One influential member of this chorus is the New England preacher Elisha Williams. He is not nearly as well-known as he should be. Williams' crucial sermon in 1744, called the Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants, challenged a 1742 Connecticut statute that prohibited ministers from speaking outside of their own parishes. The statute was an attempt by the government to mute effects of the Great Awakening (by containing the rabble-rousing enthusiasts!) and to shore up the authority of the well-established Congregationalist churches.
Williams committed powerful words to paper, eloquently framing John Locke's theory of civil government and ideas of toleration and individual dignity for the American colonies, while arguing against any government encroachment into the human quest for religious meaning. The growing seeds of discontentment with English control over the colonies can be found in the sermon. Williams' sermon is considered widely influential on his contemporaries and served as a model for later political writings and sermons that called directly for open rebellion against the tyrannical, arbitrary, and unjust actions of the British King.
Williams' most immediate concern was the unjust insertion of the civil government into the private religious affairs of citizens and their church communities. His argument assumed Locke's theory of the natural and inalienable rights of the human, and put forth the idea that the human conscience is free and cannot be subjected to rule by another, especially in matters of religion:
Every man has an equal right to follow the dictates of his own conscience in the affairs of religion. Every one is under an indispensable obligation to search the scripture for himself (which contains the whole of it) and to make the best use of it he can for his own information in the will of God, the nature and duties of Christianity. And as every Christian is so bound; so he has an unalienable right to judge of the sense and meaning of it, and to follow his judgment wherever it leads him; even an equal right with any rulers be they civil or ecclesiastical. This I say, I take to be an original right of the humane nature, and so far from being given up by the individuals of a community that it cannot be given up by them if they should be so weak as to offer it.
For Williams, the free conscience, guided by one's own reason and intuition, prayerfully searches the scriptures and encounters God in a manner unfettered by the rules imposed by external authorities. For Christians in early America, this meant that their individual encounter with the sacred scriptures was the sole "rule of faith and practice to a Christian." For Williams, faith can only lead to salvation if "every Christian has a right of judging for himself what he is to believe and practice in religion according to that rule."
Practically, this means that the "the civil authority hath no power to make or ordain articles of faith, creeds, forms of worship or church government...[which] can have no power to decree any articles of faith." If faith is the free movement of the will opening itself and being drawn back to God, through God's love and mercy, then Williams thought the civil government cannot accomplish anything in this salvation process.
The movement of faith--the conscience being reshaped by God's love--is "perfectly inconsistent with any power in the civil magistrate to make any penal laws in matters of religion." Williams argues that if faith is to work properly, it must be unfettered by the crude instruments of the civil law trying to force the conscience. If only God can save us, then only God can judge our religious lives. Individuals must have the civil right to make the wrong interpretations of scripture and lead the wrong kinds of religious lives. By Williams' reasoning, illogical doctrines and bad interpretations may be a spiritual fault, but they should not make us legally liable.
Williams believed there were great spiritual dangers for the civil ruler, and for the worshipper, if the government attempted to control the worship rituals and dictates of conscience: "if our consciences are under the direction of any humane authority as to religious matters; they cease to be under the direction of Christ." Under this premise, a civil ruler would not only muck up religion if they attempted to control it but, worse, they would usurp the proper role filled exclusively by God. The civil ruler is arrogantly sinful to think that God needs their help in bringing about the soul's salvation. And, to think that they know how to help increase the faithful flock by using the civil law is to stupidly misunderstand the process of faith.
Thus for Williams, the separation between religious life and the civil government protects religion from the blunt instruments and arrogance by civil rulers, as well as creates a space for God to work salvation upon the people, unfettered by manipulation of political designs.
That religion flourishes when left alone by governmental control is a widely-shared idea among the colonists, Founders, and by many others throughout our political and religious history. If religious freedom is to matter--and if we are to fulfill our religious aspirations and callings--then we must be able to do so without the interference of others.
Happy Independence Day.
