When I was an engineer, my mentor told me I had to choose. I could either get things done or I could take credit for getting things done. There is simply not time be the best at both. It seemed incredibly unfair at the time, but all my subsequent experience showed that I was better off getting things done and pairing up with people who wanted to spend time getting credit (they usually shared credit anyway — at a fraction of the energy and time it would have taken to master the politics of getting known).

I chose the former, and I believe Roger Williams did too. To the degree he was known at all, until recently, it was from what his archenemies said. It is astounding how Anne Hutchinson, his peer in time and place, and banished by the same people, is more famous. She has no publications or other public milestones. He has many. She did have a wealthy loving family, and you could perhaps count all feminists in her extended family, who want to keep her memory alive.

I first found Roger Williams while hunting for my family. My mother assigned me a guy, George Mount, 14 generations back. He happened to live near where I was living. That guy, like Anne, had no publications. It was hard to hear his voice. Oral history mentioned how he first came to New Jersey to get away from the dictatorial control of Roger Williams in Rhode Island.

One of the things we know about George Mount is that one of his ears was lopped off. That could be punishment for being Baptist in Massachusetts, or further back in his history for having Puritan leanings in England, or it could have been a punishment for petty theft. Most of the time it was for brave expression of thought. People wore lopped off ears like badges of honor. That intrigued me. Did Roger order George Mount’s ear lopped off? I think it highly doubtful given what I now know.

Soon, Roger Williams became my primary target of research. Our local Baptist church turned out to think he was a character in their history, though he was only briefly a Baptist. Then the book 1491 by Charles Mann indicated he was a most astute observer of Algonquian Native American culture. On further inspection, so much had been lost in the assimilation of these people with European culture that sometimes his publications are referenced for facts about the language of this people group.

Then I learned about the blizzard. I raced a bicycle in the ice and snow once. I can relate to surviving a blizzard. Most people would have ended up walking in confused circles but Roger Williams resurfaced with redesigned institutions for his new settlement. Roger Williams had more impact than George Mount, and probably deserves at least as much billing as Anne Hutchinson — he is the original architect of the separation of church and state.

Roger’s native European culture was so anti-freedom-of-conscience that you had to remake society to make freedom work. He used a new principle, the separation of church and state. He derived his principle  from the Bible’s Jeremiah —that a government must be limited to keeping civil peace. To go along with that he promoted a new style of church — one that required one to voluntarily believe before being allowed to participate in worship or become a member. On top of that, he had some novel ideas that more than just landowners should able to vote to make decisions in a community — ideas that were influenced by how he saw the Algonquian govern themselves. The specific Algonquians Roger came to respect were of a different kind of democracy. You voted with your feet if you were unhappy. Allowing tribe members the freedom to choose who they followed changed everything from how they went about war to how they treated their spouses.

Because Roger Williams believed in freedom of conscience and most around him didn’t get it, he was accused of being complicit in every strange belief that came to his territory. Much of his later writing is of him trying to state on paper that he was not complicit.

When John Barry published his book Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty I paused my project. Then I read his book. If you want a blow-by-blow account of what men did in political bodies in England and New England, go read his book. To understand why Roger did the things he did— why as a minister and a social engineer he endured through those politics — then there is a different story to tell.

I chose fiction, as nonfiction implies obligation to list plausible alternatives. Sometimes, even though we don’t know exactly how a thing happened, the preponderance of the evidence says something like that did happen. As my mentor also said, “if it walks like a duck, talks a duck and looks like a duck, it is a duck”. The difference between my story and other biographies is that I took Roger at his word and started from there.

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