ABSTRACT
To the Rational Dissenters such education for civil obedience through the Church was erroneous, illiberal and not supported by scriptural evidence. Nevertheless their radicalism, although meritocratic, was not particularly democratic; they were not Paineite radicals. Many Rational Dissenters were wealthy members of provincial communities, often merchants and factory owners, who subscribed to a bourgeois worldview of an economic order of classes within society. These Dissenters constantly argued for liberty, not just for themselves but for all who suffered from state interference. At the very foundations of the Dissenting ideals of diversity and freedom was their notion of liberal education. Certainly it was in focusing on the small and the particular, rather than the broad sweep of sublime views that underpinned the central project of Rational Dissent: a sustained devotion to empirical science. Nevertheless older radical religious groups continued to worship in defiance of the laws as ‘gathered churches’: little democracies which rejected the idea of a hierarchical national Church.
