Donald Davie speaks up for Old Dissent—for its religious life and the literature it generated—with what might be thought of as an aptly persistent dissentience. He naturally believes he must dissent from the bulk of Dissent's usual enemies. Even more, though, he feels led to dissent from some of the most insistent of Dissent's friends. Crustily, he stands between, on the one hand, the scornful majority who borrow the terminologies of Matthew Arnold for their dismissals of all Dissent as barbarously uncultured philistinism, and, on the other, that colonising minority who want to specialise Dissent into the ranks of the progressive and leftist.

It's an awkward, contentious corner to hold out in. Davie knowingly boxed himself into it in his Clark Lectures, A Gathered Church (1976), and these more recent lectures and articles [collected in Dissentient Voice: Enlightenment and Christian Dissent] show him still contentedly there, still jabbing foxily away with intent to outrage his chosen opponents. His beloved 18th-century Dissenters, so his argument goes, didn't just happen to hit off a clutch of memorable hymns. Watts and Charles Wesley, Newton and Doddridge wrote their great poems because their religion sited them comfortably within the Age of Reason. Nobody was more intellectually serious and reasonable than Watts and Co., with their abstractions and their theological paradoxes. The Enlightenment was—and enlightenment still is—as much Christian as it is anything. The members of an 18th-century Baptist or Congregationalist church were shaped by a toughly reasoning faith expressed in a strong-minded, plain-speaking poetry. They enjoyed Christ and culture. Which is, or so Davie intends, one in the eye for their snobbish, 'cultured' despisers….

Davie's case for Dissent harnesses his powerful hostility towards verbal muddling. Getting us straight about the difference between unorthodox Unitarians and orthodox Dissenters—a distinction Davie shows the tricksy, trimming Unitarians uncandidly and successfully fudging over in the later 18th century—will teach us to care for semantic clarity and precision, to 'take seriously what words say, each word, severally and together'—which is just what 'a good poem' does. Furthermore, if we read a Flavel or a Watts attentively, we may be saved from what in a hectic moment Davie sneers at as the soggily warm 'steam' of socialism's assumptions and language.

Davie knows that his egregiously huge conceptual leaps and links are likely to give us pause. They're designed to. Giving, and being given, pause are favourite Davie activities. 'Here we need to pause,' he will say, stopping us from rattling heedlessly on through some difficult stretch of Dissenting history or religious poetry that we'd rather avoid being discomfited by. He loves the unblinkable, the disconcerting, the rebarbatively exact bit of Christian doctrine that one of his favourite hymn-writers hasn't shunned. 'His dying crimson like a robe / Spreads o'er his body on the Tree'; the squeamish Christians who rarely sing these words could do with more of Watts's bleakly uncompromising and orthodox challenges. Flinching softness of doctrine, tolerance, liberalism: they've let the wily Unitarians, and all the other traducers of truth and true Dissent, get away with their language-ruining hypocrisies, prevarications and distortions. Hard sayings, these. But then Davie thinks Anglicans are exhorted in Advent to 'meditate on "the four last things"—Death, Sin, Hell, and Judgment'. No Heaven, you see; only Sin. No wonder Davie has little time for 19th-century Nonconformists—who added to orthodoxy a fifth last thing, the idea of the welcomable rescue of the saints from earth's end-time distresses. They called it the Rapture.

Davie's unwarm, unenraptured kind of Christianity, and the presumptuous critical and social assumptions into whose service it's pressed, are by no means new. T. S. Eliot also made play with the need for orthodoxy in faith and literature, for tradition and monarchism against all liberal practitioners ('knee-jerk liberals', Davie calls them) and democratisers (Davie approves a right-wing Dissenter deploring 'the tyranny of a depraved multitude'). And just as Eliot was cagey about his debt to Arnold and slippery about monarchists like Lancelot Andrewes and the Commonwealth poets Milton and Marvell, so Davie is cagey about his own debt to Eliot—after all, he was an ex-Unitarian turned Anglican—and slippery in lots of his own readings of poems and histories…. Davie's sacrifice of 19th-century Nonconformity, and Browning in particular, to the Arnoldians' 'smug grocer' scenario is appallingly sweeping. His put-down of the Rev. Thomas Binney's hymn 'Eternal Light! Eternal Light!' looks wilfully programmatic. His enthusiasm for the 20th-century Calvinist poet Jack Clemo is carefully silent about the grislier aspects of what is essentially second-hand Jack Powys eroticism, about the awful tosh his 'Royal Wedding' poem … really is, and about his hot-gospelling admiration for such anti-culture Christians as Oral Roberts and C. T. Studd. On such occasions, one could do with rather more of that candour Davie rightly blames those Unitarians for lacking.