The varieties of Hanoverian civil religion

Throughout the eighteenth century, English intellectuals sought to solve the problem of the status and public role of the Church of England by transforming it into a civil religion. By its claim to catholic apostolicity, the Church of England held authority over the interpretation of the revealed truth while recognising the fallibility of its articles of faith as a jure humano institution. The ministers of the national religion were to preach a civil confession of faith using only the gospel message of Jesus Christ. The civil sovereign secured its ascendancy over the ministers of the gospel, avoiding the problem of superstitious priestly orders destabilising the state, and provided a public option of worship to reduce the threat of enthusiasm. Irrespective of the veracity of the articles of faith of the Church of England, its status as a civil religion meant that all English people should observe its externals. In so doing, the English were to live civilly and piously in this world in anticipation of the next one. The civil religion was one of shared rituals of public worship through which English people expressed their belonging within the Christian commonwealth. Hanoverian intellectuals took seventeenth-century arguments for civil religion and transformed them for the temper of the Enlightenment in England.

There were several varieties of Hanoverian civil religion. Each civil religionist claimed to synthesise civility with piety to construct a church whose structures and beliefs were in accord with the interests of the civil state and the welfare of society. Each sought to harness the ecclesiology of the Reformation with the pastoral and learned ideals of Protestant ministry in constructing a national church whose clergymen preached the precepts of the gospel in a worldly religion of sociability, politeness, and virtue. By the promise of primitive Christianity, ministers would guide the priesthood of all believers in purging civil society of superstition and enthusiasm.