How is 18th century religion in England linked to Swift's Gulliver's Travels?

I would identify three major themes of Gulliver's Travels that relate to the religious beliefs of Swift's time.
First, Swift was a devout Christian, a member of the Anglican Church. But from his writings, one gets the sense that he was leaning towards a more ecumenical form of Christianity in which Lilliputian-like differences of opinion between denominations would become unimportant and fade away. To Swift, these disputes were petty and "small," like the Lilliputians and their arguments among themselves.
Second, Swift's satirical "mirror" is meant to show the Europeans that their own behavior is hypocritical with regard to religion. The King of Brobdingnag famously tells Gulliver that the English (by extension Europeans in general) must be "pernicious odious vermin" based on Gulliver's own descriptions of their wars and history. Put this in the context of Swift's writings overall. He criticizes the ruling class in A Modest Proposal for its unthinking insensitivity, cruelty, and hypocrisy. Part of Swift's outrage is that the people who committed these cruelties all claimed to believe in religion.
The third point is Swift's belief that without religion, man would degenerate into a condition of savagery. This is his implicit theme in Book IV. The Yahoos are—like the humans in the Planet of the Apes saga of our own age—a projection of what mankind can deteriorate into without a civilizing force to control them. For Swift, religion was that force.


In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift pokes satirical jabs at most aspects of European life, including religion. Swift's parody of eighteenth-century religion is most evident in Gulliver's first voyage, in which he is stranded on the island of Lilliput. The Lilliputians are wracked by several disputes, including the debate between the Big Enders and the Little Enders. These rival factions are engaged in a bitter argument about the proper way to open an egg (Big Enders think it should be cracked open at the big end, while the Little Enders advocate for the little end). This disagreement is meant to satirize the tensions and conflicts between Protestants and Catholics during Swift's day. By choosing such a petty dispute, Swift points out the absurdity of religious disagreements and suggests that the differences between Catholics and Protestants might not be very important after all.

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