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Paying for the Privilege: The Management of Public Order and Religious Pluralism in Two Early Modern Societies*
CHARLES H. PARKER
Saint Louis University
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A Cross-Cultural Approach to Religious Toleration | |
| Long regarded as a unique feature of Western civilization, religious toleration is a topic that has enjoyed a venerable history. Within European scholarship, the study of toleration has traditionally been the domain of intellectual historians whose primary intent was to trace the maturation of the concept from its origins in the heroic religious opposition of the Reformation period to its growth in the innovative epistemology of the Scientific Revolution, to a fully developed creed of Enlightenment theorists in the eighteenth century.1 Because of this intellectualist approach and owing to the pervasive influence of the Enlightenment, religious toleration is generally understood to have developed in a linear, progressive fashion and to embody the inevitable triumph of a modern Western rationality. |
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In the recent past, a broader range of early modern European historians has shown interest in questions about tolerance and compulsion in order to uncover the everyday interaction among people who held divergent religious views as well as the cultural modalities of confessional coexistence. As one might expect, the findings thus far have been as diverse as the territories and peoples of Europe. The extremes range from egregious popular violence in the French religious wars to quiet adaptation among local residents in other areas where neighbors worked to avoid rancorous social division.2 This wide variation suggests that the social relations around issues of religious difference followed a rather different trajectory from the linear intellectual development of toleration. Indeed, this recent scholarship calls attention to the need to ground an understanding of toleration within contemporary norms to avoid reading modern liberal notions of religious freedom back into early modern societies.3 As it related to habitual patterns of political and social discourse, toleration is better understood as the accommodation of dissent in societies organized around the ideal of religious unity. |
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Much of the latest scholarship has concentrated on the Dutch Republic (1572–1795) and particularly on the province of Holland in the late sixteenth to the seventeenth century.4 Contemporaries inside and outside the Netherlands regarded Holland's cities as the most open urban societies in early modern Europe. Just as the conspicuousness of religious pluriformity struck foreign visitors, the Dutch have also fêted their own tolerance since the sixteenth century.5 For all of the exuberance about Dutch tolerance, Calvinism, a confession not given to indulging ungodly sacrilege or theological error, became a hegemonic religious force in the republic over the course of the seventeenth century. Over the past ten years scholars have devoted attention to this paradox and have shown that ruling elites, many of whom were not keen on Calvinism's theocratic tendencies, exhibited a marked concern for public order.6 Their commitment to a well-ordered society kept the Reformed Church at bay, significantly restricted other Protestant denominations, and marginalized the Roman Catholic faith. |
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Because historians are currently rethinking the history of religious interaction in early modern Europe and the Dutch Republic, it seems useful at this moment to take a step back for a broader, more global, perspective. A cross-cultural comparison of religious minorities in pluralistic societies can provide new ways of approaching old problems and open up fresh lines of inquiry. For historians of early modern Europe, a more expansive scope for the study of religious interaction helps to counteract prevalent notions of Western exceptionalism and the tendency to identify Christianity exclusively with the Latin West.7 |
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