A statue of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island and an early exponent of religious liberty, is seen on the campus of Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island. Williams called for the separation of church and state in part because he believed government inevitably corrupted religion. (Courtesy Roger Williams University)
During a recent debate over school prayer, several Alabama House members rose to proclaim that our nation has Judeo-Christian roots. Roots they wish to dig up, tie into a cross and beat the rest of us with.
Rep. Mark Gidley, R-Hokes Bluff, said putting prayer in schools was “returning to the foundations that were there for like 200 years.” And there was Rep. Mack Butler, R-Rainbow City: “If we’re going to continue as a nation, we must ask the blessing of God and create that foundational principle in our students.”
Here I imagined a puritan — with the black-buckled hat and the heavy jacket topped by a white ruff — crashing Kool-Aid Man style through the walls of the chamber, yelling “Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no.”
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This isn’t John Winthrop or anyone building cities on hills. My puritan is at the foot of the hill, yelling that the theocracy above is an impious sham. This critic is Roger Williams. And he’s as much a part of the foundation of this country as anyone who tried to make Boston the new Jerusalem.
Williams was among the earliest Englishmen to reach these shores. He was an ordained minister whose surviving letters all contain at least one reference to God.
But that faith led to skepticism of those who claimed to embody the divine will. Humans, after all, are imperfect. In Williams’ view, we were likely to get God’s plan wrong.
That made him suspicious of powerful people who claimed to have it right. When Boston’s puritan rulers demanded an oath of fidelity in all matters, even religious ones, Williams refused to take it. As Williams’ biographer John Barry wrote, “to pledge before God and to God for an earthly purpose equated an earthly and necessarily corrupt kingdom with God’s holy kingdom.”
“By equating human society, the world in all its corruption, with God’s kingdom, it reeked of human pride,” Barry wrote. “This too was sin. This too was anathema to him.”
Williams soon found himself banned in Boston. With the help of Native Americans, he founded what became Rhode Island. Its governing document, Barry notes, was the first of its kind not to invoke divine aid or providence of any kind. Williams demanded a “wall of separation” — his term — between church and state. In Williams’ view, the world would corrupt the church.
“If no religion but that which the Commonweal approves, then no Christ, no God, but at the pleasure of this world,” he wrote.
These thoughts led Williams to reject divine right and embrace democracy. Governments were human creations, not instruments of divine will.
This is where America comes from. Not the self-confident dictates of the self-chosen elect, but the humility of a man who knew he didn’t have all the answers. And who questioned the answers rulers imposed on everyone else. When the post-revolutionary generation worked out the relationship between church and state, they turned to Williams’ tolerance and away from the fanaticism that sent him into the wilderness.
I wish the South would take that bold step into 1636. The white southern church gives one example after another of the dangers of the pulpit embracing power. Frederick Douglass once called southern religion the “justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds.”
It’s hard to argue with him. Using mangled versions of the Bible, white clergy of the antebellum era told enslaved men and women that their eternal salvation depended on submitting to their captivity.
Later, white southern churches stayed silent as thugs robbed Black Americans of their rights, their leaders and their lives. When a white mob lynched Robin White in Elmore County in 1901, preacher Lem Strength joined them, held some mob members’ horses during the murder and did nothing to intervene.
When the Montgomery Bus Boycott began in 1955, only one local white clergyman — Rev. Robert Graetz, a West Virginian by birth — supported the campaign. Graetz asked other white ministers to join him. He got a stony silence. A silence that extended to terrorists bombing Graetz’s home.
Today, many white Southern ministers pray over a president who shows a callous indifference to human life, whether on the Caribbean Sea, down the streets of Tehran, or in the barracks of the U.S. Armed Forces. They demand nothing from him but a place at his side. We have an Alabama senator who quotes scripture while spewing KKK-esque rhetoric about Muslims.
Religion at the pleasure of this world. An arm of power, not a shelter against it. It’s what Williams feared. Substituting inspiration and devotion for conformity and obedience. Lining walls with the Ten Commandments or forcing students to hear prayers won’t save a soul. It turns an intense personal experience into a mumbled chore.
Those of us who care about pluralism and tolerance can invoke the spirit of Roger Williams against those who would rob us of both. But those earnestly trying to build a heaven on Earth need him, too. Dominating the world and elevating it are two different tasks. And when religion mistakes the former for the latter, faith gets crushed.
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Author: Brian Lyman