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

by Andrew R. Murphy

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.

Genres: Religion

337 pages, Paperback

First published June 12, 2001

About the author

Andrew R. Murphy is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

He received his B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at Villanova University, the University of Chicago, and Valparaiso University.

His research focuses on the interconnections between religious and political thought and practice, most particularly in England and America.

Reviews

[Alan Johnson]

Although I agree, here and there, with some of the points in this book, I have major objections to its fundamental premises, especially its preference for the political (and thus flexible) notion of "toleration" over the concept of a natural right to liberty of conscience (a right not given up to government in the social contract per Roger Williams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison); its historically incorrect account of Roger Williams's years in New England before his banishment from Massachusetts Bay; and its empathetic treatment of those who persecuted religious dissenters. I do not currently have time or inclination to write a full-length review of the book, but I elaborate on these and related themes in my book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience .

The foregoing does not apply to the last two chapters of the book, in which the author discusses John Rawls and other recent thinkers. I take no position at this time on these contemporary issues.

(originally posted October 13, 2014; latest revision 8/10/2015)