The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America ed. by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda (review)

Abstract

The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America. Edited by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. 401, Hardcover, $45.00.)Reviewed by J. Kime LawsonThe First Prejudice is a collection of twelve essays by leading historians that reexamine role of religious and persecution in shaping legal and cultural practices of early American colonies. Religion is called the first prejudice in early America because before legal imposition of racially based forms of intolerance, municipal authorities mandated practice of religious customs and often punished nonconformists with violence. Studying history of and in America has typically been domain of legal or church historians focused on court records or sermons, but this volume demonstrates that closer scholarly attention to sources illustrating lived religion, local legal norms, or everyday practices can complicate longstanding assumptions about early American religious history. While most religious histories of early America have stressed big events like English Toleration Act or American Revolution to describe continuity, change, or progress during period, each selection in this volume challenges usefulness of those categories to explain more complex and ambiguous cultural exchanges hiding underneath grander narratives of American religious history.Christopher S. Grenda's and John Corrigan's essays on tolerance and intolerance begin volume proper. Grenda points out that over seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, faith and reason often had a complex and multidimensional relationship in public discourse of American colonial intellectuals, who relied on forms of reasoning rooted in their understanding of Bible rather than Enlightenment secularity to argue their desires for a more tolerant society. Corrigan shows more gruesome side of reasoning, explaining how a variety of early American Christians deployed Hebrew Biblical story recounting Israel's extermination at divine behest of ancient Amalekites as a justification for and violence toward Native Americans. Both essays demonstrate that religious ideology was central to people's choices and behaviors in regard to justifying both and intolerance, even if that ideology was diverse, adaptable, and situational. They disagree about continuity and change in regard to religious influence from Europe, however, insofar as Grenda suggests a formal continuity of religious ideology coming from Continent, while Corrigan notes break between British and more violent American usage of Amalekite rhetoric.Part two has four selections. Ned Landsman addresses lingering question of why Anglican Church never became a powerful religious force in American colonies. Rather than following more traditional explanation that Anglican Church resisted appointing a bishop in American colonies out of fear of igniting anti-imperial sentiments, Landsman shows that factors such as internal Anglican Church restructuring as a result of union with Church of Scotland, anxieties about preserving apostolic succession and other sacred practices without direct oversight, and stubbornness to compete within American denominational style all contributed to Anglican Church's lack of institution-building in American colonies. Landsman also claims that lack of Anglican institutional strength in American colonies led to an informal separation of church and state in practice. Joyce D. Goodfriend compares legal treatment of religious outsiders in New Netherlands with their treatment in Holland, as Dutch are usually cited for pioneering European religious toleration. Peter Stuyvesant's handling of religious outsiders such as Lutherans, Jews, and Quakers was just short of brutal, and religious toleration in Dutch colonies was at best tepid with an uncooperative colonial state authority. …