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.
Reviews
"An impressive, important, powerful, and sweeping book that few scholars could have written." * Journal of Early American History *
"Accidental Pluralism challenges the popular notion that puritans saw America as a refuge. . . . Haefeli offers a new explanation of how religious pluralism worked its way into English colonies in North America and the Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." * Australasian Journal of American Studies *
"Accidental Pluralism is brimming with fascinating details about more than a century and a half of English, Scottish, and Irish colonial enterprises, arguably more of them stillborn than successful. And he does a consistently effective job situating these projects with the contentious politics of early modern Britain. The effect is often kaleidoscopic, as patterns of common religious policies and imperatives appear among the various locales for a moment before dissipating into difference and fragmentation." * H-Early America *
"[A] rich and ranging study. . . . Accidental Pluralism is a well-written and useful book that grapples with the common religious and political dynamic underlying the disparate efforts of early modern British imperialism. It will be of real value to students and scholars alike." * H-Net *
"Origin stories of the United States often highlight religious freedom as a foundational pillar of the earliest English settlers. But Haefeli tells a more complex story in Accidental Pluralism. In this ambitious contribution to the origins of American religious tolerance, Haefeli argues that religious diversity was rarely the hoped-for goal of English expansion in the Atlantic. Rather, toleration arose of necessity from the collapse of political control over the English state church in the highly contested landscape of early modern religious conflict." * New Books Network *
"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 *
"Perhaps of most value, is that Haefeli's broadening the narrative's perspective without ignoring or dismissing local circumstances, has laid a new path through an often overwhelmingly complex historiography that scholars of this era should find useful." * Journal of Church and State *



Book Information
ISBN 9780226742618
Author Evan Haefeli
Format Hardback
Page Count 384
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 680g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 33mm