07/05/2023
INTERVIEW OF ALAN JOHNSON ABOUT HIS BOOK ON ROGER WILLIAMS AT THE JUNE 2023 DAR CONVENTION
On June 28, 2023, I was interviewed at the annual convention of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in Washington, DC, about my book “The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience” (https://www.amazon.com/First-American-Founder-Williams-Conscience/dp/1511823712/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=). From their website and from my conversations with them, it appears that the DAR has totally changed from their segregationist and far-right positions in the early twentieth century. They are now welcoming to people of all races and political and religious (and nonreligious) views.
This DAR session was not recorded, but, in response to questions, I stated, among other things, the following:
• Roger Williams wrote in his most famous work, “The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution,” that he was making arguments from religion, reason, and experience. He had to make arguments from religion for two reasons: (1) all the then-current arguments by theocrats were based on religion, and (2) seventeenth-century England and New England were dominated by religious thought such that hardly any book or pamphlet would have been published in that century in those places that was not based, at least in part, on religion. Even Thomas Hobbes, who had a (justly deserved) reputation for being an unbeliever, had to make religious arguments in his writings. Williams, unlike Hobbes, was actually religious, though his religious views evolved during his lifetime to a point that they were not at all conventional. And Williams, unlike Hobbes, always supported absolute freedom of conscience and church-state separation.
• Williams also made secular arguments for liberty of conscience and church-state separation that were based solely on reason and experience.
• I was asked what my view of Williams’s greatest strength was and also what I thought was his greatest weakness. I answered that Williams was that exceedingly rare person who was both a politician (a founder and leader of a political society, in his case) while being, at the same time, deeply ethical in both speech and deed. His greatest weakness occurred in his old age when he participated in a four-day theological debate with Quakers. Although he always recognized that Quakers had an absolute political right to believe, communicate, and practice their religion, Williams’s debate with the Quaker representatives was marred on both sides by petty ad hominem and other vituperative arguments. This was rather typical of seventeenth-century theological debates.
One of the questioners from the audience said she is a descendant of Mary Dyer, who was hanged by the Massachusetts Bay theocracy in 1660 because of her Quaker religion. Massachusetts Bay also hanged three male Quakers for their religion at about the same time. My book discusses those and many other such events as well as Roger Williams’s reaction to them.
Alan E. Johnson
Independent Philosopher, Historian, Political Scientist, and Legal Scholar
