Chapter 3 considers the extent to which the godly suffered from ‘atheism’ and what they meant by this, giving particular attention to the experience of Robert Boyle, Richard Baxter and John Bunyan. It is argued that such doubts were experienced privately, in contrast to the public irreligion propagated by the true ‘atheists’ who feature in the other chapters of the book, and it is tentatively suggested that such outspoken irreligion was what Christ had in mind in the gospels when He spoke of the unforgiveable ‘Sin against the Holy Ghost’.

This chapter traces the arc of Heaney’s progression from faithful and engaged Catholic in the 1940s, 191950s and even 60s to a more sceptical stance in the years following Vatican Council II. It sees Station Island (1984) as the axial moment where disbelief is fully acknowledged. Still, the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland make a cultural departure from Roman Catholicism moot, while the poet’s respect for a believing Czesław Miłosz and others cautions against total rejection. Heaney’s tortured conflict with Philip Larkin’s 'Aubade' points to the attraction of the latter’s post-religious stance even as the narrowness of its focus is achingly condemned. A consciously unorthodox Heaney exits with most of the rites of a more liberal but declining Irish Catholic Church that celebrates his passing without rigorously scrutinizing his creedal beliefs.

In the Epistula Apostolorum the retelling of the Easter story is closely related to the Johannine version (GJn 20), but with significant modifications. Here all of the disciples are initially disbelieving and require physical proof of the resurrection, not just Thomas; Mary Magdalene is accompanied to Jesus’ tomb by Mary and Martha of Bethany; and, once reunited with his disciples, Jesus is continually present with them in contrast to the episodic nature of canonical appearance stories. As in 1 Cor 15 but in contrast to the canonical gospels, EpAp views Jesus’ resurrection as paradigmatic of the future resurrection of the flesh. A comparison with the Treatise on the Resurrection brings to light unexpected convergences between these texts, in spite of the ‘proto-orthodox’ character of the one text and the alleged ‘gnostic’ tendencies of the other. The substantive difference is that TrRes understands resurrection soteriologically, as a reality that determines both the present and the future of the believer, whereas in EpAp resurrection is subordinated to the overriding emphasis on future judgement according to works.

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 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.