Reviews of Books

Does the principle of religious toleration, articulated in seventeenth-century England and carried over to colonial America, lead directly to the modern, secular premium on freedom of choice? To prominent political philosophers such as John Rawls, that is exactly the case; contemporary liberalism constitutes for them "the logical extension of religious toleration" (p. 273) . Andrew R. Murphy, senior fellow at the Martin Marty Center, University of Chicago Divinity School, disagrees. In Conscience and Community, he complicates this simple connection and points the way toward a more historically sensitive understanding of the origins of liberal values. To this end he employs an adroit study of political and polemical battles between tolerationists and antitolerationists in England and America in the seventeenth century. Religious toleration, he maintains, did not begin as a fight for abstract principle; rather, it involved a struggle by dissenting minorities to win exemption from persecution by civil and religious authorities for the practice of their faith. Such privilege offered only "negative freedom" in the unified world of church and state, and it took many decades, Murphy argues, for this negative freedom to blossom into the positive principle of toleration.

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Designed primarily as a contribution to political philosophy, Conscience and Community is simultaneously a first-rate historical account of the place of religious toleration in seventeenth-century Anglo-America. Three chapters of political philosophy bracket five of historical narrative situating colonial American events in their contemporary English context. "Colonial America was, in a sense, a great laboratory for English colonizers," where "plans for American institutions were formulated in response to problems identified in England." Religious toleration developed from the "complex interplay of hopes and expectations" between the "ideal of America (and its presentation in English debates) and the ideal of England (its usage in American debate)" (p. 10 ). As Murphy shows, the American context also played a pivotal role in English debates on toleration. Neither side of the Atlantic nor any single individual, party, act, or event can claim exclusive credit for achieving religious toleration.

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