Is Anglicanism a Religion? Empire, Establishmentarianism, and Thomas Macaulay's Critique of William Gladstone

Abstract: The noun "Anglicanism," coined in the 1830s, indexed the emergence of a Victorian formation of the secular wherein the Church of England would be simply one religion among others—reframed by the modern concept of religion and thus also by empire. This article explores this pivotal moment by revisiting Thomas Macaulay's damning review of William Gladstone's The State in its Relations with the Church (1838). Unlike Gladstone (the future prime minister), Macaulay (the colonial ideologue) was able to develop a theoretically coherent account of Church-State relations for the 1830s. His transcolonial secularism, born in Bengal, was in the process of boomeranging back to Britain. I further argue that, for both Gladstone and Macaulay, secularism was inseparable from intimately raced and gendered family histories.