Religion, theology and science: understanding the ‘crisis of faith’

This period was marked by bitter and prolonged controversies precipitated by such things as the intellectual polemics of the Tractarians, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), the provocative theological symposium Essays and Reviews (1860) and its milder successor Lex Mundi (1889) and the publication of the Vatican Decrees in 1870. Poets and novelists portrayed the trauma of the loss of faith in individuals, and the editors of newspapers and serious journals provided a forum for a religious elite that grappled with questions of doubt and disbelief very publicly. Articulate Victorians were preoccupied with the future of religion almost to the point of morbidity.

However, these articulate individuals did not constitute a cross-section of their society. They were the talented, well educated and the kind of people whose beliefs and values were recorded either by themselves or others. It is therefore no easy task to generalise from what they wrote and what was written about them, to the attitudes of the whole society. Was their ‘crisis of faith’ part of a new phenomenon of ideological secularisation that set the Victorian age apart from earlier periods of English religious history? If it was, can the decline of religion after 1900 be attributed, at least in part, to the gradual erosion of religious practice by this tide of doubt and disbelief?

A ‘crisis of faith’?

The intellectual ferment of the second half of the nineteenth century differed from that of earlier periods in important aspects of tone and substance and in the extent to which it implicated the ordinary church-going population as well as the religious intelligentsia. It was the percolation downwards of theological uncertainty into the ranks of ordinary believers that marks the Victorian period off from the doubt and disbelief of Hanoverian society.

Radical and potentially subversive ideas were popularised in Victorian society and this added a new dimension to the relationship between the Churches and the wider intellectual world. Victorian laymen, judged by the diet served them in popular religious newspapers, periodicals and sermons, were capable of considerable theological subtlety, but even those who were less subtle could be caught up in the crises of Darwinism and biblical criticism. The popularisation of controversy involved many of the rank and file of Church and Chapel communities in earnest debate and soul-searching. Indeed, it was the involvement of the general public in Victorian religious controversies, as much as the controversies themselves, those contemporaries often found noteworthy.

What was novel was the emergence of popular theological speculation within the Churches. Popular infidelity was not new, but in the past its very hostility to the Christian tradition had militated against its chances of subverting the faith of the church-going population. In its most famous articulation, the Age of Reason of 1794, Thomas Paine had set out to lay an axe to the roots of popular religiosity and he had reached a wide audience. As City Mission workers found in the late nineteenth century, a strong undercurrent of proletarian secularism, Paineite in the bold invective and blunt ribaldry with which it was expressed. This augmented the more urbane secularism of people like Charles Bradlaugh, George Jacob Holyoake and Annie Besant.[1] But the Victorian ‘crisis of faith’ was not precipitated by such counter-religious propaganda. It was not secularists but devout Christians that were its most effective proponents. The controversial Essays and Reviews of 1860 was the work of six Anglican clergymen and a devout layman.

There were profound misgivings in all the Churches that the traditional tenets of belief and faith were being questioned in an attempt to come to terms with wider intellectual tendencies that were anathema to some of their brethren. The most famous Victorian Baptist, whose periodical The Sword and the Trowel brought tensions to a head among Baptists in 1887, published a series of articles accusing radicals of the denomination of virtual apostasy. Similar crises occurred in Wesleyanism in the early 1880s when Rev. W.H. Dallinger was prevented from delivering the Fernley lecture advancing the synthesis of Methodist theology and evolutionary theory. Among Congregationalists similar problems arose as the result of the airing of advanced theological opinions during a meeting associated with the autumnal session of the Congregational Union held in Leicester in October 1877. Despite the tensions that the popularisation of these issues generated and the obvious fascination they held for denominational editors, preachers and pamphleteers, controversy was less significant within the Churches than the absence of permanent division. The ‘crisis of faith’ was contained and produced very little actual loss of faith. While there were notable cases of apostasy, doubt generally led not to disbelief but to theological revision of one kind or another.

Declining recruitment: a factor in the ‘crisis of faith'

The decline of religious adherence in modern English society was not caused by the loss of existing members. Membership retention has not been a major problem. From the 1830s, when various churches associated with the Baptist Union began compiling statistics, a growing number of English religious organisations have collected and collated data on aspects of recruitment and loss. A similar picture emerges in each case. While they have been growing rapidly, religious organisations have had a high turnover in membership: losses by expulsion, lapsing and leakage were offset by extremely rapid recruitment. But as their growth rates have declined, so did membership turnover. In Wesleyanism, for example, annual losses of total membership were 14.1 per cent of the total membership in 1880-81 but only 6.8 per cent in 1932. However, in 1881 it had attracted enough new members to offset the loss, by 1932 losses greatly exceeded new member. Recruitment rather than loss was the crucial variable in the process of decline.

What were the links between the Victorian ‘crisis of faith’ and the growing inability of the Churches to draw new members from the broader society? The intellectual tensions occasioned by theological revisionism and Darwinian theory did not produce any significant rate of defection among existing adherents. The reason for this lay in the strong social and cultural pressures that existing among Victorian Christians to reach some sort of ideological compromise. The heat was generally taken out of the crises by an almost irresistible imperative towards accommodation with the wider intellectual world, an imperative as much social as intellectual. In a society that was no longer dominated by a pervasive religious belief, there was a distinctively modern religious-cultural preoccupation with making the Christian faith relevant.

The quest for relevance is a characteristic of neither church type religion, in which relevance is assured by social domination, nor of sect type religion that involves an acceptance of cultural marginality. It is a preoccupation of denominational type religion. It is essential for the survival of denominations that depend on the voluntary allegiance of members who adhere in general to the prevalent ideas and intellectual fashions of their age. Victorian Christianity’s attempts to come to terms with biological and geological science, social science, archaeology, comparative religion, historical scholarship and philosophical theology can be seen in this light. The alternative to achieving some kind of ideological accommodation was the increasing marginality and cultural isolation of organised religion within English society. The ‘crisis of faith’ was part of the broader process of secularisation.

Denominations do not have the control over their members of either churches or sects. Membership does not exclude other commitments and denominational life is only one of a variety of associational activities. The denomination must compete for the energies and time of individuals with other recreational, social, cultural and vocational activities. The transition to denomination means that the organisation could no longer expect or demand from its members’ levels of participation once regarded as normal. In fact the membership’s beliefs and values were increasingly moulded by ‘worldly’ associations as by ‘religious’ ones. There was a decline in commitment, especially evident among Nonconformists. The Church of England had long had the capacity to accommodate people willing to worship in church but unwilling to tolerate too intense or too disciplined a religious life. The pervasive nature of Nonconformity to its adherents, especially falling attendance at weekday prayer, preaching and class meetings, was beginning to decline by the early 1850s. By 1900 many denominational leaders felt that the ‘Means of Grace’ were fighting a losing battle to rival ‘the social party, the secular concert or the tennis club’. The choices facing Nonconformity were stark. On one side was the growing worldliness of religion where recreational activities went alongside and often were more important that spiritual ones. The alternative was alienation both from the wider culture and from the great majority of Victorians and Edwardians who were prepared for accommodation with the changing spirit of the times. It was the worldliness of accommodation rather than the alienation of reaction that was the norm.

The Victorian ‘crisis of faith’ was simply a matter of the Churches coming to terms ideologically with the secularising tendencies within the wider culture. But the rapprochement was only partially successful. What was a ‘crisis of faith’ for believers was for outsiders a ‘crisis of plausibility’ and the failure of the Churches to deal effectively with the latter crisis clearly inhibited their capacity to maintain an adequate rate of recruitment from the broader society.

The crisis of plausibility

Far more important for the future of English religion than the specific challenges of Darwinism or biblical criticism, or the internal adjustments that these challenges demanded of the Churches, was the gradual divergence, increasingly evident after 1860, between religious and secular modes of interpreting reality. Previously there had been something like a consensus between believers and unbelievers about the plausibility of the religious worldview. Religious definitions of reality had been credible even to those who had rejected or ignored them. This was not the case in the cultural milieu of modern industrial England. Commentators were insisting well before 1900 that the most serious threat to English religion was not the incompatibility between specific aspects of science and religion. It was the growing tendency for people without much knowledge of theology or interest in it to become alienated from the modes of thought and definitions of reality that made religiosity explicable and relevant.

Two powerful forces were operating in society to produce this fundamental secularisation of the values and beliefs of the population outside the Churches. First, there was a popularisation of the ‘scientific spirit’. Increasingly after 1850 science increasingly dominated popular definitions of reality. The scientific ethos as a popular philosophy tended to stultify all forms of metaphysical thinking, despite the fact that many of the scientists putting forward these views were themselves Christians. Secondly, popular materialism emerged as a major social force. There is a significant link between the economic changes that occurred after 1750 and the growing secularisation of society. Poverty, scarcity and disease had been the common lot of all but the fortunate few in pre-industrial societies. But in nineteenth century England, for the first time in history, the material wealth of a whole society began steadily and persistently to improve. The self-sustaining economic growth of a maturing industrial society and economy had already undermined attitudes and values that had taken shape amidst the poverty and relentless economic insecurity of generations before the Industrial Revolution.

The crisis of plausibility produced by the emergence of industrial society in England made its presence felt early in the Victorian period. From a previous situation in which people had taken for granted that the world was ‘a vale of tears that must be passed though on the way of eternal bliss or damnation’, there was beginning to emerge ‘the idea that the world was susceptible to systematic improvement through the application of sustained human effort and intelligence’. Increasingly the Churches were becoming estrangement from modern English society, though this was not brought home fully until the experience of the First World War. Victorian fears about the alienation of the working-classes from organised religion, though grounded in the definition of religiosity as attendance, were not to prove groundless. It was becoming increasingly apparent that for the middle and upper-classes, religion was becoming an increasingly irrelevant activity and cultural influence. The denominational compromises of the Victorian churches in their search for illusory relevance undermined their evangelical verve just as the crisis of plausibility undermined their influence on wider society. In seeking to understand why religious adherence declined after 1850, science and theology provide only part of the answer.

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[1] S. Budd Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society 1850-1960, Heinemann, 1977, Edward Royle Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement 1791-1866, Manchester, 1974 and Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain 1866-1915, Manchester, 1980 are the best introductory works. On Holyoake and Annie Besant see the respective biographies by Lee E. Grugel, Philadelphia, 1976 and Ann Taylor, OUP, 1992. P. Knight The Age of Science, Blackwell, 1986 places the Darwinian dispute in its nineteenth century context while the monumental biography Adrian Desmond and James Moore Darwin, London, 1991 is a major study of this enigmatic figure.

A Sociology of faith

Religious practice, to most churchmen, was synonymous with Sunday attendance. But when attendance was measured, as in the 1851 Religious Census, results were disconcerting. Church going was influenced by a wide variety of social and geographical circumstances. Attendance was higher in Scotland than England and highest of all in Wales. Within England it was higher in the countryside than in the towns, though this should not be exaggerated. There were considerable variations between regions, but undoubtedly the strongest influence was that of class.

Religion never simply reflected class divisions: none of the larger churches was the preserve of any single group or class; all cut across class lines. However, class had a bearing not only on the mere fact of attendance at church but at what church people worshipped in, and more importantly on the content and character of their religiosity and on the place religion had in their lives. Among the gentry and aristocracy there was a sense that the Anglican Church deserved support precisely because it was part of a social order in which they had a privileged position. They attended partly to set an example to their inferiors and sent the bailiff round if a tenant was absent. They gave large amounts of money to build and restore churches, working with the clergy to promote Anglican interests -- and their own. The rural labouring piety of the 1850s crumbled in the 1870s and 1880s, not because of ‘irreligion’, but because of the enforced migration and collapse of archaic community structures brought about by the agricultural depression. Falling land values also eroded the status and social prestige of the Anglican clergy who were from the 1880s sliding inexorably downwards from the lesser ranks of the landed gentry into the urban lower middle-class.

It was in the middle-classes that the Victorian religious boom had the biggest impact. Religion was the opiate not of the masses but of the bourgeoisie, and their heavy involvement in church life was one of the distinctive features of the British religious scene. It was in the middle-classes that religion was most strongly sustained by social pressure: regular church attendance and keeping the Sabbath were felt to be essential for a family’s respectability. Yet external motives were far from being the only ones and deep and genuine religious commitment evidence in this and other classes in Victorian society should not be underestimated. Middle-class religiosity, despite a good deal of variation in church going, reveals some common themes. Religion was treated as a family matter. Husband, wife and children formed a religious unit not only at church but at home, in family prayers and grace before meals. Middle-class people also tended to regard their church as a social centre, where they could meet others of similar outlook and join in the various recreational and philanthropic activities and where young people could meet suitable partners of the opposite sex. By the 1870s the integrative function of Nonconformity was waning, as economic tensions rose, and as issues like Empire, feminism and Irish Home Rule split Nonconformists into rival political allegiances. Moreover, the lower middle-class, the backbone of nonconformity, was changing in character and there was a world of difference between the religious outlook of superior artisans and small shopkeepers of the 1850s and the office-workers of 1900. For the former, religion was often an expression of solidarity with the local community. For the latter it was often an expression of separateness and difference and increasingly likely to take the form, if not of Anglicanism, then of a more refined and anonymous suburban Nonconformity than had been common forty years before.

As for the urban working-class, now the majority of the population, the common view was simply that they rarely attended church and that they were therefore ‘spiritually destitute’. The obsession of churchmen and the middle-classes with Sunday attendance meant that they overlooked the fact that working-class people came into contact with the churches on a great many occasions and that they had religious notions of their own, however unorthodox. To many working-class people the churches were alien, middle-class institutions where people like themselves, lacking good clothes and unable to afford pew rents, felt out of place. Church-goers tended to be regarded as snobs and hypocrites and an member of the working-class going to church was liable to be condemned for putting on airs and setting himself above his neighbours. Social pressure did as much to deter church going in the working-class as it did to encourage it in the middle and upper-classes.

The great majority of the working-class, neither regular attenders nor total strangers to the churches, considered themselves Christian. Recent studies in oral history suggest that contemporary surveys probably underestimated the piety of the poor and that outside London as many as a fifth of the Edwardian working-class may have attended churches on a more or less regular basis. Most married in church; many mothers up to 1914 insisted on being ‘churched’ after giving birth; and most had their babies christened. Most working-class children went to Sunday school. Children looked forward to the summer treat as one of the high points of the year; the Sunday school anniversary, particularly in nonconformity, was a major festival. Many children received religious instruction in church day schools. The elaborate pomp of working-class funerals, popular resistance to the spread of cremation and the universal fear of the pauper’s grave, suggest no lack of interest in the resurrection of the body and prospect of everlasting life. The working-classes also looked to the churches and to Anglican parsons in particular for charity. Most urban churches set up extensive welfare schemes, doling out food, blankets, money and Bibles, even if such charity was only a degree less shameful than going to the workhouse. Working people dealt with the churches on their own terms, taking what they wanted and ignoring the rest.

Religion and politics

The religious conflicts of the Victorian period were fought out not only in pulpits and pamphlets but also in the political arena. The churches during much of the period did more to mobilise political feeling than the political parties themselves. The antagonism between Protestants and Catholics intensified in a period that saw heavy Irish immigration, the nationalist struggle in Ireland and the adoption of aggressive tactics both by the Catholic Church and by its Protestant opponents. It had its effect at national level on such issues as the Maynooth grant (1845) and Irish home rule; locally, in areas with large Irish Catholic populations, it led to party divisions along religious lines. No less hard-fought were the battles over the established churches. Even the Church of Ireland was a leading issue in the election of 1868 before being disestablished the following year by Gladstone. In Wales, disestablishment was the chief aim of the Liberal nonconformist majority and the central political issue from the 1860s to 1914. But it was England that saw the conflict between church and chapel in its classic form.

On one side were the nonconformists, allied with Whigs and Liberals, seeking to remove their disabilities; on the other were the Anglicans, allied with the Conservatives defending the privileges of the establishment. They clashed at national and especially at local levels where nonconformists entered municipal politics in large numbers after 1835. The struggle to turn the confessional state into a secular state was a long one. The Whig governments of the 1830s did little to whittle down Anglican privileges. It introduced civil registration and allowed nonconformists to perform their own marriages, but compulsory church rates remained in force despite bitter local struggles. In the 1850s the church courts lost their jurisdiction over divorce and wills was abolished. The main breakthrough came with Gladstone’s first government: it abolished church rates (1869) and opened Oxford and Cambridge up to nonconformists (1870). The last disability was removed by the Burials Act 1881 that allowed nonconformist ministers to perform their own funeral services in parish churchyards. But the establishment itself remained a matter for dispute as did a variety of other issues above all the closely related and bitterly contested issue of education. Any attempt to channel public money into denominational schools or to give the Church of England a privileged position in state schools provoked intense opposition from Nonconformity. That England was late in creating a system of public education was mainly due to rivalry and mistrust between the churches. The Education Act 1902, that favoured the Anglicans, spurred a large nonconformist vote for the Liberals in the 1906 general election. By this time, however, religious issues were being replaced by class ones -- the ‘social gospel’ attracted little interest -- and support grew for the notion that the churches should stay out of politics altogether.

Across denominational lines: towards a civic culture?

There was also a Victorian religious culture that cut across denominational lines and that in important respects tended to escape denominational control altogether. Virtually all clergymen regarded the threat of eternal punishment as essential to Christian faith and morals in 1850. Fire and brimstone were the stock in trade of Catholic as well as Protestant preachers. However, by the 1870s this ‘religion of the torture chamber’ began to seem inconsistent with God’s love and was quietly pushed into the background. The churches had to adapt to a moral consensus they could no longer control.

There was also general agreement, among Protestants at least, about public worship. Yet the sermon lost its pre-eminent position shrinking from an hour in 1830 to twenty-five minutes or less by 1914. It was replaced by church music that took a more central role in worship than at any time in the past. The religion of the unadorned word was being replaced by a religion of mood and feeling. Hymns, long established in nonconformity, quickly caught on in Anglican churches and Hymns Ancient and Modern first appeared in 1861. Like ornate ritual, music rekindled the spirit of worship even when the objects of worship were becoming problematic.

Sabbatarianism was a major force in this period. The Lord’s Day Observance Society, founded by Anglican evangelicals in 1831, acted as the main pressure group. Most of its attempts to impose their views by legislation failed but in 1856 it scored a major success in ensuring Sunday closing for the British Museum and National Gallery. The churches were less successful in keeping control of holidays and the holiday calendar. Christmas, in its modern form largely a Victorian invention had less to do with Christianity than with the middle-class cult of the family. The harvest festival, though introduced by high church Anglicans in the 1840s, was essentially pagan in spirit. National days of prayer and thanksgiving fell into disuse. Bank Holidays, created in 1871 by-passed Christianity altogether.

Churches became social as well as religious institutions. Sunday schools alone were a major industry. Membership of Bans of Hope, Boy’s Brigade, Men’s Societies, the Girls’ Friendly Society and the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations ran into millions. Other church activities included literary and debating societies; recreation, including cricket and football teams from which professional clubs like Aston Villa and Everton later emerged; and philanthropy. These activities, however, carried with them a danger of diverting the church from its primary religious role, particularly as they became vulnerable to the expansion of commercial leisure and to the growing provision of welfare by the state. In the 1870s the first signs appeared that the long period of growth was coming to an end. Though membership was still increasing, it failed top keep pace with the growth in population and church going actually began to decline. Such hallmarks of Victorian religiosity as strict Sunday observance and family prayers were being abandoned; the churches condemned but were unable to curb the middle-class practice of birth control. Criticism of Christian doctrine was openly published; agnosticism and ‘secular religions’ won support. Behind the statistics of falling attendance lay a deeper disaffection with the churches and their message.

The decline of the churches has had many explanations, no one of them sufficient by itself. The most general argument is simply that modern industrial society made secularisation inevitable. But this says nothing about the specific causes and processes of decline. The effect of scientific discoveries is difficult to estimate. At the level of ideas it was less the scientific than the moral critique of Christianity that did the most damage. Eternal damnation now seemed cruel and barbaric, the God responsible for it something of a monster; and if the everlasting fire burned no longer, what was the point of seeking salvation. There could be morality, people now believed, without the fear of hell and without religion altogether. A more persuasive argument us that the social pressures that had encouraged middle-class church-going earlier in the century were weakening. In an economy of large firms and professional qualifications attending church to demonstrate one’s moral credentials no longer seemed so necessary. Yet the decline of the churches did not necessarily mean a decline of religion in a broader sense. Those who drifted away from orthodox belief were sometimes attracted to successor faiths like nationalism that themselves had a religious quality and dimension. Queen Victoria’s jubilees in 1887 and 1897, the increasingly elaborate coronations and the cult of Empire were the rituals of a civil religion. For the first time, religious impulses found expression on a large scale outside the churches and outside Christianity, though probably not enough to make up for the decline in the churches themselves.