The conformity of Thomas Hobbes: a sober, peaceable, cheerful son of the Church of England

Nor can that clamour of his adversaries make Mr. Hobbes think himself a worse Christian than the best of them. And how will you disprove it, either by his disobedience to the Laws Civil, or Ecclesiastical, or by any ugly action? Or how will you prove that the obedience which springs from scorn of Injustice, is less acceptable to God, than that which proceeds from fear of punishment, or hope of benefit?

In his Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners, and Religion of Thomas Hobbes, published in 1662, Hobbes challenges those who have condemned his philosophy as 'atheistical'. Against both doctrinal ideologues and Enthusiasts, whether those promoting high-flying notions of ecclesiastical authority or Calvinistical dogmas, whether those who unsettled the Church during the Personal Rule or those who did so in Interregnum, Hobbes set forth an alternative understanding of conformity to the Church of England: obedience to the constitutional and religious settlement, motivated by a commitment to the peaceable ordering of the community.

Such motivation was, for doctrinal ideologues and Enthusiasts, to be dismissed as hopelessly inadequate, a profound spiritual failure to address the realities of salvation, of the pressing need to obediently follow holy Church for salvation, or what it was to be, as Jonathan Edwards would later declare, 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God'. It is this which provokes Hobbes' second question in the above extract. Is it really "less acceptable to God" to be motivated by a desire to live in a way which contributes to the peaceable ordering of the community than it is to be motivated by fear of hell or desire for heaven?

Hobbes' emphasis on a conformity defined by a commitment to the peaceable ordering of the community aptly embodied the concerns of the political nation which led to the Restoration. In her excellent The Restless Republic: Britain Without A Crown (2022), Anna Keay notes how, in January 1660, with the Protectorate and Commonwealth have been proved incapable of providing constitutional and ecclesiastical order, "the gentry of Norfolk ... set the tone" in their Declaration:

being deeply affected with the sense of our sad Distractions and Divisions, both in Church and State, and wearied with the miseries of an Unnatural Civil War ...

Those distractions, divisions, and miseries had been provoked and continued by doctrinal ideologues and Enthusiasts, by those whose fear of hell and hopes of heaven had motivated destructive zeal. Now was a time for a piety and conformity which, as the Apostle exhorted, enabled "a quiet and peaceable life". Or as Hobbes stated:

Gravity and heaviness of Countenance are not so good marks of assurance of God's favour, as cheerful, charitable, and upright behaviour towards men, which are better signs of Religion than the zealous maintaining of controverted Doctrines.

Hobbes' words can be regarded as encapsulating that piety which is found in the Moral and Religious Aphorisms (1703) of the Cambridge Platonist Benjamin Whichcote, who - like most clergy - had conformed under the Interregnum and at the Restoration:

I will not break the certain Laws of Charity, for a doubtful Doctrine or of uncertain Truth ...

Religion is Unity and Love: therefore it is not Religion, that makes Separation and Disaffection ...

Enthusiasm is the Confounder, both of Reason and Religion: therefore nothing is more necessary to the Interest of Religion, than the prevention of Enthusiasm ...

Religion is not served by exasperating, but by composing the minds of men.

Such a piety would define Anglican conformity across the 'long 18th century'. It was exemplified in the preaching of Tillotson, so influential throughout the century. We see it in the diary of Parson Woodforde and in the novels of Jane Austen. In her study of Anglican elite households in colonial Virginia, Lauren F. Winner notes that "not all religious systems are keyed to struggle". She therefore contrasts the 'cheerful and comfortable faith' of Anglicans in colonial Virginia with the religion of Puritan New England. "Puritans were at war", whereas, for Virginian Anglicans, in the words of a 1732 grave marker for a woman of the colony, "Her religion was ... Cheerful ... and of the Church of England". It was, as Hobbes had said, "cheerful, charitable, and upright behaviour towards men", not doctrinal zeal, which characterised 18th century Anglicanism.

For Hobbes, one particular document from "the late unhappy confusions" exemplified how doctrinal ideologues and Enthusiasts sharply contrasted with a cheerful, peaceable conformity to the Church of England - the Solemn League and Covenant:

As for your Party, that which angered you, I believe, was this passage of his Leviathan ... Whereas some men have pretended for their Disobedience to their Sovereign, a new Covenant made not with men, but with God; this also is unjust: For there is no Covenant with God, but by mediation of some body that representeth God's Person; which none doth but God's Lieutenant, who hath the sovereignty under God: But this pretence of Covenant with God, is so evidently (this is it that angered you) even in the pretenders own Consciences, that it is not only an act of an unjust, but also of a vile and unmanly disposition.

Quoting the controversial and widely condemned Leviathan against the Solemn League and Covenant - which the 1662 Act of Uniformity required clergy to reject as "traiterous", "an unlawfull Oath and imposed upon the Subjects of this Realme against the knowne Lawes and Liberties of this Kingdome" - prudently and meaningfully placed Hobbes' great work on the side of Restoration conformity. Thus, for Hobbes, was peaceable conformity to the Church of England infinitely more desirable than the destructive zeal of the ideologues and the Enthusiasts:

Your differences have troubled the Kingdom, as if you were the Houses revived of York and Lancaster. 

Hobbes, in other words, was both reflecting and contributing towards a defining characteristic of conforming, Anglican piety from the Restoration until the early 19th century - what William Gibson, in his history of 18th century Anglicanism describes as "the Church's orientation toward unity and accord", emerging from an "exhaustion with disunity and extremism". We might gratefully suggest that this continues, even today, to be reflected in much Anglican lay piety. And it is what made Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury a sober, peaceable, and cheerful son of the Church of England.