| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

William R. Hutchison. Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 276. $29.95.
Historians who glance at William R. Hutchison's new book should not think that its contents are limited to religion. Not that religion is itself uninteresting, but Hutchison goes to the heart of pluralism broadly construed, and the subtitle of this subtle and provocative book well expresses his portrait of a pluralism that emerged only reluctantly in America. Its lessons apply not only to diversity in religion but to diversity in ethnicity, race, and even economic standing.	1
Hutchison argues that religious pluralism involves much more than the religious diversity from which it comes. Pluralism is, he rightly says, "understood as the acceptance and encouragement of diversity" (p. 1). The burden of the book is to document and explain just how difficult it has been to wring pluralism from diversity in the United States.	2
Hutchison sees little enough diversity, much less pluralism, in colonial America. "Colonists had been at least 85 percent English-speaking Calvinist Protestants, and ... this quite homogenous population ... spent two centuries constructing a culture to their own specifications" (p. 21). Legal and social impediments placed on Jews, Catholics, and other religious minorities made pluralism an impossibility in the colonies.	. . .

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