A lower class deep
libertarian Protestantism, perhaps really a freeing up of social and spiritual forces always bubbling under in England and given a chance to surface in the glorious chaos of
interregnum England. They refused the chains of
convential morality, and used tobacco and alchohol in a parody of communion to heighten the spiritual atmosphere at their meetings.
Said Abiezer Coppe "My spirit dwells with God, sups with him, in him, feeds on him,with him, in him,. My humanity shall dwell with, sup with, eat with humanity; and why not (for a need) with publicans and harlots?" They advocated blasphemy because it showed a freedom from the constraints of contemporary moral dogmatism.
An emanation of the free spirit that millenia of suppression never killed in hidebound Europe, ever arising anew and unexpected in popular uprisings and movements across the continent down the years.
The leaders were imprisoned and forced to recant in the early 1650s but the Spirit lived on. In 1656 William Bond of Lacock in Wiltshire said there was "no God or power ruling above the planets, no Christ but the sun that shines on us." His fellow villager Thomas Hibbord said "God was in all things; whatever sins he did commit, God was the author of them all, and acted them in him. He would sell all religions for a jug of beer." (Quoted in Christopher Hill's 'The World Turned Upside Down, p.228)