If you’ve ever wondered why the American soul limps with one shoe missing, bleeding from its conscience, and periodically declaring war on itself, you can thank our great national tradition of misunderstanding the first man who actually got it right: Roger Williams—exile, Puritan-turned-religious frontiersman, forest wanderer, Cromwell confidant, and architect of the first truly free society in the Western world.

Williams didn’t just write political theology—he lived it, freezing in a Rhode Island blizzard with nothing but his convictions and some Narragansett corn paste stuffed in his tunic. While most of his Puritan brethren were busy policing hemlines and punishing blasphemers, Williams was laying the foundations of the modern republic. And unlike Hobbes, Locke, or even Cromwell, he didn’t build it on power. He built it on conscience.

The Divine Error of Church and State
The founding horror show of Massachusetts Bay wasn’t its harsh winters or starving settlers—it was theological totalitarianism. The colony’s leaders, drunk on covenant theology and pre-Enlightenment virtue signaling, built a state in the image of Calvin’s Geneva: part church, part surveillance system, part gulag.

Roger Williams saw it for what it was—a pious machine that couldn’t distinguish the voice of G-d from the static of power. He called it a “violation of soul liberty” and “a stench in G-d’s nostrils.” That’s Puritan for: What is wrong with you people?

In his classic Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, Williams drew a line no one else dared cross: the church must never, under any condition, call on the state to enforce its orthodoxy. Why? Because the state has no soul. It cannot worship, it cannot repent, and it most certainly cannot teach morality. You may as well ask your garbage disposal to pray for you.

Williams understood what too few do now—that the Garden must remain free, or it becomes the desert. The Garden is the soul’s domain, where love, faith, and conviction take root without coercion. The desert is what happens when power plants flags in the soil of belief. Every time the state enforces sacred law, it razes Eden and replaces it with a bureaucratic wasteland.

That’s why any flirtation with Sharia in civil law—however symbolic, partial, or “cultural”—must be a hard no. Williams wasn’t just defending soul liberty for Christians and Jews. He was laying down a universal principle: the sword and the spirit must never hold the same office.

Image 1: Roger Williams 1603-1683/84

 

The State Has No Soul—And No Allegiance Either
Let’s dispel a lingering delusion: the state is not your friend. It views you with contempt, it offers no loyalty, swears no true allegiance, and speaks no lasting truth. It does not blush when caught in a lie. It does not mourn the dead, honor the living, or protect the weak. It lacks even the most basic traits of mercy, kindness, or love.

It is not a shepherd.
It is not a father.
It is not even a decent neighbor.

It’s a brutal enforcer. A glorified bouncer with a flag pin. Its only real tool is coercion, and its favorite musical instrument is capital punishment—whether through taxes, police, subpoenas, or social media bans written in sterile legalese.

Ask it to love, and it will surveil.
Ask it to forgive, and it will prosecute.
Ask it to listen, and it will subpoena.

Roger Williams saw this centuries before the rest of us. He understood that the state wasn’t just spiritually sterile—it was morally neutered. You can’t teach a robot to repent. You can’t legislate tenderness. You can’t code loyalty into a bureaucracy.

Williams grasped a truth we still resist: when you ask the state to do spiritual work—teach virtue, form character, define sin—you’re asking the hangman to say grace before pulling the lever.

And yet somehow, in every generation, we send our children into its moral grinder hoping to get prophets out the other side. But Williams wouldn’t be surprised. He’d just shake his head and mutter: “You’re still trying to get figs from thistles.”

Apelbaum’s Switchblade: A Heuristic for a Hostile State
In an age where the line between mistake and malevolence blurs, Apelbaum’s Switchblade offers a necessary edge:

“When evaluating state actions, always attribute them to malice rather than stupidity.”

Where Occam’s Razor favors simplicity and Hanlon’s Razor pleads for incompetence, Apelbaum’s Switchblade cuts through the theater of innocence. It assumes what Roger Williams long suspected: the state doesn’t “accidentally” trample conscience—it does so by design.

This heuristic isn’t cynicism; it’s pattern recognition. It invites us to re frame public policy, historical narrative, and institutional failure not as blunders, but as coordinated attempts to dominate, distract, or destroy.

In a world that still misreads tyrants as clowns and censors as bureaucrats, Apelbaum’s Switchblade restores moral clarity: if it harms you and helps the regime, it wasn’t a glitch—it was the policy.

The Company You Keep: Coke, Cromwell, and Conscience
Williams wasn’t some crazy mystic with a pulpit. He trained under Sir Edward Coke, England’s greatest common-law jurist—the man who first told a king he wasn’t divine. Coke carved into Williams a suspicion of monarchy, a reverence for rights, and a taste for legal knife-fighting.

Later, he corresponded with Oliver Cromwell, the reluctant regicide who temporarily turned England into a republic. Their letters reveal mutual respect, but also deep tension. Williams—ever the absolutist on liberty—warned Cromwell not to mix piety with power.

“Beware the godly magistrate,” he wrote. “He will crucify you with a smile.”
While Cromwell tried to save England through force and prayer meetings, Williams built something quieter but more enduring: a civic order where no one’s conscience could be arrested at gunpoint.

Jefferson Plagiarized Him. Locke Watered Him Down. Only Williams Stood Alone.
Yes, John Locke gets the headlines. Yes, Jefferson gets the statues. But make no mistake: their ideas of tolerance and liberty came wholesale from the Williams warehouse.

Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) is praised as a cornerstone of modern liberalism. But Locke believed Jews had no rights and Catholics were inherently subversive. So much for tolerance.

Jefferson, for his part, lifted the famous “wall of separation” metaphor from Williams, but sanitized it for polite Virginia society. Williams coined that phrase nearly a century earlier—and, unlike Jefferson, he built a government around it.

In Rhode Island, no man could be fined, jailed, or exiled for his beliefs. Not even if he were a Quaker, a Jew, or a naked spiritualist howling at the moon. If you could live in peace, you were welcome.

What the Enlightenment Got Wrong (and Williams Got Right)
Voltaire mocked the clergy. Rousseau worshiped the “general will.” Hume just shrugged and lit a pipe. They cut the chains of the state churches—but they didn’t build anything morally sustainable in their place.

Williams understood something deeper: you can’t extract virtue from legislation. You can’t crowdsource morality through referendum. You definitely can’t teach love and justice from the Department of Education’s slide deck.

Williams knew that moral teaching is not a civic enterprise—it’s a personal struggle. You don’t need an act of Parliament to love your neighbor. You need room, respect, and the fear of G-d

Soul Liberty Is Not a Policy; It’s a Firewall
Williams used the image of a garden and a wilderness. The church is the garden—cultivated, rooted, intentional. The state is the wilderness—thorny, ungovernable, dangerous. The wall that separates them is not just a fire-lane. It’s salvation.

This was not a call for secularism. Williams was no Enlightenment rationalist. He didn’t distrust the state because he thought religion was irrelevant—he did it because he believed religion was too sacred to entrust to sword-wielding bureaucrats.

You can’t baptize the state.
You can only fence it off.

Why You Can’t Outsource Virtue to Bureaucracy
Every few decades, Americans rediscover this the hard way. We hand our children to the school board, our morals to the mayor, and our souls to the surgeon general. Then we wonder why our society tastes like sterilized cardboard marinated in lies.

Williams foresaw this collapse. When you ask the state to teach virtue, you get two outcomes: hypocrisy and tyranny. The virtue is fake. The punishment is real.

Look at any regime that tried to enforce moral purity—from Geneva to Tehran to woke Manhattan—and you’ll see what happens when progressive Harvard mob or mullah politics tries to impersonate virtue.

The result is always the same: gulags, gallows, or gender-neutral mandates written in blood and irony.

Williams vs. the Theocrats of Today
Let’s be honest: Roger Williams wouldn’t survive five minutes on Fox or MSNBC. Too devout for the secular left. Too principled for the synthetic right. Too consistent for anyone running for or in office.

He wouldn’t ban abortion by fiat—he’d choke off the federal blood-money and preach until hearts turned.
He wouldn’t jail drag queens—but he’d defund the school that hosted drag hour for kids, get the FBI to trace the RICO coordination and payment trail linking the school board, NGOs, and political operatives behind it, and then pass the file to the DOJ for prosecution.
He believed in law and order—but not the kind that asks your theology before renewing your gun license.

Williams wouldn’t enforce his beliefs.
He’d defend your right to disagree with them.

The Wilderness Still Howls
Today’s culture war is just an HD reboot. Same script, better sound effects. We’re still debating what the state should teach, how it should punish, and whether it should have morals at all.

But Williams gave us the blueprint in 1636.

You don’t fix the state by giving it a Bible.
You fix the people by getting the state out of their way.

Let them seek G-d—or not. Let them raise children, build temples, publish screeds, or curse the sky—so long as they harm no one.

This isn’t cowardice. It’s courage. The kind that believes truth doesn’t need a badge and a gun to survive.

Legacy: The Invisible Founder
We’ve carved stone for Franklin, marble for Jefferson, bronze for Adams—but Roger Williams gets a footnote, a trivia answer, a plaque near a Mexican food truck in Providence.

And yet, every time a preacher preaches, a skeptic publishes, or a parent teaches a child to pray without permission—Williams lives again.

He didn’t just separate church and state.
He saved them both from each other.

Final Thoughts: The Soul Must Stay Wild
Four hundred years later, and the wolves still circle. Coercion has rebranded. Theologians wear lab coats. School boards preach child castration and porn. The border between freedom and tyranny gets redrawn with every poll and proposition.

But Roger Williams still walks among us—the patron saint of the principled misfit, the architect of soul liberty, the ghost in the machine that keeps whispering:

“Don’t deputize conscience. Don’t ordain power. Don’t strap virtue to a state-issued gun.”

The Desert and the Garden
Beneath the snow, a prophet stood,
With frozen lips and fire for blood.
He raised a wall with trembling hand,
To guard what truth could still withstand.

He saw the state in scarlet dress,
A harlot cloaked in holiness.
Each law it passed, a soul it broke—
Each prayer it mouthed, a dirty joke.

“Let Caesar count his earthly toll,”
He said, “but not the human soul.
The state may tax or build or fight,
But never touch what births the light.”

No judge ordained can shape the skies,
Or speak of heaven’s enterprise.
The cross and sword in one command
Turns holy ground to no man’s land.

He walked with Cromwell, firm yet mild,
And warned him like a wary child:
“The saint who rules with sharpened pen
Will crucify his friends—and then.”

He crowned no king, he built no throne,
But scattered seeds of truth alone.
A conscience free, a sovereign heart—
He gave the hope a place to start.

From Narragansett’s windswept land,
To chapel doors on coastal sand,
His whisper lingers, bold and clear:
Let faith be free, and none should fear.

Let children learn from flame, not rote,
Let parents raise what truth they note.
The state can’t train the soul to sing,
Nor legislate what prophets bring.

So plant the hedge with thorns and grace,
Draw lines no tyrant dares erase.
Not hate, but love shall guide this land—
Where G-d walks free, and free men stand.