Roger Williams and the Lively Experiment

In January of sixteen thirty-six, a thirty-two-year-old Puritan minister named Roger Williams walked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the dead of winter. The authorities in Boston had voted to deport him back to England. His crime was insisting on things the colony's leaders could not tolerate: that the civil government had no authority over a person's conscience, that the king's charter had no right to grant land that already belonged to Indigenous people, and that the Puritan settlers were not, in fact, the elect of God entitled to rule their neighbors.

Williams survived that winter because the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit sheltered him. In the spring he acquired land directly from the Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi, something virtually no English colonist had done before, and founded a settlement at the head of Narragansett Bay. He named it Providence.

Not as a pious gesture, but as a statement of gratitude. He had been provided for when his own people drove him out. The colony Williams established in Rhode Island became, in the words of the royal charter of sixteen sixty-three, a lively experiment in the idea that government and religion must remain separate.

In sixteen forty-seven Rhode Island enacted one of the earliest laws in the English-speaking world guaranteeing that no person would be compelled to worship in any particular way or be penalized for their beliefs. That guarantee arrived nearly a century and a half before the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Williams extended that logic further than most of his contemporaries were willing to go.

He welcomed Quakers to Rhode Island even when he disagreed with their theology. He welcomed Jews. Newport's Touro Synagogue, dedicated in seventeen sixty-three, is the oldest surviving synagogue in North America, its existence a direct consequence of the shelter Rhode Island's founding principle provided.

Williams spent the last decades of his life in Providence, ferrying passengers across the Seekonk River and writing the arguments that his enemies called dangerous. The arguments eventually won.