Religious Toleration and Protestant Expansion in Revolutionary England, 1642-1658

The English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century gave expression to the first major debates about religious toleration in British history. By revealing the international and transatlantic context for these ideas, this dissertation challenges the insularity of previous accounts of the “rise of toleration” in early modern England and explores the roots of an enduring relationship between post-Reformation Christianity, the development of liberal pluralism, and the legitimation of imperial power. During the Civil War of the 1640s, partisans of the New Model Army made emancipatory calls to tolerate “false” religions even as they endorsed brutal campaigns of domination and forced expulsion against “oppressors” they identified as “popish” in England and Ireland. In English America, the eruption of sectarian disputes led England’s militantly anti-Catholic authorities to endorse toleration for Protestant heterodoxy as a demographic strategy to ensure the survival and growth of a “godly” settler population. By contrast, the toleration debates of the 1650s grappled with the validity of “Papist,” “Socinian,” “Jewish,” and “Indian” consciences as England’s revolutionary leaders struggled to consolidate their authority, propagate the “pure” Gospel to Christians and non-Christians alike, take leadership of the Protestant cause in Europe, defend an unstable Reformed orthodoxy, and launch an imperial assault on the Spanish Caribbean. These concerns culminated in the movement to readmit Jews to England and its colonies in the mid-1650s. Deploying a discourse of Christian charity that was both humanitarian and anti-Catholic, proponents of readmission presented Jews as afflicted “strangers” in need of shelter from Roman Catholic persecution