The insurgence of radical ideas, sects and publications during the English Revolution brought a third ‘style’ of anti-Calvinism to the fore. In particular, a proliferation of fissiparous networks and more formalized movements flourished during the 1650s under the relative amnesty of Cromwellian toleration, including ‘Anabaptists’, ‘Levellers’, ‘Diggers’, ‘Ranters’, ‘Muggletonians’, ‘Quakers’ and ‘Fifth Monarchists’. Much to the disgust of ordained divines, even ‘soap boilers’ and women morphed into preachers who turned tubs upside down as makeshift pulpits and turned the world upside down in the process. Daniel Featley dubbed these uneducated lay preachers ‘Mechanick Enthusiasts’. In particular, those committed to an immanentist ‘spirit’ religion considered the strictures of Reformed Orthodoxy to be suffocating and lacking any direct means of revelation or assurance. As Paul Lim has demonstrated, however, Socinians committed to ‘rational’ religion also undermined the Reformed tradition from a quite different perspective. The Socinians grounded theological authority in human reason and therefore rejected the scholastic method as specu¬lative, preferring instead the Grotian combination of historical and philological hermeneutic with an emphasis on natural law. Equally, Socinians rejected the foundational assumptions of classical theism, especially any recourse to divine mystery or aseity. As a corollary, they rejected the notion of predesti¬nation rooted in speculative eternal decrees or divine foreknowledge of future contingents. As the English Socinian John Biddle insisted, ‘God knoweth not such actions, till they come to pass’. Consequently, Lim has argued that the rejection of Calvinist soteriology became a surprising point of convergence between ‘proponents of “radical religion”, and “rational religion” … Calvinism was, unequivocally, the bête noire of both these groups’. Those committed to a rationalist hermeneutic that removed mystery from religion and those committed to the unio mystico that ‘godded’ the believer, both chipped away at the Calvinist hegemony throughout the 1650s.

Environmental factors considered in Chapter One, including the removal of press licensing, the suspension of religious Articles and unprecedented levels of political toleration, all contributed to the growth of more extreme religious views. In particular, the new print culture enabled radicals to play ‘an outsized role in shaping the tone and tenor’ of religious debate after the opening of the Long Parliament.