The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell Read Free Book Online

observe the Lord’s Sabbath.” To try and keep his mornings “free for private prayer, meditation and reading.” He “will flee idleness and much worldly business.” He “will often pray . . . with my wife.”
    The first time I read that I wondered where I had seen it before. Then I realized it was at the end of The Great Gatsby, the great novel of ambition. After the striving title character meets his tragic end, his father arrives from Minnesota for the funeral, bringing with him a book in which his son had inscribed a list of his ambitions as a youth. There is a rigid schedule that begins with getting up early, and filling the day with work, exercise, and study. From five until six p.m., he is to “Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it.” Then, in a list of “general resolves,” he orders himself to quit smoking and wasting time, “read one improving book or magazine per week,” set money aside, and “be better to parents.” Gatsby’s father tells Gatsby’s friend the list proves that his boy “was bound to get ahead.” Sure, his son had just died in a swimming pool, but at least it was a very fancy pool.
    The ambition and toil Calvinism requires will lead the economist Max Weber to coin the term “Protestant work ethic” to describe the Puritans’ legacy of rolled-up sleeves. Tireless labor and ambition in pursuit of salvation, he opined, led to a culture of tireless labor and ambition and a new religion—capitalism. No wonder a German historian dubbed John Calvin “the virtual founder of America.”
    It makes sense that Winthrop, a man accustomed to setting lofty goals for himself, would then set lofty goals for the colony he is about to lead. “A Model of Christian Charity” is the blueprint of his communal aspirations. Standing before his shipmates, Winthrop stares down the Sermon on the Mount, as every Christian must.
    Here, for example, is Martin Luther King, Jr., doing just that on November 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the “loving your enemies” sermon this way: “So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you, ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”
    Go ahead and reread that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”
    The Bible is a big long book and lord knows within its many mansions of eccentricity finding justification for literal and figurative witch hunts is as simple as pretending “enhanced investigation techniques” is not a synonym for torture. I happen to be with King in proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount’s call for love to be at the heart of Christian behavior, and one of us got a Ph.D. in systematic theology.
    “Man,” Winthrop reminds his shipmates in “Christian Charity,” is “commanded to love his neighbor as himself.” In the Semon on the Mount, Jesus puts the new in New Testament, informing his followers that they must do something way more difficult than being fond of the girl next door. Winthrop quotes him yet again. Matthew 5:44: “Love your enemies . . . do good to them that hate you.” He also cites Romans 12:20: “If thine enemy hunger, feed him.”
    The colonists of Massachusetts Bay are not going to be any better at living up to this than any other government in Christendom. (Just ask the Pequot, or at least the ones the New Englanders didn’t burn to death.) In fact, nobody can live up to this, but it’s the mark of a Christlike Christian to know that he’s supposed to.
    Winthrop’s future