War, Peace, and Disinterest European Protestantism in Crisis, 1560–1800
War, Peace, and Disinterest
European Protestantism in Crisis,
1560–1800
In his exploration of what gives rise to a sense of national identity, the nineteenth-century French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan (1823–92) pointed out the importance of suffering and persecution in creating a sense of solidarity and shared values: “Suffering in common,” he wrote, “unifies more than joy.”1 Violence and oppression—and sometimes even the mere perception of such a threat—from a rival religious grouping help to crystallize a sense of self-identity in the face of “the other.” When it comes to binding a group together, nothing is quite as effective as shared grievances, suffering, and hatred—perhaps even the hope of revenge.
This phenomenon is so well known that it needs illustration rather than justification. An excellent example lies to hand in the role of Western interventionism in politicizing and radicalizing Islam in the last hundred years. A growing Western presence and influence in Islamic regions of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been a powerful stimulus to the development of politicized forms of Islam that derive their sense of identity and mission from hostility toward the West. For instance, an appeal to a common sense of Islamic identity is central to Osama bin Laden’s ideology of “holy war.” In fact, Islam is just as divided as Christianity: substantial differences exist between Sunnis and Shi’ites, not to mention the range of sects within those two broad strains, such as the Wahhabis. But the perception of a series of coordinated attacks on Islam by the United States and others was easily portrayed as an assault on “Islam” itself. Those attacks rapidly became the centers of nucleation around which a shared belief in an essential Islamic identity crystallized.
National Portrait Gallery, London, Great Britain; Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY
Oliver Cromwell, c. 1649, by Robert Walker (1599–1658).
The origins of the modern Islamic movement can be traced back to about 1875, when Jamal al-Din al-Afghani urged Muslims to resist the growing Western influence in the Middle East by a reaffirmation of their Islamic heritage. He encouraged Muslims to believe that, prior to the arrival of the Westerners, a golden age of wise Islamic rule had held sway. This situation could be retrieved by a return to personal religious piety, a reform and renewal of Islamic shariah law, and violent resistance to the Western presence and influence in the region.2 By defining a common enemy—the United States of America, or a specific American president—modern Islamism thus creates a sense of identity and shared goals within Islam. As we shall see, much the same process happened within Protestantism in the later sixteenth century.
PERSECUTION AND THE SHAPING OF PROTESTANT IDENTITY
As Protestantism began to expand in the early 1560s, it encountered resistance from a renewed Catholicism. The Catholic Reformation, long delayed by the Habsburg-Valois conflict, had begun to make an impact. Although some degree of internal reform had been under way since the 1490s, the rise of Protestantism catalyzed a systemic review of the church’s life and thought.3 Clerical abuses were remedied; new religious orders—such as the Society of Jesus—were established, and others reformed; and the reforming Council of Trent gave a new sense of theological direction and intellectual security to the church.
Although this renewal was partly driven by an internal agenda, based on the recognition of a need for change, the importance of external factors cannot be overlooked.4 In northern Europe, the Catholic Reformation generally expressed itself as the Counter-Reformation, whose main concern was neutralizing and reversing the impact of Protestantism in hitherto Catholic territories. Peter Canisius’s Catechism (1555) proved an especially effective riposte to its Protestant rivals. When the Catholic Reformation assumed this polemical nature, Protestantism was “the other.” The term “Protestant” came to mean a third, deficient, and deviant form of Christianity that was neither Catholic nor Orthodox. Paradoxically, Catholics regarded the movement as an essentially homogeneous “non-church” that posed a clear and present danger to the real church. A group of essentially distinct, even potentially divergent, movements were thus bracketed together for essentially polemical reasons to encourage Catholic unity and vigilance. Their obvious differences were glossed over in a generally successful attempt to portray Protestantism as a single, well-defined enemy—a serious threat that demanded Catholic unity if it was to be blocked.
A similar process of mutual identification took place on the Protestant side. Especially in times of international tension, “Protestantism” became the emblematic ideal that gave a group of otherwise quite disparate religious movements a shared sense of identity—above all, through fear of a common enemy. This belief in a pan-European Protestant religious identity was at its greatest and most persuasive when the Catholic response took the form of violence. As Renan rightly noted, communal identities are forged and consolidated in many ways, but above all through a sense of solidarity in suffering.
The role of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1559) in catalyzing a sense of shared grievance and suffering illustrates this point perfectly.5 Foxe was a Marian exile who had settled in the city of Basel. Like many at that time, he was shocked by the violence of Mary Tudor’s persecution of Protestants, especially the barbaric deaths of the three leading Protestant bishops of the age—Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas Ridley. Many of those whom he had known personally were executed. Foxe’s account of the final days of England’s leading Protestant martyrs was avidly read, hardening attitudes within the community and strengthening its resolve to resist and eventually to overcome this evil. The addition of woodcut illustrations of the deaths of England’s martyrs made this one of the most effective works of propaganda of the age.
The violent deaths of possibly as many as thirty thousand French Protestants (the figures are disputed and impossible to verify) in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 further radicalized many Protestants. The outrage created a powerful, if ultimately temporary, sense of shared identity between Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican Christians, accompanied by a profound sense of grievance. Catholicism was “the other”; its violence was perceived to be directed against Protestantism as a whole. The fate of Protestantism in France did much to provoke indignation in its Protestant neighbors and create a sense of a righteous religious minority being persecuted by a Catholic juggernaut, directed from Rome. The portrayal of Protestants as the innocent victims of Catholic brutality and repression reinforced both the stereotype of Catholicism as “the other” and a sense of shared anger and solidarity throughout international Protestantism.
Protestantism’s prejudices against Catholicism were reinforced by the bizarre reaction of the papacy to the massacre in France. Gregory XIII’s celebration of the massacre was as jubilant as it was undiplomatic: the bells of Rome rang out to mark a public day of thanksgiving, the guns of the Castel Sant’ Angelo were fired in salute, and a special commemorative medal was struck to honor the occasion. Gregory even commissioned Giorgio Vasari to paint a mural depicting the massacre. Such tactless actions could not fail to produce a reaction of total distaste and disgust, and the “anti-popery” that subsequently spread throughout Protestant regions of Europe remained a persistent element of Protestant self-definition until very recently.6
In England, the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the dismantling of the “Gunpowder Plot” increased the perception that Protestantism was defined primarily by its hostility to Catholicism, and especially the figure of the pope.7 The figure of the pope thus became an icon of hostility and resistance (in much the same way that hostility toward the American president is talked up in Tehran).
Yet other conflicts led to quite different outcomes. Anabaptists were perceived as a threat by both Lutheran and Reformed Protestants, who were in turn regarded as oppressors by those who were allegedly so dangerous. As the religious geography of Germany became unsettled after the Peace of Augsburg, Lutheran and Reformed communities found themselves forced to define themselves over and against several “others.” It was not merely Catholicism that threatened to overwhelm them; they faced a significant challenge from rival visions of Protestant identity. So severe were these internal tensions within Protestantism that it was at times difficult to believe that any common ideology united the factions.
The essential dynamic of Protestant identity, as disclosed by the events of the second half of the sixteenth century, was that of a fragmented and largely disunified movement that was able to set its internal divisions in their proper perspective by the very real threat of being overwhelmed by Catholicism. So great was this threat, and so fragile any sense of commonality, that the removal of this external constraint would unleash the forces, hitherto contained and constrained, that threatened to break Protestantism into warring factions. Historically, Protestantism has always needed an “other,” an external threat or enemy, imagined or real, to hold itself together as a movement.
These tensions between different understandings of Protestantism finally erupted openly in the English Civil War (1642–51). Although this conflict possessed many dimensions and elements, at its heart it pitted two rival visions of Protestant identity against each other. Puritan and Anglican battled for the soul of England—and arguably, for the future direction of English-speaking Protestantism. The Puritan military victory could not be sustained politically, and Anglicanism regained the ascendancy after a remarkably short and ineffective inter-regnum. Yet while other intra-Protestant tensions might not have led to violence or warfare on such a dramatic scale, the tensions were real and seemed incapable of resolution. Protestantism was a house divided against itself—regionally, culturally, and theologically.
JAMES I: THE BACKGROUND TO THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR
Historians disagree as to whether the English Civil War should be seen as the last European war of religion or the first European revolutionary movement, presaging the French Revolution of 1789. A case can be made for each interpretation, in that at least some of their elements were unquestionably present. For our purposes, the importance of the English Civil War is that it set one form of Protestantism against another within a single nation, bringing about a major crisis of identity within the movement.8
The English Civil War was one of the most significant intellectual and political landmarks in the history of English-speaking Protestantism. Until the end of the Second World War, this pivotal event in English history tended to be evaluated from the perspective of the ultimate winners—the royalists and Anglicans—and thus a critical, often abusive, account of the agendas and concerns of both Parliamentarianism and Puritanism.9 In the 1960s, the history of the English Civil War was rewritten. Puritanism, it was now believed, was a less radical force than had hitherto been believed. In line with the broader revisionist perspective that was then sweeping the field of seventeenth-century English history, Puritans were seen as deeply conservative figures who were closely allied with the political and religious establishments in England until the hostility of Charles I’s regime forced them into violent opposition. Unsurprisingly, the winds of historiographical change have changed direction yet again: more recent scholarship has recovered much of the view that Puritanism was indeed a radical, even revolutionary, movement that fostered “godly discontent” to such an extent that a social and political revolution was an entirely conceivable outcome.10
While there were tensions between Anglicans and Puritans toward the end of the reign of Elizabeth I, these had always been held in check. The early years of the rule of James I not only exacerbated existing tensions but created new ones. After the heights of England’s sense of achievement and purpose during Elizabeth’s last years, a sense of disillusionment appears to have taken hold of the nation, as some of its leading figures felt increasingly undervalued and alienated.
The problems began under James I, whose somewhat extravagant notion of the “divine right of kings” caused considerable political difficulties. The idea had been around since the Middle Ages; James, however, developed it in what many regarded as an unacceptable, even downright eccentric, way.11 The basic idea is summarized neatly in the opening sonnet of James’s Basilikon Doron (1598), written while he was still king of Scotland:
God gives not Kings the style of Gods in vain,
For on his throne his Sceptre do they sway.
In some 1609 speeches to Parliament, James made it clear that he regarded himself as above the law, which was his instrument for ruling on God’s behalf.
The king’s subsequent dissolution of Parliament in 1611 was entirely consistent with his theology; it did nothing, however, to endear him to the increasingly powerful and vocal gentry. Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) led the intellectual opposition to James’s interpretation of the “divine right of kings,” arguing that the king was under the law, not above it. Law was not something the king could use as he pleased to enforce his will; rather, it set limits to his actions.
The Anglican establishment felt that it had no choice but to support James in this matter. It required little critical acumen to notice that James’s theology of kingship lent support to the idea of religious establishment, thus safeguarding their positions, status, and incomes at a time of uncertainty. James had made it clear that he was resolutely opposed to “Papists and Puritans” and that he intended to steer a middle way between these two camps. The theory of the divine right of kings neatly locked church and king together in a robust circle of mutual support and reinforcement, in effect making the established church impervious to significant parliamentary criticism.
Yet the most significant criticism of James’s doctrine was theological. The theological foundation for the doctrine of “monarchomachy”—the idea that severe restrictions were to be placed upon the rights of kings, so that the people had both a right and a duty to resist tyrannical monarchs—was laid in France in response to the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. Some years earlier, John Calvin—perhaps beginning to recognize the practical and political importance of the question—had conceded that rulers might exceed the bounds of their authority by setting themselves against God; when they did so, he suggested, they abrogated their own power. These ideas were developed and extended by his French followers in the aftermath of the events of 1572. François Hotman, Theodore Beza, and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay all emphasized precisely the same point: tyrants are to be resisted.12 The primary Christian duty to obey God is to be placed above any secondary obligation to obey a human ruler.
Puritan writers thus deconstructed the notion of the divine right of kings with theological ease and personal glee, pointing out its lack of biblical warrant. For them, the king’s excesses highlighted the virtues of the republicanism of Calvin’s Geneva. These virtues were emphasized by one of the most important English translations of the Bible—the so-called Geneva Bible, produced by English exiles at Geneva during the reign of Mary Tudor and published in 1560. It was probably the finest translation of its age. Yet its growing popularity in the reign of James I rested largely on an additional feature of this translation—its marginal notes.13
As we have emphasized time and time again, the vexed issue of biblical interpretation lies at the heart of the Protestant theological enterprise. Where earlier English Protestants, such as William Tyndale, had assumed—not a little optimistically, as it turned out—that the Bible, once translated, could easily be understood by any plowboy, the Geneva Bible explicitly recognized that there were “hard places”—that is, passages of the Bible that needed more than a little explanation. The marginal notes of the Geneva Bible provided its readers with clear explanations of the meanings of important yet potentially obscure biblical texts. Unsurprisingly, the interpretations offered were those associated with Calvin’s Geneva—theologically Reformed and politically republican. And equally unsurprisingly, the notes were highly critical of any idea of the “divine right of kings.”
The Geneva Bible provided powerful ammunition to those who challenged the theological basis of James’s ideology of kingship.14 Commenting on Daniel being thrown into the lions’ den, the Geneva Bible notes that Daniel “disobeyed the king’s wicked commandment in order to obey God.” The implication is clear: God approves of those who resist the unjust demands of kings. Much the same point is made in relation to the account of the Exodus. God ended Pharaoh’s oppression of his people through Moses. And God will deal in the same way with any other kings who oppress his people. It was not difficult to make the connection with James’s abortive attempts to rule England.
One of the biblical texts seized upon by the supporters of the “divine right of kings” was Psalm 105:15: “Do not touch mine anointed.” The meaning of the text was clear, they argued: the people are forbidden to take any form of violent action against God’s anointed one—in other words, the king. The Geneva Bible interpreted this verse in a rather different way: kings are forbidden to oppress or take any violent action against God’s anointed people. The implicit theological justification of republicanism could hardly be overlooked—as James himself knew.
James had encountered the Geneva Bible while in Scotland and cordially detested its marginal notes. One of his most significant religious actions as the new king of England was his 1604 command that a new English translation of the Bible was to be made—a translation that eventually appeared in 1611 and is widely known as the King James Bible. This new translation, he insisted, would have no marginal notes. Yet the new translation proved to be a commercial flop. The Geneva Bible reigned supreme until the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II—even though James banned its production in England in 1616.
THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR: ANGLICAN AGAINST PURITAN
The death of James I in 1625 precipitated a new wave of religious uncertainty in England. Although Charles I was widely regarded as more urbane and level-headed than his father, he was known to be much more pro-Catholic and anti-Puritan than his father. Added to that, he had married a foreign queen, Henrietta Maria of France—a Catholic. Religious criticism of the marriage surged, fueled by anxieties about what it might portend for English religious life and home and for English foreign policy.
Even the mere suggestion that Charles might marry the Spanish Infanta in 1623 had provoked intense criticism.15 One court preacher was forcibly interrupted when, speaking about Solomon’s marriage to an idolater, he announced his intention to “make an application to the present time.” It was all too obvious what that application was going to be, and silence seemed to all present to be by far the most prudent policy. The subsequent marriage of Charles to Henrietta Maria provoked outrage in many quarters. Comparing Henrietta Maria unfavorably to Jezebel, the anonymous author of the Sacrae Heplades (1625) gave vent to his hope that “some Jehu” might cause her to be thrown out of her window and trodden underfoot by some passing horse.
When Charles appointed the high churchman William Laud as archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, the Puritan faction within the Church of England was incensed.16 At this time, Puritans were divided into factions—such as Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Separatists. Presbyterians believed in an organic church, with a graded hierarchy of government; Congregationalists held fast to the idea of the sovereignty of local congregations. There is no greater disruptive force, no greater incentive to fragmentation, than a common creed held with a difference. The perception of a difference often leads to its accentuation, sometimes to the point where what is held in common seems to recede into the background, overshadowed by the suspicion and hostility evoked by the division. A seemingly minor divergence thus had the potential to become the cause of division and strife within Puritanism—if it was allowed to do so.
Yet the increasing perception of a dangerously hostile establishment caused Puritans to see their differences from a somewhat different perspective and to bring a sense of realism to their differences. Internecine hostilities were suspended in order to concentrate on the greater threat that confronted the movement. Puritanism became an increasingly well organized movement, alert to both dangers and opportunities. Whether, taken in isolation, that would have led to anything much remains open to question. In the context of the growing tensions between Charles and Parliament, however, the position of Puritans could be seen as much more serious.
Charles’s difficulties with Parliament began early in his reign and reached a crisis in 1629, when Parliament resolved that anyone who brought religious innovations into the country was to be regarded as an enemy of the state. This thinly veiled reference to Charles’s interest in Catholicism could hardly be overlooked. The king dissolved Parliament and ruled directly. The “Court of the Star Chamber” was used to dispense legal judgments, without any recourse to appeal. Like his father before him, Charles saw the ideology of the divine right of kings as conveniently legitimating his stance and abrogating fundamental legal rights. Copies of the Geneva Bible, now banned from publication in England, flowed in from the continent, especially Amsterdam. Aware of its devastating critique of this royal ideology, William Laud banned its import as well.
But it would take more than this to staunch the impact of the Geneva Bible. After reading the fine print of Laud’s banning order, streetwise Puritan entrepreneurs noted a neat (though inconvenient) way of getting around it. While they were prohibited from reproducing the text of the Geneva Bible, nothing had been said about its marginal notes. Having identified this loophole, they moved quickly to exploit it. They would print the text of the new authorized version of the Bible of 1611 and add the Genevan notes. Since the real strength—and, for Laud, the real danger—of the Geneva Bible lay not so much in its translation as in the marginal notes, it seemed to all that the Puritans had gained a tactical victory.
On the political front, the Laudian attempt to maintain a national Protestant episcopal church, with the king as its supreme governor, began to encounter setbacks. Charles’s hand was forced by war—first in Scotland, then in Ireland. In November 1640, he summoned the “Long Parliament” to finance the war. Sensing Charles’s weakness, Parliament abolished the Star Chamber and other institutions that had been instruments of his absolutism. To demonstrate where ultimate power really lay, the Parliament also tried to impeach some of Charles’s favorites. Thomas Wentworth was impeached and eventually executed for treason in 1641. Most famously, William Laud was impeached and imprisoned. He would be executed for treason in 1645.17
In 1641, John Pym led a parliamentary rebellion against Charles’s efforts to raise an army to deal with the rebellion in Ireland; he and his followers were convinced that Charles would first use this army to crush his opponents in England before turning his attention to Ireland. Parliament issued a “Grand Remonstrance,” repeating their grievances against Charles, impeaching twelve bishops, and even attempting to impeach the queen. An abortive attempt by Charles to enter the House of Commons and arrest Pym and four parliamentary acolytes polarized matters to a point at which diplomacy was impossible. In August 1642, the civil war broke out.
Initially, the war went well for Charles. Realizing the weakness of its existing military structures, Parliament revoked existing military command structures and created the “New Model Army” under Oliver Cromwell in 1645.18 From now on, a soldier’s rank would be based on ability, not social status. Then the king suffered severe military reversals. Under Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, Parliament won victories at Marston Moor (1644) and Naseby (1645). The capture of Charles’s correspondence at Naseby revealed his attempts to raise foreign support for his cause, thus alienating many of his more moderate supporters. In May 1646, Charles gave himself up to the Scottish army, which eventually handed him over to Parliament. He was held captive at Hampton Court.
The death of Laud and the capture of Charles marked the end of the defining vision that had guided English Protestantism since Elizabeth I. Whatever else it may have been, the English Civil War was fundamentally a battle for the soul of English Protestantism. Both sides regarded themselves as embodying the true ideals of Protestantism. Their soldiers found passages in the Bible that seemed to support their cause.19 Indeed, the famous “Soldiers’ Pocket Bible” of 1643, intended to encourage the parliamentary army in its fight against the king, was republished fifty years later—with some significant additions—as a royalist tract. The defeat of Charles removed the linchpin of the now-traditional Anglican doctrine of a national Protestant episcopal church, with the monarch at its head.
As long as Charles posed a serious threat, Puritanism was forced to unite in opposition to him. Once this incentive to unity had been removed, Puritanism began to fragment. Presbyterians and Congregationalists were locked in theological combat in Parliament. The command structures of the New Model Army were threatened by the rise of “Levelers,” who held that the notion of “rank” was unbiblical.20 Irritated at the aristocratic leanings of Cromwell and his right-hand man, Henry Ireton, radical Puritans pressed for the total abolition of the monarchy and a series of constitutional rights.
In a series of meetings at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Putney during late October and early November 1647, radicals met Cromwell and others, pressing for more radical reformation of the English state and army. In terms that presaged those of the American Revolution, they demanded the right of all freeborn Englishmen to vote, equality before the law, and freedom of religion. Colonel Thomas Rainborough argued that every man who is ruled by a civil government ought to have a voice in that government. Cromwell demurred, insisting that this right be limited to landowners. Sensing that things were spiraling out of control, Cromwell suspended the discussions and imposed his own set of reforms. These were so badly received that they led to a near-mutiny later that month. However, the escape of Charles I from Hampton Court that same month concentrated minds. Just as quickly as the removal of any serious external threat led to fragmentation within Puritanism, its reappearance consolidated unity. Charles was recaptured. But what should be done with him?21
The answer was suggested by a new doctrine that had arisen within Reformed Protestantism after the death of Calvin. Though he had advocated lawful resistance to tyrants, Calvin had not endorsed the justifiable regicide—that is, the killing of oppressive monarchs.22 Calvin’s death in 1564 removed the last remaining obstacle to this new doctrine, which became increasingly significant in the late 1560s. In his Short Treatise of Politike Power (1556), John Ponet (1514–56) asserted that the people had the right to revolt against their oppressors—including “Kinges, Princes and other gouvernors”—and to destroy them before they destroyed the people.23 Christopher Goodman (1520–1603) took a similar line in his How Superior Powers Ought to Be Obeyed (1558). Just as a surgeon might amputate a limb to save the whole body, so society ought to be able to eliminate oppressors through the death sentence.
On January 1, 1649, Charles I was charged by Parliament with being a “tyrant, traitor, and murderer.” The use of these three words in the charge ensured that both a legal and a theological foundation were laid for the anticipated death sentence. The “Rump Parliament”—so-called because Cromwell had allowed only those who supported the trial to attend—duly convicted Charles, who was executed on January 30. On the evening before his death, Charles told his thirteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, that he was to die for “maintaining the true Protestant religion” and urged her to read the works of Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Hooker “to ground [her] against Popery.” Charles saw himself as the defender of a specific form of Protestantism that was now imperiled, threatened by a rival that seemed to have triumphed at every level.
So a republic was proclaimed, and the monarchy abolished. But it was not merely the English state that was to be radically reformed. Between the years 1643 and 1647, the Church of England was systematically dismantled. Bishops, deans, archdeacons, and priests were abolished and replaced by presbyters. English Protestantism was now decisively polarized between the supporters and the opponents of episcopacy; the old middle ground occupied by consciously Reformed Protestant archbishops after the manner of Thomas Cranmer or Matthew Parker and their Jacobean successors had vanished. For the moment, the opponents of episcopacy had won, yet their victory meant that, after the Restoration, a very different attitude toward episcopacy would emerge.
The sweeping measures brought in by Parliament to end the established church did not end with the abolition of episcopacy. Every effort was made to eradicate its instruments. The Book of Common Prayer, detested by Puritans, was proscribed. The celebration of any Christian festival—including Christmas Day—was prohibited. The universities were purged of those with marked Anglican sympathies. The noted Puritan writer John Owen, who managed to preach to Parliament on the day after Charles’s execution without actually mentioning that not unimportant event, was appointed vice-chancellor of Oxford University. England had found its own way to Protestantism in the Elizabethan period and shaped its own distinctive form of that faith. Yet all was now changed. For the first time, England became a state modeled along the lines of Calvin’s Geneva rather than contemporary Lutheranism. The radicals had won—for the time being.
Yet disenchantment and disillusion soon set in. The religious ideas might have changed, but in just about every other respect England seemed merely to have swapped one rather oppressive regime for another. The “new” national order seemed depressingly similar to the old. Some lines penned on the eve of the Puritan Commonwealth by the Puritan poet John Milton—a vigorous defender of educational and libertarian ideals—seemed to sum up the gloomy mood within Puritanism as it became increasingly obvious that the Commonwealth was imploding. Milton’s twenty-four-line poem “On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament” (1646) argued that those who had overthrown Archbishop Laud were subverting Christian freedom, declaring the orthodox to be heretics for their own ends, and setting up a dogmatic religious institution that rivaled anything produced by the Council of Trent. The closing words of that poem would haunt the Commonwealth in its final months: “New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.”24
In the end, the Puritan Commonwealth died of exhaustion, infighting, disillusionment, and lack of vision. The decision to invite Charles II to return from exile was ultimately a counsel of despair, reflecting a wish to avoid anarchy rather than any firm conviction that it was right in itself. The Puritans had lost any popular sympathy through their religious rigidity, most famously expressed in the banning order issued against the eating of plum pudding on Christmas Day. The restoration of the monarchy unleashed a new era of social and moral experimentation, perhaps most obviously seen in the success of the bawdy “Restoration comedy.”25
Other nations might have been tempted to experiment with atheism or agnosticism in response to the religious intolerance and bigotry of the Puritan era. The English, however, decided to reinstate the Church of England instead, presumably believing that, for all intents and purposes, this amounted to more or less the same thing. Under Charles II, who reigned from 1660 to 1685, a decidedly docile form of Anglicanism emerged as the religion of the English establishment. The Church of England would be expected to be submissive to the expectations of the people and to keep its religious beliefs to itself rather than impose them on others.
Having been suppressed for more than a decade, the Church of England was put back in place with surprising ease, not unlike that experienced by Russian Orthodoxy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Everything abolished by the Long Parliament was restored. By 1662 a new prayer book was in place, and bishops, deans, and the clergy were back in their places in restored cathedrals, dioceses, and parishes.26 The King James Bible, which had languished in earlier generations on account of its associations with an unpopular monarch, became a potent symbol of a new ecclesiastical stability. Who wanted to use the Geneva Bible, with its unhappy associations with the Puritan Commonwealth? It was at this point that the King James Bible began its ascent to the religious and literary heights that would make it the most revered English translation of the Bible yet to have been made.27
Yet Puritanism left its mark on the restored church. The concept of the divine right of kings would no longer play a significant role in English religious or political life.28 Attempts to make Charles I into a religious martyr, evident in the royalist tract Eikon Basilike (1649), were subverted by Puritans. The great Puritan writer and public intellectual John Milton offered a radical deconstruction of the work to expose the vested interests of its author. The satirical writings of the Puritan poet Andrew Marvell helped shape Restoration attitudes to Charles I; by the time Marvell had finished with it, the image of Charles had been refashioned from that of “sacred icon” to “sentimental story.”
Whether on account of its “precisianist” nature or through a failure to think through the practical implications of its agendas, Puritanism had failed both to uproot an older ecclesiastical system and to root itself in the hearts of the English people. Radical Protestantism would never again be a serious presence in England. Even when, for a brief period, it seemed as if Catholicism might be imposed on the nation during the short and difficult reign of James II, none seem to have entertained even the possibility of restoring Puritanism. It would, however, be permitted: the Toleration Act of 1690 gave the successors of the Puritans the right to worship, subject to certain concessions.
Yet the Toleration Act was soon seen to have an unintended consequence. Drafted to allow the English to worship in other places besides the parish churches, cathedrals, and chapels of the Church of England, it also made possible another alternative—not to worship anywhere at all.
RATIONALISM, INDIFFERENCE, REVIVAL, AND ENTHUSIASM: THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
By 1700 western Europe was exhausted by seemingly endless wars of religion that had caused social disintegration and economic hardship. Religious idealisms—as contradictory as they were inept—had run riot, destabilizing nations and peoples. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) was both an international religious conflict and a German civil war, involving Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic regions and nations. The populations of many regions were decimated by this war of attrition, and their economies brought to the brink of total collapse. The outcomes of this sterile and inconclusive conflict were meager for all concerned.29
When the war was finally resolved through the Peace of Westphalia (1648), any remaining enthusiasm for religious warfare had evaporated. People had had enough. A yearning for peace led to a new emphasis on toleration and growing impatience with religious disputes. The scene was set for the Enlightenment insistence that religion was to be a matter of private belief, rather than state policy. In both intellectual and political circles, religion came to be viewed as a source of international and national conflict, as a burden rather than a blessing. The emerging dislike of religious fanaticism was easily transmuted into a dislike of religion itself.
The necessity for Catholics and Protestants of various traditions to coexist throughout Europe was now so obvious that it required little argument. No one wanted a repeat of the pointless brutalization and destruction that had just ended. Yet one of the more significant outcomes of this realization, an attempt to find common ground on which all could meet, inevitably led to an emphasis on philosophy and those aspects of European culture that were not overtly religious—in other words, its secular aspects.
Unwillingly, yet unable to prevent the massive shift in the tectonic plates of western European culture, an age of faith gave way to the age of reason. The shift is evident from the political writings of each age. In 1649 the Puritan George Winstanley had set out a vision for a commonwealth in which religious values were “really and materially to be fulfilled.”30 Yet a mere forty years later, with the failed Puritan social experiment in mind, John Locke argued that the “great and chief end of men uniting into governments and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property.” The scene was set for the rise of a secular Europe.31
In England, the civil war was followed by a new crisis. The stability of the Restoration ended abruptly with the death of Charles II in 1685. He was succeeded by James II, a Catholic, who appointed coreligionists to prominent positions in the government, the army, and the universities. This prompted widespread concern and gave rise to furious rumors of a plot to convert England to Roman Catholicism. A new religious civil war seemed inevitable.
A characteristically English solution, however, emerged, defusing the situation. James II’s daughter Mary had earlier married William III, Prince of Orange, a firmly committed Protestant with a reputation for tolerance and generosity. A secret approach was made to William: if he were to invade England, he could be assured that strategically placed well-wishers would rally the nation around him. Encouraged by such overtures, William landed in the west of England in 1688, to widespread public support. James soon realized that his cause was utterly lost. In January 1689, he fled England for France.
William and Mary were declared king and queen of England in February—but only after agreeing to sign a “Bill of Rights” that guaranteed free elections and freedom of speech. The “Glorious Revolution” had averted another civil war and neutralized the power of religion in English public life.32 It is no accident that John Locke’s famous Letters of Toleration were published at this precise moment, arguing for the need to tolerate diversity in religion rather than allowing it to lead to conflict. The public mood had changed.
In the intellectual sphere, this new mood was expressed in a growing interest in using human reason—rather than the contested claims of divine revelation or ecclesiastical authority—as the basis of human philosophy and ethics. Not only would the use of reason set these important areas of thought apart from the violence and fanaticism of religion, but it would place them on a single, universal basis. Reason transcended the divisions of creed, geography, and culture. Surely everyone—whether Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, or Catholic—could agree on the power of reason to guide and illuminate? And so the movement now known as the “Enlightenment” was born.33
Its iconic significance for the eighteenth century is best seen from the frontispiece to Christian Wolff ’s Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul (1719). This superb piece of intellectual propaganda shows a beaming, benevolent sun smiling upon the world, removing clouds and shadows. A new age has dawned! The darkness of earlier generations will vanish, as surely as night gives way to day! This powerful vision resonated with the hopes and fears of a war-weary Europe. Might this be the way to social, religious, and political stability?
This vision also proved compelling to many conflict-weary Protestants who were deeply disillusioned by the violence and fanaticism of the recent religious past. Some Anglican clergy and bishops found its ideas compelling. Deism—a belief in a generic creator God—seemed much less intellectually demanding and tiresome than the trinitarian God of the Christian tradition. It resonated well with the new emphasis on the divine ordering of the world, now emerging from the “mechanical philosophy” of Isaac Newton and his school.34 God could be thought of as the divine clockmaker who had constructed a particularly elegant piece of machinery and who made no demands of anyone other than a due appreciation of the beauty of the creation. Religions of all kinds now tended to be seen as corruptions of an original “religion of nature” that had no priests or creeds. Most religions were later distortions introduced by self-serving clerics who were anxious to secure their social status and exploit the gullible.
The appeal of the Enlightenment proved greatest within Reformed circles. For reasons that remain unclear, rationalism gained acceptance in many former Calvinist strongholds. Geneva and Edinburgh, both international centers of Calvinism in the late sixteenth century, were noted as epicenters of European rationalism in the late eighteenth century.35 John Calvin and John Knox gave way to the very different worldviews of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume. In marked contrast, the Enlightenment had relatively little impact on Catholicism during the eighteenth century—unless, of course, the French Revolution (1789) is seen as a political extension of the ideas of the Enlightenment.
Yet alongside this indifference to religion and the exploration of intellectual alternatives, renewal was taking place within Protestantism. The most important of these revivalist movements, known as “Pietism,” traces its origins back to the immediate aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. Faced with widespread disenchantment with the spiritually arid forms of Protestantism in this region, Philip Jakob Spener published his Pia Desideria (“Pious Wishes”) in 1675. In this work, Spener lamented the state of the German Lutheran church in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War (which had ended in 1648) and set out proposals for the revitalization of the church of his day. An obsession with rigid theological orthodoxy had to give way, he argued, to a new concern for the devotional life and a deeper personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Chief among his proposals was a new emphasis on personal Bible study as a means of deepening a personal, living faith in God. Bible study groups would be ecclesiolae in ecclesiae (“little churches within the church”), serving as springboards and catalysts for renewal. These proposals were treated with derision by academic theologians; nevertheless, they were to prove influential in German church circles, which showed a growing disillusionment and impatience with the sterility of Lutheran orthodoxy in the face of the shocking social conditions endured during the war.36
Pietism developed in a number of different directions, especially in England and Germany. Nikolaus Ludwig Graf von Zinzendorf (1700–1760) founded the Pietist community generally known as the “Herrnhuter”—named after the village of Herrnhut. Alienated from what he regarded as the arid rationalism and barren Protestant religious formalism of his time, Zinzendorf stressed the importance of a “religion of the heart” based on an intimate and personal relationship between Christ and the believer. A new emphasis was placed on the role in the Christian life of “feeling” (as opposed to reason or doctrinal orthodoxy), an orientation that is often seen as laying the foundations for Romanticism in later German religious thought. Zinzendorf ’s emphasis on a personally appropriated faith was expressed in the slogan “a living faith,” an idea he contrasted unfavorably with the prevailing nominalism of Protestant orthodoxy. For orthodoxy, faith was about assent to the creeds; for Zinzendorf, it was about a personal, transforming encounter with God, with creedal assent playing a lesser role.
Zinzendorf ’s ideas soon began to find acceptance in England. John Wesley (1703–91) was a founder and early leader of the Methodist movement within the Church of England; that movement subsequently gave birth to Methodism as a denomination in its own right. Convinced that he “lacked the faith whereby alone we are saved,” Wesley paid a visit to Herrnhut in 1738 and was deeply impressed by what he found there. Wesley found the Pietist emphasis on the need for a “living faith” and the role of experience in the Christian life to be very persuasive. His conversion experience at a meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, in May 1738—in which he felt his heart to be “strangely warmed”—led him to travel throughout England, preaching his new understanding of the Protestant religion.
Wesley’s emphasis on the experiential side of Christian faith, which contrasted sharply with what he saw as the spiritual dullness of contemporary English deism, led to a minor religious revival in England during the eighteenth century.37 Wesley was joined in his ministry by his brother Charles; between them, they wrote some of the best-known hymns in the English language, many of which express the transformative nature of faith and the need for personal conversion. It was their structured approach to Christian devotion that earned them the nickname “Methodists.”
Yet this emphasis on the experiential side of religion raised the specter of “enthusiasm”—a dramatic, religiously inspired fervor, often accompanied by the agitated body movements and faintings and swoonings so devastatingly caricatured in William Hogarth’s etching “Enthusiasm Delineat’d.”38 Many revivalist preachers—including John Wesley and George Whitefield—found themselves torn between sympathy for the idea that a direct experience of God might induce such dramatic effects and concern that its bizarre manifestations would alienate a religiously suspicious public. Somehow a middle way had to be found so as to avoid the religious excesses of “enthusiasm,” on the one hand, and the impoverishment of “formalism,” on the other.
Despite their differences, the various branches of Pietism succeeded in making Christian faith relevant to the experiential world of ordinary believers and in some ways anticipated the success of Pentecostalism two centuries later. Pietism succeeded in lodging Protestantism in the everyday realities of life for many people. It is of no small importance to note that the strongly antireligious tone of the French Revolution during the eighteenth century was partly due to the absence of any real equivalent of Pietism in French Catholicism at that time. In England and Germany, faith was being reconnected with everyday life; in France, that link appears to have been fractured—with massive implications for the future of Christianity in that region.
Initially, Methodism was organized as a group of “societies.” The Wesleys discouraged their followers from leaving the Church of England, despite the hostility and general disdain they encountered from their Anglican counterparts. In part, this negative attitude reflected the sociological differences between the movements: the Wesleys were gaining a mass following within the working class, such as among miners, whereas Anglicanism tended to see itself as representing both the social and ecclesiastical establishment. After John Wesley’s death in 1791, Methodism became a separate denomination organized as a “connection” made up of districts, which were divided into circuits of several churches or societies. The term “Wesleyanism” tended to be used at this stage.
The early history of English Methodism demonstrates the innate tendency to fragmentation that is characteristic of Protestantism. Divisions arose over a series of issues, including church order and discipline—though not, significantly, matters of doctrine. A dispute in the northeast of England led to the “Methodist New Connection” forming in 1797. A decade later, the “Primitive Methodists” broke away, believing that the Wesleyan connection was losing its enthusiasm for revivalism. The Bible Christian Church was founded by a Wesleyan preacher in England’s west country in 1815; unusually, it made extensive use of women preachers. Other Methodist groups included the Protestant Methodists and the Wesleyan Reformers.
Yet English Methodism also illustrates Protestantism’s capacity to set past controversies behind it and secure reconciliation. In 1857 three Methodist groups came together to form the United Methodist Free Churches; in 1907 these were incorporated with the Methodist New Connection and the Bible Christians as the United Methodist Church; in 1932 the Wesleyans, Primitive Methodists, and United Methodists merged to establish the Methodist Church in Great Britain.
In this chapter, we have surveyed a critically important period in the history of England—a nation destined to have a major influence on the shaping of Protestantism worldwide, particularly through its missionary enterprises in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet the nation that has had by far the greatest impact in recent years on the shaping of global Protestantism is the United States of America. We must now turn and explore how Protestantism came to be established in what is now regarded as this most religious of Western nations.