How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the WestReligious intolerance, so terrible and deadly in its recent manifestations, is nothing new. In fact, until after the eighteenth century, Christianity was perhaps the most intolerant of all the great world religions. How Christian Europe and the West went from this extreme to their present universal belief in religious toleration is the momentous story fully told for the first time in this timely and important book by a leading historian of early modern Europe. |
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... conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to another for his religious belief. —John Stuart Mill, On Liberty CONTENTS w PREFACE CHAPTER 1 Religious Toleration: The Historical Problem.
... work of Christian thinkers, mostly unorthodox Protestants, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all of whom were powerfully motivated by their religious beliefs to fight against the intolerance of both the Catholic and xii PREFACE.
... inhumanity of Christianity in its dealing with differences of religious belief, a history not yet ended even in his own time, that caused the famous eighteenth-century French thinker Voltaire to declare that 2 CHAPTER 1.
... belief,” and “freedom of worship.”11 In the1560s in France, we find the words liberté de conscience beginning to be used to oppose the forcing of consciences as a form of oppression.12 As we shall see later, moreover, the most noted ...
... belief in and the practice of toleration, as they have evolved and become established in the United States and other countries of the Western world, depend on a very simple and basic principle. This principle is that society and the ...
Contents
1 | |
14 | |
The Advent of Protestantism and the Toleration Problem | 46 |
The First Champion of Religious Toleration Sebastian Castellio | 93 |
The Toleration Controversy in the Netherlands | 145 |
The Great English Toleration Controversy 16401660 | 188 |
John Locke and Pierre Bayle | 240 |
Conclusion The Idea of Religious Toleration in the Enlightenment and After | 289 |
NOTES | 313 |
INDEX | 367 |