Tolerant Expansion: When England Established American Religious Diversity 1660-1688

Abstract

Writing to complete a book about the development of American religious pluralism and colonial British policy and practice of toleration from 1660 to 1688.

My book studies the politics of religious toleration in England and its emerging empire in the key period of the second half of the seventeenth century to explain how religious pluralism became so deeply rooted in colonial American society as to make a national religious establishment impossible by the American Revolution. Using a mix of local and official imperial records, its chapters examine the creation of new colonies (especially the middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania), the laws regulating religion in them, the challenges to pluralism in both the new and existing colonies, and the contrast between theories developed at the imperial center and their implementation on the colonial periphery to demonstrate the ambivalent character of colonial pluralism. My ultimate argument is that America’s path to religious freedom was unsteady, depended heavily on anti-democratic English politics, and intersected with growing inequalities like slavery and dispossession.