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The Bloudy Tenant of Persecution
for Cause of Conscience
Classics of Religious Liberty 2 by Roger Williams (1603-1683)
edited by Richard Groves; historical introduction by Edwin S. Gaustad
Now available to a new generation of seekers and strugglers
Roger Williams (1603-1683) was born in England, educated at Pembroke College and Cambridge University, and ordained as minister in the Church of England. During his first parish duties in England, Williams had met and worked with such eminent Puritans as John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and Oliver Cromwell, who influenced him in his conversion to Calvinism. Chafing at the lack of religious freedom under King Charles I, and with his call to ministry in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, Williams and his wife left England. Now he is remembered as an early American defender of religious liberty and the founder of Rhode Island.
Like others before him, Williams advocated reform within his own faith community, but for his efforts was turned out of his own church. Unlike some reformers before him, Williams eventually became a Separatist seeking a complete break from the Church of England. For this reason, he was tried, convicted, and banished from Massachusetts in 1635.
While in England during 1643 seeking a royal charter for the colony of Rhode Island, Williams published the first of a series of pamphlets setting forth his views on religious liberty and church-state relations—The Bloody Tenant of Persecution.
The tenets espoused by Williams, especially as regards relationships between religion and politics and religious toleration, are as valid for the ongoing struggle today as in the mid-seventeenth century. Now for a new generation of seekers and strugglers, Williams's seminal exposition of this "cause of conscience" is available in this reader-friendly edition.
Editor Richard Groves is (since 1985) pastor of Wake Forest Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Titles of Related Interest
A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity
Richard Sibbes: Puritanism and Calvinism in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England
Richard Greenham: The Portrait of an Elizabethan Pastor
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