Andrew Murphy
· Professor of Political ScienceVerifiedUniversity of Michigan · Religious Studies
Active 1969–2025
About
Andrew Murphy is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, joining the department after appointments at Virginia Commonwealth University, Rutgers University, Valparaiso University, and the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the intersections between politics and religion, both in historical and contemporary contexts. He is particularly interested in the emergence of religious liberty and liberty of conscience in early modern England and America, and the ongoing influence of these debates on American politics. Murphy's scholarly work includes a detailed study of William Penn, exploring his life, career, and political thought. He authored 'William Penn: A Life' (Oxford, 2019) and 'Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration: The Political Thought of William Penn' (Oxford, 2016), and co-edited 'The Worlds of William Penn' (Rutgers, 2019). An edition of Penn's political writings was published in 2021. His earlier work, 'Conscience and Community,' revisited toleration and religious dissent in early modern England and America. His more recent publications include 'Political Religion and Religious Politics,' co-authored with David S. Gutterman, and 'Prodigal Nation,' which examines moral decline and divine punishment from New England to 9/11. Murphy's current research continues to explore the relationship between politics and religion, with a forthcoming project on political martyrdom. His work integrates historical and contemporary political reflection, contributing to understanding the complex interplay of death, religion, politics, collective memory, and symbolic power.
Research topics
- Political science
- Sociology
- Law
- History
- Religious studies
Selected publications
2025-01-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter provides an introduction to toleration. Toleration involves a complex blend of objection and acceptance, a willingness to guarantee rights to those holding beliefs or engaging in practices that many consider wrong or misguided. Although its modern roots lie in early modern European religious disputes, efforts to secure peaceful coexistence are not limited to those times and places. Nor has toleration been limited to the religious; it has been invoked in disputes over civil liberties, human rights, race, gender, and sexuality. The chapter distinguishes between toleration and the related notion of tolerance, and explores the relationship between toleration and the notion of a modus vivendi, a “way of living together” that seeks minimal civil peace and eschews more robust notions of community.
Contesting and defending toleration
2025-01-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter brings the story down to the present day. It opens with disputes between those who view toleration as key to the modern liberal democratic tradition and those who take a dimmer view of its interconnections with colonial and imperial projects, as well as its minimal nature. It also considers toleration’s relevance to controversies over LGBTQ rights, as well as the tradition of research on political tolerance. The chapter concludes by exploring rhetoric about a “tolerant” West and “intolerant” non-Western traditions like Islam that reverberate in global affairs; and emphasizes toleration’s status within the “negative liberty” tradition in which freedom is understood as the absence of restraint.
William Penn’s Some Fruits of Solitude: Public Disgrace and Private Consolation
Early modern literature in history · 2025-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingPerspectives on Politics · 2025-02-10
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingIn this paper, I explore how two recent politically charged deaths—those of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt—illuminate the broader dynamics inherent in the concept of political martyrdom and its relationship to American democracy. Political martyrdom (as distinct from that associated with religious communities) offers martyrs a life beyond the grave, not by promising eternal life or paradise, but by ensuring them a role in a community’s collective memory. It involves three components: death , in what we might call “unnatural” circumstances, generally connected to an individual’s identity (or identities) or political commitments; consecration of that death, embedding it in a community’s collective memory and ascribing to it transcendent meaning; and transmission , the passing down of martyrdom narratives over time through media, ritual, and commemorative practices. The paper uses the examples of Floyd and Babbitt to illustrate the value of this conceptual category, one that focuses less on the personal qualities of individuals and more on communities’ narrations of their lives and deaths; highlights such narratives’ capacity to build collective identities over time, often in contexts far removed from the martyrs’ own lives and deaths; and offers new interpretive lenses for considering twenty-first-century issues of systemic violence and structural injustice.
Colonial and imperial complications
2025-01-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter considers the role played by toleration in colonial and imperial contexts, and the ways that it functioned as a tool of power and control. It opens with the anti-Catholic “Black Legend,” accusing the Spanish of intolerant savagery in their treatment of indigenous peoples. It explores the East India Company’s attempt to define Hinduism as a religion worthy of toleration, and the related controversies over allowing missionaries into India, which illustrated the conflict between evangelical claims of freedom to preach and another understanding of religious freedom as guaranteeing communities the liberty to live unmolested. The chapter closes by considering the intersection between enslavement, toleration, and proselytization in the Americas.
2025-01-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter considers the future of the tolerationist legacy. It argues that Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance,” which justified intolerance directed toward intolerant parties in society, offers an oversimplified answer to the dynamics of toleration in contemporary societies. The chapter considers toleration and related terms in human rights charters and in efforts to improve the condition of marginalized religious, ethnic, and cultural groups. Despite toleration’s minimal nature, it retains a role to play in guaranteeing basic protections to those facing hostility from their neighbors or governments. The chapter returns to the notion of a “way of living together” that seeks minimal civil peace and eschews more robust notions of community.
Toleration: A Very Short Introduction
2025-01-23
book1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Toleration is one of the foundational concepts of modern political life: both praised as an important first step toward securing rights and liberties and criticized as a half-measure that fails to secure equal respect and mutual concern. This Very Short Introduction canvasses the history, development, and contemporary status of toleration, laying out its conceptual foundations; exploring arguments advanced in its favor as well as those offered by its critics; and surveying the eras and regions where rulers and regimes have attempted to implement it as a way of dealing with various types of difference. Finally, it reflects on the prospects of toleration in a globalized, highly polarized, and ever more diverse world.
2025-01-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter explores the roles played by Luther, Erasmus, Christian humanists, and a range of early modern thinkers and activists in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emergence of religious toleration. Although Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration is the best-known account, a broad tolerationist coalition advanced a range of sophisticated scriptural, psychological-epistemological, pragmatic-political, and historical arguments. Tolerationists, however, faced powerful opponents, and the chapter also investigates antitolerationist arguments. In addition, it illustrates the powerful role played by anti-Catholicism in the development of early modern toleration. The chapter concludes by considering the ways in which thinkers tied religious toleration to a cluster of related rights at the core of a free society, including speech, press, and assembly.
7 Civil Religion on the Ground: Theory and Practice in Early Pennsylvania
Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2024-05-16
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingOxford University Press eBooks · 2024-02-22
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Much of the literature on the relationship between republicanism and religion has focused on a purported tension between republican thinkers and Christianity. Rousseau famously denied the possibility of a Christian republic (‘these terms are mutually exclusive’), while Machiavelli’s effusive praise of Numa’s use of Roman religion to unite the populace amplified his denunciations of the Christianity of his day. This chapter examines these two important exemplars while also going beyond them to consider the broader Anglo-American republican tradition, which displays a more nuanced and complex relationship between republicanism and religion. Atlantic republican thinkers drew on classical sources as well as Jewish and Christian ones, articulating a ‘godly’ or ‘Christian’ republicanism; later scholars theorized on the importance of ‘civil religion’ in ways more friendly to Christianity than Machiavelli’s or Rousseau’s formulations. Rather than an inherent hostility to Christianity (to say nothing of ‘religion’ more generally), the republican tradition offers a range of possible theoretical and institutional arrangements in a similarly wide range of historical contexts. As long as political thinkers, actors, and ordinary citizens view their political and religious liberties as intertwined, and draw meaning and value from both political and religious communities, the relationship between republicanism and religion will remain a vibrant site of inquiry.
Frequent coauthors
- 44 shared
Robert L. Winkler
Technical University of Darmstadt
- 22 shared
Richard W. Katz
- 20 shared
Barbara G. Brown
- 9 shared
Fiona Boland
- 9 shared
J Augustine
NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research
- 9 shared
T. Carlson
University of Washington
- 8 shared
Daniel S. Wilks
- 6 shared
Martin Ehrendorfer
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