Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America.

Bradley, James E.

Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America. By Andrew R. Murphy. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. xxii + 337 pp. $45.00 cloth.

The history of the idea of religious toleration seems to be particularly susceptible to teleological interpretations of progress; the pressure for finding an "inevitable" development toward liberty has afflicted not only Whig historians of the past, but many political scientists of the present as well, particularly proponents of modern liberal theory. Nevertheless, it is striking that within the last decade, political scientists like Chris Laurson and Cary Nederman, and now in the present study, Andrew R. Murphy, are in a position of admonishing historians to take the historical context of toleration seriously and to reckon realistically with setbacks and reversals in the long history of the idea. Murphy sets out to challenge three interrelated myths, the first two of which are deeply embedded in the way that many scholars have interpreted the historical materials of the seventeenth century.

The first myth is the idea that religious toleration is self-evident and that antitolerationists were narrow minded or merely self-interested, seeking to preserve their own power. By construing religious toleration as a natural right, political scientists in particular have failed to reckon with the political cut and thrust of past events. The second myth argues that religious toleration is a product of skepticism or unbelief, whereas in fact, the arguments in the English-speaking world relied almost exclusively on Christian assumptions. The more well-known arguments of John Locke, for example, had all been anticipated in the 1640s and 1650s in the writings of sectarian, but nevertheless, genuinely Christian thinkers. The third myth pertains to the modern debate concerning the natural extension of religious liberty to current issues surrounding gender, race, and ethnicity. About a fifth of the book (parts of chapter 1, and all of chapters 7 and 8) is given to a critique of modern liberal theory and a defense of a modus vivendi understanding of toleration, but that topic will be subordinated in this review.

Murphy utilizes a comparative historical method that investigates the contexts and controversies of three North American colonies in relation to developments in seventeenth-century England. A lengthy chapter on religious dissent in Massachusetts Bay Colony and Rhode Island examines the thought and practice of Anne Hutchinson, the Quakers, and Roger Williams. The author gives considerable attention to the social and political theory of the Puritan clergy and magistrates in order to show how the characteristic Protestant understanding of grace and its appropriation by individuals was not incompatible with strong communal authority. Murphy underlines the cogency of antitolerationist views by a sympathetic handling of covenant theology and contractarian thinking; such views, he argues, were completely compatible with enforced uniformity. The author's insistence that the question of order and the security of life and property is historically prior to the matter of religious pluralism helpfully contextualizes the truly disturbing claims of the dissenters who sought to be tolerated. While they enforced religious uniformity, Puritan magistrates denied that they were persecuting others for the sake of conscience, and it was in combating this line of argument that the dissenters appealed to a more subjective, inward understanding of conscience that could only be influenced by persuasion. The difficulties that the dissenters had in finding a secure basis for order in Rhode Island suggest that toleration was not a clear harbinger of the future. Hence, the political and social order in the new world receives almost as much attention in Murphy's account as the innovative ideas of Hutchinson and Williams.

Chapters on the English civil wars and the Glorious Revolution emphasize the religious, indeed specifically Protestant, nature of the arguments for toleration. However, while the arguments were grounded primarily in religion, they did not gain acceptance by the force of their inherent logic: rather these ideas were prevalent in the New Model Army, and the limited extent to which they did prevail is attributed more to victories on the battlefield than to public debate. Here, as well, those who opposed toleration on religious and political grounds are given due weight, and one finds a fine appreciation for the Anglican's use of scriptural arguments, particularly ones drawn from the Old Testament. A balanced discussion of the theological, philosophical, and political arguments for toleration shows how skepticism about infallible knowledge was compatible with a good deal of traditional Christian belief. In an age of pervasive providentialism, profound skepticism was certainly rare, and where it was found, it could as easily be linked with arguments for authoritarianism as for tolerationism. (A useful, short section on Thomas Hobbes demonstrates as much.) In addition to the increasing emphasis on the subjectivity of religious belief, the pragmatic point that drew attention to the peaceful exercise of toleration in Holland was one of the more persuasive arguments. In keeping with recent research on the Act of Toleration, Murphy emphasizes the limited nature of its provisions and insists that there is little new in the actual arguments for and against toleration in the 1670s and 1680s. The compromises that flowed out of 1689 allowed Nonconformists and Catholics to live largely unmolested, but this arrangement was not the result of published treatises or public debate; the modus vivendi emerged through a complex combination of unintended consequences derived from human miscalculation and error.

Perhaps the most innovative chapter of the book examines the schism of George Keith in the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania (1692-93). Murphy offers us a fresh understanding of the inherent problems of governing a seventeenth-century colony under the conditions of a relatively generous policy of toleration, even when (or perhaps particularly when) the governors are Quakers. This case study has the effect of reinforcing one of the book's main contentions, namely, that liberty of conscience in this era was quite modest in its claims; it extended to the easing of civil sanctions for dissenters, but it did not entail the disestablishment of religion, not even among the Society of Friends. Penn's own views are illumined by comparison with the earlier thought of Roger Williams. Penn, for example, relied more on the concept of the ancient constitution than earlier writers, and the toleration of Catholics in early Pennsylvania was notable. But no one, not even Penn, was prepared to go as far as George Keith, a malcontent who compared the exercise of power by Quakers to "rank popery." The Keithian debacle amply shows how difficult it was for even the most advanced thinkers of the age to find a purely civil basis for governmental authority. The movement toward religious toleration was anything but inevitable.

Murphy's use of comparative history to illumine the slow, uncertain development of toleration goes a long way in helping us understand the perennial tensions between the claims of individual conscience and a community's need for stability and order. Written from the perspective of political science, this balanced and well-nuanced account not only serves to correct some of the more ahistorical elements in modern liberal theory, it lends a new and exciting relevance to even the most narrow historical investigations into the religion of the seventeenth century. Ironically, such investigations are relevant today precisely because of their historical nature.

James E. Bradley Fuller Theological Seminary