THERE has been an interesting little row about Marilynne Robinson’s treatment of Puritanism in American history: in an essay in Harper’s Magazine, she attempted to rehabilitate a forgotten Massachusetts Puritan, Hugh Peters, who had helped to draw up a code of law — “The Body of Liberties” — for the colony, which, she argues, substantially anticipated the later Bill of Rights. Peters is remembered in this country as a counsellor of Oliver Cromwell, and a regicide; at the Restoration, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered.
But he was an important figure in Massachusetts, and had, in fact, returned to England in 1641 to promote the colony’s interests. Robinson contrasts puritan New England as “the most progressive society in the world at the time”, and draws a contrast with the neo-feudal and explicitly racist constitution of Anglican Carolina (an area that then extended from Virginia to Florida), which prescribed the death penalty for all manner of offences — among them, missing church three times.
In contrast, the progressive Massachusetts code is firmly Bible-based; so it only repeated the death penalties proscribed in Mosaic Law, for adultery, witchcraft, and so on. In distinction from English common law, it had no death penalty for property crimes.
But it is a later pamphlet that Robinson praises most, in which, “Contrary to established English law, Peters treats poverty as a condition that should be prevented or alleviated, rather than treating the poor as a distinct class whose rights were narrowly limited by law. He says the state should ‘have a stock readie’ to protect the poor from rising prices, so that the ‘laborer . . . may live comfortably.’ Care must be taken, ‘that poor men especially, may not bee . . . clapt up in prison . . . becaus hee is not able to put in Bail.’ There are a great many people now incarcerated in America because they cannot make bail or pay some trifling fine.”
These ideas are indeed shockingly progressive even today, in the United States, which means, as Robinson says, that they are dismissed. The charge raised against her by Peter Laarman, however, on the Religion Dispatches website, is that these enlightened humanistic Calvinist colonies had no place for the colonised. “To my mind it’s Michael Walzer who sets the bar for scrupulosity in discussing the problems inherent in the idea of enjoying God’s special favour. Walzer writes that exodus stories — the original one, of course, but also the exodus stories written by New England settlers and by South African Boers and by the founders of the modern State of Israel — tend to skip lightly over the downside of their God-sent liberation: the taking of others’ land and the effective erasure of the seized land’s inhabitants and of their story.
“Walzer asks, ‘Is it a feature of revolutionary history that newly liberated and covenanted peoples should think about their enemies in this absolutist fashion?’ Walzer’s answer is a reluctant yes: he concludes that this does indeed seem to be the case.”
The only plausible defence is that history has no record of any alternative — anything you might call cuddly colonisation. And, however brutally they started, the variously chosen peoples did, in the end, delegitimise themselves through their own universalist ideologies.
AND so to a piece by Tomiwa Owolade in The New Statesman: “It is commonplace to criticise modern-day progressive activism — what some describe as ‘woke politics’ — by comparing it to a sanctimonious, dogmatic religion. These activists . . . are sectarian by nature: more hostile, for example, to left-wing women with whom they disagree on certain issues than to conservative men with whom they disagree on everything.”
I have made this argument myself, but Owolade gives it a historically informed twist: “Many of the criticisms aimed at today’s progressive activism, then, might also have been applied to earlier religious-based activism. . . But the movements that campaigned against sugar and alcohol were . . . also progressive.
“Many of the ideas we take for granted today, from the humanity of black people to the equality of women and the dignity of workers, were shaped by people whose convictions were driven by their passionate religiosity.”
That this piece should be published in a left-wing paper shows how a respect for religion is reappearing as the smug certainties of the “end of history” melt away.
A SMALL note on Christian Concern: after the column went off last week (26 August), they got back to me, suggesting that I apply for a court transcript of the hearing of 6 June to back up their claim that “Some doctors said Archie was ‘likely’ to be brain dead based on MRI and CT scans, but the same doctors said in the same breath that he had a 1-5% chance of making some recovery” (my italics). There is no mention in the judgment of that date of any of Archie’s doctors’ holding out any hope of recovery, but, since a full transcript would cost me a couple of hundred pounds, I’m disinclined to apply for one. So there the matter must rest.