With Civil Religion and the Enlightenment in England 1707–1800, Ashley Walsh has written a thorough intellectual history of how prominent eighteenth-century English thinkers sought to develop a coherent, persuasive theory of civil religion that promised peace and worldly prosperity. Walsh uses a series of close textual readings examining the theories of a familiar group of thinkers—the Earl of Shaftesbury, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon, Lord Bolingbroke, David Hume, and Edward Gibbon—as well as shorter discussions of Anglican clergymen—Edmund Law, William Warburton, Conyers Middleton—and leading Protestant dissenters—Richard Price, Joseph Priestley. While Walsh's useful introductory survey sets up the wider ecclesiastical and political context, Civil Religion and the Enlightenment in England is primarily a work of narrow intellectual history. Walsh's case studies demonstrate the common aims of enlightened civil religion theorists in justifying the ascendancy of state over church and positioning the institutional role of the Church of England, manned by a “learned and pastoral ministry” (26), as promoting “virtue, sociability, and happiness” (4). Walsh stresses the continuity of these arguments with previous Protestant thought.

England's enlightened civil religion theorists maintained that modern Christianity could be rendered into a worldly, modern civil religion by continued reformation. We expect to find Trenchard and Gordon averring that Christianity could be “rendered a civil religion by equating gospel primitivism with natural religion” based on the “outward exercise of the golden rule” and the “personal characteristic of sincerity”; moreover, they proposed transforming the Anglican clergy into patriots serving the ends of “virtuous, prosperous, and civilized living” (78–79). But perhaps unexpectedly, and fascinatingly, Shaftesbury, Hume, Bolingbroke, and Gibbon are also demonstrated to be working firmly within the Protestant tradition. Shaftesbury is shown not to have been “criticizing Christianity tout court” but fusing a modern civil religion out of the wisdom of ancient pagan philosophy and the truths of primitive Christianity (58). Bolingbroke's deistic elements served to strengthen and not overturn Christianity. The truths of religion were attainable through the exercise of reason. Helpfully enough, they were “replicated by primitive Christianity expressed in the gospel” (101). Walsh reads Bolingbroke's thought as “infused” with ideas from the Reform tradition (107). Gibbon's idealized Church, its tenets taken from primitive Christianity, would have an educated, benign, and pastoral public religion committed to toleration and warding off superstition and enthusiasm. The laity, of whatever hue, would “smile and condescend to the national faith” (165), aware of the dangers to civilization posed by sectarianism.

These are thoughtful and well-argued chapters. It is great to see Bolingbroke's religious writings get some much-needed attention, though I think Walsh has understated the challenge to orthodoxy posed by Bolingbroke's Philosophical Works (1754). The chapter on Hume, by contrast, is slightly less assured, especially on the account of the passions underpinning Hume's religious writings. Hume was “clearly committed to the church-state relationship bequeathed by the Protestant Reformation” (121), and was trying to improve this relationship in generating a “social religion of virtue, civility and politeness” (127) fronted by a learned, pastoral, and pedagogically minded clergy. Arguably, Walsh has straightjacketed Hume into his's overarching arguments and has downplayed the critical and innovative elements of Hume's religious writings. The relevance of Hume's pessimism in Natural History of Religion—as key for understanding Hume on religion's political role as the History of England—to the indestructible quality of popular superstition and the worldly superiority of polytheism over monotheism is summarily dismissed. To be flippant for a second, it would be nice if English Enlightenment studies could stop pinching Scots for its own purposes.

Civil Religion and the Enlightenment is the best book on the subject and should be of interest to historians of political thought, religious history, and intellectual history. Reflecting its precision and comprehensiveness, the prose is quite dense. Readers not familiar with the topic will find the need to come up for air now and then. A question mark remains over Civil Religion and the Enlightenment's proposed contribution to the larger historiography about the Hanoverian Church. We do not learn much about whether anyone was paying attention to Shaftesbury's, Bolingbroke's, or Hume's accounts of civil religion, or was paying attention in the ways intended. Without incorporating publishing and reception elements, even just as found among leading thinkers, we cannot say much about what Walsh's civil religion theorists tell us about eighteenth-century Anglicanism. This is the standard criticism of author-focused intellectual history, but Walsh's Introduction encourages the reader to think in terms of Hanoverian religious culture more broadly. He discusses the leading innovative, heterodox, or irreligious thinkers of the age. It might be assumed that their views went against the grain rather than representing prominent patterns of thought, but without discussion of dissemination, response, and utilization, this remains an open question. Conversely, the learned parsons of England's Christian Enlightenment receive only cursory attention in comparison to the heterodox. Discussion of Middleton and Warburton serve primarily to contextualize Gibbon and Hume, while latitudinarians and dissenters receive summary attention in the final chapter.

Walsh repeatedly stresses the methodological dictum that scholarship misconstrues his authors’ arguments when too much attention is directed toward attempted recovery of their inner beliefs. Was Shaftesbury a deist? Hume an atheist? Gibbon a pagan? Setting aside these questions as distractions, Walsh adopts a position of learned credulity, taking his authors at their word. The fruits of this approach are in evidence throughout, but arguably it has its problems. An author's historical relevance is intimately bound up with what their readers believe their inner beliefs and motivations were. If we are cautious, reader reception can alert us to aspects of authorial intention and argument we may otherwise miss. Contemporaries read Hume's Natural History of Religion as a sustained ironical attack on Christianity, conducted through insinuation not clear argument. Hume's subterfuge matters, as does Gibbon's “sneering.” Walsh may very well respond, quite rightly, that pushed too far the concern with an author's real motivations when writing in censorious societies takes us away from the evidence we do have and into the realm of guesswork (or letting someone's critics tell us how to read them). But something is lost in our contextualized readings if we adopt scholarly naiveté: many of Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Hume, and Gibbon's contemporaries would have disbelieved entirely the idea they were authors working within the Protestant tradition, with the aim of improving Christianity. But, to repeat, this is an impressively researched and argued first book.