Jeffery Waldrop uses the Callender family, John Callender especially, and the role of the First Baptist Church in Newport to chart the emergence of religious toleration in eighteenth-century New England, a subject that he claims, probably to the surprise of historians, ‘is a relatively understudied subject’ (p. 1). Waldrop implies that the development of religious tolerance in New England is coincident with the acceptance of differences in the writing and actions of individual clergy, most notably the Baptists Elisha and John Callender and the Puritan Cotton Mather. The problem with this approach is its lack of appreciation for the shifting, transactional notions of toleration of Congregational clergy generally and Mather particularly throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Waldrop's approach has two difficulties: the first, in equating clerical statements with the emergence of religious toleration throughout New England. The second is that it does not account for the complexities of communities that had to adjust to where religious controversy and disputation took place: local and regional communities – Marblehead in opposition to Salem; Boston versus Dartmouth, Tiverton and Swansea; Massachusetts Bay in contrast to Plimoth; and Massachusetts against Newport and Providence – internal social and religious divisions within congregations or between emerging sectarian groups, or royal support for Anglicans and, as an imperial afterthought, Quakers after the 1660s. While Anglicans had considerable clout in their demand for tolerance and exemption from compulsory taxation after the Restoration, resident Quakers in towns like Kittery, Salem and most notably Boston, were able to secure grudging tolerance because of their social and economic value to their respective communities. In contrast to Anglicans and Quakers, Baptists represented one of many internal doctrinal splits within the congregational Calvinist family causing adjustments that superficially looked like the acceptance of religious difference but were in fact a working out of ambiguous truths. For Puritans infant baptism was a troubling sacrament that, while controversial, led to compromises in several towns – the Half-way Covenant – or separation – Harvard's president Henry Dunster, the Brattle Street and the First Baptist churches. Furthermore, more secular or religiously diverse communities with relatively high concentrations of dissenters – Marblehead, Gloucester, Kittery, south-eastern Massachusetts, Newport and Rhode Island – necessitated different arrangements, frequently but not always, leading to consistent patterns of toleration: Roger Williams, a champion of religious liberty for himself, never came to accept his Quaker neighbours in Newport. Indeed, what facilitated tolerance was less an affirmative valuing of difference than a process of reconceptualising or rationalising what defined common essential belief, of finding, in the words of William Hubbard, what differences were ‘not fundamental … [and] in other respects orderly and peaceable’: The happiness of the people (1676) (see William McLouglin, New England dissent, 1630–1833: the Baptists and the separation of Church and State, Boston 1971, i. 80). Under these circumstances, if they had differences in small things but remained essentially of one faith, the toleration of the Callenders and Cotton Mather is scarcely worthy of the name.