Conscience and Community

Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America

Andrew R. Murphy

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780271031767
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Religious toleration appears near the top of any short list of core liberal democratic values. Theorists from John Locke to John Rawls emphasize important interconnections between the principles of toleration, constitutional government, and the rule of law. Conscience and Community revisits the historical emergence of religious liberty in the Anglo-American tradition, looking deeper than the traditional emergence of toleration to find not a series of self-evident or logically connected expansions but instead a far more complex evolution.

Murphy argues that contemporary liberal theorists have misunderstood and misconstrued the actual historical development of toleration in theory and practice. Murphy approaches the concept through three "myths" about religious toleration: that it was opposed only by ignorant, narrow-minded persecutors; that it was achieved by skeptical Enlightenment rationalists; and that tolerationist arguments generalize easily from religion to issues such as gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, providing a basis for identity politics.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Bibliographic Abbreviations Used Throughout This Book
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 “A Theological Scare-Crow” or “The Inward Persuasion of the Mind”? Conscience and Toleration in Historical, Philosophical, and Political Perspective
• 2 Massachusetts Bay: Puritanism and the Politics of Religious Dissent
• 3 The English Civil War, Commonwealth, and Protectorate: Unintentional, Unintended Toleration
• 4 The Glorious Revolution: The 1640s All Over Again?
• 5 Prosecution or Persecution? Quakers, Toleration, and Schism in Early Pennsylvania
• 6 Revisiting Early Modern Toleration and Religious Dissent
• 7 Toleration and Political Liberalism: John Rawls’s Shrinking Liberty of Conscience
• 8 The Politics of Conscience and the Politics of Identity: The Limits and Promise of Liberal Toleration
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover