Pirates, Pilgrims, Patriots

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday March 19th, 2006


There was a small item in the news a few weeks ago which I’ve been ruminating about ever since I first saw it. But apparently more Americans (which is to say, a LOT more Americans) can name the judges on “American Idol” or the members of the cartoon “Simpsons” family, than can correctly identify the five fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. Here are the percentages: 22% can name all five Simpsons (Bart, Lisa, Maggie, Homer and Marge) and 52% can name at least two; 25% can name all three American Idol judges, and 41% name two out of three -- but only 8% of Americans could name more than two of their First Amendment Rights, and only one in a thousand (one-tenth of one per cent -- or approximately the same percentage as there are Unitarian-Universalists in the general population) could correctly identify all five.

For my own part, I can both name all five Simpsons and all five of my First Amendment rights (although in the past I’ve often lumped the Right to Petition the Government for a Redress of Grievances right in with the Right of the People to Assemble Peaceably, since they naturally go together in my mind); but I could only identify one American Idol judge (Paula Abdul -- although I could also probably pick out the obnoxious British guy in a police line-up if I had to).

When you start to look at the actual data from this survey however, you’ll quickly discover that the situation isn’t nearly so bleak as we’ve been led to believe. Two-thirds of Americans could correctly name Freedom of Speech as a First Amendment Right (and isn’t Freedom of the Press pretty much the same thing?); while 24% could also correctly identify the Free Exercise of Religion. And on some level, what difference does it make to anyone but a lawyer (or maybe a historian) whether or not they know that the right to a jury trial is covered by the Seventh Amendment rather than the First, or if they can correctly identify the Fifth Amendment as the source of their right to avoid self-incrimination when “taking the Fifth” in front of a Cop, or a Judge, or a Congressional hearing?

The most interesting part of the survey though (at least for me) was that 21% of Americans also incorrectly believe that the First Amendment guarantees them the right to own and raise pets, and about the same percentage believe that it guarantees them the right to drive (even though the automobile wouldn’t even be invented for another century after the Bill of Rights was ratified).

We Americans cherish our Constitutional Rights, even if we aren’t always exactly sure of what they are. In many ways, the civil liberties protected by the Bill of Rights are what define us as a people, and as a nation: conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal, and endowed by our creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; an indivisible nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.

I may be idealistic (or maybe hopelessly naive), but I still like to believe that when it comes to the important task of protecting and defending our Constitutional freedoms, there are no Democrats or Republicans, no liberals or conservatives -- we are all liberals, we are all conservatives. The desire to preserve our God-given liberty -- even when we may not all precisely agree about what that means, even when we may not like what other people SAY it means, even when we aren’t exactly certain that we believe in the same God (or even that we believe in God at all) -- is the reason America exists in the first place: both as a nation, and as an idea.

Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, the Free Exercise of Religion (which is actually the first freedom mentioned in the First Amendment), the Right to Assemble Peaceably and to Petition the Government for the Redress of Grievances, and all of our other rights and liberties as well (including our unenumerated ninth amendment rights to own pets and drive automobiles) -- these are the freedoms that make America the envy of the world. So when we deny them to others in order to preserve them for ourselves, what kind of a nation does that make us?

We all may enjoy the right to remain silent, but that doesn’t mean that we have to use it. More than half a century ago now Martin Luther King Jr. warned us that a threat to freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere. In 1759 Benjamin Franklin observed that “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” while it was Vladimir Lenin who cynically remarked that “it is true that liberty is precious -- so precious it must be rationed.” When we discover ourselves destroying our own freedoms in order to “save” them, it really is time to take a long, hard look at where we are going, and how we got here in the first place.

Notwithstanding the First Amendment’s “wall of separation” between Church and State (another phrase that actually appears nowhere in the Constitution, but instead was coined by Thomas Jefferson to describe his views on the appropriate relationship between theology and government), American historians are well aware of the role that religion played in the formulation of American democracy. The principle of a separation of church and state was originally intended to keep churches free from government interference, rather than the other way around. Precursors of the US Constitution, such as the Mayflower Compact, were likewise modeled on Puritan church covenants, by which congregations organized themselves into local, self-governing communities of faith grounded in relationships of mutual accountability and support, united by the promise “to walk together according to God’s Holy Ordinances, insofar as they should be made clear to us in His Blessed Word of Truth” (to use language typical of these documents). Or to put it another way, the congregational polity of seventeenth-century Puritanism is the god-parent of the American ideal of political liberty, and many of the same principles of participatory democracy we now take for granted were born and nurtured in Meeting Houses just like this one all across New England.

But congregational polity also has another, outlaw step-child we don’t generally hear that much about. Three hundred years ago, the swashbuckling pirates who plundered merchant shipping throughout the Caribbean and all along the Eastern seaboard also organized their shipboard communities in a manner inspired by the familiar church covenants of Puritan congregations on both sides of the Atlantic. Having chosen to live outside the law, and as sworn enemies of both civil government and civilized society itself, they created instead a law and a society all their own, which was perhaps the most democratic, egalitarian, and ethnically pluralistic social order of its era (and perhaps of any era), notwithstanding the fact that it was also based on violence and theft of the most base and brutal sort.

According to historian Marcus Rediker, these pirate crews were formed from what one contemporary official called “the outcasts of all nations.” Convicts, debtors, vagabonds, escaped slaves and indentured servants, religious radicals and political prisoners, demobilized soldiers from Cromwell’s New Model Army and refugees from French Peasant revolts, “all men of unfortunate condition” who had either migrated or been exiled to colonial settlements “beyond the line” in the West Indies.

Escaping the brutal conditions of the New World plantations, they chose “to go upon the account” -- electing their officers and drawing up ship’s articles by which “crews allocated authority, distributed plunder, food, and other resources, and enforced discipline” (such as it was). Captains were generally granted unquestioned authority only in matters of “fighting, chasing, or being chased;” all other decisions were determined by a majority vote of the “Common Council,” who also elected a second officer unique to pirate crews, known as the Quartermaster, whose powers counterbalanced those of the Captain, and who was responsible for seeing to it that both provisions and treasure were fairly and equally distributed.

Captains were generally chosen for their personal courage, fighting skill, and knowledge of seamanship, as well as for their ability to inspire those around them to follow them into battle; while the Quartermaster was typically the most trusted individual on the ship -- a “social leader” who used his personal influence and reputation in an attempt to keep harmony as best he could among a group of heavily-armed (and often intoxicated) “masterless men,” who had little patience for even the hint of privilege or arbitrary authority.

One method that pirate crews used to minimize the danger of violence among themselves was to prohibit individuals from striking one another while aboard ship. No matter what the provocation, it simply wasn’t allowed. Instead, quarrels between shipmates were to be settled ashore with sword and pistol. “By taking such conflicts off the ship (and symbolically off the sea),” Rediker notes, “pirates promoted harmony in the crowded quarters belowdecks.” Anyone who violated this rule (or any of the other democratically-determined rules governing shipboard behavior) would be made “Governor of an Island” -- marooned alone on a deserted spit of sand, with only a flask of water and a pistol containing a single charge.

Yet eighteenth-century pirates also invented the world’s first Workers Compensation system. In sharp contrast to the harsh punishment reserved for those pirates who were chronically transgressive and disruptive, Ship’s Articles typically spelled out in very precise terms exactly how much was to be paid for every injury suffered by a pirate who was wounded in the exercise of their duty. One of my very favorite cartoons is of a pirate with an eye patch, a peg leg, and a hook for a hand saying to a shipmate “I’ve got half a mind to retire.” But for the real-life Pirates of the Caribbean, each of those injuries would have been worth a specific monetary stipend, paid out by the Quartermaster right off the top before any other distributions of treasure were made.

This rudimentary social welfare system helped to reinforce crew solidarity, and contributed to the sense of shared risk and shared reward so essential to the egalitarian pirate social order. Pirates were partners “who valued and respected the skills of their comrades,” and who recognized that they were engaged in very hazardous work which required both loyalty and cooperation if they were to succeed and survive. Knowing they would be provided for if luck turned against them made it that much easier for individual pirates to face those risks, and to share the inherent dangers of their profession equally with their shipmates.

Of course, this so-called “Golden Age of Piracy” truly was a Hobbsean world where life by its very nature tended to be nasty, brutish, and short -- a perpetual war of all against all, in which the strong and the powerful routinely took from the weak and the helpless at every opportunity, regardless of which side of the law they were on. Within the world’s first emerging global economy, piracy in many ways represented a rebellion of the human spirit against the oppressively overpowering forces of mercantile capitalism, which reduced human labor to a fungible commodity to be used up and then discarded in the relentless quest for ever greater profits.

Dressed in flamboyant clothing and exhibiting a “devil may care” attitude, pirates were often as greatly admired and romanticized as “social bandits” by the members of the laboring classes from which they had come as they were despised and feared by the wealthy merchants and ship captains they preyed upon. Their brief, violent lives of libertine indulgence, which ended more often than not at the end of a rope or at the bottom of Davey Jones’ locker, was the stuff of both legend and popular ballad -- a reputation which they have maintained down to this day thanks to actors like Errol Flynn and Johnny Depp, and writers ranging from Daniel Defoe to Howard Pyle.

Yet these fanciful images of swashbucklers, freebooters, and buccaneers tends to diminish our recognition that pirates were also real men (and in some cases, women) who desperately yearned for a freedom they felt had been denied them, and who seized that freedom in the only way available to them. And like the Pilgrims who crossed that same Atlantic ocean in search of religious freedom in the New World, and the Revolutionary Patriots descended from them, who fought a war and founded a new nation in order to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, these pirates drew their strength and support from the covenant they formed with one another, and to which they pledged, such as it was, their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor....