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This is the first of several non-consecutive episodes about Roger Williams, whom we have teased a few times already. Williams was one of early New England’s immensely consequential figures, perhaps in the long run more so than either William Bradford or John Winthrop. While the intellectual and civic contributions of Williams were legion, there are four startlingly modern things that he essentially invented. First, Williams argued that requiring people to attend church and worship in a particular way – a practice the English called “conformity” and essentially a universal obligation in Christian Europe for centuries – was an offense unto God. Williams thought that people must be free to find their own faith and follow their own beliefs. In a universally religious time, this amounted to a wholesale reconsideration of the “proper relation between a free individual and the state.” Second, Williams challenged the settled relationship between the church, man’s manifestation of God on this earth, and the state. He concluded they should be entirely separate, an idea that most Americans today take as a given. Third, Williams founded the new colony of Rhode Island, the first political entity anywhere in the world dedicated to the proposition of religious freedom and liberty of conscience. Finally, Williams learned the local Algonquian language and studied the indigenous peoples of New England with a compassion and intellectual honesty that was, for its time, very unusual and arguably unprecedented.
In order to understand Williams, however, we need to know something about Puritan theology, an introduction to which is the main topic of this episode! More exciting that it sounds! And, anyway, it will be useful background for many of the episodes to come.
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Selected references for this episode
Apple Computer, “The Crazy Ones”
John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul
David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America
Edmund Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and State
