There’s only one way that Civil Union will ever mean Marriage. Ask banished Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, he’ll tell you. It’s simple. If the New Jersey legislature votes for gay civil unions the marriage is simply this: the Magistrates of Trenton will have officially decided to be at long last married to the Evangelical Religious Right who has been courting the state for legal sectarian recognition since the days of the Moral Majority. The Evangelicals unashamedly desire to be excluded from the First Amendment restriction of no marriage between the church and state. They want to be married to Trenton and to as many other state capitals as possible. They want to maintain their heterosexist elitism (Rogers, 2006, pp 96-98) by means of a political-religious marriage of church and state (White, 2006, p125). And now the day has come that New Jersey must decide. It’s either wedding bells for gay couples or the marriage of the Trenton Magistrates to Evangelicals. Either way someone’s getting married. But you may argue, “Isn’t that the point of Civil Unions, a compromise?” The argument is this: Trenton can tip its hat to Evangelicals by giving equal “marriage rights” to gays and calling it Civil Union, thereby keeping the valued "currency" that the word "marriage" psychologically and socially holds fully invested in the heterosexual sector. By doing this, Trenton can, in the name of great politics, pride itself in modeling tolerance. After all, isn’t tolerance the American way? Not exactly what the banished Roger Williams of 1635 would say. The following quote (Adams, 1982, pp 89-92) is very timely and much needed. It comes from a lecture given over 150 years ago by a Baptist minister to his Caldwell, New Jersey, congregation. He wanted them to understand the banished Roger Williams’ teachings on religious liberties.
religious liberty. It isn’t. Toleration is the allowance of that which is not wholly approved.
and to dictate to the conscience must also exist with it, and thus toleration becomes merely another name for oppression. Baptists have always strenuously contended for the acknowledgment of this principle, and have labored to propagate it.”
without the title of “Marriage” is “the allowance of that which is not wholly approved” and therefore “becomes merely another name for oppression.” It's an historic Baptist principle. As irony would have it, the Evangelical Religious Right are, for a sizable part, Baptist in name or in kind.
of California, for Roger Williams (who is often referred to as the founder of the First Baptist Church in America), "liberty was more than toleration, freedom more than a concession" (Gaustad, 1991, p.196). Civil Unions for gays and lesbians is not freedom, it is toleration; marriage is equality and therefore freedom. Civil Unions for gays is a concession; it is not civil liberties. (Myers and Sansone, 2005, p.) This is what every New Jersey legislator needs to tell the religious conservative of his or her district. It needs to be said simply because this principle comes right from the very religious heritage that the Religious Right wants to uphold and maintain which, therefore, puts them on the horns of a dilemma: They can't deny homosexuals their civil liberties by denying them marriage and at the same time uphold their religious heritage. Not if they stand squarely with the esteemed, banished Roger Williams. Since the Magistrates of the Bay Colony of Massachusetts were legally, once and for all, solemnly married to the Evangelicals of their day, Roger Williams, by Court order (1635), had to take his dissenting beliefs and forever remove himself from the colony. Lucky for us. His banishment gave the world religious freedom (Gaustad, 1991, p125). Did you know that the Magistrates of the Bay Colony and Rev. John Cotton, the Evangelical Boston preacher of his day, condemned Williams’ ideas of liberty as direct from the devil himself (Fish, 1983, pp 57-59)? They said his ideas were a threat to the very foundation of the settlement and prosperity of the Bay Colony (Gaustad, 1991, p). How ironic. Evangelicals are saying the same thing today of homosexuals (White, 2006) with the same intent of banishment – not from a state, but from an institution - the institution of marriage. There’s a wedding coming in New Jersey and all of America is invited. Only we don’t know yet who’s getting married. Either the church to the state or same-sex couples to one another (as it should be). Let’s hope Trenton chooses liberty over toleration and gay marriage over Evangelical sectarianism. And there is hope! After all, Massachusetts, the onetime colony of civil Magistrates who enforced ecclesiastical laws, wans’t about to make that mistake again when it came to same-sex marriage in the 21st century. Yes, marriage bells are ringing in the good old Bay Colony for gay couples. Why? Because there was, some time ago, a much needed divorce in Massachusetts. The marriage just wans’t working . . . So the state divorced the church. That’s right; the state-church marriage was dissolved in 1833. Just as it should be. Ask Roger Williams, the great defender of individual liberties for everyone. He’s no longer banished from Massachusetts. Stephen Parelli, ThB, MDiv Executive Director of Other Sheep www.othersheepexecsite.com and www.othersheep.org Former Pastor of the Faith Baptist Church of Sparta, New Jersey Written October 26-27, 2006, Bedford Park, Bronx, New York. |
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| This is an Other Sheep website |
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Visits to this web page since Oct. 2006
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| “Liberty was more than toleration, freedom more than a concession.” - Edwin S. Gaustad, Professor Emeritus of History, University of California; from his book Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America |
| References to "So, Who's Getting Married in New Jersey?" Adams, Rev. John Quincy. 1982. Baptists: Thorough Reformers. Rochester, New York: Backus Book
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- HER Statement on NJ
Supreme Court Decision
Recognizing Same-Sex
Couples' Constitutional Right
to Equal Benefits and
Protections
| Plaintiff Couples in New Jersey Marriage Lawsuit Lewis v. Harris |
| above photos Plaintiff Couples in New Jersey Marriage Lawsuit Lewis v. Harris |
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| "So, Who's Getting Married in New Jersey?" related books (click the book or author's photo for information) |
| A Gay Apostle’s Queer Epistle for a Peculiar People: Romans 1:24-27 in its context Rev. Dr. Tom Hanks Other Sheep And Other Related Writings of Rev. Dr. Tom Hanks |
| "The fundamentalist Christian attempt to exercise absolute power over our nation - church and state alike - [is] the ultimate sign of religion gone bad." Religion Gone Bad by Mel White, 2006, p 125 |
In the early days of the Religious Right’s Moral Majority movement of the 1980s, Dr. Rembert Carter, at the time Professor of History of Baptist Bible College of Pennsylvania, in the 1983 Preface of the reprint of Henry Clay Fish’s 1860 treaty on Soul Liberty, wrote . . . |
“Many modern fundamentalist leaders have continued to drink at the theocratic well [of] John Cotton [of Massachusetts Bay (contemporary theological and political opponent of Roger Williams)]. [John Cotton] equated the American experiment with the Old Testament economy of Israel in order to erect a modern counterpart of Manifest Destiny. Our [nation's] founding fathers separated church and state [under the influence of men like Roger Williams]. [Since our nation's founding], ideas of civil religion have persisted. [Today, Baptists and others] are caught in the theocratic web of modern Christian political activism. It is time Baptists did some serious thinking about this great principle of soul-liberty, independent thinking which is not encumbered by four hundred years of theocratic Protestant tradition. Although Baptists were condemned by Protestants [during the Reformation], yet today [Baptists] are behaving like the Reformers in many current church-state activities. The Baptist denomination has been the only denomination in all of church history to have consistently denied the use of magisterial force to accomplish spiritual ends. Only in modern times has this principle been called into question.” (Dr. Rembert Carter, From the preface to the 1983 reprint of The Price of Soul-Liberty And Who Paid It by Henry C. Fish, originally published in 1860, p. ix-x ) |
| "Civil union implies toleration of something inferior. Marriage connotes full societal acceptance. Civil unions provide limited rights. Marriages, straight and gay, enjoy equality of rights. Civil unions are a form of "marriage lite" and a boost to the alternatives-to-marriage movement. Marriage advances marriage as an institution." What God Has Joined Together by David G. Myers and Letha Dawson Scanzoni, 2005, page 119 |
| This article has been published in: Whosever Nov-Dec 2006 issue, (an online magazine for the LGBT Christian community) BBSNews ------------------ This Article is fully developed in a paper presented to the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, November 15, 2006. Click here to go to paper ----------------- |