Francis Foster

I'm saying the ordinary world, the world we see here now.

That's an extension of this core thing.

But in a society that takes religion deeply seriously, the right to pursue and figure this out on your own, as long as you're not harming other people, right?

If you are bringing children into dangerous activities that end up in their disfigurement or dismemberment, or you're compelling people not to pay taxes to the king or things that defy courts, these kinds of things were not tolerated.

And the public largely went along with the king stamping down on that stuff.

But if it was just a bunch of people sitting in a room singing songs out of key, the public support for this was quite low.

And one of the great aspects of the English Constitution at this period, we're talking in the 1600s,

uh before cromwell the king had to enforce his will through sheriffs and every county had a sheriff at this point and the sheriffs would often refuse to do it they would refuse to collect taxes if they thought the taxes were unjust uh they would refuse to imprison people for like what these people are doing is harmless you know i don't like their music i don't like their view of of the bible but

Oh my gosh, they're just sitting inside on a dreary winter day doing their thing.

Why do I care?

The sheriff just wouldn't do it.

And the king's ministers knew this, and they tried.

There's his correspondence, and they're trying to figure out how to get these sheriffs to actually enforce the king's censorship.

But also, the idea that censorship is a bad idea

ultimately came to be embraced by Catholics because it was used against them.

The censorship was used against them.

But initially, this was a deeply, deeply Protestant idea.

By the way, censorship always fails in the long run.

What's tempting about it is it seems to work in the short run.

So let's look at Weimar Germany, 1920s, right?