Roger Williams - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

Biography

Roger Williams is an atypical figure of North-American theology to the colonial era. In the Years 1640, it develops a Théologie Politique of which the surprisingly innovative intuitions will appear decisive in the later evolution of the colonies of the New England, then the United States of America.

Born with London at the beginning of the 17th century, Williams receives his theological formation with Cambridge. After having been useful as chaplain deprived in a puritan family, it embarks in 1630 for the colony of the Massachusetts. It hopes to exert a pastoral ministry there, but its radical positions in favor of the neutrality of the State in the religious affairs involve it in virulent conflicts with the pastors and the magistrates of the colony. Banished of Massachusetts, it finds refuge near a community Amerindian, of which it discovers with respect the cultural and religious traditions. Estimating that the American grounds are the property of the people which live them, it buys a territory to them. Baptized “Providence”, the place will become the first plantation of the future colony of Rhode Island.

Williams engages then in a controversy with those which it holds for persons in charge of its banishment. Its main adversary is Pasteur of Boston named John Cotton (1584 - 1652), which seeks to reform the Église of England in a direction congregationalist. As a Knitting machine, indeed, the State and the Church have distinct rights and duties, but they must cooperate to create a community which works with the service of morals and the Christian faith. Knitting machine thus requires that the right to vote or aspire to a political mandate be reserved to the members of the Church and he is opposed so that religious dissidence is tolerated.

In a lampoon published in 1644, The Bloudy Tenent off Persecution , Williams reproaches Cotton for wanting to monopolize the force of the State to the service of its own religious convictions. The will to establish the religious unit by the force is in the beginning, according to Williams, of innumerable crimes. It is it which generates the persecution of the dissidents who resist in the name of their conscience. Williams is thus led to plead for a radical separation of the Church and State, which only can guarantee a true freedom of Culte. This freedom of worship is for him more than one simple tolerance. To the same time, in the United Kingdom, the defenders of the tolerance generally limit the latter to the Protestants. The freedom of worship claimed by Williams is more radical: he pleads so that the Juif S, the Musulman S and the Catholique S profit from a whole religious liberty. Even John Locke and the Glorieuse Revolution (1688) will not go also far, at least with regard to the catholic community. In the colony of Rhode Island, this principle of freedom of worship made it possible to make cohabit in good harmony of the Juif S and the Quakers with the puritan communities.

Its influence until today

Experiments as that of Rhode Island will remain marginal until the moment of the American Révolution. The puritans of America showed themselves not very tender with those which did not share their convictions, that they are Anglican S, Quakers or Baptist S. In the controversy which opposes Cotton and Williams, Cotton is ultimately satisfied to put forward largely widespread arguments among its co-religionists. The political ideal of Williams will however end up carrying the victory. It will be initially reinforced by the creation of the Pennsylvania, a colony that the Quakers will make rest on principles similar to those of Rhode Island. It will be then partially confirmed at the time of the Glorieuse Revolution. It will be finally so to speak ratified with the creation of the the United States of America. The principle of the freedom of worship and the separation of the Church and the State will enter the American Constitution then. But the recognition of a separation between the Church and the State did not prevent (and perhaps even it supported) emergence, in the American nation, of a Patriotisme tinted religious values and symbols. It will however be necessary to await second half of the 20th century so that the foreign religious communities with Protestantism integrate in their turn the “civil religion” of America. Perhaps the election of the catholic John Kennedy in 1960 marks, from this point of view, the true concretization of the political ideal of Roger Williams.

Sources

The Supplements off Writings Roger Williams , Paris (Arkansas), The Baptist Standard Bearer, 2005 (reprinting of 1963), 7 vol.

February 3rd 1664 -->

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