This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star

and the American people. Up next,

another story from our series about us, the story of America. Here to tell it is Hillsdale

College Professor Bill McLeigh, author of the fantastic book, Land of Hope. When the Puritans

attempted to set up their Eden in the wilderness, they expected

to grow in their faith, but some had faith in other ideas, and there was plenty of land to test them out.

Let's get into this story. Take it away, Bill.

Of course, religious liberty, which is what the Puritans wanted, for them meant liberty to practice their own religion without interference from people who disagreed, who descended from their religious views.

We have come to understand religious freedom so that means not just my freedom to worship,

but your freedom to worship whatever wrongheaded thing I may think you shouldn't be worshipping,

but you have that right.

So the orthodoxy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in particular, came under fire.

It's some very interesting stories we don't really have time to go into.

Individuals like Anne Hutchinson, who was a kind of prophetic figure,

who found the colony was not sort of living up to its Calvinist principle.

She ended up being expelled from the colony. Similarly, Roger Williams,

this intense, really wound up guy. He became one of the great prophets of religious freedom in a very

liberal sense of the term.

Williams thought that church and state should be completely separate, not because he was

afraid of religion's effects on the state. He was concerned about the state's effects on religion.

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