A Martyr for Religious Freedom: Mary Dyer

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0:00:10.0 Paul Meany: Usually I focus on figures who wrote down their ideas for future generations, but today I’m kind of going against my own grain, I’m covering an author, who did not extensively express herself through writings but instead through action. Mary Dyer was an Englishwoman turned colonial American, who escaped the religious persecution of England only to re-​encounter it in colonial America again. Mary Dyer would pay a high price for her convictions but thanks to brave people like her who carved a path for religious freedom, that is now thankfully a fundamental right in America today.

0:00:39.1 Paul Meany: Joining us today to talk about Mary Dyer is my lovely colleague and fellow Paul, Paul Matzko, the Editor of Technology and Innovation for lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org and the host of the podcast Building Tomorrow, which you should definitely listen to. He is also the author of The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement. Thanks for joining us, Paul.

0:01:00.5 Paul Matzko: It’s a pleasure to be with you, Paul.

0:01:02.1 Paul Meany: So, Mary was born sometime around 1611. Can you describe what kind of world she was born into, and how the 17th century was a drastically different time, and can you roughly describe what was the religious and political orthodoxy of the day?

0:01:17.6 Paul Matzko: Yeah, so there’s a habit I think among Americans to frame everything in relationship to the American Revolution, and so when you think about the late 18th century, the 1770s and 1780s, the distance between that, the kind of felt cultural difference between then and today is arguably less than the distance between that moment and the early 17th century, a century-​and-​a-​half before that. In a lot of ways, 17th century Europe is a very different place than the founding of America, the revolutionary period, and especially today, so it’s a time when all these kind of things that we associate with modernity, like liberalism, the Enlightenment, individual civil liberties, religious toleration and freedom, separation of church and state, all those things that we kind of take for granted now and which were pretty well ensconced by the late 18th century are just kind of in vitro. They’re just being formulated in the early 17th century in crucial ways, so it’s as much pre-​modern as it is modern.

0:02:28.3 Paul Matzko: And so for someone like Mary Dyer, who is a Puritan in England, she later becomes a Quaker, the idea that her religious beliefs would be tolerated was alien. At the time, countries usually had a state religion, whether it was Catholic or some variety of Protestant, and anyone who wasn’t part of that religion would not be tolerated, they could be persecuted for their faith, they faced… They weren’t allowed to vote typically, they couldn’t hold political office. She’s a woman, of course, and so at the time, that meant she didn’t have the same kind of civic rights as a man, she couldn’t vote and hold political office and the like. And so she really is in this pre-​modern space that looks quite different, and she’s having to fight for stuff that we now take for granted. So yeah, I think about this time period, even though it feels kind of familiar, she’s an Englishwoman in New England, in the colonies, I want to emphasize just how different her culture and society and politics were versus today.

0:03:41.6 Paul Meany: So you mentioned the word Puritan. However I think of the word Puritan, I think of it kind of like an insult. If you don’t want to have a few drinks with a mate, they say, “Ah, come on, stop. You’re being such a Puritan,” or the town in Footloose is like exactly what I think of a Puritans, but what exactly did it mean to be a Puritan back then, was it just an insult or is it more of a religious ideology? And how did it differ? Why did the Puritans get into so much trouble? Seemingly, when you read about the 17th century, the Puritans are in trouble with nearly everyone.

0:04:10.3 Paul Matzko: Yeah.

0:04:10.7 Paul Meany: What do they believe in exactly and why was it so controversial?

0:04:13.7 Paul Matzko: Yeah, so one of the fun things about Puritanism is that we remember it through several layers of re-​interpretation and in that sense, it can be traced back to folks like Nathaniel Hawthorne, the 19th century author who wrote The Scarlet Letter. Puritans are like, “Boo! Sex, boo! Women,” and that kind of thing, or HL Mencken, the 20th century wit who wrote that Puritanism is “the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.” So we have this idea of Puritanism is just like dour, wearing Pilgrim outfits, which is funny because Pilgrims and Puritans are two completely different groups, religious groups, but we kind of imagine Puritans wearing Pilgrim buckles and the big black hats, which isn’t what they wore.

0:05:02.3 Paul Matzko: They loved colours, they loved music, they loved art. They were very much integrated in the Transatlantic Republic of Letters. They were cultured, educated. For example, Henry Vane, who was the Massachusetts Governor right before… In the generation before Mary Dyer’s death, so during Mary Dyer’s early years in the colonies, he was Oxford educated, he was an English diplomat in Vienna before he came to the colonies, he was one of the first people to call for a constitutional convention for England during the struggles, the pre-​Civil War struggles in England, supported Anne Hutchinson on questions of religious toleration, so these were very cultured, educated folks. It’s just later on, centuries later, that we re-​interpret the Puritans as these kind of dour folks. Now, what they believed? They believed that the Anglican Church, the Church of England was too Catholic.

0:06:03.7 Paul Matzko: It was like Catholic lite in their minds and that it was corrupted by its entanglement with the British crown, you think of Henry VIII executing all those wives and divorcing them and all the shenanigans he could get up to because he made himself head of the church and so he could just kind of willy-​nilly break marriage vows, that kind of stuff, not just by him, but they saw a corrupting influence in the Anglican Church, and so they were trying to purify the theology and practice of the Anglican Church, this gets necessarily tangled with politics, because church and state are not separated, they’re joined, they’re conjoined and established at this time. And so during the reign of James I, there’s… The 1620s, there’s a big knock down, drag-​out political fight over the rights of Parliament, whether or not the king has the divine right of kings. This has religious connotations as well, and so the Puritans are very much involved in that political struggle between is this country going to be a limited monarchy, a constitutionally limited monarchy or is it going to be an absolute monarchy in like the French model. They get tied up in that, they also want the Church, which is headed by the king, to be reformed.

0:07:24.6 Paul Matzko: So they’re kind of pushed out. They, to some extent, they flee to the colonies, so that they can build a New England, very literally, a New England that’s free from the corruption. As John Winthrop, the famous, one of the famous governors of the Massachusetts Bay colony puts it, we’re gonna build a city on a hill and show the world this is what a good, pure church and a well-​constructed state should look like, and then everyone will want to imitate us because we’re… We did such a good job of it. So there’s kind of this utopian vision that propels them to cross the ocean in the 1620s and ’30s.

0:08:02.2 Paul Meany: So, the Puritans wanted to lead by example and Mary eventually goes over to America, what year about does she go over? What age was she roughly?

0:08:09.9 Paul Matzko: It’s… I’m trying to remember what… It’s in the early 1630s, she’s in her 20s, and she arrives there at a time of… So Puritans, most of them arrive in the 1620s, the first wave get there in the 1620s, more keep coming in the 1630s. They establish this Massachusetts Bay Colony, and very quickly they fall into their own set of controversies, political and religious controversies. It’s called the antinomian Controversy of the 1630s. Antinomian just means anti-​law, against law. It’s not a word that anybody who was called an antinomian ever described themselves with, it was an epithet given to them, in the same way I suppose that capitalist was originally an epithet that eventually got embraced in the 19th century. But during this antinomian controversy, there were people like Mary Dyer, she was part of this faction, like Anne Hutchinson, probably the most famous female dissenter in the Massachusetts Bay Colony at the time, like Roger Williams, who goes and founds Rhode Island and really coins the concept of the wall of separation between church and state.

0:09:23.8 Paul Matzko: This faction said, “Look… ” Now again, you can’t think about the 1630s without thinking about how religion and politics are entangled, everything’s religious and everything’s political, there is no separation between the two like we kind of have today in our secular, secularized society where we compartmentalize these things off from each other. And so in Massachusetts, they’re building this perfect Christian utopian city on a hill. There is an official church, there’s the Puritan church that controls… That you have to pay parish taxes to the state which are funneled to the church, you have to be a member of a church to vote, so voting and church membership are tied to each other. They do have universal male suffrage, about nearly twice as many people in the colonies, men, I should say, in the colonies can vote relative to England, but again it’s tied to church membership and the like.

0:10:22.8 Paul Matzko: And so along come the antinomians who we’ll call for lack of a better term, and they say, “Hey, you’re trying to force people to be saved, to be righteous. You’re trying to use the power of the state to compel people to behave better.” This is rooted in Protestant ideas about redemption and salvation, how do you become a better person in this life. You… Well, the Puritans said, “You need to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. You need to really work on yourself, you need to figure out, keep a little journal, keep a journal where you note how you’re doing in terms of your personal sinning.” Like, “I lied today, check.” In fact, this tradition continues on to… If you ever read the autobiography of Ben Franklin, or the biography of Ben Franklin, he kept a little struggle journal where he’d like every day put little check marks, I lied today, I cheated today, etcetera.

0:11:28.1 Paul Matzko: You need to work on your salvation, prepare yourself for salvation, so that God’s grace would descend on you and you’d be saved. Well, the antinomians said, “Huh! You complained about the Anglicans being Catholic lite, that sounds Catholic lite to me, like working on your salvation. Salvation’s supposed to be a gift of God.” So they… You should not use then state power to compel people not to do wrong because you’re not actually affecting their hearts, you’re just affecting their behavior, and that’s not what true religion is, and so someone like Roger Williams would say that… Let me see how Roger Williams put it, forced worship or forced good behavior “stinks in God’s nostrils.”

0:12:12.0 Paul Matzko: So that’s what they say, when they say they’re antinomian, against law, they’re saying, “You cannot compel righteousness using the power of the state,” and… Well, that’s a huge challenge to the Massachusetts Bay authorities who… Their whole system is predicated on the state trying to compel individual righteousness using laws against everything from infidelity to lying, to swearing, cursing and so on, and so this theological difference becomes a political conflict, and Mary Dyer is caught up in that political conflict. It has huge ramifications both for her personally and for the history of religious toleration.

0:12:53.1 Paul Meany: So, how did she come to those ideas, who was exactly saying them to her? Did she join a different kind of church and then also how do these ideas get her into trouble eventually?

0:13:03.7 Paul Matzko: Yeah, so Dyer is a close personal friend of Anne Hutchinson, who was another woman in the Massachusetts colony, she’s actually a midwife, she helps bear Mary Dyer’s child, which was known at the time as Mary Dyer’s monstrous birth, which we can talk about in a second, so she’s very heavily influenced by Hutchinson. Hutchinson is controversial, she gets banished from the colonies, because she was… Again, she’s tied to this faction of antinomians who are saying you can’t use the law to compel people to be good. That’s not what the law should be for, that’s inappropriate, like Roger Williams, Henry Vane and others. And then Hutchinson goes a step further and she’s holding meetings in her house, first with just women, but then also with men, where they kind of dissect the weekly sermons in church and talk about what they mean.

0:14:02.1 Paul Matzko: So she’s doing something that looks kind of like preaching, she’s built a community around faith and politics. And again, it’s a huge challenge to the Massachusetts Bay authorities, and so they expel her. They banish her from the colony. So that is Dyer’s close personal acquaintance, she’s part of that assembly. So she gets a lot of her ideas from Hutchinson, from Williams, from Vane, from that kind of antinomian community who are themselves rooted… You maybe picked this up when I mentioned Vane, Henry Vane, but all of these guys, all of these folks have a tie to the radical Republicans, 17th century English Republicans, who were saying that the power of the king and ultimately the power of the state should be somehow limited, that there should be limits set and there should be limits set and codified in a constitution that outlines individual rights for people.

0:15:02.4 Paul Matzko: So it’s derived… So Mary Dyer’s beliefs are derived from English republicanism in opposition to monarchical absolutism, and from this kind of religious movement, this antinomian religious movement. It gets her in trouble. So there’s this big controversy, people are being banished, Anne Hutchinson gets banished, Roger Williams gets banished, people are being executed for their beliefs. People are having their tongues drilled through, their ears shaved off. This is some really bloody, violent stuff going on here, real repression in the 1630s, in Massachusetts. And in the middle of this, Mary, who’s I think at this time, like 26 years old, she gives birth. And the problem is that the baby when it comes out… Today, we know it probably had anencephaly, it didn’t really have a brain that formed. And you had obvious physical deformities. Again, this is a pre-​modern period, and in a pre-​modern time, it’s still an enchanted world where people think of magic being everywhere, there’s kind of folk magic, folk traditions.

0:16:10.6 Paul Matzko: And so it was still very common in the 1630s. This is 60 years before the Salem witchcraft trials, right? So this is before that, which was maybe the last gasp in some ways of pre-​modern understandings of enchantment and magic in the natural world. So this is before that. And so when you give birth to a deformed child, it was taken as either it was God’s judgment on you, for something you’d done or a belief that was wrong, or some kind of curse had been placed. In general, it was something that could be used against Mary Dyer and against the movement she was part of. And so she had this, and Anne Hutchinson was her midwife, so everyone’s kind of tied up in this. She has this what was called a monstrous birth by her opponents, they try to secretly bury the child, word gets out. And the other faction, the anti antinomian faction, led by folks like John Winthrop, the city on the hill guy, they find this out and they actually lean on Mary Dyer’s friend, they say, “Tell us about this, we’ve gotten word about this, confess that she had… Help us find the body.”

0:17:22.2 Paul Matzko: They exhume her dead, deformed child. They examine it, they then write up a pamphlet describing all of the physical deformities in great detail, label it the monstrous birth, mail copies to all the clergyman in the colony and encourage them to read it to their congregations to show that this is why the antinomians, God’s judgment on the antinomians, so so you should listen to us, the political and religious authorities. So put yourself in the shoes of Mary Dyer, think how traumatizing that would be, to first of all have a stillborn baby, and then to have it, your friend turn on you, have it dug up, described, made a public political talking point. That’s our kind of first big introduction to Mary Dyer and her monstrous birth.

0:18:13.2 Paul Meany: It’s something really sad about the Puritans is that they went to America for freedom from religious persecution, and then they just had their own round of religious persecution. And it’s such a sad story because it seems all too common that people love freedom for everyone, but… They want freedom for themselves and people like them, but once you’re a little bit different, kind of people start to go away from it and maybe the state’s not so bad, so it’s a really depressing story. But…

0:18:40.2 Paul Matzko: And there’s, I think, an interesting point there that’s related to what you’re saying, Paul, which is that religious freedom… Well, first of all, everyone involved is a Puritan at this point, Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, John Winthrop. This is all kind of an intra-​Puritan fight over what puritanism should look like, if it should change, if it should further reform, if itself should be purified. So it’s not like Puritans versus these sympathetic non-​Puritans, they’re really kind of all Puritans in this moment. But you’re right, though, that there is something… There’s a kind of core, almost hypocrisy here that the antinomian faction is picking up on and saying, hey, look, our movement is supposed to differentiate itself from Catholicism by not… By allowing kind of individual “soul liberty”, to use Roger Williams’ phrase. And Roger Williams is really the first person to use liberty in the modern sense that we use today, as opposed to the older sense, which was the freedom to do what you should do. Which, very different from how we think about it. They said, “Look, we’re not going far enough, you’re just replacing the Catholic church and its entanglement with the state with a Puritan Church, and entanglement with the state, you need to go further.”

0:20:00.9 Paul Matzko: And in the long run, they win. American Protestants, Christians in general, look much more like the antinomians like Hutchinson, Dyer, Williams than they do the Puritan, they’re kind of, the other side in this faction. So in the long run, this vision, Mary Dyer’s vision, Hutchinson’s vision, that’s what predominates in American Christianity. So they lose in the short term, but they win in the long term. And I think it’s important, because when we talk about religious liberty and freedom, we take it for granted, like it’s a thing that’s just always kind of existed, and every now and again it gets impinged upon, and then it comes back. But religious liberty had to be invented, had to be created, fought for, struggled over. And first, it wasn’t religious liberty, it was religious toleration. And so it’s in this period… And that’s a very different thing. Liberty means, it has kind of a positive connotation, let people do what they will. And that’s a good thing. Toleration, rooted in the kind of Latin, I don’t speak Latin, but tolerare means to endure, to bear, to suffer, has this idea of a big burden’s been put on your back and you’re being whipped to carry it.

0:21:17.9 Paul Matzko: And it’s a thing… So toleration is like, “Okay, I’ll tolerate you.” But that was a big step. And it’s very important, this is this moment of transition when prior to the 17th century, the default was if someone was different from you religiously, there’s no toleration, no freedom, no liberty, they just don’t belong. You burn them at the stake, like Calvin did to Servetus in Geneva, a century before. You burn them at the stake like Catholics did Protestants. And it’s… There is no toleration at all prior to this. This is the century when we really start forming this idea that just because someone’s different than you in terms of their religion, doesn’t mean you should persecute them for that. You can put up with them, you can tolerate them and work together for some bigger purpose or goal, and that has to be invented. And this is the moment, it’s the actions of people like Dyer. And literally, their kind of blood, Dyer is going to die over this in a few decades, it’s their blood that builds and cements this concept of religious toleration.

0:22:24.6 Paul Meany: So talk about the long-​term, and how America’s much better now, but let’s focus a little bit on the short term. How exactly did she get into so much trouble with the authorities and become the martyr that she is today?

0:22:35.8 Paul Matzko: Yeah. So after the monstrous birth, as you can imagine, she’s alienated from the colonial authorities at this point, she leaves and goes back to England. Again, think of her as a traumatized woman. What would you do in that situation? She’s traumatized. She goes back to England, where she becomes a Quaker, which is another kind of radical group, not tolerated by the Puritans, Puritans hated Quakers. Quakers said that not only should the religious authorities not force people, to try to force them to be righteous and good, but that the source of one’s religious sentiment, their beliefs, their impulses wasn’t to be found in external authorities like the church, like obviously the Catholic church or the church authorities, or even in the Bible itself per se, but in one’s own inner light, the little still small voice inside them. That is what told you, tells you what is right and wrong and how you should behave.

0:23:38.3 Paul Matzko: And so you can kind of understand why someone who went through what Mary Dyer went through would find that very attractive when both authorities quoted scripture and verse at her while exhuming her dead child, right, and using it as a political tool. So she becomes a Quaker, and Quakers were very evangelistic at this point in time. They would go and essentially force authorities to persecute them, to highlight how hypocritical the authorities were. And so, Dyer, 30 years later, this is now the 1660s, she returns to Massachusetts. They tell her to get out, they try to banish her, but she keeps coming back, and ultimately their laws, they passed a series of laws that stipulated that if Quakers wouldn’t leave when they were banished, they had to be executed, and she puts that to the test.

0:24:28.0 Paul Matzko: She refuses to leave, she says, “Look, I’m not going to leave, I feel compelled to be here, it’s not… This is an unjust law, and I’m going to make you kill me to illustrate just how unjust this law is.” And so after a bunch of legal wranglings, they send her to be caned and there’s this, just this great scene. Mary Dyer is badass. First of all, someone who believes something that sincerely and is willing to die for a cause, there’s something to be admired there, just in that mere fact, but her behavior in this moment… So think of this, this woman who 30 years before has been traumatized by these male authorities, now they’re going to kill her. And she just confidently responds to them at every point saying, this sole woman, you can almost imagine the movie. She’d be in a spotlit standing there in the middle of a courtroom, while a male judge condemns to death.

0:25:28.1 Paul Matzko: But as she’s going to the gallows, she’s just watched two of her friends be hung in front of her, two of her fellow Quakers. As she ascends the gallows for her turn to be hanged, her former pastor, the guy who was supposed to be looking out for her 30 years before, her former pastor calls on her to repent, and if she does so she’ll be spared execution, to which she replies, like a badass, “Nay, man, I am not now to repent.” And then she’s asked if she wants the church elders or pastors assembled in the crowd watching on, to pray for her soul before she is hung, and she replies, quote, “I know never an elder here.” It’s a big middle finger to the crowd, you call yourselves elders and pastors. “I know never an elder here.”

0:26:20.3 Paul Meany: So, what she was doing was… Massachusetts, they had these laws is that if you’re gonna come here with these beliefs, we’re going to kill you, and she put them to the test, she made them go through with the logic of how ridiculous their laws were. I think that’s… Obviously, she’s back in the 1600s, she’s a Puritan, she’s not a libertarian whatsoever, but there’s something I think all libertarians could admire of a person standing up to the state and saying, “No, this is completely ridiculous, do it. Actually implement your laws the way you want them and see how they look ’cause they’re brutal and they’re barbaric and they all come out of the barrel of a gun,” like that, you’re right. She is a complete badass.

0:26:53.5 Paul Matzko: You know what? And it’s… And really the Quakers in this sense, what they’re doing is they’re throwing their bodies into the gears of the state at the time, and the state wants to function smoothly, a lot of these laws… They didn’t want to actually execute Quakers, they just wanted to scare Quakers into staying silent and complying. It was the… They actually… The authorities tried to find an out, they gave her multiple opportunities, like if you just say you’re kinda sorry, we won’t kill you. There was actually an offer at the very end that like, “Okay, you don’t have to say you’re sorry,” this is like minutes before execution, you don’t even have to say you’re sorry, if you just leave the colony now and promise… And don’t say anything your way out, we won’t kill you, we really don’t want to kill you, don’t make us kill you,” and she saw through their bluff in that sense. And she’s not the only one, so all… There’s a whole wave of Quakers, both in Massachusetts and in England at this time, who really are jamming up the gears and cogs of the machinery of the state with their bodies very literally, and it has an effect.

0:28:01.3 Paul Matzko: So after Dyer is killed, everyone feels bad about it. It’s not even popular among the Puritan kind of Puritan community, they’re like, “Oh, we just hung this woman who’s clearly braver than we are,” is clearly a sincere, virtuous person, and it turns her into a martyr, and Quakers in England use her death to get the king to tell the Puritans to knock it off. Any Quakers after this point, they cannot be executed until they’re tried by an English court first, not by a colonial court, and it is just… It’s no accident that just a decade or so later, it leads to the 1689 Act of Toleration in England, which extends religious toleration for the first time to essentially all Protestants, not to Catholics, but to all Protestants, and it is the action of hundreds of Quakers like Mary Dyer, both in the colonies and England, that essentially, they stare down the state and they win.

0:29:04.6 Paul Meany: Sometimes I feel we prioritize politicians or people who have written down ideas or people who did something, so I only think of Roger Williams ’cause he wrote down a bunch of things, he also had… He established Rhode Island, he was a man of action. But I also thinking of the Founding Fathers, I think that those are the kind of people who established religious liberty in America the way we think of it today, but it turns out that it’s a much more complicated and long story that’s been in the making hundreds of years, even before the Founders were born.

0:29:30.2 Paul Matzko: Well, and to your point, you know, Roger Williams, he’s the one who coins the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state,” not Thomas Jefferson. That… It’s a century-​and-​a-​half before Jefferson that Roger Williams coins that concept, so it’s a, yeah, a much older story.

0:29:48.6 Paul Meany: So just to finish off, I’d like to ask two quick questions. The first one I’d say is, how integral is the idea of religious freedom to the American character today, ’cause it doesn’t always seem like it’s a big issue today. It crops up in court cases, and it comes up every now and again, but it’s nothing like it was back then. Is religious freedom still a huge part of American culture? The second little follow-​up question is, what should libertarians take from Mary Dyer?

0:30:15.8 Paul Matzko: Great questions. Well, to the first, I think the cautionary note I would sound is that we tend to take religious freedom, religious liberty, religious toleration for granted, they’re… We think of them as a birthright. They’re enshrined in the Constitution. It’s not something that has to be renewed, it’s just a thing we have and will always exist, but it’s actually the opposite. It is a concept that it… A period when we actually have the kinds of religious liberties that we have in America, and most of the world today, it’s actually enshrined in the United Nations Charter too, not just in the US Constitution, that is the exception in human history, not the rule, and it’s a cultural conceit, and yes, it’s powerful, in that it’s very widespread at this point, but it had to be made, it had to be fashioned, it had to be invented, which also means it can be un-​fashioned, dis-​invented, unmade, and so I think the cautionary tale is that it’s dangerous when we start taking things for granted.

0:31:26.2 Paul Matzko: It’s also dangerous because they got instinctively, in the 17th and 18th century, so the Founders and people like Mary Dyer and Roger Williams, etcetera, that this was a better alternative to what came before. What came before this, all of this, this concept of religious toleration grows out of the wars of religion in the 15 and early 1600s, which were massively devastating to Europe. By the end of the wars of religion, a third of the people in Germany are dead as warring Protestant and Catholic armies traipse across Central Europe for several decades. It’s just utterly devastating, it’s the exhaustion with, the conflict between religious groups that leads to a kind of grudging acknowledgement of the need for religious toleration, that a society that’s pluralist, even if you have to endure people who are different than you, again, toleration is endurance, is preferable to a dog-​eat-​dog religious society marked by religious conflict.

0:32:33.6 Paul Matzko: That was a hard lesson that took millions of people dying and generations and generations to learn, and that was in their consciousness then. I’m not sure it’s in our consciousness today that, that lesson has kind of waned over time. It’s also, I think, important to realize that these things are forged in an enemy of… The enemy of my enemy is my friend, sense. That I’m going to tolerate you because we’re united in that we don’t like X third party. So the Act of Toleration in 1689 in England, we’re going to extend religious toleration, we used to literally execute Quakers and other dissenting Protestants, now we won’t, why? Because we’re more worried about Catholics. It’s after the Glorious Revolution, after they overthrow a Catholic monarch and put in William of Orange in charge, in the monarchy. So often, this is this gradual, tactical process of extending toleration and liberty to concentric circles emanating from some center.

0:33:52.7 Paul Matzko: And what’s disconcerting to me is that we’re seeing that start to work the other way, that the circles of who… The concentric circles of who we extend toleration and freedom to are shrinking bit by bit. We’re becoming a more tribal and divided and less pluralist society, because we’re forgetting these lessons. And these lessons don’t just apply to religious liberty, they apply to essentially the entire suite of enlightenment views associated with modern liberalism. So it’s not just about religious liberty, it’s any kind of individual civil liberty that this process applies to. As for your second question, was it, what does Mary Dyer’s story have to say for libertarians?

0:34:38.4 Paul Meany: Yeah. How should libertarians interpret it? And really should they read about it more?

0:34:44.0 Paul Matzko: Yeah, I would encourage… I don’t think libertarians spend enough time reading pre-​founding era American political philosophy and American Republicans. Roger Williams should be just as well-​read by libertarians as Alexis de Tocqueville or as Thomas Jefferson.

0:35:06.3 Paul Meany: Sometimes libertarians privilege… Sometimes I feel libertarians, they privilege writing over action, and we like great theorists like John Stuart Mill, who also was a man of action too, I’m not dissing Mill at any point, but Mary didn’t… She wrote about two letters that we can look at today. She doesn’t leave a giant corpus of work, but her work is her actions, what she did and how she stared down the state. And sometimes I feel libertarians can kind of go a bit too theoretical. Maybe we should push back towards finding those proper heroes who fought against the state.

0:35:33.6 Paul Matzko: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And plus, she is challenging a culture of authoritarianism on multiple fronts. She’s challenging it as a religious dissident, she’s challenging it as a woman in a patriarchal society. She’s challenging it as someone who believes in individual soul liberty and not kind of a state absolutism. So there are multiple aspects of Dyer that we can be inspired by. And so, yeah, she’s underrated as… She’s not a libertarian in the modern sense, but she’s someone who contemporary libertarians can and should be inspired by her example.

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0:36:23.5 Paul Meany: Thanks a mil for listening. I hope you enjoyed this podcast, and if you did you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Portraits of Liberty is written and hosted by me, Paul Meany, and produced by Landry Ayres. You can also visit lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org to find more shows like this. I hope to see you next time.