As the editors note in their Introduction to this impressive volume, “civil religion” can run the gamut from the “republic built on the absolute separation of church and state” that is the modern USA, to Hobbes’s vision of an “Erastian union of church and state in one autocratic ruler” (p. 1). They set some clear goals for their collection. One is to reorient attention away from detecting precursors to an Enlightenment-centred narrative of the co-option of religion for political purposes and towards the working out of Reformation concerns and agendas. This necessarily means an imperative “to put the religion back into civil religion” (p. 5), not least through addressing aspirations to draw upon the civil power to “rescue religion” from its corruption, generally at the hands of clerics. The chapters that follow fulfill these ambitions admirably, positioning themselves carefully in the rapid succession of events, and plurality of ideas, which characterized England on either side of the traumatic, but creative, upheavals of the mid-17th century. (It should be noted, indeed, that the “Anglophone world” rarely stretches beyond England, omitting its insular neighboring nations, each with important Anglophone intellectual traditions and distinct modes of “civil religion”.)

In the opening essay Mark Goldie offers to “sketch an alternative genealogy of civil religion” (p. 48). The chapter provides an intellectual underpinning for much of what follows, reflective of the important stimulus provided by his scholarship. There is a setting loose here of many of the hares which will dart through succeeding essays, from the “paradigmatic” status of “popery” as the exaltation of sacerdotal claims, and of an “externality” of religion from the spiritual wellbeing of both individual and commonwealth, to the potential held by the Erastian state not merely to shunt aside such forms of religious tyranny but to sustain a space for emerging pluralism or tolerance under its oversight.

In a particularly impressive contribution, Charlotte McCallum considers ways of “Reading Machiavellian Civil Religion in Early Modern Britain.” She demonstrates how a thinker regarded as the arch-proponent of “instrumentalizing religion” for state purposes could plausibly be drawn upon by those determined rather to purge a true national religion of “priestcraft”, with particular attention to the ventriloquizing of Machiavelli, likely by the English republican Henry Neville, for anticlerical ends. This is a fine display of the possibilities of a reception-centered intellectual history alert to the ramifications of the ideas of a “canonical” thinker as made manifest in the concrete circumstances of readers’ times, intellectual horizons, and ambitions. Enlisting a useable past in the form of an “Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical constitutionalism” is the subject of Jacqueline Rose’s essay. If it might be harnessed to drive forward “Reformation principles”, pursuing “the purgation of superstition and priestly power”, this was “high-risk” history, for the entangled church-state relations uncovered by an ever more sophisticated scholarship could also suggest dangerous precedents of the harm done by a “church dominating or undermining the state” (p. 242).

The other essays are more chronologically concentrated. Polly Ha provides a richly-textured account of how the protagonists of the puritan-conformist debates of the 1590s argued themselves towards providing “multiple” and “mutable” variants on the relations of civil and ecclesiastical authority. What emerges here is how creative the contest itself could be, as each side adapted and pressed their own model of church order as best able to sustain civility and promote the good of the commonwealth. Esther Counsell’s study of one of the puritan “martyrs” of Caroline England, the Scots-born Alexander Leighton, explores how he understood his battle to be against the perilous triumph of “prelatical” religion which, for all its endorsement by the reigning monarch, threatened to overturn England’s “Reformed civil religion.” Leighton regarded “royal supremacy, rather than episcopal government, as the beating heart of English Protestantism” (p. 107), a positive force for the advancement of true religion, one to which parliament must rally to save the nation’s soul.

By the 1650s, many battles had been fought to that end. John Coffey provides a characteristically lucid assessment of the ideas of competing brands of religious Independents, promoting a “public profession” of faith or wary of “national religion” as merely “superficial” and “formal.” He carefully considers how such options might be construed by “classical republicans”, from the tergiversations of Marchamont Nedham to the “triangulating” efforts of James Harrington. Connor Robinson reprises Henry Stubbe, cautioning against too readily reading him as an “early Enlightenment” figure, pursuing “a distinctively secular understanding of history”, and instead reading him forward from his promotion of the “Good Old Cause” in the 1650s towards his remarkable “Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism” of the 1670s. Robinson opens up the ideas of a thinker who was certainly thinking along with the notion of “civil religion” if not thinking towards its advocacy. Andrew R. Murphy and Christie L. Maloyed invite us to consider whether that unremitting advocate of religious liberty, William Penn, might also have pursued what they usefully call a “thinner version of civil religion” (p. 201), and how such an advancing of “general and practical religion” for the common moral benefit might play out in early Pennsylvania. John Marshall charts consistencies and changes in Locke’s religious thought, from the persistence of his hostility towards the inclusion of atheism or “popery” within the bounds of toleration, to an emergent, but then “overriding fear of magistrates” rather than priests as the prime agents for potential tyranny in church as well as state.

Essay collections have fissiparous tendencies. Not so here. The reader who tackles this book as a whole will find themselves thinking through the meaning of “civil religion” alongside a cast of early modern English Protestants, various in their opinions as also in the sophistication, novelty, or scholarly or practical capacity with which they advanced them. In doing so they will learn much, not only about the intellectual fecundity of this time and place, but about the possibilities, and limitations, of “civil religion” itself, not just a means of making sense of their world, or our own, but why it may be thought a means of making it better.