I think it would be fair to say that as a general rule, the New England colonies were much stricter in their actual enforcement of moral codes, while in the South, the Episcopalians took more of a “live-and-let-live” approach. What I showed you in Virginia was much less strict than the civil law codes of colonial New England. The only colony which had religious freedom in any form recognizable to modern America would be Rhode Island, which was explicitly founded to advocate religious toleration and unlike Quakers in Pennsylvania, who also advocated religious toleration, Rhode Island didn't have a dominant unofficial church from the start.
Each of the colonies was different. Each had different origins, each had different developments over the century and a half prior to the American Revolution, and church-state relations ranged from Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire, where even **AFTER** the ratification of the Constitution the states continued to maintain official state-established churches until the last was disestablished in the 1830s, to Pennsylvania and Rhode Island where religious freedom was a key principle of the founders.
Things were not always what modern people might expect. In Dutch-ruled New Amsterdam (now New York), Jews were allowed to build a synagogue when Catholics were not allowed to build churches. That makes no sense until one realizes that Jews had full freedom to practice their religion in the Netherlands and often had good relations with Calvinist theologians who even let them use printing presses to print Jewish books, but Catholics were viewed as a political threat in the Netherlands based on a long history of Hapsburg Catholic efforts to exterminate Protestants before the Netherlands became independent. (Also, Oliver Cromwell was a strong supporter of letting Jews live in England based on theological reasons and a shared respect for the Old Testament.)
Understanding this wide diversity helps understand why the federal Constitution was designed to bar establishment of religion by **CONGRESS,** not by the states. Maryland Catholics, Virginian, Carolinian, and Georgian Episcopalians, New England Puritans, the Dutch Reformed in New York, and the Quakers of Pennsylvania may not have agreed on much, but they all agreed that the federal government had no business telling states what they should do about religious matters.
The problem was that by the late 1700s, none of those states was unified internally in religious matters.
Even before the American Revolution, Ulster (Scots-Irish) and Scottish Presbyterians as well as German Reformed and German Lutherans were well on their way toward overthrowing the Quaker consensus in Pennsylvania. In New England, the rising power of Unitarianism was taking control of the wealthy east coast churches and had captured Harvard College long before the “official” break with orthodoxy which came a generation after the Revolution. The Dutch Reformed had once run New York City and still controlled its social and commercial life in the late 1700s, but the English conquest had put English and Scottish leaders in key government leadership positions of New York and New Jersey. Farther south, backwoods Presbyterians had become a minority influence even in the late 1600s and early 1700s, but as the Revolutionary War broke out, Presbyterians proved incapable of supplying enough ministers and the Anglican clergy were viewed as being pro-British, Methodists (who at that time still considered themselves Episcopalians) swarmed into vacant pulpits and Baptists started churches in places which had no church at all.
The Second Great Awakening made the situation even more convoluted, with Campbellites, Baptists, and other groups with no history of participating in the establishment rising to prominence throughout the South. As Methodism detached itself from Episcopalianism, it started to aggressively plant churches throughout both the North and South, taking people away from older churches regarded as “dead” and starting new churches on the frontiers where the older denominations were not doing their jobs.
I don't know of any major political or religious leader who, by the 1840s, seriously argued that there should be state establishment of any particular denomination. That would have been impossible in the new states, and virtually impossible even in the older states. Massachusetts was the last state to give up its established church, and that was not out of anti-religious motives but rather because the conservatives in rural Massachusetts, after winning the battles against Unitarians to drive them out of Congregationalism, realized that having an official state church was doing nothing to help conservatives and only helped the Unitarians in the wealthy east coast churches.
What most of these various denominations shared was a common commitment to the basics of what we might today understand as evangelical Christianity. Even the Unitarians and Deists had a strong view of morality, and the Roman Catholic minority, while distrusted by nearly all Protestants, was certainly strict in the 1800s.
If we're going to understand religious freedom as freedom to practice religion without state interference, that's okay with me. I'm not interested in telling people they can't go to a church I don't like.
On the other hand, it is simply not true that religious freedom means freedom from morality. I showed you a few posts ago how even radical liberals like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams held views that would be ultraconservative today.
I hope that's of some help in showing that lots of secular liberal American education about religious freedom simply cannot be backed up with historical facts.
It is important to remember that while this theology is being advocated by key professors at Westminster Theological Seminary in California, and it's giving the seminary a bad name, Dr. W. Robert Godfrey (the seminary president) is not in agreement with these things. Many of us who are longtime fans of Westminster-West need to pray for the seminary to get rid of this theology, which is being advocated by a fairly small minority but is causing real problems.
If we want to know how bad this “R2K” (Radical Two Kingdoms) theology, sometimes known as the “Escondido theology,” can get, read these posts where an Orthodox Presbyterian minister is actually saying it's okay for OPC members to vote for abortion and that it's okay for church members to advocate eliminating laws against sex with animals (bestiality).
Where is this stuff coming from? Certainly not out of the Bible or the Reformed confessions.
Regards,
Darrell Todd Maurina
_____
My post (the following text) is here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/co-urc/message/25038
The post being referenced is on the Puritan Board, here:
http://www.puritanboard.com/f54/qs-radical-two-kingdom-ers-68417/
I believe that our own CO-URC Elder Mark Van Der Molen’s interaction with OPC pastor Rev. Todd Bordow, pastor of Rio Rancho OPC in New Mexico, is instructive. Those who don't understand the dangers of the “Escondido theology” or “R2K” or “Es2K” position need to read this.
Van Der Molen asked this: “If we assume the church member's intent is not to divide the church, but rather to pass laws in the civil sphere to sanction homosexual marriage and abort as many babies as women may see fit, the session could not step in under the R2k ‘liberty’ principle?”
Bordow responded with this: “If a member confessed with the Bible that homosexual behavior and lust is sinful, and himself did not practice such things, but decided to vote to allow homosexuals thr right to marry, we would not discipline him. These are always opportunities to teach if necessary, but we wouldn't have the Bible's authority to cast them out of the kingdom for such political views. In reality it is none of our business as clergy to know the voting practices of our members ( I know one could come up with some extreme or absurd example where this might not be true - fine - it is generally true).”
There's something really wrong when I have to commend the Roman Catholic Church for warning Catholic pro-abortion politicians not to take communion, while conservative Presbyterians are saying that's not a proper subject for church discipline.
Most of the time pastors will not know how their members voted in the voting booth. But when a church member stands up and publicly advocates gay marriage or baby-killing, it is no longer a secret sin but a public sin.
Churches need to deal with public sins, even if (arguably especially if) they are sins by people in public positions where they can do a lot of damage.
Things got worse later in the debate between Rev. Bordow and Elder Van Der Molen. Not only is consenting homosexual sodomy a matter of indifference to Rev. Bordow and shouldn't be subject to civil penalties, even the kitties, doggies, and cows and pigs aren't safe:
“Not being a theonomist or theocrat, I do not believe it is the state's role to enforce religion or Christian morality. So allowing something legally is not the same as endorsing it morally. I don't want the state punishing people for practicing homosexuality. Other Christians disagree. Fine. That's allowed. That is the distinction. Another example - beastiality is a grotesque sin and obviously if a professing member engages in it he is subject to church discipline. But as one who leans libertarian in my politics, I would see problems with the state trying to enforce it; not wanting the state involved at all in such personal practices; I'm content to let the Lord judge it when he returns. A fellow church member might advocate for beastiality laws. Neither would be in sin whatever the side of the debate. Now if the lines are blurry in these disctinctions, that is always true in pastoral ministry dealing with real people in real cases in this fallen world.”
Guys, this isn't blurry at all. I don't care how much you want to distinguish between natural law and revealed law — no way in the world can anyone argue that sex with dogs, cats, cows, pigs and goats is something which the civil magistrates have no natural law to tell them it's wrong.
Why are we even discussing this in conservative and confessional Reformed circles where our ministers and members can be presumed to believe the Bible? Aren't some things so obviously wrong that even most unbelievers today still understand they need to be prohibited and punished? Granted, back when I was a reporter in New Mexico and attending an OPC a few hours away from Rev. Bordow, I was writing newspaper articles about a court case of a woman accused of creating pornographic photos of her daughter having sex with dogs. In a generation unless something changes, we may have a whole industry in America with people paying for sex with dogs and babies — all the more reason why we as Christians need to speak up now while we still have a chance to win the political fight.
I think R. Martin Snyder said it best over on the Puritan Board: “Wow, I appreciate this thread. If the R2Kers are really advocating some of the stuff in this thread that I think I am reading and understanding, I know why it scares me. The lines of discussion keep getting moved and law and Society are disjointed. Kind of like law and the gospel in modern reformed thought. It even seems I can join a church and be a rabid Marxist, homosexual. and abortion on demand supporter and not have to worry about being disciplined. Something just isn't adding up here.”
Regards,
Darrell Todd Maurina
Gospel of Grace ARP, Springfield, Mo.