Many contemporary critics held Rational Dissenters, and especially Socinians, to be guilty of doctrinal opinions that led towards republicanism. Just as they were more extreme in their theology than Orthodox Dissenters, it was believed that they were also more extreme in their view of the constitution. Republicanism in the eighteenth century had several connotations, one of which involved the existence and acceptance of republican values of citizenship, public service, and libertarianism within a monarchical state. However, most definitions of republicanism in eighteenth-century England focused in a hostile manner upon its anti-monarchical trends. As an ideal, republicanism had been discredited by the regicide of 1649, of which denunciations were regularly preached by Church of England clergymen in their January 30th sermons, and many of these sermons took on a shriller anti-republican tone during the War of American Independence. During the 1790s republicanism was increasingly associated with revolutionary France, especially after the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793. Linda Colley, with many others, argues convincingly for a royalist resurgence in Britain after 1780, ‘part of the conservative reaction to the American, and still more the French Revolution’. Tellingly, one of the most prominent of the royalist, or loyalist societies, founded in 1792, was named the ‘Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers’.

Rational Dissenters uniformly protested their loyalty to the king and Parliament, and, stung by the accusation of sympathy for revolutionary causes in America and France, insisted that their methods of seeking religious and other reforms were strictly constitutional. Joseph Fownes in 1772 defined the legal respectability of their efforts; they would appeal to ‘the judgement of the legislature, to which their petition is again submitted’. They were keen to establish their patriotism more fully than ever before. The accusation of admiration for revolutionary causes, while directed against Dissenters as a whole, was particularly damaging for Rational Dissent. Its adherents were singled out, even by Orthodox Dissenters, as well as by senior churchmen such as George Pretyman, bishop of Lincoln and William Pitt the Younger's ecclesiastical adviser, and by various newspaper correspondents.