As passions continue to rise in this country, it is interesting to compare our situation with that of the English Civil War (1639–1650), in which the number of dead and wounded, as a percentage of the population of the country, exceeded that of the First World War. This is astonishing when one thinks that this was “brother against brother” and “hand-to-hand” combat. Optically, it is not unlike the “Battle of the Capitol” on January 6, but much, much deadlier. Such fratricidal hatred could only arise when rival parties felt that their core identities were deeply challenged: how did this happen?

The simplistic view of the English Civil War was that it was a confrontation between a would-be autocrat, Charles I, and his Parliament over who should govern the country. The “Whig Interpretation of History” is that Parliament’s final victory represents “Progress” with a capital “P,” in that an elected body (Parliament) triumphed over a politically inept King who believed that his personal rule was ordained by God. Defeated in a succession of conflicts stretching over almost a decade, Charles paid the “ultimate price” on January 30, 1649, when he was decapitated outside the banquet hall of his Whitehall palace.

Unfortunately for poor Charles, who was not actually a bad man, especially when one considers that the men of Parliament also believed themselves to be “on a mission from God,” so on what basis did their certainty trump his certainty? Furthermore, the MPs had previously sworn allegiance to the King, who they were now executing—clearly, they were not oath-keepers—and doesn’t God rather prefer that you stick to your vows, or does even He now think that that is hopelessly old-fashioned? And it gets still worse: Charles’s truly tyrannical successor as head of state, Oliver Cromwell, once he decided to kill the King, cut Parliament down to a sliver—known to history as the “Rump Parliament”—a “killer caucus” which could not pretend that they were the majority, moral or otherwise.

In the denouement of the confrontation between the King (“Chief Executive”) and Parliament (the legislature), Charles had his finest hour, calmly and courageously questioning by what authority the soon-to-be regicides were acting, claiming that as God’s representative sent to rule England in His stead, he could not legitimately be placed on trial, and stating that the purge had removed any plausible claim that the “Rumpers” represented either God or the people.

On the day of his execution, Charles asked for two shirts to avoid trembling from the cold and being suspected of fear. At the very end, whatever his flaws, he exited bravely: one lifts one’s hat, as they lifted his head: Bravo Charles.

If all parties were claiming that God was on their side, perhaps the English Civil War is better understood not as the first modern “Revolution” (as the Whigs would have it) but as one of Europe’s “Wars of Religion”—in which different religious factions, ranging from pale Anglicans to Catholics, to Calvinist Puritans, to apocalyptic millenarians, jockeyed for power at the Palace, at Parliament, and in the various churches. Mirroring our own situation today, each of these fractions and splinters was isolated and self-amplifying within their own “bubbles,” and some of them sought aggressively to “weaponize” whatever levers of power they could grasp. 

Now, religious fractions in this country, and in particular the offspring of the Evangelical churches known as “Christian Nationalists,” are working to seize control of both the legislature and the judiciary, in the belief that white, native-born, and mostly Protestant people should maintain the dominant role in our social, cultural, and political institutions. In a period of chaos, these people seek to assert their core identities and traditions, steer the country towards something that is in keeping with their own beliefs and values, and ensure that privileges go to the “rightful” recipients themselves. This requires defining and preserving distinctions between “us” and “them,” the setting of strong boundaries to disenfranchise the “other” and deny them equal rights. Whatever economic, geographic, or ethnic issues may also be involved, “core identities” are in origin closely tied to religion, to the belief that “our God” is the “true God” and that He authorizes us to treat others as badly as we choose.

To make the case that the English Civil War was a War of Religion and to begin sketching some parallels between seventeenth-century England and contemporary America, it is first necessary to give the briefest of histories of the run-up to their Civil War. Roughly one hundred years earlier, Henry VIII, who was as spendthrift as his father had been miserly, decided that by breaking with Rome and seizing the wealth of the Catholic Church, essentially privatizing it, he could launch a vast and hitherto unimaginable asset strip.

Despite careening the Crown into multiple bankruptcies, Henry would undoubtedly have described himself as “highly successful” in business. Henry had scant respect, or at best, idiosyncratic and intermittent respect, for the human, cultural and intellectual capital that the Church had built up over its millennium in England—he was “the only one that mattered”—so he ignored the fact that the Church wasn’t just the religious backbone of the country, but also provided a vast array of services, from education, to “scrivening” (writing contracts and accounts), to keeping records and documenting history, to caring for the poor, the sick, and the elderly. In modern terms, this would be similar to having the majority of banks, law firms, accountancies, colleges, schools, hospitals, and “social services” all rolled into one giant institution, which was then seized and demolished by a self-appointed “administrator” with no clear concept of alternative structures.

There is a parallel to our situation: for decades already, large groups of modern Americans—not just in the Rust Belt—have had a similar sense of being neglected or even abandoned by the state, which seemed mostly to serve the interests of an ever-smaller elite, allowing a chasm to widen between a tiny layer of the extremely rich and the rest of the population. Ironically, the right-wing and “oligarchic” media have successfully portrayed the normal, necessary institutions of the state—the Department of Justice and FBI, the IRS, and the CIA—as organs of a “deep state” that maintains the power and position of an anti-Christian, “Liberal” middle class, and works against the interests of the “common man.” According to this trope, the deep state is intent on “weaponizing” investigative and policing capabilities against the working class. It should, therefore, either be demolished or delivered into the hands of a “ruler” who will know how to rein it in. Somehow, a significant segment of America does not see the possibility of “mere anarchy” being “loosed upon the world.”

With the Reformation now underway on the European continent, Henry entered into shifting alliances with other “Protestant” countries in an effort to forestall intervention into England’s affairs by other Catholic powers. These relationships provided a cross-fertilization regarding the theological concepts and religious practices being debated in these allied churches: “free will” versus “predestination,” of “grace” versus “acts,” and God “choosing His people” versus “loving all mankind,” to name only a few salient themes.

Most of these debates dog us to this day: do we have “free will” so that our personal decisions define the arc of our lives, or are our actions somehow predetermined, and our responsibility diminished or even eliminated? Do we have to earn illumination and redemption by our acts? Will a select few be “raptured” and the majority consigned to Hell? Do we earn our place in heaven by a lifetime of careful accumulation of moral, intellectual, and even financial capital, or is God prepared to be indulgent towards the gentle slacker and even towards the angry misfit, who never really gets much done? What was at stake in the disputes was not just the intellectual substance of belief but how these beliefs should be collectively expressed in day-to-day practice, and these differences coalesced into rival churches and then into increasingly violent antagonisms between them.

The material, visual, and musical practices of the Catholic Church, with its elaborate ceremonies and vestments, its architecture and decoration, the invocation of Saints and use of their relics, as well as its hierarchical organization and structure of authority, were now reviled by the more radical Protestant churches as “Popery,” “idolatry” and “superstition.” In England, bishops, priests, monks, and nuns were either pensioned off, co-opted into the new Anglican structure, or eliminated (often with great cruelty), and churches in the more vigorously Protestant areas were stripped of all ornament—paintings, statues, altarpieces—with extraordinary thoroughness.

Henry, his daughter Elizabeth I, and her successor James I nonetheless had a keen appreciation for the role of “image” and majestic grandeur in securing the acquiescence and support of their subjects. James I, the father of our unhappy Charles I, was from Scotland, which had been at war with England numerous times. Much of its population had migrated into the Protestant denomination known as Presbyterianism—the important organizational aspect of which was that churches (the “kirks”) elected officials (the “Presbyters”) rather than having a Bishop imposed on them by an external higher authority, whether in Rome or London. Although James was an intelligent and politically tactful man and had been educated by Presbyterians, he nonetheless believed, like Elizabeth, in episcopacy (a church hierarchy appointed by the Crown)—and famously remarked, “No bishops, no king.”