I began my research this summer with a common but rarely analyzed observation: the campaign for religious liberty in colonial New England was a campaign against religious taxes. Focusing on taxation, however, reveals that this campaign hinged on evolving notions of private property. To be sure, advocates of religious liberty eulogized conscience and tolerance, but typically the actual legal battles waged between dissenters and the established churches of Connecticut and Massachusetts came down to bitter disputes over who owned what. As a result, dissenters’ demand for the separation of church and state also entailed that both churches and states radically redefine their relationship to their citizens’ economic lives.
For a glimpse into this turbulent history of temporal and eternal goods, take the case of Canterbury, Connecticut. Like all Connecticut towns, Canterbury was a Congregationalist community in both law and fact. Yet this uniformity obscures a division between town and church. Everyone in the town belonged to Canterbury’s ecclesiastical society, giving the town’s lone church a monopoly on worship and requiring all residents to contribute to its expenses. Yet only a minority satisfied the moral and spiritual criteria for church membership. In times of peace, town and church worked together to create a Christian commonwealth. The 1740s, however, were not peaceful. Canterbury was touched by the First Great Awakening in 1741, and while most initially welcomed the swell of new members this revival brought, conflict broke out when the more enthusiastic participants began to doubt that some of the older members (and a new pastoral candidate) were true Christians. This “New Light” party constituted a majority of church members. Most residents, however, were offended that their salvation was questioned and formed a dominant “anti-revivalist” faction in the town.
These overlapping political domains—church and town—collided in a debate over who owned the church. The question was both figurative and literal. When the church majority voted down the unsatisfactory pastoral candidate proposed by the town, an anti-revivalist church member got control of the keys to the meetinghouse and refused to open it for the itinerant preachers the church majority invited. This seemingly minor dispute provoked something of a constitutional crisis. The town called a council of local ministers in accordance with the Saybrook Platform, an ecclesiastical constitution adopted by Connecticut’s colonial government in 1708. Yet the church itself had previously voted to use the older Cambridge Platform to guide church affairs. Written in 1648, it upheld the congregation’s right to self-governance against both civil assemblies and ministerial associations. Unsurprisingly, the council favored the Saybrook Platform, reasoning that it would be “an infringement on ye natural rights and liberties of mankind” to hold the town to the Cambridge Platform without their “consent.” The church, of course, had explicitly withheld their consent to be judged by the Saybrook Platform, but this irony didn’t matter: the council ruled that the meetinghouse legally belonged to the town. And so, like similar groups across New England, the New Lights became “Separates”—evangelical Congregationalists who left the established church in order to form a purer and more independent church.
Having lost this initial contest, Canterbury’s Separates prepared for a long struggle against Connecticut’s Standing Order, as the established Congregational clergy were known. The crux of the issue remained property: the town demanded that the Separates continue to pay for the meetinghouse they couldn’t use and the minister they couldn’t choose. The Separates’ first response was fundamentally theological. As they stated in a 1746 church covenant, true churches ought to exercise their Christ-given prerogative in “supporting and maintaining the Gospel ministry, ordinances and ye poor of ye church, without using the civil sword or any coercive way to force men thereto.” Yet Connecticut’s civil and religious powers disagreed, believing that God commanded the state to care for the common good of its citizens by providing strong churches. Thus, when the Separates appeared before the General Assembly in 1747 to request relief from religious taxes and the penalties they paid for protesting them, they tried a civil argument rooted in rights and consent: “no body, neither single person, nor church, nor even commonwealth has any just title to invade the civil rights and worldly goods of each other upon the pretence of religion.” Infused with a bit of John Locke, Isaac Backus—the most influential Separate-turned-Baptist in colonial America—soon perfected this property-based critique of ecclesiastical taxes, arguing that “the having of temporal property in our own power so as not to have it taken away without our consent is the turning point of all civil freedom.” It would take the better part of a century—the Canterbury Separates weren’t freed from ecclesiastical taxes until 1766, and Connecticut didn’t disestablish its churches until 1818—but dissenters had discovered a powerful argument they could use to chip away at the alliance between church and state.
Thus, New England’s dissenters concluded that the freedoms of belief, worship, and assembly were insufficient unless accompanied by an expanded right to private property: a right to use one’s property to support the religion of one’s choosing in the amount of one’s choosing. In retrospect, the first movements of this history are surprising. The Canterbury Separates’ initial arguments assumed communal privileges guaranteed by an ecclesiastical constitution, while their opponents in the state church introduced the language of individual rights and consent. This story’s conclusion, however, seems strikingly familiar in our contemporary political context: a well-organized group of American evangelicals, leery of the state’s appeals to the common good, came to believe that religious liberties entailed economic liberties and that economic liberties were the surest safeguard of religious liberties.
