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. |
From inside the book
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... reason for this treatment was the refusal of Christians to worship any god but their own or take part in the imperial cult by offering sacrifices to the gods on the emperor's behalf. Christians proclaimed that the pagan gods did not ...
... reasons cited for this development are the growth of religious indifference and unbelief, and political expediency.15 With regard to the first, it is impossible to deny that these two factors, indifference and unbelief, made an ...
... reason cited for the appearance of the latter is political expediency, of which a good account has been given by Herbert Butterfield, an eminent English historian of early modern Europe, who emphasized the overwhelming importance of the ...
... reasons and justifications. In the absence of convincing reasons showing why toleration is right and desirable, the institutional accommodation and the change in individual and social values needed to 12 CHAPTER 1.
... reason for tracing its history was less to write a disinterested account than to produce a brief defending himself from the charge of heresy that his critics made against him, and to reinforce the argument of his political philosophy ...
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 |