#106 Introduction to Puritan Theology
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2023
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
This is the first of several non-consecutive episodes about Roger Williams, whom we have teased a few times already. Williams was one of early New England’s immensely consequential figures, perhaps in the long run more so than either William Bradford or John Winthrop. While the intellectual and civic contributions of Williams were legion, there are four startlingly modern things that he essentially invented. First, Williams argued that requiring people to attend church and worship in a particular way – a practice the English called “conformity” and essentially a universal obligation in Christian Europe for centuries – was an offense unto God. Williams thought that people must be free to find their own faith and follow their own beliefs. In a universally religious time, this amounted to a wholesale reconsideration of the “proper relation between a free individual and the state.” Second, Williams challenged the settled relationship between the church, man’s manifestation of God on this earth, and the state. He concluded they should be entirely separate, an idea that most Americans today take as a given. Third, Williams founded the new colony of Rhode Island, the first political entity anywhere in the world dedicated to the proposition of religious freedom and liberty of conscience. Finally, Williams learned the local Algonquian language and studied the indigenous peoples of New England with a compassion and intellectual honesty that was, for its time, very unusual and arguably unprecedented.
In order to understand Williams, however, we need to know something about Puritan theology, an introduction to which is the main topic of this episode! More exciting that it sounds! And, anyway, it will be useful background for many of the episodes to come.
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Selected references for this episode
Apple Computer, “The Crazy Ones”
John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul
David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America
Edmund Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and State
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 106. I'm your host, Jack Heneman, |
| 0:12.7 | and I'm recording this episode on February 20th, President's Day, 2023, and Austin, Texas. |
| 0:22.6 | Lest you don't already know, we are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without presentism. |
| 0:32.4 | We believe there's dignity in our national story, along with tragedy, triumph, brilliance, hypocrisy, magnificence, |
| 0:42.1 | depravity, corruption, venality, inspiration, oppression, genius, defeat, and glory. |
| 0:53.2 | So before we get to the main topic of the episode, a couple of items are in order. |
| 0:58.7 | One is, I'm recording this in an unusual way standing up in my office at like five in the |
| 1:05.5 | morning because I have to travel out to California for the next few days and all the rest of it. |
| 1:14.2 | So if I don't get it done now, it's not going to happen for a while. |
| 1:24.1 | Also, in the last episode, I puzzled over a reference to John Winthrop carrying a plant called a snakeweed, |
| 1:28.1 | which nearly, as I could tell tell came from the American West. |
| 1:36.1 | Eric from Ann Arbor, one of our most long-standing and attentive listeners, suggested that Winthrop's plant was probably Prananthi Serpentaria, otherwise known as cankerweed, lion's foot, snakeweed, earth gall and butterweed. |
| 1:50.9 | It is indigenous to much of the eastern United States, including Massachusetts, and was apparently |
| 1:56.6 | used in a poultice as an antidote for snake bite. |
| 2:06.0 | Thank you, Eric. The other item is to remind you all that if you want to buy any of the books I mentioned on the podcast, a great way to do that is to go to |
| 2:11.3 | the relevant episode post on the website, The History of theAmericans.com, and click through the Amazon link. |
| 2:19.4 | I get a teeny weenie tip on anything you buy by clicking through those links, including |
| 2:23.8 | the book in question, and that's all very appreciated and stuff. But more importantly, |
| 2:28.8 | I get to see aggregated data about at least some of the books purchased on my recommendation, |
| 2:36.0 | which is nice to be able to tell people. Okay, so on to the history part. I have a high school classmate who's enamored of the old |
| 2:44.5 | Apple computer advertisement known as the crazy ones, to the point that he's been attaching it to his emails of late. |
| 2:54.1 | It was the cornerstone piece of Apple's old think different campaign, which it should be said, |
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