Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul by John M. Barry

He concluded they should be entirely separate, an idea that most Americans today take as a given. In a universally religious time, this amounted to a wholesale reconsideration of the “proper relation between a free individual and the state.” Second, Williams challenged the settled relationship between the church, man’s manifestation of God on this earth, and the state. Williams thought that people must be free to find their own faith and follow their own beliefs. First, Williams argued that requiring people to attend church and worship in a particular way – a practice the English called “conformity” and essentially a universal obligation in Christian Europe for centuries – was an offense unto God. While the intellectual and civic contributions of Williams were legion, there are four startlingly modern things that he essentially invented.

Williams was one of early New England’s immensely consequential figures, perhaps in the long run more so than either William Bradford or John Winthrop. The story is essential to the continuing debate over how we define the role of religion and political power in modern American life.This is the first of several non-consecutive episodes about Roger Williams, whom we have teased a few times already. Barry explores the development of these fundamental ideas through the story of the man who was the first to link religious freedom to individual liberty, and who created in America the first government and society on earth informed by those beliefs. Williams’s interactions with King James, Francis Bacon, Oliver Cromwell, and his mentor Edward Coke set his course, but his fundamental ideas came to fruition in America, as Williams, though a Puritan, collided with John Winthrop’s vision of his “City upon a Hill.”Īcclaimed historian John M.

This is a story of power, set against Puritan America and the English Civil War. national security-and its perceived “will of God” and the “ancient rights and liberties” of individuals. These debates began with the extraordinary thought and struggles of Roger Williams, who had an unparalleled understanding of the conflict between a government that justified itself by “reason of state”-i.e. Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of LibertyĪ revelatory look at how Roger Williams shaped the nature of religion, political power, and individual rights in America.įor four hundred years, Americans have wrestled with and fought over two concepts that define the nature of the nation: the proper relation between church and state and between a free individual and the state.

Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul by John M. Barry