Goldsmith was a prominent member of the Irish diaspora in London. This chapter details recent research on the London’s Irish population in the eighteenth century and offers a picture of his many connections and friendships within this community, with particular reference to compatriots in his social and professional milieux. The chapter demonstrates how London saw a level of social intermingling and professional collaboration between Irish of different denominational origins which was hardly achievable in Ireland.

This chapter argues that for Oliver Goldsmith religious belief was thoroughly embedded in the world. It was not defined by theological niceties or intellectual conviction but by the rhythms of Anglican ritual and everyday acts of reverence, piety, and benevolence. Culture and politics were, therefore, inseparable from religion. With this in mind, the religion/secular divide that permeates much of our contemporary thinking must be abandoned when we approach Goldsmith’s work. His engagement with religion should be assessed not according to the doctrines he explicitly espoused (or failed to espouse) but according to religion’s practical function within his oeuvre.

When we think about faith as a relationship with god, rather than a set of propositional beliefs, this changes the way we think about ethics. We think about ethics more as a set of practices and orientations than as rules. The chapter considers this claim through examining the way evangelical Christians come to understand their relationship with Jesus, and more briefly through Catholics who seek to understand what it is to be a modern Mexican, through Amazonian shamans who want to know their spirits, and modern magicians. When we focus on religion as something people do, rather than just what they believe, we must approach ethics as a series of incremental interpretations of how people make sense of who they have become in the world, rather than a carefully considered set of logical arguments.

As the century progressed, there was an increasing emphasis on more moderate forms of discourse and behaviour that rejected the divisive social and religious attitudes of the previous century. Supporters of the primacy of the Established Church now needed other weapons, beyond legal recourse and vituperative argument, to challenge the position of Dissent. As all parties tried to work out their shifting roles in the wake of legislative change, religious prejudice began to find its expression in new forms. Chapter 3 argues that politeness, in particular, became a mode of behaviour through which tacit religious exclusion could be reframed in new, more socially acceptable, ways. Focusing particularly on how the idea of politeness interacted with the accusation of Dissenting hypocrisy, it highlights how this discourse did not wholeheartedly reject the religious divisions of the previous century, but rather re-configured them for a new era of supposed moderation.

The third chapter illustrates the nature of the second through fifth chapters. Each seeks to explore Calvin’s engagement with and use of tradition in different contexts. The third chapter takes up Calvin’s polemics with other thinkers and confessions. Through an odd quirk in the historiography surrounding Calvin, this chapter aligns most with the mainstream of Calvin interpretation. Almost every Calvin scholar or early modern analyst will admit that Calvin and other Reformers used tradition in their polemics – but it frequently is stated either as the exception that proves the rule that Calvin depended only upon scripture, or that it is a case where he and other Reforming writers had to adopt the methods of their foes. But the analysis of the material demonstrates that Calvin turned to tradition whether his foes were orthodox or heretical, Protestant, Radical, or Catholic. Calvin’s dependence on tradition and traditional sources undercuts the customary consideration of this area of his activity.

This chapter identifies the emergence of an Enlightenment critique of empire in Ireland. This laid the intellectual foundations for the Union of 1801 by connecting the exclusion of the Irish Kingdom from free participation in imperial and European trade with the exclusion of its Catholic subjects, under the terms of the ‘Penal Laws’, from the benefits of property and political representation. For thinkers such as Josiah Tucker and David Hume, the suppression of Irish commerce was striking evidence of how British policy carried ‘jealousy of trade’ to extremes that jeopardised the security of the empire. For Charles O’Connor, Edmund Burke, Arthur Young, and Adam Smith, meanwhile, the Penal Laws had ruined Ireland’s prospects for ‘improvement’ by alienating the Irish majority from property and the state. It was Smith who linked these two problematics together, creating a new kind of argument for a parliamentary union between Britain and Ireland.

Arguments for the 1801 Union of the British and Irish parliaments drew on the intellectual resources of the later British Enlightenment to implement a new system of economic and political regulation of Irish society. Proponents of Union articulated a renewed belief in the ability of commercial integration with Britain to act as a solvent to the confessional and ethnic tensions laid bare by the United Irish rising and attempted French invasions of 1796-8. The 'diffusion' of British capital to Ireland would give Ireland’s shattered Anglican aristocracy the opportunity to re-establish its political legitimacy, while forcing them to share power with a rising Catholic mercantile and professional class. The case for Union was interpreted in a broad European context of state competition and reform. The leading continental defender of British policy, the Prussian diplomat and publicist Friedrich von Gentz, hailed the legislative unification of the British Empire as a model for a necessary consolidation of the European states-system in the wake of French revolutionary violence.

Not simply the persistence of Greek and Roman comedy and tragedy, drama of the modern era had its rebirth in the liturgical performances within the church. Once the miracle and morality plays were moved out of the church, literally pro-fane, their secularized forms were soon suspected of degeneration, and the antitheatrical prejudice was promulgated. To control the possibly disruptive effects of the drama, censorship was introduced to spare leaders of Church or state from being maligned on stage. The Church of England may have been protected but Gothic melodrama found its villains and victims among the monks and nuns. Methodists, Quakers, Jews, dissenters, and nonconformists were targets for theatrical ridicule or abuse. Circumventing the proscriptions of the Licensing Act (1737), Shakespeare’s history plays provided a model for representing religious conflict on stage.

The debate over the presence and nature of a single established church in England is perhaps the most important religious issue in the long eighteenth century. From the Elizabethan ‘Penal Laws’ designed to suppress Roman Catholicism to the ‘Clarendon Code’, intended to limit the civil participation of Protestant Nonconformists, the history of religious establishment in England reveals patterns of protectionism and exclusion necessary to maintain the privileged position of the Church ‘as by law established’. New ideas in the eighteenth century, such as toleration and deism, as well as the rise of Methodism, challenged but did not overcome this Anglican hegemony.

The First Amendment’s religious clauses-“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof”-were adopted, somewhat begrudgingly, as an accommodation to the concerns of vocal religious minorities. Yet they also embodied a set of shared principles about church, state, and rights of conscience that had taken firm root in revolutionary America. Whereas “free exercise” had connoted limited grants to specific groups in particular areas, the term now referred to a broad freedom to assemble and preach. There was less consensus about what an establishment of religion entailed. However, the tide had clearly turned against exclusionary privileges. If the resulting constitutional language seemed somewhat ambiguous, it nonetheless clearly encompassed both an enlarged conception of religion and an unequivocal endorsement of liberty.

This chapter investigates the two non-establishment clauses in the U.S. Constitution: the no-religious-test clause in Article VI, and the no-establishment-of-religion clause in the First Amendment. Since religious tests were the clearest manifestation of state sovereignty over religion, their prohibition in Article VI elided any notion of a “Church of the United States” even before the First Amendment. The federal oath-Congress’s first act-no longer required a denial of Catholic beliefs as previous oaths had, yet loyalty remained a prerequisite to securing religious liberty. The chapter then contends that the First Amendment establishment clause was based on what Congress had stated in 1783: that powers in “purely spiritual” matters were “reserved to the several States, individually.” Congress had declared this principle in response to the Holy See’s request for it to approve a Catholic bishop, and had thus renounced one of the rights of patronage that governments traditionally held over ecclesiastical affairs. This context adds to the original meaning of the establishment clause, for simply prohibiting a national church did not necessarily forbid this right of patronage.

Founders of the earliest American colonies considered religious piety an essential civic virtue and therefore continued the tradition of religious establishment found in Britain and other Protestant countries. New sects and denominations (especially Quakers and Baptists) contended against Congregationalist and Anglican establishments throughout the colonies. Though prominent dissenters Roger Williams and William Penn founded colonies respecting religious liberty, the decline of religious establishment elsewhere was owed primarily to changes in British law, commercial and political expediencies necessary for increasingly diverse immigrant populations, and, in the case of Anglican establishments, the difficulty of securing ordination and a self-sustaining parish. Though Roman Catholics enjoyed some degree of toleration, enthusiastic Protestant identity on both sides of the Atlantic further reduced Catholic rights and liberties. Jews enjoyed some limited degree of toleration, but only in a handful of colonies.