My debt to dissent.

Last Friday I greatly enjoyed Evensong at King's College, Cambridge. Next Saturday I am attending a Symposium at Dr Williams' Library. How are these related?

I grew up in a home that attended the local Congregational Church, and of course I went too. The Congregationalists (now the United Reformed Church) are inheritors of the Dissenting tradition that was prominent in English religious and political life from the late 16th to the early 18th Centuries. They separated themselves from the worship of the Church of England; their opposition was focused around the Act of Uniformity of 1662. Generally they became known as Non-Conformists.

Dissenters objected to prescribed forms of worship and church government. They asserted that no statute could over rule an individual's conscience. However the precedence given to conscience could not but lead to further division. I remember being somewhat aghast, in my late teens, to discover that the local Church Meeting, in the Congregational Church in my home town, was supreme – if it didn't like the message that the Minister they had appointed was preaching, they could simply dismiss him. Doctrine, it seemed to me, was decided at the whim of the Church Meeting, while I had grown up to love and revere the saintly-seeming men whose task it was to interpret scripture to us, for task which they had been uniquely trained. Surely, I thought, what the bible taught could only be one thing, and advanced study would reveal what that was.

Looking back from 50 years on, it isn't hard to see how later I gravitated to the Church of England, where doctrine filtered down from above and the people learned what they clergy had to teach them.

My interest these last few years has been grabbed by certain philosophical ideas: liberty, free speech, rights and ethics. These come together in political philosophy, and I went back to Thomas Hobbes, the father of English political philosophy, and read quite a lot of philosophical authors and a fair bit of history as one cannot understand an idea without understanding the circumstances in which it grew. Some figures jumped out at me, as I worked to understand how the values that we now take for granted were originally expressed and developed. Hobbes himself, John Milton, John Locke, Richard Price, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill were the most prominent among these. And a surprisingly large number of them were part of, or derived from, or owed something to, the dissenting tradition. That isn't to say that there were no Anglicans who made an important contribution to the development of new ideas. Bishop Edward Stillingfleet played a prominent role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, for example. But it was the Dissent that provided the soil in which the radically democratic ideas of Richard Price, the minimal government beloved of William Godwin, the thrust against censorship of John Milton all put down their roots.

Locke's background was Puritan, as indeed was Milton's, while Paine, Wollstonecraft, Bentham and Mill's rejection of Anglicanism went further until it was a rejection of religion per se.

For an old Anglican, who still loves the ritual and music of the great Anglican churches, this was a bit of a shock, until I started to think about it. Take for example the day when, as a young curate, I found that we were celebrating Mass on the Feast of Charles, King and Martyr. What's that? I wasn't in a position to question it at the moment, but I felt a jolt. Charles I was rather far from being a Saint who died for his faith. He was the ultimate autocrat, a believer in his own divine right to rule and to require obedience. He fought bitterly to maintain his superiority and to deny popular rights, such as government by elected representatives, which we take for granted. The God he worshipped and the religion he valued were the things that underwrote his power. Yet for several years I regularly kept the Feast of Charles, King and Martyr.

Or take something more recent – the incredible surroundings of King's College Chapel, wonderful singing, that amazing roof, candle light... and the collect of the day. This time it was the Feast of St Simon and St Jude. The prayer of the day asks that we be “joined together in unity of spirit by their doctrine, that we may be made an holy temple acceptable unto thee”. Which is to say that the dogma these men may have promulgated (and apart from the Epistle of St Jude, itself of very doubtful provenance, there is no evidence of anything they may have said or done or taught) about 2000 years ago, in superstitious ignorance of everything we have since discovered, should be the basis of our common belief and practice today.

Listening to the collect of the day in King's I was strongly reminded of the thrust of dissent, claiming freedom of conscience and the liberty to do as we believed right, opposed to the claim for unyielding authority demanded by the dead hand of Anglican teaching.

There is nothing to be gained from yielding to authority, especially when it is not based on the least shred of evidence, and everything to be gained from exploring where new ideas lead. It is that dissent which has brought us to the values and privileges we enjoy today and against the loss, and the misuse, of which we must be for ever on our guard.