[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 99 (Wednesday, July 6, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4391-S4392]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       REMEMBERING ROGER WILLIAMS

 Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today I wish to reflect on a 
recent article on one of the most influential heroes from the earliest 
days of our Nation's history: Roger Williams of Rhode Island.
  Roger Williams' legacy is well known in my home State of Rhode 
Island--the State he helped found after being banished from 
Massachusetts for his beliefs about religious tolerance.
  Roger Williams argued that religious beliefs should be kept separate 
from government policies and that government should not impose a 
specific set of religious beliefs on its citizens. The separation of 
church and state is widely embraced today, both in the United States 
and in many countries around the world. But in the 1600s, this was a 
scandalous idea. The Puritans who colonized the Massachusetts Bay 
Colony fled England because of religious persecution, but they had no 
intention of allowing religious freedom in the new colonies. Rather, 
they established the Massachusetts Bay colony as a theocracy that 
enforced adherence to their particular religious beliefs with the 
gallows and the lash.
  Roger Williams rejected this framework, and was forced to flee 
Massachusetts. Upon arriving at the northwestern shore of Narragansett 
Bay in 1636, he negotiated an agreement with the Narragansett Indians 
to establish a new colony on that land. As Williams wrote, ``. . 
.having made covenant of peaceable neighborhood with all the sachems 
and natives round about us, and having, in a sense of God's merciful 
providence unto me in my distress, called the place Providence, I 
desired it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for 
conscience.'' Later on these views would be enshrined in Rhode Island's 
founding charter, providing ``full liberty in religious concernments.''
  Williams' principles of tolerance are the foundation on which our 
state, and afterwards our nation, were built. To this point, I request 
to have printed in the Record a recent op-ed from the Providence 
Journal by Rhode Island College Professor J. Stanley Lemons entitled 
``Assessing the global importance of Roger Williams,'' which does an 
excellent job of capturing this piece of American history.
  The information follows.

          [From the Providence Journal, Friday, June 24, 2011]

           Assessing the Global Importance of Roger Williams

                         (By J. Stanley Lemons)

       The greatest contribution that the U.S. has made to world 
     religion is the concept and practice of separation of church 
     and state, and that was started in Providence with Roger 
     Williams in 1636.
       Even if nothing in the rest of the history of the state was 
     remarkable, Providence would still have that one world-class 
     contribution to its credit. It was the first place in modern 
     history where citizenship and religion were separated, where 
     freedom of conscience was the rule.
       While his ideas were reviled and attacked in the 17th 
     Century, they became embodied in the U.S. Constitution in 
     1789 and the Bill of Rights, appended to it in 1791.
       Have you wondered why there is a Roger Williams Lodge of 
     B'nai B'rith? Why the oldest synagogue (Touro Synagogue, in 
     Newport) in America is in Rhode Island? Have you ever 
     wondered why Rhode Island never had a witch trial? Or 
     blasphemy trials? Nor hanged, whipped or jailed people 
     because of religion? All the other colonies executed witches, 
     but not Rhode Island. Most had blasphemy trials, but not 
     Rhode Island.
       Nearly everywhere else in colonial America, people of faith 
     were persecuted, but not in Rhode Island. Massachusetts 
     hanged four Quakers, and Virginia imprisoned dozens of 
     Baptists. Maryland, which was created as a haven for Roman 
     Catholics, came to outlaw Catholic priests and prohibited 
     Roman Catholics from inheriting property. These things did 
     not happen here because Roger Williams founded Providence to 
     be a ``shelter for those distressed of conscience.'' Rhode 
     Island's freedom of religion prevented such religious laws 
     and abuses.
       It is well to recall how this came about. Roger Williams 
     got into serious trouble in

[[Page S4392]]

     Massachusetts when he challenged both the political and 
     religious establishments by asserting that the government had 
     no role in religion. Moreover, he challenged the legitimacy 
     of the colony itself by charging that it had stolen its land 
     from the Indians. So he was tried and convicted of sedition, 
     heresy and the refusal to take an oath of allegiance to the 
     colony that required him to swear in God's name. In October 
     1635 he was ordered banished to England, whence he had fled 
     in 1630 because of religious persecution.
       Before the banishment could be carried out, however, he 
     fled from Salem into the snow in January 1636 and trekked to 
     the Narragansett Bay. In June he left the shelter of the 
     Wampanoags and crossed the Seekonk River into the domain of 
     the Narragansetts. From Miantonomi and Canonicus he acquired 
     Providence. His relations with the Narragansetts were so 
     cordial that Providence and the Narragansetts remained allies 
     for the next 40 years against the efforts of Massachusetts, 
     Connecticut and Plymouth colonies to destroy them both.
       When the householders first gathered in Providence to form 
     their town government, they agreed that they could make rules 
     and laws in ``civil matters only.'' In 1644 when Williams 
     secured his charter for the ``Province of Providence 
     Plantations in Narragansett Bay in New England,'' that 
     charter was for a ``civil government.'' It did not mention 
     religion because Williams did not believe that government had 
     any role to play in religion. ``Soul liberty'' was God's gift 
     to all humanity; it was not something granted by any 
     government.
       Soul liberty was the freedom of every person to follow the 
     dictates of conscience. A government could only acknowledge 
     this freedom and stand aside to allow full freedom of 
     religion. This meant that one had to have complete separation 
     of church and state. For Roger Williams, separation of church 
     and state was for the protection of the church from the 
     corrupting effects of government. Williams wrote repeatedly 
     that true religion needs no support of the government and 
     that government support invariably corrupts religion.
       All of the neighboring colonies regarded Providence 
     Plantations with undisguised horror and worked for the first 
     hundred years to dismember and destroy this ``hive of 
     heretics.'' But they failed, and the principle that Roger 
     Williams planted in Providence in 1636 came to be the law of 
     all of Rhode Island and then a basic principle of the United 
     States. And, Roger Williams, whose ideas were roundly 
     rejected by everybody in his lifetime, would be seen by the 
     20th Century as the quintessential American of the 17th 
     Century. What was the founding principle of Providence--
     freedom of religion (which demands separation of church and 
     state)--now holds out a hope for the whole world where 
     religious intolerance is the basis of so much strife.
       Williams believed that it was God's command that everyone 
     (including people that he regarded as heretics, pagans, 
     atheists, and infidels) had a right to freedom of conscience. 
     He believed that anyone had a right to be wrong, and that 
     only civil debate could be used to change a heart or mind. 
     The only tools of religion were those of the spirit, never 
     the sword. For him, the state had no role to play in 
     religion. He believed that whenever and wherever the 
     government tried to meddle with religion by trying to define 
     it or control it or enforce it, or even to support it, 
     religion was corrupted by such efforts.
       Williams and his good friend John Clarke, of Newport, 
     shared the view that the key to a peaceful society was 
     complete separation of church and state. Nearly everyone else 
     believed just the opposite: They believed that peace was 
     possible only when everyone was united in a single church in 
     a single state. Williams's core religious principle held that 
     each person had freedom of conscience and freedom to practice 
     their faith. Nearly everyone else thought that the state had 
     to punish and coerce those who had divergent religious 
     beliefs, wrong practices, or wayward ideas.
       His position on freedom of religion was wildly radical in 
     his day and, nearly four centuries later, this basic 
     principle is still wildly radical in great swathes of today's 
     world. Religious freedom does not exist in most nations on 
     the planet.
       What would Roger Williams think of the idea that our nation 
     was founded as a Christian nation? Certainly Providence and 
     Rhode Island were not founded as a Christian government. It 
     is deeply troubling to know that a pastor of one of the 
     largest churches in Texas declared on national TV that 
     ``separation of church and state is the product of some 
     infidel's mind.''
       To call Roger Williams an infidel reveals profound 
     ignorance of our nation's history. Roger Williams utterly 
     rejected any such concept and regarded the idea of a 
     ``Christian nation'' as ``blasphemy.'' So, he established a 
     government that was confined to ``civil matters only,'' and 
     this has become a model for the world.

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