The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty

During the mid-seventeenth century, Anglo-American Protestants described Native American ceremonies as savage devilry, Islamic teaching as violent chicanery, and Catholicism as repugnant superstition. By the mid-eighteenth century, they would describe amicable debates between evangelical missionaries and Algonquian religious leaders about the moral appeal of Christianity, recount learned conversations between English merchants and Muslim scholars, and tell of encounters with hospitable and sincere priests in Catholic Canada and Europe. What explains this poignant shift?Using a variety of sources--travel narratives, dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the world's religions, missionary tracts, and sermons, The Opening of the Protestant Mind traces a transformation in how English and colonial American Protestants described other religions during a crucial period of English colonization of North America. After the English Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent growth of the British empire, observers began to link Britain's success to civic moral virtues, including religious toleration, rather than to any particular religious creed. Mark Valeri shows how a wide range of Protestants--including liberal Anglicans, Calvinist dissenters, deists, and evangelicals--began to see other religions not as entirely good or entirely bad, but as complex, and to evaluate them according to their commitment to religious liberty. In the view of these Protestants, varieties of religion that eschewed political power were laudable, while types of religion that combined priestly authority with political power were illegitimate. They also changed their evangelistic practices, jettisoning civilizing agendas in favor of reasoned persuasion.Valeri neither valorizes Anglo-Protestants nor condemns them. Instead, he reveals the deep ambiguities in their ideas while showing how those ideas contained the seeds of modern religious liberty.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Chapter One: Disorder and Confessionalism Sources for Restoration-era Writers England's Confessional Ideology Confessional Descriptions of the World's Religions Chapter Two: Praying Indians Conversion within English Protestant Communities Missions to Algonquian Communities in New England Chapter Three: Revolution and Toleration Apologists for the Revolution of 1688 Religious Comparison and the Idea of Toleration Travel and Religious Encounters Chapter Four: Empire and Whig Moralism Imperial Agendas Whig Criteria for Religious Authenticity New Studies of the World's Religions Eighteenth-century Travelers Chapter Five: Power, Ceremony, and Roman Catholicism French Whigs and the Critique of Ceremonialism Descriptions of Ceremonial Power Images of the World's Religions Religious Diversity and Roman Catholicism Chapter Six: Indian Conversions The Great Awakening and Moral Freedom Native American Moral Conscience Missionaries' Critique of Anglicization The Moral Appeal of Christianity Disaffiliation and Affiliation Epilogue Hannah Adams and the Revolutionary Nation Conclusion: Limits and Paradoxes Index

About the Author :
Mark Valeri is the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. His book Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America, received the 2011 Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and a Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow in the Culture of the Americas at the Huntington Library.

Review :
The Opening of the Protestant Mind provides a new origin story for the idea of freedom of conscience, demonstrating its intertwined roots in eighteenth-century political and religious concerns. Eschewing portrayals of puritans as pillars of intolerance, Valeri takes readers deep inside the minds of English Protestants during the colonial conquests that created the British Empire, introduced the comparative study of religion, and paved the way for missionary movements and argues that the imperialism of the nineteenth century was far from inevitable. A deeply thoughtful, subtly multifaceted, and cogently argued intervention in ongoing discussions regarding Euro-American views of other peoples and religious traditions. This is a compelling account of how, between the Restoration and the American Revolution, Anglo-Protestants learned—at least sometimes—to tolerate non-Protestant people of faith and imagine them as trustworthy imperial subjects or republican citizens. Valeri's moderate Protestants did not embrace radical egalitarianism, but neither were they merely masking and enabling colonialism, imperialism, and racism. Under the regime of British religious toleration, Valeri finds a story marked by contingency, contestation, and conceptual transformation. Historians of religious toleration often tell a simple tale of atavistic bigotry yielding to enlightened, pragmatic secularism. The Opening of the Protestant Mind tells a more complicated story of sincere believers struggling to imagine a social order that accommodated religious difference. Making unexpected connections between domestic debates and imperial efforts to 'convert' non-European peoples, Mark Valeri deepens our appreciation of a now-imperiled legacy built by those who seriously—if imperfectly—embraced moderation as a spiritual value. The Opening of the Protestant Mind provides readers with a rich understanding of how those changes came to take place. Engagingly written and blessedly short on jargon, this study is an important addition to the study of American political history and the development of religious liberty. Using a variety of sources--travel narratives, dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the world's religions, missionary tracts, and sermons, The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty by Dr. Mark Valeri traces a transformation in how English and colonial American Protestants described other religions during a crucial period of English colonisation of North America. The Opening of the Protestant Mind makes several important contributions to historical understanding of Anglo-American life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. First, the book succeeds in emphasizing the significance of the discourse around other religions in this era. With careful readings of the texts cataloging and comparing world religions, the work demonstrates the need to take the endeavor seriously. Second, the book carefully delineates the significant implications of Whig moralism and republican thought for religion. The argument on this point helps make sense of attitudes in Georgian England that were then adopted and adapted in the American context. Finally, the result of the whole project is to demonstrate how multiple concerns came together in the thinking and writing of Anglo-American Protestants. Deep research and conceptual sophistication make Mark Valeri's Opening of the Protestant Mind a landmark account of a discursive "before" and "after" in the English/British homeland and its colonies during the early modern era (Englandbecame Britain after the 1707 Union of English and Scottish monarchies). The success of The Opening of the Protestant Mind depends upon Valeri's nuancedaccount of "discourse," or instincts, assumptions, and taken-for-granted habits of mind. He recognizes that deference to certain instincts of the ancien regime did not vanish entirely, also that eighteenth century's standards of reasonableness could be employed to justify the enslavement of Africans and the extermination of Natives. The Opening of the Protestant Mind is an impressive work, bursting with original source quotations set within helpful historical context. The Opening of the Protestant Mind, the well deserving winner of the 2024 Philip Schaff Prize, makes crucial, innovative contributions to early American history and American religious history. It deserves a wide readership, and should inspire similarly excellent, erudite research into how religious communities perceive, interact with, and understand one another.