Mary Dyer

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Mary Dyer and Religious Liberty

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How Mary Dyer gave her life and helped America erase some crappy-old parts of Western Civilization and replace them with virtues.

On this 3rd day of Christmas, instead of three French hens, I offer you my Christmas sermon.

On my way back from a winter hike in New Hampshire, last Sunday afternoon, I looked up a high-school friend, from whom I've been receiving drips of moderately anti-Muslim sentiment for over a decade. We talk and exchange emails occasionally. He invited me in for some matzo-ball soup. I wished him Happy Hanukkah, and he wished me Merry Christmas.

Consistently with the sharp elbowed way we often joke around, I replied to his warm greeting by saying that, while touring Boston with an out-of-town guest last summer, I'd visited the Old South Church -- their slightly-less-old meeting house on Copley Square -- read the congregation's history posted there, and learned that the first time a Christmas carol was sung by the assembled congregation was in 1815. Before then, members were prohibited from celebrating Christmas, on the grounds that it was a licentious pagan festival. That said, one way to figure out what people were doing in years past is to look at what was prohibited.

The biblical foundations of the reasoning that endeavored to keep this congregation on the straight and narrow path for almost 200 years are sound, so I'm now looking into how they reinterpreted scripture to allow starting down the slippery slope that begins with singing Christmas carols.

My friend replied that he'd encountered similar thinking in an Australian Muslim leader's response to the Bondi Beach massacre, blaming the victims for celebrating Hanukkah in public in these times of widespread violence against Jews. I was appalled and said so.

We moved on, as is necessary in bad times, talked of other things and years past, and I headed home.

I was curious which Muslim leader had made the horrible comment that my friend reported, so later I searched the internet but couldn't find anything. Our email exchanges are often disputatious, so I waited until a day after Hanukkah was over, then emailed asking where he'd heard all this, wrote that I couldn't find it, linked the Global Imams Council's condemnation of the "Bondi Beach Antisemitic Terrorist Attack", and quoted both its general condemnation and the following words, "... Let us be absolutely clear. The Bondi Beach terrorist attack is what the globalizing of the intifada looks like when hatred is normalized, when incitement is excused, and when extremists are allowed to fester under the cover of politics, slogans, and cowardly silence. What begins as chants and threats inevitably ends in blood. ..."
https://imams.org/gic-condemns-bondi-beach-antisemitic-terrorist-attack/

My friend didn't reply for a day, longer than usual, then forwarded me a political-opinion column about how Islam is erasing European Civilization.

Here's an edited version of the email exchange that followed, which I emailed to my friend a couple days ago, after which he called to say that he appreciates our friendship, as do I. I thanked him for inspiring me.

-- my first reply, on December 23rd --

Merry Christmas!

The first English and Welsh to arrive in New England, the fabled Pilgrims, can reasonably be considered religious refugees. Their evil acts at various times and places -- such as brutal war crimes against the Algonquin‐speaking nations and principalities they first befriended, eventually fought with and then tried to destroy, the Salem Witch Trials, and the hanging of Mary Dyer -- have been well publicized, including by the statue of Mary Dyer, near the main entrance to the Massachusetts State House.

There were no doubt some bums among them, but most shared virtues that have stood the test of time: seeking truth, universal education for children, and innovation combined with thoughtful hard work. Within a few generations, religious liberty, free speech, and representative government were added to this list of widely supported virtues.

These New England virtues eventually spread across the entire USA, as it grew, including, after too much bloodshed during the Civil War and the long Civil Rights movement, to the former Slavery States of the Confederacy.

American culture gregariously encompasses much more than these New England virtues. What a boring place it'd be if it didn't. They remain our sinews and bones.

Over the years, especially in the decades after the two World Wars, these virtues also spread to Europe, which had previously prided itself on its pomp, snobish nobility, and state religions: Catholic in France, Anglican in Britain, Dutch Reformed in the Netherlands, etc. New England virtues have already transformed European culture, for the better!

What happily surprises me about almost all the immigrants who've arrived in the USA since our independence from the British throne -- from Acadia to Norway to Indonesia to Africa: Lutherans, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Orthodox, Confucians, Hindus, Daoists, beer drinkers, soccer fans, and all -- is: rather than erasing things, they've adopted these New England virtues. And, as they have, these virtues also spread around the world. Maybe the seeds of them were already in their cultures.

These are virtues that allow all people to be both proud of their heritage and clear-eyed about the evils of many of our ancestors, such as the perpetrators of those Salem Witch Trials.

They are strong, tough, and hardy virtues. I'm not the slightest bit concerned that anyone will erase them. They've been winners, time and again.

It has been our good fortune for decades that these New England virtues are widely supported in the USA, but they've never been universally supported here, certainly not at the moment.

So, I'll warn you: beware of Americans who hate Muslims; most who do also hate Jews. That's been what I've seen, I regret to admit.

Here's a recent example.
"Racial Slurs and Nazi Symbols: Inside the Complaint That Shut Down The Harvard Salient"
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/12/21/documents-reveal-harvard-salient-complaint/

All my best.

-- his reply --
...
Europe welcomed Muslims and now countries like England are having serious problems with many of them unwilling to assimilate. As you know, in London, there are more mosques than churches. This is not a problem in itself, if the immigrants were ready and willing to adopt Western values.

As you know, it is the often-spoken goal of Islamists to populate the West to, at some point, subjugate it.
...

-- my reply --

The virtues I cherish are American, New England in particular, and didn't come from Europe. They spread back there from here and Europe is better with them:

    seeking truth,
    universal education for children,
    innovation combined with thoughtful hard work,
    religious liberty,
    free speech, and
    representative government.

Islam cannot erase traditional European culture. Americans already did that, thank goodness.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

-- his reply --

You certainly have a clear head, when it comes to "American values" and I salute you.

-- my reply --

Forgive me if I was impolite. Let me rephrase it this way.

I think people of many cultures, religions, and ethnicities -- some Muslims included along with many of those who believe in salvation through a faith consecrated in part by traditional European Christian symbols and rituals -- feel like they are barely keeping their heads above water in the deep currents of freedom and innovation in which we are all swimming.

Under the current circumstances, sticking with the hard-learned New England virtue of religious liberty will best keep dissatisfied people from turning to extremism.

Thanks for putting up with me.

***

Most people wouldn't have given their life like Mary Dyer. That's why there aren't statues of most people near the entrance to the Massachusetts State House.

Governor John Endecott and others from Boston to Salem, paraphrasing, in 1659:
Admit that you are not qualified to form your own beliefs, and we will spare your life.

Mary Dyer:
"My life is not accepted, neither availeth me, in comparison with the lives and liberty of the Truth..."

Governor Endecott, in 1660:
"[We spared you last year, now your death sentence] is to be executed. Therefore prepare yourself tomorrow at nine o'clock."

Mary Dyer:
"I came in obedience to the will of God the last General Court, desiring you to repeal your unrighteous laws of banishment on pain of death; and that same is my work now..."

Mary Dyer
Quaker
Hanged on Boston Common
June 1st, 1660,
per the orders of Governor John Endecott,
executing her death sentence from the Massachusetts General Court.

"They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts..."
Romans 2:15

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it."
Henry Ford