During the 1520s the city council of Zurich, with the full cooperation of Zwingli, created a Reformed community in which all powers of discipline were placed in the hands of the city magistrates. Both Zwingli's theory of the Christian community and the council's actions to create such a community had their roots in the late medieval communal idea which viewed the city as a “sacral community.” This corporate ideal led to the blurring of the distinctions between the civil and ecclesiastical communities.Zwingli's theory also had roots in the thought of Marsilius of Padua, Occam, and Zwingli's contemporary, Erasmus.

Theologically and ecclesiologically James I of England was a “Gentleman of Wide Swallow.” Although he did not possess the type of skepticism that later emerged in post-Restoration latitudinarianism, he did endorse as orthodox only those essential doctrines which Christians had agreed upon in the early centuries of the church, which were grounded in the “expresse word of God” and given their most basic formulation in the creeds. The king viewed himself as an irenic monarch, one who could bring peace to Christendom by promoting an accommodation to these essentials and compromise between conflicting parties. This was an ecumenical approach to religion for his day, and he believed he could help disagreeing Christians “meet in the middest which is the center and perfection of all things.”

The names of George Fox, William Penn, and Margaret Fell occupy a premier place among the leaders of seventeenth-century English Quakerism. George Fox, Quaker tradition has claimed, was the prophetic and preeminent first-generation leader from 1652 until his death in 1691. William Penn's chief claim to historical fame was his founding of the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, as well as his prolific writings in defense of Quakerism and religious toleration in England. Margaret Fell, who married Fox in 1669, has been epitomized most frequently as the “Mother of Quakerism,” a hagiographic title that leaves her role imprecisely defined. Margaret Fell's position was a powerful one in the organization of nascent Quakerism. She came under Fox's influence while Judge Fell, her first husband, was still living. At first a novitiate under Fox's spiritual guidance, she soon became an apt apologist and grass-roots organizer who equaled and in most cases exceeded other leaders in edifying, guiding, and sustaining the Quaker cause. Although Fell, Fox, and Penn were long-term friends despite a wide age difference, Fell's real-life role in this triumvirate of early Quaker leadership largely has been lost in the obscurity and myth of Quaker beginnings.

The success of early Methodism in the textile-manufacturing region of Yorkshire and Lancashire is an important part of the overall story of the success of the Methodists. That Wesley's teachings and societies should have thrived in this rough area is almost as surprising as the success of the Wesleyans in Cornwall. Any attempt to explain this growth must include an investigation into the question: what kind of people chose to join the Methodists? Earlier historians of Methodism, including John Wesley Bready, Leslie F. Church, Maldwyn Edwards, W. J. Warner, and Robert F. Wearmouth, have offered largely impressionistic overviews of the social structure of early Methodism. The best way to obtain a more precise picture is to look at those records of individual circuits, such as the Keighley Methodist circuit, which provide occupational data.

In the 1920s a loosely united band of militant conservatives launched a crusade to capture conrol of the major Protestant denominations. These fundamentalists staunchly affirmed the supernatural character and literal accuracy of the Bible, the supernatural character of Christ, and the necessity for Christians to separate themselves from the world. Most often Baptists and Presbyterians, they struggled to reestablish their denominations as true and pure churches: true to the historic doctrines of the faith as they perceived them, and pure from what they saw as the polluting influences of an increasingly corrupt modern culture. But by the late 1920s the fundamentalists had lost the fight. Not only were they powerless minorities in the Northern Baptist and the Northern Presbyterian denominations, where the struggle for control had been the fiercest, but many perceived them as uneducated, intolerant rustics. The Scopes trial cemented this notion in the popular consciousness.