{"id":153,"date":"2011-01-13T17:21:55","date_gmt":"2011-01-13T17:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/gov-chafee-and-roger-williams.html"},"modified":"2011-01-13T17:21:55","modified_gmt":"2011-01-13T17:21:55","slug":"gov-chafee-and-roger-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/gov-chafee-and-roger-williams.html","title":{"rendered":"Gov. Chafee and Roger Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lincoln Chafee, whose forebears<\/a>
\nmoved to Rhode Island in Roger Williams’ day, made returning to the
\nideals of the Ocean State’s famous founder the keystone of his
\ngubernatorial inaugural address<\/a> Jan. 4.<\/p>\n

Today, I ask all Rhode Islanders to join me in boldly reaffirming Roger
\nWilliams’ vision of a “civil state,” a vibrant, diverse community that
\nis free of political, cultural and ethnic division. For if we rekindle
\nthe vision that created our heritage, there is nothing this state and
\nher people cannot achieve.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Williams was in fact a pretty grouchy guy who wouldn’t join any church
\nthat would have him as a member. But he is rightly famous for his
\ninsistence on liberty of conscience–a stance that put him profoundly at
\nodds with his Puritan neighbors in Massachusetts and Connecticut. His
\nvision of a civil state had to do with keeping the government from
\npushing religion on the citizenry in any way, shape, or form. It was, he wrote<\/a>, contrary to Jesus’ teaching “for the civil state to impose upon the souls of the people a religion, a
\nworship, a ministry, oaths (in religious and civil affairs), tithes,
\ntimes, days, marryings, and buryings in holy ground.”<\/p>\n

Chafee chose to keep faith with this vision by foregoing a public prayer
\nservice on inauguration morning–out of “respect [for] the separation
\nof church and state,” as his spokesman, Michael Trainor, put it in
\nDecember. That explanation caught the attention of the Catholic bishop
\nof Providence, Thomas J. Tobin, who took to his diocesan newspaper to denounce<\/a> such church-state separationism. “By now,” he wrote, “you should be aware that the exact phrase “separation of church
\nand state” isn’t found anywhere in our nation’s Constitution but rather
\nwas a principle that evolved later on.”<\/p>\n

Uh, no. Church-state separation was exactly was Roger Williams pioneered
\nin Rhode Island in the 17th century. Long before Thomas Jefferson,
\nWilliams famously used the phrase “wall of separation” to stress the
\nimportance of keeping the “garden of the church” apart from the
\n“wilderness of the world.” <\/p>\n

Tobin, a Pittsburgh native who has only been in Rhode Island since being
\nelevated to the Providence see in 2005, seems to have spent more time
\nreading his colleague Charles Chaput than pondering the religious
\nhistory of his adopted state. If there’s any separation he’d like, it’s
\nkeeping the garden of his diocese apart from the wilderness of
\nMassachusetts and Connecticut, where same-sex marriage is the law of the
\nland. <\/p>\n

Good luck with that, bish. In his address, Chafee expressed the hope
\nthat Rhode Island would “catch up to her New England neighbors and pass a
\nbill to establish marriage equality.” On Jan. 6 a bill was introduced
\nin the state legislature to do just that. The most recent polling <\/a>indicates
\nthat 59 percent of Rhode Islanders favor same-sex marriage, including
\n63 percent of Catholics when told that this wouldn’t infringe on their
\nchurch’s right to marry whom it chooses.<\/p>\n

Tobin has protested<\/a>
\nthe initiative as “morally wrong and detrimental to the well-being of
\nour State.” Whatever Roger Williams might have thought of his own civil
\nstate instituting same-sex marriage, sure it is that he would have
\nrejoiced in its not doing the bishop’s bidding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lincoln Chafee, whose forebears moved to Rhode Island in Roger Williams’ day, made returning to the ideals of the Ocean State’s famous founder the keystone of his gubernatorial inaugural address Jan. 4. Today, I ask all Rhode Islanders to join me in boldly reaffirming Roger Williams’ vision of a “civil state,” a vibrant, diverse community…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nGov. Chafee and Roger Williams - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/gov-chafee-and-roger-williams.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Gov. Chafee and Roger Williams - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Lincoln Chafee, whose forebears moved to Rhode Island in Roger Williams’ day, made returning to the ideals of the Ocean State’s famous founder the keystone of his gubernatorial inaugural address Jan. 4. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}