Mark Valeri is renowned for his excellent studies on the intellectual, religious and social history of colonial North America. His new book presents an interdisciplinary approach, in that it is situated at the intersection of intellectual history, religious studies and political thought. As Valeri explains in his introduction, this volume ‘sets the intellectual history in cultural and political context’ (p. 6) in its analysis of the ways in which Anglo-American Protestants saw non-Protestant religions in the period between 1653, when the first systematic treatises in English on non-Christian religions appeared, and 1765, at the start of the imperial crisis between Britain and its North American colonies. By ‘Anglo-American Protestants’ Valeri means broad-minded and often transatlantic-oriented Protestants who held a high regard for established laws and civil government. Thus, when covering the English Protestant tradition and its representatives, Valeri considers not only the Church of England but also Dissenting Protestant Churches, such as the majority of churches in New England, which were loyal to England and, despite several doctrinal differences, adhered to the main tenets of traditional Protestant teaching.

This book argues that, after the Glorious Revolution, the Anglo-American Protestant stance towards non-Protestant religions (i.e. Roman Catholicism, Islam, African religions, Native American traditions and East Asian religions) evolved considerably under the influence of the new regime, known by the moniker ‘Whig’, which promoted cooperation between Anglicans and Dissenters and endorsed ideas of toleration, moral liberty and moral virtue. A number of Protestants in Britain and North America – not only clergymen, missionaries and theologians, but also politicians, businessmen and even commoners – embraced the constitutional principles affirmed in 1688–9, thereby relinquishing theological orthodoxy as a prerequisite for patriotism. This was a remarkable change in the attitude of English Protestants, who had previously believed that ‘the health of the state depended on a post-civil war religious confession that would alleviate the disorders of the Interregnum’ (p. 3), although Anglicans and Nonconformists disagreed about the nature and scope of this religious confession.

The period between the Interregnum and the Glorious Revolution is the subject of the first two chapters of this book. While chapter i investigates the making of England’s confessional ideology, as well as confessional descriptions of non-Protestant religions, chapter ii focuses on English colonists’ efforts to convert the Native Americans of New England. In that context, Anglo-American Protestants conceived of non-Protestant religions as illegitimate and dangerous. Accordingly, they saw conversion as submission to a specific version of Christianity that they deemed essential to English identity. Conversely, as Valeri explains in chapter iii, the Glorious Revolution triggered new notions of toleration, liberty of conscience, freedom of the will and moral reasonableness (although the legal toleration granted in the immediate aftermath of the revolution was limited to Trinitarian Protestants, since the misnamed Toleration Act of 1689 expressly excluded Roman Catholics and non-Trinitarian Christians from toleration and was silent about non-Christian believers). Chapter iv explores the relationship between Whig moralism and the growth of the British political and commercial empire in the first half of the eighteenth century, when the social and political order rested ‘not on received religious traditions but on a decided separation between revealed religion and public, civil discourse’ (pp. 130–1). This separation of political legitimacy from religious affiliation resulted from the need to find a new (and non-theological) criterion, identified with Whig moral virtues and constitutional principles, to measure the public acceptability of different religious beliefs. Consequently, under the influence of Whig notions of moral liberty, Anglo-American Protestants idealised conversion as uncoerced choice, thereby viewing it as a matter of persuasion, and no more as a crucial element of a civilising, ‘Anglicising’ mission. Accordingly, they favoured religious practices that evinced sociability, reasonableness and regard for others’ liberty of conscience. Believing that ‘politically sound or useful religion … relied on persuasion – on the moral reasonableness of its claims’, they thought that ‘religious ceremonies or evangelistic practices that mirrored institutional Catholicism in the use of force to compel adherence were politically dangerous’ (p. 166), as Valeri explains in chapter v. Therefore, in the context of the First Great Awakening, concepts such as moral freedom, moral conscience and the moral appeal of Christianity played a major role in Protestants’ attempts at converting Native Americans, as is clarified in chapter vi.

While having many merits, The opening of the Protestant mind also presents some limits. Valeri appreciates that intellectual and theological convictions contribute to shaping political agendas, and he maintains that ‘religious ideas and political agendas developed in tandem’, but he acknowledges that his ‘narrative gives a leading role to the politics’ (p. 5). In this regard, it would have been helpful to have devoted more space to the ways in which religious ideas shifted over time and supported, or even conditioned, political agendas, particularly in times of transition. This was the case, for instance, in the 1680s, when theological diatribes and arguments played a role in the process that led to the Glorious Revolution, to a new socio-political order and to significant transformations in English attitudes to politics and religion. Moreover, Valeri declares that this book aims, above all, to facilitate a better understanding of ‘the mind of those Protestants who often exercised power over the religious “other” in their sphere of influence’ (p. 5). Nevertheless, while this book accurately examines Anglo-American Protestants’ views of Roman Catholicism, Islam and American, African and Asian religions, it pays scarce attention to their perceptions of, and attitudes towards, Judaism. This is surprising, because the chronological span of this volume includes the time between the unofficial readmission of Jews to England in 1656 and the passing and repeal of the Jewish Naturalisation Act in 1753–4, and because in early modern and Enlightenment England the political debate on the legal status of Jews, as well as the scholarly debate on the nature of the Jewish religion, was lively and at times heated.

Furthermore, Valeri argues that ‘a broad coalition of Protestants – including Calvinists in England and New England, broad-minded Anglicans, and deists – took shape during the second half of the seventeenth century’, and ‘a similarly expansive Protestant coalition, including Evangelicals, was drawn together after 1688 by a discourse of religious liberty and reasonableness’ (p. 6). However, both before and after the Glorious Revolution, theological and ecclesiological disputes plagued the Church of England and caused harsh controversies and significant divisions among the Anglican clergy, such as the Trinitarian controversy, the Nonjuring schism, and the Bangorian controversy, to name a few. Not to mention the enmity between Calvinist and Arminian clergymen of the Church of England, as well as the rivalry between the low church and High Church parties. Additionally, Nonconformist Protestants were not granted full civil and political rights until the nineteenth century, and deists and Unitarians, besides being among the main targets of blasphemy laws, were objects of contempt on the part of Protestant intellectuals (including broad-minded Anglicans as well as Dissenters), who frequently compared them to ‘infidels’ such as Muslims and even to atheists. Therefore, greater attention to these tensions, conflicts and divisions, which also had an impact on English Protestants’ different attitudes towards the post-Glorious Revolution regime, would have benefited the narrative of this volume, making it even more nuanced and problematising.

On the other hand, this book persuasively demonstrates that Anglo-American Protestants, in response to political change after the Glorious Revolution, and even more after the establishment of the Hanoverian empire, became generally less biased towards other religions. Based on a painstaking analysis of scholarly texts, as well as sources often overlooked by historians, such as ‘religious geographies and dictionaries, wondrous illustrations, travel accounts, diplomatic reports, merchants’ and soldiers’ diaries, sermons, and missionary tracts’ (p. 6), Valeri notes that ‘Protestant discourse … could at times call into question or at least buffer imperial and racialized agendas’ (p. 9). While recognising that Anglo-American Protestant ideas, resulting largely from western, and particularly English, notions of morality and liberty, were also deployed to hegemonic ends, Valeri’s findings indicate that eighteenth-century Protestant ‘conceptions of reasonableness and virtue, for all of their imperial uses, prompted critical diagnoses of racial bias and colonialism’ (p. 10). Thus, this book challenges the anti-religious prejudice conditioning most of the existing historiography on this subject. Valeri indeed rejects narratives revolving around an alleged continuity between the early development of British imperialism, the increase of Protestant evangelisation efforts and the emergence and spread of racialist theories buttressing the British and American ‘civilising’ mission. The changes in Anglo-American Protestants’ attitudes to the religious ‘other’, and hence in their evangelising agendas, during the period covered by this book actually call into question accounts that highlight a supposed uniformity of Anglo-American Protestantism in its historical development. These changes show, instead, that the Protestant discourse about religious otherness was not fixed and did not have univocal political implications. These thought-provoking findings effectively substantiate the thesis of this fascinating book. For all these reasons, The opening of the Protestant mind is an important contribution to the debate on the complex origins and development of Anglo-American Protestantism, and on its role in the emergence and spread of ideas of religious liberty, reasonableness and morality in the long eighteenth century.