Roger Williams, Church and State, and Freedom of Religion

Roger Williams was a controversial theologian who lived from 1603-1683. Born in England, his religious life took him from the Church of England to Puritanism, Separatist, Baptist, and, finally, to Seeker. He also managed to found Rhode Island and find himself banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. For one whose life was filled with so much controversy, his legacy and importance could rightly be placed in any number of areas. It is, however, his contribution to government that is Williams's most important legacy. Although he lived more than a century before American independence was declared, the Constitution written, and the First Amendment ratified, Roger Williams could be considered the founding father of those most quintessentially American of ideas, the separation of church and state and freedom of religion.

Unlike others who would eventually come to share in Williams's belief in the separation of church and state, such as Thomas Jefferson, Williams's belief was not that the church should be kept out of governmental matters in order to keep the latter pure. On the contrary, Williams, a devout Calvinist, believed instead that the government should be kept out of religious matters in order that the religion should not be tainted. Indeed, Williams believed that government had no place in religion at all.

This distrust in the entangling of church and state and tolerance for other faiths might well be traced to Williams's childhood and the recent history of his home country. When Roger Williams was born in circa 1603, the Tudor age was ending and the era of the House of Stuart was just beginning. In "The Bloody Tenet of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience, in a Conference between Truth and Peace", Williams wrote that "in vain have English Parliaments permitted English Bibles in the poorest English houses, and the simplest man or woman to search the Scriptures...if they should be forced (as if they lived in Spain or Rome itself without the sight of a Bible) to believe as the Church believes". Williams would know a great deal about this. England was in the process of religious upheaval and persecution between Protestants and Catholics that would only really be settled after his death. England had been ruling as a theocracy with a state church and changed its denomination seemingly with the coming of every monarch. The recently deceased Elizabeth I was an ardent Anglican, while her sister, Mary I, who predeceased her, was an even more fervent Catholic who frequently had Protestants burned at the stake, earning her the nickname "Bloody Mary". The subsequent Stuarts were technically Protestants, but frequently had tendencies toward Catholicism and belief in the divine right of kings. Both Protestants and Catholics frequently passed laws through Parliament that persecuted those who practiced the Calvinist faith, Puritans and Separatists (those who wished to either purify the Church of England from within or separate from it entirely). For those who embodied the Puritan and Separatist ways of thinking, this interference in his faith would have been both problematic. Indeed, it led to the New England colonization on the North American continent.

The Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony still professed loyalty to their English motherland and had no designation between their church and government, nor did they tolerate any religious dissenters. Although they had a charter from the English king, the real law came from the Bible. They saw God as a public figure, not a private one that they had to go through an intermediary in which to speak. The Bible was the answer to any and all grievances, both spiritual and legal. Their belief was that God had spoken to them and given them His blessing. They were to be, as theologian John Winthrop would write, "as a city on a hill" and their God-fearing ways would set an example to the rest of the world. To many Puritans, Roger Williams hurt the example that they had been trying to set.

From the moment he arrived at the Massachusetts Bay Colony, dissent was one of the things that Roger Williams did best. Although considered pious by those in power, including Governor John Winthrop, Williams publicly refused any position of power that was offered to him. He declared that he had done so because they had not officially separated from the Church of England and still had ties to it. His sermons were critical of the Puritan leadership, he promoted separation from England, and he questioned the legality of the Massachusetts Colonial Charter, arguing that the king of England had no authority to give away land that belonged to Native Americans. Williams's views were radical in a society that promoted obedience. Indeed, John Cotton, a prominent spiritual leader in the community, found Williams's beliefs, such as that the power of the civil magistrates extended only to the bodies of men, to be "fraudulent expressions". In 1635, he was banished from the colony.

After he was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Roger Williams founded Rhode Island in 1636. There, he was allowed to practice the doctrines he had formulated that were forbidden in Massachusetts. Among these doctrines was the idea of liberty of conscience, which was that people should be allowed to believe and worship as they wished without outside interference. In "A Letter to the Town of Providence", he proposes the idea of a ship that housed people of all faiths. The people on this ship, he argues, could coexist without having to take on a different belief system and could keep their own beliefs, if they had any. Thus, everyone in Rhode Island was allowed to worship by whatever means they wished, without interference from the government. The government had willingly limited its influence to civil matters only. It was here, in Rhode Island, that the idea of separation of church and state and freedom of religion, which would eventually become cornerstones of American policy, were allowed to flourish.

In conclusion, although Roger Williams, controversial theologian and founder of Rhode Island, did not live to see the creation of the United States of America, he could be considered the father of separation of church and state, one of its most important means of governance. It is likely, however, that Williams would be appalled at the way this idea has subsequently been construed to mean that religion must be kept out of politics in order to keep the latter pure, when he actually felt the opposite. Nevertheless, all who value this separation between the United States' many faiths and its government owe Williams a huge debt, regardless of which body they believe should be kept pure from the other.

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