page_title: Liberation Society
section_title: Formation
hierarchical_section_title: Liberation Society / Formation
caption_attribution_description: Caricature of Edward Miall (1809-1881). Caption read "The Nonconformist".
context_page_description: The Liberation Society was an organisation in Victorian England that campaigned for disestablishment of the Church of England. It was founded in 1844 by Edward Miall as the British Anti-State Church Association and was renamed in 1853 as the Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control, from which the shortened common name of Liberation Society derived.
context_section_description: Edward Miall was a pastor at the Congregational chapel in Leicester who had been inspired by those who had been campaigning against church rates. The imprisonment in 1840 of one of his congregation for non-payment of church rates caused him to leave his ministry to become editor of the new Nonconformist weekly newspaper in 1841. With the additional impetus of controversy regarding discrimination in James Graham's 1843 proposals for changes to education provisions in the Factory Acts and the schism in the Church of Scotland, Miall formed the British Anti-State Church Association in 1844. The group was renamed in 1853 as the Liberation Society on the advice of the relatively moderate veteran campaigner, Edward Baines. The Liberation Society, says historian Richard Helmstadter, became "the most important political organisation of the Nonconformist community" almost from its foundation and until the death of Miall in 1881.
  The Society campaigned on issues including church rates and discrimination both in cemeteries and the established universities, such as Cambridge and Oxford. At its heart, however, was a drive for disestablishment rather than mere removal of discriminatory practices. Miall's efforts relied heavily on political means to achieve religious ends, one outcome of which was that he was elected as a Member of Parliament for Rochdale in the 1852 general election, having first tried for election in 1845.
  
  The net of the Liberation Society spread wider, though. It encompassed disaffected groups such as the Chartists and Free Traders as well as militant Nonconformists. It was a temporary recourse even for some members of the Established Church, notably the High Church cleric Alexander Mackonochie, who wanted less interference from the state so that he could practice proscribed rituals. Some people, such as Richard Masheder, a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, noted that the movement had the potential to effect change well beyond religious affairs because of the symbiotic relationship between the Established Church and the upper levels of society, whereby each buttressed the position of the other. Disestablishment might remove the prop that legitimised the role of the aristocracy and indeed the monarchy itself. There was indeed a wave of support for a more democratic society at that time and Miall repeatedly attacked the mutuality of the relationship between church and the social elite, believing it to be a force for snobbery and a barrier to progress. He said 
  The upper ten thousand with very few exceptions regard connection with the authorised ecclesiastical institution of the kingdom as inseparable from their elevated position ... To belong to the church is to side with respectability; to dissent from it is to cast in your lot with the vulgar. Accordingly, Dissenters, simply as such, are esteemed inferior.
caption: Edward Miall as caricatured by Ape (Carlo Pellegrini) in Vanity Fair, July 1871.
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