The Revolution in church and state

Shaftesbury tends to be understood as a deist and protagonist of Enlightenment proto-secularism. The inclination of modern scholarship is to fit Shaftesbury into a history of the origins of liberalism and to count him among the forebears of the separation between religion and politics. Israel, for instance, associated Shaftesbury with the ‘radical Enlightenment’ alongside Toland, Tindal, Charles Blount, Anthony Collins, and Bernard Mandeville. Shaftesbury's support for a national church has usually been exculpated as the tactic of a prudent elite who buttressed social order with theological sanction irrespective of his view of its truth. Such histories privilege Shaftesbury's hostility towards sacerdotal priesthoods over the positive role that he imagined for Christian clergymen in civilised society. They foreground the extensive history of priestcraft in the ‘Miscellaneous Reflections’ that appended Shaftesbury's major work Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). They downplay his inward professions of Protestant allegiance and dutiful attendance at his parish church. Where Shaftesbury has been associated with civil religion, it has been in its most deistical and secularising forms.

Similarly, Shaftesbury has been classified as a ‘radical’ Whig. He has been associated with such thinkers as Toland, Molesworth, Trenchard, Gordon, Walter Moyle, and Andrew Fletcher. In politics, these men were suspicious of the fiscal-military state and the court's wish, during the late 1690s, to maintain a standing army in peacetime. In Pocock's formulation, they were ‘civic humanists’ defending the autonomous freeholder-citizen in the country against the courtly forces of junto Whiggism championed by John, Lord Somers. Although republican politics need not have implied irreligion, there is a tendency to suppose that these themes coexisted in Shaftesbury's circle. Linked with Anglo-Dutch intellectual circles in a ‘republic of letters’ and ‘radical’ Enlightenment, this mode of Whiggism is considered fully anticlerical and deistical.

The result of each of these associations has been the neglect of the primary context in which Shaftesbury produced Characteristics. He must be situated within the contemporary debate about the church-state relationship in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688–9. He was interjecting in the political rivalries and paper wars raging between the developing ‘high- and low-church’ parties.