The Separatist

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, November 25, 2021

 

William Bradford, the Pilgrim leader who organized the first Thanksgiving in 1621, was a Separatist. The Separatists, reformers who took to heart the text of II Corinthians 6:17 — “Come out from among them, and be ye separate” — broke with the Church of England, and sought in the New World a situation in which they might be free to worship and enjoy community on their own terms.

 

The Separatists were intensely focused on Scripture, and their leading scholars came to believe that the Bible is best understood in its original languages, eliminating the distortions and questions of interpretation that are inevitable in translations. While other British Protestants had prioritized making the Bible available in English, the Separatists did not think especially highly of translations in general and were suspicious of the King James version in particular. They trained their clergy in Hebrew as best they could, with an eye toward eventually educating all of the faithful to be able to read the Bible in its original languages, with no mediation between Christians and the holy texts. The project, unfortunately, has not advanced very much in the 400 years since the Pilgrims celebrated their first Thanksgiving in the New World.

 

Bradford was himself obsessed with the Hebrew language, and his famous Of Plymouth Plantation has in the middle of the manuscript a section of Hebrew, a catalogue of Biblical words and expressions that Bradford had compiled.

 

The Pilgrims identified with the Israelites: As the Hebrews had been led out of bondage in Egypt, the Pilgrims understood themselves as having been delivered from spiritual bondage in Europe; as the Hebrews endured their 40 years in the wilderness, the Pilgrims endured those horrifying first months in New England, when winter, starvation, and disease killed about half of them; the Hebrews were a nation set apart by their direct national relationship with God, and the Pilgrims saw themselves in the same way, the New Israelites in a New World that was simultaneously their exile and their Promised Land. They came home to exile, and, in exile, they came home.

 

This was not an easy or comfortable undertaking. They crossed the Atlantic in sailboats. Their only power was wind and their own arms, and their only light was fire. They landed in Massachusetts. In a damaged boat. In November. With children. This exile was not imposed on them — they chose it. That is belief. That is conviction. That is resolve.

 

It was also a principled response to the example they had before them: Moses — the pilgrim leader who brought the Hebrews to the Promised Land that he himself was not permitted to enter — was a separatist, too. He was raised to separatism, educated for separatism. While he was in a sense the personification of the Hebrew people (some less-literal-minded Bible scholars believe that Moses is in fact a literary construction personifying the Israelites), he was an alien to the people he served. He was raised by foreigners — in the very household of Pharaoh himself! — and married to a foreigner, much to the disgust of his fellow tribesmen and his own family, who rejected the notion that a man married to an alien could ever be a deserving and credible leader of the people. He was physically separated from his people for most of the important events of his life. In truth, they hardly knew the man. Moses did not enter the Promised Land with his people. He did not live in the Promised Land with his people. He did not die among his people. He is not buried among his people. He was not loved by his people — they threatened to stone him when his leadership disappointed them. He did not even impress his people — he had a speech impediment, he was so shy that he spoke to his people through his brother Aaron, and he was no swaggering conqueror. Instead, he “was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.”

 

As a young man, Moses had everything. He lost it. He died with nothing — neither wealth nor political power nor status nor even the love and respect of his people. His body lies in an unmarked grave. Why did he give up everything that ordinary men treasure and hold to be the highest goods and most desirable possessions?

 

Because “he refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.”

 

We Americans like to think of ourselves as a people who are not especially impressed by kings. And we were following Moses’s very fine example when we told King George III that we were done with him, and done with kings altogether. There is a direct moral and intellectual line between Bradford and his fellow Separatists and our Founding Fathers, and the first chapters of that story were written in Hebrew.

 

But it is very, very comfortable to be the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. Wealth and comfort are powerful temptations, but not nearly as alluring or as deadly as the temptations of status, power, kinship. And how much more bewitching still is the love of love — the love of our family, our neighbors, our nation? It is not religion that is the opiate of the masses — it is love, affection, admiration, the good opinion of others, the warm embrace of family and tribe. Moses had to do without those comforts: He could be loved, or he could be Moses; he could be celebrated, or he could be Moses; he could enter the Promised Land in triumph, or he could be Moses.

 

Moses shared the household of the most powerful man in the known world. He chose exile, hardship, deprivation. His earthly rewards were ingratitude and obscurity.

 

And what is it that we, who have the benefit of Moses’s example, are thankful for at Thanksgiving? We are Americans, and so we enjoy the best of everything. We have abundance beyond Solomon’s imagining, and our national might — and the awe of our national might — reaches into every nation on the Earth and even into space. Pharaoh would have blushed to contemplate planting his flag on the moon. Pharaoh would have trembled at our weapons of mass destruction. Pharaoh could not have comprehended Americans enough even to envy us. From its austere beginnings, our pilgrim republic has grown into something else.

 

And that has not come without some cost to us — some cost to the American soul.

 

We who have been exiles must be the new mothers and new fathers to exiles. We who have been poor and hungry, who have been powerless, who have been dependent on the kindness of others, must be splendid in our own generosity. And we who have benefited from the example of the meekest of all the men who were upon the face of the Earth — we must not forget our true heritage — must not consent to be called the sons of Pharaoh’s daughter. This pilgrim republic, fearfully and wonderfully made, was made for better things and higher things. Wealth, power, reputation — these are, at best, means to some higher end, to be used judiciously and with gratitude but never with awe. These are our instruments — they must not be our gods.

 

Come out from among them, and be ye separate, Americans. Come home.