3 - Travellers, converts, and demagogues

Summary

“So, you say Theodore is willing to become a Protestant to marry you, Fanny; but have you, my dear, considered of it well?” “I have indeed, mother,” answered Fanny. “And will you consent to marry a man that will change his religion for a mistress? If he does change, think how little devotion he can have at bottom; and where there is no religion, there is seldom virtue, and consequently no happiness.”

Regina Maria Roche, “Hold your Religion Sacred” in London Tales

In the nineteenth century, the British Empire relied extensively on religion as a disciplinary mechanism in both the literal and the Foucauldian senses. In the literal sense of discipline, religious groups outside the Anglican or Christian fold were penalized in material terms, through incarceration and fines as well as a range of other punitive measures. In Ireland before 1829, for instance, Catholics could not hold political office or become lawyers, and various laws conspired to undermine their landholdings. In the Foucauldian sense of the term, those who were within the dominant religious fold were largely assumed to have internalized, along with their faith, a range of secular beliefs, including political values consistent with British hegemony. As R. Gregory Van Dussen notes of proselytization efforts in Ireland at this time, “Religious conversion, in other words, could be expected to produce political loyalty to the colonial regime. One is implied by the other, not through any theological necessity, but through the inner logic of imperial Protestantism.”