Overview

Reveals how Enlightened writers in England, both lay and clerical, proclaimed public support for Christianity by transforming it into a civil religion. In the aftermath of the seventeenth-century European wars of religion, civil religionists such as David Hume, Edward Gibbon, the third earl of Shaftesbury, and William Warburton sought to reconcile Christian ecclesiology with the civil state and Christian practice with civilized society. They built their arguments in the context of England's long Reformation, syncretizing 'primitive' gospel Christianity with ancient paganism as they attempted to render Christianity a modern version of Roman republican civil religion. They believed that outward observance of the reformed Protestant faith was vital for belonging to the Christian commonwealth of Hanoverian England. Uncovering a major theme in eighteenth-century intellectual and religious history that connected classical Rome with Italian Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment, this deeply interdisciplinary book draws from recent post-secular trends in social and political theory. Combining intellectual history with the political and ecclesiastical history of the Church of England, it will prove as indispensable for historians as studentsof political theory, theology, and literature.

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9781837651498

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Reviews

[This] an excellent book and will become essential reading for all scholars of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century religion. * JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY, LITERATURE AND CULTURE * [Walsh's] research has opened up a new angle on the age-old question of the relationship between religion and Enlightenment and deserves to be read widely. * THE JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY * This impressive new book...succeeds in covering broad ground while maintaining clarity and focus, with complex ecclesiological arguments swiftly explained in clear and often entertaining prose * JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY * Well-researched and clearly written...this book has deftly unearthed a vein of opinion in the eighteenth century which gives further meaning to the increasingly prevalent phrase, the English Enlightenment. * JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY * Professor Walsh has written an important book. His defense of Hanoverian civil religion is original, thoughtful, and provocative in the best sense of the term. Historians, philosophers, and political theorists will be forced to rethink standard interpretations of canonical thinkers, reexamine the relationship between elite intellectuals and political society, and constantly remind themselves that God was not dead in the eighteenth-century English Enlightenment. * Eighteenth-Century Studies * Walsh's outstanding tour of the creation of English civil religion, and a navigation of tradition and change, is recommended to anyone interested in the changes that confronted the Church of England in the eighteenth century. * Anglican and Episcopal History *

Author Information

ASHLEY WALSH is Lecturer in Early Modern History at Cardiff University.

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