Potential Protestants: Catholics, Conformity and Conversion in Early Modern Scotland, 1560-1780

Burns, Ryan Christopher

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-zzh9-y962

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Potential Protestants: Catholics, Conformity and Conversion in Early Modern Scotland, 1560-1780

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This project traces the efforts by Scottish Protestants to achieve complete religious uniformity in the decades following the Reformation. Discontented with outward conformity, the via media that long characterized our understanding of religious reform in England, Scotland’s ministers sought to work genuine conversions among those who resisted the new order. Rather than imprison suspected Catholics, the authorities in church and state forced them to undergo remedial education with an elder or a minister, an experience that could be as terrifying as it was edifying. Those who refused to conform were subjected to increasingly onerous rounds of enforced proselytization, which sometimes culminated in emotional breakdowns among the accused. This longue-durée study unsettles our understanding of religious persecution. Itexplores the psychological pressure brought to bear on religious dissidents, while also analyzing the secularization of this persecution over the course of the long eighteenth century. Ministers initially viewed Catholicism as a sin to which everyone was vulnerable, and one from which every sinner could be saved. This perception began to change during the late seventeenth century, when the stubborn persistence of a Catholic minority began to sow doubt in the conversion project. Faced with dangerous enemies at home and abroad, the Scottish church came to view Catholics as potential Jacobites rather than potential Protestants, would-be traitors who could never be brought into the fold. Religious differences were then thought to be immutable, with Catholics consigned to the status of a permanent, alien minority

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