New Ideas Talk at Smith’s Castle 6/10/2021
The Roger Williams Educational Foundation Panel Discussion, and the text of one of the talk by Marc Kohler
This talk was given on June 10th at Smith’s Castle. It is an historic home which was built on the same land where Roger Williams had his North Kingstown Trading Post. There were four panel presentors: Ms. Dawn Wiliams, President of the Roger Williams Family Association. She gave a look back and a look forward to the group’s activites, and she invited everyone in the audience to join in. Mr. Robert Geake, President of The Coumscussoc Association which manages the Castle, gave a talk on Re-examinaing some of what we know about Roger. Ms. Tyler Grimes discussed her work in creating a television show about Roger Williams.
What should we call Roger Williams? by Marc Kohler
My first job tonight is to tell you that I am going to change your ideas and understanding of Roger Williams. My goal is to move you to talk about Roger and increase the knowledge and appreciation of Roger in Rhode Island. I also invite you and all of your friends to meet with me on June 9, 2022, for the one-year anniversary of this meeting through what I am calling The Year of The Revival of Roger Williams. You are all invited to join. In our 2022 meeting, we will all come and share your experiences talking to people about Roger Williams and his importance to our world.
Tonight, I will talk about the many new things that I have learned about Roger Williams over the last four years. Most of you probably know something about Roger, and some of what you know is not exactly accurate, and some of what you know demeans the character of Roger Williams. We have a population of 1,061,000 in Rhode Island. 10% of that is 100,000 and 10% of that 10,000. My guess is that 1% of our population knows anything about Roger Williams, and I have talked to lots a lot of them. That is why I created the RWEF. We are not really a foundation, because we have no money, but we are a friendly group that meets once a month for a year. So, let me ask what is it that these 10,000 peole think that they know about Roger? And here is what people say:
1.Roger Williams was a minister.
2.Roger Williams bought the land for Providence from the Narraganset/
3 Roger Williams was the sole founder of the Baptist Church of America
4.And the fourth is that he had something to do with separation of Church and State and may have had something to do with the fifth amendment.
Let us look at each of these.
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Roger Williams served as a minster for only short periods of his life. In most of these cases, he was not paid, and there was no parsonage. And that is why “minister” is not a good name for him. During the day, people called him a minister, because he was deeply religious, he held worship services in his home, and he did speak and write about Jesus Christ, Christianity, Christendom, and the freedom of religion. but he did work as minister for a family in England, he never had a long or formal relationship with any other group. In the Pembroke College in Cambridge, the have a lot of celebrities who attended the college, and the use two words to describe Roger: “Statesman, and Theologian” I want you to remember those to words, and you can use them now any time that you talk about Roger
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Roger founded the Baptist Church in America. This is quite a debated point and took years and years to be settled. During the history of the Baptists in America, there were petitions and committees that worked on this distinction for decades. You see, John Clarke, a follower of Anne Hutchinson who parted from her to follow William Coddington in Newport than leave with Anne., is credited with creating the first Baptist Church in America. Yes, in 1638, with about twenty followers, Roger Williams was baptized by ‘Ezekiel Holliman. And the group adopted the Baptist faith. Now, why should that be a pronvle me. The answer is simple, after one or two months of belong a member pf this group. Roger left it and wrote that he had decided to be a “Seeker”, which oddly is what his third Cousin Oliver Cromwell called himself, too. The reason the “founding” idea is that it promotes the idea that Roger was a Baptist then, a Baptist later, and a Baptist for all time. Here is the truth: At no time from the day that he left this group was Roger Williams a member of any Christian denomination. Think about that. People who know nothing about Roger will conclude that he was a lifetime Baptist. That is such terrible thing to suggest. Think about the truth and see if we would want to continue this distortion. Roger Williams was not a member of any Christian denomination for the next forty-five years. Roger was a theologian, and not a Baptist.
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Roger Bought the land from the Narragansett. Well, we know that he might have given them some symbolic payment in 1636, and we know that there was a deed signed later. The reason this statement is not good for Roger is that it hides the real relationship that Roger had with these indigenous people. Who were they? The Abnaki, also known as the Tarrantine, the Penacook the Nashua, Piscataqua, the Winnepesaukee. the Massachusetts the Wampanoag, the Pokonokets, The Narragansett, the Nianti, the Pequot, the Nipmucs, the Pocumtucks, the Mohegan, the Nauset and others. How do we accept the fact that Roger is praised for “buying land” while intentionally hiding his knowledge of these tribes? If he did not know them, they definitely knew who that Algonquian speaking colonial was. In fact, Roger became a great supporter of the tribes, for he fought and achieved the goal that Oliver Cromwell ruled that colonial had to pay for the tribes’ land. So, as you continue expanding your knowledge about Roger and how great he was, follow the trail that he left for us.
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He had something to do with Church and State and the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This is one of the great debates about Roger Williams, did he contribute to the separation between church and state to constitute that he be called a great man. I do know that historians today do not like the idea of the great man theory of history, but I can tell you Wahhabism Jefferson, and the rest of our great men turned out not to be so great. Roger is different. That is why “having something to do with” is the phrase that I found so exasperating. Before Roger, there was no functioning democracy with freedom of religion in the history of the world. Roger did more than just write books about it, talk about it, make speeches about it, write thousands of letters about it, but he built the first state in world history to have freedom of religion. Yes, Roger and his friends did not like or tolerate Samuel Gorton, so they did have their limits. The truth is that no one, I repeat no one, accomplished more that Roger Williams, and those who did had his ideas and programs to make it happen. So, I am not going to spend a lot of time on Roger’s contributions to freedom of religion, since those ae clear, and it reflects the things of a great man. I will; leave this truth be something that you can study.
There are two aspects of Roger Williams that I want to present, and they are pretty much new ideas.
In all of your reading about Roger Williams, how much have you read about Judge Edward Coke (Spelled Coke but pronounced Cook. I have been studying him, and I can say, without a doubt, if you know nothing about this judge, then you will know nothing about Roger Williams. In short, Coke was a massively important man for his era. He is credited with creating common law, the Petition of Right, “Your home is your castle”, habeus corpus, precedent as the rock foundation of our laws. I can go on am don and on. He wrote thousands of pages in his Reports and his Institutes. Lawyers all know him well, and he speaks to the ages. The trouble, though, is that people ignore the kind of life crisis that happened while Roger was a stenographer and amanuensis. What is odd is that Coke had many stenographers, and he sent them to all the courts in London, so that he could write about the cases in his Reports. To, there are things about Coke that if we ignore, we understand Roger less. Judge Coke was an evil judge and prosecutor. Many times, he destroyed defendants, and destroyed their lives with no apology ever. In 1616, Coke loses his position as the Lord Chief Justice of England, and in November 1616 he is removed from the King’s Bench and has no court to sit on. Roger would have been 13. In 1617, he kidnaps his daughter to force her to marry Buckingham’s brother. The marriage is forced, and Mrs. Coke ends up in prison. Roger was 14. Through all these years, Coke works tirelessly to end the High Commission. This was a clerical court in existence to punish church law breakers. So, it is not accurate to say that Coke was just a regular member of the church of England. Why does this matter? Well, Roger knew the law better than all lawyers, He had seen it from judges and Coke for six years. And here is the point: At no time in his campaign for freedom of conscience did Roger use the law. He used religious documents and bible scriptures. Yet, he had the best training to campaign with the law at his side. Further, give this some thought, Judge Coke was a very evil and mean man. Would you not think that Roger would have acquired some of his ways? He never did, and through his life, even his greatest enemies considered him to be one of the nicest people that they had ever met. Remember, too. That Judge Edward Coke sent only two of his students on to the best colleges in England, The Sutton’s Hospital which became Charterhouse, and Pembroke College at Cambridge. He knew that Roger deserved the best!!
My last point has to do with influence of Roger on our constitution. Here, people tend to point out that Stephen Hopkins and Rev Isaac Backus knew the founders and influenced them to look at Roger’s ideas. The Hopkins writings are at the RI Historical Society. On the other hand, Backus was the leading Baptist minister in New England for decades. When he began his ministry, there were 18 Baptist churches in New England. When he retired decades later, there were 300. In 1764, the forty-year-old Backus became a member of the Board of Trustees of the College of Rhode Island which today is known as Brown University. Backus served a Board member for thirty-four years. The point I want to make here is that Backus knew the founders and the founders knew him. Year after year, Backus started new churches, and year after year he harangued the founders from Massachusetts about their laws against freedom of religion. Backus became one more great voice in that battle. Well, he wrote A History of New England: With Particular Reference to the Denomination of Christians Called Baptist: Volumes I & II. These two books have 1263 pages. There are over 55 mentions of Roger William in these two volumes. Backus makes his points over and over again. Roger set down the foundation, and Backus was going to see that foundation become part of the Constitution. So, any idea that the Founders did not know about Roger Williams is just not true.
