I'd like to discuss some of the early colonial leaders whose views on religion and government shaped the thinking of the Founding Fathers. One of these men was Roger Williams.
Williams was born around 1603 in London, England. He was a Puritan and emigrated to America to live in the Massachusetts colony. His ideas on religious freedom clashed strongly with those other Puritans, most of whom had become as intolerant of others as had the Anglicans been intolerant of the Puritans in England. He was banished from Massachusetts because he believed that the state should not dictate a man or woman's worship. People should be free to worship as they see fit, which he called "liberty of conscience" or "liberty of the soul." His philosophy has been called the forerunner of Jeffersonian Democracy and was certainly a precursor to, not only the Declaration of Independence, but to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
He also spoke out against the colonists seizing land from the Native Americans. When he founded the colony of Rhode Island, he purchased land from the Narragansett Indians for that purpose. His colony became what he called a "lively experiment" in tolerance (although he, himself, was intolerant of the Quaker movement.) He was a staunch scholar of the King James Bible and is commonly regarded as the original founder of the Baptist Church in America.
Eventually, he fell away from Baptist ideals and became what he called a "seeker." To quote from www.history.com:
His lifelong search for a closer personal union with God forged his beliefs and ideas. Rejecting the moderate theology of Puritanism, Williams embraced the radical tenets of separatism, turned briefly to Baptist principles, but ultimately declared that Christ’s true church could not be known among men until Christ himself returned to establish it. From his reading of the New Testament, in which Christ had commanded religious truth and error to coexist in every nation until the end of the world, Williams concluded that liberty of conscience–”soul liberty” as he called it–was necessary because no one could know for certain which form of religion was the true one God had intended.[1]
He understood far beyond the philosophies of his time that Christ could not restore His true church until there existed a government of freedom that allowed, as part of it's codified laws, "soul freedom," what we call today freedom of religion or religious liberty.
He died in 1683 and his death caused little stir. It was only with the coming of the search for independence in the 1700s that people looked back at William's philosophies and their influences on such men as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
Of interest to me as a Latter-day Saint is our belief that our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution are divinely inspired documents developed by great men under the direction of "Divine Providence." As I have presented earlier regarding God's hand in the discovery and colonization of America, I firmly believe that God blessed America from before the beginning as the place where His true church could be restored, as Roger Williams hoped for. We further believe that is exactly what happened when a young New York farm boy walked into a grove of trees on his father's farm to pray and ask God which church he should join. Young Joseph experienced a true theophany that day and, over the next ten years, he became the Prophet of Restoration through whom Jesus Christ restored His true church to the earth in April of 1830. Although it was 147 years too late for Roger Williams, I personally believe that he knows it now and that he was one of those divinely inspired men God sent to till the soil of liberty so that this nation could become the fertile ground in which God could plant the seed of His Restored Gospel.
What saddens me is that our society, particularly those who are the most socially and politically liberal, have taken the idea of freedom of religion protected by First Amendment rights and turned it into freedom from religion. Church and state should be separate so that the state does not dictate a "state religion" as was predominant in Europe until the last century. It should never be construed to mean that the state has the right to dictate that there be no religion at all. Our very rule of law was derived from British Common Law which, in turn, came out of the soil of Judeo-Christian ethics.
Religious freedom is under attack all over the world. Men of all faiths are coming together in a united effort to preserve what Roger Williams described as "soul liberty."
For further information on the role of religious freedom, check out the following site for dozens of links on the topic, including ways that we, as individuals, can help to preserve this God-given and unalienable right of liberty:
Sources
[1] http://www.history.com/topics/roger-Williams[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Williams
[3] https://www.lds.org/search?q=religious+freedome&lang=eng&domains=all
© Gebara Education, July 3, 2017 All rights reserved
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