RT Article
T1 Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution
JF The historical journal
VO 41
IS 4
SP 961
OP 985
A1 Coffey, John 1969-
LA English
YR 1998
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1963062213
AB 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.
DO 10.1017/S0018246X98008103