This article analyses two dissenting periodicals, the Occasional Paper and the Old Whig. It argues that these periodicals provide an opportunity to reconsider the current priorities in the historiography of eighteenth-century political thought and religious history. Having considered the contexts from which the periodicals emerged and the importance of a perceived growth in catholic proselytizing in the 1730s, it analyses the importance of ‘popery’ in religious and political discourse. Taken together, popery and private judgement provided the parameters to descibe what was termed ‘consistent protestantism’ and this was used to defend a particular version of dissent. The protestant aspect to oppositional whiggery has been largely ignored, particularly by those keen to assert the centrality of ‘classical republicanism’ to opposition language in the early Hanoverian period. This article suggests an alternative account of the transmission of the commonwealth tradition and indicates further lines of inquiry into the evolution of whig ideas.