Abstract

The Author claims that protestant culture has been instrumental in the assertion of citizenship in the age of the American Revolution. Going back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he traces the first focusing of the topic in the arguments for resistance advanced by swiss and scottish calvinist theologians; then he analyses the contribution of english radicals, before and after the Great Rebellion of the Forties, above all in their concept of toleration and pluralism. Trying to establish a connection between Reformation thinking, "sectarian" outlook and American experience, he finds that resistance and toleration, embedded in the religious culture of the colonies, had a leading role in the making of the young Republic and in the conceptualisation of citizenship which sustained it.