Lying for God: Providence and Profit in Early Modern English Protestantism

Appeals to God’s providence among Christians can be deeply manipulative for the sake of profit. While an acute awareness of divine involvement in everyday life may discourage unrestrained profit-seeking, the same sensitivity can also nurture patterns of exploitation of providential language for self-gain. My current project, ‘Lying for God’, calls for proper attention to this ‘providential pragmatism’ among the seventeenth-century English diaspora, especially amongst the educated elite. By highlighting this ‘providential pragmatism’ as the intellectual context for an intensified pursuit of material and economic betterment in England, ‘Lying for God’ will dispute the exceptionalist portrayal of economic progress in the English empire as wholly novel and virtuous.

Chinese religion and politics
in the English Imagination, 1600–1730

There has been increasing attention on how seventeenth-century English society portrayed or imagined China. The past two decades witnessed fruitful conversations about what these portrayals meant to the English public, who were not only making sense of Ming-Qing China, but also reflecting on who they themselves were through these references to China. However, scholars have not fully recognised the religiopolitical context in which many English writers pointed their readers to the Far East, i.e., the Laudian reformation, tensions between conformists and puritans, as well as the civil wars and their aftermath. This project seeks to address this gap, laying out how China was a popular watchword in seventeenth-century English propaganda that empowered politicians and religious leaders to construct and promote their versions of a godly, reformed England, and it therefore aims to rediscover the polemical significance of early modern English geography.