This exhaustive yet pointed study examines what J. C. D. Clark has called “the most bitter domestic ideological conflict of the [eighteenth] century” (1) and what might be read as an Enlightenment anticipation of the North American “culture wars” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the internecine quarrels of world Anglicanism. The author, Andrew Starkie, is both a meticulous scholar and an engaged parish priest in the Church of England. His book began life as a Cambridge dissertation, supervised by Mark Goldie, and he has read and digested the hundreds of politically and theologically charged newspaper columns, pamphlets, books, and published sermons in which the controversy played itself out. Though Starkie does not make an explicit connection in his monograph, one can easily imagine the early eighteenth-century equivalent of the twenty-four-hour electronic news cycle, the blogosphere, and YouTube videos. Of course, the Bangorian controversy produced a more sustained (and more substantial) print media blitz in which all sorts and conditions weighed in: Whigs and Tories, partisans of both high and low church, Latitudinarians and the fiercely orthodox, Dissenters and Non-jurors and even Huguenots and a sometime French Catholic. Kudos to Starkie for delving into the morass, unraveling the various combatants in their respective contexts, and coming up with a complex and compelling analysis.

The spark for it all was a single sermon, preached by the theologically liberal, politically whiggish Benjamin Hoadly (1676–1761), the newly consecrated bishop of Bangor, who was also concurrently a London-area rector and chaplain to the king. Titled “The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ,” and based on the text “My kingdom is not of this world,” it was preached in March 1717 before George I and was published at his behest within two weeks. The message that the Church had no authority over the consciences of Christians fit well the political and ecclesiastical program of early Hanoverian rule and the Whig faction then in power. It did not sit well with powerful segments of the Church, however, and the first pamphlet in opposition was published in early May by Andrew Snape, master of Eton, a Tory, and a formidable controversialist. Within another week the Lower House of the Convocation—the Church's governing assembly—received a report that condemned Hoadly for “Several Dangerous Positions and Doctrines,” but before the complaints could be sent to the Upper House for action, the government prorogued the Convocation, which did not meet again for 130 years. However, the controversy continued unabated for another four, and we are in Starkie's debt for sorting it out.

After locating the debate in its various “intellectual, ecclesiastical, political, and cultural” contexts (15) in the first four chapters (chapter 4 is an especially masterful, densely packed “anatomy of the controversy”), Starkie proceeds with a close reading of three themes he sees as central to the wide-ranging debate. One is the rhetorical usage of “popery” and “Reformation” by both sides in the argument (chapter 5). A second (chapter 6) is “the hermeneutics of heresy,” which turns out to be Hoadly's hermeneutics, possessing in Starkie's view a “Machiavellian dimension” as well as a Lockean reliance on human understanding and a Deistic dependence on natural reason (see 130–135). The most interesting theme, that of his chapter 7, is “the politics of piety,” which helpfully complicates our views of arid rationalists (Hoadly and friends claimed a pious sincerity for their positions) and of aesthetic moralists worried about only the externals of religion on the high church side. Discussions of passions, affections, devotion, and the eighteenth-century “e word” (enthusiasm)—familiar to most students of Puritanism and Methodism—get rare treatment from an Anglican perspective, precisely because piety is key to the controversy.

The book features a complete bibliography and a most helpful set of appendices that chart the pace of the pamphlet war and map the debate (who was answering whom and for how long; the various intricate sub-issues raised and answered by both sides, and so on). The volume's one visual, a frontispiece engraving of a pleasant-faced bewigged Andrew Snape, reinforces Starkie's conservative revisionist approach to the controversy. Not everyone will agree with that view of the eighteenth-century Anglican Church, or its implications for the twenty-first-century Church. Nevertheless, Starkie's book is immensely important for our understanding of a key early modern intersection of intellectual, ecclesiastical, political, and cultural history.