American advocates of freedom did not believe in religious liberty in Early spite of their Christianity, but explicitly because of their individual faith in Christ, which had been molded and instructed by the Bible. The greatest evidence of their commitment to liberty can be found in their willingness to support the cause of freedom for those different from themselves. The assertion that the Enlightenment is responsible for the American Bill of Rights may be common, but it is devoid of any meaningful connection to the actual historical account. History reveals a different story, intricately gathered from the following: 1 Influence of William Tyndale’s translation work and the court intrigues of Henry VIII 1 Spread of the Reformation through the eyes of Martin Luther, John Knox, and John Calvin 1 The fight to establish a bill of rights that would guarantee every American citizen the free exercise of their religion. James Madison played a key role in the founding of America and in the establishment of religious liberty. But the true heroes of our story are the common people whom Tyndale inspired and Madison marshaled for political victory. These individuals read the Word of God for themselves and truly understood both the liberty of the soul and the liberty of the mind. The History of Religious Liberty is a sweeping literary work that passionately traces the epic history of religious liberty across three centuries, from the turbulent days of medieval Europe to colonial America and the birth pangs of a new nation. Michael Farris is a constitutional lawyer, as well as founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association and Patrick Henry College. An ordained minister as well as pro-family activist on Capitol Hill, Farris is a recognized influencer among educational circles. RELIGION/Christian Church/ History RELIGION/United States/ Colonial Period (1600-1775) $24.99 U.S. ISBN-13: 978-0-89051-868-7 EAN Master Books Edition First printing: March 2015 Copyright © 2007, 2015 by Michael Farris. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in articles and reviews. For information write: Master Books®, P.O. Box 726, Green Forest, AR 72638 Master Books® is a division of the New Leaf Publishing Group, Inc. ISBN: 978-0-89051-868-7 Library of Congress Number: 2015935281 Cover by Diana Bogardus Please consider requesting that a copy of this volume be purchased by your local library system. Printed in the United States of America Please visit our website for other great titles: www.masterbooks.com For information regarding author interviews, please contact the publicity department at (870) 438-5288 Contents Introduction ............................................................................................. 5 Part I: From Out of the Short Fire 1. Scripture for Ploughboys ............................................................ 11 2. The King, the Pope, and theWord.............................................. 21 3. War of the Words ....................................................................... 32 4. Tyndale’s Triumph ...................................................................... 47 5. The Bible and the Boy King ........................................................ 57 6. Mary’s Five Years of Terror .......................................................... 65 7. Debating Freedom inside the King’s Bench Prison ...................... 85 8. Defending a Doctrine, Killing a Man ......................................... 99 9. At the Icy Blast of the Trumpet ................................................. 119 10. The “Very Wisest Fool in Christendom” ................................... 135 11. The Bravest Voices of Liberty .................................................... 157 12. The English ehoboamR ............................................................ 177 13. “The Lord athH Now Some Controversy with England” .......... 192 14. Called Hither to Save a Nation ................................................. 217 15. Explicit Faith and Spiritual Swords ........................................... 235 16. A Foundation of Paradoxes ....................................................... 252 Part II: An Irrepressible Yearning 17. Enclosed Gardens of God ......................................................... 283 18. Better Hypocrites ..................................................................... 303 19. A New Light in Hanover .......................................................... 330 20. Be Ye Separate .......................................................................... 352 21. “Very Early and Strong Impressions” ........................................ 368 22. Free Exercise of Religion ........................................................... 381 23. The Rising Sun of Liberty ......................................................... 399 24. Battle for the Bill of Rights, Part I ............................................ 425 25. Battle for the Bill of Rights, Part II ........................................... 438 Epilogue: The Lessons of Liberty .......................................................... 460 Bibliography ......................................................................................... 469 Introduction y own college textbook from a political philosophy class espoused a Mcommon view regarding the source of contemporary religious lib- erty. Enlightenment philosophies, it taught, were chiefly responsible for opening people’s minds to the error of religious persecution and paving the way for a society in which “heretics” are not tortured and burnt in town squares. This conception has not gone away. I recently served as a judge for a national essay contest in which the contestant instructions explained that religious liberty is a concept derived from the European Enlightenment. After all, the general argument goes, devoted Christians have often been the chief persecutors in Western history and therefore cannot be said to have had a positive role in advancing the idea that the civil magistrate should not interfere with matters of conscience. On the contrary, it is said, the forces most inimical to genuine Christian faith — a general religious apathy among the populace, relativism in regard to truth, a growing secularist mindset, and Enlightenment-influenced skepticism among intellectual leaders — were the primary forces behind the triumph of religious liberty in the West. Examples come from diverse sources. Firuz Kazemzadeh, an esteemed Ivy League scholar who has been appointed and reappointed to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, attributes the failure of Muslim nations to embrace religious liberty to the fact that they have nei- ther “gone through the Enlightenment” nor “developed any of the attitudes that formed the minds of the founding fathers of this country, including deism and a measure of skepticism in matters of religion which permitted the kind of tolerance which we all seek today.”1 Historian Merrill D. Peter- son has called the 1787 Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty “the supreme expression of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment,” which was driven by “skepticism toward all received truths and of untrammeled free inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge.”2 The introduction to the audio edition of Joseph J. Ellis’s His Excellency: George Washington refers to the United States ~ 5 ~ of America as “the greatest achievement of the Enlightenment.”3 Even Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, who wrote A Patriot’s History of the United States to counteract the effect of a popular Marxist interpretation of Ameri- can history entitled A People’s History of the United States, say that “the overall molding of America’s Revolution in the ideological sense” was derived from Enlightenment thinkers Thomas Hobbes and Charles de Montesquieu.4 And the colorful 2003 edition of Joy Hakim’s Freedom: A History of US, which sports a foreword written by President George W. Bush and the first lady, discusses the freedom born out of the Age of Reason, concluding, “And that’s when we were lucky enough to be born.”5 We have to recognize the truth of the claim that professing Christians were indeed the principal persecutors during the relevant era in which reli- gious liberty emerged. But is it necessarily true that the heroes who stood against persecution and brought liberty of conscience to the forefront in America were avowed skeptics and unorthodox secularists? The goal of this book is to answer this question by undertaking a detailed account of the troubling history of religious persecution from the 16th through the 18th centuries, chiefly in England, and by exploring the ideas that brought reli- gious liberty to America. Today, all Christian denominations embrace religious liberty as an ideal. But it was not always so. It is improper to judge today’s adherents of a par- ticular branch of Christianity by the acts of their distant theological cousins. Moreover, it is unfair to denigrate entirely the life’s work of significant reli- gious reformers for their failure to embrace religious liberty. Yet the sad truth is that some giants of the faith were religious perse- cutors. The story that follows is told with unflinching honesty. However, it must be borne in mind that this book is limited to a discussion of religious liberty. The scope affords no opportunity to praise these individuals’ many other positive achievements. It is similar