Michael Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 in Newington Butts, near London, into a family belonging to the Sandemanian church, a small strict Protestant sect founded in Scotland in 1730 by John Glas and continued by his son-in-law Robert Sandeman, from whom the group took the name most commonly used in England. Sandemanianism emphasized a demanding, close knit congregational life, mutual material support among members, and a literalist reading of scripture, and Faraday remained an active, committed member throughout his life, serving as an elder of the Paul's Alley meeting house in London during two separate periods, 1840 to 1844 and again from 1860 to 1864.
Faraday kept his religious commitments largely, though not completely, separate from his public scientific writing, rarely invoking Sandemanian doctrine directly in his laboratory notebooks or published papers, a compartmentalization biographers have read as reflecting a deliberate personal discipline rather than any lack of seriousness about his faith; contemporaries and later historians alike have described him as one of the era's clearest examples of a leading scientist holding an intense, orthodox religious commitment without apparent internal conflict between the two.