Gabriel Lambert

British 6 Secularization
Was Britain less of a Christian country at the end of Victoria s reign than at t
he beginning? What was Christianity in 19th century Britain? The various answers
historians have given to this broad and fundamental question have been central
to both the different methodological approaches taken and the conclusions reache
d when investigating the theory of 19thcentury British secularisation. Should Ch
ristianity in Victorian Britain be primarily defined in terms of regular church
attendance and practice of its various ceremonies and rituals as a demonstration
and reaffirmation of faith? If so a quantitative approach church attendance rat
es would be used, revealing a general decline in attendance in most but not all
areas (and with a less certain conclusion about rites of passage such as baptism
). Should a broader view be taken, in which religion is more about individual su
bjective experience, capable of being expressed in any way its practitioners fin
d meaningful? Such a position leads one to comment on the retention of many trad
itional religious customs and practices and can counter the teleological link fr
equently ascribed to modernization and secularization by seeing Victoria s reign
(and beyond) as a period of adaption and growing pluralism rather than simple d
ecline. Such a position would rest heavily on oral history, diaries and other re
cords of individual experiences. Or is this approach still too narrow? It might
be most fruitful to admit the subjectivity of religious experience, but to look
for its presence in different areas in society as well as providing pervasive sy
mbols and rituals that played an important part in most Victorians lives Christi
anity s presence in political and even national discourse (often an area seen as
in competition to religious feeling) reveals its resilience, even as church rat
es were declining and, formally at least, legislation was being passed eroding t
he Church of England s official place in society. Thus, by engaging with debates
about Victorian Christianity one is compelled to consider the merits of the var
ious methodological approaches used which in turn hinge on one s definition of C
hristianity. It will be examined in terms of personal belief, institutional atte
ndance, its complex role in political discourse, and its position in popular cul
ture and in the construction of group identity, assuming a definition that conce
ives of religious experience as subjective, and therefore considers any professe
d practice of Christianity to be valid . To come up with a fixed conception of P
rotestant and Catholic practices and to then look for their continued importance
would be to ignore the considerable change in Christian practice (and the prese
nce of numerous different denominations in Britain) throughout history. One of t
he most common starting points for 19th century British secularisation theorists
is church attendance statistics urbanisation has been frequently identified wit
h secularisation and so the urban rates are particularly important. Looking at m
embership density across the period one does see a general slide from the end of
the 19th century but actual membership reveals great regional variations. Thus
the Wesleyan Methodist Church registered yearly growth from the mid-nineteenth c
entury until 1907, followed by a small fall until 1920.1 Though the 1851 Religio
us Census is usually used to demonstrate declining church attendance, it shows a
link between areas with high numbers of rural church goers (the east midlands a
nd south-west) and the big cities in those areas (Bristol, Plymouth and Leiceste
r). These pockets that bucked the trend of declining attendance continued to exi
st into the 20th century, so a 1910 royal commission on religion in Wales found
that in Monmouthshire 75% of the population could be counted as Free Church memb
ers or Sunday Scholars or Anglican communicants and Sunday Scholars, meaning tha
t church affiliation (taking into account non-communicating Free Church attendee
s) was almost universal.2 However, one trend was fairly clear the upper-middle c
lass rates of church attendance did drop rapidly in the second half of the centu
ry because of a complex combination of genuine religious doubt (partly provoked
by a combination of science and a change of moral sensibilities), the increase o
f leisure time against the resistance of puritan taboos and a decline in social
paternalism that had
1 2
J. Morris, The strange death of Christian Britain p966 Ibid p974
Gabriel Lambert
British 6 Secularization
seen employers encourage their employees to attend their local denominational ch
urch.3 This largely explains the declining power of parish churches to act as ce
ntres for voluntary activity (upper middle class women were some of the most ent
husiastic volunteer) and the alleged shift from exogenous recruitment by convers
ion to endogenous religious socialization of the children of existing churchgoer
s.4 The upper middle class churchgoers had been key sources of funding and their
declining attendance had led to widespread financial difficulties by the 1890s.
However, such a pure quantitative analysis assumes that the local institutional
church of whatever denomination was the locale of religious life of the communi
ty and ignores the subjective individual experiences of Christianity in Southwar
k Christianity was combined with folk wisdom in the Watchnight Services that wer
e held to celebrate the New Year.5 This quasi-anthropological approach can even
explain why church attendance rates may have fallen while religious belief remai
ned religion by deputy was practised whereby whole families would assume church
affiliation through the attendance of one of their members, or through participa
tion in Sunday School (50% of the population attended between 1880 and 1914).6 R
eligious practice primarily through attendance was part of the middle class defi
nition of church involvement, the same sort of attitude that had caused other de
nominations such as the Primitive Methodists, who emphasised the common accessib
ility of the Bible, to be more popular with the working classes. A purely quanti
tative approach could also lead to misrepresentation of the statistics it uses t
hus is one equated civil marriages with growing irreligious tendencies, one woul
d assume Wales, with its 50% civil level in the 19th century as one of the least
religious areas in the whole of Britain.7 In fact, the source of the high level
was the prevalence of Calvinistic Methodist beliefs, which saw marriage as more
of a civil rather than religious concept. Thus any form church statistics alone
are insufficient to demonstrate religious decline, even if they can illuminate
a general fall in upper middle class attendance. A second teleological devise is
to use a narrative of a crisis of faith caused by the gradual erosion of the pr
inciples that underpinned belief. Although there was awareness of such a crisis
in the last quarter of the 19th century with the Telegraph publishing an article
entitled Do we believe? in 1904, its origins have been traced back to the enlig
htenment, to Comte s positivism, and perhaps most convincingly yet paradoxically
, to the evangelical revival from the turn of the 19th century to the 1830s and
1840s. Though it would be scientific naturalists who would attack the very conce
pt of a spiritual and non-mechanical world and reject subjective religious exper
ience as hallucinations or illusions,8 it was the evangelicals who provided the
model for the rejection of faith autobiography was the most common medium to wri
te about conversion from a nominal religious life to a real but harder one, the
same format evangelicals had used to describe the opposite process.9 The evangel
ical identification of religious education with the family led to personal confl
icts taking on a religious dimension that led any act of rebellion to be also se
en as a breach of faith, and any deviation of faith a personal injury.10 Thus, t
he trunk and the seed of the Victorian crisis of faith was nurtured and sustaine
d in and by the faith that was lost. 11
H. McLeod, Religion and Society in 19th c. Britain (1996) p223 J. Morris, The st
range death of Christian Britain p973 5 S. Williams, review article on 19th c. r
eligion and the working classes in Journal of Victorian Culture p308 6 J. Morris
, The strange death of Christian Britain p967 7 H. McLeod, Secularization in Wes
tern Europe 1848-1914 8 F.M. Turner, Between Science and Religion: the reaction
to Scientific Naturalism in late-Victorian England (1974) p31 9 M. Noll, D. Bebb
ington, G. Rawlyk (eds), Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular R. Helms
tadter, B. Lightman (eds), Victorian Faith in Crisis (1990) p16 10 Ibid p20 11 I
bid p31
3 4
Gabriel Lambert
British 6 Secularization
Though the origins of a loss of faith may have had roots in the evangelical move
ment, any crisis was certainly not a simple product of the rise of scientific me
thod. Indeed Wallace and Romanes, both scientists, were unsatisfied with the abs
olutism of scientific naturalism that ruled out the very possibility of the stud
y, let alone the belief, in any kind of spiritual life. Myers, man of letters wh
o similarly rejected both Christianity and scientific naturalism argued in 1893
that there were many who while accepting to the full the methods and results of
science, will not yet surrender the ancient hopes of our race. 12 Such hopes inc
luded questions about the meaning of human existence and humankind s place in th
e universe. Non-Christian spiritualism could provide a powerful challenge to sci
entific methodology the scientific basis of the séances of Daniel Dunglas Home was
never discovered, even though senior members of the Royal Society such as Crooke
s and Huggins, attended them. 13 Indeed, their failure to observe the alleged tr
ickery behind the séances led to their criticism as poor observers (and therefore p
oor scientists) at a time when scientists as a body were trying to earn the repu
tation of being objective and superior witnesses to experiments. The entire vali
dity of their empirical methodology rested on such a claim so it was vital to sh
ow that Crookes, even though he went on to be President of the Royal Society, mu
st be an imperfect practitioner of that method. The séances were so problematic bec
ause the facts pointed to Home s work being genuine, yet many scientific natural
ists had ruled out the possibility of a spiritual world. Usually séances were seen
to be a solution for those who had suffered a crisis of faith they filled a spir
itual gap left by non-belief, but they were better seen as caused by a crisis of
evidence . Thus there was a pluralism of different non-religious challenges to
belief, none of which could be said to be a master-factor that underpinned secul
arisation in general. However, the séances do reveal that there were increasing con
cerns for evidence in general converts to spiritualism were always emphatic that
their experiences left them no choice but to believe. While this challenged the
idea that observation could ever be objective, it still rested on the rational
idea that belief must be based on evidence, an idea antithetical to Christian be
lief centred in faith, revealing an intellectual environment increasingly sympat
hetic to the necessity of proof. So far we have rejected any teleological argume
nts that equate either urbanisation or scientific developments as the ultimate c
auses of secularisation but it is now time to consider the wider presence of Chr
istianity in society. A strong political identify, nationalism and racial theory
are often seen as replacements for religion as belief faded, replacement commun
ities were needed and political, national, and racial alternatives were turned t
o. There does appear to be a fundamental contradiction between missionary work a
nd racial ideas the former is based on the idea of equality before God and the i
dea that His Word has the power to lift anyone out of their conditions and rise
them up to the level of civilization while the latter ridicules such an egalitar
ian conception of mankind as unscientific. It would not be physically possible f
or all races to achieve such a high degree of civilization, with or without Chri
stianity. There are several counters to such a position firstly, while there may
be a logical incongruity between race and religion that did not necessarily mea
n that the two could were not compatible in the public consciousness. Indeed, ra
ce, Protestantism and nation were frequently bound together in a long narrative
that covered the Reformation, the Spanish Armada, the Glorious Revolution and wa
rs again Louis XIV and Napoleon (albeit the latter was conceived of as being aga
inst irreligion rather than Catholicism). Many of the major national heroes such
as General Dir Henry Havelock, David Livingston and General George Gordon were
so well respected because of their religious devotion. As part of Britain s civi
lizing mission Christianity was vital it was even offered as the explanation for
Britain s past success by Welldon, the Bishop of Calcutta in 1898, though such
a position was being criticised by racial
F.M. Turner, Between Science and Religion: the reaction to Scientific Naturalism
 in late-Victorian England (1974) p3 13 P. Lamont, Spiritualism and a mid-Victor
ian Crisis of Evidence p919
12
Gabriel Lambert
British 6 Secularization
theorists as unscientific. Political identity could also be bound with religious
identity 91% of Nonconformist MPs in 1910 were Liberal or Labour, and the disse
nting tradition seeped into class politics as well. In Wales, local churches eve
n helped coordinate strike action. Thus nationalism, political identity and even
racial theory did not necessarily contribute to secularization, on the contrary
, they borrowed from religious language and traditions to give their causes more
authority even as the Anglican Church was becoming increasingly disestablished.
There is a final important aspect of religion to consider popular culture. Even
if official religious attendance was on the wane, through its continued appeara
nce in symbols and its use in rituals, Christianity continued to heavily influen
ce every generation of Victorians and Edwardians. Rituals such as churching and
baptism actually became normalised and increased, along with Sunday School atten
dance, throughout the period. The Bible remained the most important single book
in most homes (and the only book in many) and hymns were sung even by heathen .
Even potential challenges to the time of church worshipers like sport were adopt
ed into church life in 1880 Birmingham 83 out of 344 local football clubs were r
eligiously affiliated. This type of argument is extremely intangible but extreme
ly important it is an indication of the pervasiveness of Christianity right to t
he end of the period that those who were neither strong believers nor convinced
unbelievers still observed the Christian rites of passage. However, whether or n
ot Christianity remained the framework through which people chose to base their
lives is a more difficult thing to establish it may have become a simple matter
of personal choice rather than an almost compulsory mark of respectability. Ulti
mately McLeod is correct in saying that pluralism is a better model than decline
for Christianity in 19th century Britain. Anglicans competed with Nonconformist
s and Primitive Methodists, who all competed with scientific naturalists and spi
ritualists. The key is that there was no single model of either belief or unbeli
ef and all of them were competing for converts or simply trying to retain their
members. One can point to a removal of churches from formal political life but n
ot political discourse, one can argue there was lower church attendance but not
that this inevitably meant a lower degree of belief, one can argue science and s
piritualism competed with Christianity, not that either was teleologically desti
ned to replace it and one can point to increasing national and imperial discours
e but not eliminate Protestantism from that language. Culturally, Christianity s
till formed a major part of most peoples lives, even if this was indirectly and
represented a retreat from the allencompassing framework it had provided for peo
ple a century earlier. Bibliography
H. McLeod, Religion and Society in 19th c. Britain (1996) H. McLeod, Secularizat
ion in Western Europe 1848-1914 (2000) S. Williams, review article on 19th c. re
ligion and the working classes in Journal of Victorian Culture 1 (1996) P. Lamon
t, Spiritualism and a mid-Victorian Crisis of Evidence , HJ 2004 M. Noll, D. Beb
bington, G. Rawlyk (eds), Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular R. Helm
stadter, B. Lightman (eds), Victorian Faith in Crisis (1990) F.M. Turner, Betwee
n Science and Religion: the reaction to Scientific Naturalism in late-Victorian
England (1974) E. Royle, Victorian Infidels: the Origins of the British Seculari
st Mov't (1974) J. Morris, The strange death of Christian Britain , Hist. Jnl. (
2003)