Three hundred and seventy-nine years ago today, the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law making it a crime to deny that the Bible had divine origins. The penalty was stiff: Anyone found in violation would be executed.
There’s no record that anyone was ever sentenced to death for violating the 1646 law. But in later years, four Quakers were executed because they returned to the colony after being banished and would not stop preaching their faith.
The four, known as the Boston Martyrs, were William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson (executed on Oct. 27, 1659); Mary Dyer (June 1, 1660) and William Leddra (March 24, 1661). All were hanged.
Christian Nationalists often talk about the alleged Christian roots of the U.S. government. But when they make this claim, they’re unable to point to the Constitution to buttress their argument because that document says nothing about our country being officially Christian. It is a wholly secular charter with a First Amendment that separates church and state.
The fact is, there was just one attempt to create an officially Christian government during the period of European settlement, and that was Puritan Massachusetts. It’s hardly a model for our lives today. Harshly theocratic, the colony was so extreme that the same year it approved the law mentioned above, it made it legal for the state to execute “stubborn” male children. The measure was based on language found in the Bible’s Book of Deuteronomy.
In recent years, the most extreme voices of Christian Nationalism have called for stripping LGBTQ+ people of their rights, banning books, infusing public schools with fundamentalist Christianity and rolling back women’s rights, among other things – all because they believe freedom and equality run afoul of biblical strictures.
This theocratic agenda springs not from the time of the Founding Fathers. It would have been alien to them. Its origins rest with zealous Puritans; it comes from a time of witch trials, imprisonment for blasphemy and forced attendance at religious services.
Make no mistake, when Christian Nationalists talk about how our country ought to be a “Christian nation,” this is what they’re yearning for – a government that acts as enforcer of their theology, a literal merger of church and state.
The original practitioners of the only Christian “nation” America has ever known showed us the end result of that: oppression, violence, terror and death.
