Who was the First Founding Father of America?
Some scholars say it was John Winthrop, who led the Puritan founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630--the "shining city on a hill" and all that (Bremer 2003).
Others say it was Roger Williams, who founded the city of Providence (later incorporated into Rhode Island) in 1637 (Johnson 2015).
There is some truth in both claims. But we should see that the Puritan theocracy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was the first founding of illiberal America, while the establishment of religious liberty and separation of church and state in Providence was the first founding of liberal America.
We should also see that the liberal America of Williams eventually prevailed over the illiberal America of Winthrop. Because while the legacy of Puritan theocracy has dwindled to almost nothing today, the principles of religious liberty and separation of church and state established by Williams have been foundational for American political culture.
When these principles are combined with freedom of speech and of the press in the First Amendment, this establishes liberal America as an open society with freedom of thought and speech that allows for the free pursuit of both philosophic or scientific understanding and religious experience, with an open debate over reason versus revelation.
In his book Illiberal America, Steven Hahn rightly begins his history of illiberal America with Winthrop and the theocracy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (49-63). But then he passes over Williams in four sentences (54, 60, 63, 70), and he does not allow his reader to see how in the debate between Winthrop's illiberal America and Williams' liberal America, Williams' arguments eventually (over 200 years) prevailed.
This sets the pattern for Hahn's rhetorical strategy throughout his book. He moves through nine periods of American history from the early 17th century to the present. For each period, he shows the emergence of some illiberal tradition of American history. But then he obscures the fact that each of these illiberal traditions has either been utterly defeated or seriously weakened by the success of liberalism. Hahn's deceptive rhetorical strategy then allows him to mistakenly claim that today Donald Trump and his MAGA movement manifest the triumphant convergence of all of America's illiberal traditions.
BANISHMENT FROM MASSACHUSETTS AND THE FOUNDING OF PROVIDENCE
Over the years, I have written a series of posts arguing that Roger Williams was right about the Biblical basis for religious liberty and the separation of church and state, and that John Locke's defense of religious toleration largely coincides with Williams' reasoning. Although there is no clear evidence that Locke ever read Williams, their arguments are so similar that Locke's writing on toleration can be considered a vehicle for the transmission of Williams' view of religious liberty (Johnson 2015: 345-373). Thus, Williams and Locke jointly contributed to the American liberal tradition of freedom of conscience.
This all began in 1631, when Williams and his wife sailed from England to Boston, where the Puritans had already established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1830 with John Winthrop as Governor. Winthrop recorded the event in his journal and identified Williams as "a godly minister." But then Winthrop quickly discovered that he and Williams disagreed about the fundamental principles of religious life and political order.
This became clear when Williams refused an offer to join the Congregationalist (Calvinist) church in Boston and become its minister because the church maintained its ties to the Church of England, and as a radical "Separationist," Williams believed that each church must be a self-governing association of voluntary members who are not under the authority of any ecclesiastical hierarchy. Williams also denied the authority of the theocratic government of Massachusetts to coercively enforce the First Table of the Ten Commandments--the religious commandments to worship God, to avoid worshipping false gods, and to observe the Sabbath. Williams argued that the power of the civil magistrates extends only to the "outward goods" of worldly life--one's property and bodily security--and not to the "inward goods" of one's spiritual life--one's religious beliefs and practices. He also refused to take any of the oaths required by the Massachusetts Bay Colony because while he accepted religious oaths taken voluntarily, he rejected oaths enforced by legal coercion as taking God's name in vain. A fourth point of disagreement was that Williams challenged the right of the colonists to the lands taken from the American Indians under the grant of the English king, because Williams argued that these lands could not be rightly taken without the consent of the Native Americans.
In 1635, Williams was brought up for trial and charged with "apostasy" and "heresy." He was convicted, and his punishment was banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Williams and his family travelled for many weeks in a harsh winter through the New England wilderness. Because of his friendships with Native Americans, they fed and sheltered him. Finally, he reached the Narragansett Bay area, where he was welcomed by the Native American peoples. He negotiated with them to obtain the land for his new settlement that he called "Providence."
On August 20, 1637, Williams and 12 other people who had followed him to Providence signed the "Providence Agreement":
"We whose names are hereunder, desirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do promise to subject ourselves in active and passive obedience to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for the public good of the body in an orderly way, by the major consent of present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated together in a Towne fellowship, and others whom shey shall admit unto them only in civil things" (Lutz 1998: 162).
This is the beginning of Liberal America. Previously, Puritan settlers in America had signed "covenants" in which they took an oath "in the presence of God and one another" to combine themselves into a civil polity "for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian Faith" (Mayflower Compact). But notice that in this Providence Agreement, they make a "promise" rather than an oath, God is not mentioned, and they submit themselves to the political body "only in civil things"--not in spiritual things. This was the first founding in America of government by the consent of the governed with a separation of church and state.
Prior to the Revolution, most of the American colonies--with the exception of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania--had established churches supported by the government with various kinds of coercive persecution of religious dissenters. That began to change after 1776, as the states moved away from illiberal theocracy towards liberal toleration.
DISESTABLISHMENT IN VIRGINIA
In Virginia, the established church was the Anglican Church (the Church of England) of Virginia, which became the Episcopal Church after the Revolution. Religious dissenters--such as the Baptists--were persecuted. Baptist preachers were often imprisoned because of their religion. They could be punished for publicly expressing their religious beliefs or for refusing to pay the taxes for supporting the established church. Baptist preachers like Isaac Backus and John Leland preserved the legacy of Roger Williams by arguing for religious liberty in Virginia, and they were influential with Virginia political leaders like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.
On June 12, 1776, the Virginia Constitutional Convention adopted the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was written by George Mason. The last section of that document affirmed religious liberty:
"That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other" (Art. 16).
Although this echoes some of the language of Williams about religious liberty, it still suggests some blending of religion and the state that Williams would have rejected. First, it uses religious language--"our Creator" and "Christian forbearance"--that suggests a governmental endorsement of Christian theism. Second, it does not clearly condemn the legal establishment of religion; and in fact, it was not interpreted as challenging the existence of the established church in Virginia.
Madison was a delegate at the Virginia Convention. And he proposed alternative language for this section on religious liberty: "all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience; and therefore that no man or class of men ought, on account of religion to be invested with peculiar emoluments or privileges; nor subjected to any penalties or disabilities" (Johnson 2015, 267; Madison 1962, 1:170-75). The Convention rejected this language, presumably because this would have abolished the legal privileges of the established church in Virginia.
The opening sections of the Virginia Declaration of Rights ("that all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights . . .) influenced Jefferson in writing the opening sections of the Declaration of Independence. But Jefferson's Declaration says nothing about religious liberty. It does recognize, however, "certain unalienable rights" that include "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Williams had argued that religious liberty was one of those unalienable rights:
"Truth. Kings and Magistrates must be considered (as formerly) invested with no more power than the people betrust them with."
"But no people can betrust them with any spirituall power in matters of worship, but only with a Civill power belonging to their goods and bodies" (BT, 418).
Indicating their agreement with Williams, Madison and Jefferson attacked the establishment of a state-supported church in Virginia as a violation of the unalienable natural right to religious liberty. Their arguments were set forth in Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments" and Jefferson's "Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty." Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance" was a written petition opposing a bill introduced in the Virginia General Assembly in 1784 and 1785 that would have required the people of Virginia to pay an annual tax "for the support of the Christian religion or of some Christian church." Jefferson first proposed his "Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom" in 1779, but it was not ratified until 1786 (Johnson 2015, 273-79).
All of their arguments can be found in the writings of Williams. For example, Madison repeated Williams' claim that the New Testament shows that the early Christian churches were voluntary associations that did not depend on the support of human laws, because the spiritual kingdom of God was separated from the earthly kingdom of the world. Ecclesiastical establishments supported by human laws began with the Roman Emperor Constantine, over three hundred years after the first Christian churches (Madison 1973, 12).
Madison also agreed with Williams in arguing that not only did the Christian religion not depend on the support of human laws, but the civil government did not depend on an established religion, because as Williams indicated, the "civil peace" of a political community did not depend on the "spiritual peace" of a true church. After all, native Americans and pagans have kept the peace of their communities without belonging to the true church of God (BT, 72-73). Here Williams agreed with Pierre Bayle that a society of atheists could live together in a peaceful social order based on their natural moral sense without any religious beliefs.
When the Virginia General Assembly ratified Jefferson's "Statute of Religious Liberty" on January 16, 1786, that effectively ended the legal establishment of religion in Virginia.
MADISON, THE GODLESS CONSTITUTION, AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT
The United States Constitution as ratified in 1789 and as amended in 1791 supports religious liberty and the separation of church and state in three ways. First, unlike most of the state constitutions, the national Constitution is literally "godless" in that it says nothing about any divine being, which suggests that the national government does not need the support of a national religion. Second, there is the provision in Article V of the Constitution that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." The third way is the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
All of the state constitutions except for Virginia and New York had religious tests for their public officers. For example, the members of the Pennsylvania state legislature had to swear an oath: "I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration."
In the ratifying debates on the Constitution, the "no religious test" clause was criticized. One speaker at the Massachusetts ratifying convention warned that no religious tests "would admit deists, atheists, etc., into the general government; and, people being apt to imitate the examples of the court, these principles would be disseminated, and, of course, a corruption of morals ensue."
This shows the primary reason why people wanted religious tests and the legal establishment of religion--without religion, there would be a "corruption of morals." That's why any proponent of religious liberty had to argue, as Williams did, that the "civil peace" of a community could be sustained by a natural moral sense without any particular religious belief. One can be good without God.
Apparently, this argument for "no religious test" was successful because all of the states with religious tests abolished them during the founding period.
Similarly, the Constitution's silence about God provoked a debate that continues up to today. Some of the people who want to identify America as a "Christian nation" have said that the Constitution needs a "God Amendment." The most prominent example of this movement to put God into the Constitution was the National Reform Association that emerged during and after the American Civil War. This was a movement of evangelical Protestant ministers, theologians, academics, lawyers, and judges, who claimed that the Civil War was God's punishment of America for having a godless Constitution, and that this showed the need for amending the Constitution.
They proposed an amended version of the Preamble to the Constitution--with the new language in italics:
"We the People of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, his revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government, and in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America" (National Reform Association 1874, p. 7).
Beginning in 1864, the NRA formally petitioned President Lincoln and the Congress of the United States to support this amendment to the Constitution. The leaders of the NRA argued that they were not proposing an established church or a merging of church and state. Rather, they were proposing a constitutional recognition of the fact that America was a Christian nation, and this could be done without denying religious liberty and the separation of church and state. But they failed to persuade President Lincoln or the Congress to take their proposed amendment seriously.
Their claim that their proposed amendment of the Preamble would not violate the First Amendment was not plausible. The Constitution requires that all the officers "both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution" (Art. VI). How could anyone who was not a Christian believer honestly pledge to "support this Constitution" if the Preamble affirmed "the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations"? Surely, a constitutional declaration that the United States has "a Christian government" would violate the First Amendment's prohibition on any law "respecting an establishment of religion."
That these proposals for a "Christian Amendment" of the Constitution have never succeeded confirms the triumph in America of Williams' argument for a "wall of separation" between church and state. Moreover, there is some evidence that the critical turning point in this historical triumph of Williams over Winthrop--the ratification of the Constitution in 1789 and the ratification of the First Amendment in 1791--would not have happened without the influence of Williams' ideas on some Baptist preachers in Virginia.
The devotion of some Virginia Baptists to Williams' conception of religious liberty--and particularly the devotion of one Baptist preacher, John Leland--was crucial for James Madison's elections to the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788 and to the First Congress in 1789. If Madison had not been at the Virginia convention, it is likely that Virginia would not have ratified the Constitution, and that would have swayed other states against ratification. If Madison had not been elected to the First Congress, it is unlikely that there would have been any other member of Congress willing to vigorously argue for the Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution (Scarberry 2009).
Madison's home was in Virginia was in Orange County. The election for Orange County's two delegates to the ratifying convention was set for March 24, 1788. Many of Madison's friends urged him to stand for election. Initially, he declined, but he finally changed his mind and decided to run. And yet he had reason to believe that he would lose the election. There were many Baptists in Orange County, led by the popular Baptist preacher John Leland, who opposed the Constitution because they did not think it went far enough to secure religious liberty. They liked the "no religious test" clause. But they wanted an explicit declaration that religious liberty was a natural right. They agreed with Patrick Henry that the Constitution should not be ratified so long as it had no Bill of Rights.
Madison met with Leland, and he persuaded Leland that he should support Madison's election with the promise from Madison that he would promote constitutional amendments for a Bill of Rights in the First Congress. Madison then won the election.
At the Virginia ratifying convention in June, Madison faced the eloquent opposition of Patrick Henry and George Mason, who argued that the Constitution should not be ratified without a Bill of Rights. Madison responded by insisting that if the Constitution was ratified, the new Congress would seriously consider amending the Constitution to include a Bill of Rights. Madison's argument carried the day: the Virginia convention ratified the Constitution by a vote of 89 to 79. Since Virginia was the largest state in both population and territory, it is unlikely that other states would have ratified the Constitution without Virginia's ratification.
Then, in 1789, as Madison stood for election to the new House of Representatives, he once again needed the votes of Baptists who doubted his commitment to a Bill of Rights. And once again he persuaded Leland and other Baptists that as a congressman, he would push for a Bill of Rights. He won the election by 336 votes--1,308 to 972--in a district that had been gerrymandered to be heavily antifederalist. Then, once in Congress, Madison led the movement for a Bill of Rights--against stiff opposition both in the House and the Senate. It was ratified by the necessary number of states on December 15, 1991.
So, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that the "no religious test" test clause in the Constitution and the freedom of religion clauses of the First Amendment would not have become the law of the land without the political support for Madison from the Virginia Baptist followers of Roger Williams.
But even so, Madison's original proposal for amending the Constitution to protect religious liberty was not completely successful. Because originally he wanted a clause that would secure religious liberty from infringement by the state governments. His preferred language was "No State shall violate the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases." But the final language of the First Amendment was only directed against congressional legislation: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ."
This implied that state governments were free to legislate an establishment of religion or prohibit the free exercise of religion. Indeed, some state governments did just that. It wasn't until 1940 that the U. S. Supreme Court held that the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment (Cantwell v. Connecticut). And in 1947, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment also incorporated the Establishment Clause as applied to the states (Everson v. Board of Education).
DISESTABLISHMENT IN MASSACHUSETTS
Taxpayer funding of particular Christian denominations was common in the American colonies. But after 1776, only four New England states--Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut--continued to do this. By 1833, even these four states had rejected this policy.
In Massachusetts, the debate over the public funding of churches began at the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1780 (Witte and Latterell 2019). In the Constitution of 1780, the language about the ceremonial and moral roles of religion evoked little controversy. So, for example, the Preamble affirmed "the people of Massachusetts, acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the goodness of the Great Legislator of the Universe," and "devoutly imploring His direction in so interesting a design." And Article 2 declared that "it is the right as well as the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the SUPREME BEING, the great creator and preserver of the universe." Most of the delegates did not object to this language.
But it was the institutional establishment of religion in Article 3--particularly, compulsory religious taxes "for the support and maintenance of public protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality"--that stirred intense controversy.
This debate over religious taxes continued for over fifty years. Finally, in 1833, the critics of religious taxes who wanted a complete separation of church and state that would foster "pure and undefiled religion" prevailed by passing the Eleventh Amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution, which made church membership and funding entirely voluntary.
Thus, the theocratic legacy of John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony came to an end, as it was defeated the liberal legacy of Roger Williams' Providence Colony.
FREE ARGUMENT AND DEBATE IN A LIBERAL OPEN SOCIETY
In his "Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty," Jefferson argued that securing religious liberty frees the mind by recognizing "that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them" (Jefferson 1984, 346-48).
Thus, perhaps for the first time in human history, an open society was emerging in liberal America--and later in Scotland, England, and a few other places where the liberal social order was spreading--where freedom of thought and speech about the reason/revelation debate, and about the place of the human mind in the universe, was possible.
The best sign that this was happening was that sometime after 1800, esoteric writing was no longer considered necessary or desirable, because the natural desire of philosophers or scientists for intellectual understanding was no longer seen as a subversive threat to the natural desire of many other human beings for religious experience. Philosophers and scientists no longer needed to hide their true thoughts in secret writing and speech for fear that they would be persecuted for writing or speaking openly and sincerely.
That was the ultimate triumph of "free argument and debate" in Roger Williams' liberal America.
REFERENCES
Bremer, Francis J. 2003. John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hahn, Steven. 2024. Illiberal America: A History. New York: Norton.
Johnson, Alan E. 2015. The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience. Pittsburgh, PA: Philosophia Publications.
Lutz, Donald S., ed. 1998. Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Madison, James. 1962. The Papers of James Madison. Vol. 1. Edited by William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Madison, James. 1973. The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison. Edited by Marvin Meyers. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
National Reform Association. 1874. Proceedings of the Fifth National Reform Convention To Aid in Maintaining the Christian Features of the American Government, and Securing a Religious Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Held in Pittsburg, February 4, 5, 1874, With a History of the Origin and Progress of the Movement. Philadelphia: Christian Statesman Association.
Scarberry, Mark S. 2009. "John Leland and James Madison: Religious Influence on the Ratification of the Constitution and on the Proposal of the Bill of Rights." Penn State Law Review 113: 733-800.
Williams, Roger. 1963. The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. Vol. 3: Bloody Tenent of Persecution. Edited by Samuel L. Caldwell. New York: Russell and Russell.
Witte, John, and Justin Latterell. 2019. "The Last American Establishment: Massachusetts, 1780-1833. In Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan Den Hartog, eds., Religious Dissent and Disestablishment: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776-1833, 399-424. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.
