In a fascinating chapter entitled “The Evangelical Encounter with the Enlightenment,” Catherine A. Brekus details early evangelicals’ relationship with Enlightenment principles. To be sure, evangelicals did not imbibe Enlightenment ideas and ideals wholesale. As Brekus explains:
On the surface, the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, and evangelicalism, with its heart-centered piety, seem to have stood in stark opposition to each other. Evangelicals resisted Enlightenment ideas in multiple ways: they disavowed images of human goodness; they denied that the purpose of life was human happiness; they rejected the affirmation of everyday life, and they defended the real existence of hell. They deliberately tried to set themselves apart form the new, modern world that was beginning to emerge in the eighteenth century, a world that valued freedom, choice, and the pursuit of happiness.[1]
But they also didn’t reject the Enlightenment altogether. Brekus maintains that evangelicals were “especially attracted to John Locke’s emphasis on firsthand experience as the basis of knowledge,” which she sees as underpinning some evangelical’s emphasis on “experimental” religion.[2]
Yet Brekus proceeds to argue that evangelical arguments for religious liberty are somewhat shaped by Enlightenment philosophy and “the right of the sovereign individual to choose his own government, to pursue his own economic interests in the marketplace, and to worship according to the dictates of his own conscience.”[3] Of Samuel Davies (1723–61), one of the main figures in the chapter, Brekus writes, “His defense of individual religious freedom became a hallmark of the evangelical movement.”[4]
It’s at this point where I find myself at least in partial disagreement with Brekus.[5] Her argument seems to overemphasize the role of the Enlightenment in an evangelical understanding of religious freedom and the dictates of conscience. Summarizing the thought of Davies, Brekus writes, “Not even the king had the right to elevate himself over God by acting as the ultimate judge of religious truth.”[6] But this line of thought had appeared among English and American Protestants (one might even say evangelicals) over a century before in the writings of Thomas Helwys and Roger Williams.
My aim is not merely to contend that Helwys and Williams preceded men such as Davies in making their case for religious freedom, although they clearly did. My main contention is that Helwys’s and Williams’s arguments for religious liberty actually preceded the Enlightenment philosophers who supposedly influenced evangelical arguments for religious liberty. Thus evangelical arguments for religious liberty, as well as one’s ability to follow the dictates of conscience in matters of religion, are not necessarily rooted in Enlightenment philosophy. I believe this is particularly true for Thomas Helwys.
Thomas Helwys (c. 1575–c. 1616)
Helwys’s most ardent defense of religious liberty appeared in print in the early 1600s. In A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (1612), Helwys contends that all people should have religious freedom. And Helwys really meant all. He wrote: “Neither may the King be judged between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.”[7] The Act of Toleration (1689) granted religious freedom to Trinitarians but denied religious freedom to anti-Trinitarians and Catholics.
Helwys simply did not believe that civil magistrates hold of responsibility of meddling in religious matters. Helwys wrote to King James, “The king is a mortal man and not God, therefore he has no power over the immortal souls of his subjects, to make laws and ordinances for them and to set spiritual lords over them. If the king has the authority to make spiritual lords and laws, then he is an immortal God and not a mortal man.”[8] This almost certainly landed Helwys in prison where he likely died in 1616.
The important thing to take away from this is that Helwys defended universal religious toleration, not on the basis of Enlightenment principles and ideals. Instead, he based them upon a nuanced interpretation of key biblical passages. Locke’s argument for religious freedom wouldn’t appear in print for nearly seventy-five more years. This demonstrates an early Protestant argument for religious liberty that is not in any way based upon the Enlightenment.
Roger Williams (1603–83)
A similar argument could be made for Roger Williams. Williams opposed the Puritan view of the relationship between the government and the civil magistrate. As James Byrd explains, “Puritans believed that the bible demonstrated that Baptists, Quakers, and other so-called heretics and pagans deserved punishment because they threatened both civil peace and religious orthodoxy in the ‘Bible Commonwealths’ of New England.”[9] Williams was vehemently opposed to such notions. Consequently, he was exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 but went on to found both the colony of Rhode Island and the first Baptist church in America in Providence, Rhode Island.
Williams’s most well-known work on religious liberty was The Bloudy Tenent. In this work Williams argued for complete religious toleration over the bloody tenet of religious persecution of heretics. For Williams, as for Helwys, a person should not be punished by civil magistrates for their religious beliefs, even if their religious beliefs are deemed heretical. Religious persecution, according to Williams, was expressly not a Christian concept.
Byrd has ably demonstrated that Roger Williams arrived at his views on religious liberty through his reading of the Bible. “In his published appeals for religious liberty,” writes Byrd, “Williams quoted scripture incessantly, fully aware that the Bible was the authoritative basis for any argument that needed to persuade the widest possible audience.”[10] The problem for Williams was that his opponents, those in favor of religious persecution, also argued their case from the Bible. The difference between Williams, who opposed religious persecution, and John Cotton, who favored religious persecution, was not that Williams read the philosophers and Cotton followed the Bible. Williams argued from the Bible but believed that his opponents had misinterpreted, and even perverted, it.[11]
Williams, writing in the American colonies decades after Helwys, seems to draw on English Baptists such as Helwys and John Murton. Byrd’s assessment will interest many of our readers: “In his interpretation of these passages, Williams likely appropriated the insights of some English Baptist writers, although they did not give the passages as much attention as Williams did.”[12] This is not to say that Helwys, Murton, or Williams were monolithic in their approaches to religious liberty. However, the connection does seem to demonstrate that both drew their arguments for religious liberty from the text of Scripture.
Conclusion
Thomas Helwys and Roger Williams represent early Protestant arguments for religious liberty that preceded the influence of Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke. The two authors wrote on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and their influence was significant in their respective locales. But the primary point that I want to make is that religious liberty, or religious freedom, as it developed in the early seventeenth century, was firmly rooted in the biblical text. I do not reject the narrative that Locke exerted some influence over the evangelicals of the mid-eighteenth century. But Protestant arguments for religious liberty and religious freedom came long before Locke and were anchored almost exclusively in the teachings of the Bible.
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[1]Catherine A. Brekus, “The Evangelical Encounter with the Enlightenment” in Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism, ed. Heath W. Carter and Laura Rominger Porter (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 31.
[2]Ibid.
[3]Ibid., 34.
[4]Ibid., 36.
[5]Maybe the disagreement lies somewhat in how we might define the term evangelical.
[6]Ibid., 35.
[7]Thomas Helwys, A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (London: 1612), 69. Spelling modernized.
[8] This appears as a handwritten inscription at the beginning of A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity.
[9]James P. Byrd, Jr., The Challenges of Roger Williams: Religious Liberty, Violent Persecution, and the Bible (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002), 1.
[10]Ibid., 3.
[11]Ibid., 4-5.
[12]Ibid., 148, n.50.
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