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This chapter examines the contests between Protestants and Catholics over the filial claims to Saint Augustine’s religious authority, as they played out in the competing translations of the Confessions into English in the 1620s. This was a constituent part of the battle that raged near the end of James I’s reign to establish religious orthodoxy and to maintain state control over it. The Confessions was not a useful polemical tool, but the chapter details the responsive confessional statements of one of its expert readers, John Donne. The two publications that framed his public life were Pseudo‐Martyr (1610) and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). In them, Donne challenged Augustine’s resolution of a spiritual crisis with a change of church. Donne complied, but only in respect of the body politic. He became an improbable literary spokesperson for the Protestant nation.

This chapter examines the contests between Protestants and Catholics over the filial claims to Saint Augustine’s religious authority, as they played out in the competing translations of the Confessions into English in the 1620s. This was a constituent part of the battle that raged near the end of James I’s reign to establish religious orthodoxy and to maintain state control over it. The Confessions was not a useful polemical tool, but the chapter details the responsive confessional statements of one of its expert readers, John Donne. The two publications that framed his public life were Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). In them, Donne challenged Augustine’s resolution of a spiritual crisis with a change of church. Donne complied, but only in respect of the body politic. He became an improbable literary spokesperson for the Protestant nation.

Gibbon's most explicit engagement with his critics occurred with the publication of his Vindication in 1779. Recent scholars have normally presented this as a one-sided contest leading to a devastating victory for Gibbon. This chapter argues, however, that Gibbon's victory in this encounter was achieved more at the level of style than of scholarly substance, and that he adroitly side-stepped the accusations of his critics. He exploited the eighteenth-century tradition of dispute between deists and the orthodox, with which he was very familiar, and cleverly turned the tables on his opponents by stealing from them the rhetorical clothes associated particularly with that hammer of heterodoxy, Richard Bentley.

This chapter examines the Roman influence on the religious orthodoxy in Ireland and England. It explains that the earliest writers presented the adoption of Christianity as a spiritual rebirth which transcended their physical birth. The chapter also suggests that the earliest of Irish literature can be considered a forceful affirmation of the importance of Christian universality and an indictment of those who refused to acknowledge the significance of this principle or who would undermine it.

This chapter explores the experience of two contemporary Middle Eastern thinkers: Sadiq Jalal al-ʻAzm and Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd. The former, writing in the aftermath of the Arab–Israeli War of 1967, penned a critique of Islam, alleging that its blinkered repressiveness had set the Arab world up for defeat. The latter, writing in the 1990s, sought to fashion a modern, enlightened Islam and, in pursuit of that end, subjected Islam's most sacred text, the Qur'an, to critical philological scrutiny. Both men paid a price for their heterodoxy: al-ʻAzm lost his job at the American University in Beirut and was tried for incitement of religious discord; Abu Zayd was denied promotion at Cairo University and also subjected to public prosecution. The interest in the present context is that in both instances the prosecuting agency was the so-called secular state, whether Lebanese or Egyptian, and it acted in response to the prodding of mobilized religious constituencies, thus transforming itself, though secular, into an accomplice of sectarianism. Postcolonial Arab nationalisms, as had Soviet communism before them, held out the promise of liberation, but liberation, once again, turned out to be a mixed blessing. The secular state did not set itself up in opposition to faith but catered to believers, enhancing its own power by giving satisfaction to the repressive impulses of religious orthodoxy.

This chapter follows Jews whose life-changing doubt was discovered by or confessed to a spouse. It talks about therapeutic professionals who tried to help double lifers such as Jewish life coaches, outreach rabbis, and religious therapists. It also explains the profession of religious therapy that are in the midst of a moral struggle as to which authorities they owed their allegiance: their own religious orthodoxy or their clients' individual autonomy. The chapter explains how most therapeutic professionals rejected the common rabbinic explanation in circulation for the contemporary crisis of faith, the Internet. It also points out how therapeutic professionals drew on the authority of therapeutic discourse in order to argue that it was emotional and interpersonal dynamics that obstructed emuna or faith.

This chapter focuses on Emily Dickinson's critique of religious orthodoxy, namely the legacy of New England Puritanism, using bee imagery and its cultural associations with Protestant models for both community and industry. It explores the radical re–positioning of belief within the context of production, or notion of ‘employment’ as poet, in Dickinson's work, linking spirituality with writing. It also considers how the three elements of industry, revery, and relation are strongly connected with the bee in Dickinson's work, along with the extent to which this represents an alternative ‘design’ or ‘space’ for belief within the schema of her poetry.

This chapter presents a rereading of the Unitarian controversy in nineteenth-century Massachusetts. It represents a deliberate and violent displacement of one religious regime with another. The controversy concerned a Christian denomination that split in two, ostensibly because of theological differences over the question of the divinity of Christ. Looking at disputes over church property, the discussion shows how such disputes also served as vehicles for the development of new ideas of tolerance and religious orthodoxy, ideas that are as intolerant as their predecessors.

The chapter traces the development of Zionism among Leeds Jewry, taking inspiration from the work of Theodore Herzl. In many ways, Zionism acted as a unifying influence in what was often a fragmented community, particularly since support did not depend on the degree of religious orthodoxy. Zionism in Leeds received a great stimulus from the arrival of Selig Brodetsky, who became the main organiser and leader. The city also was inspired by the visits of Chaim Weizmann.