Most people, if they even remember hearing of Roger Williams the Puritan and founder of Rhode Island, have a vague memory of him as an early advocate of religious liberty—usually contrasted with those awful Puritans, about whom we have all sorts of negative modern fantasies. The truth is, yes, the Puritans had some things wrong, but they were a lot better than their enemies make them out to be; and as regards Williams, it’s important to understand not just what he believed, but why.
The Puritans present an interesting problem of definition to the historian. Puritanism wasn’t a coherent philosophical movement; instead, it was a loose collection of English Calvinists who were determined to purify the Church of England but had differing ideas of what needed to be done. The name itself, like the names of so many movements, was not their own self-description but a label of reproach applied by their Anglican opponents. One of the greatest historians of the Puritan movement, Edmund S. Morgan, could only conclude a lengthy description of the teachings and effects of Puritanism by writing, “Puritanism meant many things.”
Given the amorphous nature of Puritanism, Williams at first seemed to fit right in. He was as Calvinist as any Puritan, sharing the basic assumptions of Puritan thought; his first position after taking holy orders was as the chaplain to a man with wide Puritan connections, and he was included in the planning for the Massachusetts Bay colony—which, given his youth, argues that he had earned considerable respect from his fellow Puritans.
He began to run into trouble, however, with John Cotton and other leaders of the colony due to his essential extremism; as Morgan put it, he had a pronounced tendency to “follow a belief to its conclusion with a passionate literalness that bordered on the ridiculous.” This reared its head within days after his arrival in Boston; on being asked to serve as the teacher for the church there while the man who normally filled that position, John Wilson, was in England, he refused because “I durst not officiate to an unseparated people.” Since the Church of England admitted unregenerate people to communion, it was a false church, and Williams felt that to stay pure he must renounce not only the false church but also any who accepted it as a true church.
Williams’ quest for perfection drove him further. When the General Court required all freemen to take an oath of loyalty, he objected, arguing that they would be forcing an act of worship upon the unregenerate, which would be an offense against God. He argued that a man could not pray or say grace over a meal if anyone unregenerate were present. Within two years of his departure from Massachusetts and the founding of Providence, he abandoned infant baptism among his congregation and had all the members rebaptized, since clearly their baptisms weren’t valid or they would have been pure enough for him; finally, whittling down the church and whittling it down again, he got to the point that he would only take communion with his wife—and then he wrote her off as insufficiently pure, concluding that purity was impossible and that there could be no true church at all.
He was, in short, a Puritan extremist, a hyper-Puritan; this was at the root of his argument with Cotton and the other leaders of the Massachusetts colony. Cotton in particular tried to reason with him, denying the need for absolute purity as a precondition for joining the church. Instead, he argued for membership for those who would “professedly renounce and bewaile all knowne sinne,” even if they “[did] not yet see the utmost skirts of all that pollution they [had] sometimes beene defiled with.” According to Cotton, the church did not require people to be perfectly pure to be godly; instead, it took godly people and showed them the areas of sin in their lives. He argued that to impose a standard of perfect repentance for church membership was to “impose a burthen upon the Church of Christ, which Christ never required at their hands nor yours.” Cotton finished by arguing that the presence of unclean people within a church did not make it any less a true church.
As odd as it may seem to us, Williams’ surface toleration was rooted in a deeper intolerance, while Cotton’s support of policies that seem intolerant to our age arose out of his belief in grace. We can reject Cotton’s insistence that “It is a carnall and worldly, and indeed, even ungodly imagination, to confine the Magistrates charge to the bodies, and goods of the Subject, and to exclude them from the care of their Soules”—and still more his position that “Better a dead soule be dead in body, as well as in Spirit, then to live, and be lively in the flesh, to murder many precious soules by the Magistrates Indulgence”—and still appreciate his motivation: his belief that grace is for everyone and no one should be written off because they aren’t good enough. By contrast, while Williams’ positions match those of our own enlightened time, we should look carefully enough to recognize that his support for tolerance was rooted in part in a belief in the spiritual inferiority of those tolerated.
(I should note, I had meant to draw out a point or two for reflection on the contemporary political climate, but I need to head off, so I think I’ll leave that for another day.)
