A revelatory look at how Roger Williams shaped the nature of religion, political power, and individual rights in America.
For four hundred years, Americans have wrestled with and fought over two concepts that define the nature of the nation: the proper relation between church and state and between a free individual and the state. These debates began with the extraordinary thought and struggles of Roger Williams, who had an unparalleled understanding of the conflict between a government that justified itself by "reason of state"-i.e. national security-and its perceived "will of God" and the "ancient rights and liberties" of individuals.
This is a story of power, set against Puritan America and the English Civil War. Williams's interactions with King James, Francis Bacon, Oliver Cromwell, and his mentor Edward Coke set his course, but his fundamental ideas came to fruition in America, as Williams, though a Puritan, collided with John Winthrop's vision of his "City upon a Hill."
Acclaimed historian John M. Barry explores the development of these fundamental ideas through the story of the man who was the first to link religious freedom to individual liberty, and who created in America the first government and society on earth informed by those beliefs. The story is essential to the continuing debate over how we define the role of religion and political power in modern American life.
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*Starred Review* Barry traces American separation of church and state back to earliest colonial days, when John Winthrop (1588–1649), first governor of Massachusetts Bay, and Roger Williams (1603–83), founder of Rhode Island, argued over whether government should enforce religious conformity, a dispute that eventuated in—besides such more immediately consequential things as banishment (and worse) for dissenters from colonial theocracies—Williams’ written formulation of the concept Jefferson boiled down to “wall of separation between church and state.” Barry likes to get to the roots of his subjects, so he delves farther back about Williams, in particular, to the inspiration he took from his patron Edward Coke, England’s greatest jurist, and Coke’s bitter rival in government, Sir Francis Bacon. From Coke, Williams garnered faith in the law and due process as well as, through Coke’s battles with James I and Charles I, the importance of maintaining the rights of Englishmen (Coke’s concept) against divine-right regimes, whether under king or, as in Massachusetts Bay, council. From Bacon, Williams imbibed a penchant for real-world (scientific) testing of beliefs (hypotheses) that led him to launch Rhode Island. Winthrop and Williams were on cordial terms almost to the former’s death, which is just one fascinating strand in the swath of history Barry brings to urgent life with the same focused intelligence that distinguished his The Great Influenza (2004). --Ray Olson
Review
"John Barry's Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul establishes Williams as a brave thinker and also a deft political actor … Mr. Barry puts Williams squarely among our great political thinkers, crediting him with bringing liberal democracy to the American colonies."
John M. Barry is “a sophisticated sorter-out of theological strands.”
“Roger Williams is one of those figures, famous but forbidding, who hover at the periphery, imposing, important, indispensable to our history and culture and yet still distant, unknown to most Americans … and yet Williams may be … the one whose breath gives life to modern American culture and whose fingerprints are most evident on the American Constitution. The task of reviving Williams has fallen happily to John M. Barry, chronicler of the great influenza of 1918 and the great Mississippi flood of 1927.”
“Roger Williams deserves our thanks for his courage to fight for religious freedom and individual liberty with his very life at a time when few thought it anything but the rankest heresy. And John Barry deserves our thanks for illuminating this critical and timely chapter of American history … Barry tells the story with passion and an eye for fine detail.”
I was born in... Nah, let's not start that far back. Let's just say after dropping out of graduate school in history I became a football coach-- in fact, the first story I ever sold was to a coaching magazine, about a way to change blocking assignments at the line of scrimmage, and I was on the staff of a guy who was named national coach of the year. I quit coaching to write, first as a Washington journalist covering economics and national politics, then I finally began doing what I always intended and wanted to do: write books. Two of those books have in turn led me into active involvement in a couple of policy areas. Anyway, here's the more formal version of my bio:
John M. Barry is a prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author whose books have won several dozen awards. In 2005 the National Academies of Science named The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history, a study of the 1918 pandemic, the year's outstanding book on science or medicine. In 1998 Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, won the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians for the year's best book of American history. His latest book is Roger Williams and The Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, which has been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, to be awarded late spring 2013. ( Scroll down for more about this book, including a syndicated op ed based on it.)
His writing has received not only formal awards but less formal recognition as well. In 2004 GQ named Rising Tide one of nine pieces of writing essential to understanding America; that list also included Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." His first book, The Ambition and the Power: A true story of Washington, was cited by The New York Times as one of the eleven best books ever written about Washington and the Congress. His second book The Transformed Cell: Unlocking the Mysteries of Cancer, coauthored with Dr. Steven Rosenberg, was published in twelve languages. And a story about football he wrote was selected for inclusion in an anthology of the best football writing of all time published in 2006 by Sports Illustrated.
He has had considerable influence on both pandemic policy and flood protection. Both the Bush and Obama administrations sought his advice on influenza preparedness and response, and he was a member of the original team which developed plans for non-pharmaceutical interventions to mitigate a pandemic. The National Academies of Science asked him to give the keynote speech at its first international scientific meeting on pandemic influenza, and he was the only non-scientist on a federal government Infectious Disease Board of Experts.
In the area of water resources, he has been equally active. In 2006 he became the only non-scientist ever to give the National Academies annual Abel Wolman Distinguished Lecture, a lecture which focuses on some aspect of water. After Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana congressional delegation asked him to chair a bipartisan working group on flood protection, and he now serves on the board overseeing levee districts in metropolitan New Orleans and on the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, which is responsible for the state's hurricane protection. Barry has worked with state, federal, United Nations, and World Health Organization officials on influenza, water-related disasters, and risk communication.
Barry sits on advisory boards at M.I.T's Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as well as on the board of the Society of American Historians and American Heritage Rivers.
He has also been keynote speaker at such varied events as a White House Conference on the Mississippi Delta and an International Congress on Respiratory Viruses, and he has given talks in such venues as the National War College, the Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard Business School, and elsewhere. He is co-originator of Riversphere, a $100 million center being developed by Tulane University; it will be the first facility in the world dedicated to comprehensive river research.
His articles have appeared in such scientific journals as Nature and Journal of Infectious Disease as well as in lay publications ranging from Sports Illustrated to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fortune, Time, Newsweek, and Esquire. A frequent guest on every broadcast network in the US, he has appeared on such shows as NBC's Meet the Press, ABC's World News, and NPR's All Things Considered, and on such foreign media as the BBC and Al Jazeera. He has also served as a consultant for Sony Pictures and contributed to award-winning television documentaries.
Before becoming a writer, Barry coached football at the high school, small college, and major college levels. Currently Distinguished Scholar at the Center for Bioenvironmental Research of Tulane and Xavier Universities, he lives in New Orleans.
Barry's latest book focuses on the development of both the idea of separation of church and state and the first expression of individualism in the modern sense. These two issues-- how we define the relationship between church and state and between the individual and the state-- have opened fault lines which have divided America throughout our history up to today. Here is an op ed syndicated by The Los Angeles Times February 5, 2012 :
A Puritan's `War Against Religion.'
In January, while conservative Christians and GOP presidential candidates were charging that "elites" have launched "a war against religion," a federal court in Rhode Island ordered a public school to remove a prayer mounted on a wall because it imposed a belief on 16-year-old Jessica Ahlquist. The ruling seems particularly fitting because it was consistent not only with the 1st Amendment but with the intent of Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island expressly to provide religious liberty and who called such forced exposure to prayer "spiritual rape."
As Williams' nearly 400-year-old comment demonstrates, the conflict over the proper relationship between church and state is the oldest in American history. The 1st Amendment now defines this relationship, but understanding the full meaning of the amendment requires understanding its history, for the amendment was a specific response to specific historical events and was written with the recognition that freedom of religion was inextricably linked to freedom itself.
The church-state conflict began when Puritans, envisioning a Christian nation, founded what John Winthrop called "a citty upon a hill" in Massachusetts, and Williams rejected that vision for another: freedom. He insisted that the state refrain from intervening in the relationship between humans and God, stating that even people advocating "the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships" be allowed to pray -- or not pray -- freely, and that "forced worship stinks in God's nostrils."
Yet Williams was no atheist. He was a devout Puritan minister who, like other Massachusetts Puritans, fled religious persecution in England. Upon his arrival in 1631 he was considered so godly that Boston Puritans had asked him to lead their church. He declined -- because he considered their church insufficiently pure.
Reverence for both Scripture and freedom led Williams to his position. His mentor was Edward Coke, the great English jurist who ruled, "The house of every one is as his castle," extending the liberties of great lords -- and an inviolate refuge where one was free -- to the lowest English commoners. Coke pioneered the use of habeas corpus to prevent arbitrary imprisonment. And when Chancellor of England Thomas Egerton said, "Rex est lex loquens; the king is the law speaking," and agreed that the monarch could "suspend any particular law" for "reason of state," Coke decreed instead that the law bound the king. Coke was imprisoned -- without charge -- for his view of liberty, but that same view ran in Williams' veins.
Equally important to Williams was Scripture. Going beyond the "render unto Caesar" verse in the New Testament, he recognized the difficulty in reconciling contradictory scriptural passages as well as different Bible translations. He even had before him an example of a new translation that served a political purpose. King James had disliked the existing English Bible because in his view it insufficiently taught obedience to authority; the King James Bible would correct that.
Given these complexities, Williams judged it impossible for any human to interpret all Scripture without error. Therefore he considered it "monstrous" for one person to impose any religious belief on another. He also realized that any government-sponsored prayer required a public official to pass judgment on something to do with God, a sacrilegious presumption. He also knew that when one mixes religion and politics, one gets politics. So to protect the purity of the church, he demanded -- 150 years before Jefferson -- a "wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world."
Massachusetts had no such wall, compelled religious conformity and banished Williams for opposing it. Seeking "soul liberty," he founded Providence Plantations and established an entirely secular government that granted absolute freedom of religion. The governing compact of every other colony in the Americas, whether English, French, Spanish or Portuguese, claimed the colony was being founded to advance Christianity. Providence's governing compact did not mention God. It did not even ask God's blessing.
Williams next linked religious and political freedom. It was then universally believed that governments derived their authority from God. Even Winthrop, after being elected governor in Massachusetts, told voters, "Though chosen by you, our authority comes from God."
Williams disputed this. Considering the state secular, he declared governments mere "agents" deriving their authority from citizens and having "no more power, nor for longer time, than the people ... shall betrust them with." This statement sounds self-evident now. It was revolutionary then.
The U.S. Constitution, like Providence's compact, does not mention God. It does request a blessing, but not from God; it sought "the blessings of liberty," Williams' "soul liberty." As Justice Robert Jackson wrote, "This freedom was first in the Bill of Rights because it was first in the forefathers' minds; it was set forth in absolute terms, and its strength is its rigidity."
Eight years after the Constitution's adoption, the Senate confirmed this view in unanimously approving a treaty. It stated: "[T]he government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
Yet the argument continues. Presidential candidates and evangelicals ignore American history and insist on injecting religion into politics. They proclaim their belief in freedom -- even while they violate it.
If you're like me, you didn't know much about Roger Williams before considering this book. Based solely on his status as the founder of Rhode Island, he hardly seems a titan of Anglo history. But Barry makes a very persuasive case that he stands in a direct intellectual lineage from Sir Edward Coke to Williams to John Locke, and that he deserves mention in the same breath as those two titans of the history of liberty. Williams's contribution was freedom of religion.
Creation of the American Soul is less a biography of Roger Williams (his family is scarcely mentioned) than it is a history that largely parallels Williams's career. The first fifth of the book deals almost exclusively with Coke. Williams took shorthand for Coke, and Coke was surely a major intellectual influence on Williams, but this section of the book is as important for what Coke does as what later influence it may have had on Williams. When King James tried to assert the divine right of kings in England, Coke stood up against him with little behind him but the common law. His efforts can at best be described as a stalemate, but the rights Coke fought for ended up embedded in the American Constitution.
Coke was not the only historical figure Williams rubbed elbows with. Williams was a contemporary of and knew John Winthrop, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Francis Bacon (Barry describes Williams as a protégé of Bacon, but it appears from the text that Williams was merely influenced by Bacon rather than having the kind of personal relationship he had with Coke), Anne Hutchinson, George Fox, John Cotton (grandfather of Cotton Mather), Benedict Arnold (great-grandfather of the traitorous Revolutionary War general), John Donne, and John Milton.
A Puritan minister, Williams was forced to flee England to escape religious persecution. He did not find the freedom he desired in the Massachusetts Bay colony (called "plantations" at the time). Persecuted again, he was again forced to flee. He then founded the colony that became Rhode Island.
A central theme is the tension between authoritarianism and anarchy. The Puritan-run Massachusetts Bay colony veered very heavily to the side of authoritarianism. Rhode Island threatened to dissolve into anarchy. Williams, though, was no anarcho-libertarian. It is a testament to his charisma and temperament that Rhode Island was able to avoid anarchy.
Barry is a talented writer, and his prose reads easily. However, he does have his stylistic quirks. He maintains a strange lack of biographical distance. When Barry states that the Puritan authorities in Massachusetts committed various heinous acts against nonconformists "out of love," he presumably means that was their own stated justification, rather than what he actually believes drove them. He also quotes his subjects heavily, creative 17th century spelling and all. The quotes are all in the same font as the main text, which may be why it appears some Us are printed as Vs (these appear in both the Kindle and hard cover editions).
Barry properly downplays Williams's forward-looking views on the Indians. By the 1800s, his views on religion and politics would have been much less radical relative to his views on Indians. But in his time violent religious intolerance was the rule of the day (dissidents commonly had their ears cut off or worse) and Americans and Europeans had not yet fully developed their nastier racial theories.
Barry explores Williams's legacy in greater length in the afterword (for example, Williams is one of only ten men honored in Geneva's Reformation Wall for their contribution to the Reformation), both rebutting his critics and featuring his proponents. Williams was in many ways the right man at the right time (earlier proponents of freedom of religion did not fare so well), but what he accomplished would not have been possible had he not been such an extraordinary man. Nor should his achievements be viewed lightly because his views did not come from secular roots or because freedom of conscience continued to face challenges in England and colonial America.
We Americans are rightly grateful to the geniuses who founded our nation, and set it going with the ideas that there would be no official religion, no religious requirement for public office, and a separation of church and state. Those founders didn't develop those ideas on their own, of course; the philosopher John Locke is often credited with inspiring ideas of religious freedom in Jefferson and Madison. Locke himself was probably influenced in turn by the Puritan Roger Williams, and Williams had a broader idea of religious freedom (he would extend liberty to atheists) than Locke did. Williams got his ideas of religious liberty from his study of human nature and human government, but especially from the Bible; he was a devout Christian minister. Williams believed in the Puritan cause, and felt it was the right way of Christian belief. We say sometimes that colonists came to America for reasons of religious freedom, but while they might have been fleeing religious persecution, they were ready enough in their turn to persecute those of the "wrong" belief. It was Williams who began turning this around, and in _Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty_, historian John M. Barry has not given a biography of Williams as much as he has teased out the religious and political ideas and the events that brought forth the several revolutionary concepts which Williams instilled in his Rhode Island colony and which were to shape the nation when it came into being a hundred years after he died. Anyone interested in the separation of church and state will find this a fascinating story.
Williams left England for New England in 1631. He was banished because he criticized the church, and founded his own settlement which he called Providence. It was the beginning of "the freest society in the world, built around a structure of law, endorsing every man's `peaceable and quiet enjoyment of his lawful right and Libertie.'" When it came to draw up a compact for his settlement, it stipulated that all within would have "libertie of conscience," the freedom to think of God any way they wished. In fact, the compact made no reference to God in any way. This is simply amazing in the context of the times and the beliefs of the compact's author. Williams was no freethinker; he was as pious a Puritan as any, and his letters and writings are profuse in mentions of God, longing for God, and faith. He included scriptural references throughout his writing; religious thought was the way his mind conducted itself. Not only did he restrict government's role in religion, he overturned the philosophy of government. He would endorse neither the divine right of kings nor the Puritan belief that they were building God's kingdom. Governments did not get their authority either from kings or heads of churches, he began to realize; governments got their authority from their citizens and were responsible to those citizens. Indeed, he called for the wall of separation between church and state a century and a half before Jefferson. He called for an end to laws that were supposed to improve the people morally, such as the ones against cards, bowling, shuffleboard, dice, and other activities that other clergy thought "haynously sinfull." Williams knew that government was necessary; he hated the thought of anarchy as much as he did governmental imposition of religious beliefs. He seemed to think of his Rhode Island colony as an experiment; the members might learn ways of government, but they would not be looking for any confirmation of godly purpose. If they succeeded, it would not be because of God's favor; while others would object that God would prosper nations that had proper religious foundations, Williams pointed out all the Catholic and "Turkish" ones that were thriving.
Liberty, in the view of the magistrates of Massachusetts, was the liberty of living a life which the magistrates themselves would recognize as good and godly, and few of their subjects disagreed with this view. The best aspect of Barry's book is its explanation of the growth of Williams's ideas at a time when they were in opposition to the thinking of the masses and the thinking of the leaders. It is true that Williams successfully petitioned Charles II to approve the colony's charter that said, "No person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinion, in matters of religion, who do not actually disturb the civil peace of our own society." Nonetheless, Williams's books had been burned; members of Parliament said that if England tolerated the religious errors of citizens, God would surely rain down his wrath. We are still trying to sort out how much religion and state may mix, but we are merely doing some fine tuning; Williams did the initial heavy intellectual labor to separate the two. It was an effort of no small heroism, and Barry's book is a brilliant examination of the birth and institution of Williams's ideas.
Review of Barry Roger Williams and the American soul
I ordered Barry's book immediately after reading the review by Chaplin a month ago (Jan 1). I read it to remind me of my past and to refresh my knowledge of Williams. I too graduated from Brown a few years before Barry and enjoyed my study with Hedges, McLaughlin and Bridenbaugh. I spent a considerable time reviewing the early social and economic history of seventeenth century Rhode Island. My personal family history includes the fact my ancestor left the Bay colony for Providence in 1637, owned the adjoining land to Williams then, and Mrs Scott was influential in convincing Williams of the need for adult or believers baptism.
I found Barry's discussion of Chaplin's review a bit contentious. That Barry discusses at length the qualities of Williams which are essential in how his ideas were used in the ensuing centuries, the book is more about how he developed these ideas. Barry has worked diligently to see how the ideas matured over time through a careful and chronological review of the maturing ideas. It would take a host of intellectual and religious historians to review how Williams ideas were pulled from his tracts and letters and used over the last two centuries. We all read history from our own point of view. So, in reading this the obvious parallels between theocracies, oligarchies, and ethnic killings are clear. Would it not be good were all people to attempt to follow soul liberty.
The early history of Williams relations with Coke and Bacon, his presence as a youth in the Star Chamber and his closeness with those puritans who would later oust him from Massachusetts is essential to understand his later course. The book covers the middle years of Williams thoroughly. This required great effort. Reading the Winthrop papers and the Williams letters and tracts is difficult. Even those included here are hard to read. It would have been easier had he followed Perry Miller in his biography of Williams of 1953 in which the texts were translated into more readable English for those of us today. I did purchase the "Key into the Language of America" in its facsimile edition and remember again now how hard it is to read. Perry Miller has always been a major source in understanding the puritan Calvinist tradition as the theology developed.
Barry recognizes the debt to Edmund Morgan who is one of the more important historians of the period. His book, "Roger Williams the Church and the State" from 1967 and reprinted in 2006 covers most of the concepts in detail. The difference is its size: only 142 pages versus 395 and more importantly organization. Barry works diligently to help see subtle changes in thought through time and approaches the biography in a chronological order.
The last period of Williams life is more briefly reviewed than the early . Perhaps details of the meetings movements and life in the period when he returned alone to work with Cromwell and Milton is not discoverable. Nor is it clear to me why Charles II supported Williams, given his treatment of Vane. By the time of his return to Providence, the land was in use for farming, as Bridenbaugh wrote "Fat Mutton" and times were changed socially. The long legacy of Williams was the preservation of soul liberty certainly here, but it would appear also in England.
