In the thirty or so years after 1800, the term ‘atheism debate’ is less appropriate than for those before it. This is chiefly thanks to the disappearance of a shared middle ground which accompanied the legal clampdown on subversive views in the mid 1790s: now, the main tools used to overcome infidelity are the courts and prisons, or the confident tones of orthodox apologists for whom their opponents are not, as it were, in the same room. On the other side, the infidels are now those who have firmly made up their own minds, but are confronted with a limited range of strategies for communicating their views, in the light of the ever-present possibility of prosecution. The four possible strategies were: to publish and be damned; to write but not to publish; to publish under a pseudonym; and to write with enough of an air of disinterested scholarship to avoid prosecution.

While the last three of these were chiefly adopted by respectable middle-class writers with reputations to preserve, the first was carried to new heights of deliberate confrontation by radicals with less to lose: a few upper-class Bohemians like Percy Shelley, but more often artisan-class agitators consciously using the battle-cry of a free press to mobilize anti-government resistance across a range of issues. Within this diverse range of strategies, however, three main reasons for rejecting orthodox religion are particularly focussed on by infidel writers of all classes: science, comparative mythology, and political utility.