Roger Williams: Father of Religious Freedom in America
Roger Williams came to the New World in 1631 with much the same hopes as the first Pilgrim Separatists. His heart’s desire was to see a pure church raised up, with no ties to the Church of England and its corruption, compromise, and oppression. Ironically that desire is what led to his banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony at the end of 1635. His outspoken zeal for “soul liberty” proved too radical for the Puritan leaders of the colony, who had brought with them the same spirit of religious intolerance from which they had fled.
Slipping away just before his arrest, Roger Williams fled into the wilderness and found refuge among the Indians. In later writings, Williams recalls how he was “denied the common air to breathe... and almost without mercy and human compassion, exposed to winter miseries in a howling wilderness [for fourteen weeks] not knowing what bread or bed did mean .” During this time, whatever shelter he found was in the dingy, smoky lodges of the Indians. Their hospitality to him in his time of need was something he sought to repay with kindness all the rest of his life.
In early 1636, Williams purchased land from the Indians and with a few friends founded a settlement they called Providence Plantations , which soon became a refuge for those “distressed of conscience.” Williams eventually obtained a royal charter for the colony, which later became the State of Rhode Island, based on this mandate:
No person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be anywise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question for any differences in opinion in matters of religion ... but that all persons may ... enjoy their own judgments and consciences in matters of religious concernments.
What is most significant about the royal charter is that it acknowledges at the foundation of Rhode Island’s government two important principles: republicanism (democratic governments made up of representatives elected by its citizens) and religious liberty . These principles characterize our American government and are later expressed in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
Neither republicanism nor religious liberty can be found in any of the charters of the other colonies in which the church and state were united. It is therefore easy to determine the original source of those principles which have protected our religious freedom and made America a refuge for the oppressed of every land. The nation’s debt to Roger Williams is a debt that can never be canceled.
The Bloudy Tenent
His bitter experience of the English Reformation, from the acrid stench of men burning at the stake in England to his banishment from Massachusetts, caused Roger Williams to write his famous Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience in which he argued his case for something hitherto unseen in the Western world -- the complete separation of church and state. The Puritan society of Massachusetts, through the civil magistrates, attempted to force its religious conscience on all who lived there. This was consistent with the whole bloody history of Christendom since the reign of Constantine. Such persecution revealed to Williams “that religion cannot be true which needs such instruments of violence to uphold it.” 1
In the great struggle of his soul, Roger Williams finally came to the conclusion that the true church had long ago ceased to exist on the earth:
The Christian Church or Kingdom of the Saints, that Stone cut out of the mountain without human hands, (Daniel 2) now made all one with the mountain or Civil State, the Roman Empire, from whence it is cut or taken: Christ’s lilies, garden and love, all one with the thorns, the daughters and wilderness of the World. 2
Christianity fell asleep in the bosom of Constantine, and the laps and bosoms of those Emperors who professed the name of Christ.” 3
So, when did the church die? The trail of evidence that proved the death of the church led from the Puritan society of New England all the way back to Constantine’s nationalization of Christianity in the fourth century. Since that time, Williams concluded, the world had been under the dominion of the “anti-Christian” Roman Catholic Church. 4 Gone was the cultural and spiritual wall that had separated His garden, the church, from the wilderness of the world. 5 As legal scholar Timothy Hall described it:
According to Roger Williams, there was no garden to be protected any longer. Weeds grew where cultivated flowers once bloomed. He did not advocate a wall between church and state; he mourned the wall’s destruction and the destruction of the church. There was no church left to be separated from the state. The most that true believers could do was wait in expectation that God would one day send apostles who would replant the garden.6
There are some who credit Williams with founding the first Baptist church in America, and point to the fact of his baptism in Providence. It is true that Roger Williams and eleven friends formed the first Baptist church in America in Providence, Rhode Island. Ezekiel Holliman baptized Williams by immersion in March of 1639. He had followed Williams from the Salem church where Williams had briefly taught several years before. Williams then proceeded to baptize Holliman and ten friends. Shortly after this, however, he came to a most remarkable conclusion, as one of those friends describes:
I [Richard Scott] walked with him in the Baptists’ way about three or four months, in which time he brake from the society, and declared at large the ground and reasons of it; that their baptism could not be right because it was not administered by an apostle. After that he set upon a way of seeking (with two or three other men that had dissented with him) by way of preaching and praying; and there he continued a year or two, till two of the three had left him. 7
