'TO HOPE, AND TO WAIT': ROGER WILLIAMS AND THE ESCHATOLOGICAL ROOTS OF TOLERATION (2022) (original) (raw)

Evangelical Toleration (The Journal of Politics)

This article recovers “evangelical toleration” as a neglected tradition in early modern political thought with important consequences for contemporary political theory and practice. Many political theorists dismiss the prudential arguments made by “proto-liberal” thinkers like Roger Williams or John Locke in favor of toleration as a necessary precondition for evangelism and conversion as intolerant, unacceptably instrumental, and inessential to their deeper theories. By contrast, critics of liberalism treat them as smoking gun evidence for an imperial and civilizing mission underlying liberal toleration. I argue that both sides underestimate evangelical toleration’s genealogical and theoretical importance. Not only were evangelical considerations essential in shaping the particular institutions associated with toleration in England and America, the varieties of evangelical toleration represented by Williams and Locke shed significant light on the very different institutions—and intuitions—governing the expression of religious difference in liberal democracies today.

Roger Williams, Natural Law, and Religious Liberty

Journal of Church and State , 2021

The seventeenth-century colonial Puritan Roger Williams remains a celebrated advocate for religious liberty. The copious number of texts devoted to Williams testifies to his longstanding legacy throughout history and to the idea of religious freedom. Roger Williams’s doctrine for religious liberty did not arise from the auspices of a religious zealot’s imagination. Instead, he discovered this pre-political liberty as founded in a biblical–theological paradigm and attested to through natural law. His biblical and theological justification for religious liberty has a home in a vast array of articles and books. Few, however, have asserted Williams as a natural lawyer. Williams’s use of natural law revealed the nonsubjective nature of religious liberty—that the natural law attested to the goodness, virtue, and moral imperative of religious freedom. Indeed, what made Williams’s idea for religious liberty enduring was that he understood religious liberty not as foundational but derivative—religious freedom derived from transcendent realities, which made religious liberty a pre-political liberty.

The Lively Experiment: Roger Williams, Rhode Island, and Religious Liberty

2021

In 1636, Roger Williams established the colony of Providence. He did so with the goal of creating a safe-haven for those who were persecuted due to their relgious beliefs. It was his desire to construct a functioning society in which people were free to live out their spiritual ideas with no governmental oversight or interference. In order to accomplish this goal, Williams called for the strict and total separation of church and state. Religion and the English government had always been closely entwined and reliant on one another other as a source of power, prestige, and authority. It was the accepted way of English life that church and government be connected. Therefore, what Williams was attempting to build in Providence was shockingly radical and met with much resistance and disdain. Through analyzing Williams’ journey in establishing what would become Rhode Island, a deeper appreciation and understanding is formed as to the crucial nature of Williams in cementing the relgious au...

'The Bond of Civility': Roger Williams on Toleration and its Limits

In this article, I examine the meaning of the concept of ‘civility’ for Roger Williams and the role it played in his arguments for religious toleration. I place his concern with civility in the broader context of his life and works and show how it differed from the missionary and civilizing efforts of his fellow New English among the American Indians. For Williams, civility represented a standard of inclusion in the civil community that was ‘essentially distinct’ from Christianity, which properly governed membership in the spiritual community of the church. In contrast to recent scholarship that finds in Williams a robust vision of mutual respect and recognition between co-citizens, I argue that civility constituted rather a very low bar of respectful behavior towards others entirely compatible with a lack of respect, disapproval, and even disgust for them and their beliefs. I show further that civility for Williams was consistent with—and partially secured by—a continued commitment on the part of godly citizens to the potential conversion of their neighbors. Williams endorsed this ‘mere’ civility as a necessary and sufficient condition for toleration while also delineating a potentially expansive role for the magistrate in regulating incivility. Contemporary readers of William who conflate civility with other good things, such as mutual respect, recognition, and civic friendship, slide into a position much like that he was trying to refute.

Basics of religious freedom Roger Williams and the concept of religious freedom

The concept of absolute religious freedom was presented and supported within the Protestant Reformation. The magisterial reformation was not the one that supported religious freedom, because it used the „cujus regio, ejus religio”, which meant that the religion of the ruler would be the religion of the population. It was the Radical Reformation that proposed the separation. However, this kind of separation meant that Anabaptists would not vow allegiance to king and country, nor would the serve in any state position. This meant that they seemed to the authorities to be unreliable citizens. The Baptists, in the XVIIth century were the first to propose complete religious freedom (to all religious denominations, including for Judaism and Islam, but also for atheists), in which they, as believers, would vow allegiance to the king and the laws of the land. The king and the authorities would guarantee freedom of conscience, as well as freedom of religion, without any physical or material repercussions. The persecuted parties in XVIth and XVIIth century England were the non-Anglicans (the Separatists, Independents, Baptists, and a host of other denominations). Because of the persecutions enacted by the state, a great number of emigrants fled to the American Colonies. Among the first were the Puritans, and later were followed by the Baptists. Once arrived and settled on the new continent, the Puritan colonists developed forms of government which mirrored the very system they fled from. They enacted laws which limited religious freedom, other than the Puritan faith. Therefore, the persecuted became the persecutors. Roger Williams was a English Puritan, who became a Baptist minister, and who wrote against the system of laws which limited religious freedom. Once he arrived in Boston harbour, he started his ministry and wrote various tracts which promoted and supported the complete separation of Church and State. The paper will focus on twelve of his principles, which lay as the foundation of his theological and ideological system. The purpose of the paper is to show how these twelve principles are valid in modern day society, in which the secular and the religious still interact, and at times they create tensions which disturb or affect civil peace and human relations.