ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the role of religious ideas in shaping the conflicts of the seventeenth century. It also addresses the issue of how to relate religious and secular discourses. Willie Lamont explores how Whig and Marxist historians had abused Baxter's autobiographical compendium, the Reliquiae Baxterianae in order to impose upon him a social-determinist reading of the origins of the Civil War. The English civil war began as a constitutional conflict and ended as a religious one. Ronald Asch shows us that Kings of England were caught up in the revival of sacral kingship in the age after the age of assassinations. The chapter illustrates that religious zeal guided how the militants on both sides read the politics, and that religious militants were, as a result of their religious militancy, supporters of the need for a war, and promoters of a different kind of post-war settlement.
