Roger Williams
Roger Williams (Lives and Legacies)
Author: Edwin S. Gaustad
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2005
Pages: 160
Price: $17.95 (Hardcover)
The proper relationship of Church and State occupied Roger Williams’s mind for the entirety of his adult life—primarily because the Church in his day used the State to restrict his liberty of conscience and to tell him what to think. But for Williams, whenever people were forced to conform to a mode or content of worship that their “hearts embrace not,” they were violated in the very depths of their being.
Expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636 for “diverse new and dangerous opinions,” Williams wondered in wilderness snow until he found the “sweet spring” that became known as Providence, Rhode Island. In this place he established a church—the first Baptist Church in America—which people could only join voluntarily as a confessing believer and which had no connection to a national church. In Williams’s colony, the civil government was assigned no religious duties whatsoever, and people enjoyed “full liberty in religious concernments.” Providence and eventually the colony became a haven for the religiously persecuted and repressed.
To say that Roger Williams was ahead of his time is an understatement. His radicalism time and again distinguished him from the majority, so much so that he often appeared detached. Yet religious liberty “became his enduring monument.”
Williams’s questions resonate today: What is the proper role of religion in matters of state—and vice versa? Did Constantine create a fatal confusion, this thing called Christendom, a political-religious, messy mixture? Why is it possible to use the Christian religion to deprive Indians of their property without negotiation or compensation? What is the role of women in the church and society? How does one live for God in a rapidly changing, pluralistic culture? What is a New Testament church and is it possible to recreate it in the 17th Century? The 21st Century?
For Williams, religious liberty was a God-given right no bishop, colony, or nation could rightfully deny. So he fought tirelessly for what he called “soul liberty,” something that belongs to all humanity.
This is the first biography of Roger Williams written by an expert in religious liberty, Edwin S. Gaustad, for the general reader. It is an easy and relatively quick read, and it is long overdue. If Williams came back from the dead, his vocabulary might be quaint, but his wisdom and his arguments would not. Just the right mix of religion and politics vexes us yet today.
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This book review was published in several newspapers nationally in the "Making a Difference" column.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved
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