CeleryKills

Tracing how martyr narratives become modern constitutional assumptions, and why that trace bends back on itself

Last November, I sat in a rainy Seattle coffee shop, overhearing two graduate students argue with the intensity of people who have never lost a house plant. One said Foxe’s Acts and Monuments proves Protestantism birthed liberty. The other said liberty proves Protestantism mattered. They were both smiling, which is how you know it is either friendship or epistemic danger. I took notes like a voyeur, because the chain they were circling is the same one that quietly powers a lot of historical writing and, frankly, a fair number of American political theologies today.

“Protestantism birthed liberty” is one of those phrases that sounds like it should come with a dramatic musical cue and a fog machine. In practice, it is a compressed historical claim that tries to turn a messy set of religious conflicts into a clean origin story for modern freedom. The idea is not that every Protestant was a proto–Bill of Rights enthusiast wandering around with a quill and a conscience. It is more specific and more slippery: certain strands of Protestant thought, especially those emphasizing individual conscience, resistance to ecclesiastical authority, and direct access to scripture, are said to have planted the seeds of later political ideas about rights and liberty. I once had a friend in Olympia who summarized it as, “No Pope, no problem, eventually.” He said it while trying to fix a leaking bike tire, which feels appropriate. The leap is from theological disagreement to political architecture, as if one inevitably rolls into the other like driftwood into a tidepool. It is an argument that often gets told backward, with the present day casting a long shadow that conveniently points back to a theological root system.

Now, Foxe’s Acts and Monuments deserves a little more texture than the name suggests, because it is not a quick read and it is not a neutral one. John Foxe, a sixteenth-century English Protestant, compiled what is essentially a sprawling, emotionally charged record of Protestant sufferings under Catholic rule, most famously during the reign of Mary I. The book is enormous, like “I hope you brought provisions” enormous, and it became one of the most influential narratives in English Protestant culture. When I first tried to read it, I lasted about half an hour before I started imagining that every marginal illustration was judging me. It is full of martyr stories, detailed accounts of trials, and a steady emphasis on conscience under pressure. Think less “history textbook” and more “national epic with footnotes and a strong editorial voice.” Foxe is not just reporting events, he is arranging them into a moral structure where the faithful suffer, endure, and ultimately vindicate their position through persistence and, importantly, memory. That is why later writers keep reaching for it: it offers a ready-made cast of characters who already know their lines. To this day I have not completed the book… but have cited parts.

The chain goes like this, with polite academic confidence: Foxe describes Protestant martyrs suffering under tyranny, which suggests a distinctive Protestant commitment to conscience. That commitment evolves into a broader Protestant liberty ethos. That ethos influences Anglo-American constitutionalism. And then the constitutional order is taken as evidence that the Protestant ethos was real all along. The conclusion feels solid enough to build a seminar syllabus on. The problem is not in any single step. The problem is in the way the steps breathe together, like a closed system that forgets it is closed.

The first move begins with Foxe. I am fond of Foxe in the same way I am fond of old maps, because both are more confident than they should be. The Acts and Monuments (Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 1563) is read as a documentary archive of Protestant liberty in embryo. Martyr narratives become evidence of a principled stance against coercion. The interpretive jump is subtle: suffering is treated as revelation. I have read those pages on a gray Sunday, coffee gone cold, and felt the pull. If people are dying for conscience, surely conscience must matter.

Here is the first place the chain could have broken cleanly. One could treat Foxe as hagiography, not as a transparent window. One could ask: what if martyrdom narratives produce liberty as a retrospective story rather than a historical origin? That move would force the historian to leave the chain and examine rhetorical construction instead. The consequence would be uncomfortable. The “liberty” would no longer sit neatly inside Protestantism like a seed waiting for water. It would instead appear as a later interpretive overlay, which ruins the neat genealogy.

The second step converts martyr narratives into a generalized “Protestant liberty.” The logic goes: if conscience was defended against Catholic coercion, then Protestantism inherently values individual freedom. I have heard this phrased with a kind of pastoral warmth, as if we are describing a family trait. The chain relies on treating a specific conflict as a universal principle. It is the moment the coffee shop argument feels less like history and more like a sermon.

The avoidance of circularity here would have been to distinguish between contingent historical conflict and doctrinal essence. In other words: you could say “this particular Protestant group argued for conscience in a specific context” without upgrading it into “Protestantism equals liberty.” That would have broken the forward momentum of the chain. The consequence would have been fragmentation. The story would splinter into competing Protestantisms, none of which can carry the entire burden of modern liberty. It would be less satisfying, and therefore less likely to be narrated in textbooks.

The third step marches from Protestant liberty to modern constitutionalism. The story becomes Anglo-American: dissent, covenant theology, resistance theory, constitutional order. I once toured a small museum in the Pacific Northwest that framed the Mayflower Compact as a proto-constitution, hovering under glass like a sacred relic. The guide said, “This is where it begins,” and I remember thinking: begins what, exactly? The chain depends on selecting a particular lineage and treating it as representative. It is a story of continuity that smooths over discontinuity.

Here again, the chain could have been interrupted by asking a simple, almost rude question: what if constitutionalism developed through multiple, competing streams that do not require Protestant liberty as a causal backbone? That question would have forced engagement with legal, commercial, and imperial histories that do not fit the Foxe-derived narrative. The consequence would be a loss of moral clarity. The constitution would cease to be the inevitable flowering of a theological seed. It would look like a messy compromise among institutions that barely agree about anything.

The fourth step is where the circularity becomes almost invisible. Modern constitutionalism is then used as retroactive validation of the Protestant liberty ethos. The thinking goes: because modern constitutional systems enshrine rights and conscience, and because those systems arose in Protestant contexts, Protestantism must have uniquely generated those values. I have seen this move used with a quiet confidence that feels like a closing argument. It is the “look around you” gesture, as if the present is obvious proof of the past.

This is the point where the chain turns back on itself without announcing it. The very outcome that was supposed to be explained becomes the evidence that explains the origin. It is a loop that disguises itself as a line. The reader is invited to admire the coherence, not notice the return.

Ok to summarize:

Step 1: Specify independent criteria for “liberty tradition” (e.g., legal practices, not narratives)

Step 3: Treat Foxe as rhetorical evidence, not ideational proof

Step 4: Separate reception history from ideological content

Step 5: Test ideology claims against diverse sources (sermons, court records, pamphlets)

Step 6: Avoid using the inferred ideology as the sole explanatory cause

If circularity were avoided here, one could resist using present institutions as retrospective confirmation. One could instead treat modern constitutionalism as a separate explanatory domain, not a validation device. The consequence would be that the chain loses its satisfying symmetry. It would no longer feel like a story that culminates in the present. It would feel like a historical argument that has to live without closure, which is, I confess, where I prefer history to live.

Now the uncomfortable part. This is not just a problem in historical scholarship. It is alive in contemporary political theology, especially in Christian Nationalism and theologically motivated libertarianism. I have had conversations in which someone says, with reverent certainty, that “our constitutional liberties are Christian at their root.” Then, in the next breath, another says, “government is illegitimate when it interferes with individual sovereignty because that is what Protestantism teaches.” They are often the same person, just rotated ninety degrees.

The Foxe-derived chain supplies both positions with a common spine. It allows modern ideals to appear preloaded into history. But here is the dilemma I keep returning to: if you believe modern rights are the natural culmination of Protestant liberty, are you willing to accept that any deviation from those rights is a betrayal of theology rather than a political disagreement? And if so, what happens when your opponent reads the same Foxe and reaches a different conclusion? I have watched that conversation become a stalemate, then a shouting match, then a mutual accusation of bad faith, all while both parties are convinced they are defending a historical truth.

It’s one lesson in not determining why an argument could be wrong, just because it fits your narrative. Remember, this happens all the time with holy books, where arguments are often incomplete, circular, contradictory to other holy books and even self-contradictory.

Theologically motivated libertarianism leans into the chain by treating conscience as an almost metaphysical absolute. Christian Nationalism leans into it by treating the same lineage as a claim about national identity. Both rely on the same move: they collapse interpretation, causation, and validation into a single loop. I am not interested in telling anyone to stop believing what they believe. I am interested in noticing what happens when belief is wired directly into a historical narrative that feeds back into itself. The wire hums like a powerline with an unbalance harmonic current. You can hear it if you stop talking.

I wonder, sitting here again with my coffee and my marginal notes, whether the chain is less about Protestantism and more about our desire to make history behave. We want a story where liberty has an origin we can point to, preferably one with martyrs and a clean moral arc. We want a present that confirms our past, and a past that justifies our present. But history is not obliged to close the loop for us.

So I will ask what I wish someone had asked in that Seattle coffee shop: if your explanation of liberty depends on liberty as proof, where exactly does the explanation begin? And if it never truly begins, why are we still pretending it does?

References

• Foxe, John. Acts and Monuments (1563).
• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972).
• Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma (1958).
• Walzer, Michael. The Revolution of the Saints (1965).
• Calhoun, Craig J. Nations Matter (2007).