Today in History—October 9: Roger Williams Banished for “Newe & Dangerous Opinions”

Today in 1635, the Massachusetts Bay Colony banished a dangerous, radical thinker. His crime? Preaching an idea that would become enshrined in the United States Constitution over 150 years later.

Meet Roger Williams: a Puritan preacher who fled religious persecution in England for freedom in North America. In 1631 he and his wife, Mary, arrived in Boston, where they hoped to find a like-minded community of exiles who shared his rejection of the Church of England.

But the colonists Williams encountered were not especially like-minded—no matter how many times he moved between settlements. Williams believed in the total rejection of the Church of England; his neighbors in Boston did not. Williams believed Native Americans owned the land they lived on; his neighbors in Plymouth did not. Williams believed the government shouldn’t weigh in on matters of religion; his neighbors—well, actually, just about everyone else—did not.

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The case of “Roger Williams v. his neighbors” came to a head in Salem, where Williams was working as a pastor. (Don’t worry: He’d be long gone by the time the witch trials started.) You can read the official complaint in a record from the Massachusetts Bay Colony court: “Mr. Roger Williams, one of the elders of the church of Salem, hath broached & dyvulged dyvers newe & dangerous opinions…the said Mr. Williams shall depte out of this jurrisdiccon within sixe weekes.”

In plain English: He had to go.

Rather than be deported to England, Williams fled. And in 1636, after purchasing a parcel of land from the Narragansett people, he founded a town of his own: a safe haven where residents, be they Anabaptists, Catholics, Quakers, or otherwise, could worship as they chose. Providence—named for God’s guidance—would become the future capital of Rhode Island.

Eventually, Williams’s ideas were no longer “newe.” In 1791 his arguments were immortalized in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”