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This chapter discusses the principles of a free society. It advances six proposals on the principles of a free society, and discusses a theory of free association. It argues that free association lies at the heart of the idea of a free society, and that the protection it offers to liberty of conscience is important.

This chapter focuses on the practice of liberty of doctrine. By the 1920s the opportunity to practice one's faith with liberty of conscience was a theme expressed increasingly by Texas religious and political leaders. Emphasis on liberty of conscience implied freedom from any monopoly over religion by government or of government by a religion. It also favored the right and duty of the individual to make a decision about his or her faith and to relate accordingly to God. In practice, liberty of conscience deterred clergy and lay leaders from bringing their faith in an official or organized way into the political arena. Clergy continued the basic work of saving souls, preaching moral repentance, and holding worship services. They devoted themselves energetically to starting new churches and increasing the size of existing ones. These activities left little time and few resources for anything else. Baptists and Methodists fought on occasion among themselves, but the conflicts were generally over worship, doctrine, church finances, and church publications than about public policy or political campaigns.

This chapter examines the case of placing toleration at the core of a political theory. It explains why toleration occupies a central position in a theory founded on freedom of association and liberty of conscience. It argues that taking toleration seriously means tolerating much that liberals are often unwilling to countenance, since it means that liberal societies should tolerate illiberalism.

This chapter links Coleman Street Ward London to the rise of the Leveller movement. Saints from the Ward’s network of gathered churches and their members serving in the New Model Army travelled widely across the country, preaching antinomianism and demanding liberty of conscience as they fulminated against kingly government. Simultaneously, they organized Leveller mass petitions and operated an underground press in Coleman Street Ward that became the Leveller’s unofficial publishing house. Former New Englanders figured prominently among the Coleman Street churches, which supplied the New Model Army with soldiers and the cause of liberty of conscience with its popular base of support. Although the Bay Colony’s agents in Old England decried the Levellers, other former Bay colonists who subscribed to radical reformation principles heralded the Leveller movement and were elected officers in one of the New Models’ most militantly republican regiments. In 1647, they led a mutiny against the army high command to promote the Leveller constitution, The Agreement of the People.The mutiny arose in part from ideological cleavages between Levellers and the army commanders over how to interpret the republican principle of government by consent, which the Levellers articulated in their attempts to abolish the embodied, political “slavery” of military impressment. (conscription).

The accession of James II paved the way for William Penn to play an increasingly prominent political role. Liberty of conscience appeared closer than ever, under a sympathetic king who cultivated Penn’s personal involvement in advancing his tolerationist program of repealing penal legislation and the Test Acts. In insisting that legitimate laws are made by consent-based political institutions, and that they ought to be motivated by civil interest and the common good, Penn was able to endorse immediate toleration through the king’s prerogative powers and simultaneously urge the legitimation of James’s Declarations by Parliament. However, Penn’s association with James would bring about his downfall, as he quickly became identified with an unpopular (and, after 1688, deposed) ruler. This chapter elaborates Penn’s high hopes for James, his theoretical and practical contributions to the tolerationist effort, and the eventual downfall of the campaign for liberty of conscience and James’s reign more generally.

This chapter discusses how the “windings and overturnings” of the 1640s and early 1650s were unprecedented in British history. For the Puritan movement, they were devastating. At the debut of the 1640s, the godly in England seemed on the verge of securing the reformation they had sought since the 1570s. As late as 1646 or possibly 1647, the classic goals of the movement still seemed within reach. Yet by 1650, the principles of a comprehensive state church and magistracy–ministry alliance had been displaced by voluntary versions of Protestantism and state support for liberty of conscience. Not in name but in practice, moral discipline had virtually collapsed. Doctrine, too, had become unhinged, although blasphemy remained a civil crime. Order of a quite different kind returned in 1660–62 with the restoration of the monarchy. With it came episcopacy throughout Britain and a line drawn in the sand about conformity. Some 1,600 ministers were unwilling to conform and, thereafter, became Dissenters (as did some of their congregations) who could not worship openly.

This chapter traces the emergence of William Penn as a national political figure by examining his published writings between 1668 and 1671, in the context of the public upheavals surrounding the passage of the Second Conventicle Act in 1670. It traces not only the political, philosophical, and epistemological arguments for religious toleration that were advanced during these years—a debate to which Penn contributed, most particularly with his The great case of liberty of conscience (1670)—but also the thought of those opposed to toleration, and who advanced their own, equally sophisticated, arguments for religious uniformity. The chapter also explores Penn’s commitment to the idea of fundamental law and Magna Carta, and concludes with a consideration of his broader defense of Quaker social practices such as refusing to observe conventional markers of social deference and to swearing oaths.

Along with many other Dutch republican writers, Spinoza holds that the sovereign must control sacred as well as civil matters, although in doing so he challenges the Dutch Reformed Church. Drawing on the example of the Hebrew Republic, he advocates the unification of civil and religious law. This suggestion guides an argument to the effect that piety (the goal of true religion and thus divine law) is a condition of peace (the goal of civil law) and vice versa, so that sovereign and citizens must protect both values, together with the religious pluralism and freedom to philosophize on which they depend. How far, exactly, should religious freedom and the freedom to philosophize extend? Spinoza sets out some limits. Nevertheless, republics become more secure as they cultivate a democratic ethos, and develop resources for engaging in the kind of peaceful debate that is the hallmark of genuine philosophy.

Although religious turmoil enveloped the colonies at the outset of the Revolution, only in New England did these conflicts spark radical reformation-inspired, constitutional revolutions against prerogative forms of civil government. Outrunning the pace of political change set by the “honest party” in England, settlers in Connecticut and Rhode Island established republican governments to preserve the people’s political and spiritual sovereignty in a reformed commonwealth. Roger Williams and Samuel Gorton returned to London to defend Rhode Island’s religiously tolerant, radical reformation experiment from violent annexation by their magisterial enemies in Massachusetts and the United Colonies. Despite the best efforts of New England and Old England’s most talented heresiographers, the pair convinced Parliament’s Committee for Foreign Plantations that the Bay Colony’s persecution of antinomians and Indians had forestalled the progress of the Reformation on the American strand. In this way, colonial emissaries in revolutionary London made the Parliamentary-sanctioned founding of a democratic commonwealth contingent upon a concept of liberty of conscience that encompassed the civil and spiritual sovereignty of native Americans and colonists alike. Coleman Streeters dominated this history, both on New England’s southwestern frontier and in Massachusetts, where Richard Saltonstall became a leader of radical reformation opposition and an exponent of republican structures of colonial government.

Chapter One begins after World War II in October 1945 at Bowne House, built in 1661 and the oldest house in Queens, for the 300^th anniversary, or tercentenary, of Flushing. This moment is then used to flash back to 1645 and connect the tercentenary to the colonial context and founding of Flushing (or Vlissingen in Dutch New Netherland), its town charter that granted religious freedom (or liberty of conscience as it was then known), the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, John Bowne’s arrest and exile by Peter Stuyvesant, and Bowne’s successful appeal to the Dutch West India Company in 1662. The chapter also traces the history of religious, racial, and ethnic pluralism in Flushing from the late seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century and the consolidation of Queens with New York City in 1898.

This chapter discusses Franklin’s family history, especially the family’s background in England. Franklin’s grandparents were trying to develop their family in England’s Midlands during the era of the civil wars, and several major battles took place in their midst. Family stories about those times came down to Benjamin Franklin through his father and his favorite uncle, also named Benjamin. These were stories Franklin reflected upon all his life, including in his autobiography written when he was a mature man. The family always embraced the ideals of liberty of conscience in matters of faith, and they admired leaders (such as John Rogers and Samuel Wells) who challenged government authority. Franklin would go on to use the story of John Rogers as an exemplary model of martyrdom for freedom of conscience when he published the New England Primer.

Harrington very deliberately engaged in a number of high-profile religious debates during the late 1650s in order to defend and advance the vision of a civil religion that was central to his account of an equal commonwealth as set out in Oceana. Alongside debates concerning the nature of the commonwealth of Israel discussed previously, Harrington engaged in religious controversies over ordination within the early church and the proper relationship between church and state, clergy and laity. This last debate even led him to coin the modern meaning of the term ‘priestcraft’. His position in these debates paralleled and interacted with his engagement in political and historical issues. Once more he offered a distinctive ‘middle way’, this time balancing Erastianism and the establishment of a national church with liberty of conscience, and his commitment to popular government or democracy was again crucial.

This chapter explores whether there was a functioning national, established Church during the Cromwellian regime of the 1650s. It concludes that under the Protectorate there was an effective, flexible, and decentralized ‘public profession’, supported by the regime alongside its commitment to liberty of conscience for most Protestants. Tithes and the basic parish structure were maintained, and successful measures were put in place to support a learned, preaching ministry. The doctrine of this ‘public profession’ was broadly Trinitarian, with ample opportunities for local initiative, lay involvement, and the participation of clergy with a range of affiliations, including Presbyterians and moderate episcopalians.

The New England colonies were settled in the early seventeenth century by men and women who could not in conscience subscribe to all aspects of the faith and practice of the Church of England. In creating new societies they struggled with how to define their churches and their relationship with the national Church they dissented from. As their New England Way evolved the orthodox leaders of the new order identified and took action against those who challenged it. Interaction with dissenters such as Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Baptists, and Quakers helped to further define the colonial religious establishment.