Persecution and Toleration The Long Road to Religious Freedom

Religious freedom has become an emblematic value in the West. Embedded in constitutions and championed by politicians and thinkers across the political spectrum, it is to many an absolute value, something beyond question. Yet how it emerged, and why, remains widely misunderstood. Tracing the history of religious persecution from the Fall of Rome to the present-day, Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama provide a novel explanation of the birth of religious liberty. This book treats the subject in an integrative way by combining economic reasoning with historical evidence from medieval and early modern Europe. The authors elucidate the economic and political incentives that shaped the actions of political leaders during periods of state building and economic growth.

1. Toleration, persecution, and state capacity; Part I. Conditional Toleration: 2 Religion and the state in the premodern world; 3. Why do states persecute?; 4. Jewish communities, conditional toleration, and rent-seeking; 5. Climatic shocks and persecutions; 6. The shock of the Black Death; Part II. The Origins of Religious Freedom: 7. State building and the reformation; 8. The inquisition and the establishment of religious homogeneity in Spain; 9. From confessionalization to toleration and then to religious liberty; 10. From persecution to emancipation; Part III. Implications of Greater Religious Liberty: 11. The persecution of witchcraft; 12. Religious minorities and economic growth; 13. The emergence of modern states, religious freedom, and modern economic growth; 14. Applying our argument to the rest of the world; 15. Modern states, liberalism, and religious freedom; 16. Conclusions.

The emergence of religious liberty in the West is one of the most important developments in modern history. This book treats the subject in an integrative way, borrowing tools from economics, history, and political science. Researchers in fields across the humanities and social sciences will find it a valuable resource.

Noel D. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Virginia and a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center.
Mark Koyama is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Virginia and a Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center. He was a 2017–2018 National Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.