The One Thing Indispensable for Justice

In her new book, When Courage Calls: Josephine Butler and the Radical Pursuit of Justice for Women (Hodder and Stoughton, September 2024), writer and historian Sarah C. Williams tells the story of Josephine Butler’s leadership of the Campaign to Repeal the Contagious Diseases Legislation and to raise the age of consent to sixteen, where it still stands in British law today. What makes that story so remarkable is not only the success of this political reform, or the significant personal cost it required, but the way in which Butler’s political work and life were animated by prayer and contemplation. To get a fuller portrait of this Christian leader, and reckon with the challenge for us—and for Christian social justice—of her life with Christ, we recommend you read When Courage Calls—Ed.

Delivered to a group of young men at the University of Cambridge in 1879, this invitation to contemplation lies right at the heart of an overtly political address. The young men were gathered to hear the (in)famous social activist, Josephine Butler, speak about the sexual exploitation of women and children. They were one group among hundreds who clamored to hear what this remarkable woman had to say. By the time, Josephine Butler stood up to speak in Cambridge, she was a prominent public figure, well-known for her audacious Campaign to Repeal the Contagious Diseases Legislation. Revered by many and hated by some, no-one could ignore her unstinting work to raise public and parliamentary awareness of the plight of the destitute women and to address the scourge of human trafficking and child prostitution. Across the nation crowds regularly flocked to listen to her. And now, in Cambridge, the ready audience waited with bated breath.

She begins with a statement of intent: “The root of the evil [we are gathered here to consider] is the unequal standard in morality; the false idea that there is one code of morality for men and another for women”.² So far, the broad expectations of the audience are met. But within minutes, the young men are blindsided. “What think ye of Christ?” she continues in the language of the Gospels.

Let us go with Him into the temple; let us look on Him on the occasion when men rudely thrust into his presence a woman, who with loud-tongued accusation they condemned as an impure and hateful thing. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” At the close of that interview, He asked ‘Woman, where are thine accusers?’ ³

Stunned, the young Cambridge men become for a moment, the accusers in the biblical scene. Anchoring her argument in the text, Butler calls them to enter in to the experience of the “outcast” woman as she encounters Christ; to hear for themselves her anguished cry; to watch as he does not preside in judgement over her, but instead draws alongside to suffer with her. She asks them to consider how Jesus not only welcomes the outcast but also becomes the outcast, submitting to the shame of exclusion in order to overthrow every human definition of power.

Butler knows her audience well. They are the future leaders of the nation; soon-to-be generals and prime-ministers, bishops and archbishops. And so she singles out the greatest threat to spiritual integrity and the well-being of society: restless activity. It is only in contemplation of Christ, she argues, that we come to know what justice is. True justice in not simply an idea that can be abstracted from a set of doctrines or principles. Justice is revealed and evoked through a relational encounter with Christ—who is perfect Justice. Butler is unambiguous on this point.

In order to arrive at the truth of these great subjects and to attain clear insight and immovable conviction in these great matters of principle [justice towards women and the equality of all human beings], there is one thing that I am convinced is indispensable. You must learn courageously to isolate your own soul, and to retire from the presence of your fellow men…⁴

Here, alone in the inner chamber with the prevailing opinions and judgements of the culture set aside, there is only one thing that matters: to behold Jesus.

Butler’s words offered a sharp prophetic challenge not only to the audience of young men in Cambridge in 1879 but also to the wider society of nineteenth-century Britain, and to the Church through time. We still need to hear this message loud and clear today. Action must not be separated from contemplation and contemplation must not be separated from action. Without the stillness of regular prayer, we will be enslaved by immediate demands at the cost of long-term fruitfulness. Our energy will be sapped and our vitality striped. We will be sucked into conformity and robbed of the strength to lead against the grain of culture. In the end, will be unable to think and act with the independence of judgement required to shape the future in fresh directions.

And the problem is even more insidious than this. The gravest danger of restless activism is blindness to one’s own sin. Overtime, as activity preoccupies our minds, driving out time and space for Christ-focused reflection, we become insensitive to the deepest truths of the inner life. Sin is left hidden in our hearts and we become blind to our own culpability in the systemic injustice of the culture of which we are a part. Gradually, as our hearts harden to meet the tyranny of our schedules it becomes easier and easier to ignore the summons to genuine and difficult goodness. And so, we reinforce the problem rather relieving it. As Butler put it, “Evil results when the habit of conferring with man takes the place of communion with God.” ⁵

In keeping with the mystical tradition, Butler understood contemplation as the gateway to self-knowledge. Prayerful contemplation restores a rightful vision of God and it brings humble recognition of our deep need of him. In his loving presence, our sin is clearly illuminated, and action is re-orientated to bring significance and meaning to our work. Butler uses the ancient word “simplicity” to best describe the effects. The opposite of “self-conceit”, ⁶ simplicity is a unity of heart and action. When action combines with prayerful contemplation the complicated tangle of our lives gives way to coherent peace. Simplicity is a single-focused life, streamlined by the singular gaze of the heart.

When Butler spoke to the Cambridge men, she knew she was treading a fine line. To issue a call to contemplation to those who were already sincere Christians, living in a society that understood itself to be Christian, was to run the risk of misunderstanding.  To call Christians to prayerful solitude could easily be misinterpreted as an invitation to pietistic withdrawal from society into a life of actionless contemplation. But this could not have been be further from Butler’s main point. The 1870s were a time of revival in the churches in Britain. Butler welcomed this revival and was indeed part of it herself, but she challenged the tendency among Christians to turn the move of God inwards and to neglect the move of God outwards towards the world. “Nothing, I am persuaded, will save the nation but a revival of such fierce and God-like earnestness and intensity as shall make the present efforts small and insignificant in comparison.” ⁷ But the focus of this revival must be far more than interior personal edification. The humility cultivated in private contemplation must be the starting point for Just action in the world. Crucially, it is in the presence of Jesus, that we learn how to rename reality: to distinguish good from evil; justice from injustice. It is here that our eyes are opened to see clearly the underlying spiritual and political issues at stake. This is prophetic illumination. As Butler wrote in 1894, towards the end of her life: “The word, to prophesy is best translated as “to show forth the mind of God on any matter,” and this can only come from direct communion with God.

In order to attain to that gift, the soul must live habitually in the closest union with God in Christ, so as to realize the prayer of the saint who cried, “Henceforth, O Lord let me think Thy thought and speak Thy speech” Many even of our holiest men and women live too active, too hurried a life, to be able to enter deeply into the thought of God, and thence to speak that thought to the thirsty multitudes who are dimly seeking after Him, and in their hearts crying, “Who will show us any good?” ⁸

To connect the inner life of contemplation with the outer life of action is to release prophetic illumination into the world. For Butler this meant re-naming women caught in the underworld of Victorian prostitution. Taking her bearings directly from regular contemplation of Christ in Gospels, Butler refused to call women who had been sexually compromised “fallen women”, “common prostitutes”, or “chattel”. Instead, she called them “outcasts”. The language of the culture alienated women who had been treated unjustly by society, stripping them of dignity, and excluding them from equal status before the law. It allowed communities to treat individuals as objects of fear, hatred and lust, and to do so without conscience. Most of all, such language contradicted the welcome women received from Jesus. For Butler, re-naming women as “outcasts” was an act of imitating Christ. It up-ended the cultural categories and turned the spotlight on those who were doing the casting out. It forced into the open those who turned a blind eye to men’s so-called “natural proclivities” whilst at the same time condemning women for their fallenness.

But re-naming was not just linguistic. The primary focus of Butler’s daily work was the practical facilitation of networks of women from every social class to work among women and girls on the margins of society. She created communities of practice that brought women together to pray, to hear testimonies, to collect statistics, to visit families, to offer employment opportunities, to introduce educational and employment reforms, to give legal aid and to encourage women to resist the legal requirements of the Contagious Diseases Acts. These groups worked from the margins of society to change the social and political imagination and they did so as an outflow of persistent prayer. The sixteen-year campaign to Repeal the Contagious Diseases Legislation combined action and contemplation. It disrupted the cultural categories and changed the political landscape. Ultimately, it created the momentum that altered the legal and political status of women in Britain.

Butler’s invitation to the young men of Cambridge was nothing short of a call to radical disruption—political and social, as well as personal. The invitation to contemplation still stands. Every day we are invited to behold the risen Christ and to imitate his loving action in the world. Our restless efforts will not change the world, nor will our pietistic retreat from reality. Action combined with contemplation and contemplation combined with action is the one indispensable thing for the prophetic illumination of justice in the world.

¹ J.E. Butler, The Social Purity Address (London: Morgan and Scott, 1894), 6.
² Butler, Social Purity Address, 3.
³ Butler, Social Purity Address, 6.
⁴ Butler, Social Purity Address, 17.
⁵ Butler, Social Purity Address, 26.
⁶ Butler, Social Purity Address, 44.
⁷ Butler, Some Thoughts on the Present Aspect of the Crusade Against the State Regulation of Vice (Liverpool: T.Brakell, 1874), 4.
⁸ Butler, Prophets and Prophetesses: Some Thoughts for the Present Times; reproduced in Butler, ed. George and Lucy Johnson, An Autobiographical Memoir (Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith, 1909), 236.