Roger Williams: Pious Puritan and Strict Separationist

Roger Williams was an early Puritan thinker who espoused the separation of church and state. His case for this principle was based on an the idea of divine sovereignty. Since the church was universal and mystical in nature, any ties with the state did not make metaphysical sense. Unlike Enlightenment thinkers, Williams based his argument for church-state separation on theocentric rather than anthropocentric grounds. Although the framers of the Constitution were guided by Enlightenment ideas, Williams influenced this document in several ways, including the connection of his thinking with that of John Locke, who provided much of the basis for Enlightenment thought.