ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

My husband violated our no-gifting tradition this year by leaving a copy of the new Sarah Vowell book out for me on my birthday.  It is called “The Wordy Shipmates” and like everything else that has ever come out of Sarah Vowell, it is highly worth your time.  Why?  Because if you’re a certified American History Lover Yet Ignoramus like I am, it will open up your world of knowledge about Puritans and make you realize how weird and wonderful the Puritans really were.  

So now because of that I have a new Puritan hero, Roger Williams.  If you knew anything about Roger Williams at all, it’s probably that he a) was a Puritan and b) founded Rhode Island.  What your high school history books probably left out was, oh, every single interesting thing about him.  Roger Williams was a difficult, cantankerous religious fanatic with no willingness to compromise himself in any way, no matter how much easier it would have made his life.  

Everybody who looks at this site regularly knows how I generally feel about religious fanatics.  But Roger Williams is so very, very different from most religious nuts.  He was a very rare breed of liberal conservative, if that makes any sense.  It is clear that Sarah Palin would legislate her religious beliefs in a heartbeat if she had the chance to do so.  Roger Williams wasn’t like that.  Despite being one of the most fervently religious people of his era, and I mean, dude was hardcore, he was basically the biggest champion of the separation of church and state.  When he founded Rhode Island the little social compact thingy they made up specifically noted that they would comply with all governing matters “in civil things only”.  

Not that he wouldn’t argue you to death about how wrong your religious point of view was in every way, but as anybody who’s been harangued by the religious before knows, it’s actually rather precious and rare to run across somebody who at least acknowledges that other people’s opinions might be as strongly held and valid (to them) as his own.  It’s also easy to take this attitude about him almost 400 years in the future.  Since nowadays we don’t have to deal with how annoying a person like him would likely be in real life.  He was not exactly a romantic.  

But he believed in racial equality, thought government should have no power to make religious mandates of any type, treated people fairly, and never sold out.  I think Sarah Vowell put it nicely when she said that he is “hard to like, but easy to love”.  It’s so true.  

My ancestors got here in 1604 according to my great grandmother’s extensive genealogical research, but they definitely weren’t Puritans.  Instead, they were with the Dutch East India Company, which probably means they were also slavers.  Since, 17th century?  Dutch?  Hard to imagine what else they were trafficking.  Probably not just cumin.  Anyway.  I don’t know where I’m going with this, and I kind of feel like eating some cold cereal.  Since I don’t know much about the personalities, writings, attitudes, and so on of my Dutch ancestors, it’s hard to imagine them being as interesting as Sarah Vowell has made Roger Williams for me.  But that’s not really their fault.  Reading this makes me wonder about them.  The broad strokes you get in history books really don’t do much for most people unless you’re very good at reading between the lines.  It’s just interesting to think about how these people were probably every bit as interesting, or uninteresting, as the people we know today in real life.  Since history makes them seem like boring witch-burners who ate squash and dried bear meat all the time.  Well.  Or boring Dutch slavers who scrubbed their decks and grew tulips all the time.  Whatever, you know.  

Facebook has this new thing called “pages” it introduced a while back, so that a famous person or a band or just whatever can have a page that people can become fans of.  Since it’s hard to “friend” famous people.  I looked to see if anyone had made one for Roger Williams.  Shockingly, no one had.  

I am now the first and only fan of my Puritan hero Roger Williams on Facebook.  Yeah!