Basil Willey in the introductory chapter of his Seventeenth Century Background calls attention to the fact that the rise of scientific humanism introduced a basic dichotomy into the intellectual and religious life of that century. A new pattern of explanation came to dominate Western thought in the seventeenth century, and it was destined to continue without being effectively challenged until the twentieth. For three centuries it was assumed that reality was a closed system of law, and no explanation was satisfactory which did not make clear the efficient causation operating within this closed system. Epistemological studies, to be sure, developed within this period a radical skepticism regarding the validity of man's knowledge of ultimate reality; but not even Hume or Kant succeeded in conceiving of reality as essentially dynamic. The early nineteenth century witnessed a reaction against the static rationalism of the previous age. Emphasis came to be put on movement, development, evolution. Things were explained, not by direct relation to a nexus of fixed laws, but by descriptions of how they came to be.

The preachers of the New Model Army during the 1640's and 1650's engaged in a three-pronged attack upon the educated people of Puritan England, i.e., upon the clergy, the university teachers, and the lawyers. Both the Levellers and the Diggers gave strong support to this anti-professional or anti-intellectual point of view. Most of the Army preachers, especially William Dell, John Saltmarsh, Thomas Collier, Walter Cradock, and William Erbery, were purveyors of that branch of Independent Puritanism (sometimes called Antinomianism) which stressed the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit rather than formal learning. Furthermore, despite the conclusions of R. H. Tawney about Puritanism in general, the Army preachers were generally concerned with the poor and uneducated members of society rather than the prosperous and educated. In the phraseology of H. Richard Niebuhr, they sought “the salvation of the socially disinherited.” An examination of this interest in social amelioration will help to clarify the anti-intellectual attack.

So far as religious affairs are concerned, the colonial period of our history begins with the planting of the first permanent English colony in 1607, guided by the intention to perpetuate in the new land the religious patterns to which the mother country had grown accustomed. Chief of these for our purposes was uniformity enforced by the civil power. The period culminates just 180 years later with the complete rejection of this central intention in the provisions for national religious freedom in the Constitution (1787) and First Amendment (1791).