Being loved by your enemies: Roger Williams

I’ve often been struck by how much people seemed to like Roger Williams.  Williams, you will recall, was  the Puritan minister who was thrown out of New England for teaching unpalatable things concerning holiness and rights to land.  Even while ministers and authority figures in Massachusetts opposed him, some of those very opponents also continued to respect him.  The high point of that strand of the story came when The Suits arrived at Williams’ door to bundle him on to the next boat back to England.  But he was not there:  he had been warned by a friend and fled.  Years later, Williams revealed the name of that friend:  one of the biggest Suits of all, his opponent John Winthrop.  

How does someone retain the respect and friendship of one’s “enemies?”  I am not referring to mortal enemies, but those on the opposite side of the fence -- those across the aisle -- the yin to one’s yang.  Perhaps this snippet from an NPR book review sheds some light.  

The book in question is Paris:  A Love Story, by Kati Marton.  It’s an autobiography, covering Marton’s marriage to diplomat Richard Holbrooke.  I was struck by this story:

When Holbrooke fell ill, Marton received calls of concern from two leaders Holbrooke was often at odds with — President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan.

"I think they understood that he was throwing himself body and soul into the work," says Marton. "I was attending Mass with my friend Samantha Power, and Karzai's call came through, so I stepped outside. . . . I said to him, 'Mr. President, for Richard, Afghanistan is more than an assignment. He's absolutely passionate about your country and about your people, and committed to finding some kind of a solution to this.' And I thought I heard emotion when he said, 'We need him back here.'

"And that [was] followed a nanosecond later by a call from the President of Pakistan," Marton continues. "He said, 'Kati, I told him he was overdoing it. He was traveling to the most awful places and crawling inside those tents in refugee camps, and I told him, 'Richard, you're not as young as you think.' So it was a real human-to-human conversation. And whatever anybody says about President Zardari's weaknesses, for me, he was a human being.”

An honorable man can be recognized as such even by his opponents, and human affection can be refreshingly broad in its boundaries.  I think Winthrop recognized in Williams things that he himself valued -- spiritual passion, love for God and a commitment to live by the truth.  Even when he did not agree with what Williams called truth, he nevertheless recognized in him an honorable man.  It was enough to impel him to slip over to his house under the cover of night and say, “Roger, they’re coming for you.  You’ll have to run for it.  But remember, friend -- try not to overdo it."

Poetry for Dummies

Bad news, folks . . . writing poetry is more than rhyming emotion-laden words in meter.  Worse news:  17th-century poetry was a craft as much as an art, and I think I probably should learn a lot of the under-the-hood stuff if I’m going to understand Ole Annie, my poet buddy whose life I’m trying to recreate.

I’ve had some helps in this department -- a couple of books, good ones:  Puritan Poets and Poetics, and Sinful Self, Saintly Self:  the Puritan Experience of Poetry.  They have further directed me to a 16-the century book,The Art of English Poesie, which is a great window into the craft of poetry writing.  But . . . sigh.  Constructing a poem is like building a cathedral; it has rules and conventions and its own terminology as well.  And I should know something about all that so I can understand what the heck she was attempting when she sat down to write.  So I have to learn it.  Some of it.  Enough to get along; the poetic equivalent of “Ou est la salle de bain?” for the American in France.  Well, more than that, I guess.

And when I finish that, maybe I can go back to learning about 17th-century ships, a task I happily set aside last spring.  Humph.

I can’t even figure out what a “foot” is.  It’s a poetic term, and it’s related to syllables, but it’s not syllables.  Mr. Poesie Art didn’t make it clear, and I haven’t consulted Dr. Google yet.

But I am learning.  Learning, learning, learning, getting comfy inside Anne Bradstreet’s mental world, and painting it out again in a story that is now at about 30,000 words.

Writing Pains #2

Abigail's small round face, with its pretty cheeks, mild brow and petite nose, was all feminine softness.  But the tilt of her chin, the ease of her hands resting on the coverlet with knuckles lightly flexed spoke in low tones of her authority.

Pretty prose, eh?  Or maybe not.  I wrote that this morning, and at the moment I’m very fond of it.  But maybe in a week or a year I’ll hate it so much that I will have to take down this post and personally excise it from the memory of anyone who has read it.  Writing is so emotional.

The funny part of it is that the paragraph I wanted to write this morning wasn’t supposed to be about Abigail at all, but rather was supposed to make evident This Other Thing about a different character.  But I got caught up in another current -- the horses got the bits in their teeth and ran -- the lunatics got in control of the madhouse -- and I ended up with something very different.  That happens to me on a regular basis when I’m writing.  It feels rather like inspiration, though I suspect it is rooted in a lack of discipline or a lack of clear vision of where I’m going, in this paragraph, today.  It’s rather like taking a right turn, fully intending to end up on Main Street, and imagining you’re about to -- but ending up at the fair grounds instead. The fair grounds are all well and good, except you still have business to attend to on Main Street.

I’ve also had quite a time with certain characters not wanting to settle down and behave themselves.  One very important character has refused to be anything except a caricature, a cartoon of himself, floating obscenely above scenes like some sort of oversized flesh-colored balloon.  But today I caught him skulking around a corridor at the start of Chapter 2 -- why hadn’t I noticed his toes sticking out from behind that tapestry? -- and I dragged him out and cuffed him a time or two; and he settled down and actually behaved like an adult.

I think I’m starting to be irritated with that paragraph that I opened this post with.  “Feminine.”  Really, Joyce?  That’s the best you can do?  Back to the drawing board, but not today.  

Real Men

This is a little off topic, but it's something that I've been wondering about a lot lately.    

Men.  What's up with them?  Since when was the ideal for male behavior strong, rugged, silent, etc?

Here's the deal:  we have this idea that historically, men are socially conditioned to be tough, to not express their inner fears and weaknesses, to squash the tears . . . etc.  So here is our narrative for male behavior over history:  "Once when the mastodons ruled the earth and humans lived in hunter-gatherer groups, men found that in order to hunt effectively and rule the clans at home, they had to be tough and authoritative.  They had to be 'real men.' They could not afford to give into their 'weaker' emotions, like grief.  Over the eons, they did not form close, intimate relationships with other men, preferring instead to form friendships around activities (such as hunting mastodons or fixing cars).  They certainly never told their guy friends how much they cared about them, except when inebriated ("I love ya, man.")    Then the 1970s happened and that all changed, except that it didn't because guys are still hard-wired to be strong, tough, silent, and fix cars.  The end."

OK, it's not perfect, you get the basic narrative.

The problem is that, as I tool along through the centuries as a historian, I keep finding evidence that that is not the case.  Whole generations of guys were very free about expressing their emotions to their guy friends, and we know because we have these intimate expressions of love and friendship to each other in their letters.

I know what you're thinking -- no, we're sure these are straight guys.  It was quite typical -- I think -- to express yourself rather rapturously about how you feel about  your closest guy friend to your closest guy friend.  Women did it too in their letters to their close female friends.

Or it was quite typical at certain times and or certain places and or certain social classes or or . . . you see, I'm hampered in two ways here:  1) it's not my area of specialty, so I don't really know, and 2) I don't think there's so much research being done on heterosexual male behavior over time.  Women's history, women's studies -- you bet.  Men's studies?  A few months I took a couple of hours googling around for some publications or university programs on the topic to get me going and get some questions answered and found zilch.  Women's studies, gender studies and LGBT was everywhere, but as far as looking specifically at norms for straight men in various times and places -- zilch.  "Men's studies."  Does that sound funny to you?  Should it?

I suppose this is all because we think that if you want to find out about male norms, look no further than history itself -- at least, the stuff we think of when we think of history, the wars, the parliaments, the leaders and their decisions -- because most of those players were men.  And I get that.  Certainly, you can learn about male behavior by looking there.

But this going narrative that we have -- that straight male history is public history, and female history is Other, seems very suspicious to me.  I think the truth is far richer because in my experience, it always is.  The real story that history reveals about any issue is always richer and more complicated than our perceptions concerning long-term effects of mastodon-hunting or what have you.

For instance:  Hillary Clinton.  There she is, a woman and Secretary of State, looking the Egyptian military in the eye and telling them to knock it off.  Is she doing that in an inherently "female" way?  Or is she doing that in a "male" way because she's operating in a context (Egypt) that demands male-style norms?  Or is this actually a "human" way?  Or are gender categories completely useless here because they're so conditioned by time and place and historical context?

Or:  are there consistent differences between matriarchal societies and patriarchal ones, all other things (size, complexity, development, etc) being equal?  That question might actually be answerable.

That's just a tip of the iceberg on this topic, so jump in if you have comments or questions,and especially if you can point me to a book on the topic.

What Happened to Roger Williams?

Roger Williams has undergone quite a transformation over the centuries:  from a purist who was too pure to worship in Massachusetts (which is how his neighbors saw him) to a backslidden Christian centuries ahead of his time, embracing post-modern liberal thought (which is how many of us see him).  I suppose it’s an understandable error; anyone in the 17th century who respected Indian cultures and championed freedom of conscience must have rejected the stern certitude of puritanism, right?

“The Bloody Tenent”, Williams’ attack on
religious persecution.

Turns out Williams was a thorough-going puritan, even a quite conservative puritan.  I’m reading this book that rightly charts his intellectual sources to be Reformed theology -- the same theology that his persecutors were working off of.  But Williams interpreted certain biblical concepts (most notably, the implications of the incarnation) in different ways and so came to very different conclusions.  So while the likes of John Cotton said that the incarnation implied that God wished to build society infused with Christian values (and from there justified mandatory church attendance), Williams argued that the incarnation implied that the Church was only spiritual and had no business forcing itself on the unwilling individual.

But Williams went further.  Once he got to Rhode Island, he formed (or helped to form) a Baptist church, which was more in line with his theology.  But he left that church as well.  Ultimately, he decided that no church currently in the world was a “true” church, and in fact that a "true" church in his time was not possible.  Reason?  The apostolic succession -- that is, the line of spiritually anointed leaders, from Christ to Peter and on down -- was broken in the Middle Ages.  Those whom Jesus had commissioned to be the church leaders and church planters had now vanished from the earth.  One could only wait until Christ returned to restart the apostolic succession before true churches would be possible again.

Huh.  Now I’ve heard wacky theology in my time, and I’ve found that the first question to ask is, what does the Wacky Theologian get out of it?  Does it justify something that s/he wants, like more power or more sex or what have you?  Or did something happen to that innovative thinker, something painful perhaps, and now a concept in her faith is difficult to live with, and so is discarded or reshaped so that it could be defanged?

What was it that made Williams reject organized religion (while remaining a thorough-going Calvinist), even when he could form his church to be anything he pleased?

How about his other beliefs?  What happened to Roger Williams that brought him to believe that Sunday worship was a sacrament meant only for true believing Christians, and that the presence of nonbelievers polluted it?  What pushed him toward the unheard-of opinion that Indians had rights to all the land in America?  Why was he willing to take a stand, to risk all and lose all, on those particular issues?

What happened to Roger Williams?  What events or series of events opened him up to considering his beliefs through such a different lens?  What opened his mind or wounded his heart, that made him bury his face in his hands, maybe, that day alone in the house, unable to handle the implications of  . . . and then his head came up, and he reached for his Bible . . . how did that verse read, exactly?  Could it mean -- that?

What happened to Roger Williams?

And was there a woman involved?

OK, sorry about that last one.  I’m sure that whatever happened to Williams was more than just love gone sour.  But we don’t know what happened to Roger Williams.  Yet surely there is a story there, and maybe a pretty interesting one, the story of this thing, this event, that  shoved his thinking in novel directions and kept it there for the rest of his life.

Perhaps some intrepid novelist will come around and offer a creative suggestion. I’ve got I, Roger Williams in the queue to read this summer -- I’ve no idea what that author’s take on Williams is.  I’m hoping that s/he will weave me a story that will showcase the many facets of Roger Williams and offer a plausible (and entertaining!) plot line for how he became who he was.

Roger Williams’ Banishment

No portrait of Williams exists. This hypothetical
sketch was done in 1936.  This is how I
imagine him.

It’s Roger-Williams-time at last:  the enigmatic puritan whose views on justice were hundreds of years ahead of his time, and who was banished for them; a man drunk on the vision of the glory of God, and who nearly destroyed the fledgling community in Massachusetts.

  I try to pursue my research for this story by letting Anne’s own experience guide the timeline -- so I  research various people and events as Anne would have encountered them.  I should have turned to Williams before this, actually -- he was at Sempringham in the spring of 1629 --  but my Inner Historian has been kicking up a fuss about turning him into a character in a novel (as opposed to the Complex Elusive Historical Figure that he was).  But the deed must be done.  So here goes.

The first stop in Williams’ transformation into a character in a book is of course historical studies.  I have three scholarly works on Williams.  Oddly, they are all slender volumes.  History books not known for being slender.  History books are usually thick, as historians always seem to have plenty to say about stuff that you never wondered about wondering about.  A “short” history work runs around 250 pages.  Typical length is around 400 pages.  None of the Williams’ books top 200 pages.

Part of this is lack of material:  we know very little about his growing-up years, not even the precise year he was born.  I suspect the other part is the complexity and foreign quality of his theology; for the newcomer to puritan New England, it’s just hard to make heads or tails of exactly what everyone was so upset about.  (This is true of the Anne Hutchinson affair as well.)

It’s even hard for us to figure out if was he a Good Guy or a Bad Guy.  Was his banishment from Massachusetts an injustice, or not?  The problem is that Williams was kind of a nut -- as visionaries and forward-thinkers often are -- and he is much easier to get along with from a distance of 400 years than he would be if he were in our own time, sitting on a local school board for instance.

Even history textbooks can’t decide if he was a good guy or a bad guy.  Here’s some samples from my shelf:

From Out of Many:  

     "Williams believed in religious tolerance and the separation of church and state” -- good guy!

     "He also preached that the colonists had no absolute right to Indian land but must bargain for it in good faith” -- good guy!

     "These were considered to be dangerous ideas” -- bad, dumb other Puritans . . . 

     "and in 1636 Williams was banished from the colony.  With a group of his followers, he purchased land from the Indians and founded the town of Providence.” -- good guy!

From Liberty, Equality, Power:  

     "Williams, who served briefly as Salem’s minister, was a Separatist  who refused to worship with anyone who did not explicity repudiate the Anglican Church.” Oooh, sounds pretty narrow  -- bad guy.

     "In 1636, after Williams challenged the king’s right as a Christian to grant Indian lands to anyone at all, the colony banished him.”  Um, the king’s right “as a Christian?"  What’s all that about?  (See, these poor undergrads get these hunks o’ history flung at them in some of these books -- you can tell there’s a lot to this story, and you get two sentences.)  But we’ll say good guy, because we like the Indians and we hate what happened to him.

    "He fled to Narragansett Bay with a few disciples and founded Providence.” -- anyone fleeing persecution has the sympathy of most Americans, so -- good guy.

     "He developed eloquent arguments for religious liberty and the complete separation of church and state.” -- good guy

America, a Narrative History: 

    “Williams' belief that a true church must include only those who had received God’s gift of grace led him eventually to the conclusion that no true church was possible, unless perhaps consisting of his wife and himself.” -- Aha.  Bad guy. Whack job.

Truth was, Boston in 1635 just wasn’t big enough to contain Roger Williams’ ideas, and Williams was temperamentally unable to work patiently to win people over to them.  The mighty tidal wave hit the immovable rock, with predictable results.  What most intrigues me about his story is, long after the shouting was over and he was gone, Williams maintained a friendly correspondence with one of his chief accusers, John Winthrop.  That fact alone, I think, says something about Williams’ appeal, even in his own time.  It makes me look forward to writing him.

Kick a Puritan, Hard

Were you one of those precocious tots who awed their parents and grammar-school classmates by learning to spell, “antidisestablishment- arianism?”  But what does it mean, ha ha?  It means being opposed to cutting off tax monies to a state church -- un-state-churching it, in other words, or in the proper terminology, “disestablishing” it.  An “established” church is one that has a favored status with the state and receives financial support from it.

One of the first things that the government of Boston, Massachusetts did after its founding in 1630 was to establish a church, and they did that by providing that the minister’s salary would come out of tax monies.  “Theocracy asserted itself at once,” sniffed a 20th-century editor of the town’s chronicles.

Anyone smart enough to be in his job should know better.  This was not the establishment of a “theocracy.”  Most of our 13 colonies had state churches.   They did not invent the practice, either.  The Anglican Church back home was (and still is) an established church.  The four colonies that did not have state churches (Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Rhode Island) were bucking a centuries-old tide.  As it turned out, that tide turned out to be the tide of the future, so those four came out looking pretty good.

So why didn’t the above history expert realize this?  Maybe he just goofed up . . . or maybe it was that the Puritans present such a tempting target for all things unAmerican.  When the subject is the Puritans, then providing for the minister can only mean theocracy, the rule by a narrow ministerial class over and against the wishes of the people.

The Puritans get that a lot, and I think the reason for it (in America, anyhow) is the Salem witch trials.  That was such a horrendous event that the rest of New England history is read, backwards and forwards, in its light.

Yet most of New England legal and social practices were pretty much in line with their century, Salem witch trials excepted.  It was a violent era, and an unfree one, wherever you were.  Freedom of worship was unknown in all the colonies except rogue Rhode Island; even Pennsylvania required a belief in God amongst its colonists.  And the story is never as black-and-white as we’d like to make it; for instance, even as they established tax-based churches, Massachusetts also banned ministers from holding public office, because they themselves had had a very bad experience at the hands of politically empowered church officials back home.

New England law is another example.  How likely would it be for you to get a fair trial in New England, would you say?  I bet most Americans assume that New England law was pretty much just a parade of of ear croppings, public whippings, and burnings at the stake for any and every cause.  Not so.  This is a huge and interesting topic which, unfortunately, I don’t have space for here.  But consider the conclusion of legal historian William Nelson.  Dr. Nelson compared Massachusetts law with that of neighboring Virginia and found that while in Virginia the law definitively empowered the economic elite,  “[Massachusetts legal practices] prevented those wielding political, economic, or social power from pressing their advantage and exploiting those under their control to whatever limits the market would permit.”

Maybe the Puritans get such a bad shake because we need bad guys to make sense of our national story.  Salem tarred them as the Ultimate Bad Guys.  So heck, let’s blame them for everything about ourselves as a nation that we can’t bear.  And  it won’t even matter if they’re not to blame, because they aren’t even really around anymore!  We can hate them and nobody gets hurt!

So are you grieved by our racist past?  The Puritans held African slaves.  Appalled by the abuses suffered by the Native Americans?  The Puritans  exiled the one person who said they should pay the Indians for that land.  Embarrassed by Prohibition?  The Puritans railed against drunkenness.  Angered at how human sexuality has been regarded as something dirty and shameful?  The Puritans whipped fornicators and declared adultery a capital crime, punishable by death.  Upset by environmental degradation?  The Puritans brought dandelions and garlic mustard to America and happily trashed their surroundings.  Uneasy about the direction that religious fundamentalism might take in our own generation?  Baby, look at them fundies frothing and fulminating in Massachusetts Bay!  How handy it is that we have a ready-made Source of All Evil in the American Past.

Everything in that above paragraph is true, and yet there is more to the story (as always) in each instance.  It is also a story worth exploring.


Citations:
 Winthrop’s Journals:  History of New England, 1630 - 1649, edited by Franklin Jameson (1908), pg. 52. Via google books.

Nelson, William E., The Common Law in Colonial America, Vol 1.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008, pg. 65.