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Spurgeon believed that religion should be carried into politics.

“Every God-fearing man,” he wrote, “should give his vote with as much devotion as he prays.” On the other hand, Spurgeon felt politics should not invade religion. “Ministers do well to give their votes and to express their opinions for the guidance of the people,” he wrote, “but in proportion as the preaching becomes political and the pastor sinks the spiritual in the temporal, strength is lost and not gained.”

Spurgeon normally observed his own principles. Although politically partisan statements occasionally crept into his sermons, they were always defensible as pronouncements on moral issues that had caught the public eye. Outside the pulpit, however, he was willing to express his party views without reserve. Spurgeon was a political force.

What was his party allegiance? Spurgeon was like almost all the English Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists of his day in supporting the Liberal Party. These denominations—the chief Nonconformist bodies— were excluded from the privileges of the Church of England. Nonconformists naturally favored reforms to reduce their handicaps, and their reforming sympathies aligned them with the Liberals. No professional group was more likely to vote Liberal than Nonconformist ministers.

That set Spurgeon and his colleagues in opposition to the other political force in nineteenth-century England, the Conservatives. The role of the Conservatives was to defend existing institutions—the monarchy, the House of Lords, and the Church of England. Liberals, while not wanting to abolish any of them, wished to ensure that none of them exceeded their reasonable powers. Spurgeon supported what was often called “the party of progress.”

Spurgeon’s identification with the Liberal Party is well illustrated by an address to local voters that he issued at the 1880 general election. “Are we to go on slaughtering and invading in order to obtain a scientific frontier and feeble neighbours?” he asked. “Shall all great questions of reform and progress be utterly neglected for years? … Shall the struggle for religious equality be protracted and embittered? … Shall our National Debt be increased?”

Spurgeon was advocating four great principles. First, he was protesting against the recent imperialistic ventures of a Conservative government; that was a stand for peace. Second, he was calling for measures of change that would benefit the common people; that was a commitment to reform. Third, he was urging religious equality, the distinctive aim of Nonconformists. Fourth, he was demanding a decrease in wasteful public spending; that was a recommendation of retrenchment.

If religious equality is left aside for the moment, Spurgeon’s principles were peace, reform, and retrenchment. Those were the three campaigning watchwords of the Liberal Party under W. E. Gladstone. Spurgeon could hardly have been closer to the heart of Liberalism.

Adding the distinctive Nonconformist principle, religious equality, put Spurgeon on the more advanced wing of the party. He was an outspoken champion of the disestablishment of the Church of England. Nonconformists, he insisted, must be allowed to enjoy all the advantages of Anglicans. They should be permitted, for example, to conduct their own burial services in parish graveyards. They should be able to take degrees at the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge. And the bond between church and state must be severed, as it had been in the United States. Spurgeon was for many years a prominent member of the Liberation Society, a pressure group aiming for disestablishment. In fact, his church, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, was regularly used for the society’s annual meeting.

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