Roger Williams And The American Revolution

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Roger Williams Roger Williams was basically the first rebel against the divine church order. During his life he was labeled as a spreader of intellectual infections. Afterwards he has been hailed as the first “flower” of Enlightenment’s spring. Most of his ideas were mainly in a religious context, but some were also engaged in debates on political liberty that would eventually fire the American Revolution. When Puritans saw good and evil, Williams saw people, usually friends with intelligence, moral sense, and a workable political system based on consensus. He thought that such people had the intelligence and the right to judge traditions, making the decision “according to their Indian and American consciences, for other consciousness it…show more content…
These are the first ideas of the separation of church and state. Magistrates enforced the first four of the Ten Commandments and Williams openly contended that the church had no right to do that. Williams also thought that civil authorities could not make an oath of allegiance to the church part of an oath of citizenship in the colony. With this idea he was defending the rights of the area’s original inhabitants. “How could Puritans claim the land by “right of discovery” when it was already inhabited?” Roger Williams. He was protecting the natives as well as those Europeans who did not wish to conform to Puritan doctrine. “Natural men” as Williams called the native peoples, “should not, and could not be forced to the exercise of those holy ordinances of prayers and oaths.” This idea is similar of the conceptions of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and others alike who reacted to the state-church power alliances in Europe by wanting to separate religion and its authority with secular authority in the designs for the United…show more content…
He would have Narragansett writing on one side of the page and English on the other. These translations would help draw cultural and spiritual conclusions, and offer moral instruction through meditation and analogy. He had poems in the text that “satirized English civilized degeneracy and sympathize with Indian barbaric virtue.” Throughout the book there are many ironic comparisons of civilization with barbarianism. (Heath, 348) Williams also wrote Mr. Cotton’s Letter that is basically his take on his exile from Massachusetts. One of his more famous works is The Bloody Tenent of Persecution. This is a dialogue between “truth and peace.” The first half “is a point-by-point rebuttal and a plea for liberty of conscience as a human right. The second half argues that a government is granted power by the people, most of whom are unregenerate. As delegates of the people, therefore, magistrates could not interfere with religion, for the unregenerate have no power in Christ’s church.” (Heath 348) His most famous letter is “To the town of Providence” that was trying to end a problem that divided the town over “religious autonomy and civil restraint.” He did not want one group (the Quakers) to be subjected to legal persecution, but instead “met their threat to social peace in his heavenly city by arguing
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