Religious toleration (original) (raw)

Learn about this topic in these articles:

history

Persia

• Cyrus II

  • 
    In Cyrus the Great: Cyrus’s conquests
    Cyrus was also tolerant toward the Babylonians and others. He conciliated local populations by supporting local customs and even sacrificing to local deities. The capture of Babylon delivered not only Mesopotamia into the hands of Cyrus but also Syria and Palestine, which had been conquered previously by the…
    Read More

• Darius I

  • 
    In Darius I: Darius as an administrator
    …of Cyrus in respecting native religious institutions. In Egypt he assumed an Egyptian titulary and gave active support to the cult. He built a temple to the god Amon in the Kharga oasis, endowed the temple at Edfu, and carried out restoration work in other sanctuaries. He empowered the Egyptians…
    Read More

• Bohemia

  • 
    In Czechoslovak history: Re-Catholicization and absolutist rule
    …the peasants, and he granted religious toleration. After the long period of oppression, these were hailed as beacons of light, although they did not go as far as enlightened minds expected. In fact, Joseph’s Edict of Toleration was not followed by a mass defection from the Roman Catholic Church in…
    Read More

• Bulgaria

  • 
    In Bulgaria: Religion
    …period of state-sponsored atheism, full freedom of religion was established. There is no official religion, and the majority of religious Bulgarians are adherents of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Minority religious groups include Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Gregorian Armenians. Within the Protestant minority are Great Commission Christians, Pentecostals,
    Read More

• Cambodia

  • 
    In Cambodia: Angkorean civilization
    …his reign was characterized by tolerance toward a variety of Buddhist and Hindu sects that occasionally blended into local cults honouring ancestral spirits and spirits of the soil. Indeed, for all the apparent absolutism of its kings, a consistent feature of Angkorean civilization unmatched in medieval Europe was religious toleration.
    Read More

• Delhi sultanate

  • 
    In India: Society and the state under the Tughluqs
    …approach to local social and religious practices. A few Hindus and Jains had held state positions under the Khaljīs; under the Tughluqs the non-Muslim Indians rose to high and extremely responsible offices, including the governorships of provinces. Muḥammad ibn Tughluq was the first Muslim ruler to make planned efforts to…
    Read More

• Egypt

  • 
    In Egypt: Egypt under the caliphate
    …especially in Umayyad times, was tolerance, partly for fiscal reasons. In order to maintain the higher tax revenues collected from non-Muslims, the Arab governors discouraged conversion to Islam and even required those who did convert to continue paying the non-Muslim tax. New Christian churches were sometimes built, and the government…
    Read More
  • 
    In Egypt: Saladin’s policies
    …the Christians of Egypt with tolerance; the Coptic Church thrived under the Ayyūbids, and Copts still served the government. Saladin also treated the Christians of Jerusalem with magnanimity after the conquest of that city. Under Saladin the Jewish community enjoyed protection, and such noted scholars as Moses Maimonides—who was the…
    Read More

• France

  • 
    In France: Henry IV
    …state, even though unity meant religious toleration for the Protestant minority. In the Edict of Nantes (April 13, 1598) Henry guaranteed the Huguenots freedom of conscience and the right to practice their religion publicly in certain prescribed areas of the country. As a surety against attack, the Huguenots were granted…
    Read More

• Germany and the Reformation

  • 
    In Peace of Westphalia: The decisions
    …Peace of Augsburg’s provisions for religious toleration to the Reformed (Calvinist) church, thus securing toleration for the three great religious communities of the empire—Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist. Within these limits the member states of the empire were bound to allow at least private worship, liberty of conscience, and the…
    Read More
  • 
    In Germany: The Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia
    In declaring the religious situation fixed as of 1624, the treaty mandated that, if a prince converted, his land no longer converted with him. Religious pluralism and—albeit grudgingly—coexistence were now the norm.
    Read More
  • 
    In Germany: Enlightened reform and benevolent despotism
    …apparent in the decline of religious resentments and discriminations. Never before had the relationship between Roman Catholics and Protestants among the well-to-do classes of central Europe been as free of rancour as on the eve of the French Revolution. It was at this time also that Jews first began to…
    Read More

• Hungary

  • 
    In Hungary: The period of partition
    Transylvania was also spared internecine religious strife when, at the Diet of Torda in 1568, the Roman Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran, and Unitarian churches agreed to coexist on a basis of equal freedom and mutual toleration. The Greek Orthodox faith of the Vlachs (later called Romanians), who constituted the rest of…
    Read More

• Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem

  • 
    In Crusades: The military orders
    The tolerance of the Franks, noted by Arab visitors, often surprised and disturbed newcomers from the West.
    Read More

• Mughal Empire

  • 
    In India: Evolution of a nonsectarian state
    Mughal society was predominantly non-Muslim. Akbar therefore had not simply to maintain his status as a Muslim ruler but also to be liberal enough to elicit active support from non-Muslims. For that purpose, he had to deal first with the Muslim theologians and…
    Read More

• Ottoman Empire

  • 
    In Eastern Orthodoxy: The Christian ghetto
    …taxes, they deserved consideration and freedom of worship. Any Christian mission or proselytism among the Muslims, however, was considered a capital crime. In fact, Christians were formally reduced to a ghetto existence: they were the Rūm millet, or “Roman nation” conquered by Islam but enjoying a certain internal autonomy.
    Read More

• Poland

  • 
    In Poland: Social and cultural developments
    Under the tolerant policies of Sigismund II, to whom John Calvin dedicated one of his works, Lutheranism spread mainly in the cities and Calvinism among the nobles of Lithuania and Little Poland. The Sandomierz Agreement of 1570, which defended religious freedom, marked the cooperation of Polish Lutherans
    Read More

• Reformation

  • 
    In history of Europe: The Wars of Religion
    …and accorded the Protestant Huguenots toleration within the state, together with the political and military means of defending the privileges that they had exacted. The southern Netherlands remained Catholic and Spanish, but the Dutch provinces formed an independent Protestant federation in which republican and dynastic influences were nicely balanced. Nowhere…
    Read More
  • 
    In Protestantism: Toleration
    The great Protestant advance depended in part on the existence of the secular state and on toleration. As late as 1715 the Austrian government had denied all protection of the law to Hungarian Protestants. After the French Revolution, however, the few survivals of this…
    Read More

religions

• Baptist faith
  • 
    In Baptist: Contents
    …forefront of the struggle for religious freedom in both England and the United States. They cherished the liberty established in early Rhode Island, and they played an important role in securing the adoption of the “no religious test” clause in the U.S. Constitution and the guarantees embodied in the First…
    Read More
• Christianity
  • 
    In Christianity: Authority and dissent
    …beginning, has tended toward an intolerance that was rooted in the understanding of itself as revelation of the divine truth that became human in Jesus Christ himself. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). To be…
    Read More
• monotheistic religions
  • 
    In monotheism: The basic monotheistic view
    …monotheistic conviction results in the rejection of all other belief systems as false religions, and this rejection partly explains the exceptionally aggressive or intolerant stance of the monotheistic religions in the history of the world. The conception of all other religions as “idolatry” (i.e., as rendering absolute devotion or trust…
    Read More
• Quakerism
  • 
    In Society of Friends: The rise of Quakerism
    principles, especially pacifism and religious toleration. Toleration would allow colonists of other faiths to settle freely and perhaps become a majority, though consistent pacifism would leave the colony without military defenses against enemies who might have been provoked by the other settlers. Penn, entangled in English affairs, spent little…
    Read More

views

• Cromwell
  • 
    In Oliver Cromwell: Legacy of Oliver Cromwell
    …protector, Cromwell was much more tolerant than in his fiery Puritan youth. Once bishops were abolished and congregations allowed to choose their own ministers, he was satisfied. Outside the church he permitted all Christians to practice their own religion so long as they did not create disorder and unrest. He…
    Read More
• Henry IV
  • 
    In Edict of Nantes
    …granted a large measure of religious liberty to his Protestant subjects, the Huguenots. The edict was accompanied by Henry IV’s own conversion from Huguenot Calvinism to Roman Catholicism and brought an end to the violent Wars of Religion that began in 1562. The controversial edict was one of the
    Read More
• James II of England
  • 
    In James II
    …suggest a genuine belief in religious toleration as a matter of principle; others point to the establishment of Roman Catholicism as the dominant if not the exclusive religion of the state. This confusion may well reflect the state of James’s own mind, which undoubtedly deteriorated in the years 1687–88, and…
    Read More
• Lessing
  • 
    In Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Final years at Wolfenbüttel. of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
    …the equality of three great religions in regard to their ethical basis, for the play celebrates man’s true religion—love, acting without prejudice and devoted to the service of mankind. Among the representatives of the three religions—Islāmic (Saladin), Christian (the Templar), and Jewish (Nathan)—only the Jew, in whose character Lessing paid…
    Read More
• Locke
  • 
    In John Locke: Association with Shaftesbury
    Locke drafted papers on toleration, possibly for Ashley to use in parliamentary speeches. In his capacity as a physician, Locke was involved in a remarkable operation to insert a silver tube into a tumour on Ashley’s liver, which allowed it to be drained on a regular basis and relieved…
    Read More
  • 
    In John Locke: Last years and influence
    …he wanted in matters of religious toleration. He was offered a senior diplomatic post by William but declined. His health was rarely good, and he suffered especially in the smoky atmosphere of London. He was therefore very happy to accept the offer of his close friend Damaris Masham, herself a…
    Read More
  • 
    In constitution: The social contract
    …Locke characteristically excluded atheists from religious toleration because they could be expected either not to take the original contractual oath or not to be bound by the divine sanctions invoked for its violation. For Rousseau, too, the willingness to subject oneself to the “general will” to which only the popular…
    Read More
  • 
    In John Locke
    …and in the importance of toleration, especially in matters of religion. Much of what he advocated in the realm of politics was accepted in England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 and in the United States after the country’s declaration of independence in 1776.
    Read More
  • 
    In political philosophy: Locke
    In advocating toleration in religion, he was more liberal: freedom of conscience, like property, he argued, is a natural right of all men. Within the possibilities of the time, Locke thus advocated a constitutional mixed government, limited by parliamentary control of the armed forces and of supply.…
    Read More
• Penn
  • 
    In William Penn: Quaker leadership and political activism
    …was as a protagonist of religious toleration that Penn would earn his prominent place in English history. In 1670 he wrote The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience Once More Debated & Defended, which was the most systematic and thorough exposition of the theory of toleration produced in Restoration England.…
    Read More
• Voltaire
  • 
    In Voltaire: Heritage and youth
    …1709 nor the horrors of religious persecution. He retained, however, a degree of admiration for the sovereign, and he remained convinced that the enlightened kings are the indispensable agents of progress.
    Read More
  • 
    In Voltaire: Achievements at Ferney of Voltaire
    …beheaded for having insulted a religious procession and damaging a crucifix (July 1, 1766). Public opinion was distressed by such barbarity, but it was Voltaire who protested actively, suggesting that the Philosophes should leave French territory and settle in the town of Cleves offered them by Frederick II. Although he…
    Read More