No Respecter of Persons

On 17 April 1630, the biblical scholar and Hebraist Joseph Mede recounted an amusing incident to a friend. Evidently, a local "oatmeal-maker, taking upon him[self] to be a preacher" had been called before the highest ecclesiastical court in early modern England, the court of High Commission:

Where, keeping on his hat, and being asked why he did not put it off, he answered he would never put off his hat to bishops. "But you will [u]s?" said one of them. "Then as you are privy counselors," quoth he, "I put off my hat, but as ye are rags of the beast, lo! I put it on again!"¹

In Mede's anecdote, this obstreperous individual represented the excesses to which a lay or "mechanick" preacher might go in asserting the priesthood of all believers. Yet in his refusal to "doff and don" his hat—that is, to pay hat honor—to the Commissioners, the oatmeal maker also revealed himself to be an enthusiastic amateur acting on one biblical injunction in particular: "God is no respecter of persons" (KJV). The anecdote provokes a key question for citation practices, and how they assign honor or shame.

This statement of God's impartiality in Acts 10:34—as well as Jas 2:1 and Rom 2:11—can sound jarring to modern ears. Contemporary liberal egalitarianism, after all, relies on the neo-Kantian language of respect for persons and its demand that every individual qua moral agent or "person" be treated with "equal concern and respect."² In the everyday micropolitics of egalitarian interaction, this means—at the very least—that we are supposed to address one another respectfully.³ Today, this means abiding by each other's chosen titles—or, indeed, our chosen pronouns. Still, by deliberately disrespecting his social and spiritual superiors, Mede's oatmeal maker was also asserting the equality of human beings, albeit in a negative fashion. He was denying to arrogant men—who were, in fact, his equals—signs of "civil worship" that were not really their due.⁴

Students of the period will know that the oatmeal maker was not the first, nor the last, English Protestant to harness what social and cultural historians call "the politics of gesture" in order to turn the world upside down.⁵ In the 1640s and '50s, the so-called Levellers and Diggers adopted similar sartorial strategies. The Leveller leader John Lilburne famously refused to remove his hat to the Peers when hauled in front of the House of Lords on charges of treason, while the Digger Gerrard Winstanley refused to doff and don to the New Model Army leader, General Fairfax.⁶

Incidentally, the essential prooftext for both movements remained Acts 10:34. The Levellers put the case for the equal rights of freeborn Englishmen to Parliament thus:

Care neither for favours nor smiles, and be no respecter of persons. Let not the greatest peers in the land be more respected with you than so many old bellowsmenders, broom-men, cobblers, tinkers, or chimney-sweepers, who are all equally freeborn with the hugest men and loftiest Anakims in the land.⁷

Even more controversially, Winstanley applied the language of Acts directly to the issue of land reform: "For if the Reformation must be according to the Word of God, then every one is to have the benefit and freedom of his creation, without respect of persons."⁸ Others took it in a still more radically redistributive direction.⁹

It was the "People Called Quakers," however, who finally elevated this principle of divine disrespect to a central tenet of their faith. George Fox began his ministry in 1646 and described its auspicious beginning in his Journal as follows:

When the Lord sent me forth into the world, he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low; and I was required to Thee and Thou all men and women, without any respect to rich or poor, great or small … and this made the sects and professions to rage.¹⁰

As Fox's description made clear, he and his brethren interpreted Acts 10...