-
"That Grand Primeval and Fundamental Religion": The Transformation of Freemasonry into a British Imperial Cult
- Journal of World History
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 22, Number 3, September 2011
- pp. 493-525
- 10.1353/jwh.2011.0080
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
In light of recent research on the role of Protestant Christianity in the British Empire, this article explores the possibility that the British actually carried to India a "religion" besides Protestantism, something that mimicked a religion so closely that it could virtually serve as an alternative to Christianity for purposes of imperial consolidation—namely, Freemasonry. The article posits that British Freemasonry, although it emerged from a Christian environment, progressively de-Christianized itself in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and increasingly espoused a religious universalism, which in turn allowed it to serve as an institutionalized, quasi-official, and de facto "civil religion" for the British Empire in India.