Reviews The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, edited by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda

Weimer, Adrian Chastain

The New England Quarterly

English

DigitalCommons@Providence

740 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLYand Judith Randolph, St. George Tucker, George Wythe, SyphaxBrown, and Hercules White: white and black—and slave and free—Virginians involved in the complicated manumission of slaves in thatstate. Eric Foner concludes with a section summarizing the broadersignificance of these life stories.This collection of biographies from below has the power to changethe way American history is taught and will be an invaluable resourcefor anyone interested in expanding on the traditional view of theAmerican Revolution and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Inone concise volume, readers will find a wealth of information on theways in which ordinary, as well as extraordinary, men and womenshaped the contours of a new nation. One factor that may hinder thebook’s potential is the questionable degree to which iconic figuresreflected popular sentiments and widespread trends. The editors’ as-sertion that the book’s individual biographies are “representative oflarger historical currents” (p. 5) may not hold water, for certain expe-riences may have applied only to exceptional individuals. One won-ders how many Thomas Paines or Abigail Adamses there were. Howmany eighteenth-century writers called for an end to all organizedreligions? How many women openly challenged patriarchal propertylaws? Representative or not, these are powerful stories that need tobe told. I will go back to this book over and over again to enrich myteaching and writing.Christopher P. Magra, Assistant Professor of Early American Historyat the University of Tennessee, is the author of The Fisherman’sCause: Atlantic Commerce andMaritime Dimensions of theAmerican Revolution, winner of the Winslow House Book Award.He is currently completing a book on the transition to capitalism andthe origins of the American Revolution.The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in EarlyAmerica. Edited by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda.(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. vi, 402.$45.00.)The First Prejudice draws our attention to the compromises andad hoc negotiations undergirding the status of religious minori-ties in the British colonies of North America. In essays dividedinto four sections—covering ideologies, practices, boundaries, andpersistence—the authors address both legal and cultural aspects ofBOOK REVIEWS 741tolerance and intolerance. The contributions overall emphasize thesignificance of the revolutionary era, when Catholics and Jews (thoughnot freethinkers, atheists, natives, or slaves) attained a significant levelof cultural acceptance and legal equality. While colonial developmentsin practice and ideology may have paved the way, it was the liminalrevolutionary years that codified religious liberty rather than mere tol-eration (which presumes an established center). In contrast to recentscholarship highlighting the long history of practical forms of toler-ance and coexistence in Europe, The First Prejudice offers a narrativeof progress in both legislation and civility over time, although the richdetails and frequent acknowledgment of contingency in these pagesdo not, on the whole, support the idea of a whiggish movement towardmodern liberal democracy. If concerns over purity and corruption inthe body politic waned in the eighteenth century, they were only toreappear in the vitriolic 1830s. Even so, the religious violence and dis-crimination that reached new levels with the arrival of poor Europeanimmigrants could not topple the legal structures of the revolutionaryperiod or the enshrinement of “nonsectarian civility” as an Americanvirtue.Several essays foreground the ways in which rhetorical bigotrycould exist side by side with practical forms of acceptance, and viceversa, so that there was, as Owen Stanwood puts it, “no necessary linebetween rhetorical vitriol, legal discrimination, and bad treatment”(p. 221). Joyce Goodfriend, for example, explores the contrast be-tween official policy in New Netherlands—which was discriminatorytoward Jews during Peter Stuyvesant’s governorship—and individualinteractions, which give little evidence of “overt prejudice” (p. 110).The story of religious tolerance in this area emerges not as a contestof ideologies but rather as a series of ongoing negotiations betweenmerchants, the Dutch West India Company’s directors, reformedministers, religious minorities, and their European sympathizers—negotiations that influenced the colonial magistrates’ willingness andability to fully impose conformity. Looking more broadly at anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism across the colonies, William Pencakargues that legal toleration actually led to more vicious cultural intol-erance. Changes in the law coincided with an expanded print mar-ket and more widespread political participation—so Jews, even whenlegally accepted, were more likely than Gentiles to be targeted inanti-elite political rhetoric.Catholics, similarly, did not experience simple regional toleranceor intolerance. Fears of conspiracies and suspicion of the ambitions742 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLYof Spain and France played a role in the rhetoric of colonial pol-itics, but anti-Catholic tropes were a versatile language that couldbe used against other Protestants, natives, and Africans. Diabolicalconspiracies—whether they involved Catholics or “Catholic-like” na-tives, Africans, or Jews—held traction even as neighbors treated eachother civilly in public. Stanwood’s careful reading of anti-Catholiclanguage helps to illuminate the ease with which the vocabulary of“popish tyranny” was transferred to the British monarchy itself after1774. Christopher Beneke also draws attention to the importance ofAmerican Catholic bishops John Carroll and John England in lob-bying for the place of Catholics on the post-revolutionary Americanlandscape and in parsing the difference between civil and theologicalintolerance.Natives were largely excluded from the debates over tolerationunder the law. Yet legal structures that made no place for Native re-ligion and rhetorical structures that relied on the genocide of Amalek(the topic of John Corrigan’s essay) did not translate into unmitigatedintolerance toward Native populations. As Richard Pointer demon-strates, those who had most personal contact with Native tribes—missionaries, traders, and captives—were generally more willing to“incorporate and fuse . . . elements of Indian spirituality” in ways thatlegitimated Native religions. Native peoples’ ability to worship freelydepended primarily on their proximity to English authority, as thoseliving in English towns were most likely to feel the “potentially dizzy-ing blends of white racism, Christian evangelism, religious neglect,and spiritual reciprocity” (pp. 176, 191).If the narrative that emerges is one of ongoing renegotiation, animportant aspect of that negotiation is the role played by religiousand ethnic minorities themselves. African Americans were generallyignored in legislation granting religious toleration, for example, yetthey actively pushed for access to religious education and full par-ticipation in religious life. While not directly contesting Jon Butler’snarrative of an “African spiritual holocaust,” Jon Sensbach emphasizesAfricans’ own fight to gain access to Christianity—“a painful calculusof spiritual loss and perceived gain” (p. 211). Ironically, planters’ fearsthat access to Christian teaching and baptism would incite rebellionled to greater toleration for African tribal religions.Some of the most important contributions in this volume addressunderstudied moments in the history of Protestantism: the Anglicaneffort to obtain a colonial bishop, the Keithian schism in Pennsyl-vania Quakerism, and the prosecution of religious crime across theBOOK REVIEWS 743colonies. Both the Anglican and Quaker controversies demonstratethat intradenominational tensions played a major role in debates overthe limits of legal toleration. These disputes were not just about the-ology or ecclesiology but about the relationships between dominantreligious groups and imperial authority.Ned Landsman astutely points to the significance of the 1707 Actof Union for the politics of religious toleration throughout the BritishAtlantic. The Church of England’s abandonment of its primacy inScotland disrupted a singular model of authority streaming from Lon-don to the colonies and heightened the legitimacy of Presbyterianismacross the empire. Strident Anglican claims for privileged status after1707 not only consolidated other Protestants into a front of ecu-menical resistance but also made the idea of a singular establishmentless palatable throughout the periphery. Susan Juster’s contributionlikewise helps us to understand the perspective of religious majori-ties. She finds that religious crimes such as sacrilegious speech andSabbath breaking were most often prosecuted when accompaniedby offensive or nondeferential behavior, revealing “the symbiotic re-lationship between religious and political order on the margins ofempire” (p. 125).As Juster’s essay indicates, it is vital to take seriously colonial lead-ers’ deeply held beliefs in the close relationship between “heresy”and political unrest. There is opportunity for more research here, an-alyzing (as Alexandra Walsham and John Coffey do for early modernEngland) the suppression of dissent not just in terms of “bigotry”but within the framework of providential theologies and the assumedsocial and material perils of heterodoxy. Further clarification of thedefinition of “tolerance” is also needed—is it personal warmth andadmiration, or the practical decision to deal equitably with peoplewhose beliefs you find spiritually or morally dangerous? While notignoring enlightenment or secular thought, these essays as a wholeargue compellingly for the significance of religious ideas for frame-works of both tolerance and intolerance. Attentive to theological andintellectual issues along with social and legal contexts, The First Prej-udice is a valuable contribution to the history of religious differencein the early modern period.Adrian Chastain Weimer, Assistant Professor of History at ProvidenceCollege, is the author of Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution andHoliness in Early New England (Oxford University Press,2011).

The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and  Intolerance in Early America

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Adrian Chastain Weimer

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<i>The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America</i>. Edited by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. vi, 402. $45.00.)

https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&amp;context=history_fac

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