Galanis on Roger Williams and Religious Liberty: Conscience, Civil Jurisdiction and the Constitutional Separation of Church and State

Panagiotis Galanis, National Kapodistrian University of Athens, has published Roger Williams and Religious Liberty: Conscience, Civil Jurisdiction and the Constitutional Separation of Church and State. Here is the abstract.

Roger Williams occupies an exceptional position in the constitutional genealogy of religious liberty. His defence of liberty of conscience was neither a limited plea for indulgence toward dissenters nor a simple extension of toleration within an established confessional order. It rested on a more radical proposition: civil government and religious authority possess different ends, different instruments and different jurisdictions. Because faith cannot be produced by coercion, and because the civil magistrate is entrusted with the preservation of civil peace rather than the salvation of souls, governmental force cannot legitimately be used to impose religious uniformity. Williams therefore developed an argument that joined theological premises to a recognisably constitutional theory of limited public power. This study examines Williams as a legal and constitutional thinker. It places The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience of 1644 within the political and religious conflicts of seventeenth-century England and New England; analyses his distinction between civil and spiritual jurisdiction; reconstructs his conception of liberty of conscience; and assesses the institutional experiment of Providence and Rhode Island. Particular attention is given to the 1663 Rhode Island Royal Charter and to the later American constitutional tradition. The study also considers the relationship between Williams, John Locke and subsequent First Amendment doctrine. The central argument is that Williams contributed something conceptually distinct to the history of religious freedom: not merely toleration by a dominant authority, but a jurisdictional separation designed simultaneously to protect conscience from government and religion from political corruption.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.