God's Empire

Abstract

Greater Britain -the English-speaking settler colonies of the British empire which we are more likely now to refer to as the British world -was an idea as much as a set of territories. 1 For the free Christian churches of the peoples of Great Britain and Ireland, it was also a mission field. This is a novel idea and one which I hope to argue throughout the course of this book. Chapter 1 begins by examining the idea of Greater Britain , first as a concept in the writing of Charles Wentworth Dilke , and then as it was taken up by the churches who adopted the term as their own in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It also introduces topics raised in subsequent chapters which examine the arrangements and organisations that were marshalled across the empire in order to provide religious services for colonists. In subsequent chapters, this book considers the development of missions to British settlers, including the colonial missionary societies ( Chapters 3 to 7 ), missionary training colleges for colonial clergy ( Chapters 8 to 10 ), church emigration societies ( Chapter 10 ), and Christian colonisation ( Chapters 11 and 12 ). Together, these provisions for the colonial churches helped shape the powerful, shared sense of British identity that suffused the British world and to which Dilke was able to give a name.In 1897, the English Baptist pastor and writer , John Clifford , completed a tour of Australia , New Zealand and Canada , during which he was swept up in the elaborate colonial celebrations for the Queen 's diamond jubilee. 2 Experiencing at close hand the wave of colonial devotion to the Queen, he confidently predicted a great coming federation of Greater Britain , which would be made up of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the Dominion of Canada and Newfoundland , 1Colonialism, colonisation and Greater Britain1 For settler loyalism and the 'imagined British world', see C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich, eds.,

Missionaries of the Millennium: Israelite Preachers in the English‐Speaking World, 1823–1863

“…135 As Hilary Carey has shown, in the nineteenth-century British world "emigration and colonization had a religious dimension"; the colonial missionary societies of Anglican, Nonconformist and Roman Catholic churches were deeply committed to following white settlers leaving the British Isles for the Empire, planting their theological and social distinctions along with a common "Christian ethos" within colonial communities. 136 Such church missions were each motivated to make British settlers "a better, more Christian, people," retaining their own specific vision of what constituted Christian life and practice. 137 The destinations of Israelite preachers after first evangelising in the British Isles -to Australia, New Zealand, and Cape Colony especially -indicate a comparable mission, not only in the effort to plant a British religious tradition in settler soil, but also in the promotion of a precise version of Christian living and worship.…”

“…136 Such church missions were each motivated to make British settlers "a better, more Christian, people," retaining their own specific vision of what constituted Christian life and practice. 137 The destinations of Israelite preachers after first evangelising in the British Isles -to Australia, New Zealand, and Cape Colony especially -indicate a comparable mission, not only in the effort to plant a British religious tradition in settler soil, but also in the promotion of a precise version of Christian living and worship. The political independence from "the British world" of the United States was irrelevant to Israelite interest in the country: there remained a large British population with whom it was important to share their prophetic message.…”

“…In precisely this period, British dissenting churches, including Methodists, Congregationalists, and Baptists, were also responding to mass emigration, expanding the remits of their existing missionary societies -originally established to "Christianise the heathen"to establish "colonial missions" to settlers in the British Empire, "to prevent the heathenising of Christians." 73 Methodism first came to Australia as the existing faith of certain settlers in Sydney, who duly initiated their own class meetings before directly appealing to the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society for a minister. 74 Equivalent "pulls" and "pushes" probably applied in the Israelite mission to Australia -both requests for a preaching ministry from existing believers and ambitions to evangelise a wider population potentially containing "hidden Hebrews.…”

Religious discrimination and the ‘hierarchy of rights’

“…The first is that a hierarchy does in fact exist since religious discrimination has unfairly been given a lower priority than other characteristics, particularly sexual orientation, as can be seen from cases where there is a clash of rights (see, e.g. Carey and Carey, 2012). The second argument has a very different starting point: religion or belief is inherently different from other protected characteristics, perhaps because it is a choice rather than an inherent characteristic of an individual and certainly because religions or beliefs place extensive obligations for behaviour on their adherents (see, e.g.…”