Fifth Monarchists. Or, One Way Not To Be a Christian Nation

Some observations by Austin Woolrych in his fine book "Commonwealth to Protectorate" (Clarendon Press 1982). While Woolrych's book focuses on the events of 1653, when the New Model Army deposed the remnants of the Long Parliament (the so-called Rump Parliament) and England's republican Commonwealth in favor of a Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, he backs up to address the problems that had been simmering below the surface for almost a decade.

In 1653 the army, back from its victorious campaigns in Ireland and Scotland, was frustrated that little (really, almost nothing) had been effected to created the godly commonwealth for which they had been fighting. Significantly influenced by a group that believed that the execution of Charles I in 1649 would usher in Christ's millennial kingdom (the Fifth Monarchists), more than a few "believed not only that the reign of Christ on earth was imminent, but that it was their mission and duty to bring it about ..."

Of course,

There was an inherent contradiction between their goal--government by the saints for the saints--and those of believers in civil liberties (including Cromwell) who held that the promised kingdom was a spiritual one, that the spheres of nature and of grace should be distinguished, and that therefore mere natural men should not be debarred from their right in the choosing of their temporal legislators.

Already in 1649 a group of Fifth Monarchists had addressed Oliver Cromwell with a question: 

"How can the kingdom be saints ... when the ungodly are electors and elected to govern?" Parliaments must be put down as well as kings, they declared, before the one true kingdom, that of Christ, could be established.

Matters were reaching a head in 1653, but what was to be done? As it turns out, the Fifth Monarchists did not get their way. True, Cromwell forcibly dissolved the Rump Parliament but he replaced it with a new parliament dedicated to reforming England, not a revolution. Of course, the new "Barebones" Parliament ultimately failed, too, in part because of the presence of a minority committed to the Fifth Monarchist agenda of what nowadays would be called "immanentizing the eschatological."

In short, if history is any guide, any program of radically reducing the remit of the American liberal political order in favor of "the rule of the saints" is most unlikely to succeed.