3.9.2.1 Anti-Slavery
Three days before he died in 1791, Wesley wrote to the Yorkshire MP William Wilberforce (1759-1833). Reiterating a conviction he had held for some time, Wesley commended Wilberforce’s ‘glorious enterprise’ of seeking to abolish slavery. Wilberforce had an evangelical conversion aged twelve, but in 1785 underwent a dramatic ‘conviction of sin’, after which he set himself to suppress the slave trade and reform manners. The former would come to dominate his parliamentary career.
Wilberforce’s friend John Newton had been a slave-trader before turning to Christ and becoming the leading Evangelical Anglican clergyman in London. But many wealthy merchants and shipping companies stood to lose large profits if slaveholding were banned, and so strongly opposed reform. In 1785 the moderate Churchman Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) published An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, and caught the attention of a group of more overtly Evangelical social campaigners in London - the so-called ‘Clapham Sect’. Named after the parish church where they worshipped, this remarkable group of activists included Wilberforce, Grenville Sharp, Henry Thornton, Charles Grant, James Stephen, Zachary Macaulay and Lord Teignmouth, as well the Vicar, John Venn. In 1787, Sharp joined Clarkson to form the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. They were in fact outnumbered on the Society’s committee by Quakers, but since Quakers were barred from becoming MPs, Wilberforce emerged as the Society’s chief advocate on the floor of the House.
Numerous parliamentary setbacks were mitigated by the passing in 1807 of a bill banning the slave trade on British ships. Later, prompted by Elizabeth Hayrick’s radical 1824 pamphlet Immediate not Gradual Abolition, and by other female abolitionists like Sarah Wedgewood and Elizabeth Pease, the Abolition of Slavery Act was duly passed as Wilberforce lay on his death-bed, and by 1838 all slaves across British colonies were freed.
Similar tenacity and missionary zeal would characterise Evangelical social and parliamentary campaigning on a range of other concerns.
3.9.2.2 Educational Reform
While the Clapham Sect was in the forefront of abolition, it distinguished itself in other areas, too - not least in education. Indeed, John Venn was the first Vicar to introduce parish schools.[1] Based on a similar worldview were the Ragged Schools for street children. Modelled by the London City Mission and co-ordinated from 1844 by the great Evangelical philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury, the Ragged School Union targeted the most deprived youngsters and offered them basic literacy and job training. By 1867, it had established over 600 such schools in the capital alone.[2] Even more numerous were the elementary schools, half of which were being sponsored by religious bodies in the mid-19th century, with Evangelicals playing a disproportionately large role.[3]
In these schools, the curriculum featured a range of specifically Christian tracts and devotional material, as well as manuals in maths and English. Also, from the 1780s large numbers of children were encouraged to attend ‘Sunday Schools’. Hitherto, young people had largely been drilled in their particular catechism and tested on it in Sunday services. Now, much broader programmes involving not only religious education but also literacy and basic numeracy were emerging for use on Sunday afternoons. These were soon so well attended that they became ‘the major distinctive contribution of evangelicals to popular education’.[4] By 1881 a staggering 5.7 million, or 19% of the total population, were attending them.[5]
One of the most energetic Sunday School pioneers was the Evangelical Anglican playwright Hannah Moore (1745-1833). A close friend of Wilberforce, Moore’s philosophy was clear and conservative: ‘My object is not to teach dogmas and opinions’, she stressed, ‘but I form the lower classes in the habits of industry and virtue’.[6] This was very much of a piece with Wilberforce’s mission to re-establish manners at the heart of family, social and civic life. A similar vision drove the Scottish reformers David Stowe and William Collins to establish church day schools for the Glasgow working class children in the 1820s, and, as part of the Glasgow Educational Society, to found a teacher training college in 1836 which would stand as a model for evangelicals across Britain.[7] Likewise, from the 1870s Christian Brethren leader George Müller funded almost 80 elementary schools in Britain and 30 abroad.
While Independents and Congregationalists had famously established Dissenting Academies in the previous century – from Rotherham to Birmingham, from Brecon in Wales to Glasgow in Scotland – and while various denominational and evangelical ‘public schools’ has sprung up in the same period, the later Victorian era saw a significant growth of new evangelical higher educational institutions, such as St David’s College, Lampeter, Lord Shaftesbury’s Litton Hall, Wycliffe Hall in Oxford and Ridley Hall in Cambridge.[8] While child education moved gradually from the voluntary to the statutory sphere, Evangelicals still contributed positively to adult learning—notably in the workplace. J.J. Colman, the Nonconformist mustard producer, ran a school for his workers in Norwich, and church-run factory night schools attracted considerable support: in 1870 some 8,131 adults attended them in the Diocese of Ripon alone.[9] Such ventures reflected a more general Evangelical commitment to improving conditions of employment as the industrial age took hold.
3.9.2.3 Employment Reform and Workplace Ministries
For all his advocacy of Ragged Schools, some of the greatest achievements of the renowned Anglican Evangelical campaigner Anthony Ashley Copper, Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-85) were in employment reform. From the early 1830s, Shaftesbury began to champion political causes associated with Evangelicals, particularly Sabbatarianism. However, he is best remembered for steering through a series of landmark Factory Acts between 1833 and 1847. These banned children under thirteen from factory labour and limited the working hours of women and young people. Later, Shaftesbury secured the appointment of a Royal Commission on mining conditions—a Commission whose report so horrified the country that he was soon able to see a Mines and Collieries Act onto the statute book, thus preventing women and children under ten from working underground. A succession of Chimney Sweeps Acts followed, while the Common Lodging-Houses Act (1851) enshrined the registration and inspection of housing for the poor.[10]
Like Wilberforce, Shaftesbury recognised the value of voluntary mission work alongside parliamentary lobbying. As a Tory, he favoured the sort of care which would ‘help the poor help themselves’ over undue state control. This notion became especially important for him after the Reform Act of 1867 broadened the British political franchise to the working classes. Thus he involved himself closely in the work of London City Mission among the urban poor, in the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, the Aboriginal Protection Society, support for the mentally ill in asylums, and numerous other charitable bodies. Reflecting on this aspect of his ministry, he professed himself ‘satisfied that most of the great philanthropic movements have sprung from [the Evangelicals]’.
3.9.2.4 Poverty Relief and Temperance
Much Evangelical discourse on poverty relief was provoked by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. This Act sought to divert the main responsibility for aid from churches into government-funded workhouses for the so-called ‘deserving poor’, and even harsher ‘houses of correction’ for to ‘undeserving poor’. While accepting the moral distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poverty, many evangelicals were sceptical about this new emphasis on state welfare. One such was John Bird Sumner, who would become Archbishop of Canterbury between 1848 and 1862. Indeed, Sumner suggested that independent face-to-face charitable relief was far more likely to elicit gratitude and responsibility in the recipient than ‘faceless’ government provision.[11] From the perspective of our present-day welfare state, these sentiments may seem at once hard and patronising, but they were reiterated by many other prominent Evangelicals, including the Scottish divine Thomas Chalmers and the sponsors of the Mendicity Society, which sought to remove beggars from the streets by offering structured financial support linked to a programme of ‘self-help’.[12] Chalmers, in fact, sought quite explicitly to counter centralised state welfare through a model of ‘one-to-one’ poverty relief based on the rural Scottish parish matrix of regular visitation, day and Sabbath schools, doorstep collections and private gifts with which he had been familiar in his youth. However, when he attempted to transplant this model to the industrialised, urban contexts of Glasgow and Edinburgh in which he later ministered, the results were at best mixed.[13]
A more progressive and successful approach to poverty relief was pioneered by the Edinburgh Kirk minister Thomas Guthrie. In contrast to Chalmers, Guthrie realised that the newly-expanded cities spurred by the Industrial Revolution demanded a fresh programme of mission to the poor. Opposed to the ‘deserving’/’undeserving’ duality, Guthrie insisted that industrialization had imposed a systemic burden on the working classes which only systemic national and corporate action could alleviate. Hence, rather than focussing on paternalistic, parochial relief, he called for co-ordinated ecumenical, city-wide projects to address the problem, and prophetically challenged an economy which ‘offers up our children in sacrifice to the Moloch of money and builds fortunes in many instances on the ruins of public morality and domestic happiness’.[14]
Another important manifestation of poverty relief emerged in the many Evangelical societies devoted to ‘temperance’. The earliest of these began in the late 1820s in the North and the Midlands, and quite explicitly proceeded by a method of ‘suasion’ in which material support in other areas was made conditional upon ‘signing the pledge’ not to touch alcohol for a fixed period. Granted, as the movement gathered pace and developed through larger bodies like The United Kingdom Alliance (1853), the National Temperance League (1856) and the child-oriented Band of Hope (1847), it targeted middle class as well as working class communities. Even here, however, the link between poverty and drink, solvency and abstinence, was maintained.
It is not hard to detect in these varied 19th century programmes a foreshadowing of the tension which exists in current political philosophy and theology, between ‘conservative’ emphases on free markets, benevolence and individual responsibility, and ‘socialist’ models of state organisation and statutory welfare. Indeed, as Brian Dickey points out, whereas the tendency of Victorian Evangelicals to voluntarism was dismissed by mid-20th century statist historians like R.H. Tawney as sentimental, individualistic and lacking theoretical coherence, by the 1990s ‘many had come to believe that neither state action, nor voluntary associationism nor face-to-face solutions would alone be enough.’ Rather, ‘all and more must be integrated into a viable social policy for Britain in the 21st century’. Hence, as Dickey goes on the attest, the basic, ‘integrated’ model of philanthropy and legislative progress exemplified in the work of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury, and by others such as the Bute family in Cardiff and the Fitzwilliams in Leeds, may once more be coming into its own.[15]
3.9.2.5 Role of the Evangelical Alliance
The Evangelical Alliance was founded in 1846. Its inaugural meeting comprised over 1000 representatives from several different Protestant traditions. Most were British, but 16% had come from America and continental Europe, and the meeting sought to establish a truly international body which would ‘manifest and promote the unity of Christ’s people’ across the world. Although this seemed eminently achievable when a Basis of Faith was agreed early on, the idea of an organic, global network soon foundered. Inspired by the achievements of Wilberforce, several British representatives backed a proposal to bar slaveholders from membership. A large number of those from the United States objected that this would push the Alliance beyond its spiritual remit. After a heated debate, it was decided to continue the movement not with a heavily centralised structure, but as a loose network of autonomous national and regional Alliances.
The so-called ‘British Organisation’ of the Alliance was duly formed in Manchester later the same year. Staring with around 3,000 individual members, it would go on to double its membership over the next decade. Early on there was uncertainty about its public role, and the great Scottish secessionist Thomas Chalmers warned that unless this was resolved, the Alliance could become a ‘Do Nothing Society’. From 1850 however, the British Organisation combined regularly with sympathetic parliamentarians to petition governments around the world on issues of religious liberty, championing the rights not only of Evangelicals, but of Nestorians, Catholics and Jews also. High profile campaigns in Turkey, Russia, Italy, Spain and elsewhere consolidated the reputation of the Alliance, and earned the respect of politicians and civic leaders.
At one point in the 1880s, the Alliance’s Executive Council included six peers, seven MPs, the Lord Mayor of London and a High Court Judge. Such political clout helped the Alliance achieve a great deal socially at home, as well as abroad, and it was active in supporting various moral campaigns, ranging from poverty relief to Sabbath observance.[16]
As the new century dawned, the Alliance’s journal Evangelical Christendom continued to carry a good deal of ‘foreign intelligence’ on the persecution of Evangelicals, but the British Organisation itself became relatively less active in this area. This was due to a number factors. First, the rise of the ecumenical movement prompted the Alliance to concentrate more on the issue of Christian unity, and under the long Secretaryship of Henry Martyn Gooch (1904-1949), it responded by positioning itself as a broad Protestant movement set against both theological fundamentalism and liberalism.[17] Second, while the Alliance remained committed to corporate action and prayer on international issues, the rise of premillennialism from 1880 blunted the edge of its political engagement.[18] Third, Gooch’s stress on the Protestant nature of the Alliance meant that its anti-Catholic identity, which had been strong at the outset but which had been mitigated by more religious liberties work in the Victorian age, once again became more distinctive. This all reflected a wider playing down of socio-political involvement among Evangelicals during this period – a trend which David Moberg has dubbed ‘the great reversal’.[19]
Although the Alliance supported Karl Barth and the German Confessing Church in their struggle against the Nazis in the 1930s,[20] it would only be after the Second World War that its former focus on religious liberties would be recovered. This would occur, however, not through the old model of a London-based Executive leading other international committees in petitioning various repressive regimes, but through a new global body—the World Evangelical Fellowship.[21] When WEF was formed at Woudschoten, Holland in 1951, it immediately embarked on a religious liberties agenda.[22] Today, the Religious Liberties Commission of the re-named World Evangelical Alliance has an office at the United Nations, and is active in the many areas of the world which still stifle religious freedom—from Iran and Pakistan to Nigeria and China.[23] The social and political commitments made in London in 1846, and applied so effectively through the first fifty years of the Alliance’s life, live on at the global level.
3.9.2.6 Kuyper and the Neo-Calvinist Worldview
In her study of Victorian Evangelical activism, Doreen Rosman points out that the British Evangelical charities and para-church agencies in this period ‘proved to be essentially pragmatic’. As she writes, they ‘sought and acquired influential patronage, mobilized mass support by constructing a network of local auxiliaries, and co-operated with any who shared their aims regardless of belief’.[24] Likewise, David Bebbington observes that the activism of these bodies often meant that systematic theological thought came to be regarded as a ‘dispensable luxury’.[25]
If there is an honourable exception to this trend, it derives not from Britain, but from the Netherlands, in the form of Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920). Almost uniquely among Evangelicals in the period we have been examining, Kuyper produced a thoroughgoing, and firmly Evangelical account of the relationship between sacred and secular, faith and nation, state and church - one which maintains significant influence today.[26]
Kuyper was the third son of a minister in the Dutch State church at Maassluis. In 1855 he entered the University of Leiden and studied under the leading liberal theologian J.H. Scholten. In the process, he abandoned his earlier orthodox faith and embraced a modernist approach. Kuyper went on to be ordained, but in his first pastorate at Beesd was challenged by a group of ‘stubborn, old-fashioned Calvinists’, who in time prompted him to recover a solidly Reformed outlook. Kuyper moved on to higher profile congregations in Utrecht and Amsterdam, and from there embraced a political career, entering the Dutch Parliament in 1874. This he combined with editorships of two newspapers and the founding, in 1880, of the Free University of Amsterdam, which was dedicated to producing scholars in a range of disciplines, yet all infused with the Calvinist perspective. In 1901 Kuyper was elected Prime Minister and served as leader of the Anti-Revolutionary party until 1905.
In addition to his journalism and political writings, Kuyper produced several theological books. The most important of these are his 3-volume Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology (1894) and his collected Lectures on Calvinism, which he delivered at Princeton in 1898 as part of a highly successful American tour. In particular, Lecture 3, on ‘Calvinism and Politics’, addresses the form and function of the state.
In keeping with much of his other work, Kuyper begins this lecture by asserting the comprehensive scope of Calvinism. For Kuyper, Calvinism is not ‘an exclusively ecclesiastical movement’, but a ‘fundamental conception’ which reaches ‘down to the very root of our human life.’ Where Christ is concerned, there can be no separation between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’, precisely because, as Kuyper insists, everything belongs to him and is subject to his divine rule. As Kuyper famously sums it up: ‘There is not a single inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: “Mine!”‘.[27] Lest this sound overbearing, Kuyper insists that the very fact of God’s intimate relationship with every part of his creation disposes him to enter ‘into immediate fellowship with the creature, as God the Holy Spirit. Hence, ‘God is not to be identified with the world and therefore with humanity, as in pantheism, nor as isolated from humanity, as in Islam. God is transcendent, yet he communicates directly with his people, and in fact lives in them through the Holy Spirit.’[28] In consequence of all this, and contrary to popular perception, the key ‘dominating principle’ of Calvinism is not justification by faith through grace, but rather ‘the sovereignty of the Triune God over the whole cosmos in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible.’[29]
Kuyper’s reference to the different ‘spheres’ of God’s rule here becomes highly significant in his system. First and foremost, ‘everything that is, exists for God’ and the ‘whole creation must give glory to him’. Thus ‘Wherever man may stand, whatever he may do, to whatever he may apply his hand, in agriculture, in commerce, and in industry, constantly standing before the face of his God, he is employed in the service of his God’.[30] The so-called secular workplace, the public square, the sports field—none need be less ‘holy’ or ‘sanctified’ than the chancel. Yet this primordial, universal sovereignty, ‘irradiates in mankind a threefold deduced supremacy, viz. 1. The sovereignty of the State; 2. The sovereignty of Society; and 3. The sovereignty of the Church.[31]
In the case of Kuyper’s first ‘deduced supremacy’ - the supremacy of state - he recognises that this has been instituted only since the Fall. On the one hand, human pride led to Babel and the diffusion of language, and with it, the diffusion of nationalities, tribal identities, tongues and cultures which distinguishes different states from one another. Yet given the fact of the Fall, any attempt to reintegrate states into ‘one world empire’ would be disastrous - producing tyranny, despotism and idolatry. So Kuyper acknowledges that the state has two distinct ‘sides’ - one ‘shady’ and the other ‘light’. In its shadiness, it is subject to ‘all manner of despotic ambitions’. Yet in its lighter guise, it offers a bulwark against the ‘hell on earth’ of anarchic disorder.[32] In this conception, we see that ‘sin alone has necessitated the institution of governments’, since without it God would simply rule humanity in a direct and unmediated way.[33] Yet even mediating rulers are subject to God’s authority, and must recognize this fact overtly if they are not to risk idolatry. Indeed, Kuyper exemplifies this point by contrasting the Godly discourse of the American settlement with the humanistic, contractual language of the French Declaration, the latter of which asserts ‘an original sovereignty’ whose root goes ‘no deeper than the human will’, and is thus ‘perfectly identical with atheism’.[34]
As far as the second sphere of deduced supremacy is concerned - the sphere of Society - Kuyper suggests that this stands in antithesis to the State. Whereas government is a ‘mechanical device’ to restrain sin, society, through its constituent smaller spheres of family, business, art and so forth, does ‘not derive authority from the superiority of the state, but obeys ‘a higher authority’ within its ‘own bosom’. As a result of this Kuyper argues that tension is bound to occur between different social arenas and the government of the day. Indeed, in his terms, ‘the government is always inclined with its mechanical authority to invade social life, to subject it and mechanically to arrange it’. Even so, Kuyper holds that from time to time different social spheres will attempt to throw off all restraints of civic order. Hence people will be continually faced with the twin threats of statism and anarchy. Yet Kuyper asserts that Calvinism manages to avoid such polarities, by insisting on the sovereignty of God and a plurality of social spheres ‘under the law’, as administered by the government.[35]
Thirdly and finally, Kuyper turns his attention to the sphere of the Church. While acknowledging the pain and scandal of a divided ecclesia, he sees it implicit within Calvin’s teaching about liberty of conscience that the healthiest situation for both Christian communities and civic authorities is that of a ‘free church in a free land’[36]. While acknowledging that unity between churches has appeal, he argues that the government must refrain from seeking to coerce this, on the grounds that it ‘lacks the data of judgment’ to do so, and would thereby be encroaching on the sovereignty of the Church. Kuyper concludes from this that while despotic church polities are plainly to be avoided, allowances must be made for historic and cultural differences between denominations, and in saying this is willing, like Calvin, to accept Roman Catholics as allies against ungodliness.[37] This last point would become highly significant for one of Kuyper’s most renowned followers, Francis Schaeffer, and his conception of ‘co-belligerence’ with non-evangelicals (see section 4.4.7 below).
[1] J. Venn, ‘Charity Schools’, Christian Observer, September 1804, p.542, cit. M. Hennell, John Venn and the Clapham Sect (London: Lutterworth Press, 1958), 137.
[2] Report and Tables on Education in England and Wales (1853-54), cxxiii.
[3] Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 124.
[4] Edward Royle, ‘Evangelicals and Education’, in John Wolffe (ed.), Evangelical Faith and Public Zeal (London: SPCK, 1995), 120.
[5] Royle, ‘Evangelicals and Education’, 121 n10.
[6] More, Martha, Mendip Annals (London: J. Nisbet & Co., 1859), 6.
[7] Edward Royle, ‘Evangelicals and Education’, 123. in Wolffe, Evangelical Faith.
[8] Edward Royle, Evangelicals and Education’, in Wolffe, Evangelical Faith, 128-31.
[9] Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 124.
[10] G. Battiscombe, Shaftesbury: A Biography of the Seventh Earl (London: Constable, 1974).
[11] Brian Dickey, ‘Going About Doing Good: Evangelicals and Poverty, c1815-1870’, in Wolffe, Evangelical Faith and Public Zeal, 43-4.
[12] Dickey, ‘Going About Doing Good’, 47-8.
[13] Dickey, ‘Going about Doing Good’, 45-6.
[14] Cit. David W. Smith, Transforming the World? The Social Impact of British Evangelicalism (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998), 44-6.
[15] Dickey, ‘Going About Doing Good’, 48-9; 54-5. On the same point, Dickey cites the work of F.K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in 19th century England (Oxford University Press, 1980); The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain (London: Faber, 1988).
[16] For further details see Ian Randall and David Hilborn, One Body in Christ: The History and Significance of the Evangelical Alliance (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2001), 71-102, 112.
[17] Ian Randall, ‘Schism and Unity: 1905-1966’, in Steve Brady & Harold Rowdon (eds.), For Such a Time as This: Perspectives on Evangelicalism, Past, Present and Future (Milton Keynes: Scripture Union/London: Evangelical Alliance, 1996), 164.
[18] Ian Randall, ‘Schism and Unity: 1905-1966’, in Steve Brady & Harold Rowdon (eds.), For Such a Time as This: Perspectives on Evangelicalism, Past, Present and Future (Milton Keynes: Scripture Union/London: Evangelical Alliance, 1996), 168.
[19] David Moberg, The Great Reversal: Evangelism versus Social Concern (London: Scripture Union, 1973).
[20] See, for example, Evangelical Christendom, January-February 1930, 35.
[21] W. Harold Fuller, People of the Mandate: The Story of the World Evangelical Fellowship (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1996), 114-15.
[22] David M. Howard, The Dream That Would Not Die: The Birth and Growth of the World Evangelical Fellowship, 1846-96 (Wheaton, Ill.: World Evangelical Fellowship, 1986).
[23] Fuller, W. Harold, People of the Mandate: The Story of the World Evangelical Fellowship, 103-17.
[24] Doreen Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 23. Editor’s emphasis.
[25] David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (London: Unwin & Hyman, 1989), 12.
[26] See for instance Peter Hesalm, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998).
[27] James Bratt (ed.), Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 488.
[28] Kuyper, Lectures, Lectures on Calvinism (Michigan: Eerdmans, 1931), 29
[29] Abraham Kuyper, Lectures,79.
[30] Kuyper, Lectures, 49.
[31] Kuyper, Lectures, 79
[32] Kuyper, Lectures, 81.
[33] Kuyper, Lectures, 82.
[34] Kuyper, Lectures,87- 88.
[35] Kuyper, Lectures, 90-99.
[36] The masthead of the newspaper De Heraut (The Herald), of which Kuyper became editor in 1871.
[37] Kuyper, Lectures, 99
