For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a minority of English people became obstinately metaphysical. Some quit these shores, not so much for religious liberty in the abstract, but in the hope of building a more rigorously godly Commonwealth in New England.
The 17th century English Civil War, in which a greater proportion of the male population perished than in the First World War, was fuelled by religious passions.
Roger Scruton in his 2012 book Our Church identifies this as the seminal period in the creation of the ethos of the Church of England and of what Joseph Addison described in 1712 as the ‘particular bashfulness in everything that regards religion’ on the part of the English people.
Read the full article HERE on the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation website.