Religious liberty is not a secular idea smuggled into Christianity after the fact. It was born from the mind of a devout Puritan who believed the Bible demanded it. Filmmaker Andrew Linn’s documentary Chiesa e Stato: Roger Williams e la fondazione della libertà religiosa makes the case that most Americans — including most Christians — have fundamentally misunderstood where their freedoms came from.
Doug Stuart talks with Linn about why he made the documentary and why the separation of church and state is not an argument against Christianity but an argument made da it. The episode takes on both the secular left’s ownership of religious liberty and the Christian nationalist right’s ambitions to replace it with theocracy.
The History Behind the Separation of Church and State
Persecution Produced Religious Liberty
Religious liberty was not born in a philosopher’s study. It was forged in the lived experience of Christians killing and exiling other Christians over theological differences:
Catholic monarchs persecuted Protestants
Protestant monarchs persecuted Catholics
Puritans in Massachusetts persecuted other Puritans
Roger Williams witnessed this pattern and concluded it was both hypocritical and unscriptural. The Puritans fled to Massachusetts Bay to practice their faith freely, then taxed Baptists to fund Congregationalist churches and banished dissenters. Williams saw the same logic they had fled now wielded by their own hands — which is why a pastor in the documentary says Williams “became too Puritan for the Puritans.”
No Nation Since Israel Has a Theocratic Mandate
The Puritans believed they were God’s new chosen people, seeking to establish a new Hebrew Republic in the colonies. Williams said no. There was one theocracy established by God, and it was ancient Israel. God appeared on Sinai. God gave the law to Moses. No comparable event has occurred since, and no nation has received a comparable mandate. Christians who claim otherwise are projecting political ambitions onto scripture, not reading it.
Williams’s Theological Framework for Church and State
The Two Tables: What Government Can and Cannot Enforce
Williams divided the Ten Commandments into two tables:
First table (Commandments 1–4): Humanity’s relationship to God — worship, idolatry, Sabbath
Second table (Commandments 5–10): Humanity’s relationship to one another — murder, theft, false witness
No civil government since ancient Israel has the authority to enforce the first table. The second table is a legitimate domain for civil law. The separation of church and state is not hostility to religion — it is a constraint on the state derived from scripture itself. Kerry Baldwin made a related point at Freedom Fest 2022: the Christian right tends to want to enforce the first table through law while the Christian left wants to enforce the second. Both get it wrong for the same reason.
The Garden and the Wilderness
Williams’s metaphor was precise: the church is a cultivated garden, hedged against the surrounding wilderness. Tearing down the wall does not improve the wilderness — it destroys the garden. His concern was not just that theocracy makes bad policy. It was what political entanglement does to faith itself. When the church gains coercive power, people conform for political reasons, not spiritual ones. Wolves enter through the breach. Williams watched this happen in England and saw it beginning again in Massachusetts.
Separation Protects Evangelism, Not Just Liberty
Williams learned the Narragansett language. He wrote Native Americans into the Rhode Island charter. His opposition to theocratic enforcement was not indifference to the spread of Christianity — it was a conviction that genuine conversion cannot be coerced. Compelling outward religious conformity through state power does not produce Christians. It produces people who know which beliefs are dangerous to hold openly. The gospel is robust enough to win on its own terms.
What Christians Get Wrong Today
Separation of Church and State Is a Christian Idea
Most Americans trace the phrase to Jefferson’s Danbury Baptist letter of 1802. Williams was making the same argument from biblical premises in the 1630s. His Rhode Island charter invoked the Christian God throughout, stated the colony’s intent to evangelize Native Americans, and still extended religious liberty to Jews, Muslims, and others. A state that cannot coerce faith is not a godless state. It is a state that has understood why coercion produces false converts rather than genuine ones.
You Cannot Legislate Morality
When Christians used the state to ban alcohol, they did not reduce drinking. They created organized crime and eventually failed completely. Gen Z’s declining alcohol consumption is happening right now without any prohibition. Voluntary cultural change is more durable than legally enforced compliance. The question is not whether law reflects morality — it does — but which moral claims are appropriate to enforce through coercion. Williams’s two-table framework is one of the better answers in the Christian tradition.
The Documentary’s Argument Is for the Christian Right
Linn made this film for theologically serious Christians, not against them. He argues the United States is foundationally a Christian nation — but draws a hard line between that claim and theocracy. The argument is not “keep religion out of politics.” It is “your own tradition, read carefully, argues against what you’re proposing.” That is a more honest argument to have, and Williams already made it four centuries ago.
Conclusion: Separation of Church and State — A Christian Argument
Roger Williams did not derive religious liberty from Locke or secular natural rights theory. He derived it from scripture — from the two-table reading of the law, from the conviction that no modern nation is ancient Israel, and from the pastoral belief that coerced faith is not faith at all.
The tradition Williams built has been almost entirely claimed by secularists, while the Christians who should be defending it most vigorously are now trying to dismantle it. Religious liberty did not happen to Christians. A Christian invented it.
Andrew Linn’s Chiesa e stato is 72 minutes and free on Faith Channel, Fawesome TV, YouTube, and RedeemTV.com. churchandstatedoc.com
Risorse addizionali
Letture esterne
John M. Barry, Roger Williams e la creazione dell'anima americana — The preeminent popular history on Williams; discussed at length in this episode.
Tim Hall, Separating Church and State: Roger Williams and Religious Liberty — Written by one of the scholars interviewed in the documentary.
Dio ha ordinato il governo civile, ma ciò non significa che tutti coloro che rivendicano l'autorità governativa siano stati ordinati da Dio per governare.
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Civilmente, agli individui è proibito iniziare aggressioni contro altri. L'immoralità non aggressiva può essere affrontata da entità non civili come la chiesa.
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I cristiani non disobbediscono a 1 Tim 6:10 finché non perseguono il denaro come fine a se stesso. È il amore di denaro proibito, non il semplice accumulo di esso.
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I cristiani non disobbediscono a 1 Tim 6:10 finché non perseguono il denaro come fine a se stesso. È il amore di denaro proibito, non il semplice accumulo di esso.
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Sappiamo che si tratta di una questione complicata e che le persone da entrambe le parti hanno posizioni in buona fede, quindi lasciamo che siano i singoli a decidere.
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In realtà non sappiamo quando inizia la vita, quindi non possiamo sapere quando iniziano i diritti, ecco perché i cristiani possono sostenere l'aborto.
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Storicamente i libertari non hanno trovato una posizione univoca sulla questione dell'aborto e noi sosteniamo che l'aborto viola il principio di non aggressione e pertanto è anti-libertario.
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Dio ha fornito alle persone gli strumenti di cui hanno bisogno per affrontare queste sfide, a partire dai primi indumenti che ha confezionato per Adamo ed Eva con pelli di animali (Genesi 3:21).
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Quando utilizziamo le risorse che Dio ha ritenuto opportuno concederci, dovremmo usarle come amministratori consapevoli di una benedizione divina (Matteo 25:14–30).
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