Few weeks pass without a rousing discussion of the meanings of religious liberty, freedom of religion, and the separation of church and state in the American context. More often than not these conversations focus especially on the arguments of the nation's founding mothers and fathers and the many ways in which their original intentions are used and abused by all sorts of subsequent generations in all sorts of situations—from the prayers Americans can pray to the allegiances they should pledge. Typically all parties involved argue about the simplicity of the correct position—always their own, of course. The essays in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America make it abundantly clear, however, that such debates not only predate the era of the U.S. Constitution and the men and women who drafted and debated it, but also that these debates were and perhaps ought to be much more nuanced and complex than most contemporary Americans want to make them.

Chris Beneke and Christopher Grenda, the volume's editors, are to be commended for the ways in which they brought together such a useful collection of potentially disparate articles written from a variety of methodological approaches. Unlike many collections, the twelve essays in The First Prejudice end up not only working well alongside each other despite what occasionally appear to be disagreements in conclusions, but also interacting well with each other as they concentrate on the relationships between practice, rhetoric, and law, identifying “intersection points where the tangle of regulations, rhetoric, and customs that governed relations between early American faiths can be addressed without reflexively defaulting to the languages of toleration, religious freedom, or church and state” (3). Such interaction helps draw together these pieces that are written from the perspective of social history, intellectual history, and constitutional history by focusing on the “coexistence” of religious tolerance and intolerance throughout time and space in early America (8).

This theme of “coexistence” allows some of the top scholars in their respective areas to stress the ways in which ideologies, practices, and lived experiences of early Americans of various religious convictions and ethnicities were anything but simple—ebbing and flowing in multiple directions at one and the same time. Such a wide focus, it seems, is one of the major strengths of this volume. From essays that specifically treat the intellectual and rhetorical foundations and developments of this period that paved the way for competing visions and definitions of tolerance to chapters that investigate the daily experiences of various religious adherents (Protestants, Catholics, non-Christians, and skeptics), The First Prejudice demonstrates the complexities of religious tolerance and intolerance in early America and thus the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of any simple resolution to such debates.

While all the included essays are excellent examples of historical scholarship, the chapters by Christopher Grenda, Susan Juster, Richard Pointer, Jon Sensbach, and Christopher Grasso were especially strong in the eyes of this reviewer. Acting as bookends, Grenda and Grasso establish the boundaries of tolerance in early America. Grenda focuses on the ideological and cultural foundations of these boundaries by investigating how the idea of religious toleration developed from the sacred, secular, and Enlightenment forms of reasoning of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In turn, Grasso analyzes the ways in which “infidels” and religious skeptics—birthed as they often were from these secular and Enlightenment forms of reasoning—struggled to be seen as within the boundaries established by their neighbors in the early American context. The chapters in between focus on the experiences of various groups within these boundaries.

For example, Juster's chapter on the prosecution of religious crimes in early America, though less than comprehensive, which she readily admits, stands as a fascinating example of the coexistence theme found throughout the larger collection. In her analysis, religious tolerance and intolerance can be seen in the prosecution of crimes of blasphemy and contempt of church, which illustrate the “symbiotic relationship between religious and political order on the margins of empire” (125). Fittingly, she stresses the severity of such bigotry. “Religious prejudice,” Juster contends, “functioned in the colonial era much like racial prejudice does in modern America, as an ever-present if not always publicly acknowledged force shaping the everyday life and civic culture of its residents” (142).

This is not to say that religious persecution and racial persecution never overlapped. For, as Pointer and Sensbach demonstrate, religious tolerance in early America often took on ethnic, cultural, and even racial casts. In their respective essays, though, these authors also use the theme of coexistence to argue that the indigenous peoples of North America and Africans both made “Christianity their own” (188) and “were actively involved in these processes of spiritual reimagination and reinvention” (211). Additionally, these two chapters illustrate the development of raced conceptions of identity in early America. While neither Pointer nor Sensbach explicitly argues that whites in early America crafted racial identities for the Native Americans and enslaved Africans living among them, this reviewer believes and argues elsewhere that many whites did use religious convictions and intolerance to construct such identities and both Pointer and Sensbach show such happening in their respective chapters.

In the end, the twelve essays comprising The First Prejudice represent what will hopefully become or inspire several book length treatments of the histories of religious persecution, bigotry, tolerance, and the free exercise of religion in early America. Even in their current forms, though, these chapters further our understanding of religion as “the United States' first prejudice” (1). For that reason alone, this volume will likely be seen as a must read for historians of early America, religious historians, constitutional historians, and scholars focusing on the development of race in America.