(PD) John Doherty–Society Stays Christian Longer If It Respects Religious Freedom: New Evidence from Pew

The question of which view of religious freedom—the Puritans’ or the Quakers’—was the more Christian one is a debate for theology; it seems plain to me at least that the Quaker view is more that of contemporary Christianity, especially as articulated in the Catholic Church’s Dignitatis Humanae. What the social science behind the Pew Religious Landscape Survey can suggest is that, at least in the long run, Quakers’ respect for freedom of conscience might be more effective than Puritans’ integration of church and state in maintaining a Christian society. Although the differences in Christian identification between New England and the Delaware Valley today are not so large in the case of certain states, the Delaware Valley still comes out on top; and its metropolis, Philadelphia, easily outdoes New England’s preeminent city, Boston. Moreover, the one outlier state in New England that does better than much of the Delaware Valley in Christian religiosity—Rhode Island—was precisely founded on the principle of religious freedom, in protest of Puritan rigidity. 

How might New England’s and the Delaware Valley’s different religious attitudes have accounted for their long-term religiosity? Although many New England Puritans were surely sincere, their harsh public policing of orthodoxy led many other Christians (like Roger Williams) to leave New England. Many who stayed perhaps conformed outwardly without interior sincerity. Some came to see Christianity cynically—as a tool of hypocritical political rulers who only wanted to control others—and they made little effort to pass on belief to their children. Others conformed out of fear and came to see Christianity as rules by which to live in order to survive, not a truth that sets one free; such religiosity was probably not very attractive to potential converts. Many later New Englanders, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, saw the society of their Puritan ancestors this way—as shown in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Speculations aside, both historical data and scholarship (such as Kevin Vallier’s book All the Kingdoms of the World) show how religiously authoritarian regimes tend to harm both religious and political culture in the long run.

In the Delaware Valley, on the other hand, religion and politics were clearly distinguished: people were given the freedom to open themselves genuinely to religious truth, without fear of political reprisal. Thus, as Dignitatis Humanae says, truth was allowed to enter their minds “by virtue of its own truth, . . . quietly,” and therefore permanently, “with power.” If religious truth is to take possession of a person, he has to make it his own, in love, until he says with the poet in the Song of Songs: “I have got him, and I will not let him go.”

Read it all.