Religion and Atheism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Priestman
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

The video focuses this large topic round a relatively few well-known literary writers. The established Church of England, central in Jane Austen’s novels, may not have been over-concerned about doctrine, but people who did included Calvinists both within and outside the established churches of England and Scotland. Dissenters outside the Church also included the Unitarians who influenced Coleridge for a period, and more fringe groups like the Swedenborgians who influenced Blake. The use of non-Christian mythologies to question Christianity is also considered, and Shelley’s outspoken atheism is related to the frequent imprisonments of the lower-class atheist publisher Richard Carlile.

Scotland

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Raffe
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
The Status ◽  
Steep Decline ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church ◽  
Episcopal Authority

This chapter examines the transformations in the status and character of Scottish Episcopalianism from 1662 to 1829. Despite being re-established in the Church of Scotland in 1661–2, episcopacy was abolished in 1689. Thereafter Episcopalians were a Nonconformist group, and only the minority of congregations whose clergy were loyal to Queen Anne and her Hanoverian successors enjoyed legal protection. But while the intermittent prosecution of the Jacobite clergy contributed to a steep decline in the number of Scottish Episcopalians, disestablishment allowed the clergy to reassess episcopal authority, and to experiment with liturgical reforms. After transferring their allegiance to the Hanoverians in 1788, the Episcopalians drew closer to the Church of England, formally adopting the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1804. By the end of the period, the Episcopalians saw themselves as an independent, non-established Church, one of the branches of international Anglicanism.

F. D. Maurice and the Contemporary Religious World

1966 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Torben Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Kingdom Of Christ ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

In 1838 Frederick Denison Maurice introduced himself to the English public through his great work, The Kingdom of Christ; or, Hints on the Principles, Ordinances, and Constitution of the Catholic Church. In this book he attempted to show that all men’s searchings, yearnings, and longings would be satisfied in the Church of England, by its ordinances, worship, and doctrinal standards. The Established Church represented the solution to all the enigmas of human existence.In many ways The Kingdom of Christ was a difficult book to master. To all appearances there was an indistinctness in the argument and an obscurity of language. But it had the touch of originality. Above all, whether Maurice could be clearly understood or not, it was evident that he spoke with passion and authority, as a man entrusted with a message from God to the contemporary world. He was convinced that he had been given the task to call back to the truth the religious world, which had not grasped it.

Parliament and Church Reform: Off and On the Agenda

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Innes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

This chapter examines the interactions between politics inside and outside of the British Parliament as well as the issue of Church reform. Attempts by Parliament to improve the Church of England's performance of its pastoral functions ceased following the Hanoverian accession, but resumed in the later eighteenth century. During the intervening period, Parliament passed increasing numbers of acts relating to individual parishes or churches along with various acts adjusting or revising rules relating to merely tolerated religious sects, but by contrast left the established church in charge of its own pastoral operations. In the opening years of the eighteenth century, Convocation provided a forum for clerics to promote their own ideas about how to improve pastoral efficacy. The chapter establishes the complex route by which challenges to and changes within the Church of England translated into a concern to act among parliamentary elites.

Marvell and the Church

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-143
Author(s):  
Philip Connell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Family Background ◽  
Central Component ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

Marvell’s hostility to the Church of England was a matter of faith for his clerical antagonists during his lifetime, and soon became a central component of his posthumous reputation. The present chapter re-examines this aspect of Marvell’s writings, which are contextualized with reference to the poet’s family background and the broader fortunes of the established Church in the early and mid-seventeenth century. Marvell’s complex and shifting political allegiances during the 1640s and 1650s had significant implications for his views on ecclesiastical settlement, but throughout the interregnal period he remained broadly in favour of a reformed national church establishment, in tacit opposition to the views of godly republicans such as John Milton and Henry Vane. This commitment survived, mutatis mutandis, into the Restoration period, and coloured Marvell’s support for a policy of ecclesiastical comprehension. Only with the king’s abandonment of that policy, and apparent surrender to the forces of intolerance, did Marvell come to identify the corruptions of the Church of England with the threat of arbitrary government on the part of the Stuart court.

scholarly journals The Historical Background to the Marriage (Wales) Act 2010

2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Intermediate Position ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Marriage Law ◽  
Marriage Laws ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

The Marriage (Wales) Act 2010 illustrates that a disestablished church will always occupy an intermediate position between an established church and one which has never been established: the Church in Wales needed an Act to reform its marriage law, whereas paradoxically the Church of England legislated for itself by Measure. The article outlines how the provisions on marriage evolved during the passage of the disestablishment legislation; accepts the validity of contemporaneous arguments based on inconsistency; and outlines previous occasions when the marriage laws of England and of Wales have fallen out of step. It concludes by accepting that the continued establishment of the marriage law in Wales is inconsistent, but that any change is likely to depend on a wholesale reform of marriage law.

From Ranters to Chapel Builders: Primitive Methodism in the South Lincolnshire Fenland c.1820–1875

1986 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 319-331
Author(s):  
R.W Ambler
Keyword(s):  
Great Proportion ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The South ◽  
Religious Instruction ◽  
The People ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

On 26 October 1832 Jonathan Gibbons of the parish of Lutton, some twelve miles east of Spalding, wrote to John Kaye, bishop of Lincoln, describing how ‘A great proportion of the lower orders are now supporting a sect called ranters and attending their meetings as the only resource for religious instruction.’ The reasons for this, he argued, lay with ‘lax government and want of proper attention to services and duties’ in the Church, but in addition to these problems the Church of England also had the difficult task of extending its ministrations into the scattered communities of the newly drained and cultivated south Lincolnshire fenland. In Lutton the people were left ‘open to all the evils attendant upon unrestrained ignorance’ and the voluntary religious bodies, including the Primitive Methodists or Ranters, were often quicker to respond to their needs than the Established Church.

‘A Just and Sufficient Maintenance’: Some Defences of the Clerical Establishment in the Eighteenth Century

1987 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 321-332
Author(s):  
Jeremy Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Black Book ◽  
Pastoral Leaders ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church ◽  
Church Historians

Arguments in justification of the Church’s wealth can be illuminating in any age. The wealth of the Church of England in the eighteenth century has had a particularly bad press. Nineteenth-century reformers portrayed the Established Church of the previous century as a money-grabbing institution; clergy being too concerned with lining their own pockets to be effective pastoral leaders. John Wade in his Extraordinary Black Book wanted to expose the rapaciousness of clergy who, ‘with the accents and exterior of angels … perpetuate the work of demons’. He concluded that true Christianity was ‘meek, charitable, unobtrusive and above all cheap’. Clergy were castigated for holding a materialistic outlook which seemed to hinder their religious role and which has been taken by both subsequent Church historians and historians of the left as a sign of the clergy’s involvement with secularizing trends in society. Even the work of Norman Sykes leaves the impression that the clergy’s defence of their wealth went no further than jobbery and place-seeking. Like Namier he played down the ideological nature of such arguments, relegating them to the realm of cant and hypocrisy.

Revival

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. McClymond
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Spiritual Experience ◽  
British Isles ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Conversion Narratives ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
Institutional Boundaries ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

Just as definitions of Dissent can be complicated, ‘revival’ was a multifaceted phenomenon in the eighteenth century. It crossed geographic and institutional boundaries and rounded histories of the phenomenon need to look at the connections between what was happening in Europe, the British Isles, and the American colonies, as well as considering groups both within and outside the Established Church. Some groups, notably Methodists, began within the Church of England, although many eventually left it. Others, like the Moravians, did not fit comfortably into the category of either Establishment or Dissent. Revivals and revivalism relied on shared and intensified spiritual experience but also networks of interconnection of people and ideas. Revivals frequently witnessed extensive outdoor preaching and leaders who were prepared to travel extensively to spread the Word. While there was some soteriological disagreement, many of the awakened sought to spread their experiences through personal interaction and conversion narratives.

scholarly journals The Church of England, Homosexual Law Reform, and the Shaping of the Permissive Society, 1957–1979

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Monica Ramsay
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Homosexual Behavior ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Sexual Offences ◽  
Moral Landscape ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church ◽  
Religious Decline

AbstractThis article re-examines existing narratives of British permissiveness and secularization through a discussion of the Church of England's role in shaping the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and ongoing debates on homosexuality in the 1970s. It suggests—contrary to existing narratives of religious decline and marginalization—that the views of church commentators, and the opinions of the Established Church more generally, remained of real cultural and political influence in the years leading up to the 1967 Act. Religious authorities were thus more responsible for the moral landscape of the permissive society than historians previously assumed. Nevertheless, British permissiveness was full of contradictions, not only in terms of the unexpected ways in which reform was shaped and brought about, but in terms of the constraints of the new moral settlement which decriminalized homosexual behavior within modest boundaries. Such contradictions were not confined to the opinions of religious commentators—they were the genuine essence of the position on which the moral consensus in favor of homosexual law reform was based. Through a consideration of the final collapse of this moral consensus in the years after 1970, this article reassesses questions of the nature and timing of British secularization. It considers how the Church of England, although anticipating and shaping earlier developments in approaches toward sexual morality, unintentionally left itself out in the cold in the years after 1970, as progressive opinion began to move away from the consensus on which the 1967 Act had been based.

Anglo-Catholicism in the Church of England, 1895–1913: Abbot Aelred Carlyle and the Monks of Caldey Island

1983 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-224
Author(s):  
Rene M. Kollar
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
South Wales ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
Seal Of Approval ◽  
Established Church

From 1906–13, Abbot Aelred Carlyle (1874–1955) enjoyed immense popularity as an Anglo-Catholic, and, according to some, could have easily become the spokesman for this section of the Anglican Church. Through perseverance and diplomacy, he singlehandedly founded the first Benedictine monastery in the Church of England since the Reformation. Unlike others who sought and failed to bring Roman Catholic practices into the Established Church, Abbot Carlyle enjoyed the explicit ecclesiastical sanction of an Archbishop of Canterbury for his work, and with this seal of approval he could dismiss critics and disbelievers. By 1910, Abbot Carlyle and his community on Caldey Island, South Wales, had become a paradise for High Churchmen. The Abbot's charismatic and hypnotic personality attracted many who nostalgically longed for the glories of a medieval and united Christendom. Armed with a High Church theory of Benedictinism, Caldey became an enclave of ritualism, the “naughty underworld” of the Edwardian Anglican Church. Caldey was, at its peak, an exemplar of pre-Reformation Roman Catholic monasticism. In 1913, the experiment was in ruins. Carlyle refused to yield to the reforming zeal of the Bishop of Oxford and his attempts to force Caldey to conform to the comprehension of the Anglican Church. The result was sensational: a group of monks renounced the church of their baptism and sought admission to the Church of Rome.

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