Remembering Roger Williams: what the father of Rhode Island can still teach us.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Roger Williams - Book Review

Americans don't know much about history. Polls regularly indicate that upward of 95 percent of us can't even name the century in which we were born or say whether we fought the Nazis or the Soviets during the Battle of New Orleans.

None of which excuses our collective amnesia regarding Roger Williams, the first American explicator of religious tolerance and secular government. If ever there was a time to recover his legacy, it's now, with Christian zealots at home pushing creation science in schools and, far more important, Islamic fundamentalists abroad swearing death to godless infidels.

It's a national shame that Williams is remembered, if at all, as the namesake of a low-ranked law school and the founder of Providence, Rhode Island, the grim port town whose main growth industry is serving as the backdrop for gross-out comedies by the Farrelly brothers.

Edwin S. Gaustad's slim new volume Roger Williams (Oxford) provides not just an excellent introduction to the man but a deep analysis of his largely unacknowledged influence on our political and cultural life. "We do not know when he was born," writes Gaustad, a historian emeritus at the University of California, Riverside, "nor exactly when [in 1683] he died. We do not know what he looked like. We cannot visit his home because it went up in flames long ago.... At his death, no carved stone marked his grave."

Yet Williams' life and major works--the 1643 bestseller A Key Into the Language of America and the 1644 treatise The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution--inspire nothing less than awe. Williams showed up in Massachusetts in 1631 and immediately mixed it up with the theocrats there, staking controversial positions on hotly debated questions such as the presence of a disturbingly papal cross on the flag of England.

Two of his arguments would earn him exile: He insisted that the colonists had robbed the local Indians of their property (he called it "an unjust usurpation upon others' possessions") and, even worse, that civil magistrates had no business enforcing religious laws (lest "the wilderness of the world" engulf "the garden of the church").

Given the chance to recant, Williams proved, as Gaustad puts it, "more a man of principle than prudence." In early 1636 he fled with his wife and children, wandering the frozen New England landscape for weeks before buying property from Indians and settling Providence, a city dedicated to "Liberty of Conscience," or true religious freedom. Indeed...