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Accidental Pluralism

America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497-1662

Evan Haefeli

Accidental Pluralism

Evan Haefeli

384 pages | 11 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2021
American Beginnings, 1500-1900
Cloth $45.00 ISBN: 9780226742618 Will Publish April 2021
E-book $45.00 ISBN: 9780226742755 Will Publish April 2021
The United States has long been defined by its religious diversity and recurrent public debates over the religious and political values that define it. In Accidental Pluralism, Evan Haefeli argues that America did not begin as a religiously diverse and tolerant society. It became so only because England’s religious unity collapsed just as America was being colonized. By tying the emergence of American religious toleration to global events, Haefeli creates a true transnationalist history that links developing American realities to political and social conflicts and resolutions in Europe, showing how the relationships among states, churches, and publics were contested from the beginning of the colonial era and produced a society that no one had anticipated. Accidental Pluralism is an ambitious and comprehensive new account of the origins of American religious life that compels us to refine our narratives about what came to be seen as American values and their distinct relationship to religion and politics.
Contents
Introduction

Part 1: Tudor-Stuart Foundations, 1497–ca. 1607

1. Colonization: Religion, Expansion, Guiana, and Slavery
2. Conformity: Religious Change, Obedience, and Virginia
3. Jurisdiction: Ireland, Scotland, and the Limits of Authority
4. Dissent: English Papists, Puritans, and Others

Part 2: Jacobean Balance, ca. 1607–1625

5. Balance: Virginia, Bermuda, Newfoundland, ca. 1607–1618
6. Polarization: Plymouth, Avalon, Nova Scotia, New England, 1618–1625

Part 3: Caroline Transformation, 1625–1638

7. Favorites: Saint Christopher, Barbados, Maryland, 1624–1632
8. Puritans: New England, Providence Island, the Leewards, 1629–1638
9. Catholics: Montserrat, New Albion, Maryland, 1632–1638

Part 4: Civil Wars, 1638–1649

10. Fragmentation: Rhode Island, Madras, Trinidad, 1638–1643
11. Toleration: New England, Bermuda, Madagascar, 1643–1646
12. Revolution: New England, the Bahamas, Barbados, the Leewards, 1647–1649

Part 5: Commonwealth, 1649–1660

13. Republic: New England, the Caribbean, Acadia, 1649–1654
14. Empire: Surinam, Barbados, Jamaica, Dunkirk, 1654–1660
Conclusion
 
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Note on Transcriptions, Dates, Sources, and Terminology
Notes
Index
Review Quotes
David D. Hall, author of A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England
“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.”
Ned Landsman, author of Crossroads of Empire: The Middle Colonies in the British Atlantic
“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.”
David Como, author of Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War
“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.”
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History: American History | British and Irish History

Religion: American Religions | Comparative Studies and History of Religion

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