Roger Williams
vers 1603-1683 17th century
Liberty of conscience held as a demand of faith, not as its opposite.
Who was Roger Williams?
A Cambridge-trained minister, banished from Massachusetts in 1635 for holding that the state has no business enforcing religion and that the land belonged to the Native nations. He spent the winter among the Narragansett, who took him in and gave him ground. There he founded Providence, guaranteed liberty of conscience to all without exception, and published the first dictionary of a Native American language.
In their own words
Forced worship stinks in God's nostrils.
God requireth not an uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state.
Boast not proud English, of thy birth and blood; thy brother Indian is by birth as good.
Nature knows no difference between Europeans and Americans in blood, birth, bodies, God having of one blood made all mankind.