Culture Wars: Nonconformity, clericalism and ‘Englishness’: the United Kingdom

This chapter focuses on the conflict about the attitude that the British state should take to religious education and to church establishments, particularly between 1870 and 1874 – the point in the nineteenth century at which both debates became most contentious. In 1872 a large conference of Protestant nonconformists at Manchester declared in favour of the principle of restricting the educational syllabus in state-funded schools to secular subjects. Between 1871 and 1873 the campaign by the Liberation Society for the disestablishment of the church of England reached a new intensity and prompted the only significant motions for English disestablishment ever discussed in the House of Commons. This movement has sometimes been called the ‘nonconformist revolt’. According to this view, it was a revolt by nonconformists – who were overwhelmingly Liberal Party supporters – against the Liberal government of the day, for betraying their principles. But though there is some truth in this view, this chapter argues that it is more helpful to see it in a number of other lights. It was, firstly, an attack on local clerical influence: nonconformists had an innate suspicion of the Anglican priesthood's ambitions to sway the individual religious conscience. Secondly, this led nonconformists to mobilise against the political consequences of that clerical influence, and so their campaign became a political one, part of a partisan Liberal struggle against the Conservative Party. Thirdly, it was a response to a powerful Catholic challenge – a response that was vehement but self-consciously patriotic and constitutional.