One New years Eve in mid-victorian London two anglo catholic clergy were
awoken by a large crowd gathering outside their church in the Holborn. They
had been reluctant to hold a new year service previous to this but were now
persuaded to open the to enable the poor of the parish to be visited with
good luck during the coming year. In spite of Victorian clerics forever
concerned about drawing in congregations here was one which appeared
spontaneously to exercise its preference for the quasi-religion which
formal religion had sometimes only the vaguest connection with. Dr. Wolfe
in this excellent textbook does much to illuminate the shadows which
pervade this area of historical discussion which has taken place at an
unhelpful distance from the more conventional institutional histories of
religion. Dr. Wolfe himself suggests that his book "explores the
interface between 'ecclesiastical' and 'church' history". This however is
not the only new emphasis to emerge since the book also reflects the fact
that the history of religion in Britain, after a period of considerable
eclipse, is at last on the move again. This has been largely due to
developments in both the agenda and perceptions of social historians as
well as those politico/cultural historians interested in the ways and means
by which 'nationhood' is created.
Social historians have in recent years challenged the long accepted notion
of secularisation which has been both rejected by some, and had the terms
and assumptions of its argument stringently qualified by others. Similarly
the de-centring of class in social history has persuaded more than the
post-modernists to look for other areas of loyalty, identity, sentiment and
affiliation for the working class in particular.
The politico/cultural historians, probably best represented by the work of
Linda Colley are seeking answers to the ways in which allegiance and
consent to the nature of the modern British state and identity were
canvassed, organised and displayed. Central to this process was the role of
religion and particularly religion allied very closely to the monarchy and,
as the century wore on, the popular notion of imperial achievement.
With these developments a new history of religion is timely and Dr. Wolfe
shows considerable skill in addressing these two important trends in
historiography without losing the sense of a comprehensive textbook
coverage which the history of religion has long craved. In some respects
his debt to the work of Linda Colley is rather more than historiographical.
The writing is at times fluid and evocative and represents an attempt to
get genuinely inside the skin of the subject without sacrificing detail or
objectivity. Examples are produced and worked through in a thorough and
illuminating manner and many are juxtaposed to produce telling
chronological analogies. Like Colley, Dr. Wolfe is not afraid of using the
architectural and pictorial legacy of 'British' culture to demonstrate the
finer points of his analysis. In some respects these are traits which we
can expect to see more of in this generation of historians as centrally
important social and political institutions of the past and present are
unpacked and examined critically.
The preface effectively declares the book's manifesto. Dr. Wolfe resurrects
the term 'Greater Britain' which 'was originally used to refer to imperial
possessions on a global scale', but is here used 'with ironically evocative
intent to point up the cultural and political prominence of the concept of
"Britain" in these islands' (page x). Dr. Wolfe possibly overstates the
case here since the phrase itself was used by contemporaries without any
trace of irony unencumbered by more modern conceptions of embarrassment
which attach themselves to the British national self-image. However the
book itself successfully avoids the pitfalls of the hindsight that goes
with imperial decline and can appear to render such imagined institutions
anachronistic.
The first chapter - Religion and nationhood in Modern Britain -sets the
scene and outlines the definitions that the book is anxious to work with.
Dr. Wolfe is eager to look at the meaning of participation but not to
adhere to glib deterministic explanations, for him ' 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
organised religion implied a lack of personal belief.' (page 3). In doing
so he also notes that religion became less a matter of adherence to
institutions and more a matter of personal conviction. In recognising the
new agenda of social history he rightly asserts that Marxists are now more
ready to concede the power of religion as a motivating factor in
individuals structuration of reality and its existence as an independent
cultural force. The historiographical question of nationhood has likewise,
argues Dr. Wolfe, moved debates about religion away from the
Thompson/Hal=E9vy British industrialisation as trauma thesis to one which
considers the later period where religion should be viewed in the light of
'nationalism in Europe, territorial fragmentation and socio-political
upheaval.'
Religious stability represented by the church of England was seen to be an
essential part of the British identity which safeguarded its international
hegemony. Rather deftly Dr. Wolfe identifies the notion of religious
perceptions emanating from national ones through his identification of the
Durkheimian analysis of religion as a system of symbols. Such symbols, it
is demonstrated can coalesce around ritual associated with national
character and identitysuch as Trooping the Colour, the opening of
parliament, school speech days and Christmas lunch.
The use of such symbols invites consideration of 'quasi-religion' -
rituals and practices which give society its cohesion. At some points this
definition has to do a great deal of work, something Dr. Wolfe does admit
to. Clearly on occasions this can stand in for religion, just as often it
acts as an imperceptible extension of it (as in Dr. Wolfe's detailed and
excellent description of the ritual surrounding Remembrance day with its
invocation of sacrifice, redemption and attachment to imperial brotherhood
as well as the desperation of the clergy in trying to bring such diffusive
feelings under the umbrella of official Christianity). Indeed the
identification of nationalism with religion is taken a stage further and
the two become interchangeable. He suggests that 'Nationalism indeed has
recently been identified as manifesting all the functional dimensions that
can be attributed to religion, namely ritual, myth, experience, ethical
implications, doctrine, organisation, and material statements in art and
architecture.' (page 17)
Dr. Wolfe also examines the construction role and purpose of the informal
or unofficial religion that is familiar to social historians. Citing in
this chapter the example of the Irish who transported turf and sticks
across Ireland as a protection against Cholera Dr. Wolfe declares that 'One
person's 'credulity or superstition could be a central part of another's
religion.' (page 10-11) This example is not as helpful as it might be since
it serves to indicate backwardness and geographical remoteness. The
invocations of providentialism on the 'British' mainland itself when
confronted with cholera perhaps provides a more intriguing example which
demonstrates the greater complexity of the 'official' versus 'unofficial'
dichotomy.
Attached to both of the preceding conceptual definitions is a
consideration of the meaning of national identity and the religious aspects
that gathered around this - '... for most inhabitants of England in the
nineteenth century as at the present day, a sense of being simultaneously
'English and British' presented few practical problems. In Scotland and
Wales and above all in Ireland, the question of whether to identify
primarily with the smaller national entity or with the all-encompassing
'British' state was a much more acute and divisive one. Indeed on
occasions it could clash stridently. Dr. Wolfe quotes the anti-Catholic
leader Hugh McNeile 'we cannot allow our spirituality as Christians
entirely to supersede our patriotism as Britons.' indicates how far the
growing religion of nationalism had progressed during this period. (page
18)
A Chapter on the formation of Victorian religion presents an account of the
rise of the various denominations and their relative status. However to
demonstrate the developments unique to the age Dr. Wolfe examines
Evangelicalism and Catholicism as the two most dynamic trends within
official Christianity. Whilst pursuing this argument he is always careful
to reiterate the established history of religion during the period.
Similarly the accounts contain helpful definitions which are useful to the
student as well as reminding the established scholar of the ground being
covered. In particular the definition of evangelicalism as 'a mode of
thinking and acting' is particularly useful as a means of dissuading
scholars from a narrow sectarian/institutional focus in their study of this
phenomenon. The verdict on evangelicalism is that it was '... a dynamic
and broadly based religious force, combining spiritual energy,
institutional diversity and cultural sensitivity. Arguably it was now
passing the peak of its influence, but its impact on the lasting framework
of British and Irish religious and social life was unmistakable.'(page 30)
Meanwhile Dr. Wolfe suggests that Catholicism in urban Britain owed a great
deal to the need to find a focus for communal identities - an analysis
which has recently been qualified by Stephen Fielding. Whilst Dr. Wolfe's
geography of Catholicism is generally sound his suggestion that there were
hardly any Catholics in the South West is perhaps an overstatement. (page
31) Catholicism was seen as a fundamental challenge to the sanctity of the
British state - an impression enhanced by the increasing identification of
Catholicism with the Irish. The perception of a revived more dangerous and
vibrant Catholicism (the so-called 'Second Spring') during the first half
of the nineteenth century should be considered a parallel development to
the evangelical revival - a suggestion which reinforces the 'thinking and
acting' analysis. Catholicism believed it could carry all before it and
this was itself a spur to evangelical Protestants to redouble their
efforts. Nonetheless Catholicism and Evangelicalism had much in common,
both providing 'a powerful stimulus to the defining and strengthening of
community, both at a local and national level. Evangelicalism contributed
to the articulation of Scottish and Welsh identities which sought to
superimpose themselves over the 'British' identity. (page 42) This
resistance was against the notion of an anglicised established church in
partnership with an anglicised civil society which sought to level out
national differences at the Celtic fringe. The health of an increasingly
'British' society was seen as dependent upon securing its Protestant
settlement. Dr. Wolfe quotes the Duke of Newcastle as indicative of
hysterical concern that constitutional change was emphatically tied up with
the Act of Emancipation. This is contrasted with the views of Arnold thirty
years later who believed that the established church should be doctrinally
flexible enough to encompass all Englishmen allowing church to seamlessly
merge with state.
Consideration of the idea of Official religion brings into stark relief the
difference between the aspirations of clergy and hierarchy in all
denominations of Victorian religion and their potential congregations. As
Dr. Wolfe suggests 'In evaluating the role of organised religion in local
communities it is important to recognise the implications of the claims of
the Church of England (in Wales and Ireland as well as England), the Church
of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland to be truly national churches
with a role in every community in the country. The fact that at times such
claims looked very unrealistic did not stop them being made.' (page 53)
However there was a national diversity in this since Scotland, for example
showed a higher level of participation in church government by lay members
than in England leading to this facet alone being a distinctive badge of
Scottish identity. Similarly the absence of a lay parliament equally served
to invest the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland with localised
national identity.
Whilst established denominations did their best to adapt to the changing
climate of Victorian Britain the newer religious bodies that were direct
products of the nineteenth century found problems in penetrating
communities where social structures already existed.In assessing the
success or failure of official religion the book is still prepared to use
the religious census of 1851 as a useful indicator of religious adherence,
despite its inherent problems . When taken together with other sources Dr.
Wolfe suggests that religious adherence throughout Britain as a whole
remained relatively constant between the late Victorian period and the
Second World War. When subdivided it appears that Scottish adherence even
rose. Ireland, however is an extreme example of official religion linked
with social structure and identity. Catholics were less numerous in the
nineteenth century due to the effects of the post-famine social structure.
Ireland's religious typography has, as the twentieth century progressed
come to resemble the political division between the north and the Free
State. Dr. Wolfe concludes that Official religion was strongest
numerically when it was linked into a wider system of cultural values.
The discussion of 'unofficial' religion is seen less as a competitive
element working against official 'religion' and more as a uniquely
constructed mentality which accepted or rejected facets of the religious
life as they appeared to the individual - 'The widespread indifference that
surrounded the institutional churches is best understood not so much as a
rejection of religion in the broadest sense, but as a loss of familiar
points of reference and a reluctance to identify with unfamiliar
structures, especially when these were associated with varying degrees of
social exclusiveness.' (page 83) The conventional Churches response to
this wave of unofficial religion was to pour resources into neighbourhoods
to counteract the tendency. Whilst the dramatic missionary work of Moody
and Sankey and the Catholic Redemptorists tends to grab the headlines there
was a more widespread lay ethic of involvement in lower key missionary work
such as tract distribution and the relief of more material distress. This
was backed up by burgeoning educational and leisure opportunities
associated with religious institutions which became such a central part of
the mid-late Victorian community throughout Britain. Taking official and
unofficial religion together Dr. Wolfe estimates that by 1900 the British
people were closer to Christian orthodoxy then they had been in their
history. Whilst not really in the scope of the work Dr. Wolfe's dismissal
of Secularism as not motivating whole communities is in danger of
undermining the notion of 'unofficial' religion he has established. This
relies on the individual's interaction with spirituality and the
environment to produce multi-farious practices which come under the
umbrella of religion. Moreover one of Dr. Wolfe's leading conclusion is
that the twentieth century has seen religion develop manifestly away from a
communal dimension yet remained recognisably intact.
The discussion under the title 'Religion and Nationhood in 1850' analyses
the competing tendencies which served simultaneously to draw together a
'British' identity which at times competed with, and at times co-existed
with, a devolved national one. Occasionally individual actions could be a
rejection of the former and an embrace of the latter. Thus Chalmers
leadership of the Scottish Disruption becomes both a nationalist protest
against an anglicised church which was abusing its patronage and 'an
endeavour to create a true, godly commonwealth... (which) had the
potential to feed into cultural currents that flowed well beyond the
specific evangelical context enunciated by Chalmers.' (page 102) However
the coalition between religious and cultural/national concerns could not be
taken for granted and Dr. Wolfe usefully reminds us that the tension
between them led to a breach between Young Irelanders and the Catholic
church in the 1840s over the precise nature of the Home Rule.settlement.
The Disruption, The Monster meetings to campaign for Home Rule and the
parliamentary investigation of Welsh education are skilfully intertwined
through narrative to assess the state of religion in 1850 in the Celtic
fringe nations and their respective relationships with the centre. Dr.
Wolfe successfully paints a picture of these peripheries asserting religion
as a core component of identities manifestly at odds with the centre which
sought to speak and legislate for these areas. Dr. Wolfe further argues
that such differences were submerged in a popular Protestantism which was
regularly fed by Catholic scares of one kind or another - such as the
restoration of the English hierarchy in 1850. Whilst this is convincing Dr.
Wolfe perhaps does not do enough to distinguish between the rhetoric of the
pulpit and the rhetoric of the street.
In his consideration of the disestablishment question the book rightly
reminds readers that a considerable leap of imagination is required to
understand the gripping importance of disestablishment as an issue to
contemporaries. Three periods of change in the relationship between
religion and politics are suggested - the reform period of the 1820s
followed by a generation during which little change took place and lastly a
period of renewed reform from the 1860s during which church rates were
abolished, the Irish Church disestablished and the first attempts to remove
education from religious control were instituted. Nonconformists saw
themselves as levelling down the church of England rather than seeking to
gain state money for themselves. This stance reached its zenith in the
creation of the Liberal conscience under Gladstone and the moralism that
spilt over from his Midlothian campaign. This however is juxtaposed with a
close examination of the Primrose League and its connection of Empire and
Sovereign to 'Religion... of a generalised kind' which Dr. Wolfe suggests
even appealed over the heads of nonconformists to a significant catholic
minority. At a cultural level though nonconformists, suggests Dr. Wolfe,
were able to draw upon the legacy of Puritanism which encompassed Bunyan
and forbearance. This however was in a process of dissolution in the
political sphere by Gladstone's death. The connection between socialism and
politics is graphically illustrated by a quote from Stanley Baldwin which
suggested that the Labour Party in 1926 contained 'many men who fifty years
ago would inevitable have gone into the Christian ministry'. However Dr.
Wolfe's assertion that Morris is a good example of the religion of
socialism needs considerable qualification since it overstates the
religious aspect of the term.
In considering the political nature of religion in Ireland the book warns
against polarising the issues with the benefit of hindsight. The two sides
of the argument were less homogenous than they have been painted, their own
perceptions of the connection between religion and politics largely
unresolved and their acceptance of majority or minority status by no means
a foregone conclusion. It was the work of Pearce who transformed Irish
nationalism into a quasi-religion which convinced laity and clergy alike of
the connection between religion and politics in an Irish nationalist
context. This was a success story, built upon the advantages conferred by
catholic spirituality, whereas the connection made in the rest of the
Celtic fringe was considerably less triumphant - 'Welsh nationalism was
transient because it lacked the same enduring quasi-religious elements
which could protect it from the defection and decline of official religion:
and Scottish nationalism was feeble because it failed to become religious
in any effective way.' (page 153)
'Culture and belief' is an attempt to decipher religious trends depicted in
architecture and other visual arts. Whilst this provides useful examples
for Dr. Wolfe's thesis it also makes important points about the role of
these artefacts in religious thought and practice. Catholics and Anglo
Catholics saw particular significance in architecture and music as vehicles
for the support and development of Christian worship. Similarly our
contemporary lack of acquaintanceship with the didactic religious novel, it
is argued, is due to its spectacular eclipse in the mind of the public
which has obliterated an earlier critical and popular acceptance.
The discussion of the influence of religious culture is convincing and
shows the attachment to the religious/ imperial nexus through Arnold and
Kipling with the process of dilution characterised by Rupert Brooke, Edward
Elgar and T.S. Eliot. His commentary on the Protestant Yeats' sentimental
attachment to the notion of a Catholic Ireland is a graphical depiction of
how closely religion and nationalism identified at a cultural level.
However the twentieth century recourse to a Christian world order was the
product of the psychological damage wrought by the First World War. John
Buchan, a strident imperialist in his younger days became just such a
devotee in the years leading up to his death. G.K. Chesterton on the other
hand saw an eventual commitment to Roman Catholicism as a means of
tempering the spirit of imperialism.
In describing the secularisation of culture since 1945 Dr. Wolfe suggests
that Matthew Arnold's shoreline of the Continent of Faith had retreated to
form a large island. Whilst making the point succinctly the poem in fact
speaks of a 'sea of faith' -perhaps the creation of navigable channels
between rocky outcrops would be a more faithful metaphor.
The discussion of the empire, war and remembrance is perhaps one of the
most engaging parts of the book and is also one the areas most recently
colonised by scholars of religion and mentality. The idea that the empire
was a providential gift was a strong one and the duty to be a 'Christian
soldier' was embodied in, among others, the person of General Gordon and
the panoply of memorials and commemorations that recalled a chivalric past.
Similarly the dualityof Christianity and Empire is graphically demonstrated
by the popularity of Holman Hunt's The Light of the World in imperial
territories. Dr. Wolfe asserts that religion and empire fused in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century - a state of affairs that had turned the
nonconformists from sceptics to enthusiastic advocates of all things
imperial. The leaching away of this certainty of Britain's sacred imperial
mission is portrayed through the attitudes engendered by the two World
Wars; the First a comparatively clear cut struggle between
nationalistically conceived 'Christ and Odin', the Second a wider struggle
between two conflicting principles that encompassed all mankind. Even this
became uncertain in the world after Hiroshima and Nagasaki which intimated
portents of the apocalypse.
Whilst admitting religion and religious participation has declined
measurably Dr. Wolfe is reticent about the concept of secularization. He
suggests that the definition of religious which such theories tend to adopt
is too simplistic since it denies the equal legitimacy of 'official',
'unofficial' and 'quasi-religion'. Similarly for Dr. Wolfe this introduces
an artificial dichotomy between the sacred and the secular which his book
is a serious attempt to dispel. In the light of this he prefers the term
'ways of being religious' or shifts in the relative strength of the three
types of religion - 'The trend during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries was for the dominant religious tone of Britain to
change from an ethos of doctrinally hard edged and tightly disciplined
churches to a more diffuse and varied shifting kaleidoscope of beliefs.'
To emphasise the poverty of the secularisation all or nothing process Dr.
Wolfe finally suggests, an only partly, tongue in cheek analysis of the
shifting tide of belief which conveys meaningful change in belief if not
adherence and practice. 'Heaven became an idealized recreation of the
Victorian family; hell changed from a place of very literal fire and
torture to a kind of negative apotheosis of English suburbia on a wet
=46ebruary afternoon'.(page 255)
Dr. David S. Nash
Senior Lecturer in History
Oxford Brookes University