Voluntaryism

VOLUNTARYISM: The conviction or the system which holds that churches should be supported, not by the State or other secular authority, but by the voluntary contributions of church attendants themselves. This system practically involves entire separation of Church and State, since the State, ceasing to grant endowments to the Church, to pay salaries to the clergy, and to subvention any project for distinctly religious purposes, thereby forfeits whatever claim it might allege to control or influence the Church, as by patronage, interference with liturgy, and the like. Voluntaryism thus represents the religious counterpart of civil Secularization (q.v.), but while voluntaryism may plead religious reluctance to contribute to the support of institutions which the contributor conscientiously disapproves, it would not be easy to find ethical justification for secularization in the manner in which it is usually earned out.

The principles of voluntaryism are to be seen in action wherever the Church and State are separate (cf. Church and State). It has become a vital interest practically only in England, where dissenters have long voiced their unwillingness to pay for the support of the established Church of England. Their objections are doubtless conscientious, and, at the other extreme, it is felt by many High-churchmen that voluntaryism would be far better for the spiritual welfare and growth of the Church of England than the present system, which presents such unedifying spectacles as appointments to high ecclesiastical position-and even to the episcopate-often from considerations that seem distinctly political, especially as those making such appointments may be dissenters, Roman Catholics, or even non-Christians; and this would also obviate such abuses as the trial of distinctly ecclesiastical cases (e.g., those involving alleged ritualism or refusal of communion to one who, in defiance of the law of the church, has gone through the form of marriage with his deceased wife's sister) by so-called ecclesiastical courts composed of laymen.

The term voluntaryism (better, " voluntarism ") is also sometimes applied, in scholastic philosophy, to that theory of the will which, derived from

Augustine (q.v.) and taught by such scholastics as Ansehn of Canterbury, Bonaventura, Duns Scotus, and Henry of Ghent (qq.v.), teaches, with Anselm, that the sovereign will of God rules the world, while the nature of the will is freedom, and maintains in general the primacy of the will and its independence of thought (see Scholasticism, II.,., § 2, III., 3, §§ 1-2, 4, § 1; Duns Scotus, § 4).