Chris Beneke Assistant Professor of History Bentley College's Books

Beyond Toleration : The Religious Origins of American Pluralism

The Religious Origins of American Pluralism

By: Chris Beneke Assistant Professor of History Bentley College

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Beyond Toleration : The Religious Origins of American Pluralism

The Religious Origins of American Pluralism

By: Chris Beneke Assistant Professor of History Bentley College

At its founding, the United States was one of the most religiously diverse places in the world. Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers, Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, Lutherans, Huguenots, Dunkers, Jews, Moravians, and Mennonites populated the nations towns and villages. Dozens of new denominations would emerge over the succeeding years. What allowed people of so many different faiths to forge a nation together? In this richly told story of ideas, Chris Beneke demonstrates how the United States managed to overcome the religious violence and bigotry that characterized much of early modern Europe and America. The key, Beneke argues, did not lie solely in the protection of religious freedom. Instead, he reveals how American culture was transformed to accommodate the religious differences within it. The expansion of individual rights, the mixing of believers and churches in the same institutions, and the introduction of more civility into public life all played an instrumental role in creating the religious pluralism for which the United States has become renowned. These changes also established important precedents for future civil rights movements in which dignity, as much as equality, would be at stake. Beyond Toleration is the first book to offer a systematic explanation of how early 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. Today when religious conflicts once again pose a grave danger to democratic experiments across the globe, Beneke's book serves as a timely reminder of how one country moved past toleration and towards religious pluralism.

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Page Count

319

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

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ISBN 10

0198041608

ISBN 13

9780198041603

Free Exercise

Religion, the First Amendment, and the Making of America

By: Chris Beneke

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Free Exercise

Religion, the First Amendment, and the Making of America

By: Chris Beneke

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Those sixteen words, scratched on parchment in 1789, open the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. From this spare expression, numberless interpretations have been drawn. The Supreme Court has been vigorously debating the meaning of this text for decades. Legions of students, law clerks, and historians have also dedicated themselves to the task. It has become something of an American pastime. Because of that work, an astounding variety of activities in modern America-from prayer after football games and Bible reading in classrooms, to funding for private religious schools and company healthcare policies, the baking of wedding cakes and the display of the Ten Commandments-have been alternately sanctioned, prohibited, or modified. Free Exercise is an innovative contribution to both United States constitutional history and the history of religious toleration in the United States. It traces the routes by which Americans arrived at the First Amendment's religious clauses, the cultural currents that shaped their meaning, and the consequences that flowed from them. The book also demonstrates how white women, African Americans, Jews, Roman Catholics, and nonbelievers expanded the application of religious liberty-and illuminated its boundaries. Each chapter demonstrates how protections for religious freedom were forged from both vague memories and intimate experiences, an emergent respect for individual autonomy and a refusal to materially alter the condition of women and the enslaved. Subsequent chapters examine their relationship to memories of religious violence, free market practices, religious civility, gender and racial exclusion, and unbelief. Each probes what America was at the time and what it was becoming. Free Exercise sheds light on this audacious and deeply flawed effort to reconcile liberty, faith, and equality.

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