to pursue the cause of religious liberty. Instead, from New England to the Caribbean, most chose to consolidate and shore up their religious establishments. Pluralism was not their goal. Even Rhode Island was guided by a special Protestant vision. The problem was their religious establishments were not the same. In the end, the colonists proved no better than Charles and Laud at creating religious unity at anything above the provincial level. As England fell into civil war, the colonial religious order broke up into discrete, mutually antagonistic, units.

***

The fragmentation in the colonies began in New England, where the consolidation of Congregationalism produced a growing radical fringe as ever more puritans fell outside the pale of its orthodoxy. The most dramatic part of this process was the so-called Antinomian controversy of 1636–38, which drove a number of leading colonists out of Massachusetts, including the wealthy Anne Hutchinson and the minister John Wheelwright. Wheelwright and his followers found refuge in New Hampshire; Hutchinson and hers, in Rhode Island. Freshly established as a refuge from New as well as Old England by a hodgepodge of individuals who could not conform to the religious establishment of any of the other New England colonies, Rhode Island, like Connecticut and New Haven, had no royal charter.

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