Roger Williams (1603-1684) was a theologian and preacher in Massachusetts Bay Colony when he was exiled for protesting mandatory church tributaries and oaths of allegiance to the King and to God. He founded Providence in 1636 with other Separatists and penned The Bloudy Tenet of Persecution in 1644 and The Bloudy Tenet Yet More Bloudy in 1652.
Rhode Island colony flourished, despite being called "a sewer" by Puritan New England. Anne Hutchinson and other banished Separatists arrived in 1637. Under its first government in 1640 and then again in 1647 under a united Rhode Island government, a "liberty of conscience" was proclaimed. In 1652, Rhode Island became the first entity in North America to abolish slavery.
Williams' principal thesis in The Bloudy Tenet was clear: "God's people since the coming of the King of Israel, the Lord Jesus, have openly and constantly professed, that no civil magistrate, no king or Caesar has any powers over the souls or consciences of their subjects ..." and mingling the Church and civil governments was sinful and contradictory to Scripture; this wrongful innovation started with Emperor Constantine in AD 315, he argued. Two "mountains of crying guilt" have burdened those who used Christ's name in vain, he stipulated, including "irreligious and inhumane oppressions and destructions" and "the blasphemies of their idolatrous inventions, superstitions and most unchristian conversations." Thomas Jefferson may have envisioned a "wall of separation" between church and state but Williams described a "hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world." The Ten Commandments, Williams reasoned, did not automatically apply to all human governance, but the "first tablet" should apply to the clergy and the "second tablet" should apply to secular government. In Yet More Bloudy, Williams heatedly argued, "The truth is, that herein all the priests in the world, Mahumetan, Popish, Pagan and Protestant, are the greatest peace-breakers in the world as they ... never rest stirring up princes and people against any ... that shall oppose their own religion and conscience ..." The introduction to The Bloudy Tenet includes a section addressed to Parliament where Williams argues that "the greatest yokes yet lying upon English necks" are spiritual statutes and acts passed over the centuries. He wrote, "All former Parliaments have changed these yokes according to their consciences (Popish or Protestant). `Tis now your Honors turn at helm, and ... so I hope your resolution, not to change ... but to ease the subjects and yourselves from a yoke . . ."
A statue of Williams is in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol and there is a Roger Williams National Monument in downtown Providence.