The introduction sets out the main themes of the book: that the role of gesture in religious worship was highlighted by the Reformation, and that it was especially significant in the English Reformation. It develops these themes by showing that gesture was central to some of the key concepts of the English Reformation: indifference, uniformity and conformity. First, were certain gestures essential to worship, or were they merely matters of indifference? Secondly, was variation in gesture permissible in public worship, or should all people use the same gestures in order to create a uniform Protestant body? Finally, was gesture a matter of free choice, or did the church have the right to impose gestural conformity on its members? It argues that these questions of church order opened up a larger epistemological question about what gestures meant, or whether, in the end, they meant anything at all.

The false consensus effect is the observation that people tend to overestimate the number of people who share their views. In modern environments we also see growing evidence of greater polarization. For example, according to the Pew Research Center over the past five decades, congressional US Democrat and Republican ideologies have increasingly diverged, with an ever shrinking middle ground. This is appears to also be reflected among US citizens, with a "disappearing center" hastened by growing “anarchist” and “anti-establishment” ideologies. Many have speculated that this polarization is a global phenomenon. The question we pose here is how beliefs and network structure might interact to facilitate both false consensus effects and rising polarization.

In Chapter 4, we conduct an in-depth exploration of norms at both the individual and group levels. We discuss how they develop, how they are classified, and the factors that encourage their acceptance by group members. We also discuss the collusive behavior and deviancy that can occur in groups and their connection to group norms.

In the 1980s and 90s in psychology, many cross-cultural comparisons were made concerning individualism and collectivism with questionnaires and experiments. The largest number of them compared “collectivistic” Japanese with “individualistic” Americans. This chapter reviewed 48 such empirical comparisons and found that Japanese were no different from Americans in the degree of collectivism. Both questionnaire studies and experimental studies showed essentially the same pattern of results. Many researchers who believed in “Japanese collectivism” suspected flaws in those empirical studies. However, none of the suspected flaws was consistent with empirical evidence. For example, although it was suspected that “Japanese collectivism” was not supported because college students provided data as participants, the studies with non-student adults did not support this common view either. It is thus unquestionable that as a whole the empirical studies disproved the reality of “Japanese collectivism.”

Bayle invites us to reflect on the psychological effects of conformity on the dissenter himself, forced to violate his conscience, as well as the counter-intuitive implications of this infringement. Bayle suggests that infringements on conscience are experienced as deep violations by the dissenter, arguably just as unsettling as more violent forms of discipline and coercion. The experience of conforming to the state religion does not merely corrode mutual understanding among citizens but asks individuals to endure the taxing experience of suppressing and violating their consciences. Hypocritical conformity is not merely a trivial demand with little consequence for their integrity, as advocates of religious persecution insist, but a deeply felt violation that reverberates even long after the act of conformity is finished. Even more discerningly, Bayle recognizes that hypocritical conformity exacerbates conscientious fervor. Hypocritical conformity does not merely fail to inspire genuine conversion; it also radicalizes dissenters and urges them to be even more committed to their conscience. In an attempt to transform dissenters through hypocritical conformity, the state risks emboldening dissenters even further and inciting backlash against the state.

Some degree of hypocritical conformity is necessary, Spinoza argues, for a political society to function. Individuals cannot be free to do whatever they like, even if their conscience conflicts with the law. Yet Spinoza also recognizes that hypocritical conformity has its own pernicious repercussions, specifically the corrosion of civic trust. Spinoza’s conscientious speech warns that conformity corrodes the social trust that undergirds politics since individuals are not able to confidently assess the sincerity of their citizens. Spinoza aims to reconcile this tension by distinguishing speech from action. Dissenters must conform to the law, even if it conflicts with their conscience, but they should be able to express their conscience freely in speech.

This book argues that liberty of conscience remains a crucial freedom worth protecting, because safeguarding it prevents political, social, and psychological threats to freedom. Influential early modern theorists of toleration, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle, I show, defend liberty of conscience by stressing the unanticipated repercussions of conformity. By recovering the intellectual origins of liberty of conscience in early modern politics and situating influential theorists of toleration in overlooked historical debates on religious dissimulation and hypocritical conformity, I demonstrate that infringements on conscience risk impeding political engagement, eroding civic trust, and inciting religious fanaticism. While this is a book about freedom, it is also a book about threats to freedom, specifically conformity, hypocrisy, and persecution. It considers the social, psychological, and political harms done by political refusals to tolerate religious differences and allow individuals to practice their religion freely in accordance with the dictates of conscience. By returning to a historical context in which liberty of conscience was not granted to religious dissenters –but rather actively denied – this book foregrounds Bayle’s argument that coercing conscience exacerbates religious fervor and inflicts significant psychological harm on dissenters, thereby undermining the goal of cultivating social cohesion in politics. In controversies on the politics of conscience, I suggest that we acknowledge that refusals to tolerate claims of conscience – while perhaps well-grounded in democratic laws and norms – might exacerbate conscientious fervor and empower resentment against the state. This Baylean intuition does not necessarily tell us where to draw the limits of toleration – what should be tolerated and what goes beyond the pale – but it does tell us something about how to approach invocations of conscience and what to expect when we deem something intolerable.

The chapter examines the puritan claim that ‘moderate puritan’ was an oxymoron; that even self-professedly moderate or conforming puritans were in fact the carriers of an ideology subversive of all order in church and state. Indeed, the Laudians claimed that those puritans who at least pretended to conform were in fact more dangerous than out-and-out non-conformists, since the latter identified themselves and could thus be the more easily disciplined or removed. The others represented a fifth column, far harder to detect or discipline, and thus able to undermine the church from within. Within the episcopal hierarchy, the correlative of the moderate puritan was the so-called popular prelate, someone who cared far too much about his reputation amongst the godly and thought that the unity of the church could best be preserved by accommodating various sorts of puritans rather than by subjecting them to firm episcopal government. Such men represented a threat to the church almost as great as the puritans themselves. Here the figures of bishops like Williams of Lincoln or Hall of Exeter, and then Norwich, could be discerned between the lines of various Laudian diatribes.

This chapter looks at fellow-travelling Calvinist conformists, that is to say persons who had always espoused a Calvinist or reformed view of predestination, who, on certain issues and in certain modes, could sound like any moderate puritan, but who, on the issue of conformity, took a firmly anti-puritan line, and consequently on certain other issues could sound just like card-carrying Laudians. It does so through the analysis and comparison of the careers of two such men, Robert Sanderson and Humphrey Sydenham, whose views on the theology of grace, conformity and puritanism, and indeed on some of the signature values of Laudianism, are analysed and compared.

This chapter addresses the paradox, present both in the scholarly literature and in contemporary discourse, where Laudianism was often seen as both a revolutionary and a largely conservative or even reactionary movement; bent on root-and-branch reform and on the preservation of the moderate ‘Anglican’ status quo. This chapter shows that the Laudians presented themselves both as agents of change, pushing for the radical reformation of a church corrupted by decades of puritan corruption, and as conservatives, returning that church to its essential and original condition. What enabled both cases to be made was the extent of puritan influence over, and penetration of, the social and ideological fabric of the church. It was this that necessitated the reformation, which was designed to return the church to the condition it was in before the puritans ‘ruined’ it. That ideal state was variously located in either the Elizabethan or the early Edwardian reformations, and when such precedents were found insufficient to validate certain parts of the Laudian agenda, in the church of the apostles and the fathers. The result was once again a minimum and a maximum case for Laudian reformation, credit for which was variously attributed to Charles I, Archbishop Laud or the bishops more generally construed.

Societies are transformed by total wars, which mobilize entire populations, penetrate society as a whole, and involve both civilian and military populations as direct targets of aggression, as well as resources for inflicting harm and destroying the enemy. Total wars bring about enormous (forced) movement of populations, as well as changes in gender roles and social class relations. Because most men are directly involved on the front lines of the war effort, new opportunities are created for women to become active in areas from which they were previously excluded. Also, because of the enormous sacrifices made by the general population and the real possibility of national defeat at the hands of the enemy, the rich also become more ready to make some sacrifices. During total wars, the rich–poor divide becomes smaller, as the rich make larger contributions toward the war effort. However, as discussed in this chapter, evidence suggests that this increase in political plasticity is only temporary. The rich–poor divide has increased enormously since World War II.