In The social contract (1762), Rousseau argued that Christianity could never form the basis for a civil religion. But, as Ashley Walsh notes in this impressive new book, few writers in Hanoverian England agreed. Political theorists have tended to treat Rousseau's non-Christian definition of civil religion as definitive, rather than one amongst many competing iterations. However, as Walsh sets out to demonstrate, this neglects the manifold strains of civil religion which were available within a Christian framework.

While historians of the Enlightenment have often been drawn to private heterodoxy, Walsh makes a compelling case for focusing on thinkers’ public ecclesiology rather than their personal religious views. ‘Historians might be attracted by the idea of smug unbelievers sniggering from within the comfort of the cabinet and the secrecy of the lodge’, he warns. ‘But Enlightened thinkers in England overwhelmingly believed that public religion was a feature of civilised society.’ Emphasising an ecclesiological perspective has become increasingly popular in recent years, particularly in studies of the seventeenth century (Jacqueline Rose's work on the royal supremacy, for example). However, this is the first study to systematically apply this lens to eighteenth-century English political thought. Walsh combines analysis of figures from the canon of Enlightenment political thought (Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Hume, Gibbon) with discussion of Anglican clergymen better known to church historians (Gibson, Warburton and Law). This combination of thinkers reflects Walsh's broader historiographical achievement, combining the insights of ecclesiastical history and the history of political thought.

Walsh identifies four ‘varieties’ of civil religion, an echo of J. G. A. Pocock's famous essay on the ‘varieties of Whiggism’. The first placed the clergy under the jurisdiction of a godly prince; the second advocated civil religion as a means of defending elite philosophical enquiry; the third hoped to see the Church of England abandon the Thirty-Nine Articles and adopt a more comprehensive definition of orthodoxy; finally, there were those who looked forward to a dissenting form of civil religion which would not require an established Church to sustain it. This is a useful taxonomy, which will make it harder for one interpretation of civil religion (Rousseau's) to obscure others. Walsh's varieties offer a roadmap for further research, of interest to both historians and political theorists.

One theme that emerges is the limitations of the term ‘deist’, which marks as heterodox many who were in fact strong supporters of orthodoxy, at least in the context of public religion. Recognising that deism was no barrier to support for Anglican civil religion leaves Bolingbroke's High Church Toryism looking less surprising than it might otherwise. Another recurring motif is nuanced thinking about the role of the clergy, even amongst thinkers known for their anticlericalism. While Trenchard and Gordon were certainly anticlerical, they also believed that the clergy could play a positive role, inculcating patriotic values. Hume, though famed for his scepticism, argued that there was a need for a class of clergymen embedded in the civil state. If the clergy were left to fend for themselves, they would have to excite their listeners enough to provide for them financially (one thinks of the modern phenomenon of televangelism). Instead, Hume advocated a form of civil religion modelled along Presbyterian lines, in which the clergy would be provided for by the civil authorities. A salary from the public purse would ‘bribe their indolence’ and protect society from the dangerous excesses of religious enthusiasm. In Hume's eyes, a sleeping congregation was more likely to be a civil one.

Walsh places his work in the context of the ‘post-secular turn’, which has seen historians reject simplistic secularisation narratives. His book adds to a growing body of literature emphasising the continued significance of religion for eighteenth-century political thought, but also offers more than a mere excavation of obsolete thinking. The question of the moral role of public institutions is one which continues to exercise historians, as we are asked to think ever harder about the public uses of history. The subtle debates of the English Enlightenment offer no easy solutions to our present conundrums; none the less, the distinctions that Walsh highlights between institutions which aim at toleration, comprehension or full moral conformity are valuable tools to think with.

The book succeeds in covering broad ground while maintaining clarity and focus, with complex ecclesiological arguments swiftly explained in clear and often entertaining prose. The Hogarthian view of the Church of England assumes clergymen ‘preferred port and plum pudding over pious principles’ and ‘the name Numa danc[es] upon the tip of Hume's pen’. The few typos I spotted were of no consequence. We members of Peterhouse generally call ourselves Petreans rather than Peterhusians (p. 169), though perhaps the latter will catch on.

As Walsh explains in his introduction, his aim is to sketch some iterations of English civil religion, rather than produce a comprehensive catalogue. These snapshots allow the reader to appreciate the range of arguments at work, but also mean that developments across the period are harder to trace. The role of subscription and dissent later in the century is treated in detail, but it would be interesting to see more discussion of the factors which brought more radical visions of civil religion to the fore in this later period.

The fascinating, if all too brief, concluding discussion of European and American comparisons also raises as many questions as it answers, particularly in the case of France. The contrast between atheistic French philosophes and the more restrained scepticism of Hume and Gibbon is starkly emphasised in chapter iv. How far did these contrasting attitudes to civil religion contribute to the divergence of France and England's political trajectories in 1789? On the evidence presented here, the impact appears to have been substantial, though Walsh also notes that the French and English drew on a shared heritage of anti-papal polemic, to which both Gallicans and Anglicans had contributed. These are questions to which we must hope Walsh returns. His research has opened up a new angle on the age-old question of the relationship between religion and Enlightenment and deserves to be read widely.