Piety was amongst the most fiercely disputed issues in the Bangorian controversy, and, as well as being the subject of the opening part of Hoadly's sermon, also dominated much of the immediate response to it. Andrew Snape's first Letter to Hoadly, for example, the prompt high church answer to the low church bishop, had almost half its pages dedicated to the subject of piety. Not even the question of church authority could rival that of piety for the vehemence that characterized the debate. Existing analysis of the controversy has, however, tended to overlook the dispute concerning piety, and when it has addressed it, has tended to view disagreement over piety as marginal to the main concerns of church authority and religious liberty. According to this view, contentions about piety were a smear or a smokescreen, a mere controversial tactic, rather than a substantial point of controversy. When Hoadly's opponents accused him of impiety, it was therefore argued, this was done in order to score points or discredit the bishop in the public imagination. Indeed, this point of view was originally advanced by Hoadly's contemporary defenders themselves.

This tradition of understanding piety to be marginal to the ecclesiological disputes of the post-Restoration and post-Revolution church was strong in nineteenth-century accounts of the period. Perhaps because of the dearth of twentieth-century research in this area, it remains the dominant historiographical perspective, and even in more recent writing, historians have felt the need to justify the presence of piety in the long eighteenth century.