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Virulent anti-Catholicism was a hallmark of New England
society from the first Puritan settlements to the eve of the
American Revolution and beyond. Thus America's tactical
decision during the Revolution to form alliances with
Catholics in Canada and France ignited an awkward debate.
The paradox arising out of this partnership has been left
virtually unexamined by previous historians of the
Revolution.
In Necessary Virtue Charles P. Hanson explores the
disruptive effects of the American Revolution on the
religious culture of New England Protestantism. He examines
the efforts of New Englanders to make sense of their own
shifting ideas of Catholicism and anti-Catholicism and
traces the "necessary virtue" of religious toleration to its
origins in pragmatic cultural politics. To some patriots,
abandoning traditional anti-Catholicism meant shedding an
obsolete relic of the intolerant colonial past; others saw
it as a temporary concession to be reversed as soon as
possible. Their Tory opponents meanwhile assailed them all
as hypocrites for making common cause with the "papists"
they had so recently despised. What began as a Protestant
crusade succeeded only with Catholic help and later
culminated in the First Amendment's formal separation of
church and state. The Catholic contribution to American
independence was thus controversial from the start.
In this felicitously written and informative book, Hanson
raises questions about difference, tolerance, and the role
of religious belief in politics and government that help us
see the American Revolution in a new light. Necessary
Virtue is timely in pointing to the historical
contingency and, perhaps, the fragility of the church-state
separation that is very much a poltical and legal issue
today.
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