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DISSIDENT AMONG DISSIDENTS
James P. Byrd, Jr. : The Challenges of Roger Williams. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002, Pp. 352. $40.00.)
Roger Williams is arguably the most extensively studied figure of Colonial American history. The literature on Williams is immense, including biographies, political histories, theological studies, and even a recent fictional autobiography. Yet, after all this ink has been spilt, much about Williams remains a mystery. The basic facts of his life are not in dispute. Williams was a religious dissident among religious dissidents. He went to America seeking separation from England's established faith, and then challenged the Massachusetts Bay Colony's own religious establishment. The Puritans banished him in 1635, and Williams founded Providence, a colony that maintained strict separation between church and state and offered religious liberty to antinomians, Quakers, Baptists, and other ne'er-do-wells. From his safe haven on Narragansett Bay, Williams spent much of the rest of his life defending religious liberty through a war of words with the Puritan divines of Massachusetts.
But Williams's motivations remain obscure. What drove Williams to his crusade against the Puritans? Was the first enclave of religious liberty in America the product of no more than Williams's intransigence and ire? Was Williams perhaps a nascent liberal democrat who had escaped Calvinism's dour pessimism over mankind's capacity for self-governance? Or is he best understood from within the Puritan tradition and thus as a foil to the Progressives' version of Colonial American history, a story that culminates in the secularized liberalism of Jefferson? Recent scholarship usually affirms Williams's Puritanism, but much remains unclear. If Williams was a Puritan at heart, exactly what caused his break with the Puritans of the Bay Colony?
James P. Byrd Jr's Challenges of Roger Williams attempts to answer this last question. Byrd argues that Williams remained...