The Williams Way or the Winthrop Way
Warren Throckmorton March/April 2026Two founding visions—and why America chose to separate church from state.
During the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration the current presidential administration seems intent on fostering an ever-closer relationship between Christianity and state. Vice President JD Vance recently declared that “Christianity is America’s creed.” President Trump’s Department of Labor posted to social media a fictitious portrait of George Washington praying in Pennsylvania snow and regularly depicts images suggesting worship in America takes place only on Sunday, ignoring members of other faiths who worship on other days of the week.1 Early in his term Trump told a prayer group, “They say separation between church and state, I said, ‘All right, let’s forget about that for one time.’ ”2
These false and misleading narratives obscure what Dartmouth College historian Randall Balmer calls “America’s best idea”—the revolutionary proposition that the state should not play religious favorites.3 In my forthcoming book The Christian Past That Wasn’t: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths that Hijack History, I describe two broad views of the relationship between religion and state that developed during the colonial period of the United States. The more dominant approach at the time sprang from Puritan New England, which united state and church. The Massachusetts way sought to promote a virtuous society by means of merging civil and ecclesiastical law.
However, at nearly the same time, another way developed as a result of the teaching of Roger Williams. Also a Puritan, Williams believed the “garden of the church” should be separated “from the wilderness of the world” by means of a wall of separation. As historian Balmer puts it: “Wilderness for them was a place of danger where evil lurked. So when Roger Williams talked about separating the garden of the church from the wilderness of the world, he was eager to maintain the integrity of the faith lest it be corrupted by too close an association with the state.”4
Born in England around 1603, Williams grew up during the reign of King James. Converted early in life, Williams attended Pembroke College to study theology and entered the ministry after graduation.5
In 1625 the son of King James, Charles I, came to power. Charles I had little tolerance for those who wanted to purge the Church of England of all Roman Catholic elements, or, as they became known, Puritans. Charles empowered church authorities to persecute those who deviated from church policy. The year 1629 became one of decision for many Puritans. John Winthrop was given an opportunity to lead an organization called the Massachusetts Bay Company. Historian E. S. Gaustad says it is very likely that Winthrop and Williams became acquainted during that year and discussed a possible future journey to New England.6
In early April 1630 Winthrop led a party bound for Salem, Massachusetts, followed by Roger and Mary Williams eight months later. Along with 20 other passengers (including two of my ancestors, John and Rebecca Throckmorton) on the vessel Lyon, they landed at Nantasket on February 5, 1631. Winthrop was glad to greet them. In his journal he referred to Williams as “a godly minister.”
Upon his arrival in Boston, Williams was offered the pastorate, at the time the top pastorate in New England. To Winthrop’s surprise, Williams turned it down, because the church was still affiliated with the Church of England. Williams believed in a fully separated church, one untainted by compromise with the state religion of the king’s church.
Without hesitation Williams expounded on the idea that church and state should be separate. He questioned the right of the civil authorities to enforce religious edicts. Williams denied that the state could enforce religious commandments to love God, avoid blasphemy, or keep the Sabbath. These are matters of conscience, he believed, which the state must leave to the church.
This was too much for the Massachusetts authorities. Dissenting religious views were not tolerated. Williams came before the General Court in Boston four times between 1632 and 1635. In October 1635, because of his religious views, he was sentenced to banishment from the colony and commanded not to preach. Because of illness and the coming winter, he was given additional time to leave.
While waiting for winter to break, a group of followers gathered at his home to pray with him. Williams continued to exhort and encourage about two dozen of his supporters. These meetings worried the authorities, who were concerned that Williams would incite a rebellion. Some wanted to execute him. Because of the perception that he was disobeying the injunction not to preach, in January 1636 the magistrates decided to send him back to England as soon as possible.
When the council summoned him to Boston, two physicians attested that he was too sick to travel to Boston and certainly not well enough to take a ship to England. His supporters petitioned the governor’s council on his behalf, but found no mercy. The council wanted him out of Massachusetts and issued an order for Williams to be cast on the boat. As the soldiers prepared to travel to Salem, a massive storm stopped them. While they waited to move, Winthrop sent a warning to Williams to flee the colony. Although he disagreed with Williams, Winthrop believed him to be a well-intentioned Puritan and did not want to see him die on a harsh winter voyage to England.
Instead, in January 1636 Williams left Massachusetts in a dreadful winter without a sure destination. Abandoned by Puritans, he lived only by shelter of the Indigenous people. Williams lived with Native Americans of one tribe or another for 14 weeks until spring and settled in what is now Providence, Rhode Island. He was joined by his wife and children and faithful like-minded friends to settle Providence with land he purchased from the Narragansett tribe.
The Williams Way
It was in Providence that the first government of any jurisdiction was established with full religious freedom. To serve or participate in that settlement, one did not need to make any religious oath or have any whiff of Puritan orthodoxy. The church and citizens’ religious opinions and commitments were completely separate from the civil government. The contrast between Winthrop’s Massachusetts and Williams’ Rhode Island was sharp and meaningful.
The actions of Williams and those who followed him to Rhode Island merit further description. Their first governmental agreement, written and agreed to in 1638, was simple and relevant “only in civil things.” The agreement did not require any religious test or creed: “We whose names are hereunder, desirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do promise to subject ourselves in active or passive obedience, to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for public good of the body, in an orderly way, by the major assent of the present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated together into a town—fellowship, and such others whom they shall admit unto them, only in civil things.”
The citizens of Providence committed themselves again to religious liberty in a more complex 1640 Agreement, affirming: “We agree, as formerly hath been the liberties of the town, so still, to hold forth, liberty of conscience.” 7 With this simple phrase, the colony at Rhode Island agreed to conduct civil business without regard to the religious views of the citizens.
Of all that had transpired in the colonies up to that point, this was arguably the greatest civil innovation: individual liberty of conscience for all citizens. No one in Rhode Island had to fear banishment or worse on account of their religious views. Not only that, but citizens were able to fully participate in the civil life of the colony.
Although it took Williams many years, he was able to convince the British government to give Rhode Island a charter that protected their religious freedom. In part, the colony “freely declared, that it is much on their hearts (if they may be permitted), to hold forth a lively experiment, that a most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained, and that among our English subjects with a full liberty in religious concernments.”8
In other words, the civil rights of Rhode Islanders were not dependent on their religious affiliation. Along with the earlier documents written by Williams and his fellow citizens, the charter provided that religious freedom, unheard of anywhere else, was a feature of daily civil life in Rhode Island.
When Claiborne Pell, senator from Rhode Island, dedicated a national park in honor of Williams in Providence on October 8, 1984, he said that in 1636, 13 families came together to create “the first genuine democracy—also the first church-divorced and conscience-free community in modern history.”9 What an incredible story! Surely it’s one that should be told alongside the story of the Puritans coming to a new land to seek religious freedom for themselves.
The Winthrop Way
It is important to note the differences in how the two colonies approached church and state. In Massachusetts, people were persecuted for deviating from the religious beliefs of the colony. That was not the case in Rhode Island. Let me expand the contrast.
Deviation from Puritan norms in Massachusetts had consequences. For instance, Thomas Arnold, who came to Massachusetts in 1635, dissented from Puritan worship in matters of baptism and church attendance. He was fined, and his property was used to pay his civil fines for an ecclesiastical offense. He later moved to Rhode Island, where his civil standing did not depend on his religious beliefs and practices.
Beginning in 1656, Massachusetts authorities implemented various penalties for Quakers who refused to leave the colony. A 1659 law forbid “all masters of ships to bring any Quakers” into Massachusetts.10 Violators were whipped, had their ears cut off, and had holes burned in their tongues. But Quakers continued to enter the colony, so the authorities implemented the death penalty. On October 27, 1659, Quakers Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson were hanged in Boston Commons. In 1660 Quaker Mary Dyer was hanged, and the following year, William Leddra suffered the same fate for the same offense. The Puritans would have continued hanging people they considered heretics if not for the advent of King Charles II in England. He prohibited Massachusetts officials from hanging any more Quakers.
Even after the hangings ceased, persecution of Quakers continued. They were banished from towns and whipped until they reached the city limits. Quakers had to pay taxes to fund Puritan ministers and had their possessions confiscated if they failed to pay. Life was hard, and Quakers were not tolerated in Puritan Massachusetts.11
In Rhode Island there were no hangings or persecution. In fact, all sects, including Quakers, were active in the government. That is not to say that Williams was fine with Quakerism. In fact, he thought Quakers were heretics. Even his “former antient neighbor and friend” (and my ancestor) John Throckmorton experienced Williams’ wrath over Throckmorton’s conversion to the Society of Friends.12 In 1672 the two Providence neighbors and veterans of the journey from England to Boston exchanged heated letters over Quaker teachings. After Williams sent Throckmorton a pamphlet condemning George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, Throckmorton blasted Williams with a letter beginning, “I advise thee to refrain any further publishing thereof” and “Repent. Repent, and mind the manifestation of the Spirit, which is given to everyone to profit with all, and knocks at the door of thy Heart for entrance which being rejected will be thy Condemnation.” Throckmorton signed his first letter, “thy friend and neighbor, J. T.”
If Throckmorton had expressed those sentiments publicly to a prominent Puritan in Massachusetts during the mid-1600s, he might have suffered the same fate as the Boston martyrs. However, the only result in Rhode Island was a rebuke from Williams: “My former antient Neighbour and friend, J. T., being bit by such infectious Teeth himself, fell on me, as a man would fall upon a Toad or Serpent, and sent me this Letter, notwithstanding he was but newly bitten by them; and for forty years pretended no small love and respect to God and me.”
Williams and Throckmorton exchanged more angry letters and apparently became estranged over the matter. But no matter how much Williams or any other Rhode Island civil leader disliked them, Throckmorton and the other Quakers did not need to worry about losing their ears, their tongues, their votes, or their lives. The lively experiment in Rhode Island ensured their safety and freedom.
The American Way
Despite the clarity of the historical record, some Christian nationalists are fixated on the Puritan myth. For instance, in his book If You Can Keep It, author Eric Metaxas writes, “Since the Pilgrims came to our shores in 1620, religious freedom and religious tolerance have been the single most important principle of American life.” As we have seen, that is 50 shades of wrong. Seventeenth-century Quakers and Roger Williams would like a word with Mr. Metaxas about the Puritan version of religious tolerance.13
Happily, it was the Williams way that won out in the United States. The phrase “separation of church and state” was later used by President Thomas Jefferson as shorthand for the First Amendment in an 1802 letter to Baptist ministers who were laboring under the domination of a state church in Connecticut. In his letter Jefferson acknowledged that the federal government had enshrined separation of church and state in federal law and supported the Danbury Baptists who wanted to see religious liberty come to their state. Eventually it did when Connecticut disestablished the Congregationalist Church in 1818.
Jefferson wasn’t the only founder who recognized the benefits of church and state separation. To Louisiana politician Edward Livingston, James Madison wrote, “Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.”14
Madison could have been giving a history lesson and foretelling the future when he told Lutheran minister Frederick Schaeffer, “The experience of the United States is a happy disproof of the error so long rooted in the unenlightened minds of well-meaning Christians, as well as in the corrupt hearts of persecuting usurpers, that without a legal incorporation of religious and civil polity, neither could be supported. A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical Religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity.”15
Today some American Christians want to legally incorporate “religious and civil polity.” There are some who want a government run by Christians principally for Christians. However, I submit that Madison is correct: mutual independence is best for the Christian church, for American government, and for social welfare. We don’t need renewed religious wars driven by government favoring one form of Christianity over other ways of believing.
Ultimately, the lasting American innovation is the separation of church and state. There are those today who want us to believe that America’s Founders wanted a Christian republic. In reality, the Constitution and First Amendment were built on the foundation of Roger Williams’ firm insistence that church and state are best served when they are kept apart. Just like the dissenters who found religious freedom in Rhode Island, Americans of all faiths and no faith need to feel safe to express their rights without fear of government reprisal because of religious favoritism. That’s the American way.
* Excerpts adapted from chapter 4, pp 96-104 of The Christian Past that Wasn't by Warren Throckmorton. To be published by Broadleaf Books Spring 2026. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.
1 See, for instance, posts on X from the U.S. Department of Labor: https://x.com/USDOL/status/2010453449641800174 and https://x.com/USDOL/status/2006887368679399583.
2 Irie Sentner, “Trump, Brushing Aside Separation of Church and State, Establishes Religious Liberty Commission,” Politico, May 1, 2025.
3 Randall Balmer, America’s Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State (Steerforth Press, 2025).
4 Warren Throckmorton, “The O’Connor Question,” Telling Jefferson Lies podcast, April 30, 2024.
5 For excellent biographies on Williams, see E. S. Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America (Judson Press, 1999) and John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State and the Birth of Liberty (Viking Press, 2012). His exact birth year is approximate because of birth records being destroyed in a fire.
6 Gaustad, pp. 19, 20.
7 Quotes from William Staples, Annals of the Town of Providence, From Its First Settlement to the Organization of the City Government, in June, 1832 (Providence, 1843), pp. 39-42. There were 13 signers of the first document and 39 signers of the second agreement, one of whom was my ancestor, John Throckmorton.
8 “Charter of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” July 15, 1663.
9 Claiborne Pell, quoted in Gaustad, p. xii.
10 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England: From Its First Planting in the Year 1620, Unto the Year of Our Lord, 1698, in Seven Books (S. Andrus, 1820), vol. 4, p. 454.
11 Caleb A. Wall, A Historical Essay: The Puritans Versus the Quakers: A Review of the Persecutions of the Early Quakers and Baptists in Massachusetts, With Notices of Those Persecuted and of Some of Their Descendants, and Tributes to Roger Williams and William Penn, and the Distinguishing Characteristics of the Early Quakers (Worcester, Mass.: 1888), pp. 11, 12, 21-31. For more on Thomas Arnold, see pp. 35, 36.
12 All quotes from Roger Williams, The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, ed. J. Lewis Diman (Russell & Russell, 1963), vol. 5, p. 7.
13 Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty (Penguin Random House, 2016), p. 70.
14 “From James Madison to Edward Livingston, 10 July 1822,” Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/04-02-02-0471.
15 “From James Madison to Frederick C. Schaeffer, 3 December 1821,” Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/04-02-02-0357.
Article Author: Warren Throckmorton
Warren Throckmorton is the author of the forthcoming book The Christian Past That Wasn’t: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths That Hijack History (Broadleaf Books, May
2026) and a retired college professor. His podcast “The Christian Past That Wasn't” critically examines Christian nationalism and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.