IN PROVIDENCE ISLAND as in all puritan colonies religion functioned both as a binding force and as a source of disruption and controversy. Like its contemporary, Massachusetts Bay, the colony was founded as the nucleus of a great colonial experiment in the protection and extension of reformed Protestantism in the face of a hostile English government seemingly intent on returning the nation to some form of Roman Catholicism. Religious goals continued to play a major part in the founders' thinking throughout the settlement's existence until the grandees were distracted by ecclesiastical issues at home with the meeting of the Long Parliament. The leading figures among the settlers were always concerned to achieve a fulfilling Christian life in their little island. This quest led them by a tortuous path through the same issues that troubled old and New England: toleration of dissent, the role of the laity in church governance and worship, and the relationship of religious and civil authority.

These were troubling issues because colonization offered unprecedented opportunities for free expression and for unfettered construction of religious societies. Historians of colonial America have assumed that Massachusetts Bay's New England Way, which strictly controlled religious expression and conferred church membership only on those judged to be “visible saints” by the congregations while restricting voting and office holding to church members, represented the fullest expression of the system all puritans would have chosen. The experience of Providence Island offers evidence that not only did mainstream English puritans not choose such a link between sainthood and political rights, with the enormous power it conferred on the religious arm, but many saw the Massachusetts experiment as dangerously deviant.