Strange Deliberations: John Betjeman and Protestant Nonconformity

Abstract: The influence of Anglican culture and theology on the development of John Betjemans poetic and spiritual imagination has been the subject of a good deal of recent scholarly attention. However, an affinity for Protestant Nonconformity is an unexpected secondary Christian influence in his poetry and prose. This essay seeks (1) to explore the various ways in which the dissenting tradition, both mainstream and marginalized, appears in his work, from cultural appreciation to gothic humor, from spiritual anxiety to theological acceptance; (2) to reconcile these contradictory attitudes toward Protestant Nonconformity; and (3) to assess its significance in the development of his literary imagination. ********** John Betjemans devotion to the Church of England and the unique and prevailing Anglican temper of his character and imagination have been amply explored in recent scholarly studies. (1) Yet this devout Anglo-Catholic also sustained a lifelong preoccupation with the dissenting Protestant tradition. In fact, he experienced a paradoxical gravitation toward and repulsion from Nonconformity, and its grip on his imagination was obsessive. The British dissenting tradition, embracing a multitude of Nonconformist denominations and sects of nearly endless variety, along with a "low church" strain of Anglicanism, is manifest across the spectrum of his writings in a veritable potpourri of allusions. An index of British Nonconformity in Betjemans writings would include General Baptists, Strict and Particular Baptists, Seventh Day Baptists, Wesleyan Methodists, Primitive Methodists, Bible Christians, Plymouth Brethren, Moravians, Lutherans, Independents and Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Unitarians, Quakers, Christian Scientists, Swedenborgians, Sandemanians and Glasites, the Peculiar People, Countess of Huntingdonites, Fifth Monarchists, Covenanters, Millenarians, Muggletonians, Agapemonites, Irvingites, Bryanites, and nondenominationals, as well as those "low church" Anglican parishes that are borderline dissenting--evangelical, reformed, and Calvinistic. Whether mainstream denomination or marginalized sect, active or defunct, they were all of great interest to him. But as his biographer Bevis Hillier notes, he was particularly absorbed "in recherche Nonconformist sects" (Young Betjeman 348). "I liked things dim," Betjeman confessed in his poetic autobiography, Summoned by Bells (59), and surely part of the appeal of Protestant Nonconformity lies in his innate fondness for all things obscure or humble. The more obscure the faction, the greater the fascination it offered, and he would resonate with accord. As A. N. Wilson notes, Betjeman was "obsessed by the byways of religious experience, sympathising with those who sought out strange ways to God" (266). In The Spectator he wrote of his interest in the Muggletonians, a seventeenth-century sect that lingered on into the nineteenth. Visiting their old meeting house in London, recently converted into a carpet business, he came away with a prized acquisition: a gas bracket which had illuminated the "strange deliberations" of this moribund affiliation ("City and Suburban" [1957] 684). The cult of the Agapemonites and their ornate 1892 church in Clapton preoccupied him as both poet and architectural historian, in part for the stunning Art Nouveau statues of the beasts of the Apocalypse carved below the steeple but no less for the scandalous stories of their leader, the Reverend J. H. Smyth-Piggott, who seduced wealthy female adherents into sexual and financial submission and who fancied himself Christ reincarnate. (2) The Peculiar People, based largely in Essex, and who survive today as the Union of Evangelical Churches, evoked an effusive pastoral recollection from Betjeman in the very year that they relinquished their memorable name: It is a place of narrow lanes which take sudden right-angle bends revealing rows of weather-boarded cottages, small hills with elms on them, and finally the great salt marshes, with their birds and sea lavender. …