ABSTRACT
Historians of the Augustan church have tended to use the terms Tow church' and 'high church' with some confidence that they are well-defined homogenous strands in Anglican theology.1 The two church 'parties' are often compared with, and linked to, the political parties, and an easy assumption is made that their doctrines were as settled as those of the Whigs and Tories. Recent scholarship has begun to question this alignment: W.M. Spellman has asked whether we can identify a single monolithic heterodox connection between low churchmanship, rationalism, deism and Whiggery.2 Rebecca Warner has suggested that low churchmanship was defined by shared attitudes in a post-Revolutionary context toward key issues such as the relationship of church and state, and attitudes to nonjurors, Catholics, and Dissenters.3 And John Spurr's study of latitudinarians suggests that their doctrines were close to the orthodox core of Anglicanism.4 While low church values and tenets have thus been placed into greater perspective, the same has not happened for the high church tendency of Anglicanism. Moreover, Jonathan Clark's alignment of political and religious heterodoxy has resonance in the second half of the eighteenth century, but its application to nonjurors and politically and theologically heterodox groups earlier in the century is less apparent. For while political heterodoxy often implied a radical and reforming ideology during the second half of the eighteenth century, in the century's first two decades it stood as much for ultra-conservativism such as divine right and
A version of this paper was read at the 2002 meeting of the American Historical Association and the American Society for Church History in San Francisco. I am grateful for the comments and views expressed at the meeting, and especially by Professor Jeffrey Chamberlain, the panel commentator.
