The Case for Christian Nationalism
10. The Foundation of American Freedom | II. Puritan New England and Free Expression (Part 2)
Previously:
New England authorities concluded that the existence of credobaptist churches threatened civil unity. Denying the legitimacy of your fellow’s baptism might undermine the credibility of the ecclesiastical and civil leadership.1
Wolfe next makes a case that religious strife in 17th-century New England was primarily the fault of credobaptists for not recognizing the infant baptism of their Congregationalist neighbors. There is a leap of logic required for this conclusion, namely the assumption of a requirement for an official state-church; the Puritans, in their desire to have a theocracy, greatly contributed to the climate in which dissent over baptism could become an existential crisis. Wolfe then notes that these disputes “follow[ed] a familiar pattern” of disagreement over whether persecution or justified suppression had taken place. A quote by Samuel Willard, used to bolster the paedobaptist side, reveals an incongruity in Wolfe’s framing, for Willard referred to his opposition as “Anabaptists”, as did his compatriot, Increase Mather.2
Anabaptists were known throughout Europe for shunning civil government, saying that Christians could not serve as magistrates, swear oaths, or hold private property; they were regarded as having wrongly transferred the government of the spiritual kingdom into the temporal.3 They were not well liked, to put it mildly. As previously mentioned, Calvin referred to them as “frantic and barbarous men… furiously endeavoring to overturn the order established by God”.4 This is not who the Massachusetts Baptists were - most formed their own civil governments where they resettled - but that Willard refers to them as such is telling of how he viewed them. Considering Wolfe, in the last chapter, made the claim of “neo-Anabaptist” political theology among his opposition, it is safe to assume he knows the difference and is ignoring it here. His use of two extended quotes from the paedobaptists in defense of their position, and only a single, highly edited quote from a credobaptist, limited to charges of “molestation”, sans details, is emblematic of the one-sided perspective of this section.
The Mathers had come to believe, as with much of new England apparently, that the Baptists were no longer (or never had been) a threat to New England civil and ecclesiastical order…
We can conclude that it was not the Enlightenment, Lockean philosophy or Baptist theological arguments that convinced Cotton and Increase Mather that a pan-Protestant political order was possible;5
We are presented with no evidence that “Baptist theological arguments” had no effect in convincing Cotton and Increase Mather that Baptists could live in peace with Congregationalists. In fact, it seems highly unlikely that Baptists’ self-defense of their theological positions would play no part in the Mathers’ change in stance on their Baptist neighbors, over several decades. Wolfe’s surety is pure conjecture. We can also say, unequivocally, that Enlightenment, Lockean philosophy had an notable effect on the American nation’s founding, roughly six decades later.
Wolfe also confirms that his “pan-Protestant political order” would likely include “forbid[ding] ‘papists’ and atheists”6, which I have argued would be nearly impossible to achieve without committing atrocity. Likewise, the Massachusetts colony did not reach its Protestant peace without committing atrocity, for in 1692 one-third of Salem’s six hundred residents were accused of witchcraft, and nineteen executed. Increase Mather’s book, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences, is considered by some historians to have helped contribute to the hysteria, although Mather himself was instrumental in ending the witch trials.7
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Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 405.
Ibid., 406-407, 408.
Matthew J. Tuininga, Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church: Christ’s Two Kingdoms, Cambridge Studies in Law and Christianity (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 170-171.
Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), sec. 4.20.1.
Stephen Wolfe, 411.
Ibid., 410-411.
“Increase Mather | Biography, Sermons, & Salem | Britannica,” August 19, 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Increase-Mather.