This chapter argues that for Oliver Goldsmith religious belief was thoroughly embedded in the world. It was not defined by theological niceties or intellectual conviction but by the rhythms of Anglican ritual and everyday acts of reverence, piety, and benevolence. Culture and politics were, therefore, inseparable from religion. With this in mind, the religion/secular divide that permeates much of our contemporary thinking must be abandoned when we approach Goldsmith’s work. His engagement with religion should be assessed not according to the doctrines he explicitly espoused (or failed to espouse) but according to religion’s practical function within his oeuvre.

This chapter argues that William Cowper aligned various faiths against atheism and the moral degeneration that, in his mind, atheism necessarily produced. Examining poems from all phases of Cowper’s career – including his 1782 moral satires, the Olney Hymns (1779), The Task (1785), and “The Castaway” (1799; 1803) – I elucidate his belief that, unlike insensible atheists, Christians should extend their sympathy to all parts of God’s creation: to the Indians oppressed by British colonialism, to the poor inhabitants of the British countryside, even to the hares Cowper kept as pets in Olney. The only figure unworthy of such sympathy in Cowper’s thinking was the atheist. Thus, for Cowper, non-Christians from abroad were excusable, and even respectable, as long as they believed in a deity and did their best with the portion of divine light they had been granted. Cowper rejected all faiths but evangelical Christianity as false, yet he aspired to a form of sociability that was available to all theists. Although there were clear limits to Cowper’s ecumenical impulses, they reveal the imaginative multifaith alliances eighteenth-century atheism was capable of engendering.

This chapter examines the gendered critique of atheism made by Phebe Gibbes in her sentimental epistolary novel The History of Lady Louisa Stroud, and the Honourable Miss Caroline Stretton (1764). Gibbes’s novel casts atheism as the root of both sexual violence and patriarchal abuse. On the other hand, belief in a God who will eventually right the cultural and institutional wrongs that beset eighteenth-century Englishwomen is crucial to Gibbes’s heroines’ successful resistance to the novel’s villainous male seducers. I conclude the chapter by turning to Gibbes’s more widely discussed Hartly House, Calcutta (1789), arguing that the novel calls for both Western and Eastern theists to unite against irreligion and unbelief. Gibbes’s two novels illustrate how eighteenth-century depictions of men’s sexual infidelity and imperialist violence were often couched in terms of religious faithlessness. Thus, the atheist represents a capacious figure of disdain for Gibbes, one that embodies various forms of faithlessness and is, therefore, entirely opposed to women’s well-being and the benignant ecumenical fantasy Gibbes imagines in her orientalist fiction.

In this chapter, I argue that Pope’s poetry is profoundly concerned with the deleterious effects of unbelief and that, at the same time, he found atheistical materialism creatively productive. First, I chart Pope’s career-long engagement with religion, paying special attention to his numerous clarion calls for unity across confessional divides and to atheism’s negative role in bringing this unity about. I address broad swathes of Pope’s work, including the Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1714), the Horatian imitations and Moral Essays of the 1730s, and, most critically, the Essay on Man (1734). After tracing Pope’s ecumenical impulses, I turn to the 1743 Dunciad, showing how the final iteration of Pope’s mock-epic masterpiece incorporates and expels godlessness at almost every turn: from the replacement of Lewis Theobald as King Dunce by Colley Cibber, whose gaming addiction Pope consistently ridicules and aligns with atheistic notions of chance, fortune, and chaos, to the dunces’ intellectual vacuity and Pope’s “Epicurean” method of composition, I show how the poem is haunted by God’s absence from start to finish.

This chapter argues that eighteenth-century moral philosophers, divines, and literati almost unanimously agreed that theism is necessary to sustain community and social stability. With this correlation in place, atheists were routinely denied the capacity for human sympathy. To make this case, the chapter focuses on two midcentury novels by Sarah Fielding: The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and its sequel, Volume the Last (1753). In these fictions, Fielding employs atheism to explore both the limits of modern selfhood and the limits of literary representation. Alongside eighteenth-century moral philosophers like John Locke, Shaftesbury, and Lord Kames, whom I examine in the chapter’s first section, Fielding casts the atheist as the fundamental incarnation of a completely autonomous self. More to the point, she insists that that self is incapable of integrating successfully into a wider community defined by developing notions of civility, sociability, and fellow feeling.

This introduction demonstrates atheism’s centrality in eighteenth-century British culture, and it illustrates the paradoxical ways in which atheism’s presence in the period’s literature was meant to prevent its presence in the real world. The chapter charts the history of British thinking about unbelief throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before arguing that fictional depictions of atheism as repulsive and unsympathetic gave rise to a unique form of believing selfhood, one defined not by creeds and doctrines but by affective rejections of unbelief. Moreover, the association of belief with sociability, and atheism with selfishness, led authors like Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Sarah Fielding, Phebe Gibbes, and William Cowper to create ecumenical fantasies in which theists around the globe unite to curb atheism’s spread. These fictions nuance our understanding of secularization, demonstrating how atheism’s relationship to modernity is more fraught than is typically acknowledged, and revealing the profound role imaginative literature has played in sustaining belief.

This chapter argues that Jonathan Swift’s satires depict godless worlds dominated by atheists. First, I provide brief readings of the “Ode to the Athenian Society” (1692), The Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man (1708), the “Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately entered into Holy Orders” (1720), and Swift’s published sermons. Then, I demonstrate how Swift’s major satires oppose atheism not by arguing against it but by paradoxically taking its premises for granted. A Tale of a Tub (1704), the Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729), for instance, all present counterfactual, dystopian worlds in which all reality is reducible to matter alone. I conclude the chapter by arguing that, when atheism is Swift’s satiric target, his satires demonstrate a considerable amount of compassion and understanding for groups he typically presents as detestable. From the Turks of An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, to the Irish Catholics of A Modest Proposal, to the Jews, Turks, and “Bonzes in China” of Mr C-Ns’s Discourse, atheism incites Swift to abandon his animosity against various religious groups and social classes.

This chapter documents an 1810–1811 epistolary prank in which Percy Shelley outlined his atheistic creed to a completely befuddled correspondent. As this exchange makes clear, Shelley’s writings against theism are attempts to counter dominant eighteenth-century perceptions of unbelief. Indeed, the poet’s letters indicate the influence such perceptions maintained well into the nineteenth century and beyond. Shelley’s promotion of atheism relies not only on logical arguments he derived from previous freethinkers and religious radicals. It also depends on his appropriation and rewriting of the various stereotypes of atheism produced throughout the preceding century. If atheists in the eighteenth century were imagined as selfish, unsociable, and incapable of sensibility, Shelley flipped the script by casting such aspersions on theists themselves.