With the first Sunday of the Lenten Season comes a reading from the Gospels: The Temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. It was my text this past Sunday and I said nothing new that I haven’t been saying for some twenty years. The life of Roger Williams was my focus point as the former Anglican-Puritan-Baptist turned Seeker and Founder of Rhode Island understood the devilish temptation of Jesus better than most. His insight got him in trouble right away.

Williams was a young man when he left Cambridge, north of London to set sail for Massachusetts. He arrived in Boston and was quickly appointed the pastor of the village church in Salem, Massachusetts. He began preaching right away about a novel idea he had at the time: The state had no right to enforce a particular religion onto its citizenship. And a religion had no right to do the same to the state. This was an outcome of his more foundational belief: That power was a corrupting force – especially for the church. Power would always distort and degrade the way of Jesus, thus it should be treated suspiciously. Williams knew, from Constantine to Charlemagne, from the Crusades to the Inquisition, power in the hands of people who claimed the name of Christ resulted in the most un-Christ-like behavior.

Roger Williams said, “God does not require a uniformity of religion to be enacted or enforced. To enforce uniformity is to deny the very principles of Christianity. It is the greatest occasion of civil war, a raping of the conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus, and makes hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls. Forcing a person to be converted is like compelling an unwilling spouse to enter into a forced bed. It is unnecessary, unlawful, ungodly, and unchristian.”

On September 13, 1635, Massachusetts excommunicated Roger Williams and sought to deport him back to England where he would be assassinated. He was tipped off just hours before the authorities arrived with the blunt words of a friend, “Get thee gone from Salem and do not return.” He escaped into the wilderness where he was taken in by the native tribes of the region, and eventually he purchased from those tribes the land that would become the colony of Rhode Island. Rhode Island became a haven for all kinds of dissidents in the earliest years of the American colonies. The very first Quakers, Jews, Anabaptists, and Baptists came there to escape religious persecution; and while Roger did not agree with all the beliefs of these groups – he still believed that these people had the right – the God-given right – to express their faith according to their own conscience, and not according to the rules of a church, religion, or a government.

But in the aforementioned wilderness Williams had an insight: Communities of faith were like gardens, he said. Civil power, on the other hand, was what he called the wilderness. “Plant a garden in the wilderness. But never open the garden to the wilderness – the garden would be overrun by the briars and brambles of the empire.” That is, the church would become compromised – exchanging mercy, justice, and humility – for status, compliance, and arrogance. By cozying up to the powers that be, the church might think, “This is great! We can REALLY make a difference in the world now!” But the difference is made in the church; as a power-holding, power-wielding church ALWAYS becomes a manipulator and an oppressor – ALWAYS.

Incredibly, when I first started writing columns and books back at the turn of the century (I love how vintage that sounds), my first website was named, “Leaving Salem,” inspired by Roger Williams. Even then, in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, I felt the fearful, terrifying pull of Christian Nationalism attempting to wield the sword of Caesar for the sake of Christ. That pull has only intensified over the decades, thus I am again reminded of Williams’s greatest rebuttals. When John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts wrote to his friend Roger begging him to leave the native tribes and come home, Roger responded, “I cannot; for I feel safer down here among the Christian savages…than I do among the savage Christians.”

It is power that leads to savagery. Corrupting, controlling, contaminating power. On this count history does not lie. For there is simply no better opportunity to oppress and persecute people than when it is done in the name of God. Paraphrasing the late Tony Campolo: Joining power with the church is like mixing horse manure with ice cream. It works out fine for the horse manure, but not so much for the ice cream.