ABSTRACT
In recent years, the connections between theological heterodoxy and political radicalism have been subjected to considerable scrutiny by historians and in no instance more fully than that of eighteenth-century Britain. The most powerful cases for a close association between doctrinal and political disaffection has been made, albeit in different forms, by J.C.D. Clark and A.M.C. Waterman.2 Rejection of the confession of faith of the ecclesiastical establishment could easily and logically extend to alienation from secular authority in an age when religious and political powers were closely intertwined and when belief in God and the routines of the Church still dominated the lives of most ordinary people. In particular, as Professor Waterman puts it, denial of the ‘central Christian conviction that Jesus Christ is mediator between God and man’ was ‘sufficient to bring down the entire structure of establishment social theory’.3 It was this notion, denominated the ‘heresy-radicalism thesis’, to which James E. Bradley devoted a detailed and thorough critique in 2001.4 While emphasizing the continuing importance of religious belief to political affiliation in eighteenth-century Britain, Professor Bradley detected the principal roots of radicalism in a separated church polity, reinforced by an acute sense of social disadvantage, as much as in deviations from orthodox teaching on the divinity and mediatorship of Christ.
