Los intereses y el futuro: “Urgencia por despertar el interés hacia el futuro, desde un

Several decades after Helwys’ death, Roger Williams, a pious and scholarly minister, came from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and was immediately offered a prominent post in the Boston church. According to John M. Barry in “God, Government, and Roger Williams’ Big Idea,” the clergyman quickly declined this offer, proclaiming that the state church’s establishment for the cause of “prevent[ing] errors in religion” was an ignoble exercise in futility. Williams asserted that, due to human

imperfection, God’s law could never be interpreted flawlessly and only harm could come from the state church’s corporate effort to do so (73). Barry relates that Williams

“therefore concluded that government must remove itself from anything that touched upon human beings’ relationship with God,” and that not doing so would lead to the hypocrisy of a forced worship which, Williams wrote, “stincks in God’s nostrils” (73). Williams eventually accepted a different position at a nearby church comprised of other

dissenters, but by January, 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony could suffer him no more, and facing arrest and deportation back to England, Williams fled into the wilderness for several months before establishing a new colony at Narragansett Bay, calling the place “Providence,” as he “desired it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience” (Williams qtd. in Barry 74). The compact written to charter this new settlement was notable not just in the radically democratizing elements it expressed, but even more so in what it did not express:

It did not propose to build a model of God’s kingdom on earth, as did

Massachusetts. Nor did it even claim to advance God’s will, as did the founding documents of every other European settlement in North and South America, whether English, Spanish, Portuguese or French. The compact did not even ask God’s blessing. It made no mention of God at all. (Barry 75)

This established not just a central tenet of American governance and the likely inspiration for part of the United States Constitution’s First Amendment, but also a founding precept of the Baptist denomination’s internally contentious doctrine that guides so much of this research endeavor: the separation of church and state. However in 1636, for Roger Williams, it merely represented a needed foundation on which to build a civic structure that would not meddle in the free practice of his faith.

Williams’ Providence colony grew on this foundation, but by the early 1640s, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, its sights now set on becoming a hegemonic power in America, sent military forces to eradicate Providence. At this time, England was

engaged in a civil war between the king and Parliament, with the English Puritans taking the side of the legislators. Realizing that only Parliament possessed the authority to

legitimize Providence and protect it from Massachusetts’ hostile incursions, Williams sailed to England, marshaled political and popular support, and against the longest of odds, received the charter he requested in March of 1644. This unlikely turn of events thus allowed an “experiment” in democracy and religious freedom in the American colonies (Barry 77). With his success in London solidified, Williams defied convention in an even more spectacular way than ever before by publishing “The Bloudy Tenet,” a treatise which brazenly flew in the face of nearly everyone associated with the state church establishment. In a radical departure from centuries of religious tradition, Williams asserted that power flows not from God to the government, but from God directly to the people (Barry 77). Because of Williams’ deep convictions, rhetorical acumen, and uncommon courage, religious freedom—in perhaps its purest, most unalloyed form—now had a toe-hold in colonial America.

Roger Williams’ “Big Idea” turned out to be persistently influential. By the year 1727, Connecticut and Massachusetts had excused dissenters from paying taxes to the state church provided they helped fund their own denominations, and by the dawn of the American Revolution, the old ecclesiastical system was rapidly deteriorating (Maclear 43). Many scholars mark the pre-Revolutionary years of The Enlightenment as the catalyst for etching the essence of religious freedom into the bedrock of the American experiment; however, others point to the Second Great Awakening as the true force behind this accomplishment (McConnell 1342). Regardless of which factor

provided the greatest motivation, the last decades of the 18th _{century witnessed an} explicative review of religious liberty’s potential effects in this new American society. Entertaining an idea of how religion’s new role might work vis-à-vis the U.S.

government, a Reverend Eliphalet Gilet opined, “All denominations are permitted to choose their religion…but no one, to the detriment of the other, established or preferred by law…The laws of our State require people to worship God: but it is left to their own choice whether they do it through the mediation of Christ, or the Virgin Mary, or without any mediation at all.” (Maclear 47) Thus, a role for religion (or at least, the role for an opinion on religion or spirituality) in society was assured and sanctioned officially; however, specifics were far from fleshed out.