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.
This chapter connects the demise of exclusive religious establishments with the foundation of republican governments. It also traces the extension of equal recognition to previously marginal groups, such as Roman Catholics. Indeed, by the founding period, the wholesale condemnation of religious minorities had become quite rare and the presumption that faith of many different kinds was better than no faith at all had become widespread. James Madison’s struggle to extend the meaning of “religion” in the Virginia legislature and John Carroll’s efforts to ensure equal rights and recognition for Catholics highlight the widening scope of American pluralism.
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