Loudon views on religion and Christianity

Loudon was reticent about his religious views, possibly because he was criticised for them in some reviews of his 1822 Encyclopedia of Gardening. One can't imagine his being afraid of controversy or criticism. But he may well have thought that his clients (as estate owers and book buyers) would not want to patronise someone thought to be a sceptic. Loudon may well have been a deist. In the 1830s, deism referred to a philosophical and religious belief that emphasized the existence of a supreme being or creator who established the natural laws governing the universe but did not intervene in human affairs or the natural order after creation. Deists rejected the concept of divine revelation, miracles, and the authority of organized religion, instead favoring a rational and naturalistic understanding of God.

1. Loudon's views on matters of faith are uncertain and deserve further study. Points to take into consideration are:

2. The wording on William Loudon's tomb, presumably written by his son, ends with this sentence: 'This monument set up by John Claudius Loudon the eldest of his sons stands as a witness of his piety.’ This would be no place to witness the son's piety so it must refer to his father.

3. It is very likely that Loudon was brought up, like his mother and grandfather, as a pious member of the Church of Scotland

4. As a student at the University of Edinburgh, he is likely to have become familiar with the sceptical philosophy of David Hume

5. In his comments on Italy, Loudon is sarcastic about the wealth and property accumulated by the Roman Catholic Church

6.. In his Encyclopedia of Gardening, Loudon gives his view that since the various world faiths give different accounts of God, they must all be regarded as relative truths, not absolute truths.

7. In his pamphlet on Parochial Instutions, by which be meant educational institutions, he calls for the national church to be disestablished and for natural theology to be taught in schools. Most supporters of natural theology, but not all of them, followed William Paley in seeing it as a support for Christianity. It is possible that Loudon considered it less dogmatic than Christianity and there for better.

8. Loudon was a friend and admirer of Jeremy Bentham, who is widely believed to have been a sceptic but who also thought that if religious faith made people happier then it satisfied the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number principle. Loudon may have shared this view

9. Loudon was buried in Kensal Green, not in or near his parents' famous tomb in Pinner. This may be because you had to have a Christian burial if interred on consecrated ground.

10. Loudon's daughter, Agnes Loudon, is buried beside her parents and has a quotation from the Bible on her headstone: 'Run now, I pray thee, to meet her and say unto her is it well with thee?  Is it well with the child and she answered, it is well.