Religious Tolerance

It was primarily ethnocentric, exclusionary, and based on human interpretations of a specific religious ideology. Men the 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 unkind who did not conform to the Puritan ideal of goodness. Mather and those like him entangle their "superior" moral stance allowed them to dispense justice against those who believed contrastively. Mather's passionate 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 make a dreadful knot of witches in the country, and by the attend to of witches has dreadfully increases?a more gross diabolism, than ever the realness saw before" (Mather 1950, 1).

Authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne protested the religious intolerance exhibited by such fanaticism in works like newfangled Goodman Brown. Goodman Brown meets a mysterious man in the wood 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 inform with your family?I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so modishly through the streets?and it was I that

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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