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THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY GREW fast, from a population of a thousand to forty thousand in its first decade or so. One of them was Anne Hutchinson, daughter of a minister, wife of a well-to-do merchant, mother of a dozen children, Boston neighbor of Governor Winthrop, and a charismatic, extremely impassioned Puritan. She promptly set herself up as a de facto preacher. Every week dozens of women came to the Hutchinsons’ big house to hear her critiques of the previous Sunday’s church sermons and ask questions about sin, salvation, and God. Since the Lord decided before the beginning of time which of us will spend eternity with Him, she explained to her listeners, any one of us might hold a winning ticket, regardless of our status in the here and now. The clergy’s learning and degrees and titles give them no special lock on godliness.
But she didn’t just argue the logic and quibble over the fine points of the beliefs they all shared. No, she gleamed with an absolute conviction, knew she was Heaven-bound, felt the truth in her gut. The Puritans in Massachusetts “were the first Americans to enact the paradigm that underlies all romantic projects,” as the historian Andrew Delbanco says: they “dared to assert the direct apprehension by the believer of the divine.” Hutchinson took that paradigm and upped the ante, calling the leaders’ bluff. People “look at her as a prophetess,” Governor Winthrop anxiously wrote in his journal. She claimed to have some kind of sixth sense for divining who was or wasn’t a member of God’s special elect.
Men began attending the gatherings as well, and she added a second weekly session. Enlightened and emboldened, her followers took to walking out of church in the middle of sermons by ministers they weren’t feeling. Anne Hutchinson, resident in America for only a thousand days, was leading a movement to make her colony of magical thinkers even more fervid. Protestantism had started as a breakaway movement of holier-than-thou zealots—and in the even-holier-than-thou zealots’ state-of-the-art utopia, they now had a still-holier-than-thou mystic militant in their midst.
Once a faction of the colony’s leaders signed on to Hutchinson’s more magical, passionate, extra-pure Puritanism, she became problematic. Sure, individuals sometimes overflowed with the Holy Spirit. And yes, everybody’s a Bible-reading amateur theologian; the “priesthood of all believers” made Protestants Protestants rather than sheeplike Catholics or crypto-Catholics. But come on, we’ve got a brand-new theocracy to run here (and at that moment a war to wage against a native tribe in Connecticut). Anne Hutchinson had gone rogue.
She was charged and tried for defaming ministers. Governor Winthrop served as chief judge. On the first day of her testimony in November 1637, she stayed within the bounds of Puritan intellectualism, batting scriptural references back and forth, arguing that her religious meetings weren’t public events. She didn’t quite tell them she was godlier than they, but her contempt was clear. “We are your judges,” Winthrop told her, “and not you ours.” She fainted.
When her trial resumed the next day, she let it all hang out. It wasn’t just the Bible that guided her but the Holy Spirit—that is, God, speaking to her personally, just as He had spoken to people in the Bible. It was, she told them, “an immediate revelation….by the voice of his own spirit to my soul….God had said to me…‘I am the same God that delivered Daniel out of the lion’s den, I will also deliver thee.’ ” Governor Winthrop and his forty fellow judges had assembled to convict her of something, and now she’d made it easy. Furthermore, she threatened them and their misguided regime with God’s own wrath: “Therefore take heed how you proceed against me—for I know that, for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity and this whole state.”
“This is the thing that has been the root of all the mischief,” Winthrop bellowed, pointing at her. And also: “I am persuaded that the revelation she brings forth is delusion.” We’re all irritating, self-righteous Christian nuts, he did not add, but good God, woman, even we have our limits.
“Mistress Hutchinson,” a once and future Massachusetts governor among the judges said during the trial, “is deluded by the Devil.” And a witness against her, one of her fellow shipmates on the passage from England, testified that she’d made “very strange and witchlike” pronouncements when they’d landed in America three years earlier. The court might have brought a conviction for witchcraft and executed her. Instead, they threw her out of the colony.
In the modern era, Anne Hutchinson is inevitably portrayed as the first great American heroine, a feminist crusader for religious liberty and the victim of a show trial. Undoubtedly her gender made her freelance shamanism even more appalling and unacceptable. The trial transcript, dozens of male judges and witnesses versus one female defendant, is a horrible, hilarious episode of mansplaining. One minister testified that she “had rather been husband than a wife; and a preacher than a hearer.”
But the intolerance she experienced isn’t what makes Anne Hutchinson a prototypically American figure. Protestant communities in Europe surely would’ve punished or exiled her as well, and by global standards, Massachusetts was not an unusually oppressive place for women. No, Hutchinson is so American because she was so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality. She’s so American because, unlike the worried, pointy-headed people around her, she didn’t recognize ambiguity or admit to self-doubt. Her perceptions and beliefs were true because they were hers and because she felt them so thoroughly to be true. They weren’t mere theories and opinions delivered by her Oxford- and Cambridge-educated antagonists. Hutchinson didn’t have to study any book but the Bible to arrive at the truth. Because she felt it. She knew it. The great historian of Puritanism Perry Miller refers to her “fanatical anti-intellectualism”—in other words, a prototypical Fantasyland American.
The American Puritans were the Protestant avant-garde, and she was the most avant of all—a dissident persecuted and banished by a corrupt and self-serving elite, a self-righteous individual whose individual imagination was all that mattered. By claiming she had personal access to God, Hutchinson took a big piece of the nonconformist Protestant idea to an even more fantastical and perfectly American extreme.
It’s hard for us to understand or empathize with our founding Puritans, not because of their wild religious beliefs—many of which a great many Americans still share—but because of their ferocious insistence on discipline. Alone among the Puritans, Anne Hutchinson is the one with whom American sensibilities today can connect, because America is now a nation where every individual is gloriously free to construct any version of reality he or she devoutly believes to be true. American Christianity in the twenty-first century resembles Hutchinson’s version more than it does the official Christianity of her time.
In other words, Anne Hutchinson lost her battle in Cambridge but would finally win the war. For the Puritan leaders, it was their way or the highway. But in America there was an infinity of highways and new places not so far away where outcast true believers could move.
While Quaker Pennsylvania soon welcomed Christian zealots of almost every kind, the Quakers’ famous civic reasonableness—tolerant, democratic, pacifist, protofeminist, abolitionist—tends to obscure their own founding zealotry: each person could directly commune with God, which variously took the form of prophecies, trancelike rants, and convulsions.
Hutchinson’s fellow charismatic Massachusetts Puritan, the young minister Roger Williams, claimed no wizardly superpowers. Nevertheless, he was also problematic for the Boston theocrats—he disapproved of theocracy, and his hatred of the Church of England was a bit too self-righteously fervent. They convicted him of heresy and sedition shortly before they banished Hutchinson. He moved forty miles south to start a new colony, which he named for God’s blessed omnipotence, Providence. Williams and Hutchinson were thus both key inventors of American individualism. He disagreed with the religious nonsense you spouted, but he would defend to the death your right to spout it; she was the crackpot case study for extreme freedom of thought and speech, insisting she be allowed to believe and tell people she had magical powers. Which Williams was willing to let her do in Providence, where she moved.
Today we tell ourselves a story of America’s progress toward freedom of thought and a happy ending. Williams in Rhode Island and the Quaker William Penn in his new colony were indeed heroic progressives, separating the state from any one church.* The Massachusetts theocracy softened and eventually dissolved. Then a century later came Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the Constitution, and the First Amendment. All that was indeed progress. Disbelief was eventually permitted, at least legally.
But during our founding 1600s, as giants walked in Europe and the Age of Reason dawned—Shakespeare, Galileo, Bacon, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza—America was a primitive outlier. Individual freedom of thought in early America was specifically about the freedom to believe whatever supernaturalism you wished. Four centuries later that has been a freedom, revived and unfettered and run amok, driving America’s transformation.
* Despite the official tolerance, however, no Catholic church was built in Rhode Island for the first two centuries of its existence.