Thanksgiving—for Religious Freedom
William White had to wade to the snowy shore. The Mayflower lay anchored in the bay, and the longboat could only take him so far. He was forced to plunge into the icy, dangerously frigid water, immersing his clothes, his skin, everything. Everything, that is, except his two sons, 5-year-old Resolved and the newborn baby Peregrine, who came to the New World on his shoulders.
My 12th great-grandfather contracted hypothermia or some other condition and died within months of setting foot on that Massachusetts shoreline, one of 49 who died from exposure, starvation or disease in the winter of 1620–1621. But his sons survived.
A group of 53 English colonists endured the hardship and lived to see the autumn of 1621. They had left behind everything they had accumulated and everything they had known an ocean away; suffered discomfort, injury, malnourishment, disease and worse; lost dozens of friends and relatives; and still faced the unknown—yet their hearts were brimming with gratitude. They were alive.
With some 90 warriors from the native Wampanoag people, who could have just as easily killed them rather than bringing them venison, they shared a feast of thanksgiving to the great God. They were thankful to be alive, thankful to be able to worship God with the precious religious freedom for which they had sacrificed so much.
The freedom to seek the true God and worship Him is something we should not take for granted today. The experience of the pilgrims and other early settlers shows us why.
Soon, more colonists chose to give up everything they had and knew in England to hazard the passage west across the North Atlantic. They sought freedom from religious and governmental coercion to worship God according to their conscience. They weren’t out to make money: They were out to lose it, in fact, all for the sake of worshiping and pleasing God as best they could. Businesses, community, acceptance, money, friends, comparative ease and everything that meant home was on one side of the scales; on the other was nothing but hardship and the worship of Jesus Christ and God the Father; yet they made their choice. These were different times. These were different people.
Nine years after the first Thanksgiving, enough colonists were seeking religious freedom for a Puritan lawyer named John Winthrop to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the area around Boston. Winthrop envisioned Boston as a “city upon a hill” that would give light to all nations (Matthew 5:14).
Like the pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony believed in religious freedom from the Church of England—and the government of England—but they did not believe in religious freedom from Puritan doctrine and church government. They wanted to change many of the Roman Catholic teachings espoused by the Church of England, but they also wanted to strictly enforce their interpretation of Scripture on the citizens of Boston. This soon brought the Puritan clergy into conflict with a courageous young colonist named Roger.
After much deliberation, Roger Williams had made the difficult decision that he could not live under the rule of Archbishop William Laud of Canterbury, who was viciously persecuting Puritans. He sailed for the New World in 1631. But soon after he arrived in Boston, he found that Winthrop was hardly more tolerant than Archbishop Laud.
What Williams believed powered his actions, and his actions would shape the state’s role in the church for more than a dozen generations to come.
Williams believed that civil magistrates must not punish any “breach of the first table” of the Ten Commandments, such as false worship, idolatry, blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking. Rather, he believed that civil magistrates should only punish breaches of the second table of the Ten Commandments, which included the commands against dishonoring parents, murder, adultery, stealing, lying and coveting.
Less than a year after moving to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritan religious leaders made it clear that he was unwelcome, so Williams moved to Plymouth. Plymouth Governor William Bradford wrote that Williams’s teachings “were well approved,” yet Williams still moved back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony after two years in Plymouth to take a job as an unofficial assistant to Samuel Skelton in Salem.
In October 1635, the Puritans convicted Williams of sedition and heresy. The punishment for these crimes was banishment. Williams was sick and winter was approaching, so the Massachusetts Bay authorities postponed his banishment until spring, provided that he ceased teaching his beliefs publicly. Williams’s conscience would not allow him to accept.
He continued preaching. In the biting New England wintertime, January 1636, the sheriff came to his home to arrest him. But Williams was gone. Like the pilgrims before him, Roger Williams was willing to risk everything for religious liberty. Despite his illness and despite a blizzard, he walked 55 miles through deep snow to a Wampanoag village some 25 miles west of Plymouth. Chief Massasoit, who had sent 90 warriors to bring the pilgrims venison 15 years earlier, offered Williams food and shelter until spring.
Once spring came, Governor Bradford sent Williams a letter reminding him that he was still within the jurisdiction of Plymouth Colony. Bradford was sympathetic to Williams’s plight, but he was worried that the Massachusetts Bay authorities would destroy everything he had built if he harbored Williams as a fugitive. Williams would have to recant his beliefs.
But he didn’t. Acting on his convictions, he chose to turn his back on what little rudimentary civilization existed in these two colonies clinging to the coastline and to journey further into the wilderness to worship God—and to trust Him to provide.
Together with a supporter named Thomas Angell, Williams crossed the Seekonk River and entered the territory of the Narragansett tribe, the enemy of Massasoit’s tribe. Miraculously, the Narragansett welcomed Williams and agreed to sell him land around a freshwater spring. Convinced that God’s hand was guiding him, Williams named it Providence Plantations.
Williams wanted Providence to be a place of refuge for those “distressed of conscience.” He spent the next 11 years laboring and finally secured a colonial charter for the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
“Stephen Mumford, a member of a Sabbath-keeping church in London, left England for Newport, Rhode Island, in 1664,” Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in Mystery of the Ages. “Rhode Island was the smallest of the American colonies, and had been founded by Roger Williams, a Baptist fleeing persecution from the Puritans of Massachusetts. Rhode Island was the first place in the world to guarantee freedom of religion as a basic tenet of its constitution. Finding none who kept the Sabbath, Mumford and his wife began to fellowship with the Baptist church in Newport. He did not proselytize, but quietly maintained his own belief. Several members of the Sunday-keeping congregation became convinced that they, too, should observe the Sabbath.”
No other place on Earth offered Christians like Mumford the same religious freedom as Rhode Island. It was the only place such a church could exist. Others started joining Mumford’s church. In fact, one of Roger Williams’s friends, Samuel Hubbard, started keeping the seventh-day Sabbath with Mumford a year after Mumford arrived from England. Hubbard told his friend Williams about the Sabbath, and Williams responded in a 1672 letter that while he disagreed with Hubbard, he would never persecute another Christian like he had been persecuted. He ended his letter: “I pray salute respectively, Mr. John Clarke and his brothers, Mr. Torrey, Mr. Edes, Edward Smith, William Hiscox, Stephen Mumford and other friends, whose preservation, of the island, and this country, I humbly beg the Father of Mercies, in whom I am yours unworthy, Roger Williams.”
These were the members of the church congregation Hubbard attended.
This is how the so-called “Seventh-Day Baptists” arrived in and thrived in Rhode Island to the point where several colonial governors were Sabbath-keepers.
In the course of time, America’s Founding Fathers obtained complete freedom from England for the purpose of giving citizens freedom of speech, of assembly, of the press, and especially of religion. When they began to draft the Declaration of Independence, they looked to Rhode Island’s example when they wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” When they began to draft the Constitution of the United States, they looked to Rhode Island’s example in drafting the First Amendment, which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Americans now commemorate January 16 each year as National Religious Freedom Day. Jan. 16, 1786, is the day Thomas Jefferson wrote the famous Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty. But the inspiring story about how religious freedom came to America traces back to a courageous group of faith-filled people who would rather freeze to death in the icy waters of Cape Cod or starve in the Rhode Island wilderness than allow a human government to stop them from worshiping God as they believed He wanted them to worship. We should all be profoundly grateful to these American heroes who risked everything to give us a better life than they had. Everything we believe—all of our other freedoms, principles and policies—flows out of what we believe or don’t believe about God. We live in a miraculous nation of religious freedom. We should diligently make good use thereof.