The Emergence Of Religious Toleration In Eighteenth Century New England

This book examines the life and work of the Reverend John Callender (1706-1748) within the context of the emergence of religious toleration in New England in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a relatively recent endeavor in light of the well-worn theme of persecution in colonial American religious history. New England Puritanism was the culmination of different shades of transatlantic puritan piety, and it was the Puritan’s pious adherence to the Covenant model that compelled them to punish dissenters such as Quakers and Baptists. Eventually, a number of factors contributed to the decline of persecution, and the subsequent emergence of toleration. For the Baptists, toleration was first realized in 1718, when Elisha Callender was ordained pastor of the First Baptist Church of Boston by Congregationalist Cotton Mather. John Callender, Elisha Callender’s nephew, benefited from Puritan and Baptist influences, and his life and work serves as one example of the nascent religious understanding between Baptists and Congregationalists during this specific period. Callender’s efforts are demonstrated through his pastoral ministry in Rhode Island and other parts of New England, through his relationships with notable Congregationalists, and through his writings. Callender’s publications contributed to the history of the colony of Rhode Island, and provided source material for the work of notable Baptist historian, Isaac Backus, in his own struggle for religious liberty a generation later.

Numerous studies have analyzed the New England Puritan persecution of dissenters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This book examines the emergence of religious toleration by revisiting the circumstances leading to the first ordination of a Baptist by a Congregationalist in 1718. This event prefigured the work of John Callender (1706-1748), Baptist pastor and historian, whose life and work contributed to religious toleration in New England in the years leading up to the First Great Awakening in America.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

First published in 2006. This book is a study of the political struggles over the repeal of laws restricting or penalizing religious minorities in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and of the opinions and ideas expressed in the controversies surrounding these struggles.

Religious intolerance, so terrible and deadly in its recent manifestations, is nothing new. In fact, until after the eighteenth century, Christianity was perhaps the most intolerant of all the great world religions. How Christian Europe and the West went from this extreme to their present universal belief in religious toleration is the momentous story fully told for the first time in this timely and important book by a leading historian of early modern Europe. Perez Zagorin takes readers to a time when both the Catholic Church and the main new Protestant denominations embraced a policy of endorsing religious persecution, coercing unity, and, with the state's help, mercilessly crushing dissent and heresy. This position had its roots in certain intellectual and religious traditions, which Zagorin traces before showing how out of the same traditions came the beginnings of pluralism in the West. Here we see how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers--writing from religious, theological, and philosophical perspectives--contributed far more than did political expediency or the growth of religious skepticism to advance the cause of toleration. Reading these thinkers--from Erasmus and Sir Thomas More to John Milton and John Locke, among others--Zagorin brings to light a common, if unexpected, thread: concern for the spiritual welfare of religion itself weighed more in the defense of toleration than did any secular or pragmatic arguments. His book--which ranges from England through the Netherlands, the post-1685 Huguenot Diaspora, and the American Colonies--also exposes a close connection between toleration and religious freedom. A far-reaching and incisive discussion of the major writers, thinkers, and controversies responsible for the emergence of religious tolerance in Western society--from the Enlightenment through the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights--this original and richly nuanced work constitutes an essential chapter in the intellectual history of the modern world.

In many ways, religion was the United States' first prejudice—both an early source of bigotry and the object of the first sustained efforts to limit its effects. Spanning more than two centuries across colonial British America and the United States, The First Prejudice offers a groundbreaking exploration of the early history of persecution and toleration. The twelve essays in this volume were composed by leading historians with an eye to the larger significance of religious tolerance and intolerance. Individual chapters examine the prosecution of religious crimes, the biblical sources of tolerance and intolerance, the British imperial context of toleration, the bounds of Native American spiritual independence, the nuances of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, the resilience of African American faiths, and the challenges confronted by skeptics and freethinkers. The First Prejudice presents a revealing portrait of the rhetoric, regulations, and customs that shaped the relationships between people of different faiths in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. It relates changes in law and language to the lived experience of religious conflict and religious cooperation, highlighting the crucial ways in which they molded U.S. culture and politics. By incorporating a broad range of groups and religious differences in its accounts of tolerance and intolerance, The First Prejudice opens a significant new vista on the understanding of America's long experience with diversity.

The historiography of church-state relations in America and Europe remains a live cultural, religious, and political issue on both sides of the Atlantic. Even more, current political invocations of history illuminate the need for a thoroughly trans-Atlantic approach to the history of church-state relations in the modern West. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the formative period for modern church-states relations we see vividly the complex interrelationship of developments from England, France, and America. Ever since, historians and political figures have compared the European and American efforts to discern the proper role of religion in government and government in religion. This work is an effort to illuminate that role or at the very least to bring to light the innumerable ways in which such roles were formed.

David Hempton's history of the vibrant period between 1650 and 1832 engages with a truly global story: that of Christianity not only in Europe and North America, but also in Latin America, Africa, Russia and Eastern Europe, India, China, and South-East Asia. Examining eighteenth-century religious thought in its sophisticated national and social contexts, the author relates the narrative of the Church to the rise of religious enthusiasm pioneered by Pietists, Methodists, Evangelicals and Revivalists, and by important leaders like August Hermann Francke, Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley. He places special emphasis on attempts by the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and British seaborne powers to export imperial conquest, commerce and Christianity to all corners of the planet. This leads to discussion of the significance of Catholic and Protestant missions, including those of the Jesuits, Moravians and Methodists. Particular attention is given to Christianity's impact on the African slave populations of the Caribbean Islands and the American colonies, which created one of the most enduring religious cultures in the modern world. Throughout the volume changes in Christian belief and practice are related to wider social trends, including rapid urban growth, the early stages of industrialization, the spread of literacy, and the changing social construction of gender, families and identities.