The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (review)

Collections of essays, despite the hazards of the form, have grown in popularity in recent years. Pulling together multiple pieces into a coherent whole is well beyond the ken of most such volumes, while editing to a high standard can be an elusive goal. Too often, a few high points are hidden among less noteworthy contributions. This collection avoids many of the pitfalls of the form. Most of the contributions are based on in-depth primary research or provide sweeping overviews chock-full of well-documented examples. A remarkably high number make important interventions into our understanding of early American religious differences and the tensions they engendered. With the exception of John Corrigan’s brief and focused analysis of the biblical texts referring to the Amalekites, the interpretive frameworks are broad. Although the essays vary in the extent of their innovation and substance, the quality is generally exemplary. The coherence across essays may be somewhat murky, and the editors’ introduction does not entirely satisfy on this score, but the volume on balance makes a worthy addition to the literature on early American religious history.

More than half of the dozen contributions address the experience of a particular group or groups. William Pencak analyzes that of the Jews in early America, organized around the themes of antisemitism, toleration, and appreciation. Joyce Goodfriend surveys three groups who were outside the Reformed Protestant community that the governor of New Netherland Peter Stuyvesant favored: Lutherans, Jews, and Quakers. Christopher Grasso explores the persistent prejudice against atheists and freethinkers in the early republic. Richard Pointer and Jon Sensbach canvass the experiences of Indians and Africans respectively. Not so much Catholics themselves as anti-Catholic fears are the subject of Owen Stanwood’s similarly broad essay. Andrew Murphy revisits the Keithian schism that sundered the early Pennsylvania Quaker community, endorsing the arguments made by George Keith himself about the causes of the controversy.

A number of the essays fit into the classic literature on church-state relations, toleration, and religious liberty. Susan Juster analyzes prosecution of three religious crimes—heresy, blasphemy, and Sabbath-breaking—across numerous colonies over time; she demonstrates the persistence of concern over these issues accompanied by a hesitation to inflict the harshest penalties. Ned Landsman shows how the Union of 1707 inadvertently permitted constitutional arguments against a Church of England establishment for the British North American colonies. Coeditor Christopher S. Grenda contributes a long and detailed analysis of the reasoning behind debates about toleration, linking an intellectual history to a discussion of the practical effects of each set of views. Coeditor Chris Beneke argues for the impact of the American Revolution on religious freedom, embracing the idea of irreversible progress while acknowledging its vulnerability to charges of “Whiggism” (p. 283). Except that Grasso’s treatment of “infidels” and to a lesser extent some of Pencak’s observations about Jews fly in the face of Beneke’s conclusions, the editors’ own articles serve as helpful framing devices for the entire volume. Their individual contributions exceed their jointly authored introduction to the collection; in that piece they unconvincingly argue that the corpus of work departs drastically from previous literature.

Catholicism, although the focus of only one essay, makes an appearance in a number of others. Sensback treats briefly the experiences of Catholic Africans; Pointer does the same for Native American converts allied with the French. The status of Catholics in the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary era come into the discussions of Beneke and Grenda in particular. For readers of this journal, however, the greatest benefit of this volume will be in the understanding of the general context for religious difference and accommodation in British North America and the new United States.