Interfaith Council of Southwestern Connecticut

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THE GOLDEN RULE FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOMS

The Rev. Dr. Blaine Edele, Union Memorial Church, September 5, 2010

Matthew 7:12

Sometimes stories from the past help us to see events more clearly in the present. One such story comes from nearly four hundred years ago, in what we now call New York City, then called New Amsterdam.

The story began in the early 1620s when a group of Dutch venture capitalists sought to develop overseas suppliers for their growing trade and retail market. In recent years English and Spanish shipping magnates had already made sizeable returns on importing raw resources, at ridiculously low prices, from the recently discovered virgin territories known as the New World or the West Indies. The Dutch capitalists, who pretentiously called themselves the West Indies Company, wanted to catch up with their international rivals by cashing in on lucrative trade agreements with the seemingly naïve  New World natives, known as Indians.

The Dutch investors capitalized on their one advantage. They claimed the legal right to exploit this new foreign market because in 1608 a Dutch explorer, Captain Henry Hudson, had made initial contacts with the impressionable natives at the mouth of the North River, which we now know as the Hudson River. Beginning in 1624 the West Indies Company underwrote expenses for Dutch immigrants to settle along the North River and on its islands, where they could set up depots for trading with the Indians. Most famously one year later, as another story goes, the Dutch settler Peter Minuit purchased an island from the Manhattan Indians for assorted trinkets worth $24.

Over the next few decades, as the West Indies Company transplanted more and more Dutch and European settlers on the Manhattan Island, they built a depot, known as New Amsterdam, into a trading hub. Through its waterfront passed furs brought by Indians, timbers cut by settlers, and cargo stolen from Spanish galleons by Dutch buccaneers. In spite of the steadily rising amount of trade and newcomers over the next twenty-five years, the settlement failed to generate the returns investors had expected. The West Indies Company board of directors blamed the problem on a string of ineffectual leaders who failed time after time to maintain law and order on this wild frontier town.

Finally, in 1647 the investors appointed Peter Stuyvesant, a no-nonsense, proven military leader to impose martial law on the disorderly town. This new Director General promised to instill law and order in total compliance with company policies, touching on every area from defending the town against the savage natives to deciding what people could do for fun on their days off.

Peter Stuyvesant, like the majority of the West Indies Company board of directors, believed that the company knew what was best for the town, and since the company owned the town, therefore the company could run the town. For example, the company decided that there should be only one church for all the settlers—known as the Dutch Reformed Church. Everyone living on Manhattan and the surrounding Dutch settlements was assessed a tax to pay for local Dutch Reformed clergy to perform religious services. Everyone-- whether they were members of the Dutch Reformed Church or transplanted Congregationalists from England or Lutherans from Germany or Jews from Brazil or Catholics from Spain—everyone had to pay the clergy tax for the Dutch Reformed clergy, for only the Dutch Reformed ministers’ salaries.

Shortly after Stuyvesant enforced this official company policy, some residents of Flushing (now part of Queens) objected. Most of these folks had earlier emigrated from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and later moved from Massachusetts to New Amsterdam. They filed a complaint with Stuyvesant. Because they did not attend worship at the Dutch Reformed Church, these English immigrants saw no reason to give any of their hard earned money to pay a Dutch pastor. But their complaint fell on deaf ears. Stuyvesant hastily rejected their motion and imposed still more fines on those who dared to criticize company policy.

We may consider Stuyvesant’s actions to be harsh and the West Indies Company’s policy to be prejudiced, but such a narrow-minded outlook was typical for the times. At that time across Europe, people believed that religious diversity weakened a nation. One nation under God ideally meant that everyone worshipping one God in one way would help unite citizens into one nation. Different people in one nation following different religions, even different Christian denominations, supposedly weakened unity and invited chaos. Consequently, the leaders of the West Indies Company wanted everyone in their company towns to be united, loyal to one country, subject to one leader, following one religion.  As for his part, Peter Stuyvesant more than gladly defended those hard-line views under the banner of law and order.

Thus, when a group of Lutherans requested permission to hold worship services in New Amsterdam, local Dutch Reformed clergy promptly informed Stuyvesant. The clergy warned Stuyvesant that permitting Lutherans to worship would open the door for other sects so that eventually the place “would become a receptacle for all sorts of heretics and fanatics.”[1] Stuyvesant summarily denied the Lutherans the right to assemble.

In 1654 a group of Jews who had emigrated from Brazil to New Amsterdam requested permission from Stuyvesant for the right to buy land on which to build a synagogue. In keeping with company policy, Stuyvesant turned them down. Instead he gave them “consent to depart whenever and wherever it may please them.”[2] Subsequently Stuyvesant refrained from actually expelling the Jews when the Dutch board of directors eventually reminded him that certain influential Jews in Holland had invested heavily in the West Indies Company.

Three years later Stuyvesant’s vision for religious conformity faced another challenge. In August 1657 custom officials in New Amsterdam ordered a suspiciously unregistered trading ship, the Woodhouse, to leave the New Amsterdam port without unloading any cargo. Eleven passengers quietly defied the order and illegally entered the city. The New Amsterdam counter-intelligence force quickly informed Stuyvesant that the eleven were dangerous fugitives. The eleven were religious fanatics—Quakers, known in that era throughout civilized Europe as outcasts, traitors, and anarchists.

 Nowadays we view Quakers as low-profile, friendly pacifists. But in the mid-1600s all other Christian denominations regarded Quakers to be a threat. For these religious zealots had a do-or-die mission: to convert other Christians to their ways of thinking. Quakers traveled throughout the Americas preaching their peculiar beliefs. For example, they thought Christians should not put their hands on the Bible to swear to tell the truth. They thought Christians should not take an oath of allegiance to any nation. And worse, they thought Christians should not pay their clergy!

No wonder the clergy despised Quakers and national leaders distrusted them.  Different people in one colony practicing different religions, even different Christian denominations, would only weaken political unity and invite chaos. Therefore, most American colonies barred Quakers from preaching or proselytizing door to door. At the same time those eleven Quakers illegally entered New Amsterdam, the nearby English town of Stamford, Connecticut had severe fines written in their laws for unwanted Quakers preaching in their village. The penalty for the first offense was to be deported from town. The penalty for a second-time offender was to be branded, whipped, put in prison and forced to perform manual labor. The next penalty for a repeated offender was to bore a hole in their tongue with a hot iron.[3]

In 1657, when Peter Stuyvesant heard that three of the illegal alien Quakers were preaching on the street corners in Flushing, he took immediate action. He sent constables to arrest them. He promptly deported two of them to the worst place in America he could imagine: Rhode Island, considered by respectable Christian clergy to be the outhouse of New England, because heretics such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson called that place home. Stuyvesant held the other Quaker, the ringleader, Robert Hodgson, for trial. Upon quickly reaching a guilty verdict, Stuyvesant ordered Hodgson to be put in jail, fed only bread and water, whipped, chained to a wheelbarrow, and left to bake for ten days in the hot summer sun. After torturing Hodgson, Stuyvesant banished him from New Amsterdam. Then, to insure that such treachery did not occur again, Stuyvesant ordered that anyone giving food and lodging to Quakers be fined fifty guilders!

The residents of Flushing took exception to Stuyvesant’s harsh tact on keeping law and order. On the evening of December 27, 1657, the townsmen gathered in Michael Milner’s house to voice their complaints. They appointed the town clerk, Edward Hart, to compose a letter protesting Stuyvesant’s heavy-handed mistreatment of the Quakers. Within a few days all thirty-one men in the town signed the letter, which they called the Flushing Remonstrance.

Three days later, Tobis Feake, the sheriff of Flushing, delivered the protest letter to Stuyvesant’s office in New Amsterdam. Stuyvesant promptly put Sheriff Feake in jail and issued arrest warrants for the two Flushing magistrates and town clerk. All four men were held in jail, fed only bread and water, and offered a choice: either recant their views or be banished from the colony. Under those threats, all four men eventually retracted their statements and returned to their homes. Their charitable view, however, deserves to be heard.

Permit me to read some lines from their letter:

Right Honorable… You have been pleased to send unto us a certain prohibition or command that we should not receive or entertain any of those people called Quakers, because they are supposed to be, by some, seducers of the people. For our part we cannot condemn them in this case, neither can we stretch out our hands against them, for out of Christ, God is a consuming fire…

The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam, which is the glory of the outward state of Holland, soe [sic] love, peace and liberty, extending to all in Christ Jesus, condemns hatred, war and bondage… our desire is not to offend any of his [Christ’s] little ones, in whatsoever form, name or title he appears in, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker, but shall be glad to see anything of God in any of them, desiring to do unto all men as we desire all men should do unto us.

One striking feature of this letter and of the thirty-one men who opposed the mistreatment of Quakers needs to be underscored: none of the thirty-one who signed were Quakers. They drafted the Remonstrance in defense of others, not in defense of themselves. They signed the Flushing Remonstrance in defense of the religious liberty of others, not in defense of their own rights.

A few years later another resident of New Amsterdam offered aid to Quakers. John Brown allowed Quakers to meet in his house. Stuyvesant arrested Browne in 1662 and pressured him to recant. Because Browne refused, Stuyvesant extradited him to Holland. Browne appealed to the West Indies Company board of directors, who agreed to support Browne and advised Stuyvesant by a letter in 1663 to end religious persecution in New Amsterdam.

 The following year, in 1664, the British took over New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed the city New York. The eighth clause of the treaty transferring ownership of the Dutch colony to the British guaranteed the rights of settlers “to the liberty of their consciences in divine worship.”

Thirty years later, the British royal governor of New York, Governor Thomas Dongan, listed the various houses of worship present in New York City. He noted that in the city one could find houses for the Church of England (currently known as the Episcopal Church), Dutch Calvinists, French Calvinists, Dutch Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Anabaptists, some Jews and varieties of Quakers.

By the way, at about the same time, in 1698 two prominent Quakers, Thomas Story and Roger Gill, came to visit the nearby town of Stamford, Connecticut while on a trip from New York City to Rhode Island. They notified the Stamford justice of the peace that they intended to lecture on Quaker teaching the next morning in a local inn. The next morning the Stamford constable and his assistant presented to the two Quakers a warrant for their arrest signed by Mayor Selleck. The constable ordered Story and Gill to leave town as quickly as possible. Story appealed, claiming that the laws of England protected the religious freedoms of Quakers. The constable replied that the city of Stamford had its own laws, which forbade Quakers to hold meetings in town. Then the constable ordered the crowd to disperse and ordered Story and Gill to leave. Once on the street, Gill shouted: “Woe, woe, woe, to the Inhabitants of this Place, who profess God and Christ, without the knowledge of God, and void of his Fear.”[4] By order of Mayor Selleck, no Quaker meeting was held that day in Stamford.

Ironically, one hundred years later, in the late 1790s, Catherine Clock Selleck, a member of Mayor Selleck’s extended family line, formed in the eastern section of Stamford, now known as Darien, the first official congregation of those once-despised Quakers.[5]

By the way, a few years after the two Quaker preachers Story and Gill came to Stamford, the Rev. George Muirson, who was rector of Rye, New York, conducted in 1705 the first recorded Episcopalian worship services in Stamford. For protection he came with armed escorts. [6]

Forty years later there were enough Episcopalians in Stamford to warrant constructing their own church building. In 1742 they made an appeal to the town fathers of Stamford for a grant of land on which to construct their church. Since the founding of Stamford one hundred years earlier, there had only been one church in town: the Congregational Church. Reluctant to break from tradition, the town council begrudgingly granted the Episcopalians permission to build on a piece of land forty-five feet long and thirty-five feet wide, in the present location of St. John’s Church downtown. Records indicate that at that time the land “ was a rude ledge of loose rock, bounded on the north and east by an almost impassable swamp.”[7]

Sometimes stories from the past help us to see events more clearly in the present. One such story came from nearly four hundred years ago, in what we now call New York City, then called New Amsterdam. The story of the Flushing Remonstrance has been overlooked in most histories of religious liberty in America. Yet it was more than likely the first written political petition for religious freedom in America. The Christian rationale for requesting religious freedom in 1657 for Quakers then remains the same for promoting religious freedom in 2010. As the thirty-one men from Flushing wrote: desire to do unto all men as we desire all men should do unto us. May these words from Jesus guide us as much as they guided the brave men from Flushing, New York. 

Christmas Column – Stamford Advocate, 12/09

HOLY DAYS,  HOLY STORIES

The Rev. Kate Heichler

Christmas is [almost] upon us – like a snowball careening down a steep hill. It’s hard to escape in our culture, no matter what our religious heritage.  Christianity has been the dominant religion in America for long enough that its sacred stories have become intertwined with our holidays. This can leave everyone unhappy.  People of other faiths fear their religious expressions get trampled in the bits of the Christian story that filter through the airwaves, while some Christians complain that “their” feast is watered down by secularism or religious pluralism. 

There is an irony to such claims, because the Christmas story itself is about a Jewish couple traveling to their ancestral town of Bethlehem – a place divided then, as now – to be counted in a census ordered by a Roman governor. The birth of their firstborn in a stable is attended by farm animals and lowly shepherds – and later, as the story goes, by astronomers/astrologers from the East. Surely this is as “interfaith” a crowd as you can get, and the sacred and secular are mixed from the start.

The interfaith resonances don’t stop there. Christmas as a Christian holy season developed a few centuries into the church’s life, as an attempt to mesh a sacred story with cultural observances, particularly the celebration of the winter solstice. Indeed, different religious ideas are constantly in conversation, and build on each other.

But that doesn’t mean all religions are alike, or could be unified with a little massaging. What makes a religious tradition meaningful to its adherents are the beliefs or rituals or practices that inevitably distinguish it from other traditions.  Interfaith cooperation does not seek to meld all religions into a lowest-common-denominator faith stew.  The goal, rather, is to honor each person’s faith as sacred for them. The way we get there is to know and prize each other’s stories, especially around our holy times. That is the great gift of interfaith conversation.  

As a leader in the InterFaith Council, I seek to foster and encourage that conversation. And as a Christian pastor, I want to share with you this central story of my faith tradition, in hopes that some of it will speak to you, in conversation with your own faith story.

So let me tell you a little about our Christmas story, because you won’t learn it from the power-grid-threatening lighting displays, from Rudolph or Santa, or shopping extravaganzas. For the story at the heart of Christian observance is not very glittery; the only thing shining in this story is the star that pointed the way to Bethlehem, where we meet a family far from home, unable to find shelter, even for a young woman in labor. She gives birth to a son, wraps him up and lays him in the closest thing to a cradle she can find – a feed box for livestock. Meanwhile, out on a hillside, a host of angels appear to some shepherds. They announce that a savior, the anointed one of God, has just been born in Bethlehem, and can be found in that very trough. They run off to see this miracle in Bethlehem. That’s pretty much the gist of it. There’s a threat of murder from a local king, and later the visit of those magi, but that’s pretty much it.

Yet I think it’s got something for everyone, this Christmas story. For those who like their worship cosmic and mysterious, there are those angels appearing out of nowhere to the hapless shepherds on a starlit night. For those whose faith tends to the intellectual and thought-out, there are the magi from the East, following their astronomical calculations to the new king’s whereabouts. For the politically minded, there is the enforced census for taxation, and the young family forced to flee as refugees. And for those who like their religion earthy, rooted in the here and now of everyday life, there is that young mother, the harried father, those clueless shepherds, the birth in the midst of farm animals, straw and muck.

And through all the messy noise of it – the choirs of angels, the lowing of cattle, the cries of childbirth; and yes, through all the messy noise of our observances – jingle bells, parties, even tears; through all the noise we make comes the still, small voice of God, wailing from a feed box: God, who made stars and mountains, the heavens and the earth, contained in the body of a human infant wailing out its first cry for food, for warmth, for love. That is the Christian claim, that God’s love is perfected in such vulnerability.

Whatever your faith or tradition, I pray that you will recognize the love at the heart of this holy story. We celebrate it best when we love with all our hearts, as we have been loved. Share your holy story with someone this season, in love.

A blessed festival of God’s Love to all. And to all a good night!