Writing in Providence, Timothy Cutler identified eighteenth-century political philosopher Edmund Burke as an “Anglican theologian,” principally relevant today for having understood “the theological underpinnings of our social order,” with Burke himself having been “a defender of the institutions of Christian civilization.” In 2023, the historian Richard Whatmore, in The End of Enlightenment, argued that in Burke’s lifetime the Enlightenment, for all its promises of radically improving the world according to universally accessible Reason had failed, resulting in the French Revolution and resultant Napoleonic Wars.
While it’s true that Burke defined Britain’s response to the French Revolution in his deployment of Anglican arguments, it’s also true that the Anglican Church heard Burke and was itself changed by his articulation of the role of Christianity in the life of a nation. This shift in response to the events of the late 18th and early 19th centuries came to be called the “Catholic revival” or the “Oxford Movement” in 19th-century England. The dialogue between the Church of England and the British state, wherein both institutions mutually shaped one another in response to the crisis of the French Revolution, is highly instructive for us today.
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