Toleration Research Articles

Religious Persecution and Practical Toleration in England (1500-1640) The Social Context of Tolerance Between Neighbors (Principle and Practice)

Religious Persecution and Practical Toleration in England (1500-1640) The Social Context of Tolerance Between Neighbors (Principle and Practice)

Dissenter Diplomacy: Sub-Diplomatic Efforts in the Making of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1850–1918

ABSTRACT This article considers the efforts of sub-diplomatic actors in building the Anglo-American alliance during the long 19th century. Particular attention is given to the role of Dissenting churches, the use of common heritage, joint building projects, and trans-Atlantic tours as a form of public diplomacy in pursuit of this goal. The ‘Pilgrims’ in particular became a useful device for promoting closer Anglo-American relations – symbolising a common history and common values, civil liberties, the rule of law, and religious toleration, all in a world where these were not common. This brought British and American voices and values closer to many ordinary people, strengthening the increasingly complex and not always visible web linking Britain and the United States, creating personal relationships and group networks, together with a sense of common political values and history.

From Archives to the Classroom: Using Religious Archives to Promote Religious Literacy and Toleration amongst European Young People

From Archives to the Classroom: Using Religious Archives to Promote Religious Literacy and Toleration amongst European Young People

“Want of Zeal for It”: Pierre Bayle on Religious Radicalization

This article argues that Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) is not merely a theorist of religious toleration but also a theorist of religious radicalization. By exploring how religious dissenters experienced religious conformity as a kind of mental and spiritual torture akin to conventional forms of corporeal punishment, I demonstrate that Bayle’s influential defense of toleration and liberty of conscience hinges on his account of the psychological mechanism of religious radicalization. Demands for religious conformity do not convince dissenters of their error but of their lack of zeal for their faith. Bayle’s plea for toleration, more broadly, urges us to reflect on the ways that we invite those who are different from us into dialogue or risk alienating them even further, an urgent concern today as extremist religious and nationalist views are on the rise across the globe.

“A Conscience Rightly Informed”: Puritan Casuistry and the Theological Justifications for Religious Establishment

Abstract In the early modern debates over religious liberty and toleration, religious dissenters often raised the issue of an individual’s conscience as a primary support for disestablishment. Dissenters like Roger Williams contended that establishmentarian policies persecuted tender consciences. God, according to dissenters, had not granted authority over the conscience to civil rulers; thus, religious establishment was both theologically specious as well as politically perilous. Much attention has been given to how religious dissenters discussed the human conscience and its place within the civil society. This essay, however, focuses on how magisterial Protestants developed their theological system of religious establishment in concert with their own understanding of the human conscience. Proponents of establishment utilized their own theology of the conscience as grounds for religious establishment, and this essay seeks to understand how they reconciled their soteriological convictions and their conception of the human conscience with their belief in the magistrate’s authority in matters of doctrine and religion.

Alison Conway. Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750–1820

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Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750–1820 by Alison Conway (review)

Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750–1820 by Alison Conway (review)

Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848. By Scott Berg

Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848. <i>By Scott Berg</i>

John Bunyan in Abolitionist Print Culture

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) was enormously popular in the nineteenth-century United States. This article shows that abolitionists appropriated that text, as well as the reputation and biography of its author, as a guide to their own political action. References to Bunyan and The Pilgrim’s Progress in abolitionist print culture, including newspapers and book-length responses to The Pilgrim’s Progress, reveal that abolitionists saw Bunyan as a virtuous progenitor who helped to legitimate and unify their political movement while representing both political commitment and religious toleration.

A Controversial Debate: The Issue of Religious Tolerance in the Early Chilean Republic (1823-1833)

Between the years 1823-1833, after the War of Independence, Chile had an intensive debate related to the issue of religious toleration, which was conducted in various pamphlets and newspapers, with two major political groups clashing over the subject: Conservatives and Liberals. While the former thought that Chile should not even recognize these practices because it was essentially a Catholic country, the latter wanted to grant a certain recognition to the Protestant practices brought to the country by the Americans and British. Following François-Xavier Guerra, the central thesis of this article states thisdebate expresses a major conflict among two conceptions of modernity.

Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America. By Michael D. Breidenbach. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021. 368 pp. $46.00 cloth.

Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America. By Michael D. Breidenbach. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021. 368 pp. $46.00 cloth.

Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 by Scott Berg (review)

Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 by Scott Berg (review)

The Truth is out There (and also in Here): Taḥqīq as an Investigative Modality in Mughal Culture and Scholarship

Abstract This article offers a brief examination of various uses and senses of the term taḥqīq (ascertaining the truth; investigation; verification) in Mughal intellectual circles in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries. Often contrasted with another term, taqlīd (copying; imitation), taḥqīq could signify different kinds of epistemological commitments – and therefore different kinds of truth-claims – depending on the context in which it was being deployed. Here we examine the ways in which the notion of taḥqīq figured prominently in Mughal debates about religious toleration, in Mughal scholarly culture, and even in Mughal notions of kingship, justice, and statecraft. Along the way, we will also use Mughal ideas about taḥqīq as an opportunity to intervene in larger debates about the nature of global early modernity.

Berlin’s Savoyard Vicar: Religious Skepticism and Toleration in Mendelssohn and Rousseau

While both Mendelssohn and Rousseau were deeply spiritual thinkers whose writings continually reflect a profound belief in a benevolent God, they both still used religious skepticism in order to undermine the logic of religious intolerance. In doing so, these religious thinkers reflect a critical assumption they share with the far less religiously inclined David Hume, namely, that skepticism is a critical tool for the promotion of tolerance. This paper analyses the skeptical and tolerant similarities in Mendelssohn’s and Rousseau’s religious thought. It explores Mendelssohn’s reception of Rousseau, before focusing on Rousseau’s arguments for religious tolerance and showing both how they reflect a skeptical undercurrent and how Mendelssohn uses many similar skeptical arguments for the same purpose. Finally, this analysis will lead to concluding thoughts on the dialectic between skepticism, faith and tolerance in the Enlightenment, and more generally, for skeptical believers ever since.

Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America

Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America

The readmission of the Jews and the power of the civil magistrate: Thomas Barlow on the Jews and natural law, 1655-1656

ABSTRACT This article sheds light upon an important but neglected context in which Thomas Barlow (1608/9–1691) and his contemporaries discussed the readmission of the Jews in 1655–56. Previous studies of readmission have shown how the English perception of the Jews evolved, but few have noticed that contemporaries saw the readmission controversy as part of a larger debate on the limit of the civil magistrate’s power in religious toleration. By recovering the specific political context in 1655–56, in which the idea of natural law played a key role, this article highlights the legal and constitutional problems of admitting the Jews and Barlow’s distinctive intellectual solution to them. Adopting Hugo Grotius’ idea of natural law and Catholic jurists’ legal method, Barlow redefined the Jews’ obligation under natural law and suggested that the civil magistrate could formally admit the Jews.

Clipping for the Commission

This Report from the Field discusses the methodology of “clipping history” developed by the European Union-funded research initiative RETOPEA (Religious Toleration and Peace). This project, launched in 2018, uses the history of religious toleration to stimulate educational and policy-related reflection on contemporary religious coexistence. The article discusses the initial doubts about doing public history within conditions pre-set by the European Commission; the difficulties faced by the academically trained researchers in handling the educational and digital ambitions of the project; and the eventual strategies that the researchers followed to produce sufficiently contextualized “clippings,”—short pieces of historical information that European teenagers could use to reflect on the topic of religious coexistence.

John Locke's Christianity by Diego Lucci

Reviewed by: John Locke's Christianity by Diego Lucci Benjamin Hill Diego Lucci. John Locke's Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 244. Hardback, $99.99. Diego Lucci's John Locke's Christianity is a fabulous work of scholarship—meticulously researched, well argued, and judicious. It should be required reading for everyone interested in John Locke's thought. In the introduction, Lucci aligns himself with John Dunn (The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the "Two Treaties of Government" [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969]), John Colman (John Locke's Moral Philosophy [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983]), and Victor Nuovo (John Locke: The Philosopher as Christian Virtuoso [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017]), who believe that Locke was a "Christian philosopher" whose "theological concerns, interests, and ideas indeed pervade his philosophical, political, and moral thought" (5, emphasis in the original). John Locke's Christianity, however, is not a book that defends that thesis. It is much more focused and does, basically, just what its title advertises—it provides a systemic and detailed analysis of Locke's core Christian beliefs, and a very excellent one at that. The book is structured around two pillars. The first, consisting of chapters 1–3, involves a contextualized analysis of Locke's theological writings, particularly The Reasonableness of Christianity and Adversaria Theologica. This analysis is then used to reconstruct Locke's conception of the fundamentals of Christianity. The second pillar, consisting of chapters 4–6, then uses this reconstruction to explain puzzling features of Locke's engagements with personal identity, the Trinity, and religious toleration. Lucci's reconstruction of the fundamentals of Locke's Christian beliefs are novel, interesting, and compelling. Furthermore, he uncovers details that materially affect the interpretations of Locke's philosophical accounts of persons and religious toleration, so much so that many popular interpretations begin to look strained after reading Lucci's analysis. Philosophers unaccustomed to considering the theological basis of Locke's account of persons or the Christian significance of religious toleration will now need to engage with Lucci's accounts. Locke famously offered a succinct conception of Christianity: to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. Lucci shows that this conception, though economical, was by no means thin. At its core was the idea of a moralist soteriology. The promise of eternal life for those who accepted Jesus as the Messiah (and who also strove to follow the law of nature) was vital to morality, in Locke's eyes, because it was only with such an inducement that depraved humans would have firm reason to try to follow the law of nature. In Locke's eyes, Christianity, and only Christianity, offered this inducement to followers of the laws of faith and the laws of nature because of the resurrection of Christ. Lucci's moralist soteriological understanding of Locke's conception of the fundamentals of Christianity differs significantly, for example, from Nuovo's presentation of it ("Locke's Christology as a Key to Understanding His Philosophy," in The Philosophy of John Locke, ed. Peter Anstey [London: Routledge, 2003], 129–53), in which Nuovo identifies Locke's Christology as "the central and organizing principle of his theology" (129). Lucci also provides an excellent answer to one of the enduring questions about Locke's Christianity: was he a Socinian or an Arminian? Against the common view that he is somewhere between the two by being a bit of both, Lucci argues that Locke was in fact neither a Socinian nor an Arminian; Locke rather maintained a unique, irenic position [End Page 331] that may have overlapped somewhat with Socianism and Arminianism but owed nothing to either. Locke's moralist soteriology, along with some of his other Christian beliefs, look like Socinian and Arminian doctrines, admits Lucci. But many of his other beliefs did not, especially, Lucci says, those concerning original sin, satisfaction, and atonement (96–105). This was because Locke's theological beliefs were formed by neither commitment nor opposition to any particular sect, but rather by his careful, plain, and simple reading of the Gospels (50). Locke had no problem with adopting the views of theologians when their positions were revealed through Scripture...

At Kingdom's Edge: The Suriname Struggles of Jeronimy Clifford, English Subject by Jacob Selwood

Reviewed by: At Kingdom's Edge: The Suriname Struggles of Jeronimy Clifford, English Subject by Jacob Selwood Christian J. Koot At Kingdom's Edge: The Suriname Struggles of Jeronimy Clifford, English Subject. By Jacob Selwood. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2022. 252 pages. Cloth, ebook. In 1707, Jeronimy Clifford, a former Suriname plantation owner, produced an extraordinary appeal for compensation from the English government. Including transcriptions of original documents and Clifford's own interpretations of them, this two-volume manuscript traces the travails of one of many early modern individuals who moved between empires. Only a child when the Dutch conquered English Suriname in 1667, Clifford came of age as an Englishman living in a Dutch colony. As a foreigner, his efforts to maintain his English subjecthood ultimately left him vulnerable to Dutch authorities. By 1691, he was imprisoned, and after his release, he fled the colony, abandoning his property. In At Kingdom's Edge, Jacob Selwood uses Clifford and his petition to examine how "an array of extralegal factors" including warfare, disease, and the social and economic makeup of colonies "shaped subjecthood" (2)—that is, the bond between an individual and their monarch, and the rights and privileges that followed. In this tightly focused study of Clifford, Selwood argues that English subjecthood was constructed not by metropolitan legal discourse and treaty language but instead through daily life at the imperial periphery. In relating the early colonial history of Suriname and Clifford's role in it, Selwood demonstrates that, beginning in the initial days of colonization, the difficulty and deadliness of Suriname's environment meant English settlers adhered to expansive ideas of subjecthood that deviated from metropolitan norms. Barbadian sugar magnates looking to expand and smaller planters looking for cheaper land founded Suriname in the 1650s. When Clifford's family arrived there a decade later, sugar had transformed the colony and more than three thousand enslaved workers were laboring on roughly five hundred plantations. Mortality was high, as those of both European and African ancestry struggled to adapt to the disease environment. Ideas about English subjecthood in Suriname were shaped by local concerns about both the establishment of a slave society and the realities of high mortality. Following the example of their close neighbors on Barbados, the English denied subjecthood to the enslaved to enforce the boundaries of a slave society, even as they departed from English practice and welcomed Sephardic Jews, a decision prompted by the high mortality rate. Their willingness to recognize the subjecthood of Sephardic Jews and to offer religious toleration was tied to the precarious nature of settlement, which prompted [End Page 423] governors to innovate. As Selwood argues, "The result was a peculiarly broad articulation of English subjecthood" (41). When the Dutch conquered Suriname, Clifford's family made the same decision as many Euro-settlers around the Atlantic in this period: they remained under foreign rule so as to best protect their local economic interests. The Dutch conquerors extended generous terms to the English who remained, allowing them to retain their property and dispose of it as they wished. Within a decade, however, most English families had departed, leaving Clifford and roughly fourteen other English residents to grapple with how to maintain their Englishness in a Dutch colony. At first Clifford prospered. As Suriname became more stable and economically successful under Dutch rule, he and his family accrued wealth, and he married advantageously to become the owner of reputedly the "finest" (148) plantation in Suriname.1 Over time, though, consolidating Dutch rule made Clifford and his claims to English subjecthood increasingly precarious. These claims came to a head in a property dispute with his wife, Dorothy Matson, regarding ownership of the plantation, Corcabo, that she brought to their marriage. The dispute over Corcabo was shaped by questions about whether Matson was Dutch or English, as well as if she and Clifford had gotten married in England. Under the English legal concept of coverture, Clifford claimed Corcabo for himself, but Matson resisted, citing the Dutch practice of "joint ownership of marital assets" (165). As Selwood shows, the legal battle that followed, though on its surface about property, was really about subjecthood. Clifford argued...

George Mackenzie of Cromarty's Synopsis Apocalyptica (1708): A New Analysis

This article offers the first detailed analysis of George Mackenzie of Cromarty's most explicitly theological work, the 1708 Synopsis Apocalyptica. It includes critical engagement with the text, consideration of its polemical aims and targets, and comparison to its major influences. It contends that the Synopsis is crucial to understanding Mackenzie's ideas and motivations, revealing for the first time, the religious, eschatological connections between Mackenzie's unionism, monarchism and opposition to deism, atheism and Judaism. The Synopsis betrays more than previously unnoticed Judeophobia on Mackenzie's part; it illustrates that a distinct form of anti-Jewish bigotry which cast Jews as dangerous, cruel oppressors of Christians was present in the British Isles throughout the long seventeenth century. The article therefore cautions against the assumption that the dawn of the eighteenth century was necessarily characterised by increased religious toleration amongst educated elites.