“A Truly Christian Hero”: Religion, Effeminacy, and Nation in the Writings of the Societies for Reformation of Manners

In the critical discussion concerning manliness, effeminacy, and luxury, the concept of civic humanism or civic virtue has been prominent, if not hegemonic. In that discussion, John Barrell has succinctly remarked that "the discourse of civic humanism was the most authoritative fantasy of masculinity in early eighteenth-century Britain." ¹ This study aims to offer a cautionary note to such a judgment by reintroducing the importance of religious discourses in shaping English and, after 1707, British views of men. The Societies for Reformation of Manners--part of a pervasive culture of reform that encompassed the court, the government, legal institutions, and religious denominations both Anglican and dissenting from the 1690s to the 1730s ² --offer a view of early eighteenth-century manliness and nationalism that relied upon an older religious rhetoric. The Societies' interaction with issues of gender or nationhood, or with religion and civic virtue, has been perceived by a number of commentators; but they have not considered how the Societies uniquely mobilized a synthesis of religious and civic virtue to effect changes in manliness. ³

A more nuanced picture of early eighteenth-century manliness and nationalism appears if one analyzes the rhetoric of the Societies' writings to answer what kind of manliness they espoused. What kind of "England" or "Great Britain" did these writings construct? What were the relations between manliness and nationalism? Was this the last flowering of the image of a manly and godly nation in the eighteenth century? I argue that the links forged between effeminacy and other demons of manliness--such as luxury, sexuality, and irrationality--are not merely commonplaces of civic humanism, but are articulated via a religious rhetoric that looked back to the ideals of the English Reformation. ⁴ The key image that focused the Societies' synthesis of religious and civic rhetoric was the trope of the nation as a fortress-isle, hedged around by God's especial care but under threat of immoral invasion often figured in metaphors of plague. What makes the writings of the Societies virtually unique is the insistence with which these older biblically based tropes of the nation are conjoined with the concerns of effeminacy and manliness, but this conjoining has been insufficiently examined in both the critical work on early eighteenth-century manliness and the Societies for Reformation of Manners.

Civic Virtue

Samuel Johnson's definitions of "manhood" and "manliness" ⁵ would seem to validate John Tosh's statements that the eighteenth-century perception of manliness "embraced moral or cultural as well as physical facets of being a man," and that "reputation and honour may have been the measure of all things, but they did not rest on behaviour and appearance alone. They depended upon the solid inner qualities which were always implicit in 'manliness,' such as courage, resolution, and tenacity." ⁶ John Shower's sermon delivered before an audience of the Society for Reformation of Manners in 1697 gives us some idea of how these attributes of ideal manliness interact with conceptions of nationhood and manly virtue:

Great Numbers of Subjects, that in a time of War, might defend their Country, are effeminated, debauched, diseased, and made uncapable of bearing Arms.... By unrestrained, unpunished Vice and Wickedness, the very Genius of a Nation is changed, a generous and brave People dispirited: By Luxury and Debauchery they are softened and dissolved into Cowardize: They lose their Reputation abroad, and have no Strength at home; and are an easie Prey to Foreign Enemies. ⁷

Shower's sermon, delivered during the Nine-Years' War, clearly addresses anxieties concerning the unfitness of the nation's men for war. His sermon vitally depends upon a set of understood concepts surrounding manliness that Johnson shared--concepts, as Anthony Fletcher notes, that are "elaborated around the polarity of manhood and effeminacy." ⁸ Effeminacy was the definitional other to manliness, and...