Roger Williams and The Creation of the American Soul by John M. Barry

Just by reading the title of this book one knows they are in for a challenge. I have enjoyed John Barry's books so I picked this up when it landed at our library. I must confess that it sat on my shelf until I got the due notice from the library. Resolving that with all the books I have to read that this would not be one of them I picked it up and started to sample. Thirty minutes in I knew I wanted to make time to read this.

Two renewals later I finished today. In short I cannot say enough good things about this book. Reading as much history and biography as I have I have a long list of people I admire from history. The obvious choices like Lincoln and Jefferson but also Teddy Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, Jimmy Stewart, and Roger Angell.

To that list I must add Roger Williams. I think many of us know or once knew that Roger Williams was the founder of Providence Plantation and Rhode Island. Some of us know that he set up Rhode Island as a refuge of religeous libery. Less of us know why this was so important.

John Barry who by writing books about the great floods of the Mississippi ( Rising Tide), the Spanish Flue epidemic of 1919 ( The Great Influenza ), and now about Roger Williams has proven that he is one of those rare authors who can write about anything and make it interesting. He is a writer of note, to be put on the must read list.

In this book we do not just read about Roger Williams. We learn about the history of English Law, the influence of Francis Bacon, one of the forerunners of scientific thought, and most noticably Edward Coke the Englishman who advanced the legal theory that " a man's home was his castle. "

Roger Williams decided early under the mentorship of Coke that he felt that the church and the state should not be connected. He objected to the State enforcing the parts of the ten commandments that had to do with a person's relationship to God. It should be noted he was not for anarchy, he believed the state could and should regulate actions and deeds. It should not monitor one's thoughts and religion.

This was revolutionry. When he landed in Massachussets he soon found himself an outcast. This shows that as much as we all learned that the Pilgrims came here seeking religeous freedome and toleration the fact is that this policy lasted just long enough for them to gain control of their own state and then they started discriminating.

Williams was one of the first. His banishment in the dead of winter, his escape from being sent to England and the gallows was remarkable for the fact that years later he would forgive and help those same colonies that treated him so poorly.

Williams created the freest state anywhere in the world. Under pressure, consistent pressure from Plymouth, Massachussets and later Conneticut Williams never faltered in his belief that the state should never control religion.

In this book we see same of the history of the English Civil War. The flirting of King Charles with Catholicism, his refusal to call Parliment for years, but eventually having to and soon regretting doing so. The rise of Oliver Cromwell, the behading of the King and then, when Cromwell dies the return of his Charles son from France.

Into all of these machinations Williams manuerver to gain a charter for his colony. He succeeds beyond all expectations.

Williams believed that the organized church could not help but end up a corruption of Jesus. He believed strenuously in God but felt that apolisitic succesion had been corrupted and that any belief in a Papal edict was fallacy. Still the church- Government marriage in Massachussets bothered him just as much.

Willaims felt that church would not corrupt the state but that the state would inevitably corrupt the church. He considered it like the wilderness encroaching on a garden. Inevitably the weeds would get through.

He beleived that forced religion stank in God's nostrils. I think that pretty clearly sums it up.

His sometime friend and longtime rival John Winthrop of Massachussets delivered a speech that revertabrates today. Speaking of the desire to build a shining city on a hill he was speaking of religion and government together created a pleasing site to the world and God both.

Williams disagreed as he insisted that the city on the hill could not be one that enforced religion and likemindedness regarding it.Williams insisted, at first by himself, and later to his followers, on the separation of church and state. His most famous statement was that Rhode Island " having bought truth deare. we must not sell it cheape, not the least graine of it for the whole World, no not for the saving of Soules, though our owne most precious."

He knew the favor he had been blessed with in Rhode Island. He would not give up for anything. He was a true hero.