Wanted: Tolerant Orthodoxies
Paul Brink Friday, 1 September 2006
Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 392 pp. $19.95.
There is present in many histories of the early modern world an account of religious toleration that emphasizes its origins in the rise of liberalism following the sixteenth and seventeenth century religious struggles of Western Europe. The narrative goes something like this: Faced with a situation in which, on the one hand, it seemed most unlikely that any one of the Christian faiths would become common to all, and on the other, religious positions that admitted no compromise, early liberals sought to establish political order on something other than a religious foundation. The story continues that as they developed these foundations, they also willed to us a second great gift: religious toleration. Religious freedom is thus identified with the secularization of the state, and the achievement of an Enlightened liberal political theory is understood to have enabled those who disagree on so much to live together in the same society.
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