When Anything Goes on the Other Side of That Wall

“In reality [Roger] Williams was an obnoxious scrapper. He was far more concerned for ‘truth’ at any cost than were his Puritan opponents. In virtually every respect, and at every stage of the controversy, the Puritans were characterized by a biblical charity and Williams was not. But in the eyes of moderns these personal failings of Williams are excused because of the content of his positions — his sympathetic stance toward the Indians, his strong articulatoin of what he called liberty of conscience, and so forth. He was, we are told, a man ahead of his time. This is quite true — Williams planted seeds that grew up into certain American institutions. Our problem is that we still think of this as a good thing. For example, it is to Williams that we owe the modern notions of separation of church and state. At some points in our history, this was able to masquerade as a good idea, but in our time the secularists have been dismembering infants on the other side of that wall of separation for a generation now, and it is time that we returned to consider some of the first principles that got us here” (Beyond Stateliest Marble, p. 75).