Undomesticated Dissent

Democracy and the Public Virtue of Religious Nonconformity

Curtis W. Freeman

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781481306904
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

On the north end of Londonliesan old nonconformistburial ground named Bunhill Fields. Bunhill becamethefinal resting place for some of the most honored names of English Protestantism. Burialoutside the city walls symbolized that thoseinterredat Bunhill lived and died outside the English body politic.Bunhill, its location declares, isthe properhome for undomesticateddissenters. Amongmore than 120, 000 graves, three monuments stand in the central courtyard: one for John Bunyan (1628–1688), a second for Daniel Defoe (1660?–1731), and a third for William Blake (1757–1827). Undomesticated Dissent asks, "why these three monuments?" The answer, as Curtis Freeman leads readers to discover, is anidea as vitalandtransformative for public life today as itwasunsettling and revolutionary then. To telltheuntoldtaleof the Bunhill graves, Freeman focuseson the three classic texts by Bunyan, Defoe, and Blake— The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and Jerusalem —as testaments of dissent. Their enduring literary power, as Freeman shows, derives from theiroriginal political and religious contexts.But Freeman also traces theabidingpropheticinfluenceof these texts, revealingthe confluence of great literature and principled religiousnonconformityin the checkered story of democraticpoliticalarrangements. Undomesticated Dissent provides a sweeping intellectual history of the public virtue of religiously motivated dissent from the seventeenth century to the present, by carefully comparing, contrasting, and then weighing the various types of dissent—evangelicaland spiritual dissent (Bunyan), economic and social dissent (Defoe), radical andapocalyptic dissent (Blake).

Freemanoffersdissentingimaginationasagenerative source for democracy, as well as a force forresistancetothe coercivepowers of domestication.By placing Bunyan, Defoe, and Blake within an extended argument about the nature and ends of democracy, Undomesticated Dissent reveals howthese three mentransmittedtheirdemocratic ideas across the globe, hidden within the text of their stories. Freemanconcludes thatdissent, so crucial to the establishing of democracy, remainsequally essential for its flourishing. Buried deep intheirfull narrative of religion and resistance, the three monuments at Bunhill together declare that dissent is not disloyalty, and that democracy depends on dissent.

1

Domesticating Dissent

But we simple shepherds that walk on the moor,

In faith, we are near-hands out of the door,

No wonder, as it stands, if we be poor,

For the tith of our lands lies as fallow as the floor,

As ye ken,

We are so lamed,

Overtaxed and shamed,

We are made hand-tamed,

By these gentry-men.1

The restoration of the monarchy in England proved to be a time of testing for dissenters, especially those like Vavasor Powell whose Baptist and millenarian convictions threatened the powers of church and state. Refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to any king but Jesus and rejecting the authority of diocesan bishops and the imposition of a common prayer book, Powell was arrested and imprisoned in the summer of 1660.2 He followed a long line of Baptist dissenters, beginning with Thomas Helwys, who declared that Christians should not avoid persecution, “for the disciples of Christ cannot glorify God and advance his truth better, then by suffering all manner of persecution for it.”3 Powell remained undomesticated in his dissent. Writing to his friends from his cell in Fleet Prison, he urged, “Let us not be troubled that the winde now blowes in our faces, or that like Lazarus we receive our evil things in this world.” For, he continued, “[a] day of close discovery and through tryal is come, or coming upon us, and the leaves of profession are like to hide hypocrisy no longer.” The only refuge for the coming danger, he warned, was for each Christian to “get Christ . . . to bind thy conscience to peace, and thy affections and flesh to the good Behaviour.” Resting in the confidence that his conscience was securely bound, he concluded, “If I may not have liberty to serve Christ, I would have the Glory to suffer for Christ.”4 And suffer he did, remaining a prisoner of conscience for seven long years. When he was finally released, Powell immediately returned to preaching, which again resulted in his arrest and imprisonment. He died in Fleet Prison on October 27, 1670, having spent most of his last eleven years in jail. He was laid to rest in the dissenter burial ground at Bunhill Fields. Etched on his gravestone were these lines, composed by his friend and fellow prisoner Edward Bagshaw, who followed him to a grave in Bunhill Fields the following year:

In vain oppressors do themselves perplex,

To find out acts how they the Saints may vex;

Death spoils their plots, and sets th’ oppressed free,

Thus Vavasor obtained true liberty,

Christ him releas’d and now he’s join’d among

The martyr’d-souls, with whom he cries, how long?5

Milton’s account of the angel Abdiel in Paradise Lost, who faced Satan and his demonic legions all alone, might have been chosen as a fitting description of undomesticated dissent:

Among innumerable false, unmov’d,

Unshak’n, unseduc’d, unterrfi’d

His Loyaltie he kept, his Love, his Zeale;

Nor number, nor example with him wrought

To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind

Though single. From amidst them forth he passd,

Long way through hostile scorn, which he susteind

Superior, nor of violence fear’d aught;

And with retorted scorn his back he turn’d

On those proud Towrs to swift destruction doom’d.6

This thinly disguised contempt for the ecclesiastical establishment identified Abdiel’s faithful stand against Satan as “dissent” and the loyal angels of heaven as his “sect,” leaving no doubt in his conviction that truth was on the side of the dissenting minority, for “few sometimes may know, when thousands err.”7 Yet Powell’s epitaph bears witness to a different sort of dissenter, not a zealous enthusiast who confronts the hosts of evil all alone, but one of a righteous remnant whose body like the Master was laid to rest with a communion of persecuted saints outside the walls of the city and beyond the reach of the state-established church. Yet it is also an apocalyptic vision of undomesticated dissent rooted in an abiding hope in the victory and vindication of the Lamb who was slain and ever lives, as the lone dissenting voice is joined with the prayers of the martyrs who cry out, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” (Rev 6:108).

The Dissenter Tradition

Dissent has proven notoriously difficult to define. Along with its synonyms “separatist” and “nonconformist,” the term “dissenter” covers a wide range of groups from Presbyterians on the right flank to Quakers on the left with Baptists and Independents in the middle. It also includes more radical movements from Familists and Fifth Monarchists, to Levellers and Diggers, as well as Ranters and Muggletonians.9 Dissenters diverged widely in theological outlook, often within the same group, though they all shared a common bond as minorities who were first persecuted and later tolerated by the dominant majority in the established church. Through the centuries, the basic request of dissenters has simply been “to be left alone to worship God in their own way.”10 This negative way of understanding dissent has its roots in “Protestantism,” which received its name on April 19, 1529, when John of Saxony read a letter dissenting from the majority decision at the Second Diet of Speyer, saying:

We protest by these present, before God, our only Creator, Preserver, Redeemer, and Saviour, and who will one day be our Judge, as well as before all men and all creatures, that we, for us and for our people, neither consent nor adhere in any manner whatsoever to the proposed decree, in anything that is contrary to God, to His Holy Word, to our right conscience, to the salvation of our souls, and to the last decree of Speyer.11

To be sure, dissent entails the courage to say “No!” But it is about more than just the “No!” Dissent is not simply a case of whining against oppression, resisting institutional corruption, demurring against the affirmations of others.12 To define dissenters merely as “noisy naysayers” supposes that if all oppressive restraints were removed, then dissent would simply fade away. Such an account ignores the deep underlying beliefs and practices that not only united historic dissenting communities but were shared across communities. Dissent is also grounded in a profound “Yes!” to Jesus Christ as Lord, to God alone as sovereign over the conscience, and to the gathered community where Jesus Christ reigns and is discerned together.13

Dissent in the context of English Protestantism has roots in a particular understanding of the royal office of Christ to whom all, even earthly monarchs, are accountable. This theological conviction of Christ as King gave rise to the dissenting practice of resisting and being subject to “the powers that be” (Rom 13:1). It is exemplified by the Scottish Presbyterian Andrew Melville, who once, in a private meeting with James VI of Scotland (later James I of England), upbraided the king, calling him “God’s sillie vassal.” Taking James by the sleeve, he declared:

I mon [must] tell yow, thair is twa Kings and twa Kingdomes in Scotland. Thair is Chryst Jesus the King, and his Kingdome the Kirk, whase subject King James the Saxt is, and of whose kingdome nocht a king, nor a lord, nor a heid, bot a member.14

Protestant dissenters like Melville followed this Reformed tradition that strictly limited the power of secular authorities. Robert Browne, the first dissenter to call for separation from the Church of England, took this conviction of reformation a step further, acknowledging the sovereignty of the queen in civil matters, but he argued that the power keys of the kingdom to bind and loose, to retain and remit, were given not to civil magistrates but to gospel ministers (Matt 18:18; John 20:23). Browne believed that the ecclesial government could not be reformed from within because the established church was under the sway of popish powers, so he argued for establishing independent congregations without waiting for the support of the civil authorities.15 The parish churches “are not Jerusalem,” he exclaimed. “For beholde, can they be Jerusalem, which is called the Throne of the Lorde, when there the Bishops sitt as on the Throne of Antichriste?”16 Though Browne later returned to the Church of England, many of his followers remained in separation.

The most articulate voice of early English dissent was Henry Barrow, who rejected the imperial establishment of the church and contended instead for the church as a gathered community that lived under the reign of Christ and maintained discipline according to Christ’s rule.17 He was arrested in 1587 for his dissenting views and locked away in London’s Fleet Prison. The separation of powers affirmed by Barrow stands in stark contrast to the magisterial flattery of Lancelot Andrewes, the preeminent English preacher of the day and avowed monarchist, who averred:

They that rise against the King, are God’s enemies; for God and the King are so in league, such a knot, so straight between them, as one cannot be enemy to the one, but he must be to the other. This is the knot. They are by God, of or from God, for or instead of God. . . . In His place they sit, His person they represent, they are taken into the fellowship of the same name. Ego dixi, He hath said it, and we may be bold to say it after him, They are gods; and what would we more? Then must their enemies be God’s enemies.18

It was a remarkable statement that identified an inseparable unity between God and the king, but more importantly it offered a theological support for an established national church under the control of a divinely ordained national monarch.19 According to this rule, to reject the sovereignty of the crown over the church was tantamount to rejecting Christ and his church.

Andrewes and other clergy called on Barrow and his fellow dissenters in jail several times during March 1590, not to make pastoral visits, but, as Barrow later observed, “to fish from them som matter, wheruppon they might accuse them to theire holy fathers the bishops, who thereupon might delyver them, as convicts of heresie unto the secular powers.”20 The meeting on March 18 began cordially, but, when Barrow asked that their conference be determined by Scripture, Andrewes unleashed a torrent of hostile questions, accusing Barrow of savoring “a pryvat spyrit.” Barrow answered, “This is the spirit of Christ and his apostles, and moste publique they submitted theire doctrines to the trial of all men,” and, he continued, “so do I.” But then Andrewes crossed beyond the pale, suggesting that Barrow should actually be happy for his imprisonment, adding that “the solitarie and contemplative life” is the one he himself would choose. It was a clever but cruel comment. Barrow had spent three years in deplorable conditions, separated from his family, friends, and church. “You speak philosophically,” Barrow replied, “but not christianly.” For, he explained, “[s]o sweete is the harmonie of God’s grace unto me in the congregation, and the conversation of the saints at all tymes, as I think my self as a sparrow on the howse toppe when I am exiled from them.” Then, like Nathan the prophet before King David, Barrow asked, “But could you be content also, Mr. Androes, to be kept from exercise and ayre so long together?’ ”21 It was for want of witty rhetoric that dissenters like Barrow used plain speech, lacking “that glib and oily art” that court preachers like Andrewes had mastered.22 Yet, unlike them, he spoke the unvarnished truth.

The ranks of dissenters were soon to swell as a result of the conference at Hampton Court called in January 1604 by King James I. The so-called Millenary Petition presented to the king by “the godly” clergy upon his ascension to the throne of England objected to such practices as the wearing of the surplice, making the sign of the cross at baptism, and kneeling at communion as remnants of Roman Catholicism that must be purged from the Church of England. Over the course of the conference, it became increa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Domesticating Dissent
• Chapter 2. Slumbering Dissent: John Bunyan
• Chapter 3. Prosperous Dissent: Daniel Defoe
• Chapter 4. Apocalyptic Dissent: William Blake
• Chapter 5. Postapocalyptic Dissent
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• General Index