Kirstin,
To me the real revelatory reading in this chapter is not the one of Young but the treatment of Prior. I must admit that Young still seems rather remote to me, even after the reading, but the reading of Prior as a closeted fideist and quasi-Calvinist with real intellectual roots in the Reformation pulls together the different aspects of this puzzling poet.
I, too, was curious about the relative neglect of the hymns, though the comments on Watt were interesting, and I think generally this chapter crystallized my feeling that BP is interested in a form of religion and religious expression that is almost entirely intellectualist, individualist, and aesthetic--again the implicit norm seems to be the poetry and sermons of Donne. That's fine, but it also runs counter to many of the implications of the Reformation in England, which had leveling or iconoclastic strains, as well. This is only to point out that the "religious poetry" in this study is of a particular sort, and it might be worth talking about other varieties of religious verse that might affect BP's thesis.
The other issue you bring up is also interesting, because it raises the problem of "the dominant" again. BP's notion of the fideism affecting serious treatments of religion is a really ingenious way to describe a surprising commonalty between Prior, Young, and Johnson, but the question is how well it accounts for the idiosyncrasies of each writer's approach to the absent deity. And here I'd say this selective account of "religious poetry" works surprisingly well with Prior, maybe not so well with Young, and perhaps best with Johnson.
DM
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