9 - The Legacy of Late Eighteenth-Century Rational Dissent

Summary

No valid analysis of any historical phenomenon can be isolated from the preceding or subsequent decades. The increasing importance of Rational Dissent, the growth of hostility towards it, and its gradual evolution between 1770 and 1800 contrast markedly with the situation in the previous thirty years. What then was the situation after 1800 – the legacy of Rational Dissent? Attacks on Unitarians, legal constraints on the activities of Rational Dissenters, and their efforts to overcome them, did not disappear in 1800. The Trinity Act, which made rejection of the Trinity no longer a legal offence, was not passed until 1813; the sacramental provisions of the Test and Corporation Acts remained in force until 1828; and not until 1836 was the legal requirement for Dissenters’ marriages to be celebrated by clergy of the Church of England removed.

How far did the theological beliefs underpinning Rational Dissent in the late eighteenth century survive into the early nineteenth, and how far did they alter? These questions raise a number of considerations – the nature of its appeal and audience in the early nineteenth century and the extent to which its characteristics were rooted in those of late eighteenth-century Rational Dissent. Unitarianism became formalised, but how far did it become much more clearly a denomination with a defined and openly declared creed that separated it from Arianism? And what was the fate of Arianism as a detectable, distinctive element of Rational Dissent?

Allegations against those described disparagingly as Socinians (professing belief in God and adherence to the Christian Scriptures, but denying the divinity of Christ and consequently denying the Trinity) continued to appear in the metropolitan and provincial press. Socinians themselves from the 1790s onwards increasingly distanced themselves from this hostility by adopting the label Unitarian. Abusive attacks against Rational Dissent no longer appeared with the same intensity or frequency as in the last thirty years of the eighteenth century. Amongst ten newspapers publishing such attacks between 1804 and 1820, the majority featured in The London Morning Chronicle and Trewman's Exeter Flying Post. In The London Morning Chronicle eleven attacks appeared between 1814 and 1820, in Trewman's Exeter Flying Post ten attacks between 1804 and 1820.