Roger Williams

English-born colonial American religious leader

• Born: c. 1603
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: April 18, 1683
• Place of death: Providence, Rhode Island

A dissenter within the New England colonies, Williams argued for the separation of church and state, freedom of conscience in religious matters, and the possibility of social order in the absence of state regulation of religion. He founded Rhode Island as a haven for those oppressed by the American Puritans.

Early Life

Roger Williams was born in London, England, in Saint Sepulchre parish, sometime around 1603. His parents were James Williams, a shopkeeper in Cow Lane and a member of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, and Alice Pemberton Williams, whose family owned land in Hertfordshire and held public office there and in London. In 1617, Williams worked as a stenographer for the famous common-law theorist and practitioner, Sir Edward Coke, whose patronage enabled Williams to enroll at Charterhouse, a London grammar school, in June, 1621. Williams was admitted to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a scholarship student in 1623, where he gained a B.A. with honors in January, 1627.

At commencement, Williams signed a statement required of all university graduates to uphold the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, the religious validity of the Book of Common Prayer, and royal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs. In October, 1627, he began a three-year theology course leading to an M.A., certainly in anticipation of a career in the Church, but he became alienated from the religious establishment over its liturgy. He may, by this time, have also decided that the Church was unacceptably corrupt. He left the university about a year and a half later, in 1629, roughly twenty-six years old, and never finished the degree.

By February, 1629, Williams had become chaplain to the household of Sir William Masham of Otes, in Essex, about ten miles east of London in an area deeply influenced by Puritanism and quite sympathetic to Parliament in its struggles with the Crown. While in residence, he married Mary Barnard in December, 1629. They sailed to New England in December, 1630, to escape punitive measures leveled by Archbishop William Laud against religious Dissenters and Puritan clergy.

Life’s Work

From February, 1631, to January, 1636, Williams searched throughout New England, to the dismay of Massachusetts Bay officials, for a religious community that had completely disowned the Church of England. His charges, in 1633, that the civil state could not on religious grounds grant a royal patent allowing the Bay Colony to claim Indian lands; his opposition to the administration of loyalty oaths, which were religious acts, to the unregenerate; and his resistance to Bay Colony authorities enforcing religious uniformity provoked the General Court of Massachusetts Bay to vote to deport Roger Williams to England in January, 1636. Before the decision could be carried out, he fled south to Narragansett Bay, where in May, on land purchased from the Indians, he founded the town of Providence as a haven for religious refugees and dissenters.

He spent much time from 1636 to 1643 corresponding with officials in Massachusetts Bay, particularly Governor John Winthrop. He was also in contact with John Cotton, a prominent Bay Colony minister, with whom Williams engaged in serious and bitter theological polemics. In this period, Williams came to believe that the medieval Papacy had abandoned the true principles of Christianity and destroyed Christ’s visible church. It would not recover its “primitive” or apostolic purity until the millennium, or Christ’s thousand-year rule upon earth. In anticipation of this restoration of the Church’s pristine condition. Christ’s prophets or witnesses, among whom Williams counted himself, were to denounce the errors of false Christendom. Accordingly, he determined that there were at present no true churches, no legitimate exercise of Christian sacraments, and no means apart from divinely appointed, apostolic messengers to found new churches.

While Williams was in England in 1643-1644 to obtain a colonial charter for Rhode Island, this perspective undergirded three of his London publications, Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, Examined, and Answered (1644), Queries of Highest Consideration (1644), and The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience, Discussed (1644). In these tracts, Williams disagreed with Presbyterian and Congregational pronouncements in England that prevailing authorities and institutions were legitimate agents and forerunners of a godly commonwealth and a millennial age that would culminate in the reestablishment of the organization and holiness of the apostolic Church.

Williams, instead, emphasized the disjunction between existing institutions and the millennium. He argued that the restoration of Christ’s true, visible church would come only after the prophetic activity of divinely ordained witnesses described in the Book of Revelation. Their denunciations of ecclesiastical corruption anticipated Christ’s apocalyptic intervention in behalf of his church. Williams complained that the Massachusetts Bay officials, with the approval of John Cotton, had driven him into the wilderness because he had undertaken such a task in New England.

Finally, Williams urged that in the Christian era the nation of Israel was no longer a valid model for church and state relationships. The two now had separate realms of authority, reinforcing his contention that public peace, contrary to conventional wisdom, did not require civil regulation of religious beliefs and church order. Mixing the two realms had brought civil unrest, religious strife, war, and suffering. This situation could be resolved and true religious reform inaugurated, Williams claimed, if the church were strictly separated from the unregenerate state. Furthermore, this would grant to eschatological witnesses such as himself the liberty to speak out against religious error in preparation for Christ’s millennial restoration of the primitive, apostolic church.

In this same vein, Williams issued additional pamphlets in England during a 1651-1654 trip made to gain reconfirmation of Rhode Island’s colonial charter. In a rejoinder to John Cotton, The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody (1652), two replies to proposals before the Rump Parliament for regulation of religion, The Fourth Paper Presented by Major Butler (1652) and The Hireling Ministry None of Christs (1652) and a summation of the issues entitled The Examiner Defended (1652), Williams’s eschatological and restorationist assessment of the true church was a common thread.

He repeated his contention that the church should allow ungodly men to live unmolested in the sphere of the civil state, while Christ’s martyrs and witnesses were to offer incessant testimony against decline and error in continued anticipation of the coming of the millennium and the restoration of the church. The state, similarly, should reject proposals before Parliament to punish heretics, to maintain ministers through tithes, or to certify university-trained candidates for preaching, since it was an incompetent judge of spiritual affairs.

Williams worked, from his expulsion from Massachusetts Bay in 1636 to his death in Providence in 1683, to unite the townships and settlements of Narragansett Bay under an orderly and effective government. He did so despite opposition from factious rivals, such as William Coddington and Samuel Gorton, predatory threats from Massachusetts Bay to swallow up contested land, and changing political conditions in England. It was after a lifetime of such struggles that, in 1672, he debated several itinerant Quaker missionaries, an account of which appeared with supplementary material in 1676 with the sarcastic title George Fox Digg’d Out of His Burrows.

Quakers interpreted religious experiences through an inner light, which they presumed to be the Holy Spirit. They also believed that such an indwelling was the mark of perfectibility and the threshold to a millennial age. Their piety was contrary to Williams’s firm conviction, expressed in 1652 in Experiments of Spiritual Life and Health, that Scripture was the sole objective standard by which one evaluated religious experiences. Quaker sentiments were also in conflict with his unchanged conviction that this was an age of imperfection for both saints and the outward, visible Church. His millenarian and restorationist hopes, strained but never lost in his late seventies, remained the framework in which he interpreted Colonial religious and political issues.

Significance

Williams contributed a rigorous and systematic apology for three important ideals long celebrated in American culture. He argued for separation of Church and State. His case, however, did not rest upon humanitarian concerns or a theory of natural rights. Instead, he based his claims upon theological and religious grounds—the radical discontinuity between the political and social powers of Old Testament Israel and the exclusively religious and spiritual responsibilities of the New Testament Church. Correspondingly, Williams advanced the cause of liberty of conscience, not because he regarded all human opinions as tentative and worthy of equal consideration, but to expedite attacks against false state religions and so to hasten the restoration of the primitive purity of the Church. He vigorously insisted upon the possibility of social order in the absence of state regulation of religion. His colonial experiment in Rhode Island was a lifelong test of the validity of this audacious assertion.

While the theological backdrop of these concepts has little in common with the Whig republican ideology and Oppositionist rhetoric employed so effectively by eighteenth century revolutionaries in North America and offers no confirmation for or support of nineteenth century American platitudes about desirable and inevitable progress, Williams’s ideals have provided a curious and ironic comfort to twenty-first century pluralists, who advocate similar concerns but on the basis of utterly secular premises, far removed from the worldview of Williams. Nevertheless, the course of events in North America has confirmed Williams’s fundamental contention that releasing man from the constraints of government-imposed religious uniformity and leaving the state to maintain order and to protect property is a practical and efficacious means to maintain social order and individual freedom.

Bibliography

Byrd, James P., Jr. The Challenges of Roger Williams: Religious Liberty, Violent Persecution, and the Bible. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2002. Describes how Williams paid the price of banishment for advocating religious liberty amid the often violent and fatal persecution of religion im the American colonies.

Gaustad, Edwin S. Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America. Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1999. A biography of Williams that traces his reputation and influence from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.

Gilpin, W. Clark. The Millenarian Piety of Roger Williams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Thoughtful monograph that makes clear that millenarian speculation shaped Williams’s ideas, piety, and historical perspective.

Hall, Timothy. Separating Church and State: Roger Williams and Religious Liberty. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. The author explores how Williams’s ideas of religious freedom were among the theoretical underpinnings of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

James, Sidney V. Colonial Rhode Island: A History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975. Excellent survey that takes sympathetic note of Williams’s patient and persistent efforts to unify the antecedent settlements of colonial Rhode Island, to make self-government effective, and to maintain goodwill between Indians and Englishmen.

Keary, Anne. “Retelling the History of the Settlement of Providence: Speech, Writing, and Cultural Interaction on Narragansett Bay.” New England Quarterly: A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters 69, no. 2 (June, 1996): 250-286. Discusses Williams’s book, A Key Into the Language of America, an account of the language and customs of the Native Americans in Rhode Island.

Morgan, Edmund S. Roger Williams: The Church and the State. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1967. Readable, lucid investigation of important themes developed by Williams’s undoubtedly theological cast of mind within a Puritan context. Celebrates Williams’s individualism to a degree incommensurate with his pietistic orientation. Clear explanation of Williams’s political contributions but weak with regard to his millenarian and restorationist frame of mind.

Skaggs, Donald. Roger Williams’s Dream for America. New York: P. Lang, 1993. Examines how Williams’s concepts of religious liberty have influenced America’s ideas of religious freedom.

Williams, Roger. The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. Edited by Perry Miller. 6 vols. Providence, R.I.: Providence Printing, 1866-1874. Reprint. 7 vols. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963. Volume 7 contains an original essay by Miller plus five tracts that did not appear in the original six-volume edition.