“An important study.”

Pennsylvania Literary Journal

“An eye-opening narrative of the many versions of church-and-state attempted or imagined during the great age of British colonization in the Caribbean and North America—a narrative uprooting the assumption that a straight line runs from those attempts to post-1789 schemes to separate church and state. Accidental Pluralism will surprise and probably enchant most students of early American history.”

David D. Hall, author of A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England

“Accidental Pluralism is an outstanding piece of research, encyclopedic in scope. It has a unique and important point of view that needs to be taken seriously by all scholars of early American religion, of toleration and religious liberty, and of the early English empire in general.”

Ned Landsman, author of Crossroads of Empire: The Middle Colonies in the British Atlantic

“A sweeping, grand narrative, which exemplifies Atlantic history at its best. Haefeli chronicles the halting, often unintended, spread of spiritual diversity throughout the English-speaking colonies, and in the process delivers what is in many ways a new, overarching religious history of the early British empire.”

David Como, author of Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War