Join Park Rangers from the Roger Williams National Memorial at the bottom of Steeple Street at Canal Street for an interactive experiment on freedom and self-expression.

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More than 300 years ago a fiery Christian preacher believed that the wall of separation between Church and State was essential for all other liberties. His ideals, incorporated into the Rhode Island Charter of 1663, laid the foundation for the laws that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would eloquently affirm in this nation’s defining documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. This fiery Christian preacher’s name is Roger Williams.

Roger Williams was born in London, England about 1603. He attended Pembroke College at Cambridge University and graduated in 1627. His increasingly radical views on Puritanism got him into trouble with the Church of England. This was a dangerous time in England to be a religious trouble maker so Roger left England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Roger Williams and his wife Mary arrived in Boston in 1631.

Soon Williams got into trouble again—this time with the Puritans in Boston. Williams believed each person should follow his or her own conscience, that the government had no jurisdiction over spiritual matters and that the Indians, not the king of England, owned the land here in New England. On October, 1635, Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his beliefs. He was supposed to return to England but instead fled to the wilderness. With help from the native Wampanoag and Narragansett Williams survived the winter and in the spring of 1636 established Providence as a “…shelter for persons distressed of conscience.”

“I having made covenant of peaceable neighborhood with all the Sachems and natives round about us, and having in a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress, called the place Providence. I designed that it might be a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.”

The status as a refuge for those persecuted because of their beliefs was formalized by the Charter of 1663.  “…to hold forth a lively experiment, that a most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained, … with a full liberty in religious concernments; …that no person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be anyway molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinion in matters of religion, …”

The colony that began with Roger Williams and the settlement at Providence was the first in the New World to guarantee freedom of worship for all.

On Saturday, August 28th, WaterFire and the Roger Williams National Memorial invite you to express your own thoughts on this 380 year legacy of freedom in an exciting new digital format. 

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For more information on park programs, please contact Park Ranger Sparkle Bryant by phone at 401.521.7266 or by email at sparkle_bryant@nps.gov.

For more information about Roger Williams National Memorial, please visit http://www.nps.gov/rowi