Changing Loyalties: Religious Conversion and the American Revolution

Saturday, January 5, 2019: 8:50 AM
Continental A (Hilton Chicago)
Mark Valeri, Washington University in St. Louis
Protestant conceptions of conversion as a freely chosen affiliation with or loyalty to a new religious community helped to shape the political discourse of revolution in eighteenth-century America. Religion served to disengage individuals from existing political loyalties and to propel them to a new set of social and political obligations.