Champions of Choice and Change

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Champions of Choice and Change examines the role of seventeenth-century English dissenting religious groups and the rise of democratic ideals in western society. Many people assume that the French philosophers whose ideas and writings gave rise to the Revolution in France were the creators and initiators of the democratic theories which would shape, order, and give direction to modern Western society as it developed. This work argues otherwise, claiming that such advances—ideas related to equality, choice, political involvement, education, enabling and inclusion of women, religious liberty/toleration—occurred first, not in the secular context of late eighteenth-century Enlightenment France, but in the spiritual context of radical and/or dissenting religious groups in Stuart England over a century earlier, shaped by previous ideas of the European Reformers.