Alan E. Johnson

This is the story of the dramatic life, thought, and work of a man [Roger Williams (ca. 1603–83) ] who refused to accept the conventional wisdom of his time and who forged a new way of thinking that came to characterize the best in the American tradition. Born and raised in England, Williams knew or otherwise personally encountered—during his youth or in later return visits—some of the greatest figures of English history: Sir Edward Coke, Sir Francis Bacon, King James I, the young man who became King Charles I, John Milton, Oliver Cromwell. In contrast to such famous contemporaries, Williams persistently argued, publicly and unambiguously, for complete liberty of conscience and a wall of separation between church and state—both for America and for Europe. At a time when most of the governments in Europe and America promulgated some form of established religion that persecuted religious dissenters, Williams founded a polity that was explicitly based on the principles and values of what became, more than 150 years later, the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.