Christianity and Freedom

By: Roger Trigg

December 17, 2012

Christianity was born demanding religious freedom. Early Christians were faced with the necessity of proving their loyalty to the Roman Emperor. In a society of many beliefs, they refused to take part in formal ceremonies of the civil religion, which treated the Emperor as divine. They often faced martyrdom as a result. Yet matters became more complicated when Christianity itself became the official religion of the Empire under Constantine. There has ever since been a tug between the assertion that the authority of God was separate from, and superior to, that of the State, and the temptation for the State (in whatever form it took) to use the power of religion to forge a loyalty to itself. Religious identity and national loyalty would become inextricably mixed.
At its best political authority would acknowledge the separate authority of God. At its worst it would try cynically to use redirect religious faith for its own purposes. Yet whether it was trying to uphold what it saw as truth, or use religion cynically, the danger was always that temporal authority would supersede spiritual authority. The history of Europe is replete with examples of battles between State and Church. Indeed the issue of the Church as an institution free from political direction was a constant problem.

Institutional freedom for organisations such as Churches is vital in the functioning of any free society. They provide important buffers between the individual and the State. It is a paradox that, even in a liberal society, the more that individuals seek individual freedom apart from what may be seen as the exacting standards of Churches, the more powerful the State has to become. It has to fulfil the vacuum created by a loss of other forms of authority, particularly moral authority.

The freedom of institutions can nurture a respect for the freedom of individuals, but the right of individuals themselves freely to adopt or reject any form of religious identity has often been met by hostility. If national identity is bound up with certain religious stances, those who reject those stances may seem to offer a threat even to the future of the nation. This proved to be particularly the case four hundred years ago at the start of the reign of King James I in England. He was faced with a threat from Roman Catholics, then regarded, with some reason, as being in league with foreign powers. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, orchestrated by influential Catholic families holding to their traditional faith, narrowly failed to blow up the Houses of Parliament on the occasion of the State Opening of Parliament. James also faced demands from Puritans and others for a greater religious freedom that itself might seem to challenge the fabric of the nation. This was far from fanciful. \Only a generation later, England was convulsed by a Civil War. Arguments amongst Protestants about religious identity, and religious freedom, undoubtedly played a part.

In this unstable political situation, with the Established Church of England being threatened on two sides, by Catholics and some Protestants calling themselves ‘separatists’, what is generally accepted as the first modern argument for individual religious freedom was made. 1612, exactly 400 years ago, was the year after the publication of the Authorised Version of the Bible, approved by King James. In that year, one the first English Baptists, Thomas Helwys wrote a treatise, upholding the idea of religious liberty.* He rather unwisely sent a copy personally to the King, in which he inscribed the view that ‘if the King has authority to make spiritual lords and laws, then he is an immortal God and not a mortal man.’ The King was not impressed, and Helwys ended his days in Newgate Prison, in London.

Nevertheless Helwys’ arguments in his book had a powerful influence, and they were to echo on through the years. Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, and a somewhat extreme supporter of religious freedom, was a boy living only a few hundred yards from Newgate Prison while Helwys was there. Helwys’ views were to exercise a powerful, indirect, influence on writers such as John Locke who himself was avidly read by some of the Founders of the United States. It is no coincidence that those most fervently pressing for individual religious freedom in places such as Virginia at the time of Independence were the Baptists.

What did Helwys say that was to strike such an important note for subsequent history? His arguments were themselves theological, as when he asks the King whether it is not ‘most equal that men should choose their religion themselves, seeing they only must stand themselves before the judgment seat of God to answer for themselves.’ The thought is taken by up by John Locke in his famous Letter Concerning Toleration, written some seventy years later, when he claims that ‘faith only and inward sincerity, are the things that procure acceptance with God’.

Helwys also drew a distinction between an earthly kingdom subject to the King and a heavenly kingdom over which the King could have no jurisdiction. He proclaims: ‘Let it suffice the King to have all rule over the people’s bodies and goods, and let not our lord the King give his power to be exercised over the spirits of his people.’ ‘Men’s religion,' Helwys says, ‘is between God and themselves.’

The thesis of the two kingdoms reflected much Protestant thinking, and still lives on in many human rights charters, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, with their distinction between personal belief, regarded as an absolute right, and the right to manifest one’s beliefs. The latter is highly qualified, and it often seems that it can be subject to the fashionable obsessions of the day. Yet Christianity cannot be split in this way between personal, private belief, and what is manifested in public or bodily, form. The laudable assertion of our duties to God above secular authority seems to have been transmuted into a distinction between the private, ‘spiritual’, realm of religion and a public realm into which religion should not enter. Some Protestant sects have indeed succumbed to this ‘quietist’ temptation, and even opted out of any contribution to the public good.

However crucial the claim that the State should not encroach on people’s response to God, the withdrawal of religion in general, and Christianity in particular, into a protected private sphere, with no public influence or relevance, is a denial of much that Christianity should stand for The familiar words of the Lord’s Prayer themselves draw attention to the desire that ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth, as it is heaven’. There is no suggestion there of two kingdoms with a divided jurisdiction. This, it is held, is God’s world, and earthly rulers should themselves acknowledge that in what they do.

For all Helwys’ personal courage, and important witness to the role of individual religious freedom, his life, like that of Roger Williams, can also be a warning. Roger Williams fell out with just about every religious group. Having to flee persecution by going to Boston from England, he was in turn eventually expelled from Massachusetts, and in Rhode Island even quarrelled with Quakers, amongst others. Similarly, Helwys’ defence of religious liberty finds him attacking, with heated prose, not just Roman Catholics and Anglican prelates, but also Puritans, and the Separatists. That included just about everybody else. The problem with this kind of exaltation of individual conscience is that one can soon find oneself in a Church of one person. The apparent subjectivism of guidance by some inner light can leave one with a precarious grasp on a truth that can be agreed with others. It is no wonder that Churches have always been wary of such unbridled licence, but feel that they have to set standards to safeguard the truth, as they see it, passed down through the generations from the time of the Apostles.

Yet this safeguarding of objective truth through teaching and practice can itself at times seem at attack on personal freedom. Heresy hunting has often resulted in oppressive and coercive practices. The Inquisition in Europe was not an arbitrary instrument of persecution against all and sundry, but was intended to safeguard the Catholic Church from what were seen as growing heresies within it perpetrated by baptized Christians, whether Protestants, converted Jews or other suspect characters. General superstition and witchcraft were also targets. The intention was to preserve truth. The result was an appalling coercion that certainly contradicts any idea in Christianity that, as Helwys and others have seen, we each have answer our own freely chosen way of life at the throne of God.

How then can one reconcile the demands of a freely chosen subjective commitment and the role of an objective truth held in common? The freedom which Helwys demands be seen as a gift of God, has to be respected as such. With it, however, comes the gift of reason. We do not each make up our minds in isolation but can share in reasoning about what is true. Without freedom we cannot properly come to judge truth for ourselves. Without the ballast of shared reason, we will each flounder in a morass of subjective opinion. It is not surprising that from the same English theological ferment that produced first people like Thomas Helwys and then Roger Williams, later groups of thinkers were sobered by the divisions producing the Civil War. The Cambridge Platonists saw that freedom had to be anchored by a God-given reason, and under their influence John Locke too tried to hold the two together. Freedom without reason is dangerous. Reason without freedom is impotent.

_______________

*See Thomas Helwys: A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, ed R. Groves (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 1998.

Discover similar content through these related topics and regions.

Opens in a new window