The Christian act of dissent

In the late 16th century, religious dissenter Henry Barrow languished in London’s Fleet Street prison, taunted by Anglican divine Lancelot Andrewes for his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the spiritual headship of the English monarch. Across the pond and the centuries, Baptist farmer-preacher Clarence Jordan endured derision and threats in the rigidly segregated rural Georgia community where he founded Koinonia Farm, an experiment in Christian communal living.

What thread ties these two together? Ac­cording to Curtis Freeman, both Barrow and Jordan stand in a living stream of faithful religious dissenters who have clung to freedom of worship, liberty of conscience, and, above all, the sovereign freedom of Jesus Christ, the one true Lord and King.

This fellowship of “undomesticated dissent”—that cloud of witnesses who endured persecution from church and state in some periods and resisted the blandishments of conformity in others—is far from monochrome. Freeman’s compelling narrative bears out the complexity of a religious phenomenon characterized more by existential fortitude and a willingness to challenge authority than a set of fixed principles or doctrines. Some dissenters were early Pres­byterians seeking to reform the establishment Church of England, others were separatist Baptists or Quakers, while yet others, like the Fifth Monarchists, embraced a radical political insurgency that evoked official repression. Some were tradespeople, while others achieved a greater measure of prosperity and stability. Freeman traces many of their stories, from the tumult of post-Reformation England to an increasingly post-Christian contemporary North America. This often riveting intellectual history reads at times like a novel (if the reader ignores the ample footnotes).