Re-claim the Levellers

Two of the most neglected movements of radical Christianity arising in the 17th C. in England are those of the Levellers and the Diggers. I'll describe the Levellers in this post and the Diggers in another.

The Levellers, so-called because they resisted a hierarchical, class-stratified society in favor of a society of equals--all on the same level, were a movement for political liberty and equality. Their political movement was very religiously-inspired: All the Levellers came from the ferment started in Britain by the Puritans. Most were Separatists/Independents--the movement that is the direct ancestor of the Congregationalist denomination. (In the U.S., most Congregationalists merged with others in the late '50s to form the United Church of Christ, which still has a congregational church polity, but in other places--Britain, Australia, South Africa, India, etc.--there are still Congregationalists as such.) Some were Presbyterians. Some were Quakers--until after 1660 when Quakers withdrew from such movements in order to avoid persecution. A great many were Baptists, especially from the General Baptist movement (the one which believed more in Free Will than Predestination) which, at this time, was more political than the Particular (Calvinist) Baptists.

The most important leader of the Levellers was Richard Overton who came out of the radical Separatist wing of Puritanism, lived in Germany during part of its Wars of Religion, and came to Amsterdam about 1612. John Smyth's congregation was just merging with the Dutch Waterlander Mennonites while Thomas Helwys and a handful of others who refused to join were returning to England to start the Baptist movement. Overton, after learning Dutch, joined the Waterlander Mennonite congregation just after John Smyth's death. He had to write his own confession of faith to be accepted for baptism and it committed him to complete nonviolence.

Sometime before 1620 Overton had returned to England and become a General Baptist, retaining his belief in nonviolence as did many first generation General Baptists. In 1640, he coined the term "human rights" or "rights of man" (he used these interchangeably)--a generation before John Locke or the Enlightenment. He led the Levellers in pushing for universal suffrage, an end to monarchy and aristocracy, free trade (as opposed to inherited monopolies), full religious liberty, rights to fair trial, etc.

Not all the Levellers were pacifists. Some joined Cromwell's army in the English revolution as did even some Quakers since Quakers were not universally pacifist until 1660. Mostly the Levellers tried to use the Revolution as a chance to promote their cause rather than as an end to itself. Nevertheless, many have charged that Overton lost his pacifism since many Leveller documents that were jointly-written allow for a small militia, even though opposing conscription and large standing armies. But this may have just been realism on Overton's part as to what reform he might get. I can find nothing written ONLY by him which allows for even defensive violence and nothing he co-wrote which says whether or not he believed that Christians could justifiably participate in the post-revolutionary militia the Levellers advocated. Today, many pacifists still defend the rights of gays and lesbians to openly join the army, for instance. So Overton's may have been a defense of others' conscience and not a change of his.

We know that every time he was arrested, he committed nonviolent civil disobedience--once clutching his copy of the Magna Carta as he was hauled off to jail. The contemporary equivalent would be to brandish a copy of the Bill of Rights or the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights as one is arrested at the School of the Americas, for example. His wife, whose name is lost to history, kept printing his tracts while he was in prison and was herself arrested and she, too, committed nonviolent resistance, going limp and still carrying her baby when arrested! As she was dragged through the streets, baby in arms, Mrs. Overton prayed loudly for her captors even while denouncing their actions!

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by Michael Westmoreland-White, otherwise known as Michael the Leveller