Roger Williams’s Opening Argument: Church, State and the Birth of Liberty

The question of church and state is probably—not probably—is the oldest argument in American history. It was first articulated almost 400 years ago by John Winthrop, the most important figure in the early Massachusetts Bay Colony. Winthrop gave what the New York Times called the greatest sermon in the last 1,000 years, which included the famous phrase, “We shall be as a city upon a hill.”[1] His definition of Americans as a new chosen people has informed American culture ever since.

But, from the very beginning, there was an alternative vision, articulated by Roger. Williams, a Puritan minister whom Winthrop himself described as “godly.” Williams was so respected that, upon his arrival in Boston, Winthrop offered him the ministry of the Boston church, the greatest such post in America. Williams declined because he considered that church not pure enough for him. Yet Williams envisioned a very different kind of city on a hill, a city where church and state were utterly separate, a city where citizens had individual freedom in a way approaching how we understand it today.

The dispute between Winthrop and Williams defined, for the first time, two fault lines that have run through American history ever since. The first fault line is obvious: the proper relation between what man has made of God—that is, the church—and the state. The second is more subtle: the proper relation between a free individual and the state, the shape of liberty.

Understanding the development of these fault lines involves intellectual history, but the fault lines themselves and the ideas that Williams articulated—and eventually the First Amendment—did not come from any intellectual exercise. They did not come from theory. They were specific responses to specific historic events. Those events led eventually to the beheading of an archbishop, to civil war, to the beheading of a king, and to a revolution 100 years before ours. I’d like to talk about these events and their relationship to theory. The history I want to review began upon Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, when King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England. He immediately made many people anxious by attacking both England’s body and soul.

He attacked the soul like this: in 1603, there were people who could remember in their own lifetimes that, under Henry, England had been Catholic, then became Protestant. Under Henry’s daughter Mary it became Catholic again, and under Elizabeth I it became Protestant again. Each of those regimes had persecuted, imprisoned, and executed dissenters, even burning them at the stake. James was nominally Protestant, but the reformers in the Church of England distrusted his commitment to the Protestant faith. Both his parents were Catholics, he married his child to a Catholic, and he began pushing the Church of England closer and closer to Catholic forms of worship. And, although Catholics attempted to assassinate him—the Gunpowder Plot would have blown up both him and Parliament—James ceased persecuting them and began to apply to Protestant dissenters laws originally aimed at Catholics. Of Puritans, he said he would “harry them out of this land or worse, hang them, that’s all.”

He also attacked the body of England. In Scotland, he had exercised much more power than English tradition and law allowed, and he edged the English monarchy toward absolute power, injecting the concept of the divine right of kings—which had not previously existed in England—into English jurisprudence. His apologists said, “At his coronation he took an oath not to alter the laws of the land, yet this oath notwithstanding he may alter or suspend any particular law that seemeth hurtful to the public estate.”[2] Even more definitively, James’s apologists claimed, “The king is the law speaking.”[3]

Enter Sir. Edward Coke (pronounced “cook”). Coke is arguably the greatest jurist in English history. First, as chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and then, as chief justice of the King’s Bench, Coke in effect organized the common law in his writings by assembling and interpreting past precedents. He also set hugely important precedents, including judicial review of legislative acts and no double jeopardy in criminal trials. Perhaps most important, he pioneered the use of habeas corpus in a form we are familiar with today. Previously, the writ had been used to expand the crown’s power: the crown would demand that some distant lord who had arbitrarily imprisoned someone show what law of the king the prisoner had violated. Coke issued habeas corpus writs against the crown. A believer in equality before the law and limits on state power, he issued his most famous ruling in slightly different language on several occasions: “The house of every man is as his castle.”

He also had great personal courage. When the king claimed to be above the law and the protector of the law, he told the king to his face that the law was above the “king and that the law protected the king. When James removed him from the bench and threw him into the Tower of London, Coke continued his defiance, saying, “If the king desires my head, he knows where he may find it.” Eventually released from the tower, he led the opposition to the crown in the Parliament.

Accompanying Coke to several confrontations with James, to the Star Chamber, to court, was a brilliant young amanuensis with whom Coke was so taken that he referred to him as “my son” and sent him to the best preparatory school in England. The boy was Roger Williams. From his years with Coke, Williams absorbed a deep understanding of liberty, state power, and the law—and not the law as in any specific court ruling or legislative act but the very concept of law, as a kind of infrastructure around which society organizes itself. Decades after Coke’s death, Williams referred to his “much honored friend, that man of honor, and wisdom, and piety. . . . How many thousand times since I had the honorable and precious remembrance of his person, and the life, the writings, the speeches, and the example of that glorious light.”[4]

Francis Bacon influenced Williams as well. This was ironic because, although Bacon is today known as the father of the scientific method, he was then King James I’s chief apologist and served James as attorney general and chancellor of England. (Incidentally, Thomas Hobbes was Bacon’s secretary.) Bacon and Coke despised each other, tried to destroy each other, and essen­tially succeeded in doing so. Bacon convinced James to remove Coke from the bench and throw him into the Tower. Upon his release, Coke convinced Parliament to impeach Bacon, the first impeachment in 150 years. It is a sign of Williams’s independence of thought that, although Coke was this great father figure, he was actually willing to learn from Bacon, rejecting Bacon’s politics but absorbing a scientific methodology—that is, the idea of testing hypotheses. Indeed, Williams cites Bacon in the dedication of his most important book, and Coke’s name does not appear until page two.

When James’s son Charles became king, Charles intensified the pressure on both religious and political dissenters. One clergyman—whose enmity to Puritans made him a favorite of the king—wrote, “Before God, it will never be well until we have our Inquisition.”[5] In politics, Charles began usurping even more power than his father. As Charles pressed ever harder both on religious dissenters and on the historic rights and privileges of Parliament and England, one parliamentary leader said he had wanted to “postpone the business of religion” to focus on “our rights,” but “never was there a more clear connection between the matter of religion and matter of state.[6]

Parliament challenged the king on both fronts. Coke led the response. In 1628, he wrote the Petition of Right, which placed elicit limits on the crown and includes several of the amendments in our Bill of Rights as well as the habeas corpus clause in the U.S. Constitution. He then ushered it through both the House of Commons and the House of Lords—both passed it unanimously—and forced Charles to accept it.

But Charles railed against the restrictions placed upon him and soon began ignoring them. Parliament protested—violently. in a chaotic scene, while soldiers stormed the doors to adjourn Parliament upon the king’s order, Parliament passed resolutions declaring capital enemies—traitors—those who supported some of the king’s policies. When soldiers finally broke in, leading members of Parliament fled or were arrested. Williams—then trusted messenger between members who opposed Charles—witnesses all this from the gallery.

Soon after, England would explode in civil war, and Parliament would not meet again for 11 years—not until Charles was desperate. Meanwhile, to escape the boiling political tensions and ever-increasing persecution, thousands of Puritans fled to America—including, of course, Winthrop and Williams.

As governor of Massachusetts, Winthrop was determined to build a New Jerusalem to advance the glory of God. God informed every aspect of life in Massachusetts, including the legal code. Although Winthrop himself had been a prominent attorney in England, this legal code was not written by lawyers but by ministers (its first draft was called “Moses His Judicialls”). One of the Bay’s leading ministers said the plantation would “endeavour after a Theocracy as near as might be to that which was the glory of Israel.”[7] Colonists had to conform to God’s will, as interpreted by the colony’s ministers and magistrates. Conformity went beyond merely obeying the law. Winthrop believed in liberty but in “a liberty to do only that which is good,” to be maintained by “subjection to authority.” Colony leaders pressured all to conform, to join and participate in the community. Becoming a full-fledged church member was an arduous process, but church attendance was mandatory even for nonmembers. No individual was to stand alone; indeed, the colony prohibited individuals, even unmarried adult men, from living alone.

Like Winthrop, Williams also wanted a godly society, but from the very first he disagreed with basing law on scripture or using government to compel any aspect of worship. His views evolved gradually, but the essence of his position was present when he opposed a requirement that colonists take an oath of loyalty to the government of Massachusetts—and very pointedly not to the king.

For Williams, requiring an oath, an act of worship, mixed church and state. He knew that when you mix religion and politics you get politics, and politics inevitably corrupted the church. (Actually, when you mix anything with politics you get politics.) His position derived not only from Coke’s views on liberty, that each man’s home was his castle—views that ran in his veins—but even more from scripture itself and from a recognition of human error. A linguist, Williams read scripture in many languages and recognized differences between translations. To decide which meaning was correct, which interpretation of a passage was correct, required a human to make a judgment regarding God. And all humans made errors.

Because of the possibility of human error, because humans had to interpret God’s word, it followed that no one should force his or her possibly erroneous interpretation upon another. To do so was, in. Williams’s words, “monstrous partiality.” For the state to use its power to do so was unconscionable. He concluded that only total and complete separation of church and state stopped the corruption of the church and prevented forcing someone to accept error. So he rejected the idea that the state had power to insert itself between humans and god.

He also argued that the parable in the Gospel of Matthew on separating wheat and tares meant that the state should make no effort to force conformity to any doctrine or practice.[8] To Williams, that parable meant that error should be allowed to exist; in contrast, Augustine had interpreted the identical passage as justifying death to heretics and blasphemers.

Williams was a minister in Salem, Massachusetts, widely respected for both religiosity and scholarship, and his views began to get traction in the colony. He became a threat to order. There was no theological difference between him and either other ministers or the Puritan government, but there was a vast difference in their views of the state’s role. Massachusetts magistrates ordered him not to “preach publicly on these matters” (which should remind us of why the First Amendment links freedom of religion and freedom of speech—it doesn’t do you much good to think freely if you can’t speak those thoughts). Williams refused to obey, so Massachusetts authorities banished him for his “dangerous errors,” sent soldiers from Boston to arrest him, and put him on a ship returning to England.

Persecution in England was then at its height; deportation meant a certain prison sentence, probably for life, after mutilation. Another man whose criticism of the Church of England was less extreme than Williams’s was sentenced to a life term, not to begin until after he was tied to a stake to receive 36 lashes, placed in the pillory for two hours, branded in the face with “SS” for “Sower of Sedition,” then had his nose split and his ears cut off. Reportedly, upon hearing the sentence, William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, threw his cap in the air and gave thanks to God.

Winthrop—who supported banishing Williams but opposed returning him to England to face such a sentence—sent him a warning of what was to happen. Williams immediately fled, into the teeth of a blizzard. Through the winter, Indians kept him alive. In the spring, he founded Providence. His ideas were still not fully developed, but he expressed their essence in a very simple document: the governing compact of Providence.

Every other founding document in the New World—whether Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Swedish, or other—said that the colony was founded to glorify God, to carry out God’s will, to spread Christianity, or something to that effect. However, a draft of the compact that would govern Providence only asked for God’s blessing—and in the final version of the compact, Williams deleted even that. The compact made no mention of divinity at all. This was extraordinary not only for the times, but also for Williams personally. In practically every paragraph of his own writing, he quotes scripture or refers to God. But the Providence government was to be only civil, and it would not compel anyone to any belief. Therefore, Williams concluded that there should be no mention of God. Williams’s colony was to be a place where the soul was free, and he began speaking about “soul liberty.” In 1652, Rhode Island actually outlawed slavery, making it probably the freest place in the world.

So how much influence did Williams have? He is a very controversial figure. Some historians—including Edmund Morgan, probably our greatest colonial historian—consider him a precursor to everyone from Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson and even Andrew Jackson. Others consider him de minimis. William McLoughlin called him “a magnificent failure . . . because of the inability of Rhode Islanders to shape . . . the destiny of New England or the other colonies.”[9]

But Williams’s ideas did shape other colonies. Ironically, that influence came about chiefly because Massachusetts regarded Rhode Island as a pestilence on its border, a foul corruption that might infest it with error, and so tried to crush it.

To protect Rhode Island, Williams returned twice to England, to revolutionary London, a place where a king had been beheaded, a place of such intellectual ferment it was called “the world turned upside down,” a place where they were defining the world anew. There he sought and eventually won protection for Rhode Island from the only person in the world that Massachusetts feared: Oliver Cromwell.

In fact, Williams spent several years in London and became a major figure there, counting not only Cromwell but also such men as John Milton and Henry Vane as friends, and moving in their circles. While there, his views matured. His ideas were not entirely without precedent. There had been the Anabaptists, there had been Sebastian Castellio, there was Hugo Grotius. Williams knew all the precedents, and he filtered the knowledge of them through his experiential understanding of the law and power, then combined all of it in a new way and took his conclusions further than anyone in his century.

He wrote numerous pamphlets and books; the most important was The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, one of the most comprehensive ever written for separation of church and state, but also for individual freedom.[10] Literally hundreds of books and pamphlets in a five-year period directly addressed him or discussed his ideas, routinely quoting him—down to typographical errors in punctuation—but often without attribution. This was not plagiarism; it was a sign that his ideas had become so well known that they enjoyed their own existence separate from him.

And what did Williams say? He said, “Forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils.” He compared it to “spiritual rape.” He demanded that “the most Jewish, paganist, Turkish, or anti-Christian consciences in all nations and countries” be allowed freedom to worship. He even opposed toleration, for toleration of course can be withdrawn. He argued that not only logic and evidence of the world around him (the murder of thousands of Christians by Christians for the way they worshiped Christ, the success of both Catholic and Islamic states—which proved that God did not favor those of any particular faith) but scripture, too, supported his conviction that neither church nor state had any justification for compulsion of belief.

And he made an analogy that demonstrated that, to him, church and state were wholly, entirely distinct from each other: “The Church or company of worshippers . . . is like unto a Corporation, Society or Company . . . which Companies may . . . in matters concerning their Societie . . dissent, divide, breake into Schism and Faction . . . yea wholly dissolve and breake up into pieces and yet the well-being and peace of the Citie not be in the least measure impaired or disturbed; because the essence or being of the Citie . is essentially distinct from those particular Socieities[.]”]

Although his views convinced only a minority, that minority had traction. Even Cromwell listened. When Indians got word to Williams that Massachusetts was pressuring them to convert to Christianity, for example, he convinced Cromwell to order Massachusetts to cease forced conversions of Indians.

But Williams’s most revolutionary statements went beyond religion to pure politics. At the time, virtually everyone believed that the authority of government came from God. Even Parliament, in its civil war with the. king, in its rejection of the divine right of kings, did not dispute that God gave the king the authority to govern. And Winthrop, after being elected governor of Massachusetts, told those who had just voted for him that “being called by you, we have our authority from God.”[11]

Williams disputed this point. Since government, in his view, was entirely secular, its power could not come from God. Where, then, did it come from? “I infer that the sovereign, original, and foundation of civil power lies in the people.” Those governments “have no more power, nor for no longer time, than the civil power or people consenting and agreeing shall betrust them with.” Now that was revolutionary—particularly the concept that the governed could withdraw their consent after giving it.

Williams also said that, just as religion was utterly irrelevant to a person’s performance as a soldier, physician, lawyer, sea captain, merchant, or any other civil profession, a Christian magistrate was “no more” a magistrate and no better than one “of any other Conscience or Religion.”[12] Try saying that today and getting elected.

Two years alter Williams left England, the Levellers were quoting him verbatim. Robert Baillie, one of his leading critics, warned that Williams’s ideas would “overthrow from the very foundation the whole edifice of our civil government; no king, no Lord, must be heard of here-after; This House of Commons must be cut down, the Imperial and absolute Sovereignty must be put in the hands of the multitude of the basest people” and that Williams was “the master of our mis-orders.[13]

The restoration of the crown did not end Williams’s influence; it enshrined it. Charles II decided to grant Rhode Island a royal charter that did not establish the Church of England and allowed complete freedom of worship. He called the colony his “little experiment.” Charles liked the experiment so much that he included the same language about toleration in later charters for North Carolina and New Jersey, although he did establish a Church of England in those colonies. Clearly, then, Williams influenced events in other colonies.

Yet Williams’s most important impact came through John Locke. While it is unlikely that many, if any, American Revolutionary thinkers read Williams, they all were conversant with events in London a century earlier, and they all read Locke. And Locke was certainly familiar with Williams’s work and even lived on the same estate where Williams had been a minister before he left England. Williams’s influence on Locke was significant. Locke scholar and Harvard divinity school professor David Little concluded that, on the question of religious toleration, Locke’s ideas are “simply restatements of the central arguments in favor of freedom of conscience developed by Roger Williams in the middle of the seventeenth century, when Locke’s opinions on these subjects were being shaped.”[14] Winthrop Hudson, a prominent historian of religion, observed: “The parallels with the thought of Roger Williams are so close that it is not entirely implausible conjecture to suggest that Locke’s major contribution may have been to reduce the rambling, lengthy, incoherent exposition of the New England firebrand’ to orderly, abbreviated, and coherent form. . . . It’s impossible to discover a single significant difference between the arguments set forth by Williams and advanced by Locke. They scarcely differ even in the details.”[15] Finally, W. K. Jordan, the president of Radcliffe and author of the classic four-volume study, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, concluded that not Locke’s but Williams’s “carefully reasoned argument for the complete dissociation of church and state was the most important contribution made during the century in this significant area of political thought.”[16]

When you take this entire context into account, it becomes clear that it was no accident that our Constitution is an entirely secular document. Nowhere in it does any reference to divinity appear. It does use the word “blessing” but it seeks the blessing not of God but of liberty. In 1797, just eight years after the Constitution was adopted, the Senate explicitly separated government from religion when it unanimously approved the Treaty of Tripoli drafted under George Washington and signed by John Adams, which stated, “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”

There is a huge difference between a nation and a government. One can argue that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, which I think we were, and even that we are still a Christian nation, which I think is a little more controversial. But our government was founded upon liberty and upon the complete and absolute dissociation of church and state.

 

[Banner image: The Landing Place of Roger Williams in Providence in 1636 (Sanford Neuschatz Collection)]

Footnotes

[1] Teter J. Comes, “Best Sermon; A Pilgrim’s Progress,” New York Times Magazine, April 18, 1999, http://wwwnytimes.com/1999/04/18/magazine/best-sermon-a-pilgrim-s-progress.html.

[2] Quoted in Baptist Wriothesley Noel, Essay on the Union of Church arid State, 211. (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1848), p. 56.

[3] John M. Barry, “God, Government and Roger Williams’ Big Idea,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 2012, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-/god-government-and-roger-williams-big-idea-6291280/.

[4] Roger Williams to Anne Sadleir, April 1652, in The Correspondence of Roger Williams, vol. 2, ed. Glenn W. LaFantasie (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, University Press of New England, Hanover and. London, 1988).

[5] Gordon J. Schochet, ed., Religion, Resistance, and Civil War (Washington: Folger Institute, 1990), p. 131.

[6] Wallace Notestein and Frances Helen Reif, eds., Commons Debates for 1629, vol. 10-11 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1921), pp.. 18-19.

[7] James E. Ernst, Roger Williams: New England Firebrand (London: McMillan Company, 1932), p. 90.

[8] Matt. 13:24-30.

[9] William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630-1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 7.

[10] Roger Williams, The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, Vol. 3: Bloudy Tenent of. Persecution (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2007).

[11] James Kendall Homier, ed., Winthrop’s Journal: History of New England, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), pp. 237-39.

[12] Williams, Bloudy Tenant of Persecution, p. 398.

[13] Robert Baillie, “Anabaptism: The Fountain of Independency,” in James Ernst, Roger Williams and the English Revolution, vol. 1 (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society Collections, 1931).

[14] David Little, “Conscience, Theology and the First Amendment,” Soundings, 72, no. 2/3 (Summer/Fall 1989): 357-78.

[15] Winthrop Hudson, “John Locke: Heir of Puritan Political Theorists,” in Calvinism and the Political Order, ed. George Hunt (London: The Westminster Press, 1965), pp. 117-18.

[16] W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 475.