Using words that Thomas Jefferson would echo more than a century later, Williams argued merely for a “hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the world.” Williams saw God’s garden as too precious to be contaminated by the profanity of human politics.

Review of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul
By John M. Barry , Viking, 463 pages, $35

The Calvinist pilgrims who founded the New England colonies had rebelled against England by leaving it, but they were certainly not rebels against a firm social order or against the idea of authority itself.

In England, laws against adultery were not enforced; in New England, adulterers might be executed, or whipped and forced to wear scarlet letters. The town of Hartford required its residents to rise from bed at the same hour in the morning. Massachusetts spurned “heathenish” practices to such a degree that it stopped using names for the days of the week, referring to them only by numbers.

Roger Williams, an early resident of Massachusetts who would go on to found the colony of Rhode Island, was uneasy about forced conformity to the Puritan mold, though not because he didn’t like the mold. Williams agreed with the Massachusetts governors on most points of theology. He objected to the way in which the colonial government legislated what he felt was properly God’s to dictate. Forced worship “stinks in God’s nostrils,” he wrote.

Williams felt that a society based on free religious exercise, uncompelled by earthly law,
was truer to the vision of society in Scripture. As he clashed with the magistrates of Massachusetts, it became clear to him that, for such a society to exist, he would have to create it.

John Barry’s “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul” establishes Williams as a brave thinker and also a deft political actor—not a rare type in early American history but one we usually associate with the American Revolution, not the Puritan colonies.

Roger Williams was born in London around 1603. His suspicion of the excesses of political power was formed early on. He apprenticed with Sir Edward Coke, the jurist who told King James I that a monarch could make laws only through Parliament, not by royal prerogative. Williams left England for the New World in 1631, equipped with a Cambridge degree and, Mr. Barry writes, “the charm of great promise.”

Williams was banished from Boston almost immediately. Gov. John Winthrop had offered him the position of assistant minister, but Williams turned it down, believing the Massachusetts church to be corrupt and insufficiently pious.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on online.wsj.com – however, the original URL is no longer available.]