1. 5HUM0271: Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Lecture 9: Religion in an Age of Dissent

2. Structure of the lecture
Church-state relationship
Key crises
Anti-Catholicism
J.C.D. Clark, English Society,
Persistence of millenarianism
Religion as cultural piety rather than theological practice
Evangelicalism

3. William III: Protestant conqueror?

4. Structure of the churches in Britain and their relationship to the state:
England: 1688; 1701 Act of Settlement; 1689 Toleration Act; 1828 repeal of Test and Corporation acts; 1829 Catholic emancipation Scotland: 1690 Presbyterian settlement Ireland: early 18thC penal laws; 1801 union but not emancipation

5. Dr Henry Sacheverell (1674-1724)

6. 18thC religion not entirely ‘rational’ or benign – legacies of the upheavals of the 17thC :
Demonstrations of anti-Catholicism:
Gordon Riots in London, June 1780

7. persistence of a millenarian religious fervour
18thC religion not entirely ‘rational’ or benign – legacies of the upheavals of the 17thC :
persistence of a millenarian religious fervour
Joanna Southcott
( )

8. Key theme
‘Popular Anglicanism was not primarily theological…it is more helpful to define religion culturally, as a form of identity linking rich and poor in a common world-view.’
Walsh, Haydon and Taylor, The Church of England, p. 27.

9. 3. Alternative ways of practising and organising religion: John Wesley (1703-1791)

10. Evangelicalism against the slave trade: ‘The Sorrows of Yamba’, c

11. Evangelicalism: Hannah More (1745-1833) and a Cheap Repository Tract

12. Unitarianism and ‘Rational Dissent’: Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) and Richard Price (1723-1791)