This collection addresses a challenging subject: the concept of ‘civil religion’, which resists easy definition across different historical and cultural contexts. The volume has its origins in a working group and then a conference held at Newcastle University in 2019 (other presentations from that gathering will appear in a special issue of the Intellectual History Review).

Civil religion is defined here as the ‘infusion of politics with religion to cultivate solidarity in a polity, galvanising the people in the myth that their society, politics, and history is an expression of the divine’. Not necessarily tied to any specific creed or denomination, civil religion ‘suffuses public life with symbols and languages that express the peoples’ relationship to the divine’ (pp. 1–2), leveraging religion in service of political cohesion. While much scholarship on ‘civil religion’ has focused on the Enlightenment and authors such as Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau (who coined the term), the present volume shifts our focus to antecedents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in Britain and America, to illuminate the intellectual traditions and writings that both predated and informed subsequent Enlightenment figures. By narrowing its focus to a specific period, this volume provides a richly contextualised analysis that highlights particular historical developments, an approach that departs from conventional treatments in political philosophy and political science. Here, the mid-seventeenth century and English Civil War appear as especially important periods for debates about Church/State relations – the years when the erastian settlement under Elizabeth became strained, driven by Puritan challenges – as well as intra-Church questions of authority and jurisdiction, such as the role of the episcopate.

The editors’ introduction and a subsequent essay by Mark Goldie adeptly orient readers to the current historiography, the questions at hand, and their respective interventions and arguments. (Together these two chapters comprise nearly a third of the book’s length.) In addition to shifting our focus away from the Enlightenment, the volume convincingly demonstrates how early modern writers genuinely valued religion, far from completely subsuming it to political ends in a cynical or transactional approach that one might associate with Machiavelli. Nor was religion to be relegated to the private sphere, as modern theorists might recommend. Instead, as this volume repeatedly affirms, early modern figures discussing civil religion were often anticlerical but never opposed to religion in itself: the ‘enemies were clergies and creeds, not Christ or Scripture’ (p. 49). They thought religion essential to a polity’s success and survival, a way not merely to build civic pride but also inculcate morality. Seen this way early modern civil religion was very much part of the Reformation, an endeavour to return to primitive Christianity and strip away clerical deformities. As such the writings of the seventeenth century stand as an extension of sixteenth-century developments rather than a sharp break from them.

Goldie also highlights how ecclesiology stood at the centre of debates over civil religion and the role of religious authorities vis-à-vis the temporal state. Scholars in other disciplines have neglected this point, but Goldie explains how the form and organisation of Churches, along with concomitant questions of jurisdiction, were critical questions to be answered: whether, and how, a ‘national’ or establishment Church should be shaped, especially with regard to local parishes or differences in creed, and to whom toleration should be extended. Writers turned to the Early Church to examine how the first Christian communities were organised, seeking models to emulate in their own communities. They could draw quite different conclusions from this exercise. Esther Counsell’s essay on Alexander Leighton examines how his writings in the 1620s drew upon and pointed back to a sixteenth-century, erastian vision of lay authorities overseeing ministers and clergymen. John Coffey explores how Independents wrestled with such questions during the English Revolution, describing the differences between conservative and radical Independents over the shape of a religious establishment: the former favouring required attendance at Sunday worship, though the location was flexible, while the latter advocated for a cleaner separation between local congregations and any national authorities. As Coffey notes, the congregational approach was inherently at odds with the tenets of civil religion, standing closer to a modern separation between Church and State as they viewed external enforcement of religious belief as at odds with devout, interior devotion.

Other chapters develop these themes focusing on different writers. Charlotte McCallum explores Machiavelli’s writings and their reception in early modern Britain to agree with many of the overarching themes mentioned earlier: that he was anticlerical but saw religion’s usefulness for a polity, and perhaps usefulness in itself. Meanwhile, Connor Robinson argues that Henry Stubbe’s writings should be seen as part of the Puritan impulse to reform the Church, and that he adapted them to specific challenges amid ongoing political developments during the civil wars. Andrew R. Murphy and Christie L. Maloyed describe how William Penn saw government’s role in protecting liberty of conscience as a way to preserve citizens’ virtue and moral character. John Locke, too, saw liberty of conscience as foundational for a society, although with limits, as John Marshall explains – the beliefs of atheists and Catholics were incompatible with the goals of civil religion.

For all the ground this volume traverses, its limits are sometimes noticeable. The title’s ‘anglophone world’ primarily refers to England and, in the North American colonies, Pennsylvania and Carolina. Wales, Scotland and Ireland are absent, as are colonies whose religious settlements would offer fruitful material to examine in the context of civil religion, such as Maryland. To that point, one also wonders about the place of Catholics in this volume. They appear mostly in the background as a group whom early modern writers like Penn and Locke variously include or exclude in their formulations of religious toleration. However, we know that many Catholic authors were theorising and writing about the same themes and questions as the individuals examined here, including authors who were either English themselves such as William Allen, Robert Persons and Thomas White, or who were writing about the political and religious situation in England, such as Robert Bellarmine. Nor did they necessarily articulate different positions from the writers treated in this volume. Catholic authors could embrace the same principles, even advocating for religious toleration as a means to ensure political stability in terms and according to logic that mirrored those eventually articulated by Locke, for instance.

These points are not critiques of the book’s scope in itself – ‘civil religion’ is difficult enough to pin down as an object of study. They are questions provoked by the variety of topics and authors treated in these pages and reflect a desire to make a rich book even richer. The volume does an excellent job of historicising what has previously been treated philosophically, and anyone studying civil religion in the premodern world will find it both thought-provoking and useful. For readers of this Journal, two interventions stand out in particular: an emphasis on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century origins of civil religion, and the role of religion qua religion in these early modern writings, including its ecclesiological aspects.