“As So Many Dead Corpses”: Religious Tolerance from Beyond the Grave

Abstract

“As So Many Dead Corpses”: Religious Tolerance from Beyond the Grave Alison Conway The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic sent me, along with thousands of other readers, to a plague narrative for answers—in my case, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. It’s a novel that I have always loved and that I taught several times in the early years of my career. One reason I liked to teach the novel was the opportunity it afforded for introducing students to Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, a work I studied in graduate school, shortly after its publication. Scarry’s description of pain’s ability to unmake the world illuminated the trauma at the heart of Defoe’s novel and the narrative’s effort to both represent and overcome it. Returning to the novel in 2021, the Journal’s account of pain seems more complicated, in part because I am thinking about it alongside the question of religious tolerance in our own pandemic moment. This time it was Lars Tønder’s Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics that I turned to after re-reading the novel, a work that, unlike Scarry’s, has not been widely taken up by literary critics thinking about pain. For Tønder, a new materialist, pain serves as a starting point for imagining a sensorial mode of tolerance. “How can pain,” he asks, “become part of a desire to belong to a world of deep pluralism?” 1 This question resonates in a moment that contains so much pain—of ongoing loss, grief, and frustration—and is marked by deep political divisions, including those fostered, most aggressively in the United States, by Christian conservatives who refuse public health mandates and the COVID-19 vaccine. The director of the Public Religion Research Institute, Natalie Jackson, reports that a June 2021 poll showed that “white evangelical Republicans were considerably less likely to say they were vaccinated or planning to get vaccinated as soon as possible (53 percent) than Republicans who were not white evangelicals.”2 It seems urgent not to let the views of this group, and others like them, reinforce a sense, among their opponents, that secularism is the guarantor of [End Page 47] collective well-being and that religious feeling stands in the way of progress. As Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and others have pointed out, this idea of an Enlightenment-based secular imperative has reinforced Islamaphobia in the West and been used to justify imperial projects and the persecution of religious minorities around the globe.3 Re-reading early modern texts allows us to think past, or beyond, this religious/secular divide, complicating our historical understanding of religious tolerance and its evolution. Tønder notes how contemporary democratic theory “has screened off many of tolerance’s remainders, making the history of tolerance seem more linear and progressive than it historically has been” (20). Teresa Bejan argues that “the real advantage of consulting the past lies in opening ourselves to the ways in which it challenges our own commitments and assumptions, especially about what it means to be ‘civil’ or ‘tolerant’ today.”4 Defoe proves a particularly fruitful source for investigating literary criticism’s association of secularism with the rise of the novel, and my reading of the Journal confirms what Nancy Armstrong, and others, have observed regarding Defoe’s ability “to write from both sides of the divide between early modern and modern cultures.”5 The Journal, I argue, represents religious tolerance in ways that are markedly different from its representation in Defoe’s other novels, which draw on liberal constructions informed by John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration.6 As David Alvarez and others have observed, Defoe’s commercial interests encourage the export of a generalized Protestantism harnessed to the imperatives of imperialism in the Robinson Crusoe trilogy.7 Protestant norms that are never identified as such masquerade as an ethics of toleration respectful of religious difference. What looks like tolerance of Roman Catholics, for example, turns out to be a transformation of Catholicism into a species of Protestantism. Practices that do not align with Protestant epistemology must be violently expurgated. Anchoring this new global regime is the...