Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (review)

In this, Professor Beneke's first book, Americans of the colonial and early republic eras come to embrace diversity in religion as a means of transforming their discrete societies into a unified republic rooted in majority rule. In describing this progression, the author consistently recognizes the importance of belief to early Americans. Homogeneity of religious belief, values, and practices within localities or regions served as the basis of community in colonial America. Diversity threatened not only American communitarianism, but also the possibility of united colonies. Therefore, the growth of toleration was a significant development, and served as the basis upon which to establish a new and larger community during the Revolutionary era.

Beneke's text is exceptionally well written, exhaustively researched, and modestly argued. It begins with a concise, yet rich depiction of the religious absolutism present in Colonial America. Intolerance was rooted in an absolute belief in one truth and in the acceptance of God's directive to spread that truth. Colonies were formed as enclaves of like believers protected by civic and church laws. "Within such a context, dissent was more than wrong. It was seditious" (p. 22). However, as the seventeenth century passed, Americans found that an increasingly diverse population compelled changes in behavior and attitudes. Toleration, as "an instrument of prudent statecraft," was reinforced by a "radical political ideology known as liberalism that asserted 'liberty of conscience' as an individual right" (p. 32). Later in the eighteenth century Americans came to "the radical conviction that true liberty of conscience could only be experienced through public discussion" (p. 43). The growth of printed materials disseminating dissenting views, "irreverence for authority and disdain for formal distinctions" explain the rapid rise of tolerant perspectives prior to the Revolution (p. 51). Beneke sees the Great Awakening as fostering the growth of ecumenism by challenging traditional religious authorities and accepting all expressions of genuine faith rooted in Christian concepts as ultimately different forms of the same truth. The ecumenism movement came to full significance in the years after the Revolution when it served as the basis for Robert Bellah's "civil religion"—a new theological understanding that united disparate Americans in shared values accepting individual rights, Judeo-Christian morals, and a belief in democracy as the means to secure both.

Beneke conceives of the progression from doctrinal exclusiveness to religious toleration to full liberty of conscience as a series of events that occurred within a Christian America. In the process he tends to minimize secular movements and Enlightenment ideas outside of Christian thought. He notes the growth of "Deism," "Universalism," "infidelity," and "religious indifference" in the early republic, but views contemporary accounts expressing alarm as overstatements. America, he assures his readers, was still a Christian nation, albeit one accepting an ecumenism as its civil religion. "To some critics, it was impossible to distinguish between wholesale indifferences to religion and the polite ecumenism that prevailed among elites" (p. 172). Beneke wants his readers not to make the same mistake.

Beneke clearly writes as one who accepts Christian precepts and the authority of a church and at times this perspective results in judgmental language that this reviewer is uncomfortable reading in a scholarly work. For example, he finds many of the Founders came "perilously close to deism" in exercising their liberties of conscience (p. 166). Near the end of the book he strangely intermingles issues of church governance and civil governance, refusing to recognize the one as a private concern and other as a public responsibility. Perhaps more importantly, Beneke could be more forceful in articulating and developing his thesis throughout his text. Lengthy descriptive passages would have benefited from more analysis and interpretation. Yet, these matters do not significantly impair this work as a significant academic contribution to the growing historiography on the meanings of religious freedom and church-state separation in the founding era.