Give Me that Old Time Irreligion

Last December, when Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee confronted critics who accused him of kowtowing to political correctness by tagging the blue spruce in the statehouse as not a “Christmas tree” but a “holiday tree,” he justified himself in the name of Roger Williams. In doing so, Chafee not only invoked the founder of his state but struck a blow for what many people believe to be the true spirit of American liberty, appealing to forbearance over bigotry, freedom over tyranny. The quarrel over how far the public observance of Christmas ought to reach in the United States has become an annual rite of the media, though as John M. Barry shows in his biography-cum-treatise, “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul,” the seeds even of this seasonal scuffle were sown by the earliest settlers of New England.