Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology - Hardcover

Larsen, Timothy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0918954932 ISBN 13: 9780918954930

Publisher: Baylor University Press, 2004

Synopsis

This volume explores the cultural, political, and intellectual forces that helped define nineteenth-century British Christianity. Larsen challenges many of the standard assumptions about Victorian-era Christians in their attempts to embody and their theological commitments. He highlights the way in which Dissenters and other free church Evangelicals employed the full range of theological resources available to them to take stands that the wider culture was still resisting - e.g., evangelical nonconformists enfranchising women, siding with the black population of Jamaica in opposition to their own colonial governor, championing the rights of Jews, Roman Catholics, and atheists. These stances belie the stereotypes of Victorian Evangelicals currently in existence and properly shift the focus to Dissent, to plebeian culture, to social contexts, and to the cultural and political consequences of theological commitments. This study brings freshness and verve to the study of religion and the Victorians, bearing fruit in a range of significant findings and connections.

About this title

About the Author

Timothy Larson is an associate professor of Theology at Wheaton College. Among other works, Larsen has authored Friends of Religious Equality: Nonconformist Politics in Mid-Victorian England (1999) and Christabel Pankhurst: Fundamentalism and Feminism in Coalition (2002).

Edition details

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0918954932
• ISBN 13: 9780918954930
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 226