Which Christianity? The Pentagon Just Found Out What Rhode Island Already Knew.

Part 2 of Not a Christian Nation Series

Jun 09, 2026

Every time I open the newspaper, I’m like — here we go again.

When I read the Pentagon memo about updating its list of religious affiliations, I was already working on this piece about the founding of Rhode Island. How serendipitous.

You see, people have been arguing about religion on this continent for at least 400 years. Not just about which religion counts, but about what the right beliefs of the right religion are. And that’s what showed up in the headlines this week.

Military service members can now choose from only 31 official religious affiliation codes — down from over 200. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth reduced the list through a May 20 memo, eliminating approximately 180 minority religious, spiritual, and secular designations. Gone are atheists, humanists, pagans, Wiccans, Druids, deists, Unitarian Universalists, and many others.

That last category is worth pausing on. Unitarian Universalists and Deists were among the belief traditions represented by signers of the Declaration of Independence. The founders themselves would not qualify for official recognition under Hegseth’s new administrative system — meaning chaplains planning religious support for their units would have no data on those service members’ needs. The Pentagon says service members can still write whatever faith they choose on their dog tags. What they can’t do is have that faith officially recognized in the system that determines how chaplain resources get allocated.

And Hegseth, in keeping with the beliefs of his own church — the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — did not list the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a Christian option. His church considers LDS a cult. After Republican lawmakers called President Trump about this, the Pentagon walked it back — not by adding LDS as Christian, but by removing the Christian label from everyone else.

Utah Senator Mike Lee posted a video saying: “I find this offensive, not just because that happens to be my faith and not just because it happens to be the faith of tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel, but it’s also just repugnant to any sense of decency, any sense of our common heritage and our common belief that the government needs to not weigh in on doctrinal disputes between various religious denominations.”

Senator Lee is right that the government shouldn’t weigh in on doctrinal disputes between denominations. The establishment clause of the First Amendment says exactly that. It’s worth noting that it applies to all religions — not just the ones his party disagrees with.

This comes just two months after Hegseth said the military chaplain corps was “infected by political correctness and secular humanism.”

All of this — which religion counts, which ones don’t, who gets to decide, who gets services and who doesn’t — goes back more than 400 years. To the moment the British started colonizing this continent.

I write like a journalist because that’s how I was trained. I have a personal interest in colonial history because I am verifiably descended from Pilgrims, Puritans, and Quakers — and they agreed on very little. I know how to do this work because my undergraduate degrees are in history and art history and my master’s is in education. And I’ve been deconstructing my own faith in different seasons over the course of at least 20 years.

I have spent the past month making videos about the thirteen original colonies. Christian nationalists love to say we were founded as a Christian nation. One of the ways I push back against that is by pointing out that on July 4th, 1776, when those colonies declared independence from Britain, it was a really big deal — because those colonies were not united. Every single one of them was founded primarily for business interests, and some had religious interests as well, but none of them were the same. And I already hear the pushback: well, at least they were all Christian.

What’s happening right now with Hegseth and the Pentagon is a perfect example of why that argument doesn’t hold. He didn’t want to list the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as Christian in his updated religious coding system. The reason is straightforward — his own church believes LDS is a cult.

When Republican lawmakers got mad and called President Trump, the Pentagon’s response wasn’t to add LDS as Christian. It was to remove the Christian label from everyone else altogether.

That’s not a solution. That’s the same non-answer Roger Williams got in 1636 when he asked the same question: who gave the government the authority to decide which religion is correct? Massachusetts Bay Colony couldn’t answer it. So they banished him into a blizzard instead.

The Pentagon just did the same thing. They couldn’t answer the question. So they removed the label and called it streamlining.

Colony Number Seven: Rhode Island

Rhode Island was the seventh colony — right in the middle of the series. And it might be the most important one.

Because Rhode Island was a haven for religious dissenters — the people every other colony was executing, banishing, and jailing. Quakers. Baptists. Jews. Anabaptists. If you believed the wrong thing anywhere else in colonial America, Rhode Island was where you went.

It was one of the earliest colonies run by a woman. Imagine being a woman in the 1630s and getting to be in charge of anything.

You know Roger Williams founded it. You probably don’t know that his wife Mary ran it.

Who Was Roger Williams?

Roger Williams was born around 1603 in the Smithfield district of London. We say “around” for two reasons: his birth records were destroyed when St. Sepulchre Church burned in the Great Fire of London in 1666, and Williams himself gave contradictory information about his age throughout his life. We know his ideas well enough that they became a constitutional amendment. We just don’t know exactly when he was born.

His father, James Williams, was a merchant tailor — and in 1600s London that title meant something specific. James had been formally admitted as a Freeman of the Merchant Taylors’ Company in 1587, one of the two most powerful trade guilds in the city. That guild membership meant civic standing and connections in London’s commercial establishment. It is almost certainly how a boy from Smithfield came to the attention of Sir Edward Coke.

Roger grew up in Smithfield — the same district where heretics were burned at the stake publicly. He was about nine years old when Bartholomew Legate was burned there in 1612 for his religious beliefs. He almost certainly witnessed it.

As a teenager, Roger came to the attention of Sir Edward Coke — one of the most brilliant lawyers in England, a former Chief Justice. Coke enrolled him at Charterhouse School in London. Williams had an extraordinary gift for languages — Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Dutch, and French — which earned him a scholarship to Pembroke College at Cambridge University, where he graduated in 1627.

At Cambridge he became a Puritan. He took holy orders in the Church of England — meaning he was officially ordained as an Anglican minister. But he was already pulling away. By the time he left Cambridge he was deeply uncomfortable with the Church of England and everything it represented.

After Cambridge he became a chaplain to a wealthy family in Essex. On December 15, 1629, he married Mary Barnard at the Church of High Laver in Essex. Mary was the daughter of Richard Bernard — a prominent Puritan preacher and author. She knew exactly what she was signing up for.

By 1630 Williams had concluded that the Church of England was beyond reform. He became a Separatist — not a Puritan who wanted to change the church from within, but someone who wanted nothing to do with it at all. He and Mary sailed for Boston, arriving February 5, 1631.

They had no children yet. That would come later — six of them, born in the New World. The first, a daughter, they named Mary. Another they named Freeborn. One they named Providence.

The names tell you everything about what Roger and Mary Williams believed they were building.

Too Radical for the Radicals

Roger Williams arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony already convinced that he wanted nothing to do with the Church of England. That put him immediately at odds with the Puritans surrounding him — men and women who had crossed the same ocean for religious reasons, but whose goal was to reform the Church of England from within, not abandon it entirely. Massachusetts offered Williams a ministry position almost immediately. He turned it down flat.

He and Mary made their way south to Plymouth, where the Pilgrims had done what Williams believed was right — separated completely from the Church of England, no half measures. Williams felt at home there. For a while.

The trouble started, as it often did with Roger Williams, over land. He believed the indigenous people of this continent deserved to be compensated for it. The Pilgrims had a king’s charter. As far as they were concerned, the king’s charter was all the authority they needed.

Consider what that means for a moment. William Brewster — the Pilgrims’ own spiritual leader, and my verified ancestor — had been dismissed from his job and imprisoned in England because his religious beliefs differed from the crown’s. When the Scrooby congregation first tried to flee to Holland they were arrested at the docks. Their captain had betrayed them. They tried again the following year and finally made it. They spent twelve years in Holland before deciding to make the crossing to the New World. They had endured persecution, poverty, and exile — all because they believed they had a right to worship according to their own conscience.

And then they told Roger Williams that the Narragansett people didn’t deserve to be paid for their land.

The persecuted became the persecutors. It is a very old story.

Williams left Plymouth and returned to Salem. He kept preaching. He kept writing. He kept saying, out loud, the thing that Massachusetts Bay Colony did not want said: that the government had no authority over matters of conscience and religion. In October 1635, the General Court convicted him of sedition. The fourth charge in the actual conviction record reads: that the civil magistrates’ power extends only to the bodies and goods of men, not to their consciences.

He was formally banished from the colony for saying the government had no business in religion.

But here is where the sequence gets interesting — because it is backwards from what you would expect. They convicted him first, then gave him a reprieve. Winter was coming and Williams was ill, so the court allowed him to remain until spring on one condition: stay quiet. Stop sharing your opinions.

He could not do it.

By December, word reached the court that Williams had been meeting privately with about twenty people who planned to follow him to Narragansett Bay and start their own settlement. Massachusetts decided the infection — their word, not mine — was spreading. In January 1636 they sent armed soldiers to his home in Salem to arrest him and put him on a ship back to England permanently.

That is when John Winthrop warned him. The governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony — the same man who had clashed with Williams for years — sent a private message: the soldiers are coming.

Williams said goodbye to Mary and their daughters and walked into a January blizzard. Fifty-five miles through the wilderness. He later wrote that for fourteen weeks he and his companions did not know what bread or bed meant. He survived because Massasoit and the Wampanoag took him in — the same people who had kept the Pilgrims alive a decade earlier.

This was not a desperate fugitive stumbling through the snow. This was a Cambridge-educated man who had spent five years learning the Narragansett language and trading with Native communities along the coast. He was the most fluent Englishman in America in the Algonquin language. He knew exactly where he was going and who would shelter him.

Soul Liberty — and the Woman Who Made It Possible

Williams purchased land directly from the Narragansett and founded Providence. He built his colony on a principle that had never been tried before in the New World — that government had no business deciding matters of religion, because no one could know for certain which faith was the true one. He called it soul liberty.

Then he sailed back to England. Twice. Because without a royal charter, Massachusetts could simply absorb his colony and everything he had built would disappear. On the two-month voyage he wrote down everything he had learned about Narragansett language and culture. Friends in England urged him to publish it. It became A Key into the Language of America — the first comprehensive study of a Native American language ever published in English.

Written on a ship. By a man trying to save his colony.

The most radical religious dissident in colonial America still needed the king’s permission to exist.

While he was gone — both times — Mary ran Providence. The town turned to her when they needed to verify the original land agreement with the Narragansett. She negotiated. She managed. She held it together. He got the charter. He got the credit. She got a footnote, if that.

His death at eighty went mostly unnoticed. It was the American Revolution that made him a hero — when the founders looked back at what he had built and understood that soul liberty deserved a constitutional amendment.

We call it the First Amendment.

Same Question. Four Hundred Years Apart.

We were not founded as a Christian nation. We were founded as a nation where people had the freedom to worship differently than others — or not worship at all. And that didn’t happen by accident. It happened in 1776 after 170 years of colonies executing people, banishing people, imprisoning people, and stripping people of their land and livelihoods over religion. The founders didn’t leave Christianity out of the Constitution because they were hostile to faith. They left it out because they had read the fine print on what happens when government decides which religion is correct.

Roger Williams asked that question in 1636. He got banished into a blizzard for it.

Pete Hegseth tried to answer it in 2026. He removed the label and called it streamlining.

Same question. Same non-answer. Four hundred years apart.

Read the fine print.

Go Deeper

History is always free here. If this piece found you at the right moment — share it with someone who needs it.

If you want to go deeper, the community is below. This summer I’m running a six-week course — Not a Christian Nation — on Tuesdays beginning June 16 at 7 p.m. EST. We’ll go colony by colony, founder by founder, amendment by amendment. Paid subscribers get full access.

Paid subscribers can also join our Sunday night book study. Our next book starts this Sunday - The Power Worshippers. This begins June 14 at 7 p.m. EST.

Sources & Notes

Pentagon memo and religious code changes

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, May 20, 2026 memo on religious affiliation codes, signed by Undersecretary Anthony Tata. Cuts 211 codes to 31. Reported by Military.com, Religion News Service, NBC Philadelphia, Task & Purpose, The Wild Hunt, IBTimes UK, Fox News.

Key detail: memo explicitly states changes do not affect what service members may list on dog tags. Changes affect administrative data collection and chaplain resource planning only.

LDS and the walkback

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) video statement, June 7, 2026. Rep. Mike Kennedy (R-UT) statement via CNN. Pentagon walkback reported June 8, 2026 — Christian label removed from all categories rather than LDS added.

Hegseth’s church: Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Church position on LDS documented in their official statements.

Founders and removed faith categories

Unitarian Universalists and Deists among belief traditions of Declaration of Independence signers. Reported by IBTimes UK citing Military.com. Note: Unitarians and Universalists were separate groups at the time of the founding.

James Williams and the Merchant Taylors’ Company

James Williams admitted free of the Merchant Taylors’ Company by servitude, April 7, 1587. Will of James Williams, September 7, 1620, describes him as “citizen and merchant tailor of London.” Sources: WikiTree (Williams-1399), Geni.com genealogical records citing guild archives. Listed as approved Jamestowne Society ancestor.

Bartholomew Legate

Burned at the stake in Smithfield, London, March 18, 1612 — last person burned in London for religious beliefs. Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica; Past Tense London history blog.

Roger Williams conviction record

General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony, October 1635. Fourth charge: “That the civil magistrates power extends only to the Bodies and Goods and outward state of man.” Source: celebrateboston.com/history/ri/roger-williams-banished.htm reproducing original conviction charges.

A Key into the Language of America

Roger Williams, 1643. First comprehensive study of a Native American language published in English. Written during Williams’ return voyage to England for a charter. Sources: National Park Service Roger Williams Memorial; American Antiquarian Society.

Mary Williams

Mary Barnard married Roger Williams December 15, 1629 at Church of High Laver, Essex. Ran Providence during Roger’s two trips to England. Town relied on her recollection to verify original Narragansett land agreement. Sources: National Park Service Roger Williams Memorial; New England Quarterly scholarship.

William Brewster

Dismissed from postmaster position at Scrooby in 1607 because of Separatist activities. Imprisoned and fined in York. Congregation arrested on first escape attempt to Holland in 1607; successfully fled in 1608. Sources: Find a Grave (General Society of Mayflower Descendants record); FamilySearch; Pilgrim Hall Museum.

Lindsay Winslow Brown

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