Introduction

Ledger-Lomas, Michael

doi:10.1093/oso/9780199683710.003.0001

Chapter

Introduction

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https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199683710.003.0001

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1–36

Published:

May 2017

Abstract

The chapters in this volume concentrate on the Dissenting traditions of the United Kingdom, the British Empire, and the United States. The Introduction weaves together their arguments, giving an overview of the historiography on Dissent while making the case for seeing Dissenters in different Anglophone connections as interconnected and conscious of their genealogical connections. The nineteenth century saw the creation of a vast Anglo-world which also brought Anglophone Dissent to its apogee. Yet any treatment of the subject must begin by recognizing the difficulties of spotting ‘Dissent’ outside the British Isles, where church–state relations were different from those that had originally produced Dissent. The chapter starts by emphasizing that if Dissent was a political and constitutional identity, then it was a relative and tactical one, which was often only strong where a strong Church of England existed to dissent against. It also suggests that in most parts of the world the later nineteenth century saw a growing enthusiasm for the moral and educational activism of the state, which plays against the idea of Dissent as a static, purely negative identity. The second section of the Introduction suggests identifying a fixation on the Bible as the watermark of Dissent. This did not mean there was agreement on what the Bible said or how to read it: the emphasis in Dissenting traditions on private judgement meant that conflict over Scripture was always endemic to them. The third section identifies a radical insistence on human spiritual equality as a persistent characteristic of Dissenters throughout the nineteenth century while also suggesting it was hard to maintain as they became aligned with social hierarchies and imperial authorities. Yet it also argues that transnational connections kept Dissenters from subsiding into acquiescence in the powers that were. The fourth section suggests that the defence and revival of a gospel faith also worked best when it was most transnational. The final section asks how far members of Dissenting traditions reconciled their allegiance to them with participation in high, national, and imperial cultures. It suggests that Dissenters could be seen as belonging to a robust subculture, one particularly marked by its domestication of the sacred and sacralization of the domestic. At the same time, however, both ‘Dissenting Gothic’ architecture and the embrace by Dissenters of denominational and national history writing illustrate that their identity was compatible with a confident grasp of national and imperial identities. That confidence was undercut in some quarters by the spread of pessimism among evangelicals and the turn to premillennial eschatology which injected a new urgency into the world mission. The itinerant holiness evangelists who turned away from the institutions built by mainstream denominations fostered Pentecostal movements, which in the twentieth century would decisively shift the balance of global Christianity from north to south. They indicate that the strength and global reach of Anglophone Dissenting traditions still lay in their dynamic heterogeneity.

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