Our Dear-Bought Liberty

Roman Catholics do not figure much in accounts of early American religious liberty, and understandably so. The vast majority of the free people in the new United States were Protestant. Accordingly, accounts of early American religious liberty favor Protestants, and especially the English philosopher John Locke. However, as Michael Breidenbach points out in this well-researched and important study, there is one big problem with this approach: Locke excluded Roman Catholics from the benefits of toleration and citizenship, but the United States did not. How and why that was possible, intellectually and in practice, is the subject of Breidenbach’s book. Locke’s discrimination was merely picking up on an old Protestant claim that Catholics could not be tolerated or relied upon because they owed allegiance to a foreign power by virtue of their religion. However, Anglo-American Roman Catholics regularly defied this claim by playing a role in all of the key phases...

Allegiance · Citizenship · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Protestantism · Toleration · Virtue · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies