The disestablishment and disendowment of the Church in Wales was a direct result of a renascent Welsh nationalism asserting itself in the daily life of Wales and in the English parliament. This thesis examines the historical, political, and social aspects of the disestablishment and disendowment of the Church.

I present a critical analysis and comparison of the early modern critiques of Christianity and of the institutional strategies for achieving religious toleration through an examination of the thought of Rawls Hobbes, Locke, and Tocqueville. I argue that the contemporary dialogue over religion is limited by its uncritical acceptance of the American experience with the constitutional regime of religious freedom, which takes its bearings from the scheme of religious disestablishment that Locke articulated in the Letter Concerning Toleration. The aim of my dissertation is to correct this distortion of the history and theory of liberalism, to restore the original theological and practical flexibility of liberal politics, and to articulate competing constitutional arrangements for theocratic reform and transition that are not exhausted by “neutrality.” Instead of presenting a monolithic argument in favor of disestablishment, the early modern liberal thinkers favored a combination of different institutional and educational strategies, tailored to national and local conditions, for reforming the Church and for advancing popular enlightenment. I turn to Hobbes and Hume to recover this case for religious establishment, and contrast and compare their arguments to those of Locke and Smith. In revealing the peculiar strengths and weakness of both church establishment and free exercise, early modern rationalists presented a set of flexible institutional and practical guidelines that could inform political statesmanship in its pursuit of the agenda of popular religious reform. Through an analysis of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and the Old Regime, I show that the uncritical focus on Locke’s regime of disestablishment captures only one side of the complex and multifaceted historical experience of liberalism with religion in Europe and America, and does not do justice to the rich theoretical and political debate that shaped liberalism. Not just Hobbes and Hume, but even Locke himself, in his early Two Tracts and even in the Letter, presented strong practical arguments for and theoretical justifications of limited but real state religious establishments as institutional engines of theological reform. The recovery of this debate is meant to contribute to the capacity of liberal theory to engage in a critical dialogue with non-liberal religion, and to its capacity to articulate competing constitutional and institutional structures that , while unfamiliar to us, may be more suited for theocratic transitions in non-Western and non-Christian societies than the regime of neutrality. / text

The manual labor movement generally has been regarded as a failed attempt to improve the educational prospects of the antebellum laboring class by enabling students to pay tuition in cash or kind. This dissertation argues that between 1820 and 1860, the movement accomplished a rather different objective on behalf of learned, not laboring, Americans. By inviting indigent youths to exchange work for education, manual laborism subordinated a portion of the laboring class’s productive power to learned-class interests. Steered by a graduate clergy who associated economic dependency with intellectual servitude, the movement constructed a national network of private academies that afforded the antebellum learned class a degree of freedom from market prerogatives. Many of these colleges remain in operation, forming laborism’s most durable legacy: a mechanism for endorsing the learned class’s rational autonomy from market constraints and thereby regulating access to moral and intellectual authority in a capitalist economy. Earlier studies of manual laborism have struggled to account for the movement’s concurrent popularity among abolitionists, slavers, evangelicals, religious traditionalists, trade unionists, merchant capitalists, and utopian reformers. Some scholars have regarded manual laborism as a democratizing movement that was infiltrated by reactionary forces, while others have seen in it a social control program that was undermined by egalitarian insurgents. By contrast, “In Cash or Kind” anchors manual laborism in the relatively stable interests of a geographically diffuse, ideologically diverse, but materially unified learned class. In so doing, this project traces important continuities between seemingly antagonistic reform movements, political persuasions, and religious traditions. Situated at the confluence of intellectual and labor history, “In Cash or Kind” presents an institutional account of learned-class formation in the antebellum period. It compares manual laborites’ memoirs, manifestoes, and school constitutions with student demographics and college financial reports to interrogate the gap between the movement’s stated agenda and its eventual outcomes. In that gap, “In Cash or Kind” locates the material origins of an American learned establishment that continues to stand in a vexed relationship with working people.

This thesis is a study of the effects of the Third Reform Act and Irish Home Rule on the politics of late-Victorian Edinburgh focussing on the general elections of 1885 and 1886. Although the impact on British politics of both the Third Reform Act and the debate on Irish Home Rule have been the subjects of many studies, Edinburgh has hardly featured in this historiography. During this short time, Edinburgh was transformed from a Liberal dominated dual-member constituency to a city represented by four single-member MPs, one of whom was not a Liberal, thus altering the long-standing liberal political tradition of the city. Both the Third Reform Act and the debate over Irish Home Rule created separate and distinct splits in the local Liberal Party of Edinburgh. The Liberal split over Irish Home Rule has attracted some attention, but the split created by the Third Reform Act has been ignored. This thesis helps bridge a gap in nineteenth-century Scottish political history by focussing on Edinburgh; however, it also seeks to highlight the Liberal infighting that took place after the Third Reform Act, but prior to the split over Irish Home Rule. This study draws heavily on the local press, campaign pamphlets and manuscripts of political elites to offer an analysis of the changes that took place upon passage of the Third Reform Act and introduction of the issue of Irish Home Rule. The political rhetoric that emerged during this period focussed on themes within the political tradition of the constituency, questioning the legitimacy of the local Party, and defining Liberalism. These were not unique to Edinburgh and the case study presented here is connected to wider themes within the study of late-Victorian politics.

Thesis advisor: James M. O'Toole / This dissertation examines the religious environment in nineteenth-century Massachusetts created by church disestablishment and a theological schism. Congregationalists, bound to God and to one another with a sacred covenant, were the traditional beneficiaries of the state's constitutional requirement that towns raise tax revenue for "the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality." The nation's last church establishment system was not removed until a statewide referendum in 1833, but, in practice, it had eroded earlier as Congregational churches encountered internal and external religious dissent. The mechanics of the establishment system had often been used by residents, including those liberal church members who eventually adopted the name Unitarians, to obstruct orthodox Congregationalists from operating more than 100 local churches in Massachusetts. These changes compelled Congregationalists to voluntarily support their churches prior to formal disestablishment, effectively ending the establishment system town-by-town and removing those churches from the center of town life. The lived religious experiences dramatically changed. Laymen took advantage of Congregationalism's inherently decentralized structure and gained control of their local churches. They sought to maintain the purity of their individual covenants by expelling absent members and those espousing theological heresies. In the process, local ministers were marginalized and dismissed with increasing frequency. Tensions arose between many in the clergy elite, who advocated for denominational consistency, and the laymen, who defended the autonomy of their local church. The story of antebellum Congregationalism in Massachusetts, rather than being part of an emerging national denominationalism, was actually one of an inward turn, a type of atomization of the religious denomination. The uncoordinated actions on the local level helped prompt the first national gathering of Congregationalists in more than two centuries, but suggestions for the adoption of explicitly "Congregational" elements by local churches were rejected by the laity. Congregationalism emerged from the Civil War with these antebellum changes made permanent and entrenched as a parochial, laity-driven denomination. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

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In early 1868 William E. Gladstone presented several bills in Parliament to disestablish the Church of Ireland. Prior to 1868 Gladstone had stated his opposition to the official connection between the Church of Ireland and the State. Gladstone, however, had also claimed that he was not in favor of immediate action and instead advocated restraint in attacking the Church of Ireland. The 1860's also saw the rise of the Fenian organization. The Fenians were dedicated to the overthrow of English rule in Ireland and the establishment of an Irish republic. The role that the Fenians played in convincing Gladstone to disestablish the Irish church has received varying interpretations from historians; yet no attempt has been made to look closely at the issue.

This thesis explores the hitherto undocumented disestablishment and reconstruction of the Anglican Church of Ireland, c.1868-1870, and argues that this experience was formative in the emergence of Home Rule. Structurally, the Church’s General Synod served as a model for an autonomous Irish parliament. Moreover, disestablishment and reconstruction conditioned the political trajectories of the Protestants initially involved in the first group to campaign for a federal Irish parliament, the Home Government Association (HGA). More broadly, both the HGA and the governance of the independent Church—the General Synod—grew from the bedrock of the same associational culture. The HGA was more aligned with the public associations of Protestant-dominated Dublin intellectual life and the lay associational culture of the Church. Although the political vision advocated was different from the normal conservatism of many of its Protestant members, culturally it was entirely grounded in the recent Anglican experience.

This thesis starts by describing the legal foundation of religious liberty in the United States and the evolvement of the religion clause jurisprudence. Then follows an outline of the main legal theories on religious liberty. It continues to describe a case study conducted on how Americans citizens perceive the protection of their religious liberty. Upon this there is a chapter where the detailed findings from the case study are described in juxtaposition to the relevant jurisprudence and how this can be applied to the overall legal framework protecting religious liberty.  The final chapter is a discussion on what conclusions that can be drawn.