[Music] hey there students I'm going to talk to you today about religious freedom in Colonial New England before I do that quick shout out to Jake Dan Jackson everybody out there at video Power marketing thank y'all for all you do to help my channel just would be nowhere without these guys so going into religious freedom in Colonial New England important topic because it really goes back to our elementary school days when we were told that the pilgrims the people who went to the Massachusetts colony that they went to this colony because of religious freedom you know and they sat down and they had this nice little dinner with the Indians and they they celebrated all of these traditions of religious freedom we have today and the whole idea of America as a city upon a hill or a city on a hill which has been an expression of American exceptionalism and I know that's a controversial topic which I might address in another video but a lot of politicians have appropriated this idea of a city on a hill that was first uh written by John Winthrop in reference to the colony in Massachusetts Bay which was of course basically taken from the bible where jesus referred to a city upon a hill Ronald Reagan in his farewell address he invoked John winth and he invoked this whole idea of America as a shining City on a Hill Mitt Romney basically took that from him in the 2012 election but Reagan in his farewell address painted the puritan leaders as people who were champions of religious liberty religious freedom in much the same way that we would view people as champions of religious freedom today when we think about religious freedom we think about Toler ation and the whole idea of people being able to worship as they please in a religiously pluralistic society now unfortunately for Reagan and any other politician who's trying to use history to make a political point this is nothing against Reagan all right I like Reagan but when he said this he was wrong that history says otherwise about the Puritan leadership in Massachusetts in context let's look at what John winr was writing for we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill the eyes of all people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us we shall be made a story and a byword through the world now in context this is really describing the religious Commonwealth that John winr envisioned the Massachusetts Bay Colony becoming and really the whole idea of a city upon a hill in that context wasn't so much to set an example for the world maybe that's there but really it's like everybody's going to be looking at us and if we fail everybody's going to make fun of us and that's going to make me really sad you know that sort of thing and that's what WTHR is worried about but he's wanting to establish a religious Commonwealth and elsewhere winr wrote in the parlament of his times we we must be knit together in this work as one man as one man not as a bunch of individuals but as one man this is really almost a Proto socialistic sort of mindset and even if you look at the way that their towns were set up in New England that everything was about the community and your job as an individual was to fit into that Community it was not to express yourself or to explore your personal beliefs or anything like that your role in this Society was to conform to whatever the group says because whatever the group says is what God says all right this was a Theocratic religious Commonwealth this was not religious freedom in the tolerant pluralistic sense that we see it today as far as the origins of religious toleration and the origins of religious pluralism in America those started in New England but they weren't started by the leaders they were started by Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson who were two famous denters in colonial Massachusetts and in the next part of this lecture I'm going to talk about Williams and then Hutchin if you wanted to get just the basics you've got it in this video that there was not religious freedom in the Massachusetts colony and Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were both exiled from New England because they advocated religious freedom [Music] [Applause]