ABSTRACT
A divide opened within Presbyterian and Congregationalist congregations between those adhering to orthodox Christianity and those that moved gradually from moderate Calvinism to Arminianism to Arianism and finally to explicit Socinianism. Joseph Priestley had, as he explains in his memoirs, grown up in a moderate home, and it seems one at least amenable to teachings and practices of the evangelical revival. This chapter shows that tradition most identified by a commitment to “rationalism”. The beliefs and behavior of more radical groups left everyone with a tendency to equate “enthusiasm” with “fanaticism,” meaning that subsequent groups had to avoid—or defend—doctrines and practices associated with them. The chapter deals with the non-evangelical orthodox Christians in the Church of England, a group principally comprised of High Church Anglicans. Some Evangelicals considered themselves Arminians, but by the early nineteenth-century Arminianism within the Church of England was closely associated with the High Church tradition while Calvinism was almost exclusively the domain of the Evangelical party.
