Roger Williams: A Rhode Island and American Founder

 

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Roger Williams: A Rhode Island and

American Founder

Alan E. Johnson

Roger Williams stepped on the shores of New England for the first time in

February of 1631. He had escaped from England, where English

governmental authorities were attempting to eliminate all dissent from the

established Church of England. Williams was a Christian minister who

disagreed with the English ecclesiastical orthodoxy. He initially thought he

could avoid attention by serving as a private chaplain at the rural estate

of a Puritan family northeast of London, but the religious authorities in

England were beginning to crack down even on private chaplains. So he

left England in order to enjoy, he thought, religious freedom in America.

Williams found upon his arrival in the New World, however, that the

Puritan leaders were establishing a theocratic system in New England

that was as harsh, if not harsher, than the Anglican theocracy he had left

in England. These rulers accepted the premise of most seventeenth-

century governments in Europe and America: that government should

require everyone within its domain to conform to the doctrines and

practices of an officially recognized church.

My recently published book, The First American Founder: Roger Williams

and Freedom of Conscience, tells the dramatic story of the life, thought,

and work of a man who refused to accept the conventional wisdom of his

time and who forged a new way of thinking that came to characterize the

best in the American tradition. Born and raised in England, Williams knew

or otherwise personally encountered during his long life some of the

greatest figures of English history: Sir Edward Coke, Sir Francis Bacon,

King James I, the young man who became King Charles I, John Milton,Oliver Cromwell. In contrast to such famous contemporaries, Williams

persistently argued, publicly and unambiguously, for complete liberty of

conscience and what he called a “wall of Separation” between church

and state—both for America and for Europe. At a time when most of the

governments in Europe and America promulgated some form of

established religion that persecuted religious dissenters, Williams

founded a polity that was explicitly based on the principles and values of

what became, more than 150 years later, the Establishment and Free

Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Within a few weeks after his arrival, the Massachusetts authorities were

criticizing Williams for, among other things, teaching that government

should not punish breaches of the First Table (religious laws) of the Ten

Commandments. They later objected to his related position that the civil

magistrate’s power extends only to the bodies and goods of people, not

to their spiritual views, as well as to his arguments that the English king

and colonists should not presume to dispose of the lands of Native

Americans without their voluntary consent. The Massachusetts

government strenuously opposed Williams’s views that English subjects

should not be required to take loyalty oaths that included a religious

component, that religious test oaths should not be required for voting or

for political office, and that witnesses and jurors in judicial proceedings

should not be required to take religious oaths. Williams’s positions on

such matters resulted in his trial and banishment from the colony of

Massachusetts Bay. After spending several weeks in the wilderness

during the winter of 1636, Williams established a new settlement based

on full liberty of conscience and complete separation of church and state.

Consistent with his beliefs, he obtained the land for this new community

by way of voluntary transactions with Native Americans. He named it

Providence, and this town later became part of a larger colony and state

that we know today as Rhode Island.

During the ensuing decades, Williams opposed the theocratic practicesStatue of Roger Williams in Roger

Williams Park, Providence (Library

of Congress)

of the other New England colonies, including their banishment of religious

dissenters, their imprisonment and whipping of Baptists, and their

discrimination against and executions of

Quakers. In return, the colonies of

Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and

Connecticut attempted, by political action

in England and military action and internal

subversion at home, to take over the

lands belonging to the emerging Rhode

Island colony and subject their inhabitants

to Puritan religious orthodoxy. Although

Williams obtained a charter from the

English Parliament for his colony in 1644,

this legal fact did not stop the imperialism

of the other colonies. The Rhode Island

colony eventually succeeded, however, in

maintaining its territorial boundaries and independence from its

acquisitive and theocratic neighbors. And, unlike the other New England

colonies in the seventeenth century, it remained committed to liberty of

conscience and church-state separation.

The historiography regarding Roger Williams has been quite curious.

Until at least the late nineteenth century, “the reverend historians of the

[New England] theocracy”—as Brooks Adams (the great-grandson of

John Adams) called them—engaged in religious attacks on Williams,

hating the very idea of freedom of conscience that he consistently

supported. The pendulum then swung the other way, and Williams was

praised by many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians

as being a votary of popular sovereignty, treating him, anachronistically,

as a figure of the Enlightenment. In the middle and late twentieth century,

many professional historians turned to an academic fad of considering

Williams as a “man of his time,” conditioned by theological

preconceptions that belonged to the seventeenth century but notacceptable to later centuries. Having earlier been condemned by

theocratic historians for his advocacy of liberty of conscience, Williams

now became an object of historicist condescension and belittlement.

The historical truth is that Williams himself advocated both secular and

religious arguments for liberty of conscience and church-state separation.

Although he was compelled by seventeenth-century publishing

conventions to use theological arguments, he also argued, quite

effectively, from reason and experience alone. In his most famous work,

The Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution, for cause of Conscience (London,

1644), he explicitly presented the English Parliament “with Arguments

from Religion, Reason, Experience . . . .”

It is often said that Williams was only concerned about the purity of the

church and not about the protection of the state from religion. However,

Williams argued in his Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody (London, 1652)

that “commixing (explicitly or implicitly) a spirituall and civill State

together” results in “confounding and overthrowing the puritie and

strength of both.” Such commingling of church and state, in his words,

“corrupts and spoiles the very Civill Honestie and Naturall Conscience of

a Nation” and is both “a Church-destroying and State-destroying

Doctrine.” In Massachusetts Bay, according to Williams, “the Magistrate is

but the Ministers Cane through which the Clergy speaks . . . .” James

Madison made exactly the same argument more than 150 years later in a

July 10, 1822 letter to Edward Livingston: “religion & Govt. will both exist

in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”

Many historians have alleged that Roger Williams had no influence on

the American Founders who fought the Revolutionary War and

established the Constitution and Bill of Rights. However, the historical

truth is not so simple. Benjamin Franklin possessed two of Williams’s

published works in his personal library. Thomas Jefferson and othercontemporaneous Founders had copies of John Winthrop’s Journal in

their libraries. Winthrop, the most famous governor of seventeenth-

century Massachusetts Bay, was Williams’s longtime “frenemy.” Winthrop

wrote extensively in his Journal about Williams’s history and commitment

to liberty of conscience and church-state separation (principles with which

Winthrop disagreed).

Moreover, Stephen Hopkins (an eighteenth-century Rhode Island colonial

governor, revolutionary pamphleteer, and signer of the Declaration of

Independence) published laudatory historical information about Roger

Williams, as did Isaac Backus, a Baptist minister who supported the

Constitution’s prohibition of religious tests for political office at the

Massachusetts ratifying convention. Hopkins, Backus, and other Baptist

and Quaker followers of Roger Williams met with John Adams, Samuel

Adams, and other delegates to the First Continental Congress in the

evening of October 14, 1774. They attempted, unsuccessfully, to

persuade Massachusetts to stop persecuting Baptists, Quakers, and

other religious dissenters.

John Leland, another Baptist minister who published favorable accounts

of Roger Williams, was a strong influence on James Madison and

probably was the one person most responsible for the election of

Madison to the first Congress. It was in the House of Representatives of

that Congress that Madison persuaded his colleagues, in the House and

Senate, to adopt what became the First Amendment to the US

Constitution and send it to the states for ratification. Leland also knew

Thomas Jefferson. In fact, Leland may have even suggested Williams’s

“wall of Separation” metaphor to President Thomas Jefferson on the very

day that Jefferson wrote his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists using

that figure of speech.

The commitment of Jefferson and Madison to freedom of conscience and

separation of church and state is often said to be attributable to theirstudy of the English philosopher John Locke’s Letter Concerning

Toleration (1689). But Appendix D to The First American Founder

establishes that Locke was very probably influenced, directly or indirectly,

by the famous and politically consequential writings of Roger Williams

published in London during Locke’s youth. Furthermore, Locke—in

contrast to Williams, Jefferson, and Madison—opposed liberty of

conscience for Roman Catholics and atheists. And Locke, like virtually all

seventeenth-century writers (including the infidel Thomas Hobbes), used

religious as well as secular arguments in support of his position.

Far from being merely a man of his time, Roger Williams has much to

teach us across the centuries. Although he was not confronted with the

complex First Amendment issues that have bedeviled the Supreme Court

in recent decades, he clearly and repeatedly objected to any notion that

any country could rightly call itself a “Christian nation.” At all times after

his arrival in America, he consistently supported freedom of conscience

and separation of church and state. Additionally, in both words and

actions, he always tried to treat Native Americans fairly, and he made

every effort, not always successfully, to prevent war between English

settlers and the indigenous peoples.

[Banner: Image from cover of Alan E. Johnson’s book, The First

American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience

(Philosophia Publications, 2015)]

Alan E. Johnson, an independent scholar, is the author of the

recently released The First American Founder: Roger Williams and

Freedom of Conscience (Philosophia Publications, 2015) and other

publications in the fields of history, constitutional law, political

science, and philosophy. He is retired from a long career as an

attorney in which he mainly focused on constitutional and public

law litigation. The factual statements and quotations in theforegoing article are fully corroborated in The First American

Founder.