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TechnoratiAlthough hindsight is a tremendous advantage, I have to say our forefathers should have known better. Many of them did and spoke out against racism—men such as Roger Williams, Baptist pastor and founder of the Rhode Island colony, and David Brainerd, missionary to Native Americans. Williams treated the Native Americans with Christian compassion, and they took him in and treated him very differently than other whites of the colonial era. He was nearly sent back to England in chains when he insisted the colonists didn’t own the land because they had obtained it by patent from the king and hadn’t paid the Indians for it.
So here we have Roger Williams, invoked today as someone who taught that religion has no place in politics, up to his colonial eyebrows in the most controversial social and public policy issue of early-seventeenth-century America: the colonists’ shameful treatment of Native Americans. He also said that the Church of England was not a true church, so one shouldn’t attend its churches or pay taxes to it. And he believed Church of England ministers were not true ministers, so one should not listen to them preach.
But foremost in the Bill of Indictment against Roger Williams was his insistence that the colonists didn’t own the land and hadn’t paid the Indians for it. When he escaped into the bitter winter of the New England wilderness, the Indians took him in. They knew a friend when they saw one. Roger Williams believed in the separation of church and state—his metaphor was the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, but his actions indicate clearly that he didn’t believe in the separation of Christian faith from public policy.
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Dr. Richard Land is president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist Convention's official entity assigned to address social, moral, and ethical concerns, with particular attention to their impact on American families and their faith.
