Pulpit Politics

Stuart Andrews, Unitarian Radicalism: Political Rhetoric, 1770-1814, Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York, 2003; xii + 232 pages, £47.50. ISBN 0-333-96925-1.

Religious toleration was a central value of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Religious toleration in England, though praised by Voltaire, was a restricted toleration combined with discrimination. Toleration was confined to orthodox protestant dissent and failure to conform to the Church of England carried with it a range of civil disabilities. Unitarians, those who rejected the orthodox doctrine of the holy trinity, technically stood outside the bounds of toleration. Thus, early in the century both John Locke and Isaac Newton were careful to keep their doubts about the trinity to themselves. When Theophilus Lindsey resigned from the Church of England and opened the first Unitarian chapel in 1774 he feared but was spared prosecution. While toleration proved broader in practice than on paper, Unitarians were vulnerable and stigmatized. Nevertheless, in the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment climate, this theological stance spread among Dissenters and some liberal Anglicans who threw themselves into various campaigns to undermine the hegemonic status of orthodox theology.

Drawing on the traditions of Protestant dissent and embracing the universalist principles of the Enlightenment, Unitarians (or 'Rational Dissenters') constituted a well-connected and vocal minority. Their concerns ranged beyond religious issues, and they were to be found in the front ranks of agitation for reform of politics, education, medicine, and the law, forming the backbone of extra-parliamentary criticism of George III's governments during the American and French revolutions.

The Unitarians have suffered their share of condescension from posterity. Modern left-liberals are often dismissed as a 'chattering class', and the Unitarians have been treated in a similar manner by historians of both high politics and popular culture. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Edmund Burke scorned the leading Rational Dissenters as noisy 'grasshoppers' who needed to be exposed and ridiculed for stirring up sedition—they were impractical 'speculative' men, 'political theologians and theological politicians', whose irresponsible calls for reform might stir up the 'swinish multitude'.¹ In the twentieth century, while the Unitarians received some attention from those interested in religion or 'the rise of liberalism', among those who dominated study of the eighteenth century it was not just Namierite students of high politics who shared Burke's dismissive view. For John Plumb and his followers, the big story of the eighteenth century was the commercialization of culture. For E. P. Thompson and the 'crime wave' historians, the focus should be on the daily struggle between coercive patricians and resistant plebs.

Since the 1980s, however, the role of Unitarianism in political and cultural debate has attracted attention owing to a number of developments in scholarship on Hanoverian Britain. Research into electioneering and extra-parliamentary agitation has made great strides and has resulted in a growing interest in the cultural values and practices of a broadly defined political nation. While the prominent role of Unitarians in political debate and reformist agitation is generally recognized, there has been much debate about their social and political significance. In his stimulating and controversial English Society 1688-1832 (1985) Jonathan Clark argued that political opinions were in essence determined by theological views. While this recognition led him to highlight the role of Unitarians in political agitation, it came as part of an overall view of eighteenth-century society as broadly consensual, in which calls for reform of a state and society dominated by Anglicanism and aristocracy stemmed from a small and largely ineffectual minority who were primarily concerned with promoting their heterodox theologies. Clark's conservative reading of the eighteenth century has stimulated vigorous debate and ensured that religion has attracted the attention of researchers.

Unitarian Radicalism is a contribution to the growing literature on the links between religion and politics. Stuart Andrews openly acknowledges his debt to other historians, and in particular to Jonathan Clark's 'groundbreaking work in desecularizing the so-called Age of Reason' (p. x). He seeks to stress that the [End Page 317...