Desire for Liberty
When Roger Williams began to fight against forced worship it was controversial and illegal to do so and communications happened in code. The code is beautiful — to the casual uneducated eye it looks like Greek, but it isn’t. The code in simple rendition as reproduced here has been cracked, but the original appears to have had a second layer of code around it’s edges that may not yet be fully cracked. It is like looking into a hallway of mirrors four hundred years old.
Roger Williams fought against compulsory worship and taxes to support an established church. He fought for the respect of conscience for all — even for women and other oppressed groups that he firmly disagreed with, most notably Quakers. He also fought with words — and only words — the people he disagreed with, vociferously. Eventually his strategy became to create a settlement with a separation of church and state, to demonstrate to the doubters how it could work.
Back then people were forced into churches on Sunday or they risked the stockades or worse. Taxes went to the English and colony church alike as direct funding. In the USA, we don’t do that today, exactly, but we are not as far from it as we might imagine. 501–3C and other religious institution are given exemption from taxes for property and that means government sets rules for the exemptions, meaning we still have would-be government dollars forfeited on the one hand, and potential for compelled rules for conscience driven organizations like charities and churches on the other. Roger Williams would reject both.
He would equally reject the secular worldview’s desire for compulsion, beyond what is required to keep civil peace. Compelling individuals to fund actions or projects against their conscience directly or indirectly would be anathema.
Civil peace in Roger Williams’s book did not mean homogeneity — the result was and is an astounding diversity of consciences, and a cacophony of disagreement. Jim Collin’s work on great organizations attests that heartfelt passionate internal disagreements aired and considered, when combined with a unity abroad, is a necessary ingredient to a great organization. A unifier is our desire for liberty, and not just in New York.
