Compel Them to Come In

Against the claim that forced worship cannot please God

Roger Williams said that forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils, and John Locke that a ruler’s force can do nothing for a man’s soul. We agree that only faith pleases God and that no man can compel it. We deny what the claim adds, that requiring a man to hear God’s word and keep his day is worthless, displeasing to God, or outside the charge of those set over him. The fourth commandment lays that charge on the head of a house, and the Westminster divines read it of every superior. We argue that a ruler may require the nation’s attendance on the worship of God and its rest on the Lord’s Day, without compelling belief, prayer or the Table.

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The question

In 1670 Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, heard that his colony had been reported in England as a people that did “not keep the Sabbath.” He answered that Calvin held the Sabbath “but ceremonial and figurative, from Colossians 2,” and he offered to debate in public “that forced worship stincks in God’s nostrils” (to John Mason, 22 June 1670). In The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644) he had argued that a sword “may produce a carnall repentance, a shew, an outside” (ch. 40). John Locke gave it lasting form in 1689: “the care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.”

Tom Hicks of Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary, setting out the Baptist case in 2022, grants that “Societies should certainly worship the one true God according to His commands,” and puts the question in the ruler’s jurisdiction. Laws compelling worship, he wrote, lead unbelievers to worship against their own minds, “God is displeased with false worship,” and such laws “can only create a nation of hypocrites.” The historian Glenn Sunshine gives Lactantius’s argument: only worship given voluntarily pleases God, so religious liberty is necessary, since “compulsory worship will never please God” (Every Square Inch, 2025). Their premise stands in a Southern Baptist resolution of 2003: “Genuine faith, by definition, cannot be coerced or legislated.”

The argument has three steps. Only faith pleases God (Heb. 11:6). No man can give another faith (John 6:44). Therefore, the argument concludes, compelling a man to worship is worthless or worse, because it makes hypocrites and hardens sinners, and it lies outside the charge of rulers. We grant the first two steps and deny the third, in both its halves, with the slogan Williams made of it. Sunshine’s sentence shows where the step goes wrong. It assumes that compelled worship and willing worship cannot be the same worship, and religious liberty would not follow even if they could not, since a man may hold compulsion useless and still forbid idolatry.

Doug Wilson, who argues for Christian laws, grants that “we cannot impose Christianity at the point of a sword” (2024). Of his boot-camp graduation, where every recruit was ordered to bow his head at the chaplain’s prayer, he wrote that the unbelievers “should have just been told to remain respectfully at attention” (2026). He drew the line where this paper draws it, between presence and an act of worship. Our paper Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing-Fathers holds that the ruler restrains public idolatry and does not compel belief. This paper asks whether a father or ruler may require the outward worship of God, and what God thinks of it. Stated as a syllogism, the case runs as follows.

What the words mean

The claim turns on three words, and it gets its force from leaving each of them loose.

Worship. By the worship a father or ruler may require we mean three outward duties: coming to the assembly on the Lord’s Day, hearing God’s word read and preached, and resting from ordinary work. We do not mean belief, which no man can give. Nor do we mean the acts a man performs as a worshiper, prayer, praise, a profession of faith and the Lord’s Supper. Only faith can offer them, and Scripture keeps the Table for the man who answers for himself: “But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup” (1 Cor. 11:28). The requirement brings a man to the door, the seat and the day. It puts no words of prayer in his mouth. The ministers of New England drew the same line in the model of church and civil power that Williams printed in order to answer it. The magistrate “hath power to compell all men within his grant, to heare the Word,” and “he hath no power to compell all men to become members of Churches” (Bloudy Tenent, ch. 100).

Compel. Three things go by the name, and the claim runs them together. God commands his worship under his own threat. A father commands and corrects, and Hebrews takes that for granted: “we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence” (Heb. 12:9). A ruler makes law as “the minister of God” (Rom. 13:4). This paper defends the second and the third. In each a man with an office requires a duty and attaches a sanction to refusal, and this paper does not argue for any particular sanction. Force used by a man with no office over the one he forces is something else.

Pleasing to God. Here the claim does its real work, because it uses one phrase for three different things. God can be pleased with the man who requires the worship, with the worship of the man who is required, or with the required man’s presence at it. The Westminster Confession already tells them apart. It teaches that the works of unregenerate men, though “for the matter of them they may be things which God commands, and of good use both to themselves and others,” still “can not please God,” because they do not come from a heart purified by faith. Then it adds, “And yet their neglect of them is more sinful and displeasing unto God” (16.7). So we state our thesis in three parts.

The man who requires it does what God charged him to do. The fourth commandment lays the day of his whole house on its head (section 04). The Westminster divines read the same charge of every superior, and on that reading a ruler may require it of the nation (section 06).

The required man who believes pleases God. Compulsion takes nothing from faith. A believer brought to the assembly worships in faith there, whether he came of his own accord or was made to come (section 03).

The required man who does not yet believe does not please God as a worshiper. Without faith no man pleases God, compelled or free (Heb. 11:6). But he displeases God less in the assembly than out of it, and he sits where faith comes from (section 05).

What God hates in worship

Scripture names the faults in worship God hated, and the faults it names are the heart and the hands. Isaiah heard God reject the feasts of his own people: “I cannot bear your new moons, and your sabbaths, and the great day; your fasting, and rest from work, your new moons also, and your feasts my soul hates” (Isa. 1:13–14). The reason follows: “for your hands are full of blood” (Isa. 1:15). God had commanded, “Three times in the year shall all thy males appear before the Lord thy God” (Exod. 23:17), so when the prophet asks, “who has required these things at your hands? Ye shall no more tread my court” (Isa. 1:12), he refuses offerings brought with bloody hands, not the coming God commanded. Two verses earlier God summoned the same men to hear: “Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodoma; attend to the law of God, thou people of Gomorrha” (Isa. 1:10). Christ named the fault in the worship of his own day from the same prophet: “This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me” (Matt. 15:8). Hebrews gives the rule under both: “But without faith it is impossible to please him” (Heb. 11:6).

Williams agreed. On his own account an unbeliever’s worship is sin whether anyone forced him or not, “Preaching sinne, praying … sinne” (Bloudy Tenent, ch. 40). That concession settles the second part of our thesis. If unbelief is what spoils worship, then faith is what God accepts, and a requirement takes nothing from a believer’s faith. A believing son whose father wakes him for the Lord’s Day assembly, and who comes, does what Paul calls pleasing: “Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well pleasing unto the Lord” (Col. 3:20). Paul wrote that to children in the church. Christ also told of a son who answered his father’s command, “I will not: but afterward he repented, and went,” and he asked which son “did the will of his father” (Matt. 21:29–31). The answer was the son who had refused at first. Reluctance at the start did not undo the obedience that followed.

The slogan proves too much. Lactantius, writing against pagans who tortured Christians into sacrifice, said that a sacrifice is a curse “unless it is offered spontaneously, and from the soul” (Divine Institutes 5, ANF ch. 21), and Williams said that forced worship stinks. If worship offered under a superior’s threat were hateful as such, God’s own commands would spoil the worship they command, since he gives them under threat: “Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice in him with trembling” (Ps. 2:11), “lest at any time the Lord be angry, and ye should perish from the righteous way” (Ps. 2:12). So the slogan has to mean compulsion by men. Its argued form says exactly that. Locke rested the case on the fact that the magistrate’s “power consists only in outward force.” That is true, and the question is what the outward duty is worth and who may require it.

The head of the house

The fourth commandment is spoken to the head of a house, and it makes him answer for the day of everyone in it: “But on the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God; on it thou shalt do no work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy servant nor thy maidservant, thine ox nor thine ass, nor any cattle of thine, nor the stranger that sojourns with thee” (Exod. 20:10). The servant and the stranger are grown men, so the charge does not rest on anyone’s childhood. Moses gave its purpose when he repeated it, “that thy man-servant may rest, and thy maid, and thine ox, as well as thou” (Deut. 5:14). The day is more than a pause in work. Moses calls it “a rest, a holy convocation to the Lord” (Lev. 23:3), a day of assembly, and Calvin, whom Williams cited for the Sabbath as a figure, held that two of its ends “are adapted to every age,” to assemble “for the hearing of the Word,” the Supper and prayer, and to give servants rest. “It cannot be doubted,” he wrote, “that the Lord provided for both in the commandment of the Sabbath” (Institutes II.viii.32). The Larger Catechism lays the charge on governors of families because they are bound “not only to keep it themselves, but to see that it be observed by all those that are under their charge,” and because they “are prone ofttimes to hinder them by employments of their own” (Q. 118). To keep the day, in the catechism’s words, is to spend it “in the public and private exercises of God’s worship,” and to make that “our delight” (Q. 117). No head of a house can require the delight or the prayers. He can require what he can see, the day kept from work and the man present where the word is read. This is the moral law, not a ceremony of Israel, and section 10 answers the objection that the day was a figure.

Before Sinai. The charge is older than the tables of stone. When God told what he knew of Abraham, he named the rule of a house: “For I know that he will order his sons, and his house after him, and they will keep the ways of the Lord, to do justice and judgment” (Gen. 18:19). To order a house is to direct it, not to invite it. Jacob used that charge over his whole company. “Jacob said to his house, and to all that were with him, Remove the strange gods that are with you from the midst of you, and purify yourselves, and change your clothes. And let us rise and go up to Bæthel, and let us there make an altar to God,” and “they gave to Jacob the strange gods, which were in their hands” (Gen. 35:2–4). Job, who lived under no law of Moses, used it over sons old enough to hold their own banquets. “Job sent and purified them,” and “Thus then Job did continually” (Job 1:5).

After Christ. The apostles keep the charge in the house. “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). An elder must be “One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity” (1 Tim. 3:4). Hebrews expects a child to find his father’s correction hard and counts its fruit later: “Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby” (Heb. 12:11).

The claim at the front door. A Christian father who takes his son to church whether the boy wants to go or not has already denied, at his own door, that a required worship is worthless. If he still holds the claim, he holds a narrower one, that the requirement is lawful in the house and unlawful beyond it, and that needs a reason why the house differs from the nation. Williams saw the difficulty and denied the charge in the house as well. “Masters of families under the Gospel,” he wrote, are “not charged to force all under him from their owne consciences to his” (Bloudy Tenent, ch. 89, margin). Section 10 answers his reason.

The man who does not yet believe

The hard case is the man who is made to come and does not believe. His worship does not please God, and we have said so. The claim concludes that requiring it is worthless or worse. Scripture gives three reasons to conclude otherwise, and the claim’s strongest point deserves an answer of its own.

Faith comes where the word is heard. Paul traces faith back to its cause: “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard?” (Rom. 10:14). “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Rom. 10:17). A requirement cannot produce faith, and we do not claim it can. It produces the hearing, which is the means God appointed. Williams asked of the man brought by force, “What promise of Presence and Blessing” has Christ made to such a way (ch. 99). The promise attaches to the word, whoever brings the hearer: “so shall my word be, whatever shall proceed out of my mouth, it shall by no means turn back” (Isa. 55:11). Paul expected unbelievers in the assembly and said what the word would do to them: “if all prophesy, and there come in one that believeth not … he is convinced of all, he is judged of all,” and “so falling down on his face he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth” (1 Cor. 14:24–25).

The master wants his house full. In the parable of the great supper the invited guests make excuses, a field, five yoke of oxen and a wife (Luke 14:18–20). The master sends his servant into the streets, and when there is still room he says, “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled” (Luke 14:23). The parable is about the kingdom, and the compelling in it is the servant’s work at the master’s command. We do not rest the office of father or ruler on it. We rest one point on it. In the parable’s own terms a compelled guest is not an unwanted guest. The master’s anger falls on the men who refused, “none of those men which were bidden shall taste of my supper” (Luke 14:24), and his will is a full house.

The privilege of the word. The Confession’s judgment, that the neglect of commanded works “is more sinful and displeasing unto God” (16.7), has a reason in Paul. A man is not a Jew “which is one outwardly” (Rom. 2:28), and yet when Paul asks “what profit is there of circumcision?” he answers, “Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God” (Rom. 3:1–2). Paul does not say the sign saved anyone. He says the privilege of having the word profited. A man required to hear has a share in it, the word read to him. The privilege makes him answerable, as Christ said of his own hearers, “If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin: but now they have no cloke for their sin” (John 15:22), and Christ came and spoke all the same. Proverbs counts the man who will not hear worse off, not better: “He that turns away his ear from hearing the law, even he has made his prayer abominable” (Prov. 28:9).

The risk of hardening. Williams’s strongest point is that compulsion hardens. The souls of blind sinners, he wrote, lie asleep “the faster, in that a sword of steele compells them to a worship in hypocrisie” (ch. 40). The risk is real, and the men who defended compulsion granted it. The tract Wholsome Severity (1645), ascribed to George Gillespie, a commissioner to the Westminster Assembly, conceded that under Josiah’s covenant “Iudah became thereby more hypocriticall,” and it cited Jeremiah: “And for all these things faithless Juda turned not to me with all her heart, but falsely” (Jer. 3:10). It answered that the same argument “maketh also against the punishment of adulteries, murthers, thefts,” since punishing any crime can leave the heart unchanged (p. 18). Augustine, who defended compulsion, warned that it is “burdensome rather than really useful, when men are only compelled, not persuaded by instruction” (Letter 100). That is why the requirement we defend is a requirement to hear. We do not argue from results, which are mixed in every age. We argue from the means God appointed, and the means is the word heard.

From the house to the nation

No text says in so many words that a ruler is to do for the nation what a father does for his house, and we do not claim one does. Our paper A King as Father argues what kind of authority the king holds. Here the step from the house to the nation rests on the fourth commandment as the Westminster divines read it, with the texts below, and it is the most inferential step in this paper.

The commandment speaks to every superior. The fourth commandment addresses the man who has others under his charge, and the Westminster divines did not confine it to fathers. Its charge, they wrote, is “more specially directed to governors of families, and other superiors” (Q. 118). Among their proofs are a prophet and a governor. Jeremiah was sent to the gates “by which the kings of Juda enter” to say, “Hear the word of the Lord, ye kings of Juda, and all Judea, and all Jerusalem,” and “take up no burdens on the sabbath-day” (Jer. 17:19–21). Nehemiah, whom the Persian king made governor of Judah (Neh. 5:14), shut the gates of Jerusalem before the sabbath, “and I set some of my servants at the gates, that none should bring in burdens on the sabbath-day” (Neh. 13:19). He warned the merchants who lodged outside the wall, and “From that time they came not on the sabbath” (Neh. 13:21), and then he prayed over what he had done, “Remember me, O God, for these things” (Neh. 13:22). Both men spoke to a people under the law of Moses, so a reader who holds that Israel was a type will discount them, and Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing-Fathers answers that objection (section 07). The commandment they enforced is the moral law, and its form is the same in the house and the city: the superior answers for the day of those under him.

Rulers are charged with God’s worship. The second psalm commands the rulers of the earth, “Serve the Lord with fear” (Ps. 2:11), and Isaiah promised kings to the church as its “nursing-fathers” (Isa. 49:23). Our paper Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing-Fathers argues that these texts bind rulers now. The Westminster Confession, in the text the Assembly wrote in 1647, gave the magistrate the charge that “all the ordinances of God” be “duly settled, administered, and observed” (23.3). The charge reaches further than this paper defends, to the unity of the church and the suppression of heresies, and it does not make the Lord’s Supper a thing any ruler may require, since the Supper belongs to the man who examines himself. We cite it for the day and the hearing of the word.

Scripture names rulers by the father’s office. Of Eliakim, set over the house of David, God said, “he shall be as a father to them that dwell in Jerusalem, and to them that dwell in Juda” (Isa. 22:21). The Larger Catechism reads the fifth commandment of “all superiors in age and gifts; and especially such as, by God’s ordinance, are over us in place of authority, whether in family, church, or commonwealth” (Q. 124), and it gives every superior the duty of “protecting, and providing for them all things necessary for soul and body” (Q. 129). That is a likeness of duty, not a claim that a king holds every father’s power, and it is enough for this argument.

A Gentile city. Nineveh shows what God did with a ruler’s decree for an outward act of worship. The people believed first and proclaimed a fast (Jonah 3:5). Then “it was commanded in Nineve by the king and by his great men” that man and beast should fast (Jonah 3:7), and “God saw their works, that they turned from their evil ways” (Jonah 3:10). God answered the city’s turning, which no decree could compel. The case shows that God did not reject a city’s public worship because a Gentile king had required it. It shows no more.

What passes from the house to the nation. The bridge is the fourth commandment, so what passes is what that commandment lays on superiors: the day, its rest and its public worship. The rest of a father’s office does not pass by it. The rod, the purifying of sons and the instruction of children at the table belong to fathers. Each office enforces by its own means. The father corrects, the elders admonish, and the ruler makes law.

The application. A ruler may require of all within his charge what the fourth commandment lays on every superior, attendance on the public worship of God and rest on the Lord’s Day. The requirement reaches the stranger’s day, as the commandment reaches “the stranger that sojourns with thee” (Exod. 20:10). It reaches his hearing, as Moses assembled “the stranger that is in your cities, that they may hear” (Deut. 31:12), and the reason Moses gave, “that they may learn to fear the Lord your God,” is no ceremony. Here we go further than Aquinas, who would compel those who never received the faith only “so that they do not hinder the faith,” and further than Augustine, whose cases were baptized men (section 08). The requirement reaches no one’s prayer, profession or place at the Table.

The texts the claim leans on

The claim’s named defenders bring a handful of texts. Each one says something true, and none of them says that requiring men to hear God’s word and keep his day is worthless or forbidden.

“Whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” Williams leaned on it: whatever the unbeliever “acts in Worship or Religion … it is but sinne, Rom. 14” (ch. 40). The verse is true without qualification. “And he that doubteth is damned if he eat, because he eateth not of faith: for whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23). Paul is speaking of meat, a thing God left free, and his rule is that the strong must not press the weak to act against conscience in it. The assembly is not a thing God left free. Read as broadly as Williams reads it, the verse condemns everything an unbeliever does, his absence from worship included, and the Confession adds that his neglect is the greater sin (16.7). Either way the verse gives him no reason to stay away. It tells him to get faith, and Paul has said where faith comes from (Rom. 10:17).

“Their heart is far from me.” Hicks cites Isaiah and Christ (Isa. 29:13, Matt. 15:8) in a translation of the Hebrew whose second half says that the people’s fear of God is taught by the commandment of men. The Septuagint reads, “but in vain do they worship me, teaching the commandments and doctrines of men” (Isa. 29:13), and Christ quoted it against the elders’ tradition of washing hands before bread (Matt. 15:2, 9). Christ’s use shows the sin he meant, a rule of men added to God’s commands. A father or ruler who requires attendance on the Lord’s Day adds nothing to God’s commands. He enforces the fourth. If the verse is read instead of a reverence held only because men commanded it, it describes the man of the third part of our thesis, whose worship does not please God, compelled or free.

“The weapons of our warfare are not carnal.” Hicks cites Paul (2 Cor. 10:3–5), and so did the prisoner whose paper Williams printed in 1644. Paul describes the weapons of his ministry: “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds” (2 Cor. 10:4). The sword belongs to another office, the magistrate who “beareth not the sword in vain” (Rom. 13:4). We give the pulpit no sword. Wilson cites the same verse in the post quoted in section 01 and then observes that “we still have these swords” (2024).

“No man can come unto me.” Hicks cites Christ: “no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father” (John 6:65). We agree. Coming to Christ is faith, and the Father gives it. Coming to the assembly is the hearing by which the Father gives it (Rom. 10:17).

“Shake off the dust of your feet.” Williams answered the New England ministers from Christ’s charge to his messengers (ch. 102): “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet” (Matt. 10:14). That is the rule for a preacher who enters a house or a city as a stranger to it. It is not a rule for the father of the house or the ruler of the city, who are not leaving.

“Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.” Hicks cites Christ’s rebuke of the disciples who wanted fire from heaven on a Samaritan village that would not receive him (Luke 9:51–55). Christ gave the reason: “For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them” (Luke 9:56). The disciples asked for destruction on men who refused a preacher. This paper asks for no fire, and the requirement it defends is a requirement to hear the word that saves.

“My kingdom is not of this world.” Hicks cites John 18:36 and the parable of the tares, “Let both grow together until the harvest” (Matt. 13:30). Christ said where his kingdom comes from and how it advances, and that its servants do not bring it in by fighting. The tares are the wicked, and the parable leaves their final separation to the angels. Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing-Fathers answers both texts (section 10), and Hicks’s arguments from Genesis 9 and Romans 13:9 that the sword reaches only the second table (sections 04 and 10). One Kingdom, Not Two answers his claim that the prophets judged the pagan nations for injustice and not for their idols (section 04).

Where the claim came from

We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth has been twisted to produce it, and where it leads. The claim began as the protest of Christians whom pagan rulers forced to sacrifice to idols. Tertullian stated it as a rule for every worship, Lactantius applied it by name to the worship of the true God, and its Protestant form was pressed against Christian rulers who required what they judged to be the worship of God.

The early steps were answered. Augustine had held the claim himself. “Originally my opinion was,” he wrote in 408, “that no one should be coerced into the unity of Christ,” and he gave it up because of what he saw, including his own town, “brought over to the Catholic unity by fear of the imperial edicts” (Letter 93). We report his reason without resting on it (section 05). The men in his cases were baptized Donatists brought back into the communion of the Catholic church, which is more than this paper defends. Calvin said of Luke 14:23 that he did “not disapprove of the use which Augustine frequently made of this passage against the Donatists, to prove that godly princes may lawfully issue edicts, for compelling obstinate and rebellious persons to worship the true God, and to maintain the unity of the faith” (Harmony of the Evangelists). Calvin claimed more than we do, since we do not argue that a ruler may compel the unity of the faith. The tract ascribed to Gillespie drew this paper’s line. There are “two sorts of Christs Ordinances: some for the communion of Saints: others, for the conversion of sinners,” and it was “far from our thoughts to admit, much lesse to compell” a whole nation to the first. Of the second it said, “The means must be used and mens hearts left to God” (p. 18). When Locke published his Letter, Jonas Proast answered him on the exact point of this paper: “the True Religion, embrac’d upon such Consideration as Force drives a man to, is not the less True, for being so embraced; so neither does it upon that account lose its Acceptableness with God” (1690, pp. 5–6). Proast wanted force to bring men to consider and embrace the true religion, which reaches further than the hearing this paper defends.

The practice and its problem. Protestant rulers acted on Augustine’s answer, and the record shows the problem the claim was built to meet. Elizabeth’s Act of Uniformity (1559) required every person in the realm to “resort to their parish church” on Sundays and holy days, at the services of the Prayer Book, which Parliament set aside for the Westminster Assembly’s Directory in 1645. In 1635 the General Court of Massachusetts gave any two magistrates power to fine or imprison those who usually absented themselves from church on the Lord’s Day (Records, vol. 1, p. 140), and later that year the same court banished Williams for opinions it judged dangerous to the authority of magistrates (pp. 160–161). The Church of Scotland ruled in 1647 that “the master of the family ought to take care that all within his charge repair to the publick worship” (Directory for Family Worship, §8). When Williams pressed the claim against New England, John Cotton replied that he could not call to mind “that either upon that colour, or any other, any man in this Country was ever compelled to heare the word of God” (The Bloudy Tenent, Washed, 1647, p. 165), twelve years after the General Court had given its magistrates that power. In France, Bayle wrote after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and drove his Protestant subjects into the Roman church by force. The claim’s Protestant form was answering Christian rulers who compelled other Christians, and that is the strongest objection to this paper. Section 11 takes it up as a limit.

What truth it twists. Each step began from a truth. No man can make another believe, and Aquinas held that those who never received the faith “are by no means to be compelled to the faith, in order that they may believe, because to believe depends on the will” (Summa Theologiae II-II q.10 a.8). God hates the worship of a people whose “heart is far from me” (Matt. 15:8). And compelling men to false worship is persecution. The three young men refused the golden image under threat of the furnace, “we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the image which thou hast set up” (Dan. 3:18), and Tertullian and Lactantius wrote to rulers who were forcing Christians to sacrifice. Lactantius took the protest against compelled idolatry and aimed it at the worship of God. Augustine named the error: “the thing to be considered when any one is coerced, is not the mere fact of the coercion, but the nature of that to which he is coerced, whether it be good or bad” (Letter 93). The remedy for compelled false worship is the worship God commands, not the end of every requirement.

Where it leads. Locke did not carry the claim into the house. He kept the father’s charge over a child without understanding. The father “must prescribe to his Will, and regulate his Actions” until the son “comes to the estate that made his Father a Free-man” (Second Treatise, §58), and Locke kept that charge apart from the church: “Nobody is born a member of any church” (Letter). The inference is ours. If a requirement is worthless because it cannot reach the heart, the father’s requirement is worthless for the same reason, and the only thing left to hold a house to the Lord’s Day is a child’s want of reason. On that ground the grown son, the servant and the stranger go free of the day, and they are the persons the fourth commandment names.

What we do

Each session of our series ends with what a man does about what he has learned, in four places: himself, his home, his church, and what he asks of rulers. The argument comes down to these.

He keeps the day when he does not feel like it. A man who waits until he wants to worship before he comes has made his mood the measure of a command. He comes on the Lord’s Day because God requires it, “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together” (Heb. 10:25), and he does not wait for the desire before he does the duty.

He requires the worship of his house. He takes his children to the assembly every Lord’s Day whether they want to go or not, he leads his house in worship at home, and he says what Joshua said, “But I and my house will serve the Lord” (Josh. 24:15). He does not wait for them to want it before he brings them to hear, since “faith cometh by hearing” (Rom. 10:17). He does it with nurture and not with harshness, since Paul commands both: “bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4), and “provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged” (Col. 3:21).

He asks his church to hold fathers to their charge. He asks his elders to treat a member’s neglect of public worship as a matter for admonition, and to teach the fathers of the congregation what the Larger Catechism lays on them, to see the day “observed by all those that are under their charge” (Q. 118).

He asks rulers to keep the day and tells them it is theirs to require. He speaks to rulers from Scripture, by letter, petition and public testimony. He asks them to keep the Lord’s Day in law, so that no master can keep his servant from worship, since the commandment gives rest “that thy man-servant may rest, and thy maid, and thine ox, as well as thou” (Deut. 5:14). He asks them to keep the day as Nehemiah kept it, when he set men “at the gates, that none should bring in burdens on the sabbath-day” (Neh. 13:19). And he tells them that attendance on the public worship of God is theirs to require, as the Larger Catechism lays the day on every superior (Q. 118). Our paper None Gives What He Has Not explains why we do this by speaking to rulers rather than by electing them.

Ten objections

“God alone is Lord of the conscience.” Hicks puts this argument first, and the Baptist Faith and Message opens its article on religious liberty with the same words, which go back to the Westminster Confession. The Confession finishes the sentence. God “hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in any thing contrary to his word, or beside it in matters of faith or worship” (20.2). If section 04 is right, a father or ruler who requires attendance on God’s worship and rest on his day commands nothing contrary to God’s word or beside it. He enforces the fourth commandment, and the Assembly that wrote 20.2 also wrote Q. 118. Hicks himself holds that “The civil jurisdiction is restricted to outward matters of the body,” and coming, sitting and resting are outward matters of the body. The hard case is the convinced dissenter, the man whose mind, in Hicks’s words, is “already convinced otherwise.” The requirement compels him to none of the acts of a worshiper. He is not made to pray, to profess or to come to the Table, and a man who stands, in Wilson’s phrase, “respectfully at attention” has told no lie. If he believes that hearing itself is a sin, he is caught until his conscience is rightly taught, since he sins against his conscience if he comes and against God’s command if he stays away. The fault lies in the error, and the requirement did not put it there. An erring conscience binds the man who has it. It does not bind the man set over him, who may bear with such a man for a time, and this paper sets no sanction for him (section 11).

“Compulsion makes hypocrites and hardens the heart.” Hicks wrote that such laws “can only create a nation of hypocrites,” Locke that a man who offers a worship he thinks displeasing to God adds to his sins “those also of hypocrisy and contempt of His Divine Majesty,” and Williams that the sword leaves sinners asleep “the faster.” Christ said “Ye hypocrites” to the people who honored God “with their lips” while their hearts were far from him (Matt. 15:7–8). The requirement we defend puts no words in a man’s mouth (section 02). Locke’s case is a man made to offer a worship he is not persuaded of, and the requirement makes him offer none. The risk of hardening is real, and section 05 grants it with Jeremiah. It falls on every law that reaches the outward act and leaves the heart, as the tract ascribed to Gillespie said of the laws against murder and theft. The requirement to hear rests on the means God appointed, not on its results.

“Forced worship is a forced marriage.” Williams wrote that persons “may with lesse sinne be forced to marry whom they cannot love, then to worship where they cannot beleeve” (Bloudy Tenent, contents, ch. 94), and he called the forcing of conscience “a Soule or spirituall Rape” (ch. 62). The figure fits the Table and the profession of faith, by which a man gives himself to Christ in the church, and nothing here compels either. It does not fit hearing. A man made to sit where the word is read has made no vow, and no one is married by hearing the banns.

“A Christian father does not force his house.” Williams granted the first step: “Families are the foundations of government, for what is a Commonweale, but a Commonweale of Families agreeing to live together for common good?” He then argued that a believing husband may not force the conscience of an unbelieving wife, since Paul lets her depart (1 Cor. 7), that the same holds “in this case to childe or servant,” and that the father of the state “ought not to force the Commonweale” (Bloudy Tenent, ch. 89). Paul treats the spouse and the children differently in the chapter Williams cites. The unbelieving spouse may go, “But if the unbelieving depart, let him depart” (1 Cor. 7:15), and of the children he says, “else were your children unclean; but now are they holy” (1 Cor. 7:14). We do not extend this paper’s argument to an unbelieving wife. Williams’s parenthesis extends his to the child and the servant, the very persons the fourth commandment puts under the head of the house, “thy son, nor thy daughter, thy servant nor thy maidservant” (Exod. 20:10).

“A father’s power is not a ruler’s.” Locke stated this one in its strongest form. Political and paternal power, he wrote, are “so perfectly distinct and separate,” and “built upon so different foundations, and given to so different ends,” that “every subject that is a father, has as much a paternal power over his children, as the prince has over his” (Second Treatise, §71). The foundation he gave paternal power is the child’s want of reason (§58). The honor a son owes lasts all his life, Locke granted, but “’Tis one thing to owe honour, respect, gratitude and assistance; another to require an absolute obedience and submission” (§66). The fourth commandment does not rest the head’s charge over the day on anyone’s want of reason. It names “thy servant nor thy maidservant” and “the stranger that sojourns with thee” (Exod. 20:10), grown men and women with understanding of their own. Locke held that a master has no greater power over a hired servant “than what is contained in the Contract between them” (§85), and the commandment lays the servant’s day on the master all the same. Locke’s foundation does not account for the commandment, and the charge the commandment gives is the one this paper defends. We do not claim that the ruler holds each father’s power over his children, and every father keeps his own. A King as Father argues what authority the king holds. Here we claim only that the commandment lays the same charge over the day on every superior, which is the step of section 06. Locke’s different ends depend on what his Letter argued, that the commonwealth’s ends are “civil interests” only, and section 06 gives our reasons for denying it.

“Hearing and the Supper are the same kind of thing.” Williams argued that a state “may as lawfully compell men by the civill sword to the breaking of bread … or Lords Supper, as to the Word or Prayer,” because the ordinances of Acts 2:42 “are all of the same nature” (Bloudy Tenent, ch. 102). If that were so, the line in section 02 would fall. Scripture draws it. Paul expected the unbeliever to come in and hear, and to be “convinced of all” (1 Cor. 14:24), and he told every man to examine himself before he eats, “For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself” (1 Cor. 11:29). Williams drew a line of his own, holding that “preaching for conversion is properly out of the church” (ch. 22), in a ministry to the unconverted apart from the church’s worship. That moves the place where the unbeliever hears. It does not answer whether he may be required to hear, and Williams denied that as well (ch. 102). The tract ascribed to Gillespie drew the line between hearing and the Supper against him (section 08).

“The national cases come from Israel.” Williams held that the kings of the Gentiles “were not charged with the worship of God, as the Kings of Iudah were” (Bloudy Tenent, contents, p. 131), and that “Ionah did not compell the Ninevites to heare” (ch. 102). We grant the second. Jonah preached, and “it was commanded in Nineve by the king and by his great men” that the city fast (Jonah 3:7), and section 06 claims no more from Nineveh than that God did not refuse a city’s fast because its king had decreed it. The first is the typology objection, and Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing-Fathers answers it (section 07). The step to the nation rests on the fourth commandment, which is the moral law and not a statute of Judah, and on the second psalm, which commands “ye kings” and “all ye that judge the earth” (Ps. 2:10), not the kings of Judah alone.

“The apostles persuaded. They never compelled.” Williams wrote of compelled hearing, “Nor did Christ Iesus or any of his Embassadours so practice” (Bloudy Tenent, ch. 102), and Paul wrote, “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men” (2 Cor. 5:11). The apostles held no office over the unbelievers they preached to, and they did what preachers do. This paper gives the pulpit no sword (section 07). The same apostles laid the charge of a house on its head (Eph. 6:4, 1 Tim. 3:4), and Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing-Fathers answers the argument from their silence before pagan rulers (section 10).

“The Sabbath was a figure, and the Lord’s Day is left to conscience.” Williams told his accusers that Calvin held the Sabbath “but ceremonial and figurative, from Colossians 2” (1670). The Baptist Faith and Message cites Colossians 2:16 and Romans 14:5 and leaves activities on the Lord’s Day to “the Christian’s conscience” (Art. VIII). Paul does write, “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come” (Col. 2:16–17), and “Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind” (Rom. 14:5). Calvin agreed that the day of the Jews was abolished, and he still held that the assembly for hearing and the servants’ rest “are adapted to every age” (section 04). The weekly rest is older than Israel. “God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it” at the creation (Gen. 2:3), and the commandment in Exodus gives that as its reason, “therefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it” (Exod. 20:11). Christ said, “The sabbath was made for man” (Mark 2:27), the church met “upon the first day of the week” (Acts 20:7), and John calls it “the Lord’s day” (Rev. 1:10). The Westminster Confession holds that it “is to be continued to the end of the world, as the Christian Sabbath” (21.7). What Colossians takes away is the shadow. What Calvin kept is what this paper asks a superior to require, the day’s assembly for hearing and its rest.

“Compulsion ran to persecution.” It did, in Massachusetts and in France (section 08). The abuse of an office does not by itself show that the office is not there, and whether it is there is argued in sections 04 and 06, not here. Augustine, whose letters are the classic Christian defense of compulsion, asked the proconsul to keep the death penalty from the Donatists: “It is not their death, but their deliverance from error, that we seek to accomplish by the help of the terror of judges and of laws” (Letter 100). Hicks adds that rulers “will inevitably make laws that enforce false doctrine and worship because human beings inevitably err,” and he cites the golden rule, “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matt. 7:12). Bayle’s fourth part argues that “Hereticks have as much Right to persecute the Orthodox, as the Orthodox them.” Rulers will err, and section 11 grants that this paper does not settle which assembly a ruler should require. The golden rule measures by what a man would rightly want done to him, and it does not make truth and error equal. Our paper All the Gods of the Heathen answers the argument from fallibility at length (section 09).

Where the argument stops

The limits of the argument should be as plain as its conclusion.

It does not compel belief. No father or ruler can make a man believe, and none should pretend to. The requirement we defend reaches attendance, hearing and the day of rest (section 02).

It does not say that required worship pleases God without faith. Without faith no worship pleases him (Heb. 11:6). We deny that the requirement is the fault.

It does not compel prayer, praise, profession or the Table. A man is required to come, to hear and to rest. The acts of a worshiper stay his own, and the Lord’s Supper belongs to the man who examines himself (1 Cor. 11:28).

It does not argue for any particular penalty. A requirement with no sanction is advice. The father enforces his by correction, the elders by admonition, and the ruler by the ordinary sanctions of civil law, as he enforces his other laws. Which sanction, and how heavy, this paper does not settle. It cites the penalties of section 08 as history and defends none of them in particular, and it defends no penalty that reaches past the outward act to the conscience.

It gives no man a charge that is not his. A father requires the worship of his own house and a ruler of those within his charge. A private man has no charge over his neighbor’s worship, and nothing here licenses him to take one.

It does not make the father the ruler, or the ruler the father. Each keeps his own office and his own means (section 06).

It does not counsel resistance. The American government is the power that is, and the Christian owes it obedience, taxes and honor (None Gives What He Has Not, section 11).

It does not settle which assembly a ruler should require. This is the hardest limit, and the history of section 08 shows why. A ruler who requires attendance on the worship of other gods compels idolatry, which is what Tertullian protested, and a ruler who requires attendance on worship God has not commanded binds men to the commandments of men. He learns what worship to require from Scripture and its teachers, not from his own will or a vote (Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing-Fathers, section 08). Which church bodies he recognizes is the further question One Kingdom, Not Two takes up (section 07).

It does not judge the faith of the men it answers. The dispute is over what a requirement does to worship and who may make it.

It stands or falls on three premises. If the fault God hates in worship is not unbelief, the major premise fails, and sections 02 and 03 answer that. If the fourth commandment does not charge the head of a house with the day of those under him, the minor premise fails, and sections 04 and 05 answer that, with the Confession’s judgment that neglect is the greater sin. If the commandment does not reach “other superiors,” as the Westminster divines read it, the argument for the house stands and the application to the nation fails. Section 06 answers that premise, and it is the step we called most inferential. A reader who rejects the conclusion should reject it at one of those three places.

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Texts and editions

Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, trans., The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (London, 1844), with its numbering.

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

Tertullian, To Scapula 2, trans. S. Thelwall, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3 (Buffalo, 1885), 105.

Lactantius, The Divine Institutes 5, ch. 21, trans. William Fletcher, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7 (Buffalo, 1886), 157–158.

Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience (London, 1644), contents and chs. 22, 40, 62, 89, 94, 99, 100, 102, EEBO-TCP A66445.

Roger Williams to John Mason, Providence, 22 June 1670, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser., vol. 1 (Boston, 1792), 282.

Pierre Bayle, A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke XIV. 23. Compel Them to Come In (London, 1708), title page and pt. 1, ch. 2, 59–61.

John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), trans. William Popple.

Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), Art. 16, Avalon Project.

Southern Baptist Convention, “On Religious Liberty,” resolution, Phoenix, June 2003, sbc.net.

The Baptist Faith and Message (2000), Arts. VIII and XVII, bfm.sbc.net.

Tom Hicks, “Should Government Punish False Worship or Coerce True Worship?,” Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary, 18 October 2022, cbtseminary.org.

Glenn Sunshine, “Constantine at Nicaea,” Every Square Inch, 5 February 2025, esquareinch.com.

Augustine, Letters 93 and 100, trans. J. G. Cunningham, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 1 (Buffalo, 1886).

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II q.10 a.8, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920).

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), II.viii.32, trans. Henry Beveridge, and Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, on Luke 14:23, trans. William Pringle, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845).

The Act of Uniformity, 1 Eliz. c. 2 (1559), in Henry Gee and William John Hardy, Documents Illustrative of English Church History (London, 1896), 463.

Orders of the General Court, 1635, in Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, vol. 1 (Boston, 1853), 140, 160–161.

[George Gillespie], Wholsome Severity Reconciled with Christian Liberty (London, 1645), 18, EEBO-TCP A86009.

John Cotton, The Bloudy Tenent, Washed, and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe (London, 1647), 165, EEBO-TCP A80608.

The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), 16.7, 20.2, 21.7, 23.3, in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3 (New York, 1877).

The Westminster Larger Catechism, QQ. 117, 118, 124, 129, text of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Church of Scotland, Directory for Family Worship (1647), §8, in The Subordinate Standards of the Free Church of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1857).

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London, 1690), Second Treatise, §§58, 66, 71, 85, EEBO-TCP A48901.

Jonas Proast, The Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration, Briefly Consider’d and Answer’d (Oxford, 1690), 5–6, EEBO-TCP A55925.

Douglas Wilson, “On Making the Sword Righteous,” 5 August 2024, and “Pete Hegseth, the First Amendment, and Me,” 23 February 2026, Blog & Mablog, dougwils.com.

A King as Father. Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing-Fathers. One Kingdom, Not Two. All the Gods of the Heathen. None Gives What He Has Not.

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Old Testament from Brenton’s Septuagint with its numbering, except Nehemiah, which Brenton prints as part of 2 Esdras and we cite by its English chapters (Nehemiah 13:19 is Brenton’s 2 Esdras 23:19). New Testament from the King James Version. Older texts are quoted in their original spelling, with the long s set as s. Modern authors are quoted briefly and paraphrased otherwise. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com