Toleration and tolerance, two distinct but complementary words, take the same adjectival form: tolerant. Toleration describes a philosophy or policy, tolerance a set of practices and attitudes. One can practice tolerance in daily life without espousing a theory of toleration. Ordinary people could live by the common-sense adage that the inquisition found so troubling, that each can be saved in his own faith, without forming a theory of toleration. Or a state could pursue a policy of toleration yet abandon working practices of tolerance whenever it became convenient to do so.
The relation between liberty of conscience and free exercise of religion is more complex. Liberty of conscience is best conceived as a form of toleration. It accords the privilege of being secure in one’s religious beliefs as a private right, but one subject to legal limitation. Free exercise subsumes liberty of conscience, but the converse is not true.
In his first and quite admirable book, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism, Chris Beneke demonstrated how the American colonists were already creating practices of tolerance before the norms of toleration came under attack. With the Revolution, the balance of forces shifted. The visible pivot of this shift can be detected at the Fifth Provincial Convention in Virginia, which drafted the commonwealth’s new constitution and its accompanying Declaration of Rights in May 1776. The architect of this change was the young James Madison, a quiet member of the convention until religious liberty, the one issue he cared most about, came on the table. In an oft-studied episode, Madison achieved the first of his many political successes by transforming the religious liberty article in the Declaration of Rights from its original tolerationist statement into an affirmation of free exercise principles.
In his new book, Beneke makes Madison and his close friend, Thomas Jefferson, the starring figures in his first chapter. Nearly every broad interpretive survey of the historical origins of American religious freedom makes the same move. One can never tell this story without privileging the two Virginians and their famous texts, including Jefferson’s Statute of Religion Freedom, Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, and Jefferson’s seminal letter to the Danbury Baptists.
These texts are only the backstory to the rest of Beneke’s analysis, however. Notwithstanding its subtitle, Free Exercise is more concerned with behavior than doctrine. The heart of the book lies in the five succeeding chapters, cleverly titled “Duties,” “Cruelties,” “Civilities,” “Inequalities,” and “Infidels.” However, the dominant motif that Beneke sustains throughout these chapters is one that also originated with Madison. It, too, is expressed in a single word, moderation. As used here, moderation has a different connotation than it carries in modern usage, where it often describes occupying the midpoint on some spectrum of opinion. For Beneke, moderation is an attitude that is synonymous with liberality, accommodation, and a willingness to deal generously with others. It is also progressive, again not in our modern political sense, but simply by denoting improvement over some past behavior. But moderation as an attitude could also take an overtly political form. When Madison insisted that the First Congress of 1789 take up the constitutional amendments Americans now call the Bill of Rights, his primary motive was to assuage the misgivings of sincere if misguided Anti-Federalists who had opposed the Constitution.
Among the ensuing chapters that develop his analysis, the first, on “Duties,” is the most subtle but also fundamental. At one level, one can juxtapose two competing notions of duty, one tied to the obligations imposed on individuals by conscience, the other to the prevailing legal framework defining the status of denominations. The American notion of free exercise privileged the former over the latter. But the real conflict that Beneke establishes lies between the modern market-oriented notion that religious beliefs and affiliations are preferences that individuals freely choose, and the moral recognition that these flow instead from the duties imposed through the working of conscience.
The next two chapters, “Cruelties” and “Civilities,” work as ventures into the cultural meaning of free exercise. Protestant culture was suffused with memories of persecution wreaked by the Church of Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After the Bible, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was the most popular religious text in North America. One incentive to move away from this ingrained anti-Catholic prejudice derived from overtly political concerns during the Revolutionary War: the American appeals to Quebec and, more important, the French alliance of 1778. But increasingly, the history of religious violence appeared as a form of barbarism that had no place in a modern commercial society, as described by Adam Smith and other writers. As the chapter on “Civilities” explains, new forms of politeness, sociability, and gentility were viewed as model agents of moderation.
But how far would civility extend when it encountered the norms of separation embedded in gender and race? In his chapter on “Inequalities,” Beneke draws more skeptical and even pessimistic conclusions. Patriarchy and racial subordination and exploitation remained dominant values for free white males, and women and African Americans needed to work hard to attain any gains. Somewhat surprisingly, Beneke gives less attention to the ways in which African American churches flourished after the Revolution.
The last chapter, “Infidels,” is the best in the book. Its star is Thomas Paine, appearing not as the author of Common Sense but as the deist and rationalist who offended American sensibilities after returning to the United States in 1802. Paine’s role is to explain and illustrate how religiosity itself became a matter of opinion, not faith, and how all sectarian beliefs, or religious faith itself, could become the object of searching public criticism. Paine failed to carry the day. Nineteenth-century Americans were far more devout than their colonial predecessors. But the grounds of discussion had shifted. The ability to freely exercise religious beliefs by challenging all religious authority became a harbinger of a broader shift in American ideas of intellectual expression more generally.
