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In the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the division of Western Christianity into rival religious camps, France descended into religious civil war in the years 1562-1598. The question then was how to respond to it. Writing after Spinoza's championing of freedom of religious thought but before Hobbes' advocacy of a strong sovereign who would dictate the prayers and forms of religious worship for the nation as a method of avoiding religious conflict, Bodin argued for religious toleration, indeed for a degree of religious toleration that was radical in its day.

The Protestant conception of religion as a private matter of conscience organized into voluntary associations informed early liberalism's conception of religion and of religious toleration, assumptions that are still present in contemporary liberalism. In many other religions, however, including Hinduism (the main though not only focus of this article), practice has a much larger role than conscience. Hinduism is not a voluntary association, and the structure of its practices, some of which are inegalitarian, makes exit very difficult. This makes liberal religious toleration an awkward fit for Hinduism; granting religious toleration in India undermines equality and autonomy in severe ways. Yet Hinduism is not without its virtues, and has historically been what I call externally tolerant—it has been relatively tolerant of other religions. Liberal toleration, by contrast, is internally tolerant—it is tolerant of religions that fit the Protestant model, while its tolerance of others is considerably more qualified. I briefly speculate at the end of the article about how to combine these two models of toleration.

One aspect of the issue of toleration of religion is how far the government and others should recognize religious claims of conscience. Such claims will be present in any liberal democracy. The particular controversies on which attention is mainly focused shift, but certain underlying themes remain. In this essay, I outline what I take to be the major issues about government recognition of religious claims of conscience. I then address the special problems created when a claim of conscience ends up competing with an opposing claim of conscience or with basic premises about fairness and justice. We can conceive of these as competing claims of toleration. Just such competition is involved when the question is a possible exemption from compliance with laws that recognize same-sex marriage and from laws that require insurance coverage of contraceptive drugs, two prominent issues in our present political setting

What motivated an absolutist Erastian who rejected religious freedom, defended uniform public worship, and deemed the public expression of disagreement a catalyst for war to endorse a movement known to history as the champion of toleration, religion's freedom from coercion, and separation of church and state? At least three factors motivated Hobbes's 1651 endorsement of Independency: the Erastianism of Cromwellian Independency, the influence of thepolitiquetradition, and, paradoxically, the contribution of early modern practices of toleration to maintaining the public sphere's religious uniformity. The third factor illustrates how a key function of the emerging private sphere in the early modern period was to protect uniformity, rather than diversity; it also shows that what was novel was not so much the public/private distinction itself, but the separation of two previously conflated dimensions of publicity—visibility and representativeness—that enabled early modern Europeans to envisage modes of worship out in the open, yet still private.

Includes indexes. ; Bibliography: v. [1], p. 421-477. ; [1] From the beginning of the English Reformation to the death of Queen Elizabeth.--[2] From the accession of James I to the convention of the Long Parliament, 1603-1640.--[3] From the convention of the Long Parliament to the Restoration, 1640-1660.--[4] Attainment of the theory and accommodations in thought and institution, 1640-1660. ; Mode of access: Internet.