SOURCE: Maclear, J. F. “Isaac Watts and the Idea of Public Religion.” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 1 (January-March 1992): 25-45.

In the following essay, Maclear examines Watts's ideas about religion and its importance and impact on society and civil matters.

Over the past two decades scholarly interest in “civil religion,” “public religion,” or “national religion” has created a large and growing literature in such diverse fields as sociology, history, and religion.¹ While these studies have succeeded in disclosing religious assumptions in the consciousness of contemporary American and some foreign societies, investigations have been far less enterprising in exploring the historical context in which the phenomenon itself developed, Generally, it has been assumed that concepts of civil religion became prominent with the subsidence of Christianity in the Enlightenment and received their primary stimulus from the nascent modern nationalisms of the American and French Revolutions. In consequence, their relation...