Between Tolerance and Tyranny: Protestant Dominicans, Social Morality, and the Making of a Liberal Nation

Focusing on the historical and ideological ties between two organizations—the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and the Grand United Order of the Odd Fellows (GUOOF)—and Dominican liberals, the chapter shows that these links grew stronger in the post-1865 period as liberal positivists promoted ideas that benefited non-Catholic Dominicans, such as the separation of church and state, freedom of thought, and freedom of religion. This chapter additionally argues that contemporary concepts of social morality among liberals and others served as a proxy for racial discourse and at times made various non-Catholic creeds—white US moral capitalism, African American Protestantism, and Latin American positivism—seem compatible with each other as well as with local expressions of Dominican Catholicism. These convergences, however, also had their fault lines.