ABSTRACT
Given the views that people in the sixteenth century held, expecting them to trust one another, I have argued, is expecting too much. No theory of rationality that does not beg significant questions against them can require them to give up what they view as their most fundamental value: salvation. Before the two sides in such intractable conflict can trust each other and before they can tolerate each other, then, something must change. As long as the people involved continue to hold the attitudes and values that they have, the two sides will be locked in conflict. Such a conflict simply is not “ripe” for any kind of solution (see Pruitt and Olczack 1995). Before any change is possible, something has to happen that profoundly alters their view of the world, so that they see the risks of trust very differently. They must somehow come to see toleration as a risk based on a perception of a precarious trust, rather than as an act of sheer lunacy. But such a change, I will argue, cannot be the result of simply rational reflection. Instead, the people must come to see the world in a new way; they must find themselves in a new moral landscape in which toleration becomes a live possibility. In a word, they must undergo a conversion.
