John Clarke (1609-1676), sometimes also spelled Clark, is one of the pioneers of religious freedom in America. He was influential in securing religious liberty in Rhode Island where he held a number of public offices, including that of legal clerk and lieutenant governor.
Clarke was born in Westhorpe, Suffock, England and received medical training in Holland. He arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 and joined Anne Hutchinson and others whom Massachusetts had exiled. He became a Baptist who favored baptism by immersion, opposed child baptism and favored local church governance.
Although Roger Williams is usually credited with founding the first Baptist church in America and arguing for religious liberty similar to that later protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in 1638 Clark founded the second such Baptist church in Newport, Rhode Island, and also played an influential role in advocating for “soul liberty.” Moreover, while Williams drifted from his Baptist beliefs, Clarke did not.
Clarke beaten with whip for preaching in Massachusetts
In 1651, Clarke traveled from Rhode Island to Lynn, Massachusetts, to hold a worship service at the home of William Witter, a blind man with Baptist leanings. He and two colleagues, Obadiah Holmes and John Crandall were subsequently arrested for failing to register as aliens and for teachings (especially their opposition to child baptism) disfavored by the established Puritan congregational churches. They were also charged for disrespecting a congregational service they had been forced to attend.
Although they pleaded for freedom of conscience, the authorities did not believe that such freedom included the right to spread what they considered to be heretical beliefs to others (Buckley 1981, 317), and they refused to enter into public debate with them. Clarke also claimed that they could not cite the laws under which they were being charged. All three were incarcerated and fined. Refusing to pay the fine, Holmes was beaten with 30 strokes of a whip, and two witnesses were subsequently fined for providing moral support.
Clarke wrote of his treatment, pled for liberty of conscience
When Clarke visited England in 1652, he published a somewhat meandering account entitled "Ill News From New England” describing and criticizing the treatment he had received in Massachusetts and making a plea for liberty of conscience, which in his mind included the right to preach and worship as one chose. Clarke argued that earthly powers had no power over such thought and practice. Using a parable of Jesus that Thomas Helwys has also cited in his “Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity” (1612), Clarke argued that heretics, or tares, should not be disturbed, lest in so doing, one also uprooted true believers, or wheat (Clarke 1652, 6).
At the same time, Clarke made it clear that he considered child baptism (pedobaptism), sprinkling (aspersion), pouring (affusion) and other Puritan practices to be contrary to the word of God. He also pointed out what he considered to be the errors of Quakers and Seekers.
He strongly opposed the Puritan practices of banishment and of using governmental tax power to support the established churches. He denied governmental power, “with outward force, or an arm of flesh to constrain, or restrain another’s conscience, nor yet his outward man for conscience’s sake, or worship of his God” (54).
In Clarke’s judgment, the only individual capable of making and enforcing such judgments was Jesus.
He argued that “by outward force to seek to constrain or restrain another’s conscience in the worship of God, etc, doth presuppose one man to have dominion over another man’s conscience and this is but to force servants and worshippers upon the Lord, which He seeks for, and is the ready way to make men dissemblers and hypocrites and to put them upon profaning the name of the Lord” (57). He further contended that “this outward forcing of men in matter of conscience towards God to believe as others believe and to practice and worship as others do cannot stand with the Peace, Liberty, Prosperity and Safety of a Place, Commonwealth or Nation. Therefore no servant of Christ can have any liberty, much less authority, so to do” (59).
Clarke’s role in securing the Rhode Island charter
While in England, Clarke and others helped negotiate a charter from King Charles II, that settled the boundaries of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations and legitimized a government consisting of a governor, general assembly and other offices.
More importantly, it permitted the colony “to hold forth a livlie experiment, that a flourishing civill state may stand and best bee maintained, and that among our English subjects, with a full libertie in religious concernements; and that true pietye rightly grounded upon gospel principles, will give the best and greatest security to sovereignetye, and will lay in the hearts of men the strongest oblivations to true loyaltye.”
Rhode Island charter provided for ‘free exercise’ of religious rights
In a phrase later associated with James Madison and incorporated into the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the charter further provided for “the free exercise and enjoyment of all theire civill and religious rights, appertaining to them, as our loving subjects; and to preserve unto them that libertye, in the true, Christan faith and worship of God, which they have sought with soe much travail, and with peaceable myndes, and loyall subjectioone to our royall progenitors and ourselves.” In so doing, the charter recognized that many of the inhabitants of Rhode Island could not, “in theire private opinions, conform to the publique exercise of religion, according to the liturgy, forms and ceremonyes of the Church of England, or take or subscribe the oaths and articles made and established in that behalf.”
The charter encouraged further settlement in Rhode Island by Quakers, Jews, and other religious dissenters. In 1790, President George Washington wrote a letter to a Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, lauding “liberty of conscience” and expressing his wish: “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Caveat about Clarke’s commitment to religious liberty
Although Clarke has thus been lauded as one of the pioneers of religious freedom in America, Professor Theodore Bozeman argues that his portrait needs to be tempered with the knowledge that Clarke later supported the Fifth Monarchy movement in England, connected in part with the English Revolution. It foresaw a millennial reign of Christ during which all existing religious establishments would be overthrown, and government would be conducted by Jesus in conjunction with a “‘Sanhedrin’ of saints” in accord with the Baptist principles that Clarke favored (2006, 82).
John R. Vile, a political science professor, is dean of the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University.