The Plague of Dissent

Abstract The story opens in the first three decades of the 18th century when dissenters were still treated as political subversives and unorthodox doctrines still compared to contagious diseases. This chapter briefly summarizes the long history of persecution in Europe and America, emphasizing the ideal of religious uniformity and the practice of religious localism. It then traces the emergence of toleration and the limits of the “divine right of private judgment”. The chapter concludes with an account of an early religious controversy involving Benjamin Franklin to underscore the relationship between the growth of the print trade and the expansion of religious autonomy.