Thomas Secker was bearish on England's moral state. ‘Christianity is now ridiculed and railed at, with very little reserve: and the teachers of it, without any at all,’ he groused in 1738. It was a recurrent theme in his public and private pronouncements on the state of the nation. England's wars abroad and the continuing belief in God's providential intervention in human affairs made the causes and cures of England's moral decline issues of national security. Many argued that new temptations, particularly a thirst for luxury goods, sapped the nation's moral strength. ‘We have increased Amusements and Gaieties to a Degree unexampled, just when Providence hath called us most loudly to thoughtful Consideration,’ Secker complained, and as a result ‘these Indiscretions have produced personal Miseries and national Inconveniences without Number’. Secker, though, thought that theological heterodoxy posed a greater threat than rampant consumerism because errant belief removed a powerful check on human behaviour: ‘… wrong Belief hath great Power to deprave Men's morals. Surely then a right one must have some Power to reform them.’ For proof, one needed only to look to the traumatic events of the previous century.

The spectre of the seventeenth century loomed large in the eighteenth century. Secker and his contemporaries ‘lived with the memory of the civil wars as the nightmare from which it was struggling to awake, or if you prefer, to go to sleep again’, J.G.A. Pocock rightly notes. ‘Its dullest complacency was a blanket spread over that memory.’