Theological communication: Representations of piety in post‐Reformation English media

Summary: ‘…put men on such Duties as have a great shew and Appearance of Holiness. By the help of them alone may men pray and preach, and maintain spiritual Communication among them with whom they do converse’ (John Owen, Pneumatologia, 1676) The Reformation gave rise to a contested notion of godliness. Contemporary media not only reflected perceptions of piety (one’s duty to God) but appeared to facilitate the construction of a series of pious attributes and their binary opposites to develop a complex and malleable Protestant morality. Indeed, what is so striking about a wide range of Protestant print is the conceptual interdependency of piety and impiety and the propensity to utilize inter-related ‘thick’ concepts, rather than merely ‘thin’ notions of observance and transgression, to expound the nature and consequences of good and evil. Yet an understanding of print as a consumable artefact of communication has arguably overshadowed an appreciation of how concepts and percepts developed through media. Partly as a result, little has been done to investigate the specific cultural phenomenon of a media influenced Protestant morality. Moreover, an historical understanding of contemporary piety, which crucially encapsulated a sense of ‘vertical communication’ with God and ‘horizontal communication’ amongst believers, has yet to be fully established. This paper will investigate Protestant piety as a form of theological communication both in spiritual abstraction and via representations in oral, textual, and visual media (e.g. sermons, religious pamphlets, and broadsheets). Representations of piety will be assessed through an analysis of the manner and matter of constituent virtues such as love and selflessness. It will be argued that a construction of piety involved complex and diverse forms of theological communication which were vital to both individual and collective religious identities by godly affirmation and solidarity against impiety, which illuminate hitherto ill-understood aspects of religious culture and community.