Schwartz, Stuart B. All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-300-15854-0.

The early modern Atlantic world, in Iberia as well as in Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World, was home to an enormous religious diversity. A simple catalog of the religions that Stuart Schwartz mentions in his book All Can Be Saved gives some idea of how diverse the Atlantic world was: Catholic Christianity, in both its pre- and post-Tridentine formulations; Judaism; Islam; Protestant Christianity, especially Dutch Reformed, French Huguenot, and German Lutheran Protestants; African animist religions; Native American animist religions; European traditions of magic and the occult; and skepticism and unbelief. Of course religious belief as actually held seldom fell into such systematic categories, and Schwartz discusses many kinds of forced and voluntary religious intermingling, among which were Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity, Old Christians who layered Catholicism on top of folk religions or skepticism, Native Americans and Africans who mixed Christianity with their traditional religions, and Christians who were influenced by Native American and African religions or converted to Islam or Judaism. The question that motivates Schwartz’s study is this: Out of that religious milieu, how did many Iberian Christians come to hold the proposition that “each person can be saved in his or her own religion” (epigraph)?  Put another way, how did toleration develop out of religious conflict?

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