Doctrine of the Trinity Act 1813

The Doctrine of the Trinity Act 1813 (53 Geo. III c. 160. sometimes called the Trinitarian Act 1812) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It amended the Blasphemy Act 1697 in respect of its Trinitarian provisions.

The Act, passed July 21, was also variously known as the Unitarian Relief Act (Trinity Act), The Unitarian Toleration Bill, and Mr William Smith's Bill, after Whig politician William Smith.^[1]

The Act granted toleration for Unitarian worship, as previously the Act of Toleration 1689 had only granted toleration to those Protestant dissenters who accepted the Trinity.^[2]

It has been regarded as legalising the practice of Islam, which does not have a trinitarian doctrine;^[3] as the Blasphemy Act applied only to those educated in or having made profession of the Christian religion, but the amending Act would in theory have applied to converts only to Islam and even then would not have allowed them to deny the truth of the Christian religion.

The Blasphemy Act was repealed in 1967, implicitly taking the Doctrine of the Trinity Act with it.

Notes

1. ^ Maclear J.F. Church and state in the modern age: a documentary history 1995
2. ^ Dudley Julius Medley, A Student's Manual of English Constitutional History. Sixth Edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1925), p. 653.
3. ^ British and Muslim?, Abdal Hakim Murad