Are we courageous enough to stand on conscience, while taking seriously those whose consciences may not now, or ever, be compatible with our own?
In 1644, Roger Williams, in London to secure a charter for the new colony of Rhode Island, published The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, perhaps his most famous written work. In part, it was a response to Puritan John Cotton’s assertion that a Christian Commonwealth required a state-privileged church to safeguard moral and spiritual order. In one important passage Williams addressed Jesus’ parable of the wheat and tares, a story over which he and Cotton vehemently disagreed, especially when applied to government and individual conscience.
The parable, found in Matthew 13, KJV, begins: “The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.” As the story continues, the man’s servants want to “pluck up” the tares lest they endanger the entire crop; but the owner forbids them to do that, “lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow up together until the harvest.”
In disputing this text and its larger implications, Cotton distinguished between freedom of a “rightly informed” conscience, versus the dangers of “an erroneous and blind” one. He insisted that heretics and other “scandalous” offenders might be tolerated, as long as they did not try to corrupt others with their views. If they did, then church and state might be compelled to use the “Civil Sword” to punish heresy and protect the innocent.
Williams agreed that the church should combat heresy, but only through the power of the Spirit, not by relying on the state to coerce or condemn those whose beliefs did not conform to official truth. In Liberty of Conscience, Roger Williams in America, Edwin Gaustad observed that for Williams, “the parable was clear: leave the wheat and tares until the harvest, when God’s judgment will be made known. Unfortunately, kings and governors, bishops and priests, have fallen fast asleep in ‘Delilah’s lap,’ failing to recognize the clear command ‘to let the tares alone.’”
I recalled this Cotton-Williams debate over conscience, church, and state while reading Susan Jacoby’s recent New York Times op-ed entitled, “Sick and Tired of ‘God Bless America,’” in which the postmodern “nonreligious American” writes: “Freedom of conscience for all — which exists only in secular democracies — should be at the top of the list of shared concern” in this presidential election year. She insists that candidates who denounce only “the persecution of Christians by Islamic radicals should be ashamed of themselves” for failure to oppose “persecution of freethinkers and atheists,” along with that of “dissenting Muslims and small religious sects.” She urges secularists and their “liberal religious allies” to challenge politicians when “they talk as if freedom of conscience is a human right only for the religious.”
Jacoby notes that while America remains “a predominately Christian nation,” the “unchurched” now reflect 22.8 percent of the population, larger than any single religious group save Evangelicals, teetering at 25.4 percent. These realities aren’t lost on presidential candidates who talked incessantly about Jesus while in Evangelical-saturated Iowa, but went largely silent on the matter in New Hampshire, a place the Times’ Gail Collins labels “the least religious state in the country.” Thus secularists, (“tares” as Cotton and Williams would have called them), are a rapidly expanding political presence in 21st century America.
That’s not new. Some studies suggest that 200 years ago (1810s) barely a fifth of southern whites and a tenth of southern blacks were participants in Methodist, Baptist or Presbyterian churches in the region. By the 1830s those churches had grown considerably, due in large part to revivalism, conversionism, and democratic idealism that made the will freer and salvation dramatically immediate.
The waning of those “enthusiastical” dynamics two centuries later is evident in many evangelical/mainline families whose children and grandchildren distance themselves from religious institutions and ideologies in which they were reared. That fact alone makes it difficult to “other” today’s “tares” as “scandalous” offenders to be “dealt with.” Rather, they may be neighbors whose decision to avoid or disengage from faith communities may provide teachable moments for the religious traditions they left behind.
These days, I’m trying to listen to the secularists, and ask: What does their absence suggest about the church? How are we being heard out there in the world? Are we understood as people of conviction or meanness? What gospel ideals have we under-emphasized or over-promised? Are we courageous enough to stand on conscience, while taking seriously those whose consciences may not now, or ever, be compatible with our own?
In 1651 Roger Williams wrote that conscience involves “a persuasion fixed in the mind and heart . . . which enforceth [one] to judge . . . and to do so with respect to God. . . .” This conscience, he concluded, was found in all humanity, “more or less, in Jews, Turks, Papists, Protestants, pagans.” For Williams (and Jesus), wheat and tares are often so indistinguishable that only God can sort them out. Perhaps we really should leave the tares alone. They may be us!