From a Confessional to a Nation State? National Identity and the Church of England, 1780-1838

This thesis seeks to understand how the Anglican Church’s relationship to wider society shifted from a position of being the principal medium of nation-wide identity formation to one in which the institution represented just one of a number of different vehicles through which to form and sustain an identity. It endeavours to achieve this through the examination of the multifarious ways in which the Church engaged and interacted with the bulk of the population. Firstly, it provides an analysis of the parochial church’s role as the provider of welfare support and how the implications of the rise of political economy served to fundamentally alter its established approach in ways which negatively impacted the perception of the institution as being the servant of the whole parish community. Secondly, it looks at the gradual reduction in the authority and function of the Anglican parochial infrastructure as being the primary mechanism for the governance and administration of the local community. A development which initiated the uncoupling of what had been a centuries old notion of the church as font of legal validation and as a place of genuinely popular government. Thirdly, how the church’s near-monopolistic control over the ceremonies of birth and death was broken through a series of socio-cultural, legislative and theological changes. Changes which themselves contributed to increasing religious plurality, and consequently to an emergent tendency of Anglican incumbents to demarcate their own ‘sheep’ from the wider parish ‘flock.’ Lastly, this thesis considers how efforts to increase the provision of church seating initiated a debate on how the physical shape, architectural style and internal arrangement of such buildings could themselves serve to influence the individual worshiper’s understanding of their faith, the institutional values of the church and ultimately their own identification with that church.