The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience by Roger Williams

First published: 1644

Edition(s) used:The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience: Discussed in a Conference Between Truth and Peace, Who, in All Tender Affection, Present to the High Court of Parliament (as the Result of Their Discource) These, (Among Other Passages) of Highest Consideration, edited by Richard Groves. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2001

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Didactic treatise; spiritual treatise; theology

Core issue(s): Church; conscience; faith; obedience and disobedience; persecution; predestination; Puritans and Puritanism

Overview

Roger Williams graduated from Cambridge University in 1627, took holy orders in the Church of England, and arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631. Regarded as a young man of great promise, he was quickly offered a ministerial post in the church in Boston. When he declined the appointment, explaining that he could not minister to a congregation that followed the Church of England, he identified himself as a separatist. At the same time, he asserted his conviction that the civil authorities had no right to punish colonists who held dissenting religious beliefs.

Williams next stopped briefly in Salem before moving on to Plymouth, but his charge that the colonies were stealing land from the Indians contributed to the controversy that followed him. Meanwhile, in 1634 the General Court of Massachusetts responded to worry about the colony’s enemies in England by requiring an oath of loyalty, a commitment that Williams refused to abide by, and when he learned in January, 1636, that he was about to be shipped back to England, he hurried south to Narragansett Bay in what was to become Rhode Island. Concerned about the mother country’s threats to his new settlement in Rhode Island, in 1643 Williams returned to England right in the middle of its civil war.

Among the contending religions in England, the Presbyterians were strongest, while their main rivals were another Calvinist group, the Independents, or Congregationalists, who rejected the hierarchy of Presbyterian Church governance. The publication in 1644 of An Apologeticall Narration was intended by its Independent authors to present their faith as a middle way, but it was attacked by virtually all parties. Alert to these doctrinal issues, Williams seized the opportunity to offer the principles of his Rhode Island settlement as the answer to England’s theological strife, and in 1644 he laid out his beliefs in The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience. This “messy book,” as Williams’s biographer Edwin S. Gaustad calls it, argued the convictions that had grown in Williams’s mind during his years in the New World.

Two interrelated issues dominate Williams’s argument. A central point was his insistence on the total separation of church and state, denying secular officials any role in spiritual matters; from this position derives the “bloudy tenent.” The Massachusetts Bay rulers had said they were not banishing Williams for his religious convictions but for inciting civil unrest. Given the establishment of a state church in Massachusetts, however, it mattered little whether he was hounded for his religious beliefs or oppressed by civil authorities for supposedly stirring up trouble among the citizens. The church had its own members, the elect, to whom the state had civic responsibilities but, in Williams’s mind, no warrant to interfere with their spiritual lives.

The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience was published in London in July and publicly burned in August, but it had a wide readership, and as Irwin H. Polishook notes, it “became one of the most noted books of the English Revolution.” Although the Presbyterians liked elements of the book that they saw as critical of the Independents, they came out strongly against any freedom of conscience. In this way Williams inserted his New World experience into the controversies of the English Civil War, but the strongest response came from John Cotton in Massachusetts, an old opponent of church-state separation. In The Bloudy Tenent, Washed, and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe (1647), Cotton replied that humankind’s only religious freedom was the freedom to obey God’s will. The debate went on tediously in Williams’s The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy: By Mr. Cotton’s Endeavor to Wash It White in the Bloud of the Lambe (1652). By the time Williams left for America again, the issues were clearly outlined.

Christian Themes

Williams stuffed The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience full of any materials he found relevant to his cause. It opens with three prefaces and three chapters from a 1620 work purportedly from a former inmate of Newgate prison pleading against persecution for cause of conscience. A broad response from John Cotton follows, and the bulk of the first part of this book of about 265 pages comes in “A Reply to the Aforesaid Answer of Mr. Cotton,” a reply couched in the form of a dialogue between Truth and Peace.

In various formulations, accompanied by references to the Scriptures and to church fathers such as Tertullian, Cotton had pounded away at one theme: that a man may be granted liberty of conscience if he fears God because it is certain that he will repent of his errors once he learns the truth, but there remains the question of should a “heretic, after once or twice admonition . . . be tolerated . . . without such punishment as may preserve others from dangerous and damnable infection.” Cotton’s answer, of course, is no. Against Cotton’s talk of punishment, Williams pleads for toleration, citing “the cry of the whole earth, made drunk with the blood of its inhabitants, slaughtering each other in their blinded zeal for conscience, for religion, against the Catholics, against the Lutherans, etc.” As for Cotton’s “admonitions,” Williams replies that “the worship which a state professes may be contradicted and preached against, and yet no breach of civil peace.”

Williams had referred to Matthew 13:30, 38, in which Christ had commanded that the tares be allowed to grow together with the wheat. To this, Cotton had responded that the tares were “partly hypocrites, like unto the godly, but indeed carnal,” and that the good and the bad are so intertwined that the persons in whom the tares grow “cannot be rooted out but good wheat will be rooted out with them.” However, Williams disagrees, saying that no evidence suggests that tares represent persons. This exchange of exegeses of the wheat and the tares—and of other scriptural passages—continued repetitiously in The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy.

A Calvinist himself, Williams slyly turned Cotton’s own Calvinist tenets against him. Because one never knows whom God has chosen for his elect, one cannot be sure that a persecuted sinner does not enjoy God’s grace. Furthermore, the doctrine of predestination disproves the logic of forcing sinners to convert when they have no free will to exercise on their spiritual fate. Williams asked what the point was anyway, as after all, “The souls of all men are either naturally dead in sin or live in Christ.” Indifference to these points of theology incurs a “three-fold guilt” on the part of those civil authorities who meddle forcefully with an individual’s faith, Williams says.

The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience is a long, repetitious work, organized according to a private vision inscrutable to most readers, replete with biblical references, and exhausting to read. Its greatness lies not only in its arguments but also in the fervor of its composition by a man whose courage was exemplary. Polishook concludes that Williams’s ideas today “appear unmistakably fitting and correct, because the accumulation of years has made them familiar and acceptable,” whereas “Cotton’s monument was the untold influence of his thought on the New England way of life.”

Sources for Further Study

Coyle, Wallace. Roger Williams: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. An indispensable guide for Williams researchers.

Gaustad, Edwin S. Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America. Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1999. A biography that elucidates the theological issues clearly and includes a valuable note on sources.

Miller, Perry. Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933. A standard overview of the period and its controversies.

Morgan, Edmund S. Roger Williams: The Church and the State. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967. An illuminating account of Williams as a separatist.

Polishook, Irwin H. Roger Williams, John Cotton, and Religious Freedom. A Controversy in New and Old England. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Contains a thirty-five-page introduction that is excellent on the background of the dispute in Puritan England and includes selected discussions from the time not only by Williams and Cotton but also by other clerics.