Religious Tolerance

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Religious Tolerance

It was primarily ethnocentric, exclusionary, and based on human interpretations of a specific religious ideology. Men like Mather believed he and the members of his community who believed as he did maintained a monopoly on virtue and goodness. Such thinking allowed for the justification of treating others uncharitably and unkindly who did not conform to the Puritan ideal of goodness. Mather and those like him felt their �superior� moral stance allowed them to dispense justice against those who believed differently. Mather�s overzealous desire to keep the community �pure� allowed him to paint those who held different beliefs as an �evil other.� He attributed those who practiced witchcraft as being under the powerful influence of �the Devil who has made a dreadful knot of witches in the country, and by the help of witches has dreadfully increases�a more gross diabolism, than ever the world saw before� (Mather 1950, 1).

Authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne protested the religious intolerance exhibited by such fanaticism in works like Young Goodman Brown. Goodman Brown meets a mysterious man in the woods who is portrayed as the devil. During the encounter, the man tells Brown he is not the first to walk this path, �I have been well acquainted with your family�I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets�and it was I that

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Waco (Feb 28-Apr 19, 2003). Viewed on Oct. 14, 2003: http://www.hardylaw.net/waco.html, 1-4.

Editorial. (Nov 21, 2002). The First Commandment. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, C.18.

Hawthorne, N. (1900). �Young Goodman Brown.� Mosses From and Old Manse. Boston, MASS: Houghton Mifflin.

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		Cotton Mather \| Mather McCarthy \| Colonial America \| Goodman Brown \| Massachusetts Crucible \| Mather Puritans \| National Guard \| David Koresh \| McCarthy Instead \| Branch Davidians \| religious intolerance \| civil law \| colonial america \| mather mccarthy \| religious authority \| divine law \| civil authority \| religious intolerance exhibited \| contemporary america \| cotton mather \| superior moral \| contemporary society tolerant \| superior moral stance \| temporal spiritual commonwealth \| justice ray moore \|