The Opening of the Protestant Mind How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty

During the mid-seventeenth century, Anglo-American Protestants described Native American ceremonies as savage devilry, Islamic teaching as violent chicanery, and Catholicism as repugnant superstition. By the mid-eighteenth century, they would describe amicable debates between evangelical missionaries and Algonquian religious leaders about the moral appeal of Christianity, recount learned conversations between English merchants and Muslim scholars, and tell of encounters with hospitable and sincere priests in Catholic Canada and Europe. What explains this poignant shift?

Using a variety of sources--travel narratives, dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the world's religions, missionary tracts, and sermons, The Opening of the Protestant Mind traces a transformation in how English and colonial American Protestants described other religions during a crucial period of English colonization of North America. After the English Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent growth of the British empire, observers began to link Britain's success to civic moral virtues, including religious toleration, rather than to any particular religious creed. Mark Valeri shows how a wide range of Protestants--including liberal Anglicans, Calvinist dissenters, deists, and evangelicals--began to see other religions not as entirely good or entirely bad, but as complex, and to evaluate them according to their commitment to religious liberty. In the view of these Protestants, varieties of religion that eschewed political power were laudable, while types of religion that combined priestly authority with political power were illegitimate. They also changed their evangelistic practices, jettisoning civilizing agendas in favor of reasoned persuasion.

Valeri neither valorizes Anglo-Protestants nor condemns them. Instead, he reveals the deep ambiguities in their ideas while showing how those ideas contained the seeds of modern religious liberty.

Mark Valeri is the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. His book Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America, received the 2011 Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and a Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow in the Culture of the Americas at the Huntington Library.

Introduction

Chapter One: Disorder and Confessionalism
Sources for Restoration-era Writers
England's Confessional Ideology
Confessional Descriptions of the World's Religions

Chapter Two: Praying Indians
Conversion within English Protestant Communities
Missions to Algonquian Communities in New England

Chapter Three: Revolution and Toleration
Apologists for the Revolution of 1688
Religious Comparison and the Idea of Toleration
Travel and Religious Encounters

Chapter Four: Empire and Whig Moralism
Imperial Agendas
Whig Criteria for Religious Authenticity
New Studies of the World's Religions
Eighteenth-century Travelers

Chapter Five: Power, Ceremony, and Roman Catholicism
French Whigs and the Critique of Ceremonialism
Descriptions of Ceremonial Power
Images of the World's Religions
Religious Diversity and Roman Catholicism

Chapter Six: Indian Conversions
The Great Awakening and Moral Freedom
Native American Moral Conscience
Missionaries' Critique of Anglicization
The Moral Appeal of Christianity
Disaffiliation and Affiliation

Epilogue
Hannah Adams and the Revolutionary Nation
Conclusion: Limits and Paradoxes

Index