Two cheers: Clapping the Clapham Sect

“The Clapham sect were heroes to me, but now I am not sure” was a comment to me at the lunch break during a Moore College Library event featuring papers on how the influential group of British Christians influenced Sydney’s evangelicals. Flourishing in the late 1700s to the mid-1800s, they are best remembered for their campaigns for social reform, particularly the abolition of slavery. That’s a wonderful achievement to set against the class blinkers of the Clapham Sect that led to the lunchtime comment. And the arrival of a Christian minister, as the white settlement of Australia began, and the spread of the gospel from Chaplain Richard Johnson, can be laid directly at the influence and financing of the Clapham Sect.

The Other Cheek, as the title of a news blog about Christians, implies that there will be fault or disappointment along with Christian achievement in society, and the Clapham Sect turns out to be an example of that.

“The Christianity promoted in India and Australia in the early 19th century was evangelical due to the influence of the Clapham Sect,” said historian Stuart Piggin, introducing the sect. ” Clapham was a class act – an upper-class act.”

Piggin contrasted the wealthy members of the Clapham sect and their networking with the powerful as a contrast to the Westleys’ mission to the plain people.  In looking at the Clapham sect, we are looking at a change from above, as well as the evangelically inspired change in England from the Methodists. 

But the Clapham sect was not a sect in the religious sense, Piggins explained, “But a network, a confederacy of evangelicals. He pointed to recent studies analysing Clapham both as a pursuit of power and the exercise of status, and as collaborative philanthropy.

The lesson of Clapham, according to Piggin, is that “Social uplift is best achieved by the interdependence of business, church and state.”

William Wilberforce is perhaps the best known of the Clapham Sect, which included other influential evangelicals, including the wealthy Thornton family and John Venn, founder of the church missionary society. The British and Foreign Bible Society, charity schools and campaigns for prison reform and the abolition of the lottery (that one was unsuccessful) flowed in the activism of the group that met at holy trinity Church, Clapham in South East London. 

Moore College Principal Mark Thompson’s paper featured someone who was never a member of the Clapham sect but whose place in history was a product of it. Thompson traced the Clapham-inspired appointment of Richard Johnson, the chaplain who arrived in Botany Bay with the convicts on the first fleet, establishing also the influence of the Eclectic Society, a group of clergy that existed in close connection with the lay-dominated Clapham sect.

Thompson traced how the two societies together lobbied successfully for a chaplain on the first fleet, then John Newton of the Ecclectics with the Claphams’ Wilberforce (who Thompson fingered as the unnamed “friend” in letters prodding Johnson to go) found their man.

Who then found, or was found, or was found by, his woman. Johnson asked the Archbishop of Canterbury, “If I decide to get married in the colony, who [which cleric] would marry me? “Mary Burton, who Thompson points out deserves much more research, became the only officer’s wife to accompany her husband to Botany Bay. Thompson said much more needs to be researched about her, for example, what caused her to give her daughter, Milbah, an Aboriginal name?

Michael Gladwin, Lecturer in History at St Mark’s National Theological Centre in the School of Theology, Charles Sturt University, quoted the letters of John Newton to Richard Johnson, evidencing the pastoral heart of the slave trader turned minister and famous human writer.

A sample from Newton’s letters that could take eight months to get to Sydney

29 March 1794

“… I wish you to consider your mission, as a whole, composed of various parts, each of which, in its proper place, has its importance. Preaching, reading, and study, etc, are of the first consideration; but if necessity required you to work with your own hands, to procure necessary sustenance for your family, this was a part of your calling likewise. I believe the Apostle was employed no less lawfully and properly when gathering sticks for the fire—Acts 28:3 [24]—than when preaching the Gospel. You understand the Gospel too well to confine religion to devotional exercises. The secret of the Lord teaches us, whether we eat or drink, or whatsoever we do, to do all to His glory. I judge that when you dig in your garden, or plant potatoes or cabbages, you serve the Lord as truly as when you are upon your knees, or in the pulpit, provided you do these things in a right spirit, in dependence upon Him and in submission to His will. Such employments are cross to our inclinations, but if we take them up as a Cross, and can cheerfully deny our own will, they become (when necessary) a part of the obedience we owe Him.”

The Clapham vision of education intertwined civilisation and Christianity. Ruth Lukbyo, Dean of Students at Youthworks College, quoted from the CMS Missionary Register, which aims for the Indigenous peoples of the colony and the convicts. they aimed to “Christianise and civilise the barbarians” and Christianise and re-civilise the hordes of wretched culprits that are vomited up by our prison ships upon our shores.” Lukabyo acknowledged how badly that language strikes our ears today But pointed out that the Clapham Sect were concerned for the education of the lower classes – ” fearing the spread of criminality and vice among the lower classes” 

In response, they funded charity schools and Sunday schools, a pared-down version of the charity school that avoided affecting the working days.

Hannah More, a prominent abolitionist and a close associate of the Clapham Sect, had 16 Sunday Schools, with 1,000 students, “forming lower classes for habits of industry and virtue”, but tellingly, Lukabyo pointed out, did not teach them to write as “that would put them above their station.”

In NSW, Richard Johnson first tried to reach adult convicts by distributing religious literature, including Bibles, but was discouraged by the failure of that scheme, recording that convicts used pages of the Bibles as toilet paper. Educating the children of the colony became a focus for the chaplains. Johnson was appointed superintendent of schools by Governor Phillip but was given no resources. But by 1813, of 3,000 children of the colony, only 1 in 5 were in state schools.

If abolition of slavery in the British empire is the crowning glory of the Clapham Sect, then promoting mass education also deserves credit, while acknowledging that the Clapham Sect’s fixed position in the class structure, which they believed was ordained by God, rendered it radically incomplete. 

Lukabyo also described the fraught nature of Clapham’s interaction with the indigenous inhabitants of the colony, removing children into a native institution, yet also lobbying in the UK Parliament for the protection of Aboriginal peoples.

“We look back and see the harm that was done, but their intentions were good.”

The confluence of wealth and power with Christianity embedded in the Clapham Sect’s view of the world was taken further in a paper by Nicole Starling, Academic Dean at  Morling College, that outlined the dangerous resectability of the Clapham Sect members. She quoted Henry Venn on learning of the success of young evangelicals sponsored at Cambridge University to supply evangelical clergy in the Church of England: “By becoming a little more respectable, we may be perceived as becoming more dangerous.”

Starling described the limitations of the Clapham Sect: “While  opposed to slavery, they opposed political reform that would upset the social order.” She pointed to the work of Gertrude Himmelfarb, who has researched the defection of the children of the Wilberforce and Thornton families from evangelicalism. 

But the Thornton family in their Clapham heyday contributed a significant amount to the financing of Richard Johnson and Samaul Marsden being sent to NSW, and the Clapham connection to the cabinet of Pitt the Younger as PM ensured an evangelical chaplaincy in Botany Bay.

Starling pointed to a glaring example of how the Clapham sect, with its banking families, was replicated in the colony, with the Bank of NSW being set up with a board of members who were also on the board of the Bible Society. “So many of the models and the institutions in Sydney Evangelicals today were shaped by the Thorntons”, Starling opined.

Historians and former deputy principal of Moore College, Colin Bale, contributed a paper on Henry Venn, at whose church, Holy Trinity Clapham, the sect met. “He was a man who had influence over the movers and shakers (the wealthy and powerful in the sect) – you can see his handprint in what happened.” In three years spent away from Clapham in Huddersfield, Venn is said to have had 900 conversions and 22 men offered for ministry. But being of the lower orders, Bale pointed out, they became ministers of independent churches. 

One thing to consider is whether the connection or mingling of Christianity and power, with the Trump administration springing to mind, but more locally examining the extraordinary number of our Prime Ministers who have been Christians.

Are Christians close to the seat of power in today’s society, pursuing a wide range of healthy goals for our society, such as the Abolition of slavery, the broadening of education, and prison reform, which the Clapham Sect brought about? Taking account of their flaws, most particularly their failure to deal with the class system of Britain and the subsequent inequity, what is the record of lacunae and achievements of modern-day christian activism?

Image: Holy Trinity Clapham