Haefeli’s previous book, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty, likewise proffered a revisionist account of the origins of religious liberty in America. In his prior book, Haefeli insisted that the greatest contribution of the Dutch to American religious diversity was not to promote tolerance, but to keep the mid-Atlantic region out of English hands until the Restoration, giving pluralism a chance to take root in what became New York and New Jersey as well as parts of Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.
In Accidental Pluralism Haefeli argues that the religious pluralism that came to characterize colonial America was not a result of the colonists’ embracing pluralism as an ideal or establishing it in some planned or deliberate fashion. Rather, Haefeli contends, the origins of American religious freedom—a “peculiar mix of pluralism, tolerance, and liberty”—can be traced to the religious and political history of England and its empire between the earliest exploratory voyages and the re-institution of the Church of England after the Stuart Restoration.
Haefeli attempts to prove his thesis via a chronological discourse on England’s political history. He divides his book into five parts—Tudor-Stuart Foundations, 1497–ca. 1607; Jacobean Balance, ca. 1607-1625; Caroline Transformation,1625-1638; Civil Wars, 1638-1649; and Commonwealth, 1649-1660—presented in fourteen chapters and a conclusion.
Haefeli opens his analysis with the earliest English voyages in 1497, and notes that in this pre-Reformation period English expansionists were able to rely upon Catholic connections throughout Europe in pursuit of their goals. He concludes the book with the 1662 Act of Uniformity, an English Act of Parliament that regulated the form of worship in the Church of England after the Restoration of the monarchy and established the foundations of the modern Anglican church. The Act required all ordained clergy to follow the Book of Common Prayer, repudiate the Solemn League and Covenant, forswear the taking up of arms against the Crown, and adopt the liturgy of the Church of England.
Throughout the book Haefeli chronicles how the common politics of religious unity embraced, he claims, on both sides of the Atlantic shaped the ecclesiastical contours of the first British Empire. Religious pluralism, according to Haefeli, persisted largely from failure, neglect, or happenstance. America was “an extension . . . not an escape” from the religious conditions in Britain. Haefeli writes, “the Anglo-American colonies [should be understood] not as alternatives or exceptions to the religious dynamics of the English world but merely variants along the broad spectrum within it.”