The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church

Quick Facts

• Full title: The Christian Religion, as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England
• Author: Mary Astell, published anonymously as "a Daughter of the Church of England"
• First published: 1705; expanded second edition in 1717
• Form: a long theological and moral letter
• Main labels: Christian Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
• Main concern: how a Christian, including a Christian woman, can use reason, scripture, and church teaching to know how to live

The Problem

Astell writes for a world where women are often expected to receive religion secondhand. They may be baptized, taught formulas, and told to obey, but not encouraged to examine Christian doctrine for themselves.

The problem is not only gender. It is also a live Anglican problem about reason and revelation. Reason means the mind's power to judge, compare, and follow evidence. Revelation means truth God makes known, especially through scripture and Christ. Church authority means the right of a church to teach, guide worship, and preserve doctrine. Astell asks how these three can work together without turning Christianity into blind submission, private opinion, or thin moral advice.

Her answer is that Christianity must be reasonable, but not reduced to what unaided reason can discover. A Christian woman should not believe merely because parents, priests, or custom speak for her. She should understand as much as she can, trust divine revelation where reason reaches its limit, and live by duties to God, neighbor, and herself.

In One Minute

The Christian Religion is Astell's mature statement of Anglican moral theology. Its main claim is simple: God gave women reason, so women must use reason in religion. A Christian woman is not supposed to be a child in understanding. She should love God with the mind as well as with feeling.

Astell starts from natural religion, the truths reason can reach without scripture: God exists, God is wise and good, and human beings are made for happiness. But she thinks reason also shows its own limits. Some Christian truths, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, cannot be fully pictured by the human mind. They can still be rationally believed if God is their authority.

The practical center of the book is duty. Duty means what a person is bound to do because of her relation to God and other people. Astell explains duties to God, duties to neighbors, and duties to oneself. True happiness is not property, status, pleasure, or praise. It is the soul's right relation to God, shown in worship, charity, self-command, and serious moral judgment.

The Main Argument

Astell's first move is direct: if God did not want women to use reason, God would not have given them reason. Since religion concerns the highest good, reason should be used there most of all. A woman who is Christian only because someone answered for her at baptism has not yet made faith her own.

Second, reason can lead the mind toward God. Astell argues that the idea of God points to a perfect, self-existing, wise, and good being. Human beings also find in themselves a constant desire for happiness. The sensible world can give pleasure, but it cannot satisfy that desire completely. So the mind must ask what kind of happiness fits an immortal rational soul.

Third, happiness comes by conforming the will to God's will. The will is the power of choosing. To conform the will to God is to choose what God commands because it is good, not merely because it is useful or socially approved. For example, charity is not just a nice feeling. It is a duty to seek a neighbor's real good, especially when that good matters more than one's small comfort.

Fourth, revelation completes reason instead of destroying it. Astell does not say that every doctrine must be easy to imagine. She says a doctrine can be above reason without being against reason. Above reason means the mind cannot fully explain it, as with the union of divine and human nature in Christ. Against reason would mean false, immoral, or contradictory. Faith is rational when reason has good grounds to trust the revealer.

Fifth, the Church of England gives this faith a public shape. Astell defends Anglican worship, scripture, sacraments, and ordered authority. But authority is not an excuse for mental laziness. The believer should understand the church's teaching as far as possible and practice it in daily life.

The result is a demanding form of rational Christianity. It asks women to think, but it does not make private judgment the final rule of everything. It honors church order, but it does not let custom replace understanding. It treats morality as inseparable from theology: bad desires cloud judgment, while a purified life helps the mind see truth more clearly.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Rational Christianity: Christianity that uses reason instead of fearing it. Example: Astell thinks a woman should ask why Christian worship is true and good, not simply repeat words because family or clergy tell her to.

• Natural religion: truths about God and duty that reason can reach before appeal to scripture. Example: the order and dependence of the world can lead the mind to a creator, and the desire for happiness can lead it to ask what human beings are made for.

• Revelation: truth God makes known beyond what unaided reason can discover. Example: the doctrine of the Trinity is not something Astell thinks ordinary reasoning could invent, but it can be received on divine authority.

• Faith: rational trust in God. Faith is not guessing. It is believing what God reveals because God is truthful, even when the thing revealed is not fully clear to us.

• Duty: a binding "ought." Astell divides duty into duties to God, neighbor, and self. Example: helping a neighbor at real cost can be a duty because the neighbor's greater good matters more than one's smaller convenience.

• True happiness: the lasting good of the soul, not just pleasure or advantage. Example: getting praise may feel good for a day, but Astell thinks a soul ordered toward God has a deeper happiness that cannot be supplied by reputation.

• Church authority: the church's right to teach and order worship. Astell accepts Anglican authority, but she expects believers to use understanding. Authority should guide reason, not replace it.

• Women's authorship: the title matters. A "daughter" of the Church publicly explains doctrine. That is a claim about women's religious agency: women can profess, argue, and teach within Christian life.

• Stewardship: the idea that goods are entrusted by God, not owned as absolute private possessions. Example: wealth beyond reasonable need creates duties of charity, because the owner is a steward under God.

• Passive obedience: submission to lawful authority for the sake of public order. Astell's version is conservative and can sound severe: she often prefers enduring a private wrong to breaking the structure of government. That does not make her anti-woman; it shows how her feminism sits inside High Church Anglican politics rather than modern liberal politics.

Why It Matters

The Christian Religion matters because it shows Astell's feminism in its most theological form. Her point is not only that women need education for social improvement. It is that women have rational souls before God. If religion is the highest business of human life, excluding women from serious religious understanding is an offense against their purpose.

The book also complicates the history of rational religion. Astell is not a deist, someone who tries to keep only a bare natural religion and set aside revealed doctrine. She is also not an enemy of reason. She wants reason, revelation, and Anglican church teaching to support each other.

It also matters for early modern moral philosophy. Astell treats morality as a matter of rightly ordered love, disciplined desire, and duty. Moral and intellectual improvement cannot be split apart: pride, vanity, lust, and worldly ambition make people worse thinkers because they bend the mind toward excuses.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Astell belongs with Rationalism, Anglican theology, and early modern women's philosophy. She is close to the tradition of Rene Descartes in treating the mind as a rational power that should move from confusion to clarity. She is also connected to Cambridge Platonist and High Church Anglican currents, though there is no local page for those here.

Her relation to John Locke is critical. She resists versions of "reasonable Christianity" that seem to make doctrine too thin or treat many ordinary believers as people who only need plain commands. Against that, she insists that women and socially ordinary people can think justly even if they do not have the leisure or training for vast learning.

Damaris Masham is one of the main nearby opponents. Masham's Occasional Thoughts partly answers Astell and gives a more Lockean account of reasonable Christian life, toleration, sociability, and women's education.

Catharine Trotter Cockburn is a useful comparison, not the author of this work. Cockburn also defends rational Christianity and women's public philosophical authority, but she is much more sympathetic to Locke and later to Samuel Clarke's moral fitness theory. Astell is more anti-Lockean, more Cartesian, and more High Church.

Related Pages

• Mary Astell
• Rene Descartes
• John Locke
• Damaris Masham
• Catharine Trotter Cockburn
• Feminist Philosophy
• Early Modern Philosophy
• Rationalism
• Empiricism
• A Serious Proposal to the Ladies
• Some Reflections upon Marriage