By J. Stanley Lemons
John Barry, a prize-winning author whose books have examined George Washington, cancer, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the influenza pandemic of 1918, has produced an outstanding book about Roger Williams. In Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, Barry argues that one of the great fault lines in American history has been the relationship of church and state and the individual and the state.
Barry traces one side of the “American soul” back to Roger Williams and sees him as the revolutionary source of that stream that separates church and state and brings political liberty. The other side was represented by John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay colony, and the Reverend John Cotton. Winthrop presented his state as a Christian “city on a hill” whose continued success required the state to be a “nurturing father” to the church. The “Massachusetts Way” of Winthrop and Cotton required the government and the church to be partners in preserving their covenant with God. If they failed, God would make an example of them, chastising them as Jehovah did to Israel or destroying them like Sodom or Gomorrah. Williams, on the other hand, said that the state had absolutely no role to play in religion. Whenever the government intervened in religion, it corrupted religion.
In this book, Barry traces Roger Williams’ ideas, showing how he developed them in England and America and struggled against great odds to preserve his little colony of “Providence Plantations” from the efforts of all the neighbors to dismember and destroy it. Barry stressed the influence of Sir Edward Coke, England’s greatest jurist. Coke plucked the boy Williams from obscurity, made him his amanuensis, and saw that he received the finest formal education available. Williams accompanied Coke to Parliament, the Court of Star Chamber, Court of Common Pleas, the Privy Council, confrontations with the king and other high-level meetings. Williams learned about the law, government, and justice firsthand at the elbow of England’s greatest legal thinker. Coke is famous for establishing the Common Law concept that a “man’s home is his castle” and asserting that the king is subject to the law.
In addition to this formal and practical education, what Williams concluded about religion, the state and humanity flowed from his interpretation of the Scriptures and his personal experiences. He fled probable imprisonment in England because he was a dissenter, was banished on pain of death from Massachusetts because of his ideas, and evolved from Anglican priest to Puritan to Separatist to Baptist to “Witness” for Christianity. (He was never a Seeker.)
His interpretations and experience led Williams to hold the most enlightened view of the Native Americans by any Englishman of his time, and it led to his revolutionary conclusion that church and state must be separated. He founded, for the first time in modern history, a totally secular state. The town government that he created in 1637, the charter that he obtained from Parliament in 1644, and the government established for Providence Plantations in 1647 were all secular entities. The enormity of this development provoked the neighboring colonies (Massachusetts, Plymouth and Connecticut) to try to dismember and destroy Williams’ colony.
The “wall of separation” between church and state was a metaphor from Williams 150 years before Thomas Jefferson used it. And, while there is no evidence that Jefferson ever read anything written by Williams, everyone knows how important John Locke was to Jefferson. Barry agrees with many historians that Locke knew Williams’ work, even though Williams was even more radical than Locke or John Milton in advocating religious freedom for “all men of all nations.”
Barry concluded that the division between Winthrop and Williams is still here and represents divergent understandings of the American soul. The debate that Roger Williams had in the 1640s with John Winthrop and John Cotton still rages on in the 21st century. Those who maintain that the United States was founded as a Christian nation articulate the same position Winthrop and Cotton made in the 17th century.
Roger Williams is a huge problem for them because Williams was a devout Christian minister, a profound Biblicist whose conclusions flowed from his interpretation of the Bible. And, Williams demolished the arguments of those who would maintain that God favored the nurturing father-state or even that there was any such thing as a “Christian nation.” Williams’ profound analysis and conclusion of these matters has made him especially attractive to those concerned about the rise of those who think that the United States is God’s new Israel. This book is an antidote to those who have argued so loudly in recent decades that America was founded as a Christian nation. Roger Williams believed that the concept of a “Christian nation” was blasphemous, and the state that he founded was wholly secular.
Dr. Lemons is Professor of History Emeritus at Rhode Island College and historian of the First Baptist Church in America.
