Not the Wall You Were Looking For
Yes, Roger Williams separated church and state in Rhode Island, but the “wall of separation” that Williams mentioned is not Thomas Jefferson’s! That would be the wrong wall. Williams’s message is more accurately: TEAR DOWN THIS WALL, Mr. Cotton! In short, while Roger Williams did implement a practical separation of church and state he did not call what he built a wall. He called what Mr. Cotton built in Boson a wall of separation and that is not the wall most are looking for, for Mr. Cotton was building what we would call an identity based echo chamber.
A modern conception of separation goes something like Jeffrey Levin’s illustration in his recent tweet:
Notice that every single person needs to be on both sides of this wall to be whole, and that each person must discriminate what activities to perform on each side of the wall. The full quote where Roger refers to a “wall of separation” is a very different religious city centric picture. The wall formed a ring around the City on a Hill as a hedge rings a beautiful garden. Williams’s opponents attempted such a city in Boston in the 1600’s. Each person in this city was to be beautiful as in holy, like a pruned rose in a garden. If found a heretic, as in an unwanted plant, they risked banishment outside the walls, and possible death. People inside the wall that were properly obeying church order should not have use for any other “civil” authority.
Williams did not approve. Cotton’s argument, that Williams is answering, was that Cotton would not approve a rogue church gathering (forerunners of the Baptists) that had separated from the City on a Hill (gone outside the wall), even if was in order make their practices more scripture-based. The particular group in question instituted a believer’s baptism vs. the christening of infants. Williams says, “However Mr Cotton believes and writes of this point, yet hath he not duly considered these following particulars: First the faithful labors of many witnesses of Jesus Christ, [historical scriptural examples provided] separate from the world; that when they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God has ever broke down that wall himself, removed the candlestick, and made his garden a wilderness, as at this day. And that therefore if he will ever please to restore his garden and paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly to himself from the world, and that that shall be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of world and added until his church or garden.”[1]
[1] Williams, Roger. The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, Volume 1, ed. by Rueben Aldridge Guild, A.M. “Mr. Cotton’s Letter Examined and Answered” (Paris, Arkansas: The Baptist Standard Bearer Inc. reprinted in 2005, originally published in 1867), p. 108 of the letter, Vol. 1 p. 392, spelling modernized.
Williams goes on to point out practices that show that even Cotton’s church physically separated from other (parish-based) churches as it attempted to separate holy from unholy, and that “to frame any other building upon such grounds and foundations, is no other than to raise the form of a square house upon the keel of a ship, which will never prove a soul having true rake[as in scoudrel] or church of Christ Jesus, according to the pattern.” Both men agreed all church constitution must be a “voluntary uniting” or adding of such Godly person, whom they carefully examine, cause to make a public confession of sin, and profession of their knowledge and grace in Christ. Williams claims the process of separating from the world, including from imperfect churches, is a quest we cannot end in our time before Christ’s return, and leads to a need protect the consciences of all men from persecution, so long as they keep a civil peace.
The wall around Cotton’s earthly City on a Hill was meant to separate holy from unholy and Williams says to succeed it can be no earthly city, no earthly wall. God’s true church on earth, Williams says, is invisible. Williams alludes to that when he says if God is going to put his garden back into a city it will be “out of this world”. In the meantime, if faithful well-meaning people try to build that wall of earthly stones, God will eventually remove the candlestick, the ability to be the light to the world. He will break down the wall because His garden is plants He feeds within a wilderness here on earth.
In William’s day, people declared unholy were banished not just from worship but even from civil society, left to die or even put in prison/executed. In fact, authorities aligning with Cotton’s views punished Baptists with whippings or worse. The hope was that they would confess and repent (be pruned), but in practice especially if they were falsely accused or believed their position was on a scriptural basis, they could not redeem themselves. So Williams did separate church from state and did form the basis on which the Founder’s “wall” was later built — but that separation is not the “wall of separation” of the holy from the unholy he refers to in this quote, but rather a wall between functions required to mandatory to keep civil peace and all other functions, which should be voluntary. Roger Williams would not approve us walled into echo chambers of similar consciences, as he wanted people interacting and sharpening each other in a civil society.
It is time to recommit to the vision of Roger Williams. That is not a wall of separation putting “right” people into a pure building or city that damns all those outside, but a society of toleration, that forbids persecution for conscience’s sake. The state should enforce civil peace, and all else (e.g. church) should be a voluntary union (no one forced inside by the state) that resides in civil society as in a wilderness — with no wall to keep in those that don’t want to be there no deprivation of civil needs for those outside. A difference between the way Roger Williams implemented his separation model and the later Founder’s Wall was that Williams perceived education as the primary responsibility of the family, with voluntary associations for support — not the civil state.
Roger Williams is often portrayed as in the above article: “Roger Williams, an iconic Puritan minister who was later briefly a Baptist and after that a free-spirited Christian outside denominational bounds, founded the colony in 1636. He was driven to do it by his devotion to absolute freedom of conscience.” It is correct he was devoted to freedom of conscience. It is not correct he was only briefly Baptist — though he did hand off pastorate to Chad Brown very quickly (Roger Williams was a civil leader at that point) and return to his part indigenous, part family church. Decoding Roger Williams shows there is evidence from late in his life that his beliefs were still Baptist. He did not stray from his scripture based Christian faith.
Note: The set of sites proliferating a misreading Roger Williams’ “Wall of Separation” quote is greater than one. For example, the attribution in the following site is to John Barry’s book, but John Barry’s book only references the original quote reviewed above, and then provides a second reference that when checked goes to an IBID of a reference to Roger Williams complete writings, but to a book and page that do not contain the term “wall of separation”.
