Coleridge and the lay sermon

This essay, a contribution to the study of secularisation, explores conditions under which a new genre, the lay sermon, emerged early in the nineteenth century. It does so through a reading of the texts that inaugurate the genre, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lay Sermons (1817). In particular, the essay examines Coleridge’s Lay Sermons’ historical context, that is, to the beginnings of liberal politics. And it also pays attention to Coleridge’s relation to the heritage of religious sermons, especially seventeenth- century sermons. It argues that the lay sermon, unlike the religious sermon, tends to be directed to particular social groups or formations rather than, more broadly, to Christians of a particular denomination.