Mary Dyer had already been twice banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but she had no intention of leaving lost souls behind. Three times she returned to preach a gospel of the Inner Light, a theological claim characteristic of the Quakers which teaches that people have individual access to God and thus no need for clergy, the sacraments, or ritual. This time, however, would be her last. On the 1st of June, 1660, Dyer was put to death by hanging, cementing her name in the history books as one of the four Boston Martyrs. As her body hung there at the gallows, her skirt waving in the wind, one General Atherton looked up at her swinging corpse. “She hangs like a flag.”
Puritan-Quaker relations in 17th-century Massachusetts were characterized by intense religious persecution and oppression. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was an intensely theocratic institution, with the people identifying with and situating themselves within a neo-Exodus narrative. They had fled from the tyranny of a Pharaoh, crossing an expansive sea and establishing the New Israel, the Kingdom of God, a “City Upon a Hill” of sorts (see Matthew 5:14). This underlying narrative was inseparably tied to the Puritan government and acted as the driving theological motivator for snuffing out what they perceived to be heresy and false teaching.
Quakers posed theological concerns for the Massachusetts Bay, true. But perhaps more so, they stood as a threat to the established social order. The supposedly subversive nature of Quaker ideology, evidenced by their willingness to allow women to speak on theological matters, their opposition to the established church’s hierarchy as an institution, and their lack of emphasis on formal education, presented Quakers as a danger to the pious City Upon a Hill that colonists had worked so hard to build. They had to be stopped, so the reasoning goes, or else the colony would fall into chaos and sin at the hands of itinerant fools.
Quakers were overtly persecuted in the Bay. In 1656, a Quaker ban was instituted and violators were whipped, mutilated, imprisoned, and banished. Two years later, another law was passed that prescribed the death penalty for the simple crime of being a Quaker in Massachusetts. The Quakers refused to back down from their religious convictions, often returning to the colony after being banished. They would interrupt Puritan services to preach their understanding of the gospel, with some even going so far as to call Puritan religious leaders “priests of Baal” (see 1 Kings 18:25-29).
Ultimately, King George II would intervene and halt the executions of Quakers in 1661. As persecution began to taper, the Quakers started to adopt even more radical methods of spreading their message. Some women went so far as to interrupt Puritan services naked and covered in ashes to represent the “spiritual nakedness” of Puritan leaders and the congregation at large.
Today, Quakers unfortunately seem best known for their contribution to the oatmeal industry. Interestingly, they also spearheaded the anti-slavery movement, being the first religious group to ban owning slaves and vehemently advocating for abolition. While they were certainly never a large religious group, their impacts are evident throughout American history.
In John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, he makes a strong case against religious persecution. “The care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate, because his Power consists only in outward force,” Locke says. “It [that is, the Mind] cannot be compelled to the belief of any thing by outward Force. Confiscation of Estate, Imprisonment, Torments, nothing of that Nature can have any such Efficacy as to make Men change the inward Judgment that they have framed of things.” Put simply, the spiritual domain is not subject to the state’s monopolistic threat of force; people’s minds are persuaded, not coerced. The state’s responsibility ought to be entirely constrained to the civil interests of its constituents. We see clearly, brought to life through the story of Mary Dyer, that neither punishment, banishment, nor even the gallows would have ever changed the minds and hearts of persuaded Quakers.
These ardent devotees were beaten, imprisoned, and banished for merely refusing to take off their hats in the presence of their Puritan superiors. Why such senseless barbarism? In the mind of the Puritan, Quakers represented a threat to their established theocratic order. The political, theological, and social hierarchy was radically threatened by this small band of deviants, and it is imperative that the memory of their persecution lives on. It serves as a vital reminder of the threat posed by theocratic regimes and bad actors who intend to abandon the Gospel of grace (see Acts 20:24) in favor of a gospel of force and control.
Josef Westberg ‘27 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at j.r.westberg@wustl.edu.