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.”

James has two conspicuous claims to fame: he assembled a group of scholars to produce the King James Version of the Bible (the favorite of many, to this day, even those who have clearly not read it), and he was the principal target of the “Gunpowder Plot,” when Guy Fawkes & Friends attempted to blow up the entire Parliament at its 1605 state opening. 

This brings us to Charles. Influenced by the Catholicism of his French queen and by William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles believed that his own preferred denomination, a bishop-heavy High Church Anglicanism, mediated a sacramental grace that reconciled man to God and that the Church’s rituals and ceremonies brought a sustaining, saving faith. Armed with this belief, at once well-intentioned and self-serving, he set out in 1638 to create greater uniformity in both theology and the practice of religion across his three separate realms—England, Scotland, and Ireland. 

Lacking his father’s tact and acute political sense, he was surprised when this initiative was met with angry resistance. The first attempt to have Laud’s new (Anglican) Book of Common Prayer read in the (Presbyterian) St. Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh caused a riot when a woman named Jenny Geddes threw a stool at Archbishop Spottiswoode. When neither side backed down, this escalated into a succession of wars collectively known as the “English Civil War.” The King needed money from Parliament, which demanded political concessions in turn, leading to another irreconcilable standoff and civil war. But to get to full-fledged war, each of the sides—each of the factions—had to decide that their rivals were, in fact, enemies, challenging or denying the “foundations of their being” and that their opponents, therefore, deserved death.

Puritans maintained that the Catholic Church (and its pale copy, the Anglican Church) was the “Whore of Babylon,” working her wiles to achieve dominance at whatever price. Citing the Book of Revelation, Puritans branded the Pope and his bishops collectively as “the Antichrist,” who must be destroyed with fire and sword. Anything that resembled “Popery” must be annihilated—and this eventually included Archbishop Laud himself, who the Puritan-dominated Parliament succeeded in executing in January 1645. So much for Common Prayer.

Like our own Congress, which has become more and more dysfunctional with the growth of an initially small but intransigent, extremist minority opposed to all compromise, the rise of the Puritan faction in Parliament to a dominant position took place in stages, beginning with appeals to “constitutionalism” and the need to define the appropriate purviews of monarch and Parliament. The Puritans denied that they were conducting a “holy war” against “Popery,” reluctantly accepting that fighting to assert one’s religious beliefs had never been legitimate, going back to the origins of the faith. Christ Himself acknowledged and accepted Pontius Pilate’s right, even duty, to enforce the laws of the state he governed, that is, to arrest and execute Him. 

In the Gospels, Christ was subjected to temptation twice: once in the desert by the Devil, who offered Him all earthly power if He would bow down to him, but also by St. Peter, who was aghast when Christ told him of His imminent crucifixion, and remonstrated with Him to fight fire with divine fire, in order to save Himself. Christ’s response was the same in both instances—“Get thee behind me, Satan!” in order to make plain to both that “My Kingdom is not of this world.” His example was followed for centuries by Christian martyrs, who practiced non-resistance to persecution and even execution by their states. Fighting for one’s religion was, therefore, not only a repudiation of the ancient martyrs but also exactly what Puritans were accusing the Catholic Church of doing: corrupting Christ’s message by forcing its faith on others through violence. 

Tim Alberta’s book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, chronicles the transition that many members of the Evangelical churches in this country have made towards a gross, blasphemous distortion of Christ’s message: “my Kingdom” has become “USA! USA!”, very much “of this world.” Evidently, Trump’s careful reading of his “favorite book” did not embrace the Old Testament since he would then have had to consider whether the golden image of himself at the CPAC conference, like the Golden Calf erected while Moses climbed Mt. Sinai, might leave his people wandering in the desert for forty years, unable to enter the Promised Land.

The same failure to distinguish between temporal power and the spiritual, the urge to combine or conflate the two, emerged as the Puritan MPs wrestled with seemingly incompatible imperatives: Parliament should act only upon and for the law. Yet, the Whore of Babylon must be brought low. The answer: first, bring the law into conformity with their religious beliefs, and then enforce the (new) law so that the state would indeed promote or prosecute (the mot juste) their beliefs, but do so “legally.” The concept that Parliament should mirror the balance of power between different factions and that it should provide a forum in which each faction could represent its interests—in other words, the rough prototype of our own American system—began to slip. Within a decade, the Puritan faction achieved control by working with and for a genuine tyrant, Oliver Cromwell, and together, they made a travesty of the whole idea of Parliament.

This parallels once again our own experience: as cited by Heather Cox Richardson, an article in Slate by Mark J. Stern noted that when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was Senate majority leader, he “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”

As Americans, we have enjoyed our liberty, however imperfect and unevenly offered, for the “pursuit of happiness.” In principle, we have a neutral state, separated from any particular church, which is meant to protect the rights of its citizens to conduct their lives as they see fit, in accordance with their own beliefs, tastes, and choices. In practice, however, a significant portion of the electorate is bitterly opposed to giving fully equal rights to ethnic, gender, or religious minorities.

Like the British Isles in the seventeenth century, many conservative Christians in America today are primarily concerned with living out their faith as individuals. Still, we are also paralleling early modern England with the emergence of semi-religious fragments with a powerful urge for self-assertion. The Christian Nationalist movement insists that our Constitution is founded on biblical principles (selectively chosen and painted red, white, and blue) and that America’s future success depends on a return to these beliefs. Christian Nationalism makes few calls for piety, kindness, tolerance, or high moral standards but rather exhorts its members to fight the secularists, “deviants,” and infidels who are “perverting” America. With an irrational fear or antipathy towards immigrants, it claims divine sanction for ethnocentrism and nativism, promoting white supremacy, racial subordination, and narrow “traditional” gender roles. It is symptomatic of their radical evolution away from truly Christian principles that Mike Pence, once considered pious and God-fearing amongst Evangelicals, came close to suffering Archbishop Laud’s fate.

Like the Puritans in their pre-purge Parliament, Christian Nationalists and their less rabid allies have achieved enough electoral success to produce a dysfunctional Congress. However, this assertion of their own interests at the cost of acknowledging the interests of all others runs much deeper.

The packing of the judiciary means that if our would-be “autocrat for a day” returns to power, he will have much-improved chances, compared to his first term in office, of achieving “success” when his Executive Orders are challenged in the courts. Slanted policies that are at odds with the majority opinion will have a far greater chance of standing. More immediately, and a grave threat, is that the Supreme Court has worked to delay cogent, serious indictments of the former President, deliberately facilitating his return to power.

Incontrovertible evidence of egregious wrongdoing, crimes that threaten the foundations of our existing Constitutional order, are grotesquely misrepresented as “weaponization of the justice system.” Truth, always elusive in its pure form, is nonetheless allied in its practical day-to-day approximations with “fact.” How is this country to deal with a growing acceptance that “alternative facts” are somehow “real,” and not simply falsehoods, lies, and nonsense? The ridiculous conspiracy theories of groups like “Q-Anon” in the political sphere are mirrored in the scientific realm by groups of “Anti-Vaxxers,” the “Flat Earth Society,” etc. One sometimes wonders, do these groups have reciprocal memberships?

It is a truism of the intelligence community that you can’t have a good policy—or strategy—or tactics—that are based on false information. Yet, so much of the current discourse is built on the deliberate and knowing acceptance of falsehood.

The parallels between our situation and that of seventeenth-century England abound—and so do the contrasts and ironies. Charles was devoutly religious and believed that he was God’s representative on earth. Still, he came to be reviled by some as an Antichrist and was judicially murdered by an “empowered” Puritan splinter of Parliament.

Trump, on the other hand, has no discernable religious belief or even curiosity. Despite his reliance on the support of Evangelical Christians, he does not appear to have felt it necessary to “learn a bit of their language,” his attempts to appear religious are always comically inept and betray a profound, even bottomless, ignorance. This has not stopped some of his followers from now insisting that he was sent by God to lead them in battle. As vain as he is ignorant, the apotheosis of a Dunning-Kruger “over-reacher,” Trump seems to believe them, even referring to himself as “the Chosen One.”

In the English Civil War, it was Parliament that objected, at first on a constitutionalist basis, to a King who was exceeding his powers and prerogatives. Still, as the conflict evolved, a fanatical faction within Parliament, claiming their own religious superiority, succeeded in seizing control, executing the King, and steering the country into a dictatorship. We are now confronted with the fact that half of our Congress refuses to address unambiguous evidence of wrongdoing, is unable to find any excess as “beyond the pale,” and is unwilling to check the rise to power of a desperate criminal/autocrat—his acolytes and adherents, who in 2016 were perhaps shuffling about half-heartedly, have now become so terrorized that they are actively working to subvert the Constitution, permitting any tactic of prevarication, obstruction, resistance, or denial of simple, obvious facts. 

In so doing, they are helping him to achieve dominance over their own institution: in contrast to seventeenth-century England, this time, the autocrat “wins” against the legislature. Worse still, Project 2025 is a blueprint for rejecting a state apparatus built on neutral, objective expertise—a triumph of our educational, scientific, and technological achievements over the last three centuries—in favor of subservience and loyalty to an individual who believes injections of cleaning fluid could cure COVID-19. One wonders, is there any other head of state in the entire world capable of such buffoonery?

The majority of Americans see Christian Nationalists and “ultra-conservatives” who do not endorse a pluralistic democratic system that welcomes people of all religions as a threat. Although we support an elected legislature in principle, how many of us are ready and willing in practice to take action on behalf of beleaguered, divided, gridlocked Congress? In particular, to work to convince our opponents that we are not, in fact, enemies and that the protection of the civil rights of all of us through a functional Congress that is as technocratic, meritocratic, and bipartisan as possible is not only our common salvation but also the precise intention of our Founders?

With or without Mitch McConnell, the willingness of half of our legislature to accept absurdities and non-truths, whether from politicians, extremist media, Q-Anon, random conspiracists, or even the Flat Earth Society, means that increasingly, our epistemic foundations are just “turtles all the way down.” We are right to be worried that, with such hands grasping at the tiller, the ship could eventually fall off the edge of the world.

Adam Dixon has extensive experience in Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union as a consultant, businessman, and entrepreneur, working mostly in aviation and telecommunications. He is currently working on a range of innovative military technologies, including a platform for the removal of landmines. Mr. Dixon studied at Harvard (BA 1983), Oxford (M.Phil 1988), and Leningrad State University (1986).

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain.