What We Owe to Mr. Williams

by

Nicki Leone

What are all the Contentions and Wars of this World about (generally) but for greater Dishes and Bowls of Porridge?
       —Roger Williams, in a letter to Major John Mason, June 22, 1670

When I was a child in first grade, making hand-turkeys and Indian war bonnets out of construction paper to decorate the classroom for Thanksgiving, we learned that the Pilgrims came to the New World “to be free to practice their religion.” What that meant, exactly, was never explained. As first graders we were more interested in the discovery of Indian popcorn and the possibility of pumpkin pie than we were in the forces that drove a group of men and women (and children) to get on a boat and cross an ocean to start a new life. They wanted freedom—something that, as far as we were concerned, came with the territory. With being in America. Like corn and maple syrup, and Indians.

I’m sorry to say that my concept of freedom of religion in America, of freedom in general, remained similarly un-nuanced for almost the whole of the next thirty years, until a terrorist attack on the United States sent the country into a tailspin, careening down a course that seemed, to me, the exact opposite of the principles those original Pilgrims had come to these shores to practice.

There have been many repercussions to the 9/11 attacks. One personal one for me was a renewed attention to the Constitution of the United States (which seemed to be daily in jeopardy) and the circumstances and people that surrounded its creation. This, in turn, lead to a renewed feeling of admiration and awe for the founding fathers—admiration for their sense of vision and ambition, awe for the fact that by and large, it worked. “Freedom” to speak and act according to one’s conscience, without the fear of retribution from some authority, freedom in the sense of personal liberty, still works.

As it turns out, one of the reasons it works is because of Mr. Roger Williams. And that story that my teachers told me about the Pilgrims coming to America for religious freedom? Well, they weren’t exactly lying, but it was a little more complicated than that.

Roger Williams is best known in America as the founder of the Rhode Island “plantation,” and perhaps also as the founder of the First Baptist Church, but according to John M. Barry he might also be the founder of the founders of the country. Barry’s book, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, documents how many of the ideas at the center of the American Revolution—ideas about personal liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, separation of church and state, and the concept of a democratic government where sovereignty resides in the will of its people, not a divinely ordained king or council—all of these can be traced back in some fashion to the half-forgotten but wholly remarkable theologian and political thinker named Roger Williams. His theories influenced not just the political figures of his day (who tended to be aghast and appalled at them) but also philosophers and political figures of later ages. Men like John Milton, whose later work shows clear evidence of his friendship with Williams and whose ideas about freedom of conscience parallel Williams’ own. Or John Locke, whose work is built on Williams’ idea of a completely secular civil government. Even Thomas Jefferson, the man who most identify as the ideological soul of the American Revolution, owes his famous call for a “wall of separation between Church and State” to Roger Williams. Williams said it first, 130 years earlier.

“This book was supposed to be about the home front in World War I,” writes Barry a bit plaintively in his afterward, “...to investigate the role of religion in American public life as part of a larger story.” But it is clear that the personality of Roger Williams exerts a kind of irresistible force even this far removed from those early Colonial beginnings. He simply takes over the story Barry wanted to tell. The “larger story” Barry found himself facing turned out to be the story of the debate about religion and politics—the two things we are told never, ever to bring to the dinner table. I have this mental image of the author working feverishly, excitedly on his book, but finding himself utterly unable to talk to friends and family about it. “What are you working on now, John dear?” “Oh, a book about religion and politics...” “How nice. Pass the gravy boat please.”

The origin of the debate between religion and politics in America lay in the conflict between two seventeenth century Puritan thinkers: Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island based on the principle of the separation of church and state, and John Winthrop, who founded Massachusetts in order to build “a city on a hill” in which the church was the state. So as it turns out, those Puritans didn’t come to the new world for freedom of religion, but for the freedom to practice their religion.

It’s a significant distinction. Puritans had been harassed and harried in England for defying the official Anglican Church of England, and by extension, the head of that church, the King, but they were all for the creation of their own near-theocratic society. And people who chose to defy or even simply question the tenets of their new city on the hill could suffer some pretty severe punishments. Lopping off ears and hands and other protruding body parts (yes, those too) being a favorite seventeenth century punishment for any number of offenses. Puritan authorities did not prove any more merciful or less bloody than their counterparts for the Crown when it came to enforcing their Biblically-inspired laws.

Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul is both a political biography of a man, and the intellectual biography of an idea—the idea of personal liberty as the foundation for civil society. It is a complicated topic—politics in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England were especially fraught, as anyone who has ever seen a Shakespeare play can attest. And the tangled history of the relationship of secular authority to religious authority is even more so. But Barry navigates the complexities of both civil disputes like those over the Divine Right of Kings versus the rule of Common Law, and theological disputes, like the fine but exceedingly important distinctions held between Anglican and Calvinist doctrine regarding the concept of predestination, and he does so with ease and a sure hand. Thus, even though fully a third of the book is devoted to the religious conflicts in England and the struggles of its monarchs to impose their absolute will upon the people they ruled, it is background that serves to frame the work of Williams himself, who appears all the more remarkable against the chaotic times in which he lived. Indeed, it is a minor miracle that he lived at all, since his friends and patrons had a way of getting themselves thrown into the Tower of London or beheaded.

But as adept as Barry is in his coverage of shifting political tides and religious ideals, this is not the strongest or most rewarding part of his book. The reward is in his illumination of the character of Roger Williams himself. The man must have been extremely charismatic in life, because even on paper he seems to be almost force majeure.

Roger Williams’ star began to rise when at the age of thirteen he was noticed by Sir Edward Coke for, of all things, his proficiency with shorthand. (Williams would go on to show a talent for mastering many languages, but this one is the most idiosyncratic). Coke was the leading English barrister of the day—possibly the leading English jurist of all time—and the man who established the primacy of Common Law over the will of the monarch. In effect, establishing that even the King had to obey the law. It is Coke who is attributed with the saying “an Englishman’s home is his castle.” Roger Williams, as Coke’s protégé, attended him in his various stations as Speaker of the House of Commons, chief justice for the Court of Commons, attorney general for two kings, member of the King’s Bench, and member of the Privy Council. He was in the room when Coke actually argued with King James I and told him, very respectfully but adamantly, that his royal highness was in error on a point of the law. Roger Williams himself was on speaking terms with the King’s son, Charles (later, Charles I) although he apparently didn’t think much of him.

Williams also knew, and admired, Sir Francis Bacon, the great empiricist and natural philosopher who insisted that logic wasn’t logical if it ignored observable evidence. And it perhaps speaks to Williams’ originality of mind that he could find so much to admire in Bacon’s ideas, since Bacon and his own mentor, Edward Coke, detested each other personally. As the author points out, it could hardly have been a better training ground for an original thinker. Roger Williams found himself literally at the center stage where modern political and scientific thought were beginning to contend against forms of civil society that had stood for thousands of years.

Ah to be young, brilliant, and in England in the midst of a civil crisis. Eventually Williams’ own religious and political views would put him into royal disfavor and he would do what many others decided to do in similar circumstances—go west, young man. Flee to America, where he would be safe from royal pressure to conform to the Church of England, and more to the point safe from arrest, and free to exercise his own conscience. Unfortunately, as Barry points out, the Puritan colonies established in America had no intention of allowing anyone to freely exercise their own conscience. Conformity was still demanded, it was just a different kind of conformity.

If there is a pattern to Williams’ life it is that he possessed a singular talent for winning the friendship and admiration of people, whilst being an unrepentant, unbending irritant to persons in authority. Barry ascribes this effect to Williams’ own steadfast integrity—a thing which tends to irritate people who have none—and his intelligence, especially in his willingness to subject even his own assumptions and beliefs to rigorous questioning. His character, then, was universally understood to be completely honest. His learning, of the highest order. And since a man who has seen the King of England in a temper tantrum is not inclined to be easily intimidated, colonial authorities in Massachusetts found to their consternation that Williams was beyond the reach of their influence. Plus, he had advanced the rather disturbing theory that Indians should be paid for the land the colony had settled, which sat well with no one who had settled on any.

Williams was nothing but respectful of the men with whom he had disagreements on matters of religious doctrine and civil government. But they could not force him to act against his own conscience. So eventually, they banished him to the wilds of Rhode Island, little expecting that there he would found a colony of his own, based on complete religious freedom, and that this colony would not only not become a den of anarchy and licentiousness of godless persons, but would thrive, be a model of civil order and harmony, and become in turn a model for other new settlements. So shocked were the Massachusetts authorities that they even attempted to invade Rhode Island on a pretext and annex it, thus bringing it back into the fold of their own city on the hill. No less a person than Oliver Cromwell (who met and admired Williams) told Massachusetts to desist and leave Rhode Island alone.

Barry spends little time on Roger Williams’ personal life, except insofar as it affected or was affected by his public life and developing views of personal liberty. But the man himself still shines through. Certainly, as the author points out, Williams seemed to crave a kind of absolute personal liberty—the kind of freedom that sends pioneers into the wilderness to carve out their own piece of heaven. He had a gift for maintaining friendships with people who were enemies to each other—as his relationship with Coke and Bacon shows. Even at the height of his conflicts with the authorities in Massachusetts, he remained good friends with the governor, John Winthrop, who admired Williams very much and even went into business with him on occasion.

Williams also was intellectually curious. The Native Americans that most colonists did their best to ignore, Williams found fascinating. He learned the Naragansett language, spent days in a canoe visiting different tribes, and published a book on their language and customs that even today is considered highly accurate. Williams became the de facto mediator between many white and Indian disputes, and once even diffused an Indian uprising in Massachusetts by walking into a war council—the only white man among 1,500 natives—and convincing the tribes not to fight. The settlers in the Massachusetts colony were profoundly grateful for his intervention, although they couldn’t tell him so since Williams had been banned from the colony for his dangerous opinions.

He was profoundly, passionately religious. He believed in the word of God. But he was never blindly loyal to the word of man, and his intellectual honesty caused him to forever search backwards for scriptural justification for his beliefs. In fact he was so unflinchingly rigorous in his studies, that he came to the agonizing conclusion that no current church could have true “Apostolic Succession” (that is, a true line of spiritual authority passed down from Christ). Too much time and corruption had occurred over the millenia. So he felt he had no choice but to leave his own church, “casting himself loose,” forever to be a “Seeker” without the comfort of being part of a covenant.

So it is clear he was incredibly brave.

And no doubt, Barry writes, incredibly strong. To get about in the wilds of Rhode Island where horses were scarce to nonexistent, one usually had to walk or travel by canoe. Williams probably had arms like tree trunks.

And he was committed to his ideal: the creation of a free society where the governing body had no say over an individual’s personal conscience. That is, his beliefs. Just how committed Williams was to this idea was shown towards the end of his life when Rhode Island became the refuge for several Quaker communities. Quakers were a bit like the hippies of the day—all emotion and seeking the inner light and doing outrageous things like smashing bottles in churches and running naked in the aisles. They would have adored Woodstock.

Most civil authorities at the time imposed harsh punishments on Quakers caught within their jurisdiction. In some cases they even disregarded their own laws and found excuses to circumvent standard practice in order to deal in justly harsh manner with these religious radicals they considered a threat to civil order. Williams also hated the Quaker beliefs—not because it was “disorderly” but because it seemed to lack any rational foundation. It was a religion of emotion, not wisdom. Williams considered it to be intellectually lazy. An abdication of a person’s responsibility to consult and question their own conscience in all things.

Nevertheless, when neighboring colonies exerted pressure on Rhode Island to expel, make an example of, or even execute the Quakers in their colony, Williams and the Rhode Island civil authorities refused. The Quaker religion was ridiculous, but in their city not on a hill, one had every right to be as ridiculous in their faith as one wished.

The story of Roger Williams and the development of his theories of personal liberty and the necessity of the separation of Church and State is not an obscure tale about an irrelevant moment in early American history. Nations, even this nation, still routinely try to circumvent established law for “reasons of state” as King James I would put it. Nowadays we say “for national security.” It is a temptation that can have drastic consequences. Charles I pushed religious conformity “for reasons of state” with such force he ended up beheaded on his own gallows. “The question,” writes Barry, “of whether the end of national security justifies extraconstitutional means is alive now as it was four hundred years ago.”

Nor is the idea of the separation of Church and State—the ultimate guarantee of freedom of expression, and freedom of religion—a simple truism in American culture. The tenor of political debate is increasingly invaded by the language of religion. Sometimes even legislation inspired by religious doctrine makes its way into the law. Freedom, almost any politician’s re-election campaign commercial will tell you, is a thing that must be constantly defended.

Roger Williams would concur. But he would also tell us is that freedom is best defended when we fight for it not for ourselves, but for the rights of those with whom we do not agree.

Books mentioned in this column:
Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty by John M. Barry (Viking, 2012)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this with the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.