No Person Shall Bee Any Wise Molested: Religious Freedom, Cultural Conflict, and the Moral Role of the State

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A conference planned for October 3 - 6, 2013, in Newport and Providence, Rhode Island, organized by the Newport Historical Society, the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, Salve Regina University, the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom, the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University and the Rhode Island Historical Society to mark the 350th anniversary of the 1663 Rhode Island Charter.

What is religious toleration? What are its functions, effects, and limits in society? How has it manifested (or not) around the world in human history?

The 1663 Rhode Island Charter stipulated that no person "shall bee any wise molested,punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinione in matters of religion." This charter famously ignited the "lively experiment" that both reflected and shaped religious and political developments in the early modern world and has continued to influence global conversations about the role of toleration and religious freedom. The 350th anniversary of this charter provides a timely point of entry into a thoughtful consideration of a far larger set of questions about religious freedom in particular historical and present day contexts.
Far from exemplifying a simple narrative of "progress," toleration and religious liberty have
been contested, often resisted ideas that have proved surprisingly difficult to implement equitably. This is especially true when one looks outside the traditional boundaries of church- state relations to consider the lived experiences of religious dissenters, ethnic minorities, women, and enslaved and free people of color, including American Indians and indigenous populations around the world. The uneven adoption of such ideas in the early modern world, ongoing intolerance in the United States even after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, and the globalization and contestation of full religious liberty today suggest that a more comprehensive investigation of the meaning of religious liberty and toleration is an issue of particular urgency for the present.

Situated in historic Newport and Providence, Rhode Island, this conference looks at the sources, consequences, changing meanings, and lived experiences of religious freedom and intolerance. To that end, the program committee solicits panels and individual paper proposals that represent innovative research on the broad themes of religious liberty, toleration, intolerance, religious conflict, and the role of government in such contexts. Papers that cut across traditional lines of disciplines, geographies, and chronologies are especially welcome, as are papers that look at transnational and comparative contexts, local and international conditions of toleration, and the shifting boundaries between the public and the private. In addition to historians, the committee hopes to engage scholars from other disciplines, including (but not limited to) anthropology, ethics, literature, religious studies, political science, economics, theology, sociology, law, philosophy, and peace, conflict, and coexistence studies.

Possible topics include (but are not restricted to):

* New perspectives on the 1663 Rhode Island charter-its context and consequences
* Shifting meanings of religious freedom in specific historical contexts
* Intersections of religious freedom or prejudice with race, ethnicity, class, gender, or
* sexuality
* Limits of religious freedom and expression
* Economic, cultural, and political consequences of religious tolerance and intolerance
* Conflicts over public space
* Religiously inspired moral coercion
* Nationalism, national identity, and transnational networks
* Historical formations of the religious, the civic, the secular, and the state
* Experience of the religiously unaffiliated, freethinkers, and the "nones"
* Attitudes towards religion in secular culture
* The interplay between law, policy, and religious coexistence
* Lived tolerance and intolerance
* Interreligious dialog and ecumenism
* Instruments of religious intolerance in the twenty-first century
* Governments and indigenous peoples
* Literary and artistic boundaries of religious freedom

Please send a 500 word proposal and curriculum vitae for each participant to
spectacleoftoleration@gmail.com by February 1, 2013. Full panel proposals should be sent
under one cover and should include a panel chair and respondent. Questions should be directed to the email above.

This conference is part of The Spectacle of Toleration: Learning from the Lively Experiment,
a multi-year project that aims to open up an international conversation about toleration and
religious freedom. In addition to the academic conference, The Spectacle of Toleration plans
to provide several years of public programming. For more information, please see:
www.newporthistorical.org/index.php/the-spectacle-of-toleration/

The New History of Toleration

Chris Beneke

The latest issue of the William and Mary Quarterly includes a forum on Stuart Schwartz’s groundbreaking All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008), which argues that a surprisingly large proportion of ordinary people within the early modern Spanish and Portuguese empires maintained that salvation was available to a wide range of believers. Drawing on his extensive archival work on both sides of the Atlantic, Schwartz contends that these two Catholic regimes, famous for their religious exclusivity, actually harbored a substantial number of religious relativists. Schwartz’s book is distinctive in another way: its subject, he notes, “is not the history of religious toleration, by which is usually meant state or community policy, but rather of tolerance, by which I mean attitudes or sentiments.” (6)

The WMQ comments are generally positive. Lu Ann Homza does find fault with Schwartz’s heavy reliance on statements drawn from inquisitorial tribunals and suggests that when “Schwartz found over and over again the phrase that ‘each could be saved in his own law,’ we must ask whether Inquisition notaries were fitting defense testimony into rhetorical formulas.” David D. Hall sets Schwarz’s book within the new, non-linear and anti-triumphalist historiography of toleration in early modern Europe, specifically Alexandra Walsham’s Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700 and Benjamin J. Kaplan’s Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Hall suggests that Schwartz’s universalist-minded subjects might be evidence of “the persistence of tensions within any strong cultural system.” Marcy Norton expresses her wish that Schwartz had given more weight to the impact of religious and ethnic diversity in prompting tolerant attitudes. And Andrew R. Murphy argues that we need to devote more attention to the “borderland between attitudes and political practices” than Schwartz does in All Can Be Saved.

As engaging as it is for specialists, this WMQ forum might seem a bit esoteric to the un-initiated. Fortunately, Murphy summarizes recent historiographical developments in his conclusion. The new literature on toleration in the early modern (Anglo-American) world, he writes, is characterized by four “corollaries”:

* Intolerance was—theoretically, conceptually, and theologically speaking—as robust as tolerance.

* Elites often had “good,” or at least comprehensible, reasons for persecuting religious dissenters.

* Toleration often resulted from the intentional plans of tolerationist elites but as an unintended consequence of actions growing out of complex motivations (economic, political, strategic).

* Toleration, when it happened, was due as much to exclusionary impulses and intolerance (separatism, anti-Catholicism) as to humanistic and skeptical ideals.

The WMQ forum on All Be Saved falls on the heels of a fascinating September 2008 conference organized by Evan Haefeli, Brendan McConville, and Owen Stanwood on “Anti-popery” in the Protestant Atlantic world from 1530 to 1850, which also offered a generally non-triumphalist and socially grounded take on the extent of early modern toleration across the Atlantic world.

Beneke's essay, "America’s Whiggish Religious Revolution: An Instance in the Progress of History," will appear in the June 2009 issue of Historically Speaking.