A “Dangerous Woman” Makes Her Stand

After her husband died, Lady Deborah Moody lived in London with her children for ten years, then found herself at odds with the Church of England. She was called into the Star Chamber, the court reserved for British nobles. They did not approve of her new religious associations. She was consorting with the Anabaptists, who insisted it was wrong to baptize infants, for they could not yet embrace Christian faith. The chamber ordered her to leave London and return home to Wiltshire. Instead, she sailed to New England, home of her friend, Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts.

Lady Moody joined the church in Salem in the spring of 1640. She soon became a landowner, with over 1000 acres, renting it out to other settlers. Her social status and influential personality gave her the opportunity to share her religious convictions with friends and neighbors, and her Anabaptist ideas began to take hold. One influential neighbor took note. Reverend Hugh Peter, who succeeded in banishing Anne Hutchinson for her religious views, complained to other prominent men, and they soon labeled her a “dangerous woman.”

December 14, 1642, Deborah Moody and other women were brought to court and charged with falsely teaching that the baptism of infants was not an “ordinance of God.” Refusing to recant, or remain in another religiously intolerant environment, she moved again. This time to the more tolerant Dutch area of New Amsterdam, where she founded the settlement that eventually became Brooklyn and Coney Island.

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“But Peter and John answered unto them, and said, Whether it be right in the sight of God, to obey you rather than God, judge ye. For we cannot but speak the thing which we have seen and heard.” 

(Acts 4:19-20; 1599 Geneva Bible)