Much that we might want to know about religion in the eighteenth century is suggested by Johnson’s seven-word definition of Christian and the choice of his illustrative quotation from the late seventeenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury (the highest authority in the Anglican Church), John Tillotson. Before we look at eighteenth-century Anglicanism more closely, however, it may be helpful to envision a moment to come in the twenty-first century when Jews, Muslims, and Christians all decide they have had their fill of bloody efforts to overwhelm those who do not believe as they do and, laying down their arms, create a brave new world in which we can hold to our own faiths without wanting to punish those who think differently. Perhaps, since we are generating visions, we might even see a world in which religious differences are fully tolerated within every community. Some will mutter on the sidelines that such faith is nominal and lukewarm – some will even label it heretical. Since such mutterers want to lead us back to a renewal of warfare (we might today label this as terrorism and antiterrorism), they will have to be forcefully discouraged, and the power of all countries will have to be solidly engaged in disarming religious conviction (literally and figuratively), finally bringing to all religions the virtues of peace and goodwill. The paradox of our vision, the need to pacify people by brute power, does not escape us.

Religious centrism

Christianity is a religion built on mysteries and paradoxes, but the one that most concerned the eighteenth century has been fundamental to the faith since its Gospel beginnings: insisting on the Truth of God is in direct conflict with the message of peace professed by Jesus. Even without the New Testament injunction to spread the Word, the very nature of knowing the Truth seems to entail, as Jonathan Swift astutely argued in the most brilliant of all eighteenth-century satires, A Tale of a Tub (1704), the desire to impart it to others – in a friendly way if possible, forcibly if necessary.