Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | B | Baptist History and Heritage

The conflicted Puritan inheritance of John Bunyan''s political writings.

Article Excerpt
In his study of the Italian Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt suggested that a heightened sense of the individual demarcates modern from medieval times.

Difficult life under despotic rulers forced medieval persons who had previously looked to race or nation for self-understanding to turn to "inward resources" instead, and they eventually came to think of themselves in individual rather than collective terms. (1) A definite political corollary of the new individualism in Europe was the growing call, especially by the time of the Enlightenment, for toleration and freedom of conscience in the public sphere. Perhaps the quintessential example was John Locke, who said that because all persons must construct their lives individually without the foundation of innate ideas, they should also have civil liberties conducive to their doing so. Since the highly introspective writings of John Bunyan (who was Locke's slightly older contemporary) both reflected and furthered the individualist ethos of his era, one might naturally assume that Bunyan may have petitioned the state to permit free exercise of conscience to religious nonconformists like himself. However, as Christopher Hill pointed out, "Unlike Levellers, Cromwell, and Locke, Bunyan contributed nothing to the theory of toleration, proclaimed no principles of natural right." (2) I believe that Bunyan's failure to construct a systematic theory of toleration and free exercise of conscience--remarkable enough from someone whose legacy is "the great seventeenthcentury religious writer and contender for religious conscience" (3)--was not a result of neglect but rather indecision based on the conflicted Puritan heritage on the relationship between church and state which the Baptist Bunyan inherited.

The classic Puritan statements on liberty of conscience were made by William Perkins (1558-1602) and his student at Cambridge, William Ames (1576-1633). Yet, their writings assumed that the Calvinistic worship for which they desired liberty would also become the religion of the state church and thus have the support and protection of the crown. However, when their disciples found themselves in an adversarial relationship with the unsympathetic Stuart kings James I and Charles I, the Perkins-Ames linking of liberty of conscience with established religion could no longer hold.

Nowhere was this tension more evident than in America when Puritan immigrants who were dissatisfied with Caroline England tried to establish new governments of their own. Was it more important for the good of society, as John Cotton believed, that magistrates establish a single state religion (and that a Calvinist one), or instead, as Roger Williams argued, that liberty of conscience be unfolded to its fullest extent so that even Catholics and Anabaptists could worship freely? Both Cotton and Williams could appeal to the Perkins-Ames tradition to argue their case.

With Bunyan, however, the debate became internalized. Having been imprisoned for over twelve years after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Bunyan vigorously desired religious liberty for his Nonconformist congregation, and he showed no serious belief that Nonconformity could ever be the religion of all. Yet, in his overtly political writings, he assumed a role for magistrates in contending for true religion that seems to be a holdover of the older, establishment Puritanism. The juxtaposition of his individualist tendencies and his nostalgia for a king who would be a Protestant defensor pacis makes Bunyan a personification of the bridge between the premodern and modern world views.

Individualism and Conservatism in Bunyan's Political Theory

Even while he described why Bunyan's political theory has received relatively little scholarly attention, Michael Mullett unintentionally demonstrated why it should:

It is worth noting that, of his nearly sixty published works, none directly concerns politics, and that one early production, the 1663 Christian Behaviour "illustrates the conservatism of Bunyan's social views." Conservative or not, there is every indication that Bunyan was not deeply interested in political questions, in view of the overwhelming priority of spiritual and religious issues in his scheme of things. However, he was a leader in a church which had taken a consistent radical line on political questions. (4)

Mullett's evaluation reflects the very conflict between two strands of Puritan tradition that I summarized above: how could it simultaneously be that Bunyan's church toed a "consistent radical line on political questions" while Bunyan's writings remained politically conservative? Mullett is correct that Bunyan did not write a treatise strictly on politics as such (though neither did Perkins or Ames), but his opinions about the state, particularly in the posthumously published works, occur frequently enough that a reconstruction of Bunyan's political views is possible. Before illustrating the two sides...