During the mid-seventeenth century, Anglo-American Protestants described Native American ceremonies as savage devilry, Islamic teaching as violent chicanery, and Catholicism as repugnant superstition. By the mid-eighteenth century, they would describe amicable debates between evangelical missionaries and Algonquian religious leaders about the moral appeal of Christianity, recount learned conversations between English merchants and Muslim scholars, and tell of encounters with hospitable and sincere priests in Catholic Canada and Europe. What explains this poignant shift? Using a variety of sources--travel narratives, dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the world's religions, missionary tracts, and sermons, The Opening of the Protestant Mind traces a transformation in how English and colonial American Protestants described other religions during a crucial period of English colonization of North America. After the English Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent growth of the British empire, observers began to link Britain's success to civic moral virtues, including religious toleration, rather than to any particular religious creed. Mark Valeri shows how a wide range of Protestants--including liberal Anglicans, Calvinist dissenters, deists, and evangelicals--began to see other religions not as entirely good or entirely bad, but as complex, and to evaluate them according to their commitment to religious liberty. In the view of these Protestants, varieties of religion that eschewed political power were laudable, while types of religion that combined priestly authority with political power were illegitimate. They also changed their evangelistic practices, jettisoning civilizing agendas in favor of reasoned persuasion. Valeri neither valorizes Anglo-Protestants nor condemns them. Instead, he reveals the deep ambiguities in their ideas while showing how those ideas contained the seeds of modern religious liberty.

About the Author
Mark Valeri is the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. His book Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America, received the 2011 Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and a Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow in the Culture of the Americas at the Huntington Library.

Reviews
The Opening of the Protestant Mind provides a new origin story for the idea of freedom of conscience, demonstrating its intertwined roots in eighteenth-century political and religious concerns. Eschewing portrayals of puritans as pillars of intolerance, Valeri takes readers deep inside the minds of English Protestants during the colonial conquests that created the British Empire, introduced the comparative study of religion, and paved the way for missionary movements and argues that the imperialism of the nineteenth century was far from inevitable. * Ann Braude, author of Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion *
A deeply thoughtful, subtly multifaceted, and cogently argued intervention in ongoing discussions regarding Euro-American views of other peoples and religious traditions. * Arun W. Jones, Dan and Lillian Hankey Associate Professor of World Evangelism, Candler School of Theology, Emory University *
This is a compelling account of how, between the Restoration and the American Revolution, Anglo-Protestants learned-at least sometimes-to tolerate non-Protestant people of faith and imagine them as trustworthy imperial subjects or republican citizens. Valeri's moderate Protestants did not embrace radical egalitarianism, but neither were they merely masking and enabling colonialism, imperialism, and racism. Under the regime of British religious toleration, Valeri finds a story marked by contingency, contestation, and conceptual transformation. * Christopher Grasso, author of Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War *
Historians of religious toleration often tell a simple tale of atavistic bigotry yielding to enlightened, pragmatic secularism. The Opening of the Protestant Mind tells a more complicated story of sincere believers struggling to imagine a social order that accommodated religious difference. Making unexpected connections between domestic debates and imperial efforts to 'convert' non-European peoples, Mark Valeri deepens our appreciation of a now-imperiled legacy built by those who seriously-if imperfectly-embraced moderation as a spiritual value. * Daniel K. Richter, author of Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts *
The Opening of the Protestant Mind provides readers with a rich understanding of how those changes came to take place. * Andrew R. Murphy, History of European Studies *
Engagingly written and blessedly short on jargon, this study is an important addition to the study of American political history and the development of religious liberty. * Choice *
Using a variety of sources--travel narratives, dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the world's religions, missionary tracts, and sermons, The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty by Dr. Mark Valeri traces a transformation in how English and colonial American Protestants described other religions during a crucial period of English colonisation of North America. * New Books Network *


Awards
Winner of Winner, Philip Schaff Prize, American Society of Church History.



Book Information
ISBN 9780197663677
Author Mark Valeri
Format Hardback
Page Count 312
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 626g
Dimensions(mm) 165mm * 237mm * 25mm