A Puritan Minister Who Decided the State Had No Business in Belief

Roger Williams, an English Puritan minister who emigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631, developed the idea he called soul liberty, the conviction that civil government has no legitimate authority over matters of conscience and religious belief, and that requiring anyone to worship, or worship in a particular way, at the state's command corrupts true faith rather than protecting it. Williams put the claim memorably, writing that forced worship stinks in the nostrils of God. The position put him on a collision course with the Puritan authorities of Massachusetts Bay, who governed the colony as a religious commonwealth in which church membership and civil standing were closely bound together and dissent from the established faith carried real legal consequences. Williams also drew colonial authorities' anger by arguing that the English crown had no right to grant land already inhabited by Native peoples without fairly purchasing it from them, a position tied to the same underlying conviction that legitimate authority has limits the state cannot simply assume for itself. Massachusetts Bay banished Williams in 1635 for these views, and he fled south through the winter wilderness, eventually purchasing land from the Narragansett people and founding the settlement of Providence in 1636 as a colony where soul liberty would be the governing principle rather than a punishable offense.