Chapter 2 - Public Religion

Summary

While the Toleration Act provided significant legal protection that made the lives of Dissenters much easier, it also sparked a new and difficult process whereby differing parties jostled to secure their place in public religious life. The greater confidence of Dissenters in expressing their religion publicly, combined with the desire of Church interests to limit Dissenting influence, served to stimulate contests over religion on a local level. Chapter 2 explores the key effects of this on print, parish politics, attitudes to the physical presence of meeting houses, and inter-denominational relations at funerals and burials. Ultimately, disputes over the place of Dissent within the public religious landscape resulting from the settlement of 1689 acted to keep issues of religious difference alive in new ways, even as the embers of Restoration persecution burned out. As the concluding section of this chapter emphasises, considering the prominence of such disputes may help us to reconsider the place of the first half of the eighteenth century within longer narratives of the privatisation of belief.