There are probably no Anglo-American histories told with more triumphant and whiggish tones than how the Atlantic World embraced religious liberty. One curious aspect of these stories is how the heroes can also be the villains, depending on who is telling the story. For example, in one telling, the Puritan heroes emigrated to America to establish religious liberty. These same Puritans can be villains to others for driving out heroic Roger Williams. Williams then supposedly established religious liberty—never mind that Williams and the Rhode Island colony he co-founded were largely ignored by Americans until the nineteenth century. In England, was it the Roman Catholic James II who began religious toleration with his 1687 Declaration of Indulgence, or was it the Protestant Glorious Revolution’s Toleration Act of 1689? Either may be credited, perhaps, so long as one overlooks the Test Acts of 1673 or 1678 that remained in place for a half-century or the Settlement Act of 1701 that confined the throne to Protestants. One can even find fantastical histories wherein either the Enlightenment or America’s First Amendment (or both) becomes the restoration of a pre-Constantinian golden age disrupted by a millennium of Christendom’s intolerance.
Mark Valeri offers a much more coherent and sober history in The Opening of the Protestant Mind, though it is confined to Britain and America between the mid-seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries. While “Mind” in Valeri’s title suggests that this is an intellectual history, he provides more than a survey of philosophical ideas. He demonstrates how a broader swath of Protestants encountered people of other faiths, whether in person or in print, and reconciled themselves to their differences. Valeri’s scholarship should be of interest to Law & Liberty readers, including his Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America, chronicling how Puritan New England made peace with a market economy and more commodious living. As with Merchandize, Valeri’s Opening describes how Protestant proscriptions progressed to enable greater personal freedom.
Middling Intellectual Culture
Valeri diverges from the familiar intellectual history insofar as he emphasizes “middling intellectual culture.” Consider, for example, how John Locke looms large in many studies of religious liberty. Focusing on Locke’s 1689 “Letter Concerning Toleration,” popular tales of religious freedom make it seem as though Locke invented it through this anonymously published book. That approach turns politics into a Great Books seminar wherein ideas from philosophers are the prime movers of politics. But how likely is it that something as tectonic as religious toleration is owed to a few books? While Valeri doesn’t ignore landmark books, he builds on safer ground of ubiquitous sources more likely to have moved the broader Protestant zeitgeist in the Atlantic world.
These sources include materials that are, relatively speaking, overlooked by scholars even though they were surely more popular and influential: travel narratives, encyclopedias or dictionaries, geographies, playing cards, or other media. Such materials cast the opinions of educated and curious Britons about other faiths and traditions, and those opinions were prerequisites to any change in politics. The point of focusing on more widely purchased and viewed materials is not social history as such, or similar egalitarian methodology, but consideration of sources more likely to change perceptions. Elites were exposed to these more ubiquitous sources, too, of course, but middling sorts must be recalled as well because they too influenced defining the toleration of the Interregnum or the ethos of a Congregational church in New England, for example. What’s more, the middling sources Valeri uses are less cerebral but more efficient and visceral. Valeri explains how the visual depiction of a Buddhist ceremony (a very exotic image for its audience), for example, could double as a warning against the superstitions of Roman Catholicism.
Despite this less-travelled academic route, Valeri almost always sticks to the big story (the progress of toleration) and rarely gets bogged down in minutiae. The book remains largely a traditional and straightforward history describing how magisterial Protestantism moved from confessional exclusion to religious liberty. Valeri does partake in some trendy handwringing about colonialism or appropriation but also often defends his subjects against anachronistic scolds who would judge the past too harshly. Valeri mostly does the traditional work of a historian: reconstructing the past on its own terms and standards.
Of course, The Opening of the Protestant Mind does not (and probably cannot) provide a comprehensive picture of Protestantism and all of the parties involved in the move towards toleration and freedom. We do not see the shift through the perspective of the persecuted Quakers or Baptists, for example, but instead largely through the changing perspectives of the persecutors: this is the point of the title, of course. Valeri includes the American Indians because there was some question of what religious traditions would be tolerated or not among them by Britons or Americans, but the perspective is largely that of the missionaries. Neither omission takes away from the merits of the book, however; this is a book about the opening of minds and not about the ones already open or affected by the opening. Valeri apologizes for this on occasion, but such are the academic pieties of the age.
Redefining What It Means to Be Faithful
As Valeri presents it, toleration began when Protestants used the aforementioned travel narratives or encyclopedias to survey foreign faiths and foreign lands. Comparative study of religions was relatively new in the seventeenth century, and few could or would travel to non-Protestant nations. Through printed works surveying these other countries, including those on other continents, Protestant Britons formed perceptions of the piety of others. At first, the judgment of these foreign faiths was mostly concerned with doctrinal conformity or orthodoxy: what theological beliefs did others have, and how did they align with confessional or catechetical statements? (This was true at home as well.) For Indians living among Britons in North America, already outside the Protestant faith, faithfulness also meant becoming more English. Insofar as doctrinal or confessional conformity was most of what mattered, toleration or freedom was considered undesirable for those who did not conform or convert.
More than anti-revelatory movements, it was the deliberate emphasis on republican virtues that redefined Protestantism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
But that perception of piety broadened, not so much because ecclesiastical opinions became more tolerant (at least not at first), but because tolerance or liberty made more sense in crucibles of political conflict. The criteria of evaluation bent to consider political expediencies for the sake of building Protestant alliances against Roman Catholic foes. Gradually, this meant that two faiths were promoted: Protestantism and republicanism, which were understood to be symbiotic. As republicanism itself became a kind of faith in the English mind, complete with its own civic virtues and eschatology, it became as imperative as Protestantism for the survival of Britain.
Of course, the Protestant perception of other religions was never interested in just their doctrinal content, as if any popular opinion of other religions will ever be purely theological. This presumes that everyone is a theologian. The accounts of non-Protestant religions were also very interested in practice and virtue: were they idolatrous, superstitious, or bigoted, for example? Such traits were increasingly viewed as enemies of rationality and freedom. Were they disorderly, violent, cruel, or fanatical? Such traits made virtue and political stability impossible. During the crises that began in the 1680s in Britain and extended into the 1700s, virtues undergirding reason and liberty became especially important. Enemies of reason or liberty or the rule of law were cast as Jacobite or Jesuitical. In other words, they were enemies to the British social and political ethos and, therefore, Britain’s survival.
As Valeri describes the progression, it was the deliberate emphasis on republican virtues that redefined Protestantism. There was no hostile takeover, as some intellectual histories have asserted, by anti-revelatory movements often called “the Enlightenment,” “Secularity,” or “Pluralism.” To the contrary, atheism and skepticism were deemed antisocial and irrational and just as threatening to Anglo-American order as any superstitious or cruel religion. Protestantism redefined itself within its own tradition: the Atlantic world was no less interested in being Protestant in the 1760s than it was in the 1660s. What changed was that being a good and faithful Protestant certainly included much more than doctrinal orthodoxy. Along with this expansion came a broader realm of tolerable non-Protestant belief.
Accounts from abroad, beginning in the 1680s and the years after 1700, reflected a new emphasis on pan-Protestant unity against perceived Roman Catholic threats to Britain’s constitutionalist tradition. New England Puritans, for example, who had just chafed under the administration of Sir Edmund Andros, eagerly endorsed Protestant unity under William III and then under the Hanoverians. Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana reflected the shift in America, including the idea that “liberty of conscience” could enable a broad Protestant interest. Along with this broader Protestant interest, however, came a reshuffling of alliances. If certain Native American or even Islamic traditions seemed to promote rational sociable religion, or recognizable civic virtue, broader toleration became conceivable. Even certain Roman Catholics like the Jansenists seemed less threatening. Britons and Americans captured by the French during the Seven Years War told stories of reasonable priests they encountered during captivity. On the other hand, radical dissenters (e.g., Quakers) or High Church Anglicans—though Protestants—could become marginalized as enemies of the new Whig virtues. Protestantism was still considered the one true faith able to robustly sustain liberty and constitutionalism, but extremes within the Protestant camp were scorned as much as extremes outside of it were.
Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard’s The Independent Whig exemplified the change. They advanced the Protestant interest by praising the Hanoverian monarchy and repeatedly declaring opposition to papal tyranny. Of course, that papal tyranny was both ecclesiastical and political, and this distinction was rarely made in the discourse. Transgressions under the new Whig regime included “priestcraft” in the form of blind ritual, idolatry, or conformity. New virtues included benevolence, humaneness, sociability, and politeness, and these virtues were sustained by learning, education, and civility. Rightly understood and promoted, persuasion could win against irrational or idolatrous superstition, coercion, violence, and religious enthusiasm. Those who practiced such virtues were also more likely to be “useful and beneficent,” able to trade with and live alongside their neighbors in peace.
As Protestantism changed, so did its understanding of conversion. Earlier presentations of conversion made it a kind of submission or surrender emphasizing both God’s free and irresistible grace and conformity to confessional orthodoxy. A half-century later, accounts of conversion and evangelism would emphasize rational appeals and free choice. This was true even in the case of American Indians, whose moral sensibilities were increasingly emphasized while demands for Anglicization were deemphasized. This emphasis on rational appeal and free choice was not owed to a rising commitment to Arminian theology versus the more Calvinist varieties, for example. It reflected the republican and Whig virtues associated with republican and constitutional government.
Opening the Mind or Opening the Heart?
Although this past half-century has seen any number of books about the “closing” or “opening” or “coddling” of the American mind, we probably flatter ourselves when we think of politics as an affair of the mind. What Valeri’s Opening of the Protestant Mind demonstrates, at the very least, is that religious toleration and liberty came down to something else: proprieties and civilities that (as Cicero rightly said of proprieties in De Officiis) are felt more than they are understood. Protestants in Valeri’s history heard stories and saw pictures of other faiths in the context of international crises (real or imagined) and came to feel differently about what kind of pieties and practices are fit for political life. Those sensibilities naturally became laws and policies in the context of circumstances.
Perhaps it is these proprieties that are at the heart of our current wars of opposing political faiths. Each side has a particular set of proprieties that it deems appropriate for political life rightly understood. Unfortunately, we too often act like Valeri’s seventeenth or eighteenth century Protestants: separated by insurmountable miles from those we presume to be bad neighbors. Today, those miles are created not by geography or oceans, but by 24-hour news, social media, influencers, bots, and pseudonymous X accounts. The sooner we can overcome them and seriously articulate a reasonable and expedient definition and sense of civic virtue, the better.
