The Origins of Church and State, Disillusioned?

The relentlessly bandied claim of the separation of "church and state" goes back farther than the Founding Fathers. But what happens when the momentous, legendary origins turn out to be far less momentous and legendary than political pundits would care to guess?

From grammar school on, children are taught from their texts in history that the Pilgrims (or more rarely, Puritans) fled England for North America during the 17th century. Motivations include the rampant persecution of Puritans by King James VI and I. Other motivations include boredom and allegedly, that their iconic buckled shoes were on too tight. However, information regarding any actual, state mandated, persecution of the Puritans/Separatists who fled to Holland and then to North America during the 17th century is inconclusive.

Furthermore, many of the proponents of the Separatist/Puritan movement were strong proponents (redundantly) of the separation of church and state, namely Roger Williams, a distinguished Cambridge alumnist, cunning linguist according to the April 1955 issue of The Jewish Quarterly Review, and good lad all round. This, provided unless church and state were not speaking the same language, a language that favored their belief. A language that the State apparently had no intention of learning even enough to ask where the restroom was. (Latin, perhaps?)

King James VI and I regarded actual persecution of people (the nasty kind that results in the burning of four Quakers in Massachusetts) as "one of the infallible signs of a false church." Noting my previous parenthesized sentence, it would seem the only "false church" and persecutors were the original colonists of New England, as the Quaker burning did far more than spoil one's oatmeal, but instead routed them to Rhode Island.

It would appear, most especially based on the accounts of William Bradford, that their motivation to retreat to the "New World" was based on fear of cultural extinction. That same fear is the only parallel to be found today with our own times culturally; simple, narrow-minded fear of change. On speculation from this writer, a dash of sexual repression may well also be the case, however undocumented.