fun of that beginning. In a thrilling montage scored with a choral arrangement of the socialist anthem, “ The Internationale,” there is this one little flash, amongst the clips of Lenin at the podium or a workers’ candlelight parade, in which Jack walks outside and Louise, lying in wait, pelts him with a snowball. It is a small snapshot that makes being part of a world historical uprising look like nothing but glee. Because what’s coming has yet to come—the gulags and purges, Stalin and Mao, somewhere between 20 and 100 million dead. But at the snowball’s moment of impact on Jack Reed’s head, there is only happiness and hope.
That is where we are with Winthrop, at the grace note before the downbeat of gloom. Remember, when he delivers “A Model of Christian Charity” he is either by the shore back home or out on the open sea. He’s been chosen governor but he has yet to govern. What’s coming has yet to come. And here is what is coming:
On June 14, 1631, almost a year to the day after the Arbella arrives in Massachusetts, Governor Winthrop presides over the court in Boston. He records in his journal that a servant named Philip Ratcliffe convicted of “most foul, scandalous invectives against our churches and government was censured to be whipped, lose his ears, and be banished the plantation, which was presently executed.”
The Winthrop of “Christian Charity,” yearning that the settlers should think of themselves as members of the same body, orders a man’s ears to be cut off.
It reminds me of that moment in Whittaker Chambers’s book Witness. Chambers describes the way every decent young person in the twentieth century contemplated becoming a Communist because of its ideal of fairness. But he also describes the moment every decent person who became a Communist stopped being one. A woman tells him that her East German father had been a Communist Party loyalist up until “One night—in Moscow—he heard screams.” Yet another person was being hauled off to jail in the dead of night. Chambers writes, “Five annihilating words: one night he heard screams.”
As literature, Winthrop’s “Christian Charity” is a kind of poem of union—arm-in-arm romance, a snowball before the screams. But given Philip Ratcliffe’s hacked-off ears, seemingly innocuous sentiments in the sermon come off as absolutely chilling. Like, “We must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren.” One way to read that line is in keeping with the sermon’s title, as a call for charity, a reminder to donate a few soup cans to the town food drive. But another way to read that line is to see it as a call not only for conformity but also surveillance—to keep watch on one’s neighbors (or servants), to make sure they are not doing or saying anything that contradicts the government or the church. Same thing with Roger Williams’s charming little metaphor about the commonwealth as a ship; it also has a sinister subtext, namely, that a ship has a captain and a captain’s orders are to be obeyed.
Even such statements of Winthrop’s as God “loves His elect because they are like Himself,” and the early Christians “used to love any of their own religion even before they were acquainted with them,” can be read as both a harmless ode to the affection shared by like-minded joiners and as a dangerous manifesto of xenophobia that cuts off the ears of anyone giving lip to those in charge. In that light, the opening sentence of the sermon seems even more ominous—that God made sure “some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.”
Here is a useful mantra for maintaining some basic empathy for Winthrop and his English compatriots at their racist, persnickety, Indian-killing, puritanical worst: Harbottle Grimstone. Their contemporary, Grimstone, or Grimston as his name is sometimes spelled, was a Member of Parliament from Colchester,
That is where we are with Winthrop, at the grace note before the downbeat of gloom. Remember, when he delivers “A Model of Christian Charity” he is either by the shore back home or out on the open sea. He’s been chosen governor but he has yet to govern. What’s coming has yet to come. And here is what is coming:
On June 14, 1631, almost a year to the day after the Arbella arrives in Massachusetts, Governor Winthrop presides over the court in Boston. He records in his journal that a servant named Philip Ratcliffe convicted of “most foul, scandalous invectives against our churches and government was censured to be whipped, lose his ears, and be banished the plantation, which was presently executed.”
The Winthrop of “Christian Charity,” yearning that the settlers should think of themselves as members of the same body, orders a man’s ears to be cut off.
It reminds me of that moment in Whittaker Chambers’s book Witness. Chambers describes the way every decent young person in the twentieth century contemplated becoming a Communist because of its ideal of fairness. But he also describes the moment every decent person who became a Communist stopped being one. A woman tells him that her East German father had been a Communist Party loyalist up until “One night—in Moscow—he heard screams.” Yet another person was being hauled off to jail in the dead of night. Chambers writes, “Five annihilating words: one night he heard screams.”
As literature, Winthrop’s “Christian Charity” is a kind of poem of union—arm-in-arm romance, a snowball before the screams. But given Philip Ratcliffe’s hacked-off ears, seemingly innocuous sentiments in the sermon come off as absolutely chilling. Like, “We must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren.” One way to read that line is in keeping with the sermon’s title, as a call for charity, a reminder to donate a few soup cans to the town food drive. But another way to read that line is to see it as a call not only for conformity but also surveillance—to keep watch on one’s neighbors (or servants), to make sure they are not doing or saying anything that contradicts the government or the church. Same thing with Roger Williams’s charming little metaphor about the commonwealth as a ship; it also has a sinister subtext, namely, that a ship has a captain and a captain’s orders are to be obeyed.
Even such statements of Winthrop’s as God “loves His elect because they are like Himself,” and the early Christians “used to love any of their own religion even before they were acquainted with them,” can be read as both a harmless ode to the affection shared by like-minded joiners and as a dangerous manifesto of xenophobia that cuts off the ears of anyone giving lip to those in charge. In that light, the opening sentence of the sermon seems even more ominous—that God made sure “some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.”
Here is a useful mantra for maintaining some basic empathy for Winthrop and his English compatriots at their racist, persnickety, Indian-killing, puritanical worst: Harbottle Grimstone. Their contemporary, Grimstone, or Grimston as his name is sometimes spelled, was a Member of Parliament from Colchester,
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