In 1672, a sixty-nine-year-old man rowed a boat thirty miles from his home at Providence, Rhode Island, down the Narragansett Bay to Newport, near the Atlantic Ocean, to engage in a theological debate with some Quakers. This man had already provided the Quakers a home that was safe from those who would have persecuted them. His name was Roger Williams.

Williams was born in London, probably the year (1603) that King James I succeeded Queen Elizabeth I as the monarch of England. King James ruled for twenty-two years, the decades when Williams was growing up, and then died. Charles I became King of England in 1625. Two years later, in 1627, Williams received his bachelor of arts degree from Pembroke College at Cambridge University in preparation for a life of ministry in the Church of England.

His sympathies were with the Puritans, reformers who wanted the national church to side more thoroughly with the Protestants. In the winter of 1630, when he was twenty-seven, Williams and his bride of about a year, a clergyman’s daughter named Mary Barnard who was half a dozen years younger, sailed with twenty other passengers on the Lyon from Bristol, England, to Nantasket, a few miles south of Boston. Their winter journey across the Atlantic took a little less than two months, excellent time for that era.

Roger and Mary Williams first settled in Salem, north of Boston. Because he was frequently at odds with various religious leaders, he moved from there to Plymouth and then back to Salem. After fourteen weeks of wandering in severe snow in order to escape arrest, primarily because he denied the right of King Charles I to grant land to the settlers without compensating those they called "Indians," he purchased some land from the Native Americans and established an outpost. It was located at the headwaters of the Narragansett Bay, about forty miles south and west of Boston. He named the settlement "Providence" in gratitude for God’s mercies. A year later, in 1637, Mary and their two small children joined him.

Williams was not a flawless clergyman. He was excessively opinionated, outspoken, and abrasive. He also neglected his wife and children while he traveled in New England and back and forth to Old England in support of his fervent cause: religious liberty. Nevertheless, he was fair to the Native Americans and hospitable to all without regard to their religious convictions.

Williams embodied a third option in religion and life. Equally unlike the believing but intolerant Purtitans at Boston, such as John Cotton, and the later unorthodox deists in Virginia and elsewhere, such as Thomas Jefferson, he was an intense believer who accepted diversity. In Roger Williams: Prophet of Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Edwin S. Gaustad, the doctoral advisor of Spectrum’s own Leigh Johnsen, puts it this way: "Williams, who cared deeply about his own faith and his own conscience, would, with equal passion and devotion, ever care about and protect the conscience of others" (107).

Williams cared enough about his own beliefs to debate the Quakers. He cared enough about their convictions to guarantee them a safe home although he disagreed with some of their beliefs.

It is easy to be intolerant. It is just as easy to be indifferent. It takes true character to be convinced of something but equally persuaded that others have different points of view that deserve to be protected and honored. Now, more than ever before, we need Roger Williams’s combination of conviction and forbearance. What a positive difference this would make in our families, churches, schools, and communities!

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