The debate over the presence and nature of a single established church in England is perhaps the most important religious issue in the long eighteenth century. From the Elizabethan ‘Penal Laws’ designed to suppress Roman Catholicism to the ‘Clarendon Code’, intended to limit the civil participation of Protestant Nonconformists, the history of religious establishment in England reveals patterns of protectionism and exclusion necessary to maintain the privileged position of the Church ‘as by law established’. New ideas in the eighteenth century, such as toleration and deism, as well as the rise of Methodism, challenged but did not overcome this Anglican hegemony.

In Tom Jones Henry Fielding treats his readers to a debate between Parson Thwackum, representative of “narrow and rigid” Anglican orthodoxy, and the philosopher, Square, deist and defender of the “unalterable Rule of Right and the eternal Fitness of Things.” They are wrangling over the nature of honor, whether it may be said to exist independent of religious belief. “If by Honour you mean the true natural Beauty of Virtue,” argues Square, “I will maintain it may exist independent of any Religion whatever. Nay (added he) you yourself will allow it may exist independent of all but one; so will a Mahometan, a Jew, and all the Maintainers of all the different Sects in the World.” Thwackum, for whom honor is a “Mode of divine Grace,” accuses Square of “arguing with the usual Malice of all the Enemies of the true Church.” He doubts not but that “all the Infidels and Hereticks in the World would, if they could, confine Honour to their own absurd Errors, and damnable Deceptions.” For honor, according to Thwackum, “is not therefore manifold, because there are many absurd Opinions about it; nor is Religion manifold, because there are various Sects and Heresies in the World.”

Here Fielding provides an epitome of the struggle between Anglican orthodoxy and the heterodox promulgators of “new modish systems” in religion and government: a representative deist attacks the hegemony of the established church, implying that Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Judaism make equal (and equally dubious) claims to moral authority, while his Anglican counterpart responds with charges of heresy, infidelity, and malice aforethought.

As the first work of British philosophy to fully exploit the subversive potential of irony and ridicule, Hobbes's Leviathan was also the first to be reviled for a brilliance of style and subtlety of wit that made it seem virtually “unanswerable.” Deists and freethinkers were quick to find in Leviathan a rhetorical model for their own assaults on priestcraft and political tyranny, abandoning more conventional modes of argumentation for the strategic indirection of irony and wit. The adaptation of irony to the demands of religious and philosophical controversy inspired the systematic defense of ridicule as a test of truth given its most memorable form in Shaftesbury's Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor (1708) and Anthony Collins's Discourse of Irony and Wit in Writing (1729). The efflorescence of heterodox wit also elicited angry rejoinders from critics as various as Lord Clarendon, Richard Blackmore, and Mary Astell, all of whom recognized the power of wit to undermine orthodox assumptions.

Treatments of eighteenth-century wit have been limited almost exclusively to discussions of its aesthetic significance, but as we shall see, much of the critical and philosophical debate over the “decorum” of Augustan ridicule disguised a much more fundamental struggle over the very means by which power was to be defended or assailed. This chapter briefly traces the process by which wit first came to be associated with heterodox assaults on established institutions of religion and government, and recounts subsequent attempts to proscribe all forms of rhetorical indirection, including ridicule, innuendo, and wit, as essentially subversive modes of discourse.