Roger Williams (theologian) Quotes (1603-1684)

“The pretended Vicar of Christ on earth, who sits as God over the Temple of God, exalting himself not only above all that is called God, but over the souls and consciences of all his vassals, yea over the Spirit of Christ, over the Holy Spirit, yea, and God himself ... speaking against the God of heaven, thinking to change times and laws; but he is the son of perdition (II Thess. 2).”

“At once maddeningly original and disarmingly humane, Roger Williams championed Native American rights, church-state separation, and an independent judiciary when each was considered rank heresy.”

“"The most fascinating figure of America's formative seventeenth century," Roger Williams has now gained general acceptance as a symbol of a critical turning point in American thought and institutions. He was the first American to advocate and activate complete freedom of conscience, dissociation of church and state, and genuine political democracy. From his first few weeks in America he openly raised the banner of "rigid Separatism." In one year in Salem he converted the town into a stronghold of radical Separatism and threw the entire Bay Colony into an uproar. Banished for his views, after being declared guilty of "a frontal assault on the foundations of the Bay system," he escaped just as he was to be deported to England. He settled in Providence with thirteen other householders and in one year formed the first genuine democracy, as well as the first church-divorced and conscience-free community in modern history. Williams felt that government is the natural way provided by God to cope with the corrupt nature of man. But since government could not be trusted to know which religion is true, he considered the best hope for true religion the protection of the freedom of all religion, along with non-religion, from the state.”

“Williams' life and major works — the 1643 bestseller A Key Into the Language of America and the 1644 treatise The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution — inspire nothing less than awe. Williams showed up in Massachusetts in 1631 and immediately mixed it up with the theocrats there, staking controversial positions on hotly debated questions such as the presence of a disturbingly papal cross on the flag of England. Two of his arguments would earn him exile: He insisted that the colonists had robbed the local Indians of their property (he called it "an unjust usurpation upon others' possessions") and, even worse, that civil magistrates had no business enforcing religious laws (lest "the wilderness of the world" engulf "the garden of the church").”

“The English... justified their grabbing of Indian land by claiming that these simple folk did not really believe in property rights. On the contrary, Williams observed, "the Natives are very exact and punctual in the bounds of their Lands, belonging to this or that Prince or People," even bargaining among themselves for a small piece of ground.”

“Roger Williams... successfully vindicated the right of private judgement in matters of conscience, and effected a moral and political revolution in all governments of the civilized world.”