Anna Keay: belief

Transcript context

…An even simpler question: If the English Civil War of the 1640s wasn’t about having a republic, what exactly was it about? What’s the stupid answer to that question? Well, yes, not a stupid answer. I think the answer is, it was really, in my view, overwhelmingly about religion. There’s a historian who works on this period who talks about it and says you shouldn’t think of it as a revolutionary war. It’s really one of the last wars of religion. That was the biggest of the issues. There was a related secondary issue about the extent of royal power. That was in the mix, but it wasn’t the first issue. Really, it was about Charles I, who was the king — who was being fought against by the parliamentarian forces — wanted the Protestant religion of England to be more elaborate, more like Catholicism in terms of the way it was performed in the liturgy, and so on. That was something that was anathema to a lot of very committed Protestants in that tension. How much of that was sincere belief, and how much was that simply an arbitrary marker that different interest groups struggling for power fixed upon, and actually, the Civil War is about the interest groups struggling for power?…

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