religious toleration
Rhode Island founder Roger Williams believed in religious toleration. Williams (1603-1683) founded the Rhode Island colony after being banished from Massachusetts in 1636 because of his views. He advocated keeping church and state separate. Rhode Island became a safe place for various religious dissenters and minorities to find a place to exist peacefully -- Baptists, Quakers, Jews and other religious minorities. Years later, when colonial America became the United States of America and the US Constitution was being written, Roger Williams idea of maintaining a “wall of separation” between church and state influenced the framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.