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PURITANISM AND LIBERTY REVISITED: THE CASE FOR TOLERATION IN THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 1998

JOHN COFFEY
JOHN COFFEY
Affiliation:
University College, London
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Abstract

In recent years historians have grown sceptical about attempts to trace connections between puritanism and liberty. Puritans, we are told, sought a godly society, not a pluralistic one. The new emphasis has been salutary, but it obscures the fact that a minority of zealous Protestants argued forcefully for the toleration of heresy, blasphemy, Catholicism, non-Christian religions, and even atheism. During the English revolution, a substantial number of Baptists, radical Independents, and Levellers insisted that the New Testament paradigm required the church to be a purely voluntary, non-coercive community in the midst of a pluralistic society governed by a ‘merely civil’ state. Although their position was not without its ambiguities, it constituted a startling break with the Constantinian assumptions of magisterial Protestantism.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , December 1998 , pp. 961 - 985
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The paper on which this article is based was originally presented at the Stuart seminar in Cambridge and at the modern British history seminar at Harvard. I am most grateful for the insightful comments of both audiences. The shortcomings that remain, of course, are my own responsibility.