Accused seemingly relentlessly of everything from (participating in) genocide through to religious tyranny to attempting to set up another theocracy in the image and likeness of ancient Israel...
I must protest, especially on the first - by far the most significant and libellous - count...
for my understanding is that their supposed ill-treatment of America's indigenous/native population has been highly exaggerated, if not oftentimes fabricated fullstop...
And their views on religious liberty were pretty well impeccable, though admittedly and regrettably they, like so many of their (post-Reformation) Protestants, were so often not willing to extend the selfsame religious and even civil liberties to others (of differing Christian denominations as well as non-Christian religions in general) that they were so zealous in championing for themselves...
Yet as one far-seeing much-published Christian author has well stated, those newly emerging from great and deep spiritual darkness do not all at once see/perceive everything in the bright light of the midday sun...
And as (in paraphrase) said another, the Pilgrim father Roger Williams, of the new colony of Rhode Island, also quoted in Ellen Gould White's seminal, epochal & classic The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan (known as Cosmic Conflict), expressed things so very thoughtfully and farsightedly:
We vow before our God to accept and follow all the additional light our gracious God may well see fit to shed upon our path(way) in times to come...
...for it simply cannot be that having lately emerged from such midnight darkness [as above referred to] that all additional duties and obligations, rights and privileges pertaining to our high estate as Christians can yet have been fully revealed to us...
