2 - Contemporary Perceptions and Identity

Summary

Powerful responses to Rational Dissenting beliefs from ministers and laity within the Church of England and from Orthodox Dissenters demonstrate the strength of feeling and the fears that those beliefs aroused in England during the last thirty years of the eighteenth century. Analysis of the arguments of those who rejected and felt threatened by Rational Dissent illuminates the complex and to date little-explored range of contemporary perceptions of its nature and composition. The adherents of any system of beliefs under attack find it damaging to allow allegations against them to go unanswered, and their answers help to define, redefine, and refine those beliefs themselves. Accordingly this chapter examines the impact of external perceptions upon Rational Dissenters themselves through their written responses to attack, and in so doing explores ways in which its identity was in part moulded by the hostile responses directed against it.

For most religious thinkers in the late eighteenth century the key issue was the relationship between reason and revelation, which they saw as mutually reinforcing. The term ‘rational’ could be used positively by those who were not themselves Rational Dissenters. Most members of the Established Church did not see themselves as ‘non-rational’. John Wesley, though far from divorcing faith from reason, nevertheless held that reason must always be subject to scriptural authority. Orthodox Dissenters, such as the Particular Baptist John Macgowan in his Familiar Epistles of 1771, likewise took exception to the suggestion that those who adopted a Rational Dissenting approach were more rational than those who did not: ‘I would know from whom [the name Rational Dissenter] can distinguish you, except from such as are deemed irrational among the Dissenters.’

High Churchmen, Methodists, and Evangelical Calvinists within the Church of England, together with Orthodox Dissenters, reacted strongly against key Rational Dissenting beliefs. These beliefs included rejection of doctrines of the Trinity, of predestination, of original sin and atonement; doubts about eternal punishment; and, in the case of Unitarians, an assertion of the total humanity of Christ. Many Latitudinarians reacted in a similarly hostile way, although some took less orthodox positions on the Trinity and the person of Christ than others in the Established Church. By virtue of their profession clergymen debated and explored doctrine more extensively than did laypeople.