John Corrigan and Lynn S. Neal set the tone of the second edition of Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History with the same epigraph used in the first edition (2010): “I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end.”1 This declaration by John F. Kennedy made during an election speech to Protestant ministers in Houston, Texas, in 1960 continues, “For, while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist. . . . Today I may be the victim but tomorrow it may be you.”2
Religious Intolerance in America is an effort to address and contextualize Kennedy's vision of possibility in the wake of deeply rooted prejudice via a collection of primary documents that illustrate how religious intolerance has been...