HISTORIANS TALK ABOUT ROGER WILLIAMS

The Greatest Ideas and Accomplishments of Roger Williams

Freedom of Conscience:

–Alan Johnson suggested:   Establishing a political society in Providence and later helping to establish a larger political entity (now known as Rhode Island) on the basis of freedom of conscience for all people regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof.

–He settled in Providence with thirteen other householders and in one year formed the first genuine democracy, as well as the first church- divorced and conscience-free community in modern history. Williams felt that government is the natural way provided by God to cope with the corrupt nature of man. But since government could not be trusted to know which religion is true, he considered the best hope for true religion the protection of the freedom of all religion, along with nonreligion, from the state.

— And Providence’s other settlers unanimously agreed: “We, whose names are hereunder…do promise to subject ourselves in active and passive obedience to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for public good…only in civil things.”

John Barry

—“..1663 Charter:  [A] most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained among our English subjects, with a full liberty in religious concernments; and true piety rightly grounded upon gospel principles will give the best and greatest security to sovereignty, and will lay in the hearts of men the strongest obligations to true loyalty…”

–Even more extraordinary, the committee left all decisions about religion to the “greater Part”—the majority—knowing the majority would keep the state out of matters of worship. Soul liberty now had official sanction.

–ROGER W:   A civil sword (as woeful experience in all ages has proved) is so far from bringing or helping forward an opposite in religion to repentance that magistrates sin grievously against the work of God and blood of souls by such proceedings… Religion cannot be true which needs such instruments of violence to uphold it so.    The God of Peace, the God of Truth will shortly seal this truth, and confirm this witness, and make it evident to the whole world, that the doctrine of persecution for cause of conscience, is most evidently and lamentably contrary to the doctrine of Christ Jesus the Prince of Peace.
Amen.

 

Democracy

–Governments must be run by the governed.  This is one of the greatest ideas that Roger pursued, and he also did not mention the name o f God in any of agreements among the members of Providence or Rhode Island.  The voting group, though, grew over the centuries.  The first voters in Providence were the thirteen landowners.

—–Williams had created the freest society in the Western world. But he had only begun. He went on to reject the idea that God lent His authority to government. Instead, Williams made what in the 17th century was a revolutionary claim: “I infer that the sovereign, original, and foundation of civil power lies in the people.” The governments they establish, he wrote, “have no more power, nor for no longer time, than the civil power or people consenting and agreeing shall bedrest them with.”

Church Organization

No person can lead a church, for the ministers of the future will be picked “by God, himself, when Jesus returns”

Christian Doctrine

If you do not follow the Christian precepts that Roger follows, he will                            disagree with you strongly but politely.  In the case of Quakers, when Roger debated them, they would yell out, interrupt him, an make it so he could not present his case.  Here, Roger decided that their must be civil control over the failure for the violation of “civility”

—Roger did supported the idea that women had to cover themselves when in church.

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Freedom of Speech

He was part of a group of Americans who established the idea that all persons can debate and argue with the current thought.  This is something that comes through all of Roger’s writing about Freedom of Conscience, and it is the Freedom of Conscience that leads to the Freedom of Speech.

Oaths

He held that no one could require that oaths be used for any enforcement, for oaths can be only to God,  I was also a sin to require non-Christians to worship with groups.

 

Religious Practices

He would only have communion with his wife, but he did offer worship services for any who would come.

Roger did not approve of the MBC(Massachusetts Bay Colony) use of the term “Goodman” for their members.  He thought this should only be used if the person was an active Christian. “…“…He also, to some degree or other, began to object to using the common term “Goodman”—equivalent to “Mr.” today—to address men who were not revealed to have been saved by God’s grace. How could a man who was not truly good be given the title o“…. The argument was dynamite: the colonists had no right to the land because f Goodman?….”

 

State Building

–From Alan Johnson:  Establishing a political society in Providence and later helping to establish a larger political entity (now known as Rhode Island) based on total church-state separation.

–He spent forty years building Rhode Island. People forget that there were four disparate sections of Rhode Island:   Providence (1636), Pocasset/Portsmouth (1638), Newport (1639), and Shawomet/Warwick (1642). . They combined in 1643-44 with the Patent, but the issues were not made steady until the 1650s.

–The colony was first named “Roodt Eylandt” by Dutch trader Adriaen Block (1567–1627), who had explored that area for the Netherlands.

—-From Cyclone Covey’s book, The Gentle Radical: Roger Williams:

“The most fascinating figure of America’s formative seventeenth century,” Roger Williams has now gained general acceptance as a symbol of a critical turning point in American thought and institutions. He was the first American to advocate and activate complete freedom of conscience, dissociation of church and state, and genuine political democracy. From his first few weeks in America he openly raised the banner of “rigid Separatism.” In one year in Salem he converted the town into a stronghold of radical Separatism and threw the entire Bay Colony into an uproar. Banished for his views, after being declared guilty of “a frontal assault on the foundations of the Bay system,” he escaped just as he was to be deported to England…”

Publications

 –Another accomplishment from AlanJohnson:  Authoring publications for distribution at home and abroad with strong nonreligious and well as religious arguments for freedom of conscience and church-state separation.

–Roger wrote and wrote and wrote.  His writings are the core of early America debate.

NOTE ABOUT REPRESSION OF INDEPENDENTS

What is unusual is that this great religious freedom was granted in the Americas at the same time the crown was clamping down hard on religious freedom in England itself. The laws of the Clarendon Code maintained uniformity and orthodoxy. The Corporation Act of 1661 required all town officials to be Anglicans. The 1662 Act of Uniformity required the clergy in England to use only the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. The Conventicle Act of 1664 forbid groups of five or more people holding dissenting religious views to gather. And the Five Mile Act of 1665 made it illegal for a dissenting minister to live within five miles of a town unless he had taken the Oath of Allegiance, which was unlikely. These measures sent more English Puritans to America.

John Barry https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/god-government-and-roger-williams-big-idea-6291280/

Williams believed that preventing error in religion was impossible, for it required people to interpret God’s law, and people would inevitably err. He therefore concluded that government must remove itself from anything that touched upon human beings’ relationship with God. A society built on the principles Massachusetts espoused would lead at best to hypocrisy, because forced worship, he wrote, “stincks in God’s nostrils.” At worst, such a society would lead to a foul corruption—not of the state, which was already corrupt, but of the church.

And Providence’s other settlers unanimously agreed: “We, whose names are hereunder…do promise to subject ourselves in active and passive obedience to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for public good…only in civil things.”

He bought the land from the Narragansett Indians and wrote that “having, of a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress, [I] called the place PROVIDENCE, I desired it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.

Williams described the true church as a magnificent garden, unsullied and pure, resonant of Eden. The world he described as “the Wilderness,” a word with personal resonance for him. Then he used for the first time a phrase he would use again, a phrase that although not commonly attributed to him has echoed through American history. “[W]hen they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wildernes of the world,” he warned, “God hat he ever broke down the wall it selfe, removed the Candlestick, &c. and made his Garden a Wildernesse.”

The committee could have imposed a governor or defined the government. Instead, it authorized a democracy, giving the colonists “full Powrie & Authority to Governe & rule themselves…by such a form of Civil Government, as by voluntary consent of all, or the greater Part of them shall find most suteable” so long as its laws “be conformable to the Laws of England, so far as the Nature and Constitution of the place will admit.”

Williams had created the freest society in the Western world. But he had only begun.

 He went on to reject the idea that God lent His authority to government. Instead, Williams made what in the 17th century was a revolutionary claim: “I infer that the sovereign, original, and foundation of civil power lies in the people.” The governments they establish, he wrote, “have no more power, nor for no longer time, than the civil power or people consenting and agreeing shall bedrest them with.”

Others have taken the opposite view. Vernon Parrington, a leading historian in the first half of the 20th century, called him “primarily a political philosopher rather than a theologian” and said his theory of the commonwealth “must be reckoned the richest contribution of Puritanism to American thought.” Even Harvard’s Perry Miller, who placed Williams entirely in the religious sphere, admired him as “an explorer into the dark places, the very nature of freedom.” And Yale’s Edmund Morgan, arguably America’s leading colonial historian, noted that Williams “wrote most often, most effectively, and most significantly about civil government” and “put human society in new perspective; and he demolished, for anyone who accepted his premises, some of the assumptions that encumbered the statesmen of his day and still haunt our own.”

Having fought to allow all to worship as they pleased, in the end Williams—like his friends John Milton and Oliver Cromwell—worshiped at no church; he concluded that God’s will was better discerned by individuals than by institutions.

I observe the great and wonderful mistake, both our own and our fathers, as to the civil powers of this world, acting in spiritual matters. I have read … the last will and testament of the Lord Jesus over many times, and yet I cannot find by one tittle of that testament that if He had been pleased to have accepted of a temporal crown and government that ever He would have put forth the least finger of temporal or civil power in the matters of His spiritual affairs and Kingdom.
Hence must it lamentably be against the testimony of Christ Jesus for the civil state to impose upon the souls of the people a religion, a worship, a ministry, oaths (in religious and civil affairs), tithes, times, days, marrying, and buryings in holy ground…    I observe the great and wonderful mistake, both our own and our fathers, as to the civil powers of this world, acting in spiritual matters. I have read … the last will and testament of the Lord Jesus over many times, and yet I cannot find by one tittle of that testament that if He had been pleased to have accepted of a temporal crown and government that ever He would have put forth the least finger of temporal or civil power in the matters of His spiritual affairs and testament of Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit revealed, “Then said he, Lo, I come to do thy will O God. He takes away the first, that he may establish the second. By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Heb. 10:9-10).Kingdom.
Hence must it lamentably be against the testimony of Christ Jesus for the civil state to impose upon the souls of the people a religion, a worship, a ministry, oaths (in religious and civil affairs), tithes, times, days, marryings, and buryings in holy ground…Thus, the New Testament is the last will and testament of Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit revealed, “Then said he, Lo, I come to do thy will O God. He takes away the first, that he may establish the second. By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Heb. 10:9-10).

The civil state is humbly to be implored to provide in their high wisdom for the security of all the respective consciences, in their respective meetings, assemblings, worshipings, preachings, disputings, etc., and that civil peace and the beauty of civility and humanity be maintained among the chief opposers and dissenters.

 Breech of civil peace may arise when false and idolatrous ong and preposterous way of suppressing, preventing, and extinguishing such doctrines or practices by weapons of wrath and blood, whips, stocks, imprisonment, banishment, death, &c.; by which men commonly are persuaded to convert heretics, and to cast out unclean spirits, which only the finger of God can do, that is, the mighty power of the Spirit in the word.

Hence the town is in an uproar, and the country takes the alarm to expel that fog or mist of error, heresy, blasphemy, as is supposed, with swords and guns. Whereas it is light alone, even light from the bright shining Sun of Righteousness, which is able, in the souls and consciences of men to dispel and scatter such fogs and darkness.practices are held forth, and yet no breach of civil peace from the doctrine or practice, or the manner of holding forth.

And this is the more carefully to be minded, because whenever a toleration of others’ religion and conscience is pleaded for, such as are (I hope in truth) zealous for God, readily produce plenty of scriptures written to the church, both before and since Christ’s coming, all commanding and pressing the putting forth of the unclean, the cutting off the obstinate, the purging out the leaven, rejecting of heretics. As if because briars, thorns, and thistles may not be in the garden of the church, therefore they must all be plucked up out of the wilderness. Whereas he that is a briar, that is, a Jew, a Turk, a pagan, an anti-christian, today, may be, when the word of the Lord runs freely, a member of Jesus Christ tomorrow, cut out of the wild olive and planted into the true.

What is unusual is that this great religious freedom was granted in the Americas at the same time the crown was clamping down hard on religious freedom in England itself. The laws of the Clarendon Code maintained uniformity and orthodoxy. The Corporation Act of 1661 required all town officials to be Anglicans. The 1662 Act of Uniformity required the clergy in England to use only the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. The Conventicle Act of 1664 forbid groups of five or more people holding dissenting religious views to gather. And the Five Mile Act of 1665 made it illegal for a dissenting minister to live within five miles of a town unless he had taken the Oath of Allegiance, which was unlikely. These measures sent more +English Puritans to America.

“…He also, to some degree or other, began to object to using the common term “Goodman”—equivalent to “Mr.” today—to address men who were not revealed to have been saved by God’s grace. How could a man who was not truly good be given the title o“…. The argument was dynamite: the colonists had no right to the land because f Goodman?….”