Review
Books
Culture
6 min read

The beliefs that made Jane Austen and her world

A ‘fashionable goodness’ lay at the heart of the author and her writing.

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here

A woman in 18th century clothes sits within a windowsill reading a book
Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen in Becoming Jane.

‘There just wasn’t a comprehensive book on Jane Austen’s faith’, Brenda Cox told me when I chatted to her recently, ‘That’s why I decided to write one’. She’s right. There are a handful of books that treat Austen’s Anglican faith seriously, even extensively. Irene Collins’ two books on Austen, Jane Austen and the Clergy (1994) and Jane Austen: The Parson’s Daughter (1998), as well as Laura Mooneyham White’s Jane Austen’s Anglicanism (2011) are excellent examples. But they’re also very academic. On the other hand, Cox’s new book Fashionable Goodness: Christianity in Jane Austen’s England (2022) achieves something truly remarkable: it’s both highly accessible – assuming no prior knowledge of Austen’s life, of theology, or of Regency history – and highly insightful. It’s a true labour of love (Cox told me she spent years on reading and research), and it shows. Before I say anything else about Fashionable Goodness, let me urge you to read it. If you want to understand the way Austen and her characters saw the world around them, this is the book to pick up.   

I’ve spent the last ten odd years reading, thinking, and writing about Austen, and yet Cox has made me see her novels in a new light. What she does best is to help us immerse ourselves into the daily life of Regency people, detailing in the first part of her book how the Church of England functioned in Austen’s times. She explains the difference between a vicar, a rector, and a curate; what tithes were; what exams a young man had to pass to become an ordained priest. As I was reading Cox’s book, Austen’s characters gradually came alive in my imagination like never before. Learning more about how they lived their faith day to day helped me to better grasp their motivations and their behaviour. For example, how many readers (myself included!) have been left confused by the passage in Persuasion where Anne judges her cousin Mr. Elliot for his habits of ‘Sunday traveling’? It only starts to make sense once we know that traveling on a Sunday would have likely meant missing church attendance, of which Austen disapproved. Similarly, in Mansfield Park Mary Crawford’s scoffing remark that Edmund Bertram will become ‘a celebrated preacher in some great society of Methodists’ will mean little to us unless we know that in the early 19th century Methodists were often treated suspiciously and looked down upon as overly emotional and ‘enthusiastic’. To my surprise, even my opinion of Austen’s most notoriously silly clergyman, Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Collins, improved. Cox points out that Mr. Collins writes at least some of his own sermons, at a time when many clergymen would simply pick ready-written sermons out of a sermon book; he is also resident in his own parish of Hunsford after marrying Charlotte Lucas, when non-residence – the practice of a priest delegating all duties to a curate and living away from the parish – was common. Mr. Collins may be irritating and obsequious to a fault, but if we judge him by the standards of his own time, not of ours, he emerges as quite a respectable man after all.  

Far from being in ignorance of these changes in religious sensibility, Austen observed them, and they gave her hope. 

And that is something else that Cox does brilliantly: she shows us that the past is indeed a foreign country, with different moral standards. Instead of trying to find ways in which we’re similar to the people of Austen’s England, Cox helps us to realise that the values and assumptions of Austen’s England are radically different from ours. Even our language is different. Focusing on what she identifies as key ‘faith words’, Cox shows us that we cannot understand just how deeply English society was steeped in the Christian faith, unless we recognise the religious significance that many words had in Austen’s times. For example, when Elinor Dashwood cries to her sister Marianne, ‘Exert yourself’ in Sense and Sensibility, she doesn’t simply mean that Marianne should be less emotionally affected by Willoughby’s betrayal. Rather, she’s reminding Marianne of her religious duty of ‘exertion’, meaning not giving in to despair. Or, when Anne Elliot engages in ‘An interval of meditation, serious and grateful’ after her engagement to Captain Wentworth in Persuasion, we should not understand Anne’s ‘serious meditation’ as mere reflection; Austen would have expected her readers to know that, in this passage, Anne is examining her conscience and specifically praying. Even the word ‘manners’, often mentioned in Mansfield Park, had a deeper meaning than simply social graces, pointing to a person’s religious principles. Cox encourages us to notice these differences, and to let the past change our way of seeing the world through its alienness. 

Lastly, Cox also presents an England whose religious sensibilities were changing fast. The Church of England faced pressure to address its problems. Pluralism, the practice of one clergyman serving several parishes, meant that some members of the clergy were very well off, while others struggled to make a living. In turn, this encouraged non-residence – especially if the parishes were far from each other – and led to the non-resident parishes to be neglected. But at the same time, the Church of England was also being infused with newly found religious fervour. The Evangelical and Methodist movements, still officially part of the Anglican Church at this point, were spreading at a rapid pace thanks to figures like George Whitfield and the Wesley brothers, championing many worthy causes in the name of the Christian faith. The abolitionist movement heralded by Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Hannah More was gaining momentum just as Austen was beginning to write novels. By the time Sense and Sensibility, her first, was published, the slave trade had been abolished in England. Sunday schools were opening up which would educate thousands and thousands of children in the 19th century; the prison reform movement was gaining popularity, as were efforts to combat animal cruelty and ensure better conditions for factory workers. Goodness, as Cox puts it, was becoming fashionable in England.  

What about Austen herself? Cox tells us that she mentions reading the works of abolitionists with pleasure in her letters, as well as remarking on the newly emerging Evangelical movement with somewhat like cautious admiration. Far from being in ignorance of these changes in religious sensibility, Austen observed them, and they gave her hope. As Cox quotes in the final chapter of Fashionable Goodness, in an 1814 letter to her friend Martha Lloyd, Austen describes England as ‘a Nation in spite of much Evil improving in Religion’. Austen was confident that faithful Christians could rise to the challenges placed before them, and this confidence is reflected in her heroines and heroes, whose storylines trace their growth in virtue. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that 1814 is also the year Austen started working on Mansfield Park, a novel whose heroine, Fanny Price, is famously the most ardent in her moral principles. Fanny’s ‘goodness’, however – which the narrator often explicitly mentions – is no longer fashionable. Contemporary readers of Austen tend to dislike her seriousness and her outspoken religiosity. But perhaps, if we join Brenda Cox in immersing ourselves in the alien country that is Regency England, we can learn to judge the ‘goodness’ of Austen’s characters by different standards from our own. Perhaps we can free ourselves of our prejudices, and appreciate earnest characters like Fanny, as well as witty ones, like Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet. Perhaps we too, like Austen herself, will gain hope that ‘goodness’ can be made fashionable once more in our time. 

Article
AI
Belief
Culture
Mental Health
Pride
4 min read

Are AI chatbots actually demons in disguise?

Early Christian thinkers explain chatbots better than Silicon Valley does

Gabrielle Thomas is Assistant Professor of Early Christianity and Anglican Studies at Emory University

An AI image of a person stood holding a phone with a bubble above their head, below them is a chatbot-like demon with a tail
Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

AI Chatbots. They’re here to save us, aren’t they? Their designers argue so, fervently. There’s no doubt they are useful. Some, like EpiscoBOT (formerly known as ‘Cathy’), are designed for those asking ‘life’s biggest questions. 'Our girlfriend Scarlett’, is an AI companion who “is always eager to please you in any way imaginable.”  So why not defend them?  

 They offer companionship for the lonely, spark creativity when we run on empty, and make us more productive. They also provide answers for any and every kind of question without hesitation. They are, in short, a refuge. Many chatbots come with names, amplifying our sense of safety. Names define and label things, but they do far more than that. Names foster connection. They can evoke and describe a relationship, allowing us to make intimate connections with the things named. When the “things” in question are AI chatbots, however, we can run into trouble.  

According to a study conducted by researchers at Stanford University, chatbots can contribute to “harmful stigma and dangerous responses.” More than this, they can even magnify psychotic symptoms. The more we learn, the more we are beginning to grasp that the much of the world offered by AI chatbots is an illusory one.  

Early Christian thinkers had a distinct category for precisely this kind of illusion: the demonic. They understood demons not as red, horned bodies or fiery realms, but as entities with power to fabricate illusions—visions, appearances, and deceptive signs that distorted human perception of reality. Demons also personified pride. As fallen angels, they turned away from truth toward themselves. Their illusions lured humans into sharing that pride—believing false greatness, clinging to false refuge. 

 Looking back to early Christian approaches to demonology may help us see more clearly what is at stake in adopting without question AI chatbots. 

  

According to early Christian thinkers, demons rarely operated through brute force. Instead, they worked through deception. Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373) was a bishop and theologian who wrote Life of Antony. In this, he recounted how the great desert father was plagued by demonic visions—phantoms of wild beasts, apparitions of gold, even false angels of light. The crucial danger was not physical attack but illusion. Demons were understood as beings that manufactured appearances to confuse and mislead. A monk in his cell might see radiant light and hear beautiful voices, but he was to test it carefully, for demons disguise themselves as angels. 

Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345–399), a Christian monk, ascetic, and theologian influential in early monastic spirituality, warned that demons insinuated themselves into thought, planting ideas that felt self-generated but in fact led one astray. This notion—that the demonic is most effective when it works through appearances—shaped the entire ascetic project. To resist demons meant to resist their illusions. 

 Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was a North African bishop and theologian whose writings shaped Western Christianity. In his book The City of God, he argued that pagan religion was largely a vast system of demonic deception. Demons, he argued, produced false miracles, manipulated dreams, and inspired performances in the theatre to ensnare the masses. They trafficked in spectacle, seducing imagination and desire rather than presenting truth. 

 AI chatbots function in a strikingly similar register. They do not exert power by physical coercion. Instead, they craft illusion. They can produce an authoritative-sounding essay full of falsehoods. They can create images of people doing something that never happened. They can provide companionship that leads to self-harm or even suicide. Like the demonic, the chatbot operates in the register of vision, sound, and thought. It produces appearances that persuade the senses while severing them from reality. The risk is not that the chatbot forces us, but that it deceives us—just like demonic powers. 

Using AI chatbots, too, tempts us with illusions of pride. A writer may pass off AI-generated work as their own, for example. The danger here is not simply being deceived but becoming complicit in deception, using illusion to magnify ourselves. Early Christian theologians like Athansius, Evagrius and Augustine, warned that pride was the surest sign of demonic influence. To the extent that AI tempts us toward inflated images of ourselves, it participates in the same pattern. 

When it comes to AI chatbots, we need a discipline of discernment—testing whether the images and texts bear the marks of truth or deception. Just as monks could not trust every appearance of light, we cannot trust every image or every confident paragraph produced by the chatbots. We need criteria of verification and communities of discernment to avoid mistaking illusion for reality. 

Help is at hand.  

Through the ages, Christians have responded to demonic illusions, not with naïve credulity nor blanket rejection of the sensory world, but through the hard work of discernment: testing appearances, cultivating disciplines of resistance, and orienting desire toward truth.  

 The Life of Antony describes how the monk confronted demonic illusions with ascetic discipline. When confronted by visions of treasure, Antony refused to be moved by desire. When assailed by apparitions, he remained in prayer. He tested visions by their effects: truthful visions produced humility, peace, and clarity, while demonic illusions provoked pride, disturbance, and confusion. We can cultivate a way of life that does the same. Resisting the illusions may require forms of asceticism: fasting from chatbots and cultivating patience in verification.  

Chatbot illusions are not necessarily demonic in themselves. The key is whether the illusion points beyond itself toward truth and reality, or whether it traps us in deception.  

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