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3 Persecution and Polemics Bap­ tists and the Shaping of the Roger Williams Tradition in the Nineteenth Century James P. Byrd Controversy has always surrounded Roger Williams. Soon after arriving in New England, he engaged Puritan leaders on several issues. He denied the validity of their church because it was still aligned with the corrupt Church of England. He denied the validity of their colony, arguing that King Charles I had no right to authorize colonization of lands that rightfully belonged to Native Ameri­ cans. Finally, he denied Massachusetts Bay’s civil and religious government, arguing that civil authorities had no jurisdiction over religious life—a direct offense to Puritan efforts to establish a colony of “visible saints.” For these reasons and more, Puritan leaders banished Williams from Massachusetts Bay in 1635. But the controversy did not stop there; it had only begun. Over the next several decades,Williams published several works—mostly polemical attacks on the religious persecution of New England and mostly published in London for an English audience that included Parliament.1 Given the polemical life that he lived, it is perhaps appropriate that after his death, Williams’s controversies continued, though the difference was that he became the center of the debate. Williams the polemicist became a polemic. His reputation became entangled within a variety of controversies, especially over religious liberty, the separation of church and state, and Native Ameri­ can rights. More than these debates, however, scholars became intrigued with Williams himself—the nature of the man, his character, and the origins of his innovative ideas that seemed so ahead of his time. The controversies over Williams rose to such a level that historians became entangled not only with uncovering Williams’s history, but also in assessing his historiography.There have been so many examinations of his 54 James P. Byrd historiography that one could write a substantial essay on the historiography of Williams’s historiography.2 Even today, Williams claims the attention of scholars in various fields. To cite one prominent example, Williams was a central figure in Martha C. Nussbaum’s 2008 book Liberty of Conscience. Nussbaum, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago, calls Williams “a hero” who “can help us greatly as we grapple with problems that are not unlike those he confronted in the seventeenth century.”3 Nussbaum is one of the latest of many recent scholars who have found Williams relevant to contemporary issues. Although interpretations of Williams have never lagged, a major turning point for modern views of Williams came half a century ago in the work of Perry Miller. As was often true of Miller’s work, his interpretations tended to establish new benchmarks for scholarship. Such was the case with Miller’s interpretation of the Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, and Roger Williams. After Miller’s treatment of Williams, historians had to take seriously what Edmund Morgan called “Miller’s Williams,” a radical thinker acknowledged as much for the theological context of his thought as for his innovative concept of religious liberty.4 Much has been gained from the work of scholars since Miller, who have delved into Williams’s thought and lifted out his relevance on a variety of topics.Yet with the advancement of so much scholarship on Williams,one aspect of his life and thought has received less notice: his Bap­ tist identity . This neglect is not altogether inappropriate. Even though Williams played a central role in founding the first Bap­ tist church in America, he was not a Bap­ tist for very long—just how long is debatable, but possibly only for a few months. At some point, Williams came to doubt the validity of the Bap­tist church, and all churches for that matter, believing that Christianity needed to be restored to its primitive purity, and that restoration could not come from human efforts alone. Only Christ, or perhaps his apostles, could reset Christianity on new foundations, Williams believed . Until then, founding new churches, even Bap­ tist churches, would do no good. So one could argue that Williams’s brief sojourn among the Bap­ tists discredited much of his relevance for the movement’s long history . Moreover, the issues Williams engaged spanned far beyond one particular denomination or tradition. Still, without assessing Williams’s reputation among the Bap­ tists, historians miss a crucial part of Williams’s status in Ameri­ can history. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bap­ tists wrote the majority of works on Roger Williams. And...

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