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The Williamsburg Charter: A Compact for Peace with Diversity*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
Extract
The recent celebration of the national holiday of Thanksgiving prompts me to make two comments about the Williamsburg Charter. The first is that the concept of a charter document providing cohesion for a community has its roots in Puritan theology. One can make light of this connection, as a cartoonist in the New Yorker did, depicting two of the Pilgrims standing on the deck of the Arabella, one telling the other: “Religious freedom is my main reason for coming here, but when we get that settled, I'm going into real estate.” As humorous as this spoof on the hidden economic agenda of the Pilgrims might be, the commonplace image of the Pilgrims as rugged individualists overlooks the role of the covenant or communal bonding that was so central to their thought.
One of the most famous sermons of the seventeenth century, entitled “A Model of Christian Charity,” was delivered not in a church but on the deck of the ship depicted in the New Yorker cartoon. The preacher was not an ordained member of the clergy, but the civil leader of the new colony, Governor John Winthrop, who encouraged his weary fellow travelers with the words: “We must delight in each other, make other's conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.”
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- III. The First Liberty Forums
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- Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 1990
Footnotes
*
These remarks were delivered at the First Liberty Forum in San Francisco on December 2, 1988.
References
1. As cited in Noonan, John T., The Believer and the Powers That Are: Cases, History, and Other Data Bearing on the Relation of Religion and Government 64 (Macmillan, 1987)Google Scholar (spelling and punctuation altered to reflect modern usage).
2. The Williamsburg Charter, 7 above.
3. Id.
4. Id at 12.
5. Id at 8.
6. See, e.g., Broek, Jacobus Ten, Barnhart, E., and Matson, F., Prejudice, War and the Constitution (California, 1958)Google Scholar; Girdner, Audrie and Loftis, Anne, Betrayal, Great: The Evacuation of Japanese-Americans during World War II (Macmillan, 1969)Google Scholar; Irons, Peter, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar; and Irons, Peter, ed, Justice Delayed: The Record of the Japanese American Internment Cases (Wesleyan, 1989)Google Scholar.
7. Holy Spirit Ass'n v Molko, 46 Cal 3d 1092, 762 P 2d 46 (1988), cert denied, 109 S Ct 2110(1989).
8. Walker v Superior Court, 47 Cal 3d 112, 763 P 2d 852 (1988).
9. New York Times v Sullivan, 376 US 254, 270 (1964).
10. McRae v Califano, 491 F Supp 630, 741 (EDNY 1980), rev'd on other grounds, sub nom Harris v McRae, 448 US 294 (1980).
11. “[T]he public square cannot and does not remain naked. When particularist religious values and the institutions that bear them are excluded, the inescapable need to make public moral judgments will result in an elite construction of a normative morality from sources and principles not democratically recognized by the society. The truly naked public square is at best a transitional phenomenon. It is a vacuum begging to be filled. When the democratically affirmed institutions that generate and transmit values are excluded, the vacuum will be filled by the agent left in control of the public square, the state. In this manner, a perverse notion of the disestablishment of religion leads to the establishment of the state as church.” Neuhaus, Richard John, The Naked Public Square: Religion and American Democracy 86 (Eerdmans, 1984)Google Scholar.
12. The Williamsburg Charter, 9 above.
13. Id at 18.
14. Id at 22.
15. Bellah, Robert, Madson, Richard, Sullivan, William M., Swidler, Anne, and Tipton, Steven, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (California, 1985)Google Scholar.