Who was Roger Williams and why should we care about his views?
A. Roger Williams was a 17th-century Puritan and the earliest notable voice for religious freedom in Amerca. He’s important not just because he called for religious freedom earlier than, say, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, but because his views came out of a very different worldview than theirs, namely a traditionally (even conservatively) religious one. Q. Why did Massachusetts Bay Colony kick Williams out? A. Well, there’s some debate about that, and the debate goes back even to Williams’ time. Williams insisted that he was kicked out of the Bay Colony because of his religious views, specifically that he taught that the Church of England was an apostate (false) church and that the New England Puritans should publicly declare their separation from that institution. This “separatism” was a minority view in Puritanism and was seen as dangerous by those who ran the Bay Colony, because a rejection of the official English Church was a rejection of the king’s authority (since the king
