Undomesticated Dissent is an original and engaging work which interrogates the literature of early dissent – and especially the writings of Bunyan, Defoe and Blake – as a strategy for the revival of a neglected dissenting canon, and as a pattern for an active and faithful vocation of dissent in the present day. Freeman is concerned to recognise the contribution of dissenters to the formation of modern democracy, whilst simultaneously emphasising their potential to resist the institutions of power which are the natural but malignant outcomes of western democratic systems. Placing liberty of conscience at the core of dissenting faith (and demonstrating how early American dissenters were willing to extend their aspiration for freedom of belief and practice ‘to apply equally to “Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians”’; p. 129), Freeman nevertheless argues that a privately nurtured, ‘domesticated’ religious conviction is inadequate without this rigorous social engagement and resistance: for, ‘if the current heirs of religious dissent seem to have little to say that is truthful for the wider culture or fail to exemplify a way of life that is threatening to the powers that be, perhaps it is because their dissent has become domesticated’ (p. 223).
The most distinctive feature of Freeman's unusual methodology is his use of close literary and source analysis and reception history to reveal how the works of three influential voices of early dissent, John Bunyan (1628–88), Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) and William Blake (1757–1827), were reactivated in diverse and urgent contexts of political oppression from the English Civil War to the twentieth-century American civil rights movement. Freeman's ‘exercise in remembering’ (p. xv) starts at an evocative site of dissenting presence and absence: Bunhill Fields, the London dissenters’ cemetery where memorials to these authors stand amidst the graves of a larger community of English nonconformity which included Independents, Baptists, Presbyterians, Unitarians, free-thinkers and others, like Blake, who defy these categories.
After a brisk and highly readable introduction to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dissenting history as a narrative of persecution and persistence (‘Domesticating Dissent’), two key themes emerge for Freeman as characteristic of nonconformist discourse. The first is of course liberty of conscience and worship. The second is a complex eschatological vision which resisted the urge either to literalise or to allegorise the possibilities of an apocalyptic future, and which instead used the imagery of apocalypse to address Christian life in an ever-expectant present. As Freeman shows, the ‘apocalyptic imagination’ of early dissenters marked them out as dangerous and threatening to empire and state. It also presented them with an epistemological challenge which they confronted in different ways. For Bunyan, he contends, the radical eschatology of apocalypse was rechannelled, under political subjection and persecution, into an internalised, personal struggle. For Blake, drawing on Bunyan, Milton and an eclectic array of religious and literary forebears, nothing less than complete political and psychological revolution could bring closer the desired apocalyptic end to earthly history.
A problem arises, for this reader at least, in Freeman's use of the model of ‘domestication’ to depict state-sponsored attempts to force dissenters into accommodative behaviours such as occasional conformity, and to penalise those whose conviction made them stubbornly untameable. Though suggestive, the term does not map easily onto the literature under discussion, and it is hard to see what the study as a whole gains from framing its sources in this way, rather than in relation to ‘toleration’ or ‘permission’ which have featured more readily in the vocabularies of dissenting ecclesiastical history.
Freeman is an acute and interesting literary critic and deserves to be read in literature departments as much as by those interested in the fate of Christian dissent today. His analysis of Robinson Crusoe is a case in point: taking a significant step forward to identify and specify the deep influence of Defoe's dissenting convictions on the shape of the text. Pointing to Defoe's continually evolving reception in religious and secular reading cultures, especially postcolonial rereadings and the identification of Robinson Crusoe with the evangelical conversion narrative, Freeman argues that the text's ‘surplus of meaning’ is evidence of an unstable conjunction between political and religious dissent.
Freeman's previous works included a number of collections of Baptist sources which are clearly the fruits of a concerted commitment to a Baptist canon: A Company of Women Preachers (Baylor University Press, 2011), and Baptist Roots (Judson Press, 1999). With its careful concern to introduce and explicate the most significant political and historical debates surrounding early modern cultures of dissent, and to provide summaries of plot and character to aid readers in engaging Bunyan's and Blake's complex allegory, this new, highly accessible book can serve as a counterpart to those anthologies, and as a model for sensitive reading of such sources. Such work enables a conversation of great scope which crosses literary and theological disciplinary boundaries.
