In 1636, Roger Williams, who became a Baptist, was banished in the dead of winter and led some religious dissidents away to found Rhode Island.
A Revolutionary Idea By JOE NOCERA
“Rick Santorum is John Winthrop,” the historian and author John M. Barry was saying the other day.
Barry is in a unique position to make such a judgment. His most recent book, published last month, is entitled “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul.” To call it a biography sells it short. What it is, really, is the history of an idea — an idea that Williams articulated before anyone else — about the critical importance of separating church from state. So revolutionary was this idea that it caused Williams to be banished from Massachusetts and to seek refuge in nearby Rhode Island, which he founded. In doing so, Williams created the first place in the Western world where people could believe in any God they wished — or no God at all — without fear of retribution.
In opposition to that idea, always, were Winthrop and the other Puritans who first came to Massachusetts. Puritans fled to America in the 1600s because they were being persecuted in England for their hard-edged, Calvinist beliefs, and their rejection of the Anglican Church. Having one’s ears cut off for having deviationist religious beliefs was one of the lesser punishments Puritans suffered; being locked up in the Tower of London, where death was a near certainty, was not uncommon.
Yet Winthrop and the other Puritans did not arrive on the shores of Massachusetts hungering for religious freedom. Rather, Winthrop’s “city on a hill” was meant to be, in Barry’s words, “an authoritative and theocentric state,” no less tolerant of any deviation of Puritan theology than England had been toward the Puritans. Even before Williams’s views about church and state were fully formed, he became an outcast in Massachusetts because he not only deviated from conventional Puritan theology but preached his beliefs from the pulpit — and then did not back down when confronted by the Massachusetts magistrates about his “errors.” Just as in England, the state served to enforce the dictates of the church.
Williams and Winthrop came to America about 150 years before the Constitution was signed. They are not the country’s founding fathers, but rather the founders’ forefathers. Although it is unlikely that Thomas Jefferson ever read the writings of Williams when he was formalizing the separation of church and state in the Constitution, he was, nonetheless, influenced by him, as his ideas had been carried forward by other thinkers over the next century.
But Winthrop’s core idea — “that the state must enforce God’s laws,” as Barry puts it — also never completely went away. Well into the 1800s, a number of states, including Massachusetts, continued to have establishment churches. For much of our history, religion regularly seeped into civic life. In the 1950s, Barry pointed out to me, Joe McCarthy used to rail at “godless communists,” the implication being that America was a country that lived “under God.” Indeed, President Eisenhower added that very phrase — “under God” — to the Pledge of Allegiance, with scarcely a whimper of protest.
In recent decades, the separation of church and state has been more scrupulously followed, thanks to lawsuits and court decisions, many of them controversial. That, in turn, has brought a backlash from social conservatives, who believe that the country has strayed too far from God’s law. Though the separation of church and state may be one of the country’s foundational doctrines, it is, nonetheless, one that many Americans do not readily accept.
In the current presidential campaign, Rick Santorum is clearly their standard-bearer. When he accuses President Obama of following “not a theology based on the Bible,” he is calling, implicitly, for a country that would, instead, follow theological precepts. His book, “It Takes a Family,” is a lamentation about the rise of individualism. Liberty, properly understood, he writes, means “lifting our eyes to the heavens.”
“God gave us rights, but he also gave us laws upon which to exercise those rights, and that’s what you ought to do,” Santorum has said. “Laws cannot be neutral. There is only moral or immoral.” This is precisely what Winthrop believed.
I don’t doubt that if Winthrop could see America today, he would be horrified — just as, in many ways, Santorum is. Americans are free to do things that Santorum — and Winthrop — would view as deeply sinful. Individuals can believe what they want and act as they wish, without caring about what Rick Santorum — or John Winthrop — thinks.
By the time Roger Williams was an old man, Quakers had largely taken over the political structure of Rhode Island. “Roger Williams despised the Quaker religion,” Barry writes. But he did nothing to prevent their ascent, because he believed so strongly that one’s religious beliefs should not matter in the affairs of state.
Unlike Winthrop, if Williams could see the America his central idea gave us, he would likely be pleased. We should all be.
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