At a time when many of us are still stuck at home unable to meet with fellow Christians in church, it’s worth imagining the plight of the Separatists in the early 17th century.
Meeting in their homes to pray instead of attending ‘church’ got them into serious trouble with the government. And it was out of these illicit meetings in villages near the Nottinghamshire border with Yorkshire that the Pilgrim Fathers emerged.
It is perhaps ironic that, as we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s sailing in 16201, the British nation is once again plunged into a volatile scenario comparable to that which led to this exodus of the faithful few.
Religious conformity
When, following the Elizabethan era, James I (James VI of Scotland) ascended the English throne in 1603, he introduced a policy enforcing religious conformity which almost blew up in his face.
First, there was the unsuccessful gunpowder plot of 1605 through which Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators registered Catholic opposition to the new king with their attempt to reduce Parliament to rubble.
Then the Puritans and Separatists came in for the monarch’s ire. At a time of significant political and religious tension, he tried to steady the ship by ensuring that all his people followed the same pseudo-Protestant script.
As with the Catholics, he also saw the Puritans as potential enemies, warning that he would “harry them out of the land”. And indeed his dire threat duly succeeded in driving their fellow dissidents out of the country.
Leaving for a new world
Like the Puritans, the Separatists were devout Christians who believed the church needed purifying from unhelpful ritualistic ceremony. But whereas the Puritans sought change from within, the new movement was convinced such endeavour was a lost cause and that they needed to “come out from among them” (Isa 52:11).
But some were fined, others were imprisoned, and the pressure of persecution eventually led, in 1608, to their escape – and the embrace of a more tolerant Holland.
It was a further dozen years before they sailed for the New World in the Mayflower, the king having changed his mind and given them permission to establish a colony there. And so these Christians laid the foundations of what was to become the greatest nation on earth, built firmly on the principles of the Bible that had been challenged back in England.
These courageous pioneers were thus used to loose us from the chains of slavery to religious conformity which saw communities forced to attend the state-recognised church where ritual and dead orthodoxy reigned, and where the Bible was chained to the pulpit. Those who sought to experience the vitality of New Testament Christianity with its emphasis on freedom of the Spirit and a personal relationship with God were deemed as outcasts.
A new ‘religious’ conformity
It seems that, as a nation, we have come full circle. Faced with aggressive lobbying from woke liberals and humanists, we are now urged to follow the politically-correct script, or else. The Bible has been jettisoned in favour of what is effectively Cultural Marxism commanding what is and is not permissible to say or do.
We have driven a coach and horses through the Ten Commandments, seriously undermined marriage which is designed to create safe boundaries for the protection of family life and society in general, and effectively introduced state-sponsored child abuse through the proposed indoctrination of young children with the idea that they can choose their gender. I suppose, in a way, this is the natural outcome of the state-sanctioned massacre of nine million unborn babies over the past 50 years. When will we acknowledge our own guilt? When will we stop pointing a finger at other people’s sins and take the ‘plank’ out of our own eye? (Matt 7.3)
It seems that, as a nation, we have come full circle.
A church under pressure
Current tighter lockdown restrictions following a spike in coronavirus cases are indeed frustrating to believers becoming wary of endless zooming, but there may well come a time when we are unable to meet publicly anyway – not due to Covid, but because we represent a view which marks us out as mad, or even criminal.
Extinction Rebellion campaigners may wish to gag the Press, but in fact the groupthink media, the political elite and social media activists are itching to muzzle the voice of Christians, as has been seen yet again with LGBT lobbyists having persuaded Barclays to close the bank account of a Christian charity. Some of us have already been taken to court for daring to express biblical views on morality.
We should take heart from the courage and determination of the Pilgrim Fathers by refusing to kowtow to the diktats of a woke culture that demands we toe the line of rebellion against our Creator.
We should take heart from the courage and determination of the Pilgrim Fathers.
The freedom Jesus offers
Why not follow these pilgrims to a ‘new world’ of peace and freedom, where the Scriptures are sacrosanct and where Jesus reigns in our hearts and lives?
What Jesus has done for us can be likened to the action of a World War I chaplain who, when asked for prayer by an officer who was about to embark on a dangerous mission into ‘no man’s land’, said he would do more than that – he would go with him. And when a shell exploded near the two men, the chaplain threw himself on the officer and died in his place!
The nation that grew out of those small beginnings in New England, built upon the rock of Christ and his teachings, has – for all the mockery of the left-wing media – become a bulwark in the defence of Western civilisation and its values.
400th anniversary of the Mayflower: The story of the passengers that built America — and shaped Britain, by Mark Bridge, The Times, 15 September 2020
Photo, by Charles Gardner: Clumber Park, Nottinghamshire, just a few miles from the village of Babworth, where the Separatist movement began under Rev Richard Clyfton in 1606.