Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America

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Description

Religious toleration appears near the top of any short list of core liberal democratic values. Theorists from John Locke to John Rawls emphasize vital interconnections between the principles of toleration, constitutional government, and the rule of law.

Conscience and Community revisits the historical emergence of religious liberty in the Anglo-American tradition, having a look deeper than the traditional emergence of toleration to find not a series of self-evident or logically connected expansions but as an alternative a much more complex evolution. Murphy argues that recent liberal theorists have misunderstood and misconstrued the true historical development of toleration in theory and practice.

Murphy approaches the idea that through three “myths” about religious toleration: that it used to be opposed only by ignorant, narrow-minded persecutors; that it used to be achieved by skeptical Enlightenment rationalists; and that tolerationist arguments generalize easily from religion to issues such as gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, providing a basis for identity politics. The book seeks a renewed appreciation of the specificity that made religious toleration so divisive in addition to the general tension between moral sense and community that persists in recent societies.

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