Fields of Blood (49 page)

As William
Cavanaugh explains in
The
Myth of Religious Violence,
these wars were neither “all about religion” nor “all about politics.” Yet it is true that these wars helped create the idea of “religion” as a private and personal activity, separate from mundane affairs.
¹⁰⁴
Chancellor
Axel Oxenstierna, who masterminded
Sweden’s participation in the Thirty Years’ War, told the Swedish Council that the conflict was “not so much a matter of religion, but rather of serving the status publicus, wherein religion is also comprehended.”
¹⁰⁵
He could speak in this way because the
Lutheran church had already been absorbed or “comprehended” by the Swedish state. New configurations of political power were beginning to force the Church into a subordinate realm, a process that involved a fundamental reallocation of authority and resources. When the new word
secularization
was coined in
France during the late sixteenth century, it originally referred to “the transfer of goods from the possession of the Church into that of the ‘world’ [
saeculum
].”
¹⁰⁶
Legislative and judicial powers that had been in the Church’s remit were gradually transferred to the new sovereign state.

Like most states, these early modern kingdoms were achieved by
force: all struggled to annex as much land as possible and had internal battles with the cities, clergy, local associations, and aristocracies who jealously guarded traditional privileges and immunities that sovereign states could not permit.
¹⁰⁷
The modern state had come into being by militarily defeating rival political institutions: the empire, the city-state, and the feudal lordship.
¹⁰⁸
The church, which had been so integral to medieval government, also had to be subdued. Thus the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars were “the crucible in which some of the competing forces from an earlier age were consumed in the fire and others blended and transmuted into new compounds … the matrix of all that came after.”
¹⁰⁹

These political and social developments required a new understanding of the word
religion.
¹¹⁰
One of the characteristics of early modern thought was a tendency to assume binary contrasts. In an attempt to define phenomena more exactly, categories of experience that had once co-inhered were now set off against each other: faith and reason, intellect and emotion, and church and state. Hitherto, the “internal” and “external” worlds had been complementary, but now “religion” was becoming a private, internalized commitment separate from such “external” activities as politics.
Protestants, whose reinterpretation of Christianity was itself a product of early
modernity, would define
religion
and set an agenda to which other faith traditions would be expected to conform. This new definition mirrored the programs of the new sovereign states, which were relegating “religion” to the private sphere.

A crucial figure in this development was Edward, Lord
Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), who was not only a philosopher but also a statesman committed to the state control of ecclesiastical affairs. His most important work,
De Veritate,
which influenced such important philosophers as
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645),
René Descartes (1596–1650), and
John Locke (1632–1704), argued that Christianity was neither an institution nor a way of life but a set of five truths that were innate in the human mind: (1) a supreme deity existed, (2) which should be worshipped (3) and served by ethical living and natural piety; (4) human beings were thus required to reject sin and (5) would be rewarded or punished by God after death. Because these notions were instinctive, self-evident,
and accessible to the meanest intelligence, the rituals and guidance of a church were entirely unnecessary.
¹¹¹
These “truths” would, however, seem strange indeed to
Buddhists,
Hindus, Confucians, or Daoists, and many Jews, Christians, and
Muslims would also find them bleakly unrepresentative of their faith. Herbert was convinced that “all men will be unanimously eager for this austere worship of God,” and since everybody would agree on “these natural tokens of faith,” it was the key to peace; “insolent spirits” who refused to accept them must be punished by the secular magistracy.
¹¹²
Emphasis on the “natural,” “normal,” and “innate” character of these core ideas implied that those who did not discover them in their minds were in some way unnatural and abnormal: a dark current was emerging in early modern thought. This extreme privatization of faith, therefore, had the potential to become as divisive, coercive, and intolerant as the so-called
religious
passions it was trying to abolish.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) also saw state control of the church as essential to peace and wanted a strong monarch to take over the church and enforce religious unity. A committed royalist, he wrote his classic
Leviathan
(1651) in exile in
Paris after the English Civil War. The disruptive forces of religion, Hobbes argued, must be curbed as effectively as God had subdued Leviathan, the biblical chaos-monster, to create an ordered universe. Hobbes was adamant that pointless squabbling about irrational dogmas had been entirely responsible for the
Wars of Religion. Not everybody shared this view, however. In
Commonwealth of Oceana
(1656), the English political theorist
James Harrington discussed the economic and legal issues that had contributed to these conflicts, but Hobbes would have none of it. The preachers alone, he insisted, had been “the cause of all our late mischief” by leading the people astray with “disreputable doctrines.” The
Presbyterian divines, he believed, had been particularly culpable in stirring up unruly passions before the English Civil War and were “therefore guilty of all that fell.”
¹¹³
Hobbes’s solution was to create an absolute state that would crush the tendency of human beings to cling obstinately to their own beliefs, which doomed them to perpetual warfare. Instead, they must learn to recognize the frailty of our grasp on truth, enter into a contractual relationship with one another, elect an
absolute monarch, and accept his ideas as their own.
¹¹⁴
This ruler would control the clergy in such a way as to prevent even the possibility of sectarian
conflict.
¹¹⁵
Alas, history would show that Hobbes’s solution was too simplistic; the states of Europe would continue to fight one another savagely, with or without sectarian strife.

John Locke’s solution was religious freedom, since, in his view, the Wars of Religion had been caused by a fatal inability to entertain other points of view. “Religion,” he argued, was a “private search” and as such could not be policed by the government; in this personal quest, everyone must rely on “his own endeavours” rather than an external authority. To mingle “religion” and politics was a grievous, dangerous, and existential error:

Locke assumed that the separation of politics and religion was written into the very nature of things. But this, of course, was a radical innovation that most of his contemporaries would find extraordinary and unacceptable. It would make modern “religion” entirely different from anything that had gone before. Yet because of the violent passions it supposedly unleashed, Locke insisted that the segregation of “religion” from government was “above all things necessary” for the creation of a peaceful society.
¹¹⁷
In Locke we see the birth of the “myth of religious violence” that would become ingrained in the Western ethos.

It is true that Western
Christianity had become more internalized during the early modern period. This is evident in
Luther’s conception of faith as an interior appropriation of Christ’s saving power, in the mysticism of
Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), and in the
Spiritual Exercises
of
Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). In the past the exploration of the inner world had compelled
Buddhist
monks to work “for the welfare and happiness of the people” and Confucians to engage in a political effort to reform society. After his solitary struggle with
Satan in the wilderness,
Jesus had embarked on a ministry of healing in the troubled villages of
Galilee that led to his execution by the Roman authorities. Muhammad had left his cave on
Mount Hira for a political struggle against the structural
violence of Mecca. In the early modern period too, the
Spiritual Exercises
had propelled
Ignatius’s
Jesuits all over the world—to
Japan,
India,
China, and the
Americas. But modern “religion” would try to subvert this natural dynamic by turning the seeker in upon himself, and inevitably, many would rebel against this unnatural privatization of their faith.

Unable to extend the natural human rights they were establishing to the indigenous peoples of the New World, the
Renaissance
humanists had already revealed the insidious underside of early modern ideas that still inform our political life.
Locke, who was among the first to formulate the liberal ethos of modern politics, also revealed the darker aspect of the
secularism he proposed. A pioneer of tolerance, he was adamant that the sovereign state could not accommodate either
Catholicism or
Islam;
¹¹⁸
he endorsed a master’s “Absolute, Arbitrary, Despotical Power” over a slave that included “the power to kill him at any time.” Himself directly involved in the colonization of the Carolinas, Locke argued that the native “kings” of America had no legal jurisdiction or right of ownership of their land. Like the urbane
Thomas More, he found it intolerable that the “wild woods and uncultivated waste of America be left to nature, without any improvement, tillage and husbandry,” when it could be used to support the “needy and wretched” of Europe.
¹¹⁹
A new system of violent oppression was emerging that would privilege the liberal, secular West at the expense of the indigenous peoples of its colonies.

On the issue of colonization, most early modern thinkers agreed with Locke. Grotius contended that any military action against the natives was just because they had no legal claim to their territory.
¹²⁰
Hobbes believed that because they had not developed an agrarian economy, the
Native Americans—“few, savage, short-lived, poor and mean”—must relinquish their land.
¹²¹
And in a sermon delivered in
London in 1622 to the
Virginia Company, which had received a royal charter to settle all the terrain between what is now New York and South Carolina,
John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, argued that: “In the Law of Nature and Nations, a Land never inhabited by any or utterly derelicted and immemorially abandoned by the former Inhabitants, becomes theirs that will possess it.”
¹²²
The colonists would take this belief with them to North America—but unlike these early modern thinkers, they had absolutely no intention of separating church and state.

10

W
hen the
Pilgrim Fathers arrived in
Massachusetts Bay in 1630, they would have been horrified to hear that they were about to lay the foundations of the world’s first secular republic. They had left England because Archbishop
Laud, they believed, had corrupted their church with popish practices; they regarded their migration as a new Exodus and America, the “English Canaan,” as their “land of Promise.”
¹
Before landing,
John Winthrop, first governor of the Bay Colony, reminded them that they had come to the American wilderness to build a truly
Protestant community that would be a light to other nations and inspire Old England to revive the
Reformation:
²
“We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world.”
³
One of their most important missions was to save the Native Americans from the wiles of the French Catholic settlers in North America, making New England a “bulwark against the kingdom of
Antichrist, which the Jesuits labour to rear up in these parts.”
⁴
Winthrop would have found the notion of a secular state inconceivable, and like most of the colonists, he had no time for democracy. Before they set foot on American soil, he reminded the migrants firmly that God had “so disposed the condition of mankind,
as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection.”
⁵

The Puritans were convinced that God had given the land to them by a special dispensation, but this covenantal faith blended seamlessly with the
humanists’ more secular doctrine of natural human rights. On the eve of their departure from Southampton in 1630, their minister,
John Cotton, had listed all the biblical precedents for their migration. After showing that God had given the children of
Adam and
Noah, who had both colonized an “empty” world, the “liberty” to inhabit a “vacant place” without either buying it from the original inhabitants or asking their leave, he segued quite naturally into the argument: “It is a principle in nature, that in a vacant soil he that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his right it is.”
⁶
England was overcrowded, contended Robert Cushman, business manager of the Bay Company, and America was “a vast and empty chaos” because the Indians were “not industrious, neither having art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities but all spoils, rots and is marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering etc.” It was therefore “lawful” for the settlers “to take a land which none useth.”
⁷
This liberal doctrine would inform their dealings with the Native Americans quite as much as the biblical teachings.

The centrality of
Original Sin in their theology predisposed these staunchly Protestant colonists toward an absolutist remedy for man’s fallen nature in their polity. If Adam had not sinned, government would have been unnecessary; but unredeemed men and women were naturally prone to lie, steal, and murder, and these evil impulses could be forcibly held in check only by a strong, authoritative government. Those who had been “born again” enjoyed the freedom of the sons of God but were at liberty only to do what God commanded. At their conversion, they had surrendered the right to follow their own inclinations and must submit to the authorities God had placed over them.
⁸

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was, of course, not the first English settlement in North America. The founders of
Jamestown in
Virginia had arrived in 1607. They were not ardent Puritan dissenters but mercantilists, intent on making their colony a profitable commercial enterprise. Yet on disembarking, the first thing they did was build a makeshift church, with a sail for a roof and logs for pews. Their colony was almost as strict as Massachusetts.
⁹
Church services were obligatory, and there
were fines for drunkenness, gambling, adultery, idleness, and ostentatious dress. If an offender failed to change his ways, he was excommunicated and his property confiscated.
¹⁰
This was a Christian as well as a commercial enterprise, hailed in
London as a pivotal moment in salvation history. According to its royal charter, the Virginia Company’s chief objective was the conversion of the native peoples rather than financial success.
¹¹
As good early-modern Protestants, Virginians adhered to the principles of the Treaty of
Augsburg:
cuius regio, eius religio
(“whoever controls the region controls religion”). Where most agrarian rulers had rarely attempted to control the spiritual lives of their subjects, the commercially minded Virginians took it for granted that in a properly regulated society all citizens should have the same faith and that it was the duty of any government to enforce religious observance.

John Locke was not yet born, so in the American colonies, religion, politics, and economics were still inseparable. Indeed, the Virginians were incapable of thinking of
commerce as a purely secular activity.
¹²
Samuel Purchas, the company’s propagandist, gave fullest expression to their ideology.
¹³
If
Adam had not fallen, the whole world would have retained its original perfection and exploration would have been easy. With the arrival of sin, though, men became so depraved that they would have slaughtered one another had not God scattered them over the earth after the destruction of the
Tower of Babel and kept them in ignorance of one another. Yet he had also decreed that commerce would bring them together again. In Eden, Adam had enjoyed all essential commodities, but these too had been dispersed after the Fall. Now, thanks to modern maritime technology, a country in one region could supply what was lacking in other places, and God could use the global market to redeem the non-Christian world. In America the Virginians would supply staples for
famine-prone
England and at the same time bring the gospel to the Indians. A company broadsheet explained that God no longer worked through prophets and miracles; the only way to evangelize the world these days was “mixtly, by discoverie, and
trade of marchants.” Living on the Indians’ land and trading with them, the colonists would “sell to them the pearles of heaven” by “dailie conversation.”
¹⁴
So the quest for commodities, Purchas insisted, was not an end in itself, and the company would fail if it sought only profit.

Purchas initially believed that the land must not be forcibly taken from the Indians because it had been assigned to them by God.
¹⁵
His
Protestant ideology may have been paternalistic, but it also had a measure of respect for the indigenous peoples. Yet during the first two terrible winters, when the colonists were starving to death, some of their conscripted laborers had fled to the local
Powhattans, and when the English governor asked their chief to return the fugitives, he disdainfully refused. Whereupon the English militia descended on the settlement, killed fifteen Native Americans, burned their houses, cut down their corn, and abducted the queen, killing her children. So much for peaceful “dailie conversation.” The Indians were bewildered: “Why will you destroy us who supply you with food?” asked Chief Powhattan: “Why are you jealous of us? We are unarmed and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner.”
¹⁶

By 1622 the Indians had become seriously alarmed by the rapid growth of the colony; the English had taken over a significant acreage of their hunting grounds, depriving them of essential resources.
¹⁷
In a sudden attack on Jamestown, the Powhattans killed about a third of the English population. The Virginians retaliated in a ruthless war of attrition: they would allow local tribes to settle and plant their corn and then, just before the harvest, attack them, killing as many natives as possible. Within three years they had avenged the Jamestown massacre many times over. Instead of founding their colony on the compassionate principles of the gospel, they had inaugurated a policy of elimination imposed by ruthless military force. Even Purchas was forced to abandon the Bible and rely on the
humanists’ aggressive doctrine of human rights when he finally agreed that the Indians deserved their fate because, by resisting English settlement, they had broken the law of nature.
¹⁸
More pragmatic considerations were beginning to replace the old piety. The company had not been able to produce the staples England needed, and investors had not seen an adequate return. The only way their colony could function was to cultivate tobacco and sell it at five shillings a pound. Begun as a holy enterprise, Virginia would gradually be secularized not by
Locke’s liberal ideology but by pressure of events.

The Puritans of Massachusetts had no qualms about killing Indians. They had left England during the
Thirty Years’ War, had absorbed the militancy of that fearsome time, and justified their violence by a highly selective reading of the Bible. Ignoring
Jesus’s pacifist teachings, they drew on the bellicosity of some of the
Hebrew scriptures. “God is an excellent Man of War,” preached
Alexander Leighton, and the Bible “the best
handbook on war.” Their revered minister
John Cotton had instructed them that they could attack the natives “without provocation”—a procedure normally unlawful—because they had not only a natural right to their territory, but “a special Commission from God” to take their land.
¹⁹
Already there were signs of the exceptionalist thinking that would in the future often characterize American politics. In 1636
William Bradford described a raid on the Pequot village of Fort Mystic on the
Connecticut shore to avenge the murder of an English trader, contemplating the fearsome carnage with lofty complacency:

When the
Puritans negotiated the
Treaty of Hertford (1638) with the few Pequot survivors, they insisted on the destruction of all Pequot villages and sold the women and children into
slavery. Should Christians have behaved more compassionately? asked
Captain John Underhill, a veteran of the
Thirty Years’ War. He answered his rhetorical question with a decided negative: God supported the English, “so we had sufficient light for our proceedings.”
²¹

Thirty years later, when Europeans were recoiling from the violence in the Thirty Years’ War, some Puritans had begun to question the validity of these Indian campaigns.
²²
After the murder of an Indian convert to
Christianity in 1675, the
Plymouth authorities, on very shaky evidence, pinned the blame on
Metacom, chief of the
Wampanoag, whom the English called “King Philip.” When they executed three of his aides, Metacom with his Indian allies promptly devastated fifty out of the ninety English towns in Plymouth and
Rhode Island; by the spring of 1676 the Indian armies were within ten miles of
Boston. In the autumn the war turned in the colonists’ favor. Yet they were facing a hard winter and the
Narragansetts on Rhode Island had food and supplies. Accusing them—again on dubious grounds—of aiding Metacom, the English militia
attacked and looted the village, massacred its inhabitants—most of them noncombatant refugees—and burned the settlement to the ground. The war continued with
atrocities on both sides—Indian warriors scalped their prisoners alive; the English disemboweled and quartered theirs—but in the summer of 1676, both sides abandoned the struggle. Almost half the prewar Indian population had been eliminated: 1,250 were killed in battle, 625 died of wounds, and 3,000 died of disease in captivity. The colonies, however, suffered only about 800 casualties, a mere 1.6 percent of the total English population of 50,000.