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Nonconformism is the refusal to conform to common standards, conventions, rules, traditions or laws.
Nonconformist was a term used in England after the Act of Uniformity 1662 to refer to an English subject belonging to a non-Christian church or any non-Anglican church. It may also refer more narrowly to such a person who also advocated religious liberty. (see English Dissenters)
The term is also applied retrospectively to earlier English Protestants (such as Puritans and Presbyterians) who violated the Act of Uniformity 1559, typically by practicing or advocating radical, sometimes separatist, dissent with respect to the established church.
Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and those less organized, were considered Nonconformists at the time of the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Later, as other groups formed, they were also considered nonconformists. These included Methodists, Quakers, Unitarians, and members of the Salvation Army.
The religious census of 1851 revealed that total nonconformist attendance was very close to that of Anglicans.
Nowadays, churches independent of the Anglican Church of England or the Presbyterian Church of Scotland are often called Free Churches. In Scotland, the Anglican Scottish Episcopal Church is considered nonconformist (despite its English counterpart's status) and in England, the Presbyterian United Reformed Church is in a similar position.
Members of noncomformist churches dissented, and often substantially, from established churches. It has, however, been frequently noted that, within the church, the required degree of conformity was quite high, and that members who refused to conform to common standards, conventions, rules, traditions or laws of the nonconformist church were dealt with far more severely than the established church dealt with its members. G. K. Chesterton observed:
For instance, what we called the Free Churches, constituting what was also called the Nonconformist Conscience, represented a marvel of moral unity and the spreading of a special spiritual atmosphere. But the Free Churches were not free, whatever else they were. The most striking and even startling thing about them was the ABSENCE of any individual repudiations of the common ideals which the Conscience laid down. The Nonconformist Conscience was not the normal conscience; they would hardly themselves have pretended that the mass of mankind necessarily agreed with them about Drink or Armaments. But they all agreed with each other about Drink or Armaments. A Nonconformist minister standing up to defend public-houses, or public expenditure on guns and bayonets, was a much rarer thing than a heretic in much more hierarchical systems. It was broadly the fact that ALL such men supported what they called Temperance; which seemed to mean an intemperate denunciation of temperate drinking. It is almost as certain that ALL of them insisted on what they called Peace; which seemed, so far as I could make out, to mean such weakening of armament as would involve disaster and destruction in War. But the question here is not whether I disagreed with them; but whether they ever disagreed with each other.*
The term dissenter came into use, particularly after the Act of Toleration (1689), which exempted nonconformists who had taken the oaths of allegiance and supremacy from penalties for nonattendance at the services of the Church of England. For more on Nonconformists of the 17th and 18th centuries, see English Dissenters.
In England, nonconformists were restricted from many spheres of public life and were ineligible for many forms of public educational and social benefits, until the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in the nineteenth century and associated toleration. For example, attendance at an English university had required conformity to the Church of England before University College London (UCL) was founded, compelling nonconformists to privately fund their own Dissenting Academies.
See also
External links
Religion in the United Kingdom | Protestantism | English Reformation
"Nonconformism"