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‘Britishers and Protestants’: Protestantism and Imperial British Identities in Britain, Canada and Australia from the 1880s to the 1920s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2018

Géraldine Vaughan
Géraldine Vaughan*
Affiliation:
Université de Rouen / Institut Universitaire de France
*
*34 rue du Fardeau, 76000 Rouen, France. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

This article explores the links between the assertion of British imperial identities and the anti-Catholic discourse and practices of a network of evangelical societies which existed and flourished in Britain and in the dominions from the halcyon days of the empire to the late 1920s. These bodies shared a broad evangelical definition of Protestantism and defended the notion that religious beliefs and their political implications formed the basis of a common British heritage and identity. Those who identified themselves as Britons in Britain and in the dominions brought forward arguments combining a mixture of pessimistic interpretations of British history since the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act with anxieties about ongoing Irish Catholic immigration and an alleged global papist plot. They were convinced that Protestantism was key to all civil liberties enjoyed by Britons. Inspired by John Wolffe's pioneering work, the article examines constitutional, theologico-political and socio-national anti-Catholicism across Britain and its dominions.

Keywords

Anti-CatholicismBritish imperial identitiesDominions
Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 54: THE CHURCH AND EMPIRE , June 2018 , pp. 359 - 373
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2018 

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Footnotes

This article was written during a period as a visiting fellow at the School of Divinity, Edinburgh University, which was generously funded by a Royal Society of Edinburgh / Caledonian Research Fund European Visiting Research Fellowship. I would like to thank Sir Tom Devine for his remarks on an earlier version of this article and also Patrick Vaughan for his comments.

References

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