Bourgeois Salvations
On Protestantism, Calvinism, Anglicanism, and their relation to capitalism. See also this previous essay.
The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.
– Marx, Capital vol.1, Chapter 1, Section 4
But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin’s creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith – the value of gold and silver – began to totter and to break down. Calvin’s church constitution of God was republicanized, could the kingdoms of this world remains subject to monarchs, bishops, and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried.
– Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
1.
In Behemoth – the first great work of sociological and political analysis of Nazi Germany, published in 1944 – Franz Neumann, a political scientist affiliated with the Frankfurt School, commences a consideration of the roots of German fascism with an account of the ideologies of the revolutionary Protestant movements of Early Modernity.
He writes:
In the periods of religious wars and civil insurrections, the rising middle classes had great need of peace and tranquillity; merchants and industrialists yearned for equality with the clergy and the nobility. As a result, a central secular authority was established and its sovereign power was justified as that of an institution to which men owed not only outward obedience but sincere inner devotion. Charismatic justification of existing authority thus found a place at the beginning of bourgeois society…
2.
The great ideological fault line between Catholicism and Protestantism was always the issue of salvation. How is one saved?
Martin Luther answered the question of salvation by pioneering a set of five conditions or methods by which one may be saved, sometimes known as ‘the five solas’: sola scriptura (by scripture alone), solus Christus (by Christ alone), sola fide (by faith alone), sola gratia (by grace alone), and soli Deo gloria (by glorification of God alone). Thus salvation was to be achieved not through ‘good works’ and/or penitence, not by any of the accreted practices of the Roman Church, but via a direct and personal relationship with God, expressed through adherence to the word of God, the worship of God, faith in Christ, and belief in grace. The works of one’s life had nothing to do with it. Still less could salvation be purchased or earned through the intercession of Church authority. Consequently, also, there is no question of extra-Biblical innovations such as Purgatory, an afterlife waystation where one gradually and painfully atones for one’s sins in order to achieve worthiness to enter Paradise.
The trouble with this Lutheran idea was always that it seemed – or at least had the worrying tendency to seem, to some – far too egalitarian. Calvinism’s theory of salvation, Unconditional Election, remedied this problem.
John Calvin was one of the greatest intellectual and ideological innovators of the Reformation. In his theocracy in Geneva, he imposed his certainties on all with proto-totalitarian methods and pitiless intolerance of dissent.
As Neumann writes, this repressive and statist function was always part of the political reality of Protestantism, even outside or before Calvin’s Geneva:
The early Tudor Puritans used all sorts of justifications for the king’s authority—the Scriptures, divine natural law, reasons of state; they pointed with solemn warning to the terrible fate of revolutionary and millennial movements on the continent, such as the peasant insurrections or the Taborite and Anabaptist movements. The apologists of Henry VIII invoked the Calvinist and Lutheran doctrines to recommend obedience to the king’s person. Their argumentation was predominantly anti-rational, even charismatic.
…
One can readily see that these doctrines were opportunistic in character, devised to meet the needs of England’s domestic and international position. A central and unchallengeable authority was required, free from the grip of the Catholic Church and able to resist foreign aggression—an authority that would subordinate and, if necessary, even exterminate the autonomy of local, feudal, and ecclesiastical domains. All this made it impossible to resort to a social-contract theory, with its revolutionary implications. The Lutheran and Calvinist political doctrines supplied a solution to the problem.
Neumann traces the evolution of Luther’s thought, outlining his solution to the egalitarian implications seen by some in his doctrines – of which Luther very much did not approve – in the development of a dual concept of justice.
To Luther, says Neumann,
[t]rue inner justice can only be fulfilled in inner freedom, and outer justice through carrying out one’s duties in a given station. An attack against a ruler is an attack against his office.
Luther’s triangulations “contained very little, however, that might be termed a charismatic justification of power.” In other words, while he apparently escaped the revolutionary implications of his own ideas, he failed to provide a convincing positive, counter-revolutionary theology, and so his thought continued to contain “revolutionary seeds that came to blossom in the teachings of the Taborites and Anabaptists.” If Luther explains why the world outside one’s soul needn’t be just, he fails to explain why it should be unjust.
“The Calvinist doctrine”, writes Neumann,
makes a clean break with medieval thought in all its aspects, theological, philosophical, political, and social; whereas Luther at least confronted the wickedness of the world with the justice of the evangelical order, as the latter contained the kernel of possible protest and revolution, Calvin brought temporal and religious realms into harmony by imposing his new creed upon the state.
Calvinism has five interrelated theological keystones, collectively known by the acronym TULIP, which stands for: Total depravity; Unconditional election; Limited atonement; Irresistible grace; Perseverance of the saints. Crudely summarised: humans are all irredeemably sinful; God saves those whom he chooses and it has nothing to do with desert; Jesus’ sacrifice is only for the chosen Elect; if you’re Elected you have no choice about it and cannot change it.
In the theory of Unconditional Election (sometimes called ‘the Doctrine of the Elect’ and various other things), one is saved because one is one of the Elect. Those who are saved have always been saved. And one is among this number solely and entirely because God has decided. It cannot be otherwise since, in this view, God’s sovereignty over human affairs is absolute. He does not need to wait upon our behaviour to make his decisions. His decision about your salvation, or lack thereof, is not based upon your worth or behaviour. The sinfulness of all humanity is so absolute as to preclude salvation without God’s intervention inside one’s soul. Nobody can earn salvation; one’s sinfulness always precludes this, unless God chooses to reach into one’s soul to make one capable of salvation. One must be saved first in order to be worthy and capable of being saved.
As Neumann puts it, in Calvinism
[t]he universal grace that potentially envelops all men alike becomes actualized only through God’s appointment of men to special stations.
This theology is inherently an ideology of bourgeois class rule.
Quoting Neumann again, in a crucial passage:
[H]ow are men to recognize whether their fellow men are endowed with God’s grace? The answer is, by their success. The ruler, the magistrate, the successful businessman, the political leader, the lawyer, doctor, factory foreman, the slave owner, all owe their position to God’s grace. They are therefore to be obeyed. The charisma flows to everyone in power, in every sphere of life, every profession and condition. The political and social theory follows logically from the theological premises…
…and yet, very clearly, the theological premises are designed, consciously or otherwise, to lead to the political and social theory, and thus the entire thing derives from the class rule of the ascendant bourgeoisie and their integrated state.
Sanctity extends not only to the state as such (as Luther contended), but to all persons in the hierarchy of the state who share in the exercise of its power. No distinction is made between the bearer of sovereignty and its organs. To our superiors we owe unconditional obedience, not merely as a duty to man but to God, and beyond obedience we owe humility and reverence. Those who disobey invoke not only the severity of earthly law but the wrath of God. Obedience and reverence to authority are demanded not out of constraint but out of volition. The medieval notion of the governmental contract is implicitly and explicitly repudiated.
Voluntary obedience is thus owed as an enforceable condition of freedom. Talk about constitutive contradictions!
Neumann discusses complexities of Calvin’s thought which we needn’t go into here, save to gesture at their existence. Suffice it to say, for all the misconstructions put upon this or that fragment of Calvin, his doctrine is resolutely conservative within the framework of a bourgeois state system.
3.
I have previously written that the doctrine of Unconditional Election is a perfect expression of bourgeois ideology. This needs nuancing.
Upon reflection, I think that it is truer to say that the various inflections of the idea of predestined salvation, taken together, constitute a perfect expression.
Much as bourgeois law and legal theory function as ideology by opportunistically oscillating back and forth between the poles of universalism and consequentialism (as I wrote about here), so too does the Protestant doctrine of salvation – or rather, the complex of conflictual Protestant doctrines of salvation.
It also needs to be said that, taken by itself, the Calvinist idea of salvation is too perfect, too accurate an expression of not bourgeois ideology but the actual contradictions of capitalism. It expresses the modern capitalist reality that salvation in material terms, in terms of property and class, is essentially arbitrary. It stems from new possibilities for social mobility and accumulation of private wealth impossible in the previous epoch. In theory, these possibilities are open to all, based as they are upon a marketized society, marketized human interactions and relations, which destabilize ancient hierarchies. And yet success in this new epoch is going to depend upon things very divergent from the moral claims made by the newly rising classes.
The great ideological boast of bourgeois society is that it offers freedom for the individual. It takes each person out of the web of reciprocal bonds and obligations that is feudalism and substitutes a marketplace in which each individual may buy or sell everything they have, are, and do, according to their rational calculation of their self-interest. The trouble with this is that the end result is manifestly not a fair distribution of liberatory and beneficial outcomes, not a general wellbeing and benefit, not a free market in human contribution and profit, but a highly stratified pyramid of power and wealth. The old feudal way of justifying its own version of this pyramid was to stress the inborn and innate qualities of each kind of person. Each individual, being part of such a kind, is suited for their station in life. The kinds stack on top of each other in ways which make society work like a great machine, each layer sending obligation and protection up and down to each other kind, but with all the benefit ultimately flowing down from God, and all the obligation ultimately flowing up to him. If you are part of a kind, it is because God put you there, and this is evident in the fact that you were born into it.
This was the system declining and being replaced.
Calvinism, then, perfectly expresses – in a theological form – the real situation dawning with bourgeois modernity. Newly forming conceptions of human freedom and equality; in reality limited to and by markets, social class, and legality which enshrines the power of property. A new form of class system, with wealth and power increasingly more widely distributed within the new classes but also increasingly polarised and unequal between them, this situation arising directly from the newly apparent or claimed equality of human beings. Alongside all this, even as the old certainties about inborn and unalterable social position decline, the criteria for upward mobility into the new ruling classes is – it in increasingly clear – essentially arbitrary, and often based upon behaviour which fetishizes ruthless market competition, even as those new ruling classes construct a new form of severe private and public morality.
Calvinism looks like a very blunt attempt to express and justify all this in theological terms. Using the authority of God, the contradictions of the new social system are justified without justification, resolved without resolution, enshrined and enforced without apology. The authority of God is, of course, here an encoded expression of the authority of the coming modern state – even when that state is ruled by feudal or semi-feudal monarchs who have allied with bourgeois property and ideology for reasons of their own, connected to their rearguard defence of their positions in the face of the general crisis and decline of feudalism. It is no accident that Calvinism, as we have seen in previous essays, prefigures the ideological core of reactionary libertarianism in the 20th Century, and prefigures fascism.
In my previous series on the Austrian School of economics, I adapted the insights of Corey Robin to identify Calvinism as a key influence upon reactionary libertarian ideology, to the point where many aspects of today’s hegemonic right-wing discourse are little more than recoded (and in some places vulgarised and bastardised) reiterations of Calvinism. This makes perfect sense once you understand that both Calvinism and modern libertarianism are both expressions of the same class interests at different points in their rise, triumph, and stagnation.
When Neumann writes that, for Calvin
[t]ruth can never be attained through the rational process.
…
Philosophy and political doctrines can never attain ultimate truth; one would say in our time, they are concerned solely with finding the right means to revealed ends. Calvin’s positivism is even more clearly revealed in the fact that the only methodological principles he recognizes as valid are induction and generalization from daily experience
he is describing the way in which Calvin pioneers the various reactionary philosophies of knowledge, most especially ‘praxeology’.
Within Calvinism, there remains the question of inequality within the category of the saved. The ideology of Calvinism addresses this by assuming the equality of all the saved in the eyes of God, and their collective status as those who have been chosen by God for mercy in the face of sin. The Calvinist idea-complex rests upon the doctrine of God’s total sovereignty. The supreme God, from whom all events spring, cannot be questioned or understood. His choice divides all into saved and unsaved, elect and un-elect, those who will be absolved of sin and those who will not, those who will receive God’s compassion and those who will not. This division is unquestionable and innate, and puts all those in the category of the saved into a formally equal status, regardless of disparities of wealth and power within the group.
This schema expresses bourgeois ideology in that it is a reiteration of the rising modern idea of formal legal and social equality linked to the concomitant rise of new social classes to positions of power and wealth owing to new forms of property, production, and trade.
It is an early address to the same built-in contradiction between the bourgeois idea of equality versus the bourgeois idea of inequality of property which will find expression in the founding documents of the French Republic and the United States of America. In these, freedom and equality are expressed as the equal freedom to seek success, wealth, and property, to pursue happiness – to be, in other words, a competitive market actor. The fact that the burgeoning system is based on the trade in enslaved human beings is squared away with the new ideas of human equality – needed in order to suborn the support of the new working and lower middle classes against the older forms of property and governmental power – via the new doctrines of biological racism. All men are created equal, but not all are equally created men.
In the Calvinist ‘preliminary sketch’ of such an ideological address to these contradictions, we see the status of the new middle classes justified as a result of the decision of an absolute heavenly monarch, and also simultaneously based upon their worth.
The election of the saved is innate and unquestionable. It is not earned, but the status of having been granted salvation entails the ability to earn it, the conferred worthiness for it. The inequalities among the saved, and the potential inability for the socially superior people to demonstrate any superior value, is neutralised both by expressing the value as the possession and demonstration of correct faith, and also by declaring this extra value to stem entirely from the decision of the heavenly arbiter.
In this way, the doctrine also expresses the bourgeois ideological view of capitalist value production by showing us value simply appearing out of thin air as a result of an occult process. Much as this doctrine is a ‘preliminary sketch’ of the ideologies that would be used to express and justify the bourgeois revolutions (including biological racism), so it is also a prefiguration of bourgeois economic theory such as marginalism.
God thus becomes the ideological expression of value production, of invisible market forces, and of the total social authority needed in order to build this new bourgeois system – as seen in Calvin’s Geneva and, in a less drastic form, in the newly centralising and expanding Tudor state in England.
In bourgeois ideology, the idea of freedom is the freedom of all to be market actors. In bourgeois ideology, the idea of law is that it binds the propertied and the propertyless equally to their respective situations. These twin conceptions have been the basis of the reactionary idea of ‘liberty’, which has always been the keystone of formulated bourgeois ideology, from the ‘liberty’ of the Founding Fathers to own slaves, to the ‘liberty’ of the current billionaire oligarchs to own the entire media ecosystem and to thus control the entire ideological discourse. It is this conception of ‘liberty’ that is being championed when people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg drivel on about absolute freedom of speech. They must have the freedom to speak over millions of others who have chosen not to be billionaires. Everyone has an equal say in their ‘democratic’ government because everyone has one vote. Elon Musk has one vote, just like you. Meanwhile, your equal freedom allows Musk to own billions of dollars, to donate billions of dollars to his chosen candidates, and to control and manipulate the flow of information on one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet, while you have the freedom to not have or do any of those things.
Even as the ideological reflection of the God/Market – an invisible and unquestionable arbiter of success and moral status – supports the position of the new classes ruling the new modern economic system, so too does it appear to rob people of the ability to take part in the market themselves, to be free actors discovering their own ability to succeed.
This is what I meant when I said that the ideology is too perfect, too accurate an expression of the situation in the era of primitive accumulation and rising capitalism. It reproduces the contradictions of the world and fails to adequately resolve them at an aesthetic / ideological level.
This Calvinist position is distinct even from the superficially similar Arminian version of predestination, which has God electing some individuals in advance based upon his foreknowledge of who will or will not prove worthy.
Whereas Arminianism came to be extremely influential upon the various branches of Protestant Nonconformity such as the Baptists and Wesleyans (Methodists), Calvinism was always – and for a long time remained – a kind of unofficial orthodoxy within the establishment English Protestant Church, before and after its official consolidation as the Church of England and Anglicanism.
The Arminian amendment of the doctrine addresses objections to the apparent toxicity of Calvinism’s extreme predestinarianism, its seeming evacuation of ‘free will’, the contradiction in the bourgeois conceptions of law/judgement and freedom/salvation, by spinning the ideas slightly in order to justify the heavenly judgements, and leave room for human choice to play a role. In this version of the theory, God has – as the source of all events, and with His perfect foreknowledge – seen who will deserve election and who will not. The elect are therefore pre-chosen, but pre-chosen because God has foreseen that they will use their free will to deserve election. Arminianism, perhaps a little incoherently, also allows for the possibility that the elect can fall from grace through their own actions.
But this incoherence addresses and attempts to ideologically resolve the contradictions in bourgeois society that Calvinism reproduced too perfectly within its doctrines.
4.
As stated, Calvinism was baked into the core of the new Church of England. As Neumann noted in an above quoted passage, Calvinism was an extremely convenient doctrine for the Tudor state.
Professor Alec Ryrie, in The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation, writes that
Elizabeth’s [i.e. Queen Elizabeth I’s] third Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift… stamped out any open defiance of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Indeed, predestination – Calvinist Protestantism’s most distinctive and divisive doctrine – became the English Church’s consensus position, if not quite its unchallenged orthodoxy, during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. In 1618–19 England even sent delegates to the Synod of Dordt, an international council of Reformed churches summoned to resolve a Dutch dispute over predestination [i.e. the Arminians or Remonstrants]. The other Reformed churches unproblematically recognized their English colleagues as brethren, and the English happily supported the synod’s staunch reaffirmation of predestination.
In Anglicanism: A Very Short Introduction, Mark Chapman writes:
After 1611, when European alliances were of decisive importance, a major pan-Protestant dispute emerged across northern Europe which divided many in the English Church. The conflict centred on the teachings of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609). Against the Calvinists, Arminians believed that even the elect could fall from grace, and that the non-elect were damned because of their own sins rather than from all eternity. This allowed for a certain degree of free will: God’s grace could be resisted. Christ died for all, even though none but the faithful could enjoy the pardon of sin. The Synod of Dort (1618–19) was convened to resolve these doctrinal questions. Bishop George Carleton of Llandaff, who represented the English Church, pursued the rigidly Calvinist line which was ratified by the Synod. Faith was understood as a gift of God that was given to some but not to others. This election was made before the foundation of the world: the elect were determined to everlasting life, and the non-elect to everlasting death. Christ’s atonement was for the elect alone. Those whom God had chosen nevertheless had to persevere in their faith, a gift bestowed by God. Even though there was no official ratification of the Synod in England, it nevertheless shaped theology profoundly in the years to come, so much so that most clergy in the period probably accepted this so-called double predestination. The effects of the doctrine on the Church of England were not clear-cut. It was, after all, difficult to reconcile the church of the elect with obedience to a national church made up of saints and sinners alike. In distinction, the Arminian notion, which accepted a universality of salvation and the possibility of co-operation with God’s grace, placed great stress on the obedience to the divinely appointed authority.
…
It was not long before there were moves away from rigid Calvinism. This expressed itself in what has been called ‘avant-garde conformism’.
With reference to just this ‘avant-garde conformism’, Ryrie writes that
predestination was more or less the doctrinal consensus of the English Church in the years around 1600, but that consensus was never fully settled or stable. Predestinarians continued to spar about the precise extent and definition of the doctrine. Theologians such as the great William Perkins, the first English Protestant writer to find a truly international readership, devoted enormous effort to resolving the pastoral problems that the doctrine produced, and no matter how subtle and humane his solutions might be, his efforts testify to a persistent problem.
(The problem being, as Professor Ryrie explains elsewhere in the book, that the idea of predetermined and select salvation based solely on God’s caprices, without any allowance made for human free will and desert, made conversion harder rather than easier.)
In every country where Calvinist predestination became an orthodoxy, it also provoked opposition from within the Calvinist fold. The Church of England was, in this respect, at one with its sister Reformed churches.
It was the Calvinist version of the theory which predominated within the nascent English Church, probably because – as noted before – that church was based, above all else, in a top-down revolution dictated and supported by royal authority, a result of the decisions and appointments of the absolute monarch. This absolute authority was needed to birth the first version of the modern state. But, as also noted above, the extreme Calvinist version of predestination had its discontents within the English Church at the time. Even as it stressed the absolute authority of God, to rhyme with the absolute earthly authority of the national monarch, it seemed to take away the possibility of taking any active part in faith or obedience. It seemed to enforce a static status quo which, while extremely attractive from the point of view of wanting an ideology to shore up the social order, also contained problems of interpretation of events in a world riven by political turmoil, by rising and falling fortunes, by new social mobility, etc.
Ryrie:
What brought English anti-predestinarians out into the open was, ironically enough, the Synod of Dordt, the international Calvinist synod of 1618–19, which – with explicit English backing – reaffirmed a stiff doctrine of predestination and stamped down an insurgent Dutch anti-predestinarian movement. It should have been a moment of Calvinist triumph. Instead, the publicity it gave to the dispute awakened English anti-predestinarians from a ‘dead sleep’, and made the synod’s hardline doctrines look like a contentious (and foreign) partisan position rather than a settled orthodoxy. The doctrine had always felt morally counter-intuitive. That feeling now became the glue which brought ceremonialism and episcopalianism together into a newly energized movement to celebrate the distinctive heritage of the Church of England. The fiercest partisan of the new unorthodoxy was the future bishop Richard Montague, who in an anti-predestinarian tract in 1624 did something no English Protestant had dared before: to use the old notion of the English Church as ‘moderate’ to claim that it stood halfway between Geneva and Rome. It was as shocking as claiming to position yourself halfway between good and evil.
And so the ideological negotiations around the issue of predestination stemmed from public unease at the idea of injustice, and was resolved by aesthetically packaging the English Church as a moderate force, a sort of ‘third way’ in matters of religion. This solution – despite the sometimes violent buffeting it has received – has proved an immensely successful and durable one.
The Anglican Church, then, is the result of a prolonged ideological negotiation from a politically convenient Calvinist orthodoxy, via encounters with reaction against insurrectionary egalitarianism and attempted renegotiations of establishment orthodoxy, to an aesthetic positioning which contains aspects of any and all of these – complete with Nonconformist offshoots – as political, economic, class, and state realities require.
But, beside the German Luther appeared the Frenchman Calvin. With true French acuity, he put the bourgeois character of the Reformation in the forefront, republicanized and democratized the Church. While the Lutheran Reformation in Germany degenerated and reduced the country to rack and ruin, the Calvinist Reformation served as a banner for the republicans in Geneva, in Holland, and in Scotland, freed Holland from Spain and from the German Empire, and provided the ideological costume for the second act of the bourgeois revolution, which was taking place in England. Here, Calvinism justified itself as the true religious disguise of the interests of the bourgeoisie of that time, and on this account did not attain full recognition when the revolution ended in 1689 in a compromise between one part of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. The English state Church was re-established; but not in its earlier form of a Catholicism which had the king for its pope, being, instead, strongly Calvinized. The old state Church had celebrated the merry Catholic Sunday and had fought against the dull Calvinist one. The new, bourgeoisified Church introduced the latter, which adorns England to this day.
– Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
January 22, 2025 @ 11:13 am
While I don’t disagree with any of this analysis, I think it is missing one thing. Just as the apocryphal quote claims “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” various Christianities constructed to ideologically justify the ruling elite also contain within themselves the contradiction that can tear it all down. It was Calvinism that led John Brown to becoming a radical abolitionist, because he saw God’s law as higher than human laws and believed that the elect could be of all people, including Black people. After all, a religion that said only the powerful in society can be saved doesn’t help pacify the masses. Further, it was his postmillennialism that led him to take violent action to end slavery. Brown viewed his actions as leading towards the thousand year rein of Christ, which could only be accomplished after the evil institution of slavery had been abolished.
January 22, 2025 @ 5:15 pm
Great comment, thank you. I agree with what you add. Indeed, you are anticipating stuff I’m planning to add myself in later essays! J.G.
January 29, 2025 @ 8:19 am
Couple of notes.
1) Anglicanism grabbed onto the Third Way and, finding it successful, never let go. The weird thing is, this was probably the greatest theological legacy of the absolutist Stuarts; this got going under Charles I and became full orthodoxy under his son.
2) That said, don’t leave Cromwell out of the story. Anglicanism splintered under Cromwell and it never recovered. Multiple different Protestant sects, from Baptists to Quakers, spalled off the English Church in the 1640s. They were never recovered! After the Restoration they all got lumped together, along with diehard Presbyterians and Independents, as “Nonconformists”. Most were doctrinally Calvinist, but the emphasis placed on predestination varied wildly!
3) And also, religious toleration — leading inevitably to religion as a consumer choice — was made inevitable under Cromwell. The early Restoration tried stuffing it back into the bottle but it was too little, too late. After the Glorious Revolution, the Church of England and the ruling elites had to accept formal tolerance for dissenting (Protestant) sects. Various sorts of formal discrimination endured for decades — Nonconformists couldn’t get degrees from Oxford or Cambridge, for instance, and they still had to pay Anglican parish fees — but they were officially tolerated. And if you want to look for the most bourgeois of salvations, you won’t find it in the Anglican Church, but in its half-acknowledged children, the Nonconformists. The modal Anglican elite was fox-hunting landed gentry; the modal Nonconformist elite was a merchant or, a bit later, an industrialist.
Doug M.