{"id":6548,"date":"2020-09-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/2020\/09\/01\/roger-williams\/"},"modified":"2020-09-01T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-01T00:00:00","slug":"roger-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/2020\/09\/01\/roger-williams\/","title":{"rendered":"\u200bRoger Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the film Reds<\/em>, Warren Beatty\u2019s biopic of the radical journalist and, for a time, Lenin sympathizer John Reed, we first see Reed chasing a runaway horse-drawn vehicle during his time with the revolutionary Pancho Villa. At the end of the film this image emerges once again, where Reed, disillusioned by the Bolshevik Revolution, once again is chasing another horse-drawn vehicle.<\/p>\n

This symbolism aptly fits Roger Williams (1603\u20131683), a Puritan minister, the foremost proponent of the concept of the separation of church and state, and dogged promoter of \u201cfree thought.\u201d Williams was forever chasing his \u201chorse-drawn carts\u201d and after catching them, he found them insufficiently radical for the brand of libertarianism he favored.<\/p>\n

In the 1930s expensively educated students at college, as typical of that age group, often became Communists in a burst of youthful enthusiasm.And less explosively, many, now middle-aged, wandered back to conservatism (with the key component of anti-Communism).But, as George Orwell perceptively noted, the Communism of that time, which demanded slavish worship of Joseph Stalin, was as dogmatic in its way as the Catholic Church was.<\/p>\n

In the seventeenth century Williams made his switch, ironically, at Cambridge. His turn was religious. Raised in the exclusive Anglican Church of England, Williams became a Puritan. But he never accepted any of its literal-mindedness and dogmas or that of any other denomination. It was because of this that he was repelled by fellow college student Oliver Cromwell, in which the future religious dictator was already in thrall to a warlike \u201cGod Is on Our Side\u201d Manicheaism. Williams never succumbed to such views even when he was being persecuted.<\/p>\n

His collegiate switch to Puritanism was a radical, even life-threatening, act. For whatever the image and behavior of New World Puritans—that of fanatics who installed a theocracy in seventeenth-century Massachusetts—in seventeenth-century England it took intellectual as well as physical courage to declare for religious \u201cpurification.\u201d Castigating the official church of Britain, the Anglican Church, as hopelessly corrupt and challenging the religious basis of the monarchy, the divine right of kings, could earn these dissenters imprisonment, torture, and, in some instances, burning at the stake.<\/p>\n

One cannot overestimate the influence of key figures of that on Williams. The son a merchant tailor, with an astonishing gift for languages (in America he learned the Indian language, and even wrote the first dictionary of their lexicon), the teenager was apprenticed in his formative years to Sir Edward Coke, England\u2019s premier jurist. Although Coke had some conventional religious beliefs, he nevertheless veered dangerously close to detaching the Anglican Church from its partner, the monarchy. As chief justice of common law courts, Coke sought to rescue religious dissidents from ecclesiastical judges with a penchant for torture and execution.<\/p>\n

From this springboard Williams asserted that all religions should be afforded equal treatment in court (i.e., Muslims and Jews). Williams would also go further than Coke in the latter\u2019s measures toward the separation of church and state. <\/p>\n

Williams was part of the \u201csecond wave\u201d of Puritans who left England to create a \u201cpurified\u201d religious community in the New World. He settled in Salem in 1631: it was the epicenter of masochist theocracies. Williams for a while preached in the Salem church, but his views that governmental tampering in religion was a violation of \u201csoul liberty\u201d soon brought him into court. Williams was forced to step down as a Puritan pastor for his advocating the \u201cwall of separation\u201d between church and state. The verdict was that, as a pastor, and later as a preacher in his home to his like-minded citizens, he had expressed \u201cnew and dangerous opinions, in particular his denial of the magistrates\u2019 authority in religious matters, and his seditious letters, one in thename of the Salem church attacking the General Court, and the second to the Salem church urging their separation from the other churches of the colony.\u201d<\/p>\n

And what were these \u201cnew and dangerous opinions\u201d?<\/p>\n

Williams asserted, couched in religious terms that the government should not be involved in religious manners. Citing the religious wars of the Old World, which he said resulted in \u201coceans of blood,\u201d he stated that when a government favored one denomination over another, this was \u201cforced worship,\u201d which \u201cstinks in God\u2019s nostrils.\u201d He also wrote that \u201cGod is too large to be housed under one roof\u201d and that there is\u201cno regularly constituted church of Christ on, nor any person qualified to administer church ordinances.\u201d For a government to oversee the individual\u2019s relationship to God was for Williams a \u201crape of the soul.\u201d <\/p>\n

But Williams insisted that his views were not new. The separation of church and state was formulated by early Christians: \u201cGod\u2019s people, since the coming of the King of Israel, the Lord Jesus, have openly and constantly professed, that no civil magistrate, no king nor Caesar, [has] any power over the souls or consciences of their subjects.\u201d<\/p>\n

Equally threatening to the Boston authorities was Williams\u2019 view toward neighboring Indian tribes.Almost alone about Indian relations in the seventeenth century, he didn\u2019t regard them as \u201csavages\u201d but the equal of Whites:<\/p>\n

\u201cBoast not, proud English, of thy birth and blood,<\/p>\n

Thy brother Indian is by birth as Good.<\/p>\n

Of one blood God had made Him, and Thee and All,<\/p>\n

As wise, as fair, as strong, as personal.\u201d<\/p>\n

As such, he refuted the idea that all discovered lands where Indians lived belonged to the monarchy (known as the \u201croyal charter\u201d). <\/p>\n

Convicted of \u201csedition\u201d and \u201cheresy\u201d and ordered banished from Salem by the Boston court, Williams soon had the opportunity to put his beliefs in practice.In 1636 he, along with some followers, left Salem and founded Rhode Island (after purchasing the land from the Indians).Believing that God had guided him and his followers to this area, he christened the settlement \u201cProvidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams established the first area to practice the separation of church and state in the New World. To merge the two, he held, harmed not only democracy but religion as well. Theocracies were themselves heretical in their determination to oversee the individual\u2019s relationship to God. To rob the individual of this personal relationship went against Scripture; Williams believed the only \u201ctrue\u201d religions were based on a voluntary and free conscience.<\/p>\n

Politically Williams innovated majority rule. The religious minorities who came to Rhode Island could become \u201cfull citizens\u201d by majority vote.He codified the idea that the government could rule only in civil matters. As such, the Providence government could not punish those who violated the religious principles contained in the Ten Commandments, such as \u201cidolatry, Sabbathbreaking, false worship, and blasphemy.\u201d Of these \u201cviolations\u201d Williams wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cBut who is to decide who truly fears the Lord? The magistrate has no power to enforce religious demands. The laws of the First Table of the Ten Commandments are not regulations for civil society or a political order.They belong to the realm of religion, not politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

A century before Thomas Jefferson (who cited Williams as \u201cthe original thought influencer on the First Amendment\u201d), Williams asserted that civil authorities could rule only from the \u201cmoral principles\u201d of the Bible. Thus, citizens could be prosecuted for \u201crobbery, adultery, or murder.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Williams was more radical than Jefferson. In opposition to the slave-owing Jefferson, Williams was anti-slavery. When Massachusetts introduced laws legalizing slavery in the New World, Williams in 1643 helped pass a law designed to halt the introduction of slavery into Rhode Island (this did not prevent Newport from joining the African slave trade in 1700, decades after Williams\u2019 death; Newport would become, according to historians, \u201cthe leading port for American ships carrying slaves\u201d until 1776).<\/p>\n

Williams did help found a denomination: in this case, the Baptists. In their doctrinal statement Baptists supported the separation of church and state and an immersion baptism for believers only, rather than \u201cinfant baptism.\u201d Although Williams supported such ideas, he was careful not to affiliate himself too closely with the Baptists.<\/p>\n

For those who historically \u201cattack dead White males\u201d as racist Bible-thumping hypocrites, Williams was by any standards a libertarian: indeed, one could call him a religious one. Still, he held the then-subversive view<\/p>\n

(and in some circles equally subversive today) that Christianity was not essential for a \u201cmoral\u201d and \u201csecure\u201d government. He hated theocracies and the wars that resulted from favoring one religion over another. He saw Indians as the equal of Anglo-Saxons. A decided Christian, he was inclusive toward all religions: \u201cIt hath fallen out sometimes, that both Papists and Protestants, Jews and Turks, may be embarked upon one ship; upon which supposal I affirm, that all the liberty of conscience, that I ever pleaded for, turns upon these two hinges—that none of the Papists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks be forced to come to the ship\u2019s prayers or worship, nor be compelled from their own particular prayers or worship.\u201d \u201cI acknowledge that to molest any person, Jew or Gentile, for either professing doctrine or practicing worship merely religious or spiritual is to persecute him, and such a person (whatever his doctrine or practice be, true or false) suffers persecution for conscience.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this Williams was much more tolerant than John Winthrop, who sought a closed community of European Christians. For Williams all religions had an equal place in society. But he also parted company from the aristocratic Winthrop in other matters. Winthrop believed that God determined who was rich and who was poor, and for the poor to rebel against the rich was a violation of God\u2019s will: \u201cthe poore, and dispised\u201d should not \u201crise vpp against their superiors, and shake off their yoake.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although mostly concerned with matters of separation from church and state and the perils to individual liberty, Williams did not share Winthrop\u2019s view that God wanted the \u201cdispised\u201d to stay in their place. The class structure of society was not ordained by God, but was a matter of economics that was alterable.<\/p>\n

After an examination of his life in detail, it is apparent why Williams deserves the title of the father of the separation of church and state. He practiced what he preached, favoring neither religion over government nor vice versa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the film Reds, Warren Beatty\u2019s biopic of the radical journalist and, for a time, Lenin sympathizer John Reed, we first see Reed chasing a runaway horse-drawn vehicle during his time with the revolutionary Pancho Villa. At the end of the film this image emerges once again, where Reed, disillusioned by the Bolshevik Revolution, once<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[337],"tags":[169],"class_list":["post-6548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-september-october-2020","tag-september-october-2020"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}