In this episode, host Jean Geran speaks with guest historian Michael Rutz about the historical experience of British Protestant dissenters in the 18th and 19th centuries. Drawing from his book The British Zion: Congregationalism, Politics and Empire, 1790–1850, Dr. Rutz explores how dissenting Christian communities navigated issues of religious liberty, education, social activism, and citizenship under an Anglican state church.

🗝️ Key Topics Covered

Who Were the Dissenters?

• Protestant groups (Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians) who refused to conform to the Church of England.
• Faced legal discrimination and second-class civic status.

Education and the Dissenting Academies

• Creation of alternative institutions to educate ministers and laypeople.
• Emphasis on practical, Enlightenment-influenced curriculum including science, history, and civic engagement.

Rational vs. Evangelical Dissenters

• Rational dissenters embraced Enlightenment ideals and supported revolutionary causes.
• Evangelical dissenters focused on personal conversion, biblical authority, and social activism.

Religious Liberty and Political Reform

• Campaigns to repeal discriminatory laws like the Test and Corporation Acts.
• Advocacy for religious freedom as a core Christian and civic principle.

Missions and Abolition

• Evangelical dissenters played key roles in foreign missions and anti-slavery movements.
• Missionary work in places like the Cape Colony led to campaigns for civil equality for indigenous populations.

Coalition Building Across Faith Lines

• Groups like the Clapham Sect united Anglicans and dissenters around shared goals like abolition.
• Lessons for today: working across theological and political divides for common good.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Michael A. Rutz, Ph.D. is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Since joining UWO’s history faculty in 2002, he has built a distinguished career as a scholar of 19th- and 20th-century Great Britain, the British Empire, religion and politics. Dr. Rutz earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in History from Washington University in St. Louis, and a B.A., with high honors in History, from the University of Michigan. His major publications include The British Zion: Congregationalism, Politics, and Empire (2011) and King Leopold’s Congo and the “Scramble for Africa” (2018); he has also published several articles on the intersection of religion and politics in 19c Britain and the British empire and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

📚 Recommended Reading

• The British Zion: Congregationalism, Politics and Empire, 1790–1850 by Michael Rutz (Baylor University Press, 2011)
• https://www.baylorpress.com/9781602582057/the-british-zion/

🔗 Resources

• Learn more about the S.L. Brown Foundation and Upper House: https://slbf.org/

And so I think that idea of the possibility of finding common Christian principles that people across a range of faith and political ideas can mobilize together to accomplish is one good way of thinking about how do we create a Christian citizenship that is less polarized and less divisive in these times.

but more targeted towards working together towards common principles. Exactly.

and building the kingdom of

And that's where the Enlightenment influence comes in, right? Because at the core of their kind of like Christian identity is this concept of voluntarism. Right. Right. That salvation and your participation in a Christian community and a church, right, is an individual voluntary act.

It's an issue of conscience.

It's issue of conscience and it's an issue of your discernment of the gospel, scriptures, theology and everything,

Welcome to the Upwards Podcast, where we discuss the intersection of Christian faith in the academy, church, and marketplace. Today, I'm talking with Michael Rutz, who is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Since joining UWO's history faculty in 2002, has built a distinguished career as a scholar of 19th and 20th century Great Britain, the British Empire, religion, and politics. He's also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Today we discuss a British Christian community from the 18th and 19th centuries, made up of a few groups of Protestants known as dissenters due to their refusal to adhere to the theological tenants and practices of the established Church of England. Discrimination against these dissenter groups led to a challenging relationship for them to the concept of citizenship as subjects of the realm.

but also led to creative and effective approaches to related issues like education, religious liberty, missions, social activism, and the abolition of slavery. Now on to our conversation.

So Mick, thank you for joining us on Upwards Podcast. We're delighted to have you. You'll be our second speaker in our series on Christian citizenship. And I think we did the first one with Chris Seipel was a little introduction to the topic, a little more contemporary, but we're really excited to hear from you to learn a little bit about a historical case of how a community of faith in Great Britain

We're having

how they dealt with issues of citizenship and their faith. So maybe to start with that, we will be drawing especially heavily, I think, from a lot of your work, especially your book, The British Zion, Congregationalism, Politics and Empire, 1790 to 1850. So I just wanted to commend that to our listeners.

So why don't you start us off by giving us a little bit of a background on this community called, or often known as the dissenters. Who were they and then what was their historical context?

And so that is the core of the folks who become known as dissenters. They are dissenting from participation in the established church. And that dissent is centered primarily around sort of doctrinal and various theological positions. A lot of them having to do with bishops and the kind of hierarchical structure of the Church of England and the liturgical emphasis and the vestments and the...

will prevent dissenters from holding significant national and local political offices. They will restrict the access of dissenters to the universities like Oxford and Cambridge. They will undertake various ways to make it difficult for dissenters to have their own independent churches and chapels and communities and essentially

church communities to exist. after 1689, they can legally set up their own chapels, their own churches, their own communities, their own organizations, and those sorts of things. And so they really start to kind of take off as what we would call denominations, Congregationalist Baptists, those sorts of things from that time 1689.

Okay. So actually to unpack the citizenship or the church and state issues. So they're dissenting primarily from the Church of England on theological grounds to simplify things. I know it's more complicated than that. And then it gets a little, or help us understand given that the Church of England is the state established church, and we're talking about an Anglican established church here, right? So

what would their kind of relationship to the actual state be versus the church, or is it actually the same? What do think?

So it's a little tricky because the concept of citizenship is still a little complex in the late 17th century, right? Technically, legally, they're all subjects of the crown. But if we use citizenship in the sort of more generic term of meaning sort of like participants in civic and political life, right? The basic situation is that those who remain dissenters face certain basic disabilities that prevent them from full participation in

know, civic engagement. So again, there are political offices that they can't hold. There are universities that they're unable to attend. There are rules and regulations that require, if they're going to get married, they actually have to go through the rights of the Anglican church to get their marriages recognized. They can't sort of do that on their own. If they want to be buried in the local churchyard, which is often the only cemetery on offer in a small village or a small town,

They actually have to go through the Anglican rights because that's the only legal way to get yourself. Interesting. Right. So in a general sense, we could say that they have a kind of second class citizenship in that general sense, That there are certain basic privileges that Anglicans have that they don't, and those are enforced by law. Right. Going into the 17th, through the end of the 17th and into the 18th century.

Right. Well, and this leads us to another topic that we're going to pull into this series, and that is how groups like this, groups of faith handle education. You said they couldn't get into universities. So what did they do?

to offer young men from the dissenting ranks what we would today call a college education. There's an emphasis on preparing and training them for the ministry, but there is also increasingly due to the influence of the enlightenment, which is going on in this same 18th century period. And we can talk a little bit more about as we go along an interest in what they often refer to as

practical education. So these dissenting academies, which don't last much past the end of the 18th century, they don't establish themselves in the permanent sort of way that the universities do. But in that period, they are innovators in education in a sense. The academies will have instruction and lecturing in English rather than relying just on the Latin and the Greek and the ancient languages that still kind of dominate the university curriculum.

Over time, they introduce additional subjects to the overall curriculum. So things like history and the natural sciences and things of that sort are incorporated in ways more fully in ways that they're still not in the universities, which still follow more of that medieval university classical model of education. So the academies emerge around this idea of providing practical

And what for the time is a kind of modern education. And that is not only part of preparation for ministry, but increasingly seen as preparing young men to kind of go out and live in professions and business and things of that sort. Right? Yeah. And so what you get is this idea of a more kind of holistic view of where

good men, good citizens, and good subjects of the moral kingdom of the supreme being. And so they're envisioning this idea that education is a part, there's religious education and then also the kind of secular practical education that are combined there for a way of sort of forming character and knowledge to make these young men who attend academies kind of engaged and

productive members of society, guess, to be able to put it.

So you mentioned that they went away. did any of them become universities or did some of what they were doing get adopted by the larger universities?

and incorporated it into their theology. So many of them are Unitarians. Many of them are Joseph Priestley is an example, Richard Price is an example. And these men are ministers, but they're also engaged in science and they're engaged in business and they're engaged in these other sorts of things. And they are adopting a kind of more rational, non-orthodox Christianity.

They identify themselves as Christians, but many of them are Unitarians. Many of them are, they're not quite all the way to deists, but they're closer to that end of the path than say the evangelicals who are also sort of growing in numbers during this time as part of the evangelical revival. Long story short, what this does is it means in the 1780s and 1790s, they become significant defenders of the basic ideals of the age of revolution as well.

They had championed this sort of crazy radical revolutionary spirit in France. And that's dangerous. And that doesn't sound like practical education anymore. Right. And so by way of their vocal support for these more revolutionary, radical, enlightenment political ideas in that later period, they then kind of become tarred as radicals. And that wanes their influence.

some degree, especially as parallel to this, you have the evangelical revival taking place in the 18th century. And that is increasingly swelling the numbers of Orthodox dissenters, Congregationalist Baptists, the emerging Methodist denomination. so there's this kind of divergent path that happens between those who become known as the rational dissenters and those who become known essentially as the evangelical dissenters.

Right. Well, and it sounds like the rational dissenters, and we're generalizing here, of course, got a little further away from the faith being the motivation and more a little bit political action.

That's true in some ways, although I think we have to think about their faith in a way that, you know, I think a lot of times today we hear the word Unitarian and Unitarianism today is sort of Unitarian Universalism and it's kind of, it's sort of moved, yeah, moved a little bit beyond just Christianity and kind of incorporating many different kinds of faiths, traditions and things of that sort. But these 18th century Unitarians really

They view themselves as Christians. They are Christians, right? They're not interested in sort of necessarily incorporating other faiths. It's really doctrinal. It's just, no, we don't ascribe to the doctrine of the Trinity. You know, we are Socinians or we are, you know, various other, I guess, churches would look at it as, you know, heretical, like that one doctrine we don't ascribe to, but otherwise we think of ourselves as Christians.

was still.

That's part of the complexity of their identity. And the other thing that's important to recognize is that in this time, while the rational dissenters are pushing a more radical, revolution-oriented political line here, and that it becomes controversial,

Those who are the evangelical dissenters in the Baptist and the congregational congregations and those sorts of things, they're adapting, we can talk about this, enlightenment ideas of politics and citizenship as well, but just not in as, maybe not pursuing it to the kind of more radical revolutionary kinds of places necessary.

Right, well let's shift to that a little bit. you maybe take us through the, what's the imago-co revival, right? And it's combination with enlightenment, you said a lot already. But summarize that a little bit and then start to give us a little bit more about what motivated, what parts of their faith, that cohort, motivated their social engagement and really what can be seen in many ways on abolition and education again.

as social activism, right? Not just kind of a passive civic engagement, but a very active one. So, Tell us a little bit about that group.

as it emerges as a movement is an emphasis on the Bible, an emphasis on individual conversion, an emphasis on Christ's atonement on the cross for salvation, and an emphasis on activism, right? That you go into the Bible, you have this experience of faith and salvation, you sort of ascribe to and accept Christ's atonement and the crucifixion, and that religious experience, then

motivating factor of engagement with politics and civic life. And that's where the enlightenment influence comes in, right? Because at the core of their kind of like Christian identity is this concept of voluntarism, right? That salvation and your participation in a Christian community and a church, right, is an individual voluntary act.

Right. An issue of conscience. And it's an issue of your discernment of the gospel, scriptures, theology and everything. Right? Obviously an established church works in a very different sort of way, right? Top down, the government says, this is your church. This is your community. These are your doctrines. These are your teachings. Right? In a kind of top down model. The enlightenment.

It's an issue of conscience.

sort of core concept of citizenship, right, on the sort of secular political side is about rejecting top-down power, right? They're articulating an idea of citizenship, the consent of the governed, right, individual rights. These are the things that are the core of this emerging idea of citizenship. And it's all, right, sort of whether it's Locke or whether it's Rousseau or Montesquieu, right, to varying degrees.

positioning itself in opposition to absolutism and the idea of the imposition of political power from the monarch down and instead the idea that no political legitimacy rests with the consent of citizens, the consent of people, some degree or another, engaged in political life, bottom up. And so that aligns really well with the religious situation, right? The church is a top-down power in the same way that a monarch could be a top-down power.

And dissenters are basically adopting that enlightenment model of citizenship, voluntary, individual, rights, conscience, as their identity. And so they use that enlightenment political theory as a way to make arguments for political reform to redress their religious persecution.

religious discrimination that they face.

advocating for religious liberty, even not just for themselves, but for others as well. Which comes to play in our country, right? Yep. And the founding of our country, right?

Separation of church and state, very, very big here, right? It becomes a core feature of their politics and their point of view. And what it's really about, in a sense, if we step back for a second and think about the historical progression of it, I said, right? So 1660, sort of this is when dissent is created. The established church is restored. These various laws are put in place to try to force everybody back in.

But we're going to allow you to do it along with these restrictions and disabilities that we are also going to oppose. And so what happens and is influenced by the introduction of these Enlightenment ideas is that across the whole spectrum of dissenters, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, that's what informs the emergence of their politics, right? That toleration is not good enough. Toleration is still, right?

sort of you're still subject to the whims of the state. What is real and what is true and what is good is not toleration, it's religious liberty. It's the freedom of conscious to choose your own religious faith, ideas, church and community without suffering any civil penalties, without suffering any restrictions, without suffering any disabilities for those choices. And so what becomes sort of one of their first core

political goals is the repeal of the test and corporation acts, right? Repeal of these religious tests that are the very laws that are keeping them in this kind of second class citizen status.

Well, let's move. think that one of the podcasts you might have been referring to was in a program that we did was with Karen Zwabo-Pryor. I did the podcast, but we also had a great, great event with her. And we talked a little bit about the evangelical revival. And then I specifically was interested. I share an interest in Hannah Moore and the Clapham sect who were part of that. Right. And they

having worked on human rights myself and anti-trafficking, they are big abolitionists, right? So talk me through a little bit about how that subgroup of dissenters engaged so heavily in that and what that led to.

So there's a couple of things here. One, we mentioned that evangelicalism leads to activism. And in that, what we see is not just political activism, but social activism and humanitarian activism. And part of that is missionary activity and overseas missionary activity. So evangelical dissenters in particular, the congregationalists that I write about in my book, Baptists.

and spread the gospel overseas and we're going to go to various places and attempt to evangelize there. That bumps them up against slavery in the Caribbean colonies. They're attempting to evangelize and undertake missions to slaves. Planters, slave owners don't necessarily always see eye to eye with the idea that converting and evangelizing the slaves is in their best interests.

And it bumps up against various, as we can talk about various other kinds of colonial policies and structures that disadvantage, whether it's slaves in the slave colonies or whether it's indigenous peoples in places like South Africa. part of it is this push to take evangelical missions to various parts of the empire and in the name of religious liberty, the right to do so. So bumping up against.

coincides with this sort of developing notion of religious liberty and religious freedom, right? Undertaking missions in the colonies is an act of religious freedom, an act of religious liberty, an act of religious conscience. And any potential restrictions that the colonial government or others attempt to put in place to stop that, right, are problematic, and they want to reform and change that.

Can you jump to a little bit of a description how their faith, and I'm imagining as part of a core Christian faith is the belief in the human dignity of all people, we're all made in the image of God, so we have a level of equality, which also probably bumped up against the colonial administration. That's the next.

So part of the activism is the evangelizing and doing the missionary work. Again, going sort of parallel with that is their own particular sort of incorporating of these enlightenment ideas of liberty and citizenship and equality. And so it's absolutely that, right? The most famous sort of anti-slavery imagery of the campaigns of the late 1700s led by Wilberforce and backed.

by most of these evangelicals is the slave in chains on his knees, right? Am I not a man and brother? The Wedgwoods were Quakers, so they were dissenters of their own branch. on the Wedgwood plates and all of that, right? And so, the rivers come together here, right? Part of it is a evangelizing activism, and then the political activism comes in alongside of it, and the human rights activism comes in alongside of it, right?

In the Wedgewood.

a barrier to the evangelization of the slaves, say in Jamaica. It's the opposition of the state commandeered by the slaveholders who are trying to prevent that evangelization from, or putting up obstacles in the way of that evangelization from happening. so anti-slavery activism becomes both a moral religious imperative, it's immoral, it's against

the sort of nature of the world part of God's creation and equal in that way. And we're all part of equal humanity, but it's again, also against this sort of foundational principle of Christian freedom. Right. And so it's this sort of dual argument that says we need to slaves who are converted can't make free choices of conscience and faith if they're enslaved. And so therefore.

That's additional motivation for why they should be free.

Right. Well, I like the, I mean, I love that. And some of this is in your book as well, right? This story of the missions, particularly. it was encouraging to me because as we all know, there was some really nasty, there's nasty things done in the names of evangelization and missions and the colonial regime. But I think what you point out in your book and here is the complexity of that. There are examples of different sides of that same point here.

So in the context of missions, one of the good examples you also offer in your book is the Cape Colony. So why don't you tell us a little bit about citizenship and the movement there?

So another area of evangelical dissenting missionary activity is Cape Colony, Southern Africa. Cape Colony, which originates as a Dutch colony, comes under British control in the beginning of the 18th century during the course of the Napoleonic Wars. And around about that same time, the London Missionary Society, which is made up predominantly of evangelical congregationalists, begin to send missionaries to South Africa. And they begin to establish

missionary stations there. In the Cape Colony, the primary population that they're working with are people known as the Koi, and this is an indigenous population in that part of South Africa. The Koi are not slaves, they're Africans, they're not slaves, but they are discriminated against under colonial policy. Effectively, there are a series of laws

in the colony that date back to the Dutch times that restrict their freedom, restrict their movement, and restrict their independence in ways that sort of trap them as laborers on white colonists owned farms, branches, things of that sort. The LMS missionaries arrive and they begin to work within the colonial koi and building communities and trying to convert them and bring them into churches. And this

reform the laws of the colony to give civil equality to the African population. This is happening in the context of the abolitionist campaigns working against slavery. And part of Philip's motivation is that there are some slaves in the colony as well. And if those slaves are freed and their status simply becomes this kind of semi-slavery that the Koi live under,

and these restrictive laws, then that's what have we accomplished? What have we done? So long story short, Philip leads a campaign to essentially make an argument on the principles of the ideas of shared humanity and enlightenment ideas of citizenship that the non-white population in the colony should receive equal rights, essentially. Should be treated equally before the law. And so sort of drawing off of these same principles that we've been talking about, he leads a campaign

the impulse to spread the gospel and the idea that civil equality and the right to citizenship essentially, right, is essential to the creation of a Christian society, right? As long as the Africans are being discriminated against, Christianity can't flourish within the colony. into their faith. And they can't grow into their faith. And so this is another important example. And what it essentially...

to the kingdom, they would argue, in those colonial territories.

And we're back to advocating for religious liberty for all. With our time that we have left, I wonder if we could switch back to a little bit of education, the same evangelical revival strain and my favorite, Hannah Moore, but others as you've mentioned and their approach to education, which I think also relates well to the civil equality we were just talking about, right? And the ability to come to your own decision of faith.

Exactly.

and frankly, even just to read the Bible. So could you tell us a little bit about the Sunday school?

So, you know, with the rise of evangelicalism, there are essentially within the dissenting communities kind of two key things that happen. One is the influence of Wesleyan Methodism and George Whitefield, who's another Methodist preacher alongside of John Wesley, of their itinerant preaching. They're traveling around the countryside and they're preaching in the open air and they're drawing people together for kind of like revivals and these sorts of things.

Many of them are going to working class and poorer communities, whether it's in towns or in the countryside, right? And they're, they're attempting to reach areas and people that they see the established churches not reaching. And they have success in converting people and drawing people into these evangelical movements. The itinerant preaching is part of that. But the other part of that is, is the education and faith formation where these itinerant preachers go and begin to establish and set up small Christian communities.

huh. Yeah.

Sunday schools invariably follow. so Wilberforce and Hannemore and those Anglican evangelicals are working to establish their own network of Sunday schools within the structures of the established church. And parallel to that, within the dissenting communities, the same sort of thing is happening across the English countryside. And this eventually comes to tie in

to the religious liberty thing because what starts to happen is that these dissenting communities begin to establish themselves in these various places and they start to grow and there's larger numbers of them. And there's more of these evangelical Christians and there's more of these itinerant preachers and there's more of these Sunday schools. And in the case of the centers, it's all happening outside of the established church and less evangelical minded and more establishment church minded.

the number of Sunday schools and it would in effect sort of reduce the reach of evangelical religion. And this is a sort of catalyst point to evangelical dissenting political participation. This is the beginning chapters of my book and is basically what my dissertation was about. They mobilize politically to block these laws in the name of religious liberty and they ally themselves with the Whigs.

and various other entities in parliament who are not necessarily evangelicals, but who are broad supporters of the kind of enlightenment ideas to campaign to bring about the defeat of these attempted restrictions.

Great. think this might be a great way to kind of wrap up with kind of, you know, what does that mean for us today? And I think one of the things we've talked about is the way that this dynamic pulled together coalitions of people of faith, but even some of different faith, as you just said, in the political realm, but also around a cause, right? Like abolition or education or what have you. And so

Yeah, unpack that a little bit, how you see, and even the complexity of missions actually, right? These are different people working toward the same goal. And one of Chris's recommendations for us in our local community was to work together with people who are different from you on a community project. To things. And this echoes that a little bit. Absolutely. So talk little bit about that.

does, absolutely. And so I think that that's right. One of the things that is maybe sort of a takeaway of kind of what can we learn about the sort of concept of Christian citizenship in this time with these communities and civil engagement in this time with these communities is one that, yeah, the identification of sort of clear principles that you're attempting to advance, civil equality, abolition.

religious liberty, right? And the building of coalitions to accomplish that. And so as we were talking about a little bit before we started, if you look at the Clapham sect and sort of at the center of that are people like William Wilberforce and Hannah Moore, who are evangelical, Orthodox, Anglicans. But other key members of the Clapham sect include people like William Smith.

who is a rational, dissenting, Unitarian member of parliament, who is also part of the group in Clapham. Religiously very different from Wilberforce, theologically very different from Wilberforce, but they can both agree that slavery and the slave trade are bad things. And we should work to, in effect, move towards something that's closer to God's kingdom here on earth by accomplishing

the abolition of these things. And so I think that idea of the possibility of finding common Christian principles that people across a range of faith and political ideas can mobilize together to accomplish is one good way of thinking about how do we create a Christian citizenship that is

Less polarized and less divisive in these times, but more targeted towards working together towards common principles. Exactly.

and building the kingdom of God.

Well, thanks Mick. This was great. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for sharing your vast knowledge of the history. It's hard to keep track of the dates, but you know them and thank you for sharing that with us and a little more description of these communities.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for tuning into the Upwards Podcast. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation. For more information about the S.L. Brown Foundation and Upper House, please visit slbf.org. Go in peace to be a light on our campuses, in our churches, and in our businesses so that all may flourish.