Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism
Chris Beneke
Abstract
Drawing on pamphlets and broadsides, newspaper exchanges, document collections, personal diaries, church records, and legislative journals, this book engages the question of how early Americans learned to live amid a great diversity of beliefs and modes of worship. It begins by explaining how the right of private judgment gained the status of an unquestioned assumption, and then recounts how the print trade expanded the meaning of this right, and a series of religious revivals transformed it. Beyond Toleration chronicles the subtle changes in public language and social behavior that occurred a ... More
Drawing on pamphlets and broadsides, newspaper exchanges, document collections, personal diaries, church records, and legislative journals, this book engages the question of how early Americans learned to live amid a great diversity of beliefs and modes of worship. It begins by explaining how the right of private judgment gained the status of an unquestioned assumption, and then recounts how the print trade expanded the meaning of this right, and a series of religious revivals transformed it. Beyond Toleration chronicles the subtle changes in public language and social behavior that occurred as official persecution ceased and social institutions became integrated. It shows how toleration first became law and then became irrelevant as religious establishments crumbled and an ambiguous concept called religious liberty triumphed. It demonstrates how the assumption that dissenting faiths were merely permissible gave way to the conviction that a variety of faiths deserved equal treatment. In the end, Beyond Toleration explains how Americans learned to live with differences in matters of the highest importance to them-and how they found a way to articulate these differences civilly.
Keywords:
religion,
liberty,
pluralism,
United States,
eighteenth century,
persecution,
belief,
churches,
diversity
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2006 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195305555 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2006 |
DOI:10.1093/0195305558.001.0001 |
