God and Greater Britain

Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843-1945

John Wolffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134960156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Concern and debate over the role of religion in the make up of the United Kingdom is a contemporaneously relevant as it was in the nineteenth century. God and Greater Britain is a survey of the contribution of religion to society, politics, culture and national self-understanding in Britain and Ireland at a pivotal period in their historical development. It derives from primary research as well as from an extensive synthesis of the secondary literature. John Wolffe's timely and stimulating appraisal of the centrality of religion is well illustrated with specific episodes and uniquely places religion in a firm historical perspective.

1
INTRODUCTION

Religion and nationhood in modern Britain

As the trains from the north-east rumble across the Victorian viaduct into Leeds station they pass the parish church, built between 1838 and 1841, a prominent symbol of the self-assertion of the Church of England in a northern industrial town. It is recorded that on an ordinary early spring Sunday evening in 1851 the church was filled to capacity with 3,000 people, several hundred of whom were standing in the aisles.¹ The traveller who leaves the train at Leeds will emerge from the station into the bustle of City Square and will be confronted with further reminders of the role of religion in urban life. On the eastern side of the square is the conspicuous Mill Hill Unitarian Chapel, constructed a few years after the parish church, imitating its style and in conscious rivalry with it; to the west is a line of statues of local worthies, which includes W.F. Hook, the energetic vicar during whose incumbency the parish church was rebuilt.

An hour’s drive north of Leeds in the very different landscape of Upper Wharfedale one finds, amidst the fields and fells, the beautiful medieval church of Hubberholme. Like almost all old churches, however, it has not been left untouched by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, a prominent monument records the career of George Andrew Hobson, a civil engineer who had family ties with that quiet Yorkshire village and who went at the high tide of British imperialism to superintend the construction of the railway-bridge over the River Zambezi below the Victoria Falls. Part of the inscription reads:

In this and other ways he helped to further the building up of the British Empire whose interests were dear to his heart. A practical Christian, brave, faithful, modest and single-minded, pure in heart and duty—Blessed are the Pure in Heart for they shall see God.

The images can be multiplied and are apparent today to anyone who travels around the British Isles with their eyes open. The townscapes of Guildford, Liverpool and Truro are dominated by Victorian or post-Victorian cathedrals. In Scotland the diverse buildings of the Presbyterian denominations, from the grandiose churches of ‘Holy Corner’ in Edinburgh to the small meeting places of Highland congregations, serve as reminders of the equally prominent place of religion north of the Border. Nonconformist chapels survive across Wales, mute testimony to their prominence in the social and cultural life of the communities of the principality in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The simple buildings of Primitive Methodism are still to be found in the depths of the English countryside. Across the Irish Sea the two cathedrals of Armagh, set on their opposing hills, serve as striking symbols of the depth and divisiveness of religious labels. At the seat of government, the statesmen commemorated within the walls of Westminster Abbey and the grave of the Unknown Warrior underline the pervasive role of religion in the rituals of the nation, in war and in peace, and its place in the joys and the griefs of communities and individuals. Assessments of the exact significance of such visual evidence will vary considerably, especially when it is examined in conjunction with the documentary sources that form the usual raw material of historical research. Nevertheless it provides an appropriate starting point for this book: church buildings and monuments not only indicate both the pervasiveness and the variety of religion in the period with which we are to be concerned but also remind us that its legacy, however utilized, is with us still.

The central theme of this book is the interaction between religion in its various manifestations, and forms of community, national and imperial identity, culminating in the vigorous nationalism of the early twentieth century. This is naturally a story in which the organized churches played a significant part, but this is not to be a study in conventional ‘church’ or ‘ecclesiastical’ history. Rather it is an examination of the broader force of religion which, as will be shown in due course, can be seen as operating in numerous unofficial and unorthodox manners. In a moment we shall turn to look more closely at some key concepts, but at the outset it is worth formulating some further questions which will help to focus enquiry and point to the general shape of the argument.

First, what did the people of the United Kingdom really believe about fundamental problems of life, death, God and personal identity, those issues which are generally labelled as ‘religious’? This is an extremely difficult question for the historian to answer, overlaid as it is with the need to disentangle personal conviction from records which are likely to be more informative about official teachings and outward appearances. The forms of official and outward religion are very revealing in themselves in indicating much about the power structures and shared values of society. Furthermore, in the absence of other evidence, active participation in them is the best indication we have of the attitudes of individuals. However, such participation would mean different things to different people at different times, and it should not be assumed without careful investigation that non-involvement in organized religion implied a lack of personal belief.

Second, what contribution did religion make to the formation of group identities, in terms of local communities, political parties and nations? In recent years scholars have increasingly moved away from viewing social class as a general organizing principle, so the exploration of such an alternative approach has a wide historical relevance. It is noteworthy that even historians with Marxist sympathies, who might have been expected to have adhered most closely to materialist interpretations, have become increasingly interested in religion. As the editors of an important recent volume put it:

The cultural revolution of the 1960s has perhaps made socialists more ready to admit the power and autonomy of the imaginary, to consider belief systems as a primum mobile which structure and constitute action rather than passively reflecting it. It has made us more sensitive to the ways in which belief acts, not so much as a reflection of material interests, but as an independent cultural force.²

Third, a development of the previous question is to ask how religion shaped the general pattern of British history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Set in a wider historical context, Britain appears distinctive and unusual in respect of its political and social stability. Between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries France and Russia experienced violent revolutions; the United States and Spain were ravaged by civil wars; Germany and Italy were ‘unified’ and, later, succumbed to dictatorships; and the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires disintegrated. Earlier generations of historians from Elie Halévy to E.P. Thompson have argued that religion in general and Methodism in particular were of crucial importance in preventing revolution in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Our present concern is not so much with that now rather hackneyed debate, but with a later period during which the rise of nationalism in Europe added the threat of territorial fragmentation to that of political and social upheaval. How does an understanding of religious history help to explain why in Scotland, Wales and the north-east of Ireland cultural and political identification with Britain continued to prove stronger than more localized nationalism? How did religion contribute to that high point of national self-confidence which saw the acquisition of a worldwide empire, and the dogged waging of two total wars? How, on the other hand, was religion related to the most dramatic discontinuity in the history of the United Kingdom state, the ending in 1921 of the Union with the twenty-six counties of southern and western Ireland?

Finally, how satisfactory is it to accept the conventional view of the twentieth century as a period of inexorable ‘secularization’ in which religion became more and more marginal to community and national life? If Britain is compared with the United States, Poland, or South Africa, or, within our own frame of reference, with Ireland, broad generalizations about the decline of religion in the modern world become less satisfactory. To what extent is it valid to think in terms of changes in the nature of religion rather than of its retreat to the wings of the historical stage? And in what ways was the history of religion in twentieth-century Britain a reflection of specific features of the national experience?

These groups of questions set an agenda for the book and they will be addressed in turn in the chapters that follow. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are concerned with different aspects of the context of belief, initially through an examination of the formative influences on Victorian religion; and subsequently through an analysis of the varieties of official and unofficial religion and the encounters between them. This discussion will also begin to address the second question posed above by drawing connections to social and community identities. Chapter 5 opens the second part of the book in which links to other processes of historical change are more explicitly addressed, first through a number of verbal ‘snapshots’ of the situation in the mid-nineteenth century, and then in subsequent chapters by way of an examination of politics, culture, imperial mentalities, and the impact of war. In this analysis discussion of the relationship between religion and identity will be developed, and the implications pursued for the nature of ‘Britishness’, the place of Ireland, Scotland and Wales within the United Kingdom, and national responses to the wider world. The material here collected will lay the foundation for exploration in the concluding chapter of the final set of questions relating to secularization.

Historical periodization should never be rigid especially when, as in this book, we are concerned with currents of belief and influence that did not abruptly appear or disappear. Nevertheless the chronological limits indicated in the title provide some indication of the shape of the argument. As we shall note in more detail in subsequent chapters, 1843 was a highwater mark in the prominence of religion in the early Victorian period. The Church of Scotland was disrupted, the Repeal campaign in Ireland reached its climax, controversy raged over the role of the churches in education, and spiritual concerns loomed large in the discussion of social problems and international relations. Such were some indications of the formative influence religion was to have on national life during the next century. The year 1945 will be a much more familiar date to the secular historian, marking the last great triumph of the British Empire, and presaging the decline of the structure of interlinked religious and political ideas with which it had been associated.

The remainder of this chapter is designed to provide a theoretical and historiographical explanation of the terms used and the approach adopted. The reader who is content to take this discussion as read—at least for the present—may prefer to skip these sections and proceed directly to Chapter 2.

1. APPROACHING THE HISTORY OF RELIGION

Historians of religion have been noticeably coy about defining the scope of their enquiries. Peter Lake confesses himself ‘no more capable of defining religion than…of defining history’ while Patrick Collinson views the question ‘what is religion?’ as one ‘with which anthropologists are more familiar than historians’.³ Such caution is understandable, but it means that once the scholar ventures beyond the defined territory of ecclesiastical institutions, the ground covered by traditional ‘church history’, he or she does not encounter any clear frontiers. This can have considerable advantages, and is certainly a check against the simplistic pigeonholing of subtle human beliefs and experiences, but it can also be a source of confusion. Moreover, it has been observed that historians’ assumptions about the nature of religion have far-reaching implications for the character of their work, which are all the more insidious if they remain unspoken.⁴ Accordingly, with the intention of providing something of a conceptual map for the chapters that follow, we shall briefly examine some influential definitions of religion as they have been applied to historical enquiry. The definitional and conceptual problems to be addressed lie at the interface of at least six disciplines in addition to history: anthropology, philosophy, psychology, religious studies, sociology and theology. Accordingly any viewpoint will be a personal and potentially debatable one, inevitably simplifying some of the issues and reducing complex ambiguities in the hope of at least achieving an approach that is comprehensible and a tool that is usable for historical analysis.

In classical Latin the word religio was used of reverence for the gods or holy things, a usage revived in the context of Christian humanism in the fifteenth century. The effect of the division of western Christendom in the sixteenth century was to give the word its application to specific institutionalized bodies, Protestant or Roman Catholic ‘religions’.⁵ However, such frameworks of belief and ecclesiastical authority did not operate in isolation in early modern Britain: under the 1688 political settlement ‘the Protestant religion’, in a Presbyterian form in Scotland and an Anglican one elsewhere, played a key role in the structures of the state and local communities. ‘Religion’ thus came in effect to be viewed as the ideological cement of society as well as a specific theological framework of belief. The Church of England’s 1662 Holy Communion liturgy spoke of ‘godly and quiet’ governance and linked ‘the punishment of wickedness and vice’ closely to ‘the maintenance of thy [God’s] true religion and virtue’. In 1828 the Duke of Newcastle, a staunch political conservative, wrote of the necessity

above all things in Religion…to have a standard and fixed point, that standard I consider to be Christ and that fixed point the Church of England inculcating to the letter and the purest spirit the doctrine of our Saviour and the whole word of God.⁶

Newcastle subsequently attributed the political and social turmoil of the early 1830s to changes in the religious constitution of the country. He held that political stability could only be restored through a return to ‘the revered Religion of our wise forefathers.’⁷

Meanwhile, however, alternative perceptions were gaining ground, stimulated most directly by the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century. ‘Religion’ became less a matter of adherence to an institutional and social structure; more a matter of personal conviction and experience. Thus a Methodist evangelist in Norfolk in the 1830s wrote of one of his converts who had professed to be ‘a very godly man’ that ‘he had never…had any light, or religious feeling’ before his conversion.⁸ It was religion in this subjective, intensely personal sense that the American evangelist Charles Finney had in mind when he published his Lectures of Revivals of Religion (1835), which was tremendously influential in Britain. In articulating his own understanding of religion the Duke of Newcastle had derided evangelical preachers as ‘spiritual upstarts’; but by 1892 the definitional boot was on the other foot in a Punch cartoon in which a disillusioned Methodist local preacher announces to the vicar that ‘For the future, I chucks all religion, and I goes to Church’.⁹ Perceptions still differed, however, as expressed in an exchange in one of J.M.Barrier’s novels, published in 1892 but set earlier in the century, in which the Auld Licht minister’s mother advises him on the kind of woman he should marry:

‘A truly religious wife would be a great help to you.’ ‘Religious,’ Gavin repeated slowly. ‘Yes, but some people are religious without speaking of it. If a woman is good she is religious.’¹⁰

The personal experiential understanding of religion profoundly influenced one of the earliest social scientific approaches to the problem. In 1901–2 William James, a psychologist and philosopher at Harvard University, del...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• List of tables
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION: Religion and nationhood in modern Britain
• 2 A STRANGE WARMING? The formation of Victorian religion
• 3 GOD MADE THEM HIGH OR LOWLY? Official religion
• 4 OUTSIDE THE SHEEPFOLD? Unofficial religion
• 5 HIGH TIDE OF FAITH? Religion and Nationhood around 1850
• 6 THINE IS THE KINGDOM? Politics, community and the monarchy
• 7 THE REAL FREE CHURCH? Culture and belief
• 8 ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS? The Empire and war
• 9 CONCLUSION Nationalism and secularization
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index