The chapter begins with an effort to explain the book’s starting-point in the Enlightenment. Moving from historiography to the events of the time, it begins by telling the tale of the essay competition on the question “What is Enlightenment?,” in which Moses Mendelssohn came first, followed by Immanuel Kant. Mentioning that some 200 years later, the French post-modernist historian-philosopher Michel Foucault wrote yet another essay under the same title, in which he explicitly combined German and Jewish history, the chapter moves once again from historiography to history, concentrating on the biography of Moses Mendelssohn, especially on his repeated confrontation with the religious intolerance of some of his enlightened colleagues and then, stressing the ambivalence of the situation, typical of the German Enlightenment as a whole, the chapter ends with a comment on Lessing’s Nathan der Weise.

This chapter aims to define the limits of religious toleration of the Eastern Orthodox Church in those areas of Europe which remained outside of direct Ottoman or Muscovite rule in the early modern period. The rudimentary confessional balance that had obtained between the Eastern and the Latin Churches in the kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Transylvanian principality and the kingdom of Hungary was disturbed by the arrival of Protestantism in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. The growing numerical strength and political influence of Evangelical nobles and burgesses necessitated the introduction of toleration as a state policy. When it was set in place, however, the politically emasculated believers of the Eastern Church were either effectively excluded from, or found themselves on the bottom rung of a tiered system of, official toleration. The survival of Orthodox privilege in Moldavia and Wallachia, and the full religious toleration granted by the Habsburgs to the South Slav peoples in exchange for their support in defending the imperial frontiers from the Ottomans, underscore the significance of political authority and instruments of violence in the hands of local élites for the preservation of traditional Orthodox identity.

This chapter examines the most important religious consequence of the Revolt of the Netherlands, the splitting of the Low Countries into two confessional states: the Catholic Southern Netherlands and the Protestant Dutch Republic. In the Southern Netherlands Catholic reformation would pick up speed, as church, state and laity worked together to re-catholicize the region and marginalize its small Protestant minority. This would prove in the long term to be a successful effort, and the Southern Netherlands became a bulwark of Baroque Catholicism. The Dutch Republic would be an officially Protestant state with one public church, the Dutch Reformed, but its population was multiconfessional. A regime of toleration was put in place that managed both the privileged church and the private confessions. Thus the legacy of reformation continued in both states, but under very different guises.

Chapter 6 traces the place of religion in negotiations for a settlement between Charles I and his opponents from 1642 up to the regicide. Often dismissed as irrelevant and futile gestures by two sides with irreconcilable positions who negotiated in bad faith, it is argued here that these negotiations nevertheless provide intriguing sets of potential reformation settlements that could have reshaped the Church of England in significant ways, and useful indications of where creative compromises might be made. The chapter demonstrates the official royalist commitment to upholding the reforms of 1640-41, and readiness to offer further reforms curbing the power of episcopacy, offering toleration to ‘tender consciences’, and the calling of a national synod to debate further religious reforms. The parliamentarian side in negotiations was significantly hamstrung by the restrictions of the Solemn League and Covenant’s condemnation of ‘prelacy’ and the uniting of the British churches. The chapter traces the arguments through various peace negotiations, noting in particular the new opportunities opened up by the army’s intervention and the offers of the Heads of the Proposals. It is noted that the concessions offered by Charles – however insincere – would enjoy a significant after-life in his published works and future reform proposals.

This chapter investigates Grotius’s broader intellectual involvement with the doctrine of predestination. Grotius deliberately renounced the religious importance of predestination as he called for religious concord in a time of fierce inter-confessional strife in the United Provinces - an endeavour that almost cost him his life. Considering his abhorrence for religious dogmas about divine predestination and human free will, two of his writings, Meletius and Ordinum pietas, display a remarkable restraint on Grotius’s part on the matter. Social and political order was not to be found in unrelenting dogmatic questions of certainty about what Grotius’s viewed as theologically non-essential religious principles. Rather it required a commitment to religious toleration. This chapter argues that Grotius’s involvement in the Dutch predestination debates reveals important philosophical connections between his religious and political ideas and allows for further explication of two central aspects of Grotius’s political theory: natural sociability and the impious hypothesis. From a careful contextualisation of predestination in Grotius’s religious oeuvre, emerges an account of socialisation independent of the predestination question, and establishes the infamous ‘etiamsi daremus’ statement as an obligation device that served his pursuit for religious and political accord.

Edward Andrew discusses Pierre Bayle, who held that conscience was the “voice of God,” but that humans can still err. Enlightenment thinkers increasingly insisted that social approval, not God’s voice, guided conscience. Thus, conscience became not about certainty concerning the right course of action, but rather about alignment with social forces that might create stability. Bayle maintained that conscience was a faculty of the person, although subject to error. This distinguished him from Locke, who referenced conscience in his political writings. However, in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke asserted that conscience was only one’s abiding beliefs. Bayle, however, proposed that conscience was the development of applications of natural law and Scripture. Harold Schulweis and Harold Berman are conversation partners for Bayle. Schulweis sees conscience as a force of judgment outside law. Morality is not fixed; rather, the person with an active conscience constantly recalibrates her actions and judges the right thing to do. Berman, however, thought conscience as a force beside law, like a jury that renders its judgment about the right decision under the circumstances.

The sixteen words on religion in the First Amendment have generated voluminous and vociferous scholarly interpretations. These controversies strike at the heart of the role of religion in American public life. How are we to decide which interpretation of the First Amendment is correct? Answers to this question have been laden with presuppositions. This chapter is an interdisciplinary analysis of recent historical, political, legal, and philosophical writing on the First Amendment to illustrate how key presuppositions inform the approach to arguments about the meaning, scope, and intent of the First Amendment. The chapter will first outline the contextual and philosophical problems of interpreting the First Amendment. It will then evaluate the providentialist, secular, and pragmatic presuppositions that have guided scholarly interpretations. Ultimately, the chapter will argue that there has not been a single understanding of the relationship between church and state in America, but that investigating these presuppositions can help us better appreciate the dynamic nature of religion, politics, and jurisprudence in America.

Founders of the earliest American colonies considered religious piety an essential civic virtue and therefore continued the tradition of religious establishment found in Britain and other Protestant countries. New sects and denominations (especially Quakers and Baptists) contended against Congregationalist and Anglican establishments throughout the colonies. Though prominent dissenters Roger Williams and William Penn founded colonies respecting religious liberty, the decline of religious establishment elsewhere was owed primarily to changes in British law, commercial and political expediencies necessary for increasingly diverse immigrant populations, and, in the case of Anglican establishments, the difficulty of securing ordination and a self-sustaining parish. Though Roman Catholics enjoyed some degree of toleration, enthusiastic Protestant identity on both sides of the Atlantic further reduced Catholic rights and liberties. Jews enjoyed some limited degree of toleration, but only in a handful of colonies.

This chapter focuses on Joseph Addison and Richard Steele as primary proponents of Enlightened culture in late Stuart England. Often seen now as ineffectual witnesses to the human costs of expanding commerce and imperialism, Addison and Steele were important as advocates of religious toleration, universal education, cultural relativism and hostility to extractive colonialism. Drawing a parallel between their modelling of empathetic persuasion in their periodical papers with Steele’s practice as a sentimental dramatist, I show how his playwriting sought to create national sympathy across sectarian, ethnic and ideological boundaries in order to create empathy for outsiders. This was a particularly urgent issue for Steele, who suffered all his career because he was Anglo-Irish.

John Cotton and Roger Williams were Puritan ministers in colonial New England. Cotton authored Abstract of the Laws of New England (1641), an early example of American constitutionalism drawing from both scripture and English law. Cotton’s Abstract was adopted by the New Haven colony and influential in the legal systems of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut. Cotton also became a prominent spokesman for the laws of Massachusetts Bay, and also advocated a particular style of Congregationalism significant for development of American political and legal thought. Roger Williams, once an apprentice and recording secretary for the eminent English jurist Sir Edward Coke, served briefly as a minister in Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies. Exiled for his criticism of the colonial charters and the Puritan partnership of church and state, Williams eventually founded the colony of Rhode Island and served as its President. Williams argued eloquently for religious liberty, provoking Cotton to engage him in a now-famous “Bloudy Tenant” debate published in London and read on both sides of the British Atlantic. Both Cotton and Williams were articulate representatives for opposing sides of a legal question contested as much in colonial America as today, the question of church-state relations and religious liberty.