Richard Hooker and American religious liberty.

Summary

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The American concept of religious liberty may be partly traceable to the writings of Richard Hooker, an Anglican theologian who lived from 1554 to 1600. Hooker's "The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity" defended state establishment of religion and repression of dissenters. Paradoxically, Hooker also developed a theory of consent of the governed which the Anglicans brought with them to colonial Virginia and which ultimately influenced the Founding Fathers' support for religious freedom.

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Extract

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Richard Hooker and American religious liberty.

When historians trace the origins of the American concept of religious liberty, they often cite as a key fact that many of the English settlers came to North America to escape religious persecution. This is tree, especially when one considers the Puritans in New England and the Roman Catholics in Maryland. Few people could quarrel with the assertion that the experience of persecuted groups should make a major contribution to ideals of free exercise of religious belief and practice.

However, the Puritans in particular were not especially enthusiastic about securing the same freedom of belief and practice for later immigrants whose religious ideas differed from the ones which the first colonists hoped to establish in the Western Hemisphere. Persecuted groups, when they finally escape and gain an ascendency of their own, have a tendency to persecute others with the same enthusiasm from which they had previously suffered. If such a pattern had not been moderated in some way, it is unlikely that citizens in the United States would enjoy the right of religious liberty as it has come to be understood.

In some ways, it seems to fall to those in power to assure the liberties of those who cannot do so for themselves. Minorities can only continue to exist because those who hold power allow them to do so. In some instances, over extended periods of time, those in power come to see the positive value of the toleration of previously persecuted groups. This has some bearing on the formation of the right to religious liberty as a constitutionally guaranteed freedom in the United States: religion itself, broadly understood, is a positive good because it encourages moral behavior directed toward the well-being of the populace. The doctrinal specifies of particular religions, are, however, not defined by America's foundational documents, and the framers wisely limited their power to articulate such formulae. This set the stage for respect of persons to follow their consciences in matters of religious belief and practice within their own faith groups, and presumably to act on the mandates of various traditions in public life.

It is the intention of this essay to explore the possibility that there is a connection to be drawn between Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and the ideas of religious liberty which eventually became enshrined in the Bill of Rights. At first glance, it may seem like a parado...

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