Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (12 page)

Roger Williams (c. 1606–1683), who had forsaken the Anglican Church for Puritanism while at Cambridge University, had become a minister before leaving England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631. But four years later he would be banished, having run afoul of the Puritan establishment there. He’d demanded that all Puritan ties to the Anglican Church in England be severed, and he also rejected Puritan claims to land he believed rightfully belonged to Native Americans.
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More provocative still, he insisted that the Puritan theocracy of Massachusetts Bay did not have the right to enforce their will over individuals in religious matters.
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Like Helwys and the early Baptists, he believed only the second, civil tablet of the Ten Commandments to be the proper purview of the state.
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Williams’s exile in 1635 occurred during a bitter New England winter, and he sought refuge among the Native American Narragansett tribe to the south.
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In 1636, he purchased land from them, founding a town he called Providence in thanks for his deliverance.
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In 1644, just over thirty years after the Baptist Helwys’s bold proposal, Williams wrote a treatise of his own. No doubt influenced by the early Baptists, Williams condemned the role of Calvin in the martyrdom of Servetus in Geneva. He may well have read Castellio’s work too.
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Like Menocchio, Castellio, and Franck before him, Williams had much to say about the rights of Muslims and Jews, but unlike Menocchio and Franck, he believed Christianity to be superior, as had Castellio and Helwys.
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As noted in the previous chapter, Williams was aware of Islam’s basic premise regarding the Prophet as final messenger in a continuum that included the Hebrew prophets and Jesus. But he rejected this understanding utterly, condemning the Prophet to hell as an impostor who
had misled his followers.
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Contrary to Menocchio and Franck, there would be no salvation for Muslims in Williams’s theology. However, he did not deny the right of Muslims to believe, even in what he defined as their “false” faith.
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Instead, he defended their liberty of conscience, along with all other believers, from state interference. Williams’s banishment of government from spiritual matters thus extended even the individual’s right to profess a creed that he personally vilified, his own prejudices trumped by the innate rights of any person to adhere to their faith. Needless to say, this was an unpopular idea in Protestant America, and in Providence its feasibility would be put to the test.

A man of deep faith who distrusted organized religion, Williams recognized the moral sensitivity of all individuals as an aspect of their universal humanity.
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He had disavowed attempts at forced conversion, and now he offered protection to those suffering sometimes violent persecution at the hands of fellow Christians. Although essentially elaborating views that Baptists like Helwys had already expressed, he became the first to put such theories of “toleration,” a word he used frequently but apparently disliked, and what he termed “soul liberty” into practice, eventually to be regarded as the nation’s “first great defender of natural and religious liberty.”
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And within his espousal of universal toleration, he included numerous explicit references to Muslims and Jews.
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Williams’s protest against his treatment in Massachusetts,
The Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution for Cause of Conscience
, was published in London in 1644, when Williams returned there to claim a parliamentary charter for territory in what is today the state of Rhode Island. Taking the opportunity to become friendly with the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, and the poet John Milton, he hoped to press his case for freedom from state interference in all spiritual matters on both sides of the Atlantic by addressing his treatise to Parliament.
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Cast as a dialogue between Truth and Peace, Williams’s
Bloudy Tenent
is rambling and repetitive, yet full of unique insights. It so horrified readers in England that it was publicly burned a month after its publication, but Williams returned to his Rhode Island colony with many copies, intending that it not be ignored, especially in the Massachusetts colony from which he had been expelled.
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The word “bloudy” in the title meant “intractable,” but also alluded to Williams’s painful recollection of violent religious persecution in Europe: “the blood of so
many hundred thousand soules of Protestants and Papists, spilt in the Wars of present and former Ages, for their respective Consciences, is not required nor accepted by Jesus the Prince of Peace.”
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Bloudy Tenent
focused on Christian political and religious fanaticism, but there are also numerous strategic references scattered throughout the treatise—thirteen in all—to the toleration of Muslims. Most notably, in his introduction, when he enumerated the first twelve theses, Williams ranked as sixth the prohibition of violence against non-Christians, in- cluding Turks or Muslims:

Like Castellio, Williams here appeared to retain hope for the peaceful conversion of non-Christians, yet his eighth and ninth theses propose that in matters of the soul or conscience the individual should not suffer violent coercion by the state, an early plea for religious freedom from civil control. Later, however, Williams appeared to reject even persuasion in the conversion of Jews and Muslims. Instead, he pled for an end to “our desires and hopes of the Jewes conversion to Christ,” in terms that implicitly included such “hopes”
for Muslims as well.
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Williams’s linkage of Turks, Jews, and pagans (by which he meant Native Americans) became a consistent triad in his work “against the bloody
Doctrine of Persecution for cause of conscience.
” More than one historian has argued that Williams’s repeated enumeration of Jews with Turks and pagans betrayed only an intention to place the former among “the stereotypical alien outside the pale of Christianity.”
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But Williams’s main message makes clear that no one is to be excluded from the universal rights he proposed: liberty of conscience and freedom from persecution. Muslims and Jews, he argued, both deserved what all Christians enjoyed, and the onus for this social change rested upon the Christian majority:

In Williams’s view, religious error did not prevent non-Christians, including Muslims and Jews, from being loyal subjects, and hence represented no basis for state coercion, whose proper purview was civil order and peace:
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In Williams’s words may be heard references to tolerant precedents. Calling non-Christian neighbors “peaceable” but also “loving and helpful” echoes the Golden Rule, while “reason and experience in many other flourishing cities and kingdoms” may allude to Holland, where religious toleration for all Christians, including Jews, had been noted in England as a directly positive contribution to their national success in trade and commerce.
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Williams’s treatise challenged the very basis of the Massachusetts Bay theocracy that had expelled him, in particular the minister
John Cotton (d. 1652), whose religious authority helped enforce Williams’s political exile and to whose refutation Williams dedicated his effort.
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Five years earlier, in
A Discourse about Civil Government
, Cotton warned of the dangers of allowing “heretics” and Muslims to interfere with the established Puritan religious and political order.
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Insisting that only those in complete spiritual accord with the Commonwealth’s Puritan faith should be allowed to govern, Cotton asserted that this same principle undergirded Muslim rule in the Ottoman Empire: “Yea, in Turkey itself, they are careful that none but a man devoted to Mahomet bear publick Office.” What Cotton believed essential in his Christian Commonwealth (and all others) was a “form of Government as best serveth to Establish their Religion,” as the only one “Established in the
Civil State.”
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Williams by contrast saw no necessity, only harm from this fusion of the spiritual and the civil function of government.

Citing the Gospel of Matthew,
Williams argued that it was not for humans to decide upon uprooting the “tares,” or weeds, from the garden. He argued that Christ himself condemned the destruction of Christian heretics and non-Christians as tares among the Christian wheat, and that the only legitimate judgment would be made at the Second Coming, which he believed to be imminent: “Christ commandeth to let alone the
Tares
and
Wheat
to grow together unto the
Harvest
Mat 13.30.38.”
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Williams does not subscribe to the heresy that all can be saved, regardless of their faith, believing the prospect of non-Christian salvation grim, but he insists that the fate of Christian and non-Christian alike will be decided on the
Day of Judgment. And meanwhile, Jesus’s example would remain the best argument against religious persecution on earth: “Christ calleth for
Toleration
, not for
penall prosecution
.”
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Williams, unlike his predecessors, frequently used the word “toleration,” though he emphasized the sanctity of conscience, as had the early Baptist Smyth.

In 1647, John Cotton responded to what he deemed outlandish ideas with another tract entitled
The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lamb.
After asserting that he had not personally persecuted Williams, Cotton refused Williams’s analogy of toleration and leaving judgment to God as described in Matthew; to do so was to allow the spread of “dangerous” and “damnable infection.”
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Williams had the final word in 1652, the last year of Cotton’s life, when he published another attack against him in
The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody.
Addressed to the English Parliament, Williams’s new tract cited the example of Holland, which he said had “paid so dearly for the purchase of their freedoms,” but had finally learned “that one poor lesson of setting absolutely the consciences of all men free.”
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Williams had been, at least for a few months in 1638 or 1639, a Baptist.
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Indeed, he helped found America’s first Baptist church in Providence, but he began to regret his decision to join after a few months.
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Ultimately, though Williams realized that no earthly organized church could fulfill his needs, he would continue to welcome Baptists fleeing persecution in Massachusetts for Rhode Island, and also the Quakers, a sect persecuted in both England and North America. Such was his principled tolerance that the refuge he gave Quakers came despite having
disputed Quaker leaders in Newport for three days in 1672 and writing a tract attacking their beliefs in 1676.
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In 1655, while serving as the elected president of the Providence Plantations, Williams described his vision of the ideal government, one that made room
for Muslims, Jews, and Catholics, as long as they obeyed civil authority in earthly matters.
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Almost a decade after he had first imagined universal toleration, Williams adopted a new metaphor to define his ideal society:
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