Original Intent

Confessions of a Prayer-Struck Atheist

by Sarah Braasch
Published in the September/October 2009 Humanist

My tenth great grandfather, or something like that, Thomas Joy, was an early settler of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He didn’t come over from England on the Mayflower, but not long thereafter he emigrated from Norfolk and took his place in the annals of American history. He was an architect and a builder, and he designed and constructed Boston’s first town hall, as featured in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. He was wealthy and prosperous and successful. He owned land. He was a member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts. And, he married the daughter of a formidable mariner and Indian trader, Captain John Gallop, my eleventh great grandfather, or something of the sort. They had ten children, five of whom survived their father. Fortunately for myself, one of those five was my ninth great grandfather, or something along those lines, Joseph Joy. 

Now, Robert G. Ingersoll wasn’t able to suffer genealogy. He liked to say that he knew as much about his ancestors as his ancestors knew about him. I can see his point. Many of the most devout amateur genealogists are searching only for kings, queens, VIPs, or iconoclasts. They wish for a little of that bygone prestige or intrigue or notoriety to rub off on them and posthumously and vicariously endow them with power, wealth, fame, courage, intelligence, beauty, and so on. This is nothing less than modern day ancestor worship. (And nobody does it better than the Mormons, who are known to retroactively convert their ancestors.)

I do admit that I find it all fascinating. But, the thing that I like the most about genealogy is that once you go back a handful of generations you realize that social constructs like racism and tribalism seem downright silly. 

The Puritans saw racism and tribalism as anything but silly. They established the Massachusetts Bay Colony under Governor John Winthrop as an ideal theocracy, a “city on the hill.” They fled religious persecution but saw no value in a pluralistic, democratic polity. England had been too lenient and multicultural for their tastes. Instead they wished to impose upon their society a rigid asceticism and a strict piety. Winthrop saw the devastation of the local native population by small pox as God’s will and judgment meant to clear this God-given land of infidels. 

The Bostonian Puritans were Congregationalists. Governor Winthrop took pains to establish his government so as to exclude all but Congregationalist Church members from participation, including voting, holding public office, exercising privileges in the churches, and levying taxes. The Presbyterians and the Anglicans had to pay taxes to support the Congregationalist churches, but they were politically marginalized, as were the freethinkers.

My ancestor Thomas Joy wasn’t a Puritan. Most indications are that he was neither a churchgoer nor a theist, but a deist and a Freemason. He was not a member of one of the local Congregationalist Churches and, therefore, had no rights to vote or participate politically in the affairs of the colony. Having established himself as a pillar of the community both socially and economically, he also wished to do so politically. 

Thomas Joy signed and supported a petition by Dr. Robert Child that decried the tyrannous, capricious, and arbitrary abuse of power by Winthrop and his cronies. The petitioners were demanding equality before the law and democratic representation without regard for church membership, as stipulated by English law in the colony’s founding charter. 

He was a church-state separatist. One hundred and thirty years before the American Revolution, before Thomas Jefferson, before the French Enlightenment, the Massachusetts Bay colonists were fighting for a “wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world,” as went the original turn of phrase uttered by theologian Roger Williams. The founding of our nation was preceded and predicated on the struggle to establish a government unfettered by religious identity. Not only did our forefathers seek to rid politics of church influence, our forefathers’ forefathers sought to free themselves from the authoritarian totalitarianism of church leaders. 

Joy and his fellow rabble-rousers succeeded in garnering attention. As soon as Winthrop and his ilk discovered their intent to plead their case in England and present the petition before Parliament, they wasted no time rounding up the motley crew and persecuting them, as any self-respecting Puritan theocrats would have done. Many were forced to escape the colony. Some were sent to prison. Some paid exorbitant fines just like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams nearly ten years prior, except that the supporters of Child’s petition were fighting not so much for freedom of religion as for freedom from religion. 

Thomas Joy questioned the court’s authority to arrest him, so the court clapped him in irons for five days for being “too ardent [a] lover of liberty.” He finally relented and recanted for the sake of his family. Governor Winthrop recounted the entire debacle in his journal. 

Ultimately, Thomas Joy was forced to remove himself and his family from Boston to Hingham, Massachusetts, was ostracized as something of a pariah for nearly a decade, and suffered substantial pecuniary losses. He had to place his Boston properties in trust, and his subsequent children were baptized in Boston’s Puritan First Church by their maternal grandfather, John Gallop. Eventually, Joy’s reputation and stature were more or less rehabilitated. And ten years hence most of what he’d been lobbying for was part and parcel of colony policy. 

This is something of a call to arms. I am so tired of hearing how our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian precepts or Judeo-Christian principles or Judeo-Christian ideals. This trite claim is bandied about as if it were a mantra or a rallying cry for the American religious right. If by Judeo-Christian precepts they mean the repression and oppression and persecution of heathen advocates of human and civil rights, then certainly our nation is founded on Judeo-Christian precepts. Our nation’s founding embodies the struggle against Puritanical dogma and religious tyranny.

While I make no claims of erudition in the field of history, I feel confident in saying that our nation is better defined in opposition than allegiance to these so-called Judeo-Christian precepts. Our nation is as well founded on secular humanist precepts as it is on Judeo-Christian precepts. I would go so far as to say that anyone insisting on the Judeo-Christian origin theory hasn’t bothered to learn anything more about our colonial past than what he or she was taught in the fifth grade. These myths have been so assiduously and vociferously propounded by the devious and the willfully deceived that they’ve gained far too much traction for my taste, including the aspersions cast upon the constitutional wall of separation.

My great respect and admiration for Robert Ingersoll’s example notwithstanding, I am more than a little proud to claim as my own a gentleman who was disowned by church leaders for loving liberty a little too well. I wish to encourage all descendants of freethinking colonists to claim their ancestors as their own. I think it’s time for a little revisionist colonial history. A reformation, if you will.

Sarah Braasch is a recent graduate of Fordham University School of Law in New York City and will be spending the next year in Paris, France, working with Ni Putes, Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissives), a women’s rights organization focused on ending gender violence and discrimination in the predominantly Muslim immigrant ghettoes of France. This work in supported by a James E. Tolan Human Rights Fellowship from the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham University.