Friends of Religious Equality: Nonconformist Politics in Mid-Victorian England.

Johnson, Dale A.

Friends of Religious Equality: Nonconformist Politics in Mid-Victorian England. By Timothy Larsen. Studies in Modern British Religious History 1. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 1999. ix + 300 pp. $60.00 cloth; $35.00 paper.

A prominent thesis drives this study--that the principle of religious equality was the foundation of the political philosophy and activity of Nonconformists in the mid-Victorian era (here understood as 1847-67). If one were to think this a not particularly dramatic claim, Timothy Larsen is quick to show how the lingering stereotype, as well as much continuing scholarship, sees a tension between religious and political concerns among Nonconformists of this era, projects later social reform interests of the "Nonconformist conscience" back on this earlier period, or tries to root Dissenting political views in an ideology of Evangelicalism (not acknowledging the profound differences between Evangelical Anglicans and Evangelical Nonconformists). One problem has to do with the referent for "Dissent" or "Nonconformity" in any analysis. Larsen's focus limits the term basically to Congregationalists and Baptists. Wesleyans, the largest non-Anglican Protestant denomination by this period, are out because they did not identify with those labels and did not have the same kind of ecclesiology (which Larsen sees as the ground for the principle itself); Unitarians, Quakers, and Presbyterians are out for other reasons. While such limitations produce greater consistency, the force of the thesis is more limited than the title itself might suggest.

Nineteenth-century Nonconformists certainly had grievances--from church rates to exclusion from the universities to denial of access to consecrated burial grounds. Moving from appeals for religious toleration to religious equality was a sign of increased vigor and confidence, and their claims were marked by a justifiable fear of state involvement in or support of religious activity. Thus the primary issue by midcentury became disestablishment. Larsen lays out the Nonconformist argument well, but because he stops at 1867 he is less interested in helping a reader see why the protest against religious establishment was unsuccessful, when virtually every other grievance had been eliminated by 1880. At the same time he uses the adjectives "militant" and "radical" so frequently (following convention and the labeling common in the period) that readers could easily be misled as to the character of the protest.

Opposition to state education and support of voluntary efforts was a corollary of the disestablishment issue--fear of public education as a means of social control, assertion of parental rights, concern for religion as an important part of a child's education, and suspicion of what the state might do in education if in league with the Church of England all played into the development of this position. Before the first Education Act in 1870 it was at least arguable, but population growth and the increasing recognition of the need for broad public education made the cause a nonstarter. Larsen calls it "doomed idealism" (166), not exactly a persuasive label. Nonconformists lost considerable momentum in the division over this issue--whether to advocate denominational efforts or support a secular national system--and ironically they lost on both fronts.

The final section, "Another Gospel?", takes up aspects of the charges that the politics of Nonconformity were paternalistic and coercive. In the mid-Victorian period, two issues of moral reform were prominent: prohibition and Sabbatarianism. The first is easier to address, as Larsen notes that the majority of Dissenters, especially those active in politics, were against prohibition.

Here, as with Sabbatarianism, the principle being violated was not religious equality but state noninterference. But on both, Larsen concludes that "there was another political gospel within Nonconformity ... but it was not the faith of the majority" (206). On such issues of the relation between religion and society, one might also conclude that religious equality is not sufficient to explain the range of responses.

A chapter on national identity adds even more complexity to the theme. Nonconformists were patriots as well as dissenters; they supported national wars and were as vigorous in their anti-Catholic spirit (though opposed to Romanism rather than to Romanists) as were other segments of the population, though they tended to oppose national days of humiliation and fasting. What emerges, Larsen properly concludes, is less an incompatibility than a vision of synergism between religious equality and the foundations of a Christian nation. Here the Wesleyans could be included on the spectrum, although in a somewhat different place from Congregationalists and Baptists. Such an issue has been more prominently a part of the historiography of the corresponding period in American religious history. Larsen's contribution in part is that he engages that juxtaposition on the English scene, even if his thesis tends to undermine the complexity rather than engage it.

Dale A. Johnson Vanderbilt University