DGS

"...we do not study the history of religion in any serious way, even for explanations of religious phenomena. Instead, we look for sociological explanations, or economic explanations, or even political explanations, and we do so precisely because we find it almost impossible to posit spiritual appetites and spiritual passions as independent, primary forces in human history.
Yet they are, or they can be. Take the rise of Puritanism in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare's England. At that time the Church of England was the most tolerant of all national churches. It was a church with a beautiful liturgy and a host of first-rate thinkers. And England itself was the most prosperous and the freest society in the Western world, with a glorious secular culture. So why should people, especially young people among whom were many women, suddenly decide that they wanted to be, of all things, Puritans?
All one can say is that these things happen, that the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and that sometimes all you need to generate a counterculture is an orthodoxy against which it can rebel. For no orthodoxy can ever fully satisfy our spiritual appetites and our spiritual passions."