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Ooh, but see, I think that the trouble is that in BRITAIN politics and religion were divorced long ago.

The problem was that in the English Civil War, the Puritans won full, plenary, absolute power: Cromwell and his Ironsides were invincible in the field. He ruled everything, and they ruled everything.

But was Jerusalem builded there, among those dark satanic mills?

No.

And that was the problem. The desiderata of plenary political power having been achieved, the Puritans very sincerely and with utterly true hearts (in my analysis) set about really and truly trying to build the New Jerusalem there, in England.

And it failed utterly.
It failed massively.
A Frenchman might have said "Mais, mon cher monsieur, il faut que vous sachiez que le monde ne veut pas etre sauver" - "But, my dear sir, you MUST understand that the world does not WANT to be saved", but you English actually had to play it out in three acts.

In the buildup to the war, there was tension, Anglican supremacy, and the Roundhead assertion that the established order was morally corrupt. Then the Roundheads WON, and they went to every length to build Jerusalem there in England's green and pleasant land. Gambling, card games, 'baccy, everything banned, restricted. England entire became Salem, and it stayed that way for a decade. The Puritans had no challengers really, and they did not lose any sincerity either. The true Puritan believers were as true at the end of Cromwell's rule as at the beginning. Trouble was, the rest of England, which by that point was the overwhelming majority, was well and truly SICK of the joyless Puritan impositions.

Now, remember, Catholicism is a pretty joyful religion, really. Lots and lots of feasts. Lots of candlelight and dancing and music. Drinking is alright. Dancing is alright. Gambling is alright (at least to a point). There are some moral demands in Catholicism, but it's a much less restraining corset than Roundhead Puritanism was.

A good American analogy is Prohibition. The Christian Women's Temperance Union succeeded in organizing and dominating the American political process sufficiently to actually amend the US Constitution to get alcohol banned after World War I. They won the victory, complete and absolutely. But then the sun came up the next day, and the day after, and a whole country full of people who WEREN'T Christian Women's Temperance ladies found themselves living in a country where they couldn't get a drink anymore. You had Catholics who have drinking wine as part of the religious rite, and Irish and Germans (Catholic and Lutheran both), not to mention Episcopalians!, for whom drinking in substantial quantities is an important part of normal social intercourse. But those shrivelled up old prudes managed to get the laws of the country changed to take the drink right out of their hands!

Obviously rigorous puritanism about drink didn't work in America, and Puritanism didn't work as the basis of government in England either. People do not WANT to live like that, and when faced with the argument that the religion and piety DEMANDS it, people will change their religion and chuck out the tenets of the bad religion in favor of something they could stand.

And that's what happened when Cromwell died. Puritanism was DEAD in England after that. It wasn't because Puritans themselves lost faith, but because the sum total of the rest of the people were well and truly and utterly SICK of the nagging little Puritan ninnies being in their faced. They were shoved out of power, forever, never, ever to return. Puritanism was DISCREDITED by the fact of governance, in the same way that Christian Temperance was destroyed by its very success. Once the Christian Temperance movement actually took drink away from Americans, their reaction, when they took power back, was to make sure that the Christian Temperance types became a very model of how NOT to govern a republic.

Charles II was invited back. Catholic, this worried a lot of folks, but the Church of England came back into command, and with it, the corset of Puritanism was untied. Embittered, the Puritans emigrated to America in droves.

The overall result was a general diminution of the importance of and respect for religion IN GENERAL in England. It's not that the English stopped being Christians. It was that they were no longer willing to tolerate an excess of piety in their laws. Anglican Catholicism, with its much looser rules of conduct and much greater pageantry, fit the bill nicely. The ceremonial and ritual demands are real, but the CIVIC demands, enforceable by the magistrate, these relics of the Puritan rule did not pass, and nobody would have tolerated their passing.

Ten years of Cromwell and the Puritans was enough to discredit the concept of theocracy in England FOREVER. Really, the candle of English piety was burnt at both ends by the Puritans, and by the time Cromwell's life was done, the English were quite done with EXCESSIVE piety forever.

And so this is why drawing parallels between the British Left today and the Roundheads seems a bit inapposite to me. I might agree that on certain concepts of the organization of government, that's true. But the crux of the difference is too important: the Left and Right, in Britain are worried about government and politics. Argument and history are means to a political end. The Puritans were really worried about piety and building the New Jerusalem; theirs really was a religious project. And it failed catastrophically, so much so that nobody, left, right, center, pious or impious dreams of that anymore in England.

That is also true on the Continent. The lesson of the intense bloodshed of the Protestant Reformation was a GENERAL diminution in the willingness to accept any sort of REAL religious power over affairs in the Protestant countries. The excesses of zeal of the victorious Reformers in the North, and Savanrola in the South, were quite sufficient to convince Germans and Italians to diminish the importance of Christianity as a POTENT force. Christianity remained, and remains, as a symbolic thing in Europe, but the torrents of blood that Puritans of all stripes unleashed in Europe in the 1500s and 1600s were sufficient to leave the lasting impression that, really, we do not want to attempt to build the New Jerusalem anywhere nearby, and to never let the really pious ever get CLOSE to the levers of power again.

The legacy of Christian rule in the Europe of Cromwell, the Lutheran Fathers, Calvin and Savanarolla is that Europeans recognize from experience that Christianity is NOT really a viable principle for remotely civilized government, and needs to be confined to the quaint traditions of Churches and the like. The worst government in English history was the Puritan. The worst government in German history was the Lutheran establishment. The worst government in Italian history was the likes of Savanarolla and his fanatics. The worst government in Spanish history was the Spanish Inquisition. All of Europe remembers, collectively, that Christianity rampant, armed with the sword, is evil. That's the real legacy of the Wars of the Reformation and the Cromwellian dicatorship.

America never went through that.
In America, the intense desire is still there among various Puritan elements to well and truly have a state that is founded upon and respects "Christian principles". This it the evolution argument. The public schools teaching Darwin are teaching apostasy and blasphemy, according to those who believe that the Bible is being traduced thereby. And so they seek to use their numbers to vote in people who will teach the truth as they understand it.

So, I think it would be fair to say that the activist religious right in America descends from Cromwell and the Roundheads, but that BOTH political traditions in England - whatever their pretenses - are post-Christian. They BOTH descend from the Restoration Compromise, whereby an overtly Catholic King was allowed to take back the throne, so long as he would, very hypocritically, allow the functioning of the Protestant Anglican Episcopacy, which would, in turn, ignore the core tenets of its faith, tolerate the heathen Catholic on the throne. And everyone would let people dance, play cards and fornicate without further religious intrusion...because to do otherwise would be to break the compromise. What got compromised away was ANY form of Christianity with any teeth in it, in favor of a government which everyone could stand. That compromise holds in England and across Europe in most places.

In America, the closest to any of that was Prohibition, but that was not so murderous as Cromwell and Savanarolla, and therefore religion as a viable force in politics is nowhere near spent in American politics. It has been spent in Europe since Cromwell and Louis XIII.

It's not that the English stopped being Christians. It was that they were no longer willing to tolerate an excess of piety in their laws.

Vicomte13, I thank you for another splendid posting, very stimulating and deeply engaging; I only fear I cannot bring sufficient erudition to make a suitable reply. So take the following as 'thoughts out loud,' or work in progress...

First, I think your analysis of events following the restoration of Charles II -- the period we presumptively call 'The Glorious Revolution'-- is compelling; the chief element certainly appears to be a wholesale popular rejection of the unnatual constraints and indeed chaos wrought by the Puritain Protectorate. British Constitution still reflects a great deal from this period, defining checks and balances on both the monarchy and parliament, and some of this legal framework was subsequently transmitted to the written American constitution. That said, I would add that the British form is still marked by lots of 'fudge and mudge' compromise, which is at once the British genius and a particularly British disease!

But I am intrigued (and this really is thinking out loud, I don't have a particular position to argue here) by the manifest success of the American Revolution, which I believe marked an enormous stride forward for all mankind--and all the more remarkable in its contrast to other revolutions, which have ended in disaster. Which perhaps is my first reply to you here: I would be interested in your analysis of why the American revolution succeeded while the French, which in part drew on the American experience for inspiration, overthrew a corrupt ancien regime but ended in the Terror and Bonaparte.

Now, I had previously assumed (but this may be the legacy of half-understood school history) that the ethos of both the American and French revolutions was the Enlightment, or the Age of Reason, that the experience of American colonials (reliant on their own resources, and looking to one another to build a new society) lent them particularly receptive to the ideals of the Enlightment, and that the new Republic proved fertile ground for core values of independence, freedom, enterprise, reason, meritocracy--all of which I see as core conservative values. Whereas in Europe, revolutions failed because these same ideals did not take such strong a root, were still competing with notions of hereditary privilege, special pleading, priestly power, old corruption, etc. etc. Do you yourself see a role of Enlightenment ideals in the foundation of the American Republic?

Also, though I am not a expert on the history, I believe that there were a series of religious movements in the 19th Century United States ('The Great Awakening,' of which I think there were several waves) which altered the cultural landscape, if not also the political. Do you think these movements had their roots back in the English Civil War, or represent a singular American innovation?

Finally (before I waffle too much), my own sense is that it is pointless to argue matters of Faith; for those to whom Faith is sufficient, one cannot meaningfully disagree; it would be tragic, in my view, if arguments about Faith undermined our common cause. And it is certainly the case that misunderstanding and downright bafflement are apparent here in regarding the US, even by those who most staunchly admire America, over the public role of religion, here regarded as a personal matter that should not intrude on politics. And I would add my impression that, in the UK at least, one of the effects of 9/11 (and for us, 7/7) has been an even greater scepticism about the public display of religion--though we have been tardy in addressing various 'religious' speakers whose messages have been about anything but Faith (e.g. Abu Hamza)