ABSTRACT
The Church Crisis left some Protestants with the fear that this model of church–state relations was under threat. The more zealous among them formed a politically active Protestant Party. The Church Crisis gave birth to the Protestant Party, which, then, initiated a public debate about Erastianism and the nature of the British church–state relationship. In short, the Church Crisis created a relatively small anti-Ritualist movement after 1898. But after 1906, conditions that had created the Church Crisis had largely dissipated and Protestant campaigners were never again able to center the domestic political conversation largely on ecclesiastical concerns. However, increased criticism of the Established Church–state relationship also catalyzed the late Victorian revival of Protestant Erastianism. Hastings takes this as evidence of parliamentary apathy toward the church, but actually better reading is that Parliamentarians were increasingly affected by “Catholic” arguments about church independence. This was a sea-change from the heyday of Protestant Whig Erastianism during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
