Nonconformist conscience
The Nonconformist conscience was a phrase used in British politics to describe the influence of the Nonconformist churches in politics.[1]
The phrase gained wide currency during the campaign by the Welsh Methodist Hugh Price Hughes against the participation in politics of the divorcee Sir Charles Dilke (1886) and the adulterer Charles Stewart Parnell (1890), believing that political leaders should possess high moral integrity.[2] In Britain one strong base of Liberal Party support was Nonconformist Protestantism, such as the Methodists and Presbyterians. The nonconformist conscience rebelled against having an adulterer (Parnell) play a major role in the Liberal Party. The Liberal party leader William E. Gladstone warned that if Parnell retained his powerful role the leadership, it would mean the loss of the next election, the end of their alliance and also of Home Rule.[3]
The high point of the Nonconformist conscience came with the Nonconformist opposition to the Education Act 1902, in which Nonconformist voluntary schools were taken over by state authorities.[4] Élie Halévy wrote that: "Thoroughout the Nonconformist and Radical ranks frenzied excitement prevailed. To read the Liberal newspapers of the day you would imagine that the Cecils were preparing to revive the policy of Laud if not of Strafford, and that in every village a Nonconformist Hampden was about to rise against their persecution".[5]
By 1914 the Nonconformist conscience was in decline and during the Great War ecumenism gained popularity. By 1938 David Lloyd George remarked that these changes had killed off the influence of the Nonconformist conscience.[6]
In 1943 the United Reformed minister and theologian Harry Francis Lovell Cocks published the book The Nonconformist Conscience in which he declared that "The Nonconformist Conscience is the mark of a spiritual aristocracy, a counterblast to coronets and mitres".[7]
Notes
- ↑ John Ramsden (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century British Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 474.
- ↑ s:Hughes, Hugh Price (DNB12)
- ↑ Christopher Oldstone-Moore, "The Fall of Parnell: Hugh Price Hughes and the Nonconformist Conscience," Eire-Ireland (1996) 30#4 pp 94-110.
- ↑ Ramsden, p. 474.
- ↑ Élie Halévy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century. Volume V: Imperialism and the Rise of Labour (London: Ernest Benn, 1951), p. 210.
- ↑ Ramsden, p. 474.
- ↑ Harry Francis Lovell Cocks, The Nonconformist Conscience (1943), p. 17.
Further reading
- D. W. Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics 1870-1914 (London, 1982).
- J. Kent, ‘Hugh Price Hughes and the nonconformist conscience’, in G. V. Bennett and J. D. Walsh (eds.), Essays in Modern English Church History: in memory of Norman Sykes (1966), pp. 181–205.
- Stephen Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics (London, 1975).
- Christopher Oldstone-Moore, "The Fall of Parnell: Hugh Price Hughes and the Nonconformist Conscience," Eire-Ireland (1996) 30#4 pp 94-110.
