In Roger E. Moore’s chapter on Jane Austen and religion, he introduces us to his view on Austen and her view on religion. The following contains a brief summary of his text in A Companion to Jane Austen; this summing up is based on the pages 314-322.

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Roger E. Moore, writes that 'Jane Austen knew a great deal about religion,'[i] and he reminds us that Austen lived for the first 25 years of her life in a country parsonage in Steventon parish where her father was the rector. Further, her eldest brother, James, and her favourite brother, Henry, took holy orders; Moore paints a picture of the Steventon parsonage being the scene of much discussion and religious debate. Moore continues to suggest that on Sundays Austen would have attended Morning and Evening Prayer services, and he also points to the fact that Austen’s History of England  ‘betrays a lively interest with Anglican liturgy.’[ii] In his contribution to A Companion to Jane Austen, he writes that Austen’s ‘novels demonstrate a sustained, if subdued, interest in religion that suggests Austen’s engagement with the ideas, controver-sies, and events of the eighteenth-century English church,’ (p.314) which supports Caroline Austen’s words regarding her aunt (please see Ch3/1a).

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Moore writes, for example, that in the eighteenth century, the Church of England was a battleground between a conservative faction desperate to defend tradition and a liberal faction urging change; the latter believed that they were fulfilling the goals of the Reformation by removing the last forms of superstition and credalism from the Church. In opposition to this was the High Church Tories, who sought preservation of the creeds and priestly authority. Later on, in the Austen’s time, an evangelical faction rose who rejected both the Tories and the liberals (also called the latitudinarians). These Evangelicals revered old fashioned Calvinistic austerity.

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Moore rhetorically asks where Austen might be positioned in this religious debate. He states that her letters seem to indicate that, as she grew older, Austen came to sympathise with the evangelicals. In her letter (Letter 70) of January 24th, 1809, (Letter 66, p.177)[iii] she writes to Cassandra, her sister, that ‘I do not like the Evangelicals’, whereas she writes to Fanny Knight on the 18th - 20th November, 1814, (Letter 109, p.292)[iv] that ‘I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, & am at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason and Feeling, must be happiest & safest.’

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Moore goes on to mention that critics such as Marilyn Butler have noted  evangelicalistic influence in Mansfield Park, as the novel addresses clerical non-residence and patronage and its questioning of the potentially corrupting effect of theatrical entertainments. Moore, on the other hand, feels that her novels differ from the evangelical faith by giving hardly no rein to Calvinism, but instead her novels suggest a faith in the goodness of humankind and stress the possibility of personal improvement. Moore reminds us of Emma Woodhouse who discovers her own faults and limitations and begins to change; Emma’s ‘travel’ thus indicates Austen’s belief in human effort.