Why did roger williams doctrine of soul liberty conflict with puritanism?

Many Americans have forgotten that the founders of our nation created a Constitution that for the first time in human history separated church and state. This act, separating church from state and state from church, was truly revolutionary.

With the passage of the first tenet of the First Amendment, individual freedom of conscience was protected by law. But how did the “separation of church and state” clause come to be? One such foundational story is that of Roger Williams, an extraordinary man and the founder of the first Baptist church in America.

Soul liberty. That’s what Roger Williams called freedom of conscience. He believed deeply and passionately in it. To Williams, it followed that religious truth and error existed in every nation and would do so until the end of the world. He believed that soul liberty was absolutely necessary because no one could know with certainty which religion was the religion God intended. God had not only created human beings, but God had given them the right to make their own choices in matters of faith.

Williams, who arrived in Boston on Feb. 5, 1631, was already a controversial figure in England because of his ideas on freedom of worship. From his reading of the New Testament, Williams believed Christ’s true church could not be known until Christ himself returned to establish it. For Williams, religion was a personal choice and each person had the liberty to choose what his or her conscience or soul dictated.

Williams believed religious freedom was a God-given right. To him, rulers throughout history had used religion to do “violence to the souls of men,” strewing history with examples of “spiritual and soul rape.” Williams believed no government, no authority must ever come between citizens and their soul liberty. Religion itself must be won only by persuasion and never by intimidation or coercion.

That belief in soul liberty put Williams immediately at odds with John Winthrop and many of the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Puritans believed they were creating a new Israel, a society modeled on the Old Testament, a shining example for Europe and the rest of the world to follow. This type of society demanded complete religious obedience and conformity. The irony cannot be lost that Puritans had fled England over religious persecution and yet, in their own colony, they did not tolerate religious difference.

Williams, on the other hand, placed his faith in the New Testament. He believed Jesus Christ heralded a new beginning, a new age. Since he believed soul liberty and freedom of conscience were gifts from God and freedom of religion a natural right, church and state needed to be separated.

In October 1635, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony convicted Williams of sedition and heresy. The court declared that he was spreading “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions.” He was banished.

Williams fled southwest to Rhode Island and settled at the headwaters of Narragansett Bay. He called the new settlement Providence in thanks to God and designed it to be a haven for those “distressed of conscience.”

A dozen men and their families followed him. Realizing that even with such a small group there needed to be a form of government, a compact, he created the first place where citizenship and religion were separated and majority vote, democracy, ruled. Unlike the Puritans in Boston, this compact did not propose to build a model of God’s kingdom on earth. It did not claim to be doing the work of God or God’s will, as had the founding documents of every other European settlement in the “New World.” The compact made no mention of God at all.

The government of Providence was to deal with civil matters only. It set up no church or taxes to support one, nor did it demand church attendance. This was revolutionary.

Williams was baptized in 1638. He had come to believe that a valid baptism required knowing consent, something infant baptism did not offer. He founded both the Baptist faith in America and the First Baptist Church in America when he converted the Providence congregation to Baptist. But he remained a Baptist for only a short period. True to his soul liberty, Williams argued that “There is no regularly constituted church of Christ on earth, nor any person qualified to administer any church ordinances; nor can there be until new apostles are sent by the Great Head of the Church for whose coming I am seeking.”

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Williams never again allied himself with a church.

Thanks to Williams, an original Baptist belief was that government should be kept out of the church and the church out of government. That a wall of separation should exist between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world. Williams fought for this separation his entire adult life so that we could have soul liberty.

His belief and defense of soul liberty is one of the foundational events that led directly to the First Amendment, the separation of church and state and the right to worship or not worship as individual conscience dictates.

Eric Lane is president of the San Antonio Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church & State.

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