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.