Nonconformist (Protestantism)
Nonconformists were
Use of the term Nonconformist in England and Wales was precipitated after the
By law and social custom, Nonconformists were restricted from many spheres of public life – not least, from access to public office, civil service careers, or degrees at university – and were referred to as suffering from
One influential Nonconformist minister was Matthew Henry, who beginning in 1710 published his multi-volume commentary that is still used and available in the 21st century. Isaac Watts is an equally recognised Nonconformist minister whose hymns are still sung by Christians worldwide.
The term Nonconformist is used in a broader sense to refer to Christians who are not communicants of a majority national church, such as the Lutheran Church of Sweden.[5]
England
Origins
The Act of Uniformity 1662 required churchmen to use all rites and ceremonies as prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer.[6] It also required episcopal ordination of all ministers of the Church of England—a pronouncement most odious to the Puritans, the faction of the church which had come to dominance during the English Civil War and the Interregnum. Consequently, nearly 2,000 clergymen were "ejected" from the established church for refusing to comply with the provisions of the act, an event referred to as the Great Ejection.[6] The Great Ejection created an abiding public consciousness of nonconformity.
Thereafter, a Nonconformist was any English subject belonging to a non-
The term
A census of religion in 1851 revealed Nonconformists made up about half the number of people who attended church services on Sundays. In the larger manufacturing areas, Nonconformists clearly outnumbered members of the Church of England.[10]
Trends within Nonconformism
Nonconformists in the 18th and 19th century claimed a devotion to hard work, temperance, frugality, and upward mobility, with which historians today largely agree.[clarification needed] A major Unitarian magazine, the Christian Monthly Repository asserted in 1827:
Throughout England a great part of the more active members of society, who have the most intercourse with the people have the most influence over them, are Protestant Dissenters. These are manufacturers, merchants and substantial tradesman, or persons who are in the enjoyment of a competency realised by trade, commerce and manufacturers, gentlemen of the professions of law and physic, and agriculturalists, of that class particularly who live upon their own freehold. The virtues of temperance, frugality, prudence and integrity promoted by religious Nonconformity...assist the temporal prosperity of these descriptions of persons, as they tend also to lift others to the same rank in society.[11]
Women
The emerging middle-class norm was for women to be excluded from the public sphere—the domain of politics, paid work, commerce and public speaking. Instead, it was considered that women should dominate in the realm of domestic life, focused on care of the family, the husband, the children, the household, religion, and moral behaviour.
Politics
Disabilities removed
Next on the agenda was the matter of church rates, which were local taxes at the parish level for the support of the parish church building in England and Wales. Only buildings of the established church received the tax money. Civil disobedience was attempted but was met with seizure of personal property and even imprisonment. The compulsory factor was finally abolished in 1868 by William Ewart Gladstone, and payment was made voluntary.[18] While Gladstone was a moralistic evangelical inside the Church of England, he had strong support in the Nonconformist community.[19][20] The marriage question was settled by Marriage Act 1836 which allowed local government registrars to handle marriages. Nonconformist ministers in their own chapels were allowed to marry couples if a registrar was present. Also in 1836, civil registration of births, deaths and marriages was taken from the hands of local parish officials and given to local government registrars. Burial of the dead was a more troubling problem, for urban chapels rarely had graveyards, and sought to use the traditional graveyards controlled by the established church. The Burial Laws Amendment Act 1880 finally allowed this.[21]: 144–147
Impact on politics
Since 1660, Dissenters, later Nonconformists, have played a major role in English politics. In a political context, historians distinguish between two categories of Dissenters, in addition to the
After the Test and Corporation Acts were repealed in 1828, all the Nonconformists elected to Parliament were Liberals.[10] Relatively few MPs were Dissenters. However the Dissenters were major voting bloc in many areas, such as the East Midlands.[24] They were very well organised and highly motivated and largely won over the Whigs and Liberals to their cause. Gladstone brought the majority of Dissenters around to support for Home Rule for Ireland, putting the dissenting Protestants in league with the Irish Catholics in an otherwise unlikely alliance. The Nonconformist conscience was also repeatedly called upon by Gladstone for support for his moralistic foreign policy.[22] In election after election, Protestant ministers rallied their congregations to the Liberal ticket. (In Scotland, the Presbyterians played a similar role to the Nonconformist Methodists, Baptists and other groups in England and Wales.)[25] Many of the first MPs elected for the Labour Party in the 1900s were also nonconformists.[26]
Nonconformists were angered by the
By 1914 the linkage between the Nonconformists and Liberal Party was weakening, as secularisation reduced the strength of Dissent in English political life.[31]
Today
Today, Protestant churches independent of the Anglican Church of England or the Presbyterian Church of Scotland are often called "free churches", meaning they are free from state control. This term is used interchangeably with "Nonconformist".[32]
The steady pace of secularisation picked up faster and faster during the 20th century, until only pockets of nonconformist religiosity remained in England.[33][34][35]
Wales
Nonconformity in Wales can be traced to the Welsh Methodist revival; Wales effectively had become a Nonconformist country by the mid-19th century; nonconformist chapel attendance significantly outnumbered Anglican church attendance.[36] They were based in the fast-growing upwardly mobile urban middle class.[37] The influence of Nonconformism in the early part of the 20th century, boosted by the
In other countries, the term Nonconformist is used in a broader sense to refer to Christians who are not communicants of a majority
See also
- English Dissenters
- English Presbyterianism
- Christian revival
- Independent (religion)
- Nonconformist register – records of baptisms, weddings and funerals kept by chapels
- Recusancy
- Religion in the United Kingdom
References
- ^ ISBN 978-0-511-05784-7.
- ISBN 978-1-7252-3202-0.
- ISBN 978-0-631-20154-0.
- ^ Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part One: 1829–1859 (1966) p 370
- ^ a b News from Sweden, Volumes 766–792. Swedish Consulate General. 1959.
The number of communicants also shows a marked increase in many places. Of all weddings, 91.4 per cent take place under the auspices of the Lutheran State Church and 1.5 per cent in nonconformist churches, while the remaining 7.1 per cent are civil marriages.
- ^ a b Choudhury 2005, p. 173
- ^ Reynolds 2003, p. 267
- ^ "Nonconformist (Protestant)". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 30 January 2014.
- ^ Cross 1997, p. 490
- ^ a b Mitchell 2011, p. 547
- , quote p. 41
- ISBN 978-1-4129-6594-1.
- .
- ^ Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part One: 1829–1859 (1966) pp. 60–95, 142–58
- .
- ^ E. Neville Williams, The Eighteenth-Century Constitution, 1688–1815: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 341–343.
- JSTOR 1876681.
- .
- JSTOR 2638302.
- ^ Jacob P. Ellens, Religious Routes to Gladstonian Liberalism: The Church Rate Conflict in England and Wales 1852–1868 (2010).
- ^ a b c Richard Helmstadter, "The Nonconformist Conscience" in Peter Marsh, ed., The Conscience of the Victorian State (1979)
- ^ a b D. W. Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914 (George Allen & Unwin, 1982).
- .
- ^ Henry Pelling, Social Geography of British Elections, 1885–1910 (1967) 89–90, 206,
- .
- OCLC 1285556329, retrieved 20 June 2022
- ISBN 9780582089211.
- .
- JSTOR 1050168.
- ^ Élie Halévy, The Rule of Democracy (1905–1914) (1956). pp 64–90.
- JSTOR 1849549.
- ISBN 978-1-84802-395-6.
- .
- ^ Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (2009)
- ^ Alan D. Gilbert, The making of post-Christian Britain: a history of the secularization of modern society (Longman, 1980).
- ^ "Religion in 19th and 20th century Wales". BBC. Retrieved 31 January 2014.
- ISBN 9780198229698.
Works cited
- Choudhury, Bibhash (2005). English Social and Cultural History: An Introductory Guide and Glossary (2nd ed.). PHI Learning. ISBN 8120328493.
- Cross, F. L. (1997), Livingstone, E.A. (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press
- Helmstadter, Richard J. (1979). "The Nonconformist Conscience". In Marsh, Peter (ed.). The Conscience of the Victorian State. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. pp. 135–72. .
- Mitchell, Sally (2011). Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. London: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0415668514.
- Reynolds, Noel Beldon (2003). Durham, Cole (ed.). Religious liberty in Western thought. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. ISBN 0802848532.
Further reading
- Bebbington, David W. (2003). Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-10464-7.
- Bebbington, David W. (1984). "Nonconformity and electoral sociology, 1867–1918". S2CID 145647109.
- Binfield, Clyde (1977). So down to prayers: studies in English nonconformity, 1780–1920. J. M. Dent & Sons. ISBN 978-0-87471-959-8.
- Bradley, Ian C. (1976). The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-02-514420-0. — Covers the Evangelical wing of the established Church of England
- Brown, Callum G. (2009). The death of Christian Britain: understanding secularisation, 1800–2000 (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-47133-6.
- Cowherd, Raymond G. (1956). The Politics of English Dissent: The Religious Aspects of Liberal and Humanitarian Reform Movements from 1815 to 1848. New York: New York University Press. OCLC 256591.
- Davies, Gwyn (2002). A light in the land: Christianity in Wales, 200–2000. Bridgend: ISBN 978-1-85049-181-1.
- Ellens, Jacob (1994). Religious Routes to Gladstonian Liberalism: The Church Rate Conflict in England and Wales 1852–1868. Penn State University Press. JSTOR 10.5325/j.ctv1453n37.
- Hempton, David (1984). Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750–1850. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-1269-9.
- Koss, Stephen (1975). Nonconformity in Modem British Politics. Hamden, CT: Shoestring Press.
- Machin, G. I. T. (1974). "Gladstone and Nonconformity in the 1860s: The Formation of an Alliance". The Historical Journal. 17 (2): 347–364. S2CID 154524776.
- Mullett, Charles F. (1937). "The Legal Position of English Protestant Dissenters, 1689–1767". JSTOR 1067999.
- Payne, Ernest A. (1944). The Free Church Tradition in the Life of England. London: S. C. M. Press. LCCN 44047927. — well-documented brief survey
- ISBN 978-1-63087-579-4.
- Wellings, Martin, ed. (2014). Protestant Nonconformity and Christian Missions. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. ISBN 978-1-62564-773-3.
- Wilson, Linda (1999). "'Constrained by Zeal': Women in Mid-Nineteenth Century Nonconformist Churches". Journal of Religious History. 23 (2): 185–202. .
- Wilson, Linda (2000). Constrained by Zeal: Female Spirituality Amongst Nonconformists, 1825–75. Carlisle: Paternoster. ISBN 978-0-85364-972-4.