The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c.1920–1960 (Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series)

The Passing of Protestant England In The Passing of Protestant England, S. J. D. Green offers an important new account...

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The Passing of Protestant England

In The Passing of Protestant England, S. J. D. Green offers an important new account of the causes, courses and consequences of the secularisation of English society. He argues that the critical cultural transformation of modern English society was forged in the agonised abandonment of a long-domesticated protestant, Christian tradition between 1920 and 1960. Its effects were felt across the nation and among all classes. Yet their significance in the evolution of contemporary indigenous identities remains curiously neglected in most mainstream accounts of postVictorian Britain. Dr Green traces the decline of English ecclesiastical institutions after 1918. He also investigates the eclipse of once-common moral sensibilities during the years up to 1945. Finally, he examines why subsequent efforts to reverse these trends so comprehensively failed. His work will be of enduring interest to modern historians, sociologists of religion and all those concerned with the future of faith in Britain and beyond. s. j . d . g r e e n is Extraordinary Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University, and Reader in Modern British History at the University of Leeds.

The Passing of Protestant England Secularisation and Social Change, c. 1920–1960 S. J. D. Green All Souls College, Oxford

c a m b r i d g e u n i ve r s i t y p r e s s Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521839778 C S. J. D. Green 2011

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Green, S. J. D. (Simon J. D.) The passing of Protestant England : secularisation and social change, c. 1920–1960 / S. J. D. Green. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-521-83977-8 1. Great Britain – Church history – 20th century. 2. Great Britain – Religious life and customs – History – 20th century. 3. Protestantism – Great Britain – History – 20th century. 4. Religious institutions – Great Britain – History – 20th century. 5. Secularism – Great Britain – History – 20th century. 6. Secularization (Theology) I. Title. BR759.G744 2010 2010040289 274.2 082 – dc22 ISBN 978-0-521-83977-8 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For E.A.H., at last

Contents

Acknowledgements

page viii

Part I Outline of the problem 1 Towards a social history of religion in modern Britain: secularisation theory, religious change and the fate of protestant England

3

2 Religion in the twilight zone: a narrative of religious decline and religious change in Britain, c. 1920–1960

29

Part II Disclosures of decline 3 The ‘soul of England’ in an ‘age of disintegration’: Dean Inge and the ‘trial of the churches’ in the wake of World War I 4 The strange death of puritan England

95 135

5 Social science and the discovery of a ‘post-protestant people’: Rowntree’s surveys of York and their other legacy 180 Part III Resistance, revival and resignation 6 The 1944 Education Act: a church–state perspective

211

7 Was there an English religious revival in the 1950s?

242

8 Slouching towards a secular society: expert analysis and lay opinion in the early 1960s

273

Conclusion: the passing of protestant England

303

Index

317 vii

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Michael Watson of Cambridge University Press for commissioning this study in the first place; and scarcely less for his immense patience in awaiting the final version. Archivists and librarians at All Souls, the Bodleian Library, Magdalene and Trinity Colleges in Cambridge, Lambeth Palace Library, the London Library, the Centre for the Study of Methodist History at Oxford Brookes University and the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York proved graciously and endlessly helpful. My college continues to provide the ideal conditions in which to undertake this kind of work. Would that the results achieved matched the opportunities afforded. Humaira Ahmed transformed my scrawl into a typescript. Michael Bentley cast a severe and sympathetic eye over the outcome. The author took heed whenever he was sensible. Elizabeth Harwick did the same; ditto. Some portions of the book have appeared, under very different guises, in print before. Shorter and slighter versions of chapter 2 first appeared as ‘Le Crépuscule de la religion en Grande-Brétagne, 1920–1960’, in Hugh McLeod, Stuart Mews and Christiane d’Haussy (eds.), Histoire réligieuse de la Grande-Bretagne ´ (Paris, Editions Cerf, 1997); of chapter 4 as ‘The Strange Death of Puritan England, c. 1914–1945’, in Wm. Roger Louis (ed.), Yet More Adventures with Britannia (London, I. B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 185–211; of chapter 5 as ‘Social Science and the Discovery of Post-Protestant England: Rowntree’s Surveys of York and their Other Legacy’, Northern History, 45 (2008), 87–109; of chapter 6 as ‘The 1944 Education Act: a Church–State Perspective’, Parliamentary History, 19 (2000), 147–65; and of chapter 7 as ‘Was There a Religious Revival in Britain in the 1950s?’, Journal of the United Reformed Church Historical Society, 7 (2006), 517–38. My thanks to the various editors and publishers for permission to reprint here.

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Part I

Outline of the problem

1

Towards a social history of religion in modern Britain: secularisation theory, religious change and the fate of protestant England

This book aims to make an original contribution to the social history of religion in modern Britain. It offers no a priori definition of religious phenomena. Rather, it conceives of its subject as including all (anyway, most) of those characteristic ideas about, and institutions dedicated to, explicit and significant notions of the sacred that have flourished in these islands during the last century or so.1 Mutatis mutandis it presumes the widest possible remit for a comprehensive study of an ever-changing thing. This presumes the ‘social history’ not merely of ecclesiastical institutions, but also of quasi-religious organisations; similarly, of arcane doctrine and unsophisticated attitudes about God, His Church and our immortal ends.2 Yet what follows is, for the most part, an unashamedly specific account of the fate of Christian, denominational, practice and popular, protestant, belief in Britain from the end of the First World War down to the dawn of the 1960s.3 Indeed, its real concerns are in some respects narrower still. That is because it concentrates overwhelmingly (though not entirely) on English experience in these respects. This study sheds little direct light on Scottish and Welsh religious history, and even less 1

2

3

Not least because any such definition is almost immediately a matter of dispute amongst scholars. For an introduction to the range of possible definitions, see Bryan S. Turner, Religion and Social Theory, 2nd edn (London, 1991), pp. 242–6. What is ‘social history’? For the fullest ‘mission statements’, see Peter N. Stearns, ‘Some Comments on Social History’, Journal of Social History, 1 (1967), 3–6 and 7–16; also Janet Blackman and Keith Neild, Editorial, Social History, 1 (1976), 1–3. For a more theoretical perspective, see B. R. Wilson, ‘Sociological Methods in the Study of History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 21 (1971), 101–18; also the wider reflections contained in E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘From Social History to the History of Society’, in M. W. Flinn and T. C. Smout (eds.), Essays in Social History (Oxford, 1974), pp. 1–22. Social history as simply all-encompassing history is asserted rather than established in the remarks of F. M. L. Thompson, Editorial preface, The Cambridge Social History of Britain, vol. I: Religion and Communities (Cambridge, 1990), pp. xi–xv. Albeit different from most pre-existing examples. For some of the best, see Roger Lloyd, The Church of England, 1900–1965 (London, 1966); Rupert Davies, A. Raymond George and E. Gordon Rupp (eds.), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, vol. III (London, 1983); and R. T. Jones, Congregationalism in England, 1662–1962 (London, 1962).

3

4


on the very different dynamic of contemporary Irish Christianity.4 To the extent that its English interests are multi-denominational, they are devoted largely to the fortunes of the protestant churches. According to these terms, Roman Catholicism stands at the farthest shores of indigenous biblical faith.5 About Jewish history in this country, of the recent emergence of British Islam and concerning the recent emergence of socalled ‘new religious movements’, these pages are virtually silent.6 That may seem strange. By comparison with typical priorities in the contemporary sociology of religion, it may be perverse.7 Judged even by the less exotic standards of modern religious historiography, it must appear somewhat outdated.8 But if such narrowness of focus entails obvious limitations of breadth, it may permit certain less immediately observable gains in depth. There is, of course, much to be said 4

5

6

7

8

On which see Callum Brown, The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730 (London, 1987), esp. chs. 6 and 7; Keith Robbins, ‘Religion and Community in Scotland and Wales since 1800’, in Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheils (eds.), A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present (Oxford, 1994), pp. 363–80; John Davies, A History of Wales (London, 1993), chs. 8–10; J. J. Lee, Ireland, 1912–1985 (Cambridge, 1985), esp. chs. 2–5; and J. H. Whyte, Church and State in Ireland, 1923– 1979, 2nd edn (Dublin, 1980), passim. More generally, consult John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843–1945 (London, 1994), chs. 5–8 and, above all, Keith Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: the Christian Church, 1900–2000 (Oxford, 2008), passim. Perhaps best approached initially through the various essays contained in A. McClelland and M. Hodgetts (eds.), From Without the Flavian Gate: 150 Years of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales, 1850–2000 (London, 1999); note also the important works of Michael P. Hornsby-Smith, especially his Roman Catholic Beliefs in England: Customary Christianity and Transformations of Religious Authority (Cambridge, 1991); though, again, see Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, passim. For Jewish history, see Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry (Oxford, 1992), esp. chs. 4–7; also the essays collected in David Cesarani (ed.), The Making of Modern AngloJewry (Oxford, 1990). On Islam, see Philip Lewis, Islamic Britain: Religion, Politics and Identity amongst British Muslims (London, 1994), esp. chs. 1, 4 and 6. Much important information is summarised in Muhammad Anwar, ‘Muslims in Britain’, in Syed Z. Abedin and Ziauddin Sardar, Muslim Minorities in the West (London, 1995), pp. 37–50. On the ‘new religions’, see Roy Wallis, The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life (London, 1984), chs. 2 and 3; also Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, Sociological Theory, Religion and Collective Action (Belfast, 1986), chs. 7 and 8. For a flavour, representative enough, see Paul Davie, John Smith and Linda Woodhead (eds.), Religion, Revival and Secularisation (London, 2003), esp. the introduction and chs. 7–10. For the pursuit of ‘popular’ or extra-institutional religious experience in modern religious historiography, see (inter alia) James Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society in South Lindsay, 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976), pt III; Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth 1870–1930 (Oxford, 1982), esp. ch. 7; and, above all, Sarah Williams’s Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c. 1880–1939 (Oxford, 1999), passim. The present author is far from unsympathetic to their cause. See his Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1996), esp. ch. 8.

Towards a social history of religion

5

for a fully integrated, multi-national history of religious experience in twentieth-century Britain. But there is still something to be gained from both chronological and geographical disaggregation. To concentrate upon the English experience is explicitly to acknowledge – for good or ill – England’s ever-increasing priority in the economic, social and cultural history of post-imperial Britain.9 It is also, implicitly, to recognise the very different trajectories of British religious history in its many (and various) Celtic fringes.10 In a quite different way, to highlight the fate of protestant denominationalism in English religious history is to insist that mainstream, twentieth-century British social history properly comes to terms with its institutionally Christian as well as its popular and pagan dimensions. This is no small point. To date, it has shown remarkably little inclination to do so. One possible reason suggests itself immediately. This is the argument of salutary neglect. It is rooted in the supposition that there is not very much to write about. This is because religion is in decline. Moreover, it has been in decline for the whole of the twentieth century.11 That decline, so the argument goes, is inexorable; its progress in the direction of further decline is inevitable. It will eventually proceed to the point where religion – if not now, then very soon – becomes a truly marginal aspect of social life. Some call this process the secularisation of British society.12 Others resist the phrase.13 Most, bar a few eccentrics, acknowledge the underlying dynamic. They equally seem to agree that, whatever its name, 9

10

11

12 13

Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. v and vi; also ch. 1. On demography, see David Coleman, ‘Population and Family’, in A. H. Halsey with Josephine Webb (eds.), Twentieth Century British Social Trends (Basingstoke, 2000), ch. 1, esp. at pp. 34–5 and 72–3; implicit recognition of the economics can be found in Christopher Harvie, No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Scotland since 1914, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1987), chs. 2, 3 and 6; Davies, A History of Wales, chs. 9 and 10; also Geraint H. Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales (Cambridge, 2007), ch. 7; and for Ireland, Eorin O’Malley, ‘Problems of Industrialisation in Industrial Society in Ireland’, in J. H. Goldthorpe and C. T. Whelan (eds.), The Development of Industrial Society in Ireland (Oxford, 1994), ch. 11. For a sense of that difference, and its significance, see the balance of the essays in Gilley and Sheils, A History of Religion in Britain, pts III and IV; also the specific histories noted in n. 4 above. The fundamental argument, with attached statistical proof, adduced in Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), ch. 4 and pp. 128–95. For a subtle qualification, bringing the material up to date, see Peter Brierley, ‘Religion’, in Halsey and Webb (eds.), Twentieth Century British Social Trends, ch. 19. Hence the sub-title of Alan D. Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain: a History of the Secularisation of Modern Society (London, 1980); see esp. pp. 9–15. Note the scepticism sounded in Robin Gill, Competing Convictions (London, 1989), passim; also his ‘Secularization and Census Data’, in Steve Bruce (ed.), Religion and Modernization: Historians and Sociologists Debate the Secularization Question (Oxford, 1998), pp. 90–117, esp. pp. 90–101.

6


the causes and consequences of this dynamic entail the increasing irrelevance of religion as a significant agent in the evolution of contemporary social history. So widespread is this attitude that, to re-work Trevelyan, the vast body of modern British social history – at least of twentiethcentury English social history – might for all practical purposes be defined as ‘history with the religion left out’.14 This book has been written in explicit opposition to that view. It argues that religion has been a vital aspect of the history of twentieth-century Britain, including England. More: it insists that the evolution of British, including English, society cannot be properly understood without significant reference to the importance of religion in that story. It does not suggest that the evidence of decline in common-sense experience is entirely erroneous. It is certainly not argued that religion has actually gained in social significance during that time. Nor does the book posit that such diminution is of only qualified significance. To the contrary, it insists that the specific forms which this decline has assumed (and also, by implication, avoided), similarly the particular changes both of religion and in wider society which these in turn have implied, have been of enormous significance for the nature and evolution of the society in which they occurred, both informing all aspects of modern British social relations and altering the very nature of British identity itself. It is becoming increasingly clear that, more than anything else, it was a religious creed, specifically the protestant, Christian, faith, that forged the manifold peoples of the British Isles into something like a recognisable nation during the eighteenth century.15 It has long been appreciated that it was this 14

15

See the remarks in Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain, p. 2. Note the absence of religion as a factor, even in the index, of E. J. Hobsbawm’s influential Industry and Empire: from 1750 to the Present Day (London, 1968); and for an explanation, consider his observations in his Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1984), ch. 3, esp. pp. 36–9. Nor is this a viewpoint confined to the ‘Marxist’ fringe in British historiography. It is embodied in the Oxford History of England/Britain: see A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 168–9 and 252, and Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History, 1945–1990 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 67–8, 208 and 479. A more recent account by Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998) contains one short chapter on religion, but longer chapters on sport, cinema and music. An exception is Keith Robbins: see his History, Religion and Identity: Modern Britain (London, 1993), esp. chs. 7, 9, 11 and 14. Trevelyan’s original remark, ‘Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out’, comes from his English Social History: a Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria (London, 1944), p. vii. It has long been criticised and parodied by ‘new’ social historians, who seem wilfully to ignore the perceptive – and prescient – remarks which followed. For an altogether more sensitive discussion, both locating and contextualising Trevelyan’s remarks, see David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: a Life in History (London, 1992), appendix C, pp. 234–6. On which, see esp. Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth Century England, c. 1714–80: a Political and Social Study (Manchester, 1993), chs. 2 and 7; also Linda


7

belief, together with the institutions that supported it, that proved crucial, even in their seemingly divided and mutually disputatious forms, to the development and integration of so much of the recognisably modern, urban-industrial, society that emerged in late Victorian Britain.16 It would be altogether more remarkable, not to say incredible, if so great a degree of subsequent religious change in twentieth-century Britain, a transformation of institutions and sensibilities which has included, but is not exhausted by, the phenomenon of decline, had not also had a profound impact on the way Britons have gradually come to define themselves, and to understand each other, in recent times. Hence two presuppositions, each crucial to the conception and composition of this work. The first is that the social implications of religious change in twentieth-century Britain have never been limited merely to changes in contemporary British religion. Therefore, they cannot be compartmentalised into the ever-diminishing domain of church history.17 The second is that neither the origins nor the consequences of contemporary religious change are properly understood merely as passive reflections of wider changes in society. If each of these presuppositions is accepted, then it follows that not only must a proper social history comprehend religious history, but it must also acknowledge that the unproblematically privileged standing of so-called exogenous factors, that is of logically prior and analytically distinct forms of social change, in the account of religious change is unjustifiable. Indeed, any such presumption is insufficient either as an explanation of those changes or for a proper understanding of their implications.18 This is because religious

16

17

18

Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), ch. 1. For the later period, see John Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829–1860 (Oxford, 1991), chs. 1 and 8. Compare the alternative views in George Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England (London, 1962), ch. 6 and Keith Robbins, Nineteenth-Century Britain: England, Scotland and Wales, the Making of a Nation (Oxford, 1989), ch. 3. And for a recent, and illuminating, discussion of the local and regional dimensions of this phenomenon, see David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: from the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge, 1996), esp. chs. 3–5. A basic assumption in the early volumes of Hobsbawm’s Making of British Society series. See Noreen Branson and Margot Heinemann, Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (London, 1971), also Noreen Branson, Britain in the Nineteen Twenties (London, 1975) where the social history of religion is all but ignored, similarly so in the popular works of Arthur Marwick, e.g. Britain in the Century of Total War (London, 1968), and more recently, British Society since 1945 (Harmondsworth, 1990), passim. See, most recently of all, Martin Pugh, We Danced All Night: a Social History of Britain between the Wars (London 2008), where the words ‘Christianity’, ‘protestantism’ and ‘religion’ are absent even from the index. Pace Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 96–9; and its implicit corroboration in Harold Perkin, The Structured Crowd: Essays in English Social History (Brighton, 1981), pp. 223ff.

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ideas – like any other ideas – have a certain life of their own.19 So too do religious institutions.20 Inevitably, such intellectual and organisational lives are related to the world outside themselves, wilfully or not, knowingly or not. But even to say that much is to acknowledge that they also affect the world, just as it affects them. Social history is as much an aspect of religious history as vice versa. The systematic application of that insight to twentieth-century British history is both the best justification for, and points to the importance of, a social history of religion in modern Britain. Important as it may be, the construction of such a history is far from straightforward, particularly so in the present context. This is to some degree because of the seemingly intractable theoretical difficulties involved in constructing a plausible narrative. It is also traceable to the incorrigible elusiveness of much of the most significant evidence. Finally, it owes something to the peculiar problems of perspective implied in recounting a story whose end cannot be known for certain. The theoretical difficulties involved in constructing a modern social history of religion stem from the special complexity of the subject matter itself. For religion is simultaneously a system of soteriological doctrine, a body of ecclesiastical institutions and a vehicle for wider cultural expression.21 Some aspects of its multi-form character are more effectively described through the application of a characteristically ‘social’ approach than others. Yet to concentrate attention exclusively on these particular elements of religious experience, typically the more institutional, on the grounds that they are more amenable to historical analysis, especially to do so by neglecting others, typically the more ethereal, because they are usually less susceptible to this way of looking at things, is to run the risk of intellectual fragmentation and descriptive deficiency. Taken to its logical extreme it can have the effect of divorcing the social history of religion from ecclesiastical and even intellectual historiography altogether. This is no idle observation. Something suspiciously like it has been going on

19

20 21

A truth more readily acknowledged, of late, by eighteenth- and nineteenth- than by twentieth-century British historians. See inter alia the observations of J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 5; Richard Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform (Oxford, 1987), ch. 3; and J. P. Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge, 1986), ch. 3. A point made in Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. 33–5. For the specifically Christian dimensions of this relationship, see the incomparable analysis in David Martin, The Breaking of the Image: a Sociology of Christian Theory and Practice (Oxford, 1981), passim.


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in the relevant historiography for decades.22 Nor is the resulting loss confined to an implicit abandonment of the putative goal of total history. As is becoming ever more clear, this distinction in scholarly activity has actually worked to the profound disadvantage of social history. If this is the case generally, it is especially true for the social history of religion.23 The road back to a truly integrated social history of religion must begin with the acknowledgement that so many of the supposed social boundaries of religion – about which sorts of religious belief are generally acknowledged (that is, taken as credible and not dismissed as ridiculous) and the wider effect that often arbitrary division seemingly has in society – are profoundly affected by otherwise highbrow debates concerning the proper content of justifiable faith; similarly, by ostensibly unrelated political struggles revolving around its rightful place in the public sphere. Arcane theological arguments and the ecclesiastical antagonisms of intellectual and political e´ lites do not in themselves determine what the masses hold dear or practise faithfully. Even to speak of a ‘popular’ religious culture is to admit that much.24 But these sorts of conflicts do profoundly affect the nature, and also the dynamics, of the relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture in even minimally religious societies. That is because such struggles never take place in that atmosphere of cultural isolation (perhaps incorrectly) presupposed for so much selfconsciously superior fine art or imaginative literature. This has certainly been true of modern British experience. There has never been any easily distinguishable ‘high’ and ‘low’ religious culture in these islands.25 What the e´ lites said and did always filtered down to the masses. It also materially affected what the masses said and did. Still, their responses were seldom purely passive. On the contrary, they were often profoundly reactive. The very existence of so-called Christian fundamentalism, indeed 22

23 24

25

As noted in Hugh McLeod, ‘Varieties of Victorian Belief’, Journal of Modern History, 64 (1992), 321–37, esp. at 322–3; and lamented by Jeffrey Cox, ‘On the Limits of Social History: Nineteenth-Century Evangelicalism’, Journal of British Studies, 31 (1992), 198– 203, esp. at 201. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. 15–21; S. J. D. Green, Reviews of Books, Journal of Modern History, 65 (1993), 398–402, esp. at 399. On the concept of ‘popular religion’ generally, see the essays collected together in Peter Hendrik Vrijhof and Jacques Waardenburg (eds.), Official and Popular Religion: Analysis of a Theme for Religious Studies (The Hague, 1979), esp. chs. 7–9; for the specific case of Christianity, note the approach taken in Wendy James and Douglas H. Johnson (eds.), Vernacular Christianity: Essays in the Social Anthropology of Religion Presented to Godfrey Lienhardt (Oxford, 1988), pt III; and for empirical examples, consult the material in Ellen Badone (ed.), Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society (Princeton, 1995), esp. chs. 1 and 8. For the British example, see David Hempton, ‘ “Popular Religion” 1880–1986’, in Terence Thomas (ed.), The British: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, 1800–1986 (London, 1988), pp. 181–210. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. 22–6.

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popular religious movements more generally, bears stark witness to that fact. On the other hand, the masses were much more rarely proactive. It is difficult to think of a single instance in the twentieth century when popular religious opinion has actually anticipated, and thereby deflected, e´ lite judgements in these matters. No social history of religion in modern Britain can ignore that salutary truth.26 Consider the secularisation or, more properly, the desacralisation of British politics during the twentieth century. It requires no genius to observe that the systematic elimination of religious questions from mainland politics in our time (an e´ lite-driven achievement if ever there was one) has also had an important, and generally a deleterious, impact upon the social prestige of British religious institutions over the same period.27 This is not necessarily to condemn the result. Few can applaud the consequences of the obvious failure of those same e´ lites to remove the religious question from the politics of Northern Ireland after 1922.28 It is, however, to observe that this development has to be taken into account in any serious consideration of the changing political nature and social significance of religious organisations in England over those years. In short, intellectual history and political history matter in the social history of religion. They matter even for self-consciously ‘popular’ versions of the social history of religion. Still, the most exhaustive research into what have become the characteristic objects of the social history of religion – the identification of religious constituencies, the description of sacred and quasi-sacred institutions and the comprehension of popular, supernatural mentalities – is not only incomplete but also actually profoundly misleading as social history if it is conducted in the absence of similar consideration of the interaction between the supposedly ‘social’ and the peculiarly political, 26

27

28

Christian fundamentalism is a vast subject. Perhaps the best introduction remains that in James Barr, Fundamentalism (London, 1977), esp. chs. 1, 2 and 4. For an historical account, covering much British material, see Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism (London, 1970), passim; and more generally, Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.), Accounting for Fundamentalism: the Dynamic Character of Movements (Chicago, 1994), esp. pt I. Most recent treatments of the subject include G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1869–1921 (Oxford, 1987), ch. 7, and Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000, 4th edn (London, 2001), esp. chs. 4, 14, 26, 29, 35 and 39. A notable, comparative treatment is found in Donald Harman Akenson, God’s Peoples: Covenant and Law in South Africa, Israel and Ulster (Ithaca, 1992), esp. chs. 6 and 7; the ‘protestant’ view is analysed objectively in Steve Bruce, The Edge of the Union: the Ulster Loyalist Political Vision (Oxford, 1994), ch. 5; and a ‘catholic’ perspective can be found in Oliver P. Rafferty, Catholicism in Ulster, 1603–1983: an Interpretative History (London, 1994), esp. chs. 6 and 7.


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or between the allegedly attitudinal and the specifically doctrinal, in religious life. A social history of religion has to be a political and intellectual history of religion as well. At the very least it has to be a history borne in upon, as well itself bearing upon, political and intellectual history. So much might seem obvious. If so, it is necessary to observe that this simple truth has clearly not yet been generally apprehended.29 To appreciate that lesson, social historians of religion would do well to practise a little more modesty in the way they judge traditional ecclesiastical and intellectual history. If they did, they might find out that they had a great deal to learn from them.30 There is a second, related, point. A general history of religion in twentieth-century Britain would be a travesty if it somehow ignored, even indeed if it sought to minimise the significance of, Britain’s historic Christian and denominational legacy. The Victorians believed that they were perhaps the first successfully to disseminate, that is to systematise and to popularise, a truly Christian understanding of God and His works in the world. That their successors have subsequently come to marginalise what was actually a very specific, protestant, faith is a tale well worth telling. On any account it was a slow change, not a quick victory. Its triumph is the product of very recent history. Those same Victorians also self-consciously organised the people into Christian denominations that conceived of themselves (though, generally, not each other) as the best expression of that belief. That such denominational loyalties, and the significance of Christian denominationalism more generally, have declined so markedly during the intervening decades is to point to institutional developments of unambiguous historical importance, processes as much a part of the political and social as of the ecclesiastical history of modern Britain. So the social history of religion in Britain since 1914 must begin where the Victorians left off: with a protestant God and among Britain’s traditional, Christian denominations. But, of course, it cannot end there. If the decline of specifically Christian, denominational institutions is nothing more than a commonplace of contemporary British social observation, it is scarcely less axiomatic among contemporary sociologists of religion, at least among those generally critical of what might be called the ‘conventional model’ of religious historiography, that the demise of such associations was not synonymous with the passing of Christianity, per se; nor even is the eclipse (if such, 29 30

A point made in McLeod, ‘Varieties of Victorian Belief’, 337; and reinforced in Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. 20–2. For an inkling, albeit reluctant, see the remarks of Cox, ‘On the Limits of Social History’, 198–203; and for a rather more forceful statement, Green, Reviews of Books, 398–402.

12


in fact, it is) of historic Christianity the same thing as the death of the sacred in modern Britain. Most of these critics generally acknowledge that, for better or worse, religion has become either increasingly dispersed or altogether more privatised in contemporary British society. They similarly accept that, in this way, it has become more personal, more a question of individual belief and practice, less a matter for the overt display of specific social attitudes and of their attendant political loyalties than once before. However, they invariably insist that while this transformation of traditional understanding and institutions is a social development of undoubted significance, it is not synonymous with the decline of religion. Rather, they suggest, it marks the changing nature, shifting locus and, paradoxically, the continuing significance of modern religiosity. This change represents the emergence of a specifically modern form of the recognition and valuation of the sacred, a free-floating model for religious life bound neither to traditional understandings nor to traditional institutions.31 Whatever the theoretical merits of the thesis, the argument that it implies poses the most acute problems of investigative method. This is because the characteristic techniques of social science are altogether better attuned to understanding the visible dynamics of organisations than to uncertain oscillations in the attitudes of individuals; equally to the unambiguous effects of collective action rather than to the curious impact of particular agencies.32 Not entirely so, of course; the exploitation of questionnaires and other survey studies has often provided important clues for an understanding of otherwise unfathomable puzzles about private doings and personal beliefs. These will be deployed, albeit rather cursorily and unsystematically, throughout this study. But, as is 31

32

See esp. Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York, 1970), p. 42; A. M. Greeley, The Sociology of the Paranormal: a Reconnaissance (Beverley Hills, 1975), passim; and D. Hay, ‘Religious Experience Amongst a Group of Postgraduate Students: a Qualitative Study’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 18 (1979), 164–82. For a subtle variation on this theme, and a consideration of the contemporary desecularisation of religion, see Hastings, A History of English Christianity, ch. 42. Which is not to say that the problems involved have gone unnoticed in social scientific investigation of them. For four of the most famous, and their attendant methodological considerations, see Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London, 1955), pp. 320ff., esp. p. 325; B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: a Social Study (London, 1951), pp. 339–41; A. M. Carr-Saunders, D. Caradog-Jones and C. A. Moser, A Survey of Social Conditions in England and Wales, as Illustrated by Statistics (Oxford, 1958), pp. 259–64; and finally, Kenneth Thompson, ‘How Religious are the British?’ in Thomas (ed.), The British, pp. 211–39. The various merits and demerits of these efforts will be discussed in detail below, esp. in chs. 7 and 8.


13

well known, the limitations of those forms of investigation are considerable. Moreover, these only multiply as their use moves further back in time.33 Oral evidence, gathered from individual responses to particular questions, fills in some of the gaps. That, too, will occasionally be utilised here. But the limitations of this source are, if anything, greater still. This is particularly the case for religious belief.34 Hence a profound paradox in the modern social history of religion. While the characteristic sources of individual religious belief have in so many ways become more uniform and predictable – as a system of national, secular education, an increasingly standardised print journalism and, finally, the homogenising impact of the televisual media have eclipsed the comparatively diverse stimuli of home, Sunday school and local religious organisations – so perversely, our ability adequately to document, let alone satisfactorily to interpret, the content of those beliefs has actually diminished. This is, to some extent, because the documentary sources of modern piety are more exiguous than those of traditional faith. That, in turn, is itself partly a reflection of the fact that they are now invariably the product of a more tenuous connection between individual belief and social action, similarly, between personal commitment and its characteristic visible or expressive form. It is not just that those who once actually joined religious organisations, attended services and took particular vows thereby freely gave up more of themselves to the life of religion than those who have now generally ceased to do so (though that, surely is the case). It is also that, in so doing, they necessarily revealed more about their religious life – of the real content of their beliefs, practices and taboos – than those who now simply tune into Songs of Praise once a week; or for that matter than those who merely fill in questionnaires about their various ‘social’ attitudes once a decade.35 For students of the social history of religion this sad fact poses a real problem. It must be doubted 33 34

35

See the comparison between 1990s and 1940s questionnaire material – and, accordingly, the varying extent of their proper use, in Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 654–6 and 678–82. This is not to say they are valueless. See the evidential material in Elizabeth Roberts, Working-Class Barrow and Lancaster, 1850–1930 (Lancaster, 1976), pp. 62ff.; and Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman’s Place: an Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890–1940 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 4–6, 44–5, 68–70 and 184–5; also that in Sarah Williams, ‘Urban Popular Religion and the Rites of Passage’, in Hugh McLeod (ed.), European Religion in the Great Cities, 1890–1930 (London, 1995), pp. 216–36. Yet note the earlier, cautionary, remarks (generally ignored) of Michael Argyle, Religious Behaviour (London, 1958), pp. 67–9, where the ubiquity of religion among the elderly is shown to influence their recollection of its forms (and popularity) in their youth. Though, for sceptical remarks about what we can know even of the nineteenth-century, organised, version, see the observations in Owen Chadwick, The Secularisation of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 3–4, and Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches

14


whether it is open to any simple solution. Indeed, it must be doubted whether much of what has come to constitute the peculiarly modern religious sensibility is meaningfully subject to what generally passes for historical investigation. It is just too diffuse and found in too many different forms. It has too many diverging contexts and consequences. It must follow that, given the inevitable difficulties of interpretation involved, any methodological absolutism which insists upon the existence of one peculiarly effective technique for the study of the history of modern religion, or of one especially fruitful field of research into its various and changing forms, is entirely fanciful. Under these circumstances, there is surely much to be said for a social history of modern religion informed by an unashamed eclecticism of approach. That means a historical approach motivated by an openness to all the available sources, whether the supposedly scientific or the allegedly anecdotal, the presumptively objective or the unashamedly partisan; whether indeed, the obviously religious or the seemingly mundane. Certainly, much of the history related below will be drawn from other than obviously religious sources, for instance, from the private papers of politicians and the public records of secular journals. Similarly, much will be drawn from individual accounts, in effect from personal analyses of what had happened, was happening and might happen in the future. This must be a good thing in itself. Scarcely a person alive today over the age of forty does not have some idea, rooted in some sort of substantiating experience, about the fate of religion in our time. Not all those theories are true. However, few are valueless. And much of the evidence adduced in them is priceless. This approach entails taking none of the sources at face value. But, then, historians are used to being sceptical of their raw material, especially, in this instance, of that of religious organisations themselves. They are perhaps less well equipped, or at least less obviously inclined, to do the same in the case of self-conscious social scientific investigation. Yet for our purposes these too are fallible, historical sources, no more and no less. That is as true of the most recent, official survey as it was of the earliest efforts in mass observation.36 In this sense methodological eclecticism implies not only epistemological pluralism, but also a general scepticism. It is similarly to acknowledge that the resulting analysis will be incomplete, its conclusions tentative, its value undetermined.

36

in a Secular Society, pp. 90–105; for a compromise view, see Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. 21–3 and ch. 8. For further remarks on this problem, see below chs. 5 and 8, pp. 193–208 and 295–300.


15

I Still, no historian, qua historian, can remain sceptical forever. Merely to attempt a historical narrative is necessarily to suspend epistemological disbelief, even if at no more profound a level than in the willingness to tell a story.37 In this task, the greatest advantage of the historian lies in the sense of perspective that hindsight properly affords. But the more contemporary the subject, the shorter and also the weaker the advantageous viewpoint. For the writing of the recent social history of religion this problem is more acute still. That is because the prevailing perspective is not merely short and weak, it is also blurred. Not just a little out of focus either, rather confused in the clash of two, competing and contradictory lights. These are the theories of secularisation and of antisecularisation respectively. Until very recently the historiography of modern British religion generally presumed the substantive truth of the theory of secularisation.38 Indeed, it took the British case to be the paradigmatic example of that process.39 This was because it was widely accepted that secularisation was an essentially constitutive factor of modernisation and that Britain was the first, in this sense the exemplary, modern society.40 Secularisation, according to this understanding, meant the systematic and inexorable decline of the social significance of religion: systematic, because religious beliefs and religious practice no longer possessed the capacity significantly to affect either the efficient organisation or the intellectual apprehension of society; inexorable, because the process provided for no element of, indeed admitted of no opportunity for, its substantive reversal.41

37

38

39

40

41

For the ‘post-modern’ critique of historical narrative, begin with Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), esp. ch. 2. Other speculations can be found in Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Oxford, 1983), pt I, and Eric Voegelin, What is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (Baton Rouge, 1990), ch. 1. See, inter alia, Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, pt II (London, 1970), ch. 8; Alan D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914 (London, 1976), pp. viii, 23–48 and 198–207; and Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society, pp. 3–20 and 265–76. Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain, pp. 14–15; Bryan Wilson, Religion in Secular Society: a Sociological Comment (London, 1966), pp. 103–24; and Bryan Wilson, Contemporary Transformations of Religion (Oxford, 1976), pp. 14–16 and 21–9. Hence the very title of, for instance, A. L. Beier, David Cannadine and James Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989); for its inspiration, see Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present Revisited (London, 1987), p. xi. The definition offered in Wilson, Religion in a Secular Society, p. xi; see also Karel Dobbelaere, Secularisation: a Multi-Dimensional Concept (London, 1981), ch. 1; and David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford, 1979), pp. 1–11. A summary

16


The cause and course of this decline were invariably traced to so-called exogenous changes in society. Most notable among these analytically prior changes were generally taken to be the processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and rationalisation. Industrialisation meant above all else a change in the essential techniques of human productivity; more particularly, that shift away from natural – and therefore unpredictable – forms of production, especially agriculture, to the essentially man-made – and thus reliable – goods of industrial manufacture.42 Urbanisation pointed not only to the simple fact of a majority of the population living in towns, it also implied the unprecedented diversity of life, the cultural pluralism, or even the moral relativism, embodied in those forms of civilisation associated with the word urbane.43 Rationalisation was what flowed, cumulatively, from industrialisation and urbanisation taken together; this was wrought from the greater emphasis placed upon material needs, and the enhanced capacities of industrial-urban man to supply those wants, made explicit in the rule-based bureaucracies that Max Weber deemed to be constitutive of the modern, disenchanted world.44 This wholly new, that is modern, society was characterised, so the pioneers of sociology and their later disciples believed, by a systematically diminished desire, indeed by the inexorably reduced capacity, to sustain a significant religious life. Modern society had no such desire because the progressive division of labour and resultant compartmentalisation of life increasingly marginalised religious belief and religious practice. In effect it rendered them no more than one aspect of modern leisure, occasionally tending to the spiritual needs of particular individuals, as these intermittently surfaced, but generally bypassed in the efficient organisation of collective production, as this increasingly predominated.45 It had no such capacity because the supposedly eternal, interpersonal and

42

43

44 45

is offered in Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, ‘Secularization: the Orthodox Model’, in Bruce (ed.), Religion and Modernization, pp. 8–30. See Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain, pp. 42–6; for historical background, Hugh McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe, 1789–1970 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 93ff.; and for the economic theory implied, David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe, from 1750 to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1969), ch. 1. Summarised in Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain, pp. 83–5; for an interesting discussion of the issue more generally, see Hugh McLeod, ‘Religion in the City’, in Urban History Yearbook, 1978 (Leicester, 1978), pp. 7–22; and for an unforgettable counter-polemic, Callum Brown, ‘Did Urbanisation Secularise Britain?’, in Urban History Yearbook, 1989 (Leicester, 1989), pp. 1–14. Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain, pp. 63–6; H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London, 1984), pp. 155ff. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society, pp. 55–73; also Martin, A General Theory of Secularization, pp. 1–11.


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communal verities for which religion, and especially the Christian religion, had traditionally stood were now revealed to be progressively less true in the essentially dynamic, impersonal and societal régime that was emerging.46 The great merit of this view was that it made both cognitive and cultural sense of the contemporary decline of religion in the advanced world.47 Above all, it put the decline of religious membership and attendance, of sacred beliefs and associated ethical taboos, even of the social standing of clergymen and of the political position of the church, into a wider and plausible, yet also into an integrated and coherent, historical context. In doing so it explained their origins. It also plausibly described their present state. It even suggested their probable future course. Finally, it made sense of Britain’s place in all of this. Britain was the first secular society because it was the first modern society. Other modern societies would soon catch up. As other societies modernised, so they too would secularise.48 But that was what they somehow failed to do. By no means every supposedly modern society eventually secularised in the fashion of postwar Britain.49 Many of the modernising societies of the East have thus far failed significantly to secularise at all. Some, indeed, have become more, not less, religious in the interim.50 Odder still, the process of secularisation seems actually to have stalled in parts of the West during the past 46 47

48

49

50

For a definition of the word ‘societal’, see Bryan Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford, 1982), pp. 153–9. Wilson, Contemporary Transformations of Religion, pp. 1–5; for a quite different perspective, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Christianity in a Secularised World (New York, 1989), chs. 1 and 2. And for a very recent reassertion of the theory, in all its cultural and cognitive comprehensiveness, S. S. Acquaviva, ‘Some Reflections on the Parallel Decline of Religious Experience and Religious Practice’, in Eileen Barker, James A. Beckford and Karel Dobbelaere (eds.), Secularization, Rationalism and Sectarianism: Essays in Honour of Bryan R. Wilson (Oxford, 1993), pp. 48–58. See e.g. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society, pp. 86–102, on the USA; or Karel Dobbelaere, ‘Church Involvement and Secularization: Making Sense of the European Case’, in Barker et al., Secularization, Rationalism and Sectarianism, pp. 19–36, on Europe. And, for the most general appraisal, see S. S. Acquaviva, The Decline of the Sacred in Industrial Society, trans. Patricia Lipscomb (Oxford, 1979), ch. 1. For the continuing anomaly of the United States, see Robert Finke, ‘Unsecular America’, in Bruce (ed.), Religion and Modernization, pp. 145–69; in Europe, note the example of Belgium, in R. C. Fox, ‘Is Religion Important in Belgium?’, European Journal of Sociology, 23 (1982), 3–38; and for the renewed significance of religion in Eastern and Central Europe, begin with Roberto Cipriani, ‘Tradition and Transitions: Reflections on the Problems and Prospects for Religions in Eastern and Central Europe’, in William H. Swatos Jr (ed.), Politics and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe (Westport, 1994), pp. 1–16. For some of the reasons why, see Charles F. Keyes, Laurel Kendall and Helen Hardacre (eds.), Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modern States of East and South-East Asia (Honolulu, 1994), ch. 1; for the example of Japan, see Keichi Yanagawa, Religion in Japan (London, 1992), passim; and for the curious case of the rise of evangelical

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twenty years or so, even, to a degree, in contemporary Britain.51 In that context, those theoretical and empirical problems long associated with secularisation theory increasingly came to the fore. Sociological and other critics of the theory pointed to the weaknesses of the causal connections between the allegedly prior material and the supposedly subordinate cultural realms that it so often merely assumed rather than actually proved. Increasingly, they asserted that the contrary assumption – that such connections may actually be reversible – was no less plausible.52 Historical sceptics argued that secularisation theory appeared to conceive of no possible historical process beyond itself; which is to say that while the process of industrialisation could pass (and perhaps has passed) into the stage of post-industrialisation, and urbanisation into suburbanisation, secularisation theory did not even allow for the possibility of, let us call it, resacralisation.53 Yet something like that, they insist, seems to have actually happened of late.54 These objections have taken their toll. Precisely what the extent of the damage has been remains a matter of dispute. For some they have merely suggested that the process of secularisation is not quite as simple as they once thought it was. But for others they have proved something altogether more far-reaching: that the theory of secularisation is fundamentally inadequate. The most advanced formulation of this new argument is the theory of anti-secularisation. It may be stated simply: first, that the presumption of secularisation – or at least the presumption of a general process of secularisation through modernisation – is false; secondly, that it is false because the amount of religion, however calculated, in any given society, at any given time does not significantly change; finally, that the appearance of quantitative decline, axiomatic in the transition from traditional to modern societies, is always a function of what is in fact

51

52

53 54

protestantism in Korea (sic), see David Martin, Tongues of Fire: the Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford, 1990), pp. 138–56. Forcibly argued for in Keith Ward, The Turn of the Tide: Christian Belief in Britain Today (London, 1986), see esp. pp. 11–20; some corroborating evidence, albeit of a very qualified sort, can be found in Thompson, ‘How Religious are the British?’, pp. 217–26. See, for instance, Daniel Bell, ‘The Return of the Sacred? An Argument on the Future of Religion’, British Journal of Sociology, 28 (1977), 418–49; also Peter L. Berger, Facing Up to Modernity: Excursions in Society, Politics and Religion (New York, 1977), pp. 78–80. Hence the tortured analysis of Alan D. Gilbert, ‘Secularisation and the Future’, in Gilley and Sheils (eds.), A History of Religion in Britain, pp. 503–22, esp. at p. 520. See, inter alia, Paul Badham, ‘Religious Pluralism in Modern Britain’, in Gilley and Sheils (eds.), A History of Religion in Britain, pp. 481–502; Kim Knott, ‘New Religious Movements’, in Thomas (ed.), The British, pp. 158–77; and S. J. D. Green, ‘The Revenge of the Periphery? Conservative Religion, Multiculturalism and the Irony of the Liberal State in Modern Britain’, in Ralph McInerny (ed.), Religion and Modernity (South Bend, IN, 1994), pp. 89–115.


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qualitative change within society, whether traditional or modern. While the characteristic forms of religious life change over time, the significance of religion in society does not. Societies always have been religious. To a significant degree, they always will be religious. This is because religion performs an absolutely essential human function, both for cognitive coherence and within social organisation. Call this the existential imperative: the need to explain personal mortality, to inspire pious expression and to regulate the moral order by reference to something beyond the merely mundane. Anti-secularisation theory argues that historical and sociological students of religion must also learn to appreciate its real, and continuing, social significance. For it points to the wider truth that though religion changes superficially across time, it will remain with us, so its proponents argue, to the end of time.55 This counter-thesis has many merits. From the point of view of sociological theory, it points to the profound limitations of any form of understanding that either posits a deterministic relationship between the material and the spiritual in society – in effect, that progress in the material entails decline in the spiritual – or conceives of the spiritual in a very limited, traditional sense, as no more than that which is formally identified by churches. In this way anti-secularisation theory both accounts for the considerable differences between the religious evolution of Eastern, as opposed to Western, societies and also suggests a theoretical framework for appreciating the importance of some of the newer, and apparently more bizarre, expressions of religious sensibility – often collectively described as ‘new religious movements’ – closer to home.56 The empirical yield has also been of note. Under its influence, some of the most basic statistical evidence for the decline of religious participation in the West has been subjected to more critical scrutiny, even to a substantial degree of numerical revision.57 Inspired by its possibilities, historians have also begun to take more seriously some of the supposedly marginal manifestations of religious organisation and practice in the past, especially as and when these have re-emerged, often quite forcefully, in present 55

56 57

The most striking statement of this view is found in Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 1–3 and 429–39; it is more carefully corroborated in the essays which make up Phillip E. Hammond (ed.), The Sacred in a Secular Age: toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion (Berkeley, 1985). On which, see above all Eileen Barker, New Religious Movements: a Practical Introduction (London, HMSO, 1989), ch. 1 and appendix II. For a general analysis, see Stark and Bainbridge, The Future of Religion, pp. 429–56; for the British evidence, see Thompson, ‘How Religious are the British?’, pp. 220–5; and, for a critical note, Wallis and Bruce, Sociological Theory, Religion and Collective Action, p. 75.

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times.58 Guided by its lights, sociologists have tentatively explored some of the surviving sacred aspects, and even some of the novel sacred expressions, of our allegedly secular society, among its values, within its defining symbols and as aspects of its characteristic institutions.59 But the theory of anti-secularisation has failed to persuade many historians, or even the majority of sociologists, about its basic claim. Counterrevisionists insist that, to the contrary, it explains too little while presuming too much. It explains too little because the evidence of real and general organisational decline is still overwhelming, however much the basic numbers are revised, and however much attention is paid to the numerical significance of new cults, fleeting affiliations or casual responses to surveys.60 It presumes too much because its blanket repudiation even of the possibility of a historical process of secularisation effectively denies most of the putative content of religious history tout court. To conceive of a so-called ‘religious economy’, and to view it as essentially self-sustaining, that is, as being of roughly the same size and scope across the ages, is necessarily to minimise the importance of historical change within it over time. This sounds implausible. It is certainly unproven. And it points to an ‘economy’ in stark contrast to the established dynamics of most of those other ‘economies’, whether material or spiritual, forged through human ingenuity. It looks suspiciously like a theory not only outside of history, but incapable of refutation; in short, it looks like an essay in pseudo-science.61 One way to take account of historical change within the compass of a testable sociological theory is to posit a process of post-secularisation; that is, to conceive of a partial revival of religion, subsequent to the impact of secularisation, through the development of a specifically post-modern society. This is the argument advanced by the sociologist Professor Grace Davie in her recent and important book. Hers is a subtle, wide-ranging analysis of modern religious change, and of the conditions which give rise to it; one that both acknowledges the reality of secularisation (within 58

59

60

61

See, inter alia, Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychic Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1985), chs. 2 and 3; Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850–1910 (London, 1986), chs. 1 and 5. The approach generally pursued in James Beckford, Religion in Advanced Industrial Society (London, 1990), passim; vigorously espoused in Kenneth Thompson, ‘Religion: The British Contribution’, The British Journal of Sociology, 41 (1990), 531–5; and equally strenuously criticised in Wallis and Bruce, ‘Religion: the British Contribution’, pp. 510– 13. Wallis and Bruce, Sociological Theory, Religion and Collective Action, chs. 3 and 4 provides an explicit critique; Bryan Wilson, ‘The Return of the Sacred’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 18 (1979), 268–80, is more generally sceptical. For a scathing critique on these lines, see Bryan R. Wilson, ‘Reflections on a Many-Sided Controversy’, in Bruce (ed.), Religion and Modernization, pp. 195–210.


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modern society) but which also seeks to understand the roots of its subsequent transcendence (through post-modernisation). The argument cannot be reproduced in detail here. But it can be reduced to a formulaic summary. Professor Davie does just that herself. To reproduce her own model:62 Religion and Modernity: A Schematic Representation Modernism

Po s t - m o d e r n i s m

Industrialisation Urbanisation

Information technology De-urbanisation

Production

Consumption

Both modernity and post-modernity are problematic for religion but in different ways:

Modernism

Po s t - m o d e r n i s m

The grand narrative: religious or anti-religious

Fragmentation/decentring of the religious narrative but also of the secular, i.e. of the scientific-rational or anti-religious narrative

Progress Secularisation

Rationalism/communism A space for the sacred but often in forms different from those which have gone before

God and Son The institutional churches Medical science Agribusiness

Holy Spirit Varied forms of the sacred Healing Ecology

This scheme acknowledges the reality of modern religious decline. But it also insists upon the possibility of a post-modern revival. Moreover, it offers an analytical framework that not only fits the twentieth-century British case but also describes much of the actual course of religious change in twentieth-century Britain. The problem for a social historian is that it commits him or her to the rhetoric of post-modernism. This may prove to be a mixed blessing. Many, for instance, will find Professor 62

Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford, 1994), p. 192.

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Davie’s basic characterisation of a supposed state of ‘post-modernity’ unconvincing. They will judge it merely as a delineation of characteristic developments within modern economic and social organisation, and not the description of an entirely novel form of human existence.63 Equally, they will suggest that her understanding of such phenomena presumes a particular kind of relationship between the phenomenon of post-modernity and the religion of post-modernity, for which there can scarcely yet be sufficient corroborative evidence. In other words, hers is an interpretation of contemporary social change, and of the place of contemporary religious change within that wider scheme, which comes suspiciously close to assuming the truth of what it should be setting out to establish. Faced with such difficulties, some religious historians have begun to theorise for themselves. Most prominent among these is Professor Callum Brown. Professor Brown has set out his empirical findings in two recent books. But the theoretical moral underlying those accounts was most clearly articulated in an earlier article. In that seminal paper, he proposed what he called a specifically historical approach to religious change, one which was adaptable to different time periods and national contexts and also capable (so he believes) of accommodating a conception of religion ‘undergoing both decline (secularisation) and growth (religionisation) in modern societies’.64 The basic principles of the approach are as follows. That the social significance of religion: 1 can rise and fall in any social and economic context – pre-industrial, industrial, post-industrial; 2 does not decay automatically or irreversibly with the growth of human knowledge, rationality or technology; 3 does not decay automatically or irreversibly with industrialisation or urbanisation; 4 is not to be measured by unity of religious belief or uniformity of religious adherence in any given nation/region; 5 can be challenged by fundamental social and economic change, and can suffer short- to medium-term decay, but can adapt to the new context and can show significant long-term growth;

63

64

See, for example, the ‘liberal’ interpretation of the internal transformations of modernity in Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: a Venture in Social Forecasting (New York, 1973). esp. chs. 1 and 2; and the Marxist critique, both of liberal capitalism and of its ‘post-modern’ interpretation, in Alex Callinicos, Against Post-Modernism: a Marxist Critique (London, 1996), esp. chs. 1, 2 and 5. Callum Brown, ‘A Revisionist Approach to Religious Change’, in Bruce (ed.), Religion and Modernization, pp. 31–58, at p. 31.


23

6 can change the ways, or the balance of the ways, in which it arises from one social and economic context to another.65

The advantage of thinking in this way is the flexibility which it permits in the historical and social analysis of modern religious change. In general, it allows for the real possibility of religious growth as well as decline in the advanced societies; also, for such growth (or decline), whether significantly related to wider social or institutional change or not. In particular, it affords a free-standing appreciation of the British example of such change, unrelated to any peculiar presupposition of its presumed priority. The disadvantage of this approach is that it furnishes virtually no theoretical basis at all for the understanding of modern religious change, whether in Britain, or for that matter anywhere else. In effect, it conceives of religion as the independent variable in both historical and contemporary social life, capable of growth, also prone to decline, but subject to such various forms of development in a way seemingly unconnected with anything going on around it. Yet this is surely to mistake the proper autonomy of religious agency for a world in which religion is simply left to hang free as part of a social kaleidoscope. If so, it is to afford the observer an insight only into that uncoordinated intellectual confusion which must be the result when any notion of the analytical order of social phenomena is abandoned. A determined intellectual eclecticism points to the best way out of these difficulties. By this I mean to invoke a conceptual eclecticism bound by a determined empirical particularism. This suggests the possibility of a project dedicated to explaining the course of religious change in modern Britain that does not presume to offer an explanation of contemporary transformations of religion elsewhere.66 Intellectual eclecticism, conceived in this way, also means taking secularisation theory, antisecularisation theory and post-secularisation theory seriously together, each as describing aspects of religious change in modern Britain, but none as defining of the whole. Particularism, by contrast, implies the necessity of relating those theories of religious change to the very peculiar dynamics of denominational Christianity from which they began 65

66

Ibid., pp. 55–6. Professor Brown’s books are, respectively, The Death of Christian Britain (London, 2001) and Religion and Sociology in Britain: the Twentieth Century (Harlow, 2006). These will be referred to extensively in later chapters. On some of the acknowledged peculiarities of the British model, see Martin, A General Theory of Secularization, pp. 1–12; on one generally unacknowledged difference, namely the peculiar vitality of evangelical protestantism in one part of Britain, Northern Ireland, see especially Steve Bruce, God Save Ulster! The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism (Oxford, 1986), esp. chs. 1, 5–6, 9 and the appendix.

24


their work in the Britain of 1914, or thereabouts.67 It may still be hoped that such a form of sociological and historical investigation will suggest development and implications of relevance to the understanding of other instances, on other occasions. But it is not assumed, in advance, that this will be so. After all, Britain may turn out to be the exceptional, not the exemplary, case. To consider the processes of secularisation and their various inversions together is not to subject the complex claims of theory to the insufficient arbitration of empiricism. It is merely to acknowledge that both the drive to secularisation and resistance against it have been profound forces for historical change in Britain during the past century. It can be conceded at once that the impact of secularisation, and of the diminishing social significance of organised religion, really has been felt in an altogether wealthier, industrial society that has progressively provided so many more diversions for its population than the ritual of Sunday service. Similarly, it may also be acknowledged that this development has also been experienced by a much more mobile, urban society, one which has increasingly found itself effectively removed from traditional sources of community and custom. Finally, we should also appreciate that this has all been the undoubted inheritance of a more uniformly educated, rational society in which the characteristic forms of common knowledge, ordinarily required, have had less and less contact with religious inspiration. These are developments in British society which point to the reality of secularisation in its midst. In that sense they also suggest an extent of, and a dynamic in, social change that no one specifically intended and which indeed no one may particularly applaud. Put another way, they identify exactly that kind of structural change, of social development impersonally wrought and inexorably forged, that the peculiarly modern academic discipline of sociology was specifically designed to describe and explain. After all, it can scarcely be coincidental that one of its very first self-appointed tasks, performed by each of the founding masters alike, was the delineation and the interpretation of the decline of religion in advanced societies.68 At the same time, we may happily concede that powerful forces for the revival and renewal of religion have been forged in modern Britain. This has been true not simply of the predictable 67 68

Machin, Politics and the Churches, ch. 7; Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pt 1. As noted in Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective, pp. v–vi; see also the remarks in Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: the Uses of Faith after Freud (New York, 1966), pp. 1–2.


25

responses of imperilled ecclesiastical institutions, important though these have been, but also of the emergence of self-consciously peripheral social agents – regional and ethnic minorities, women and the elderly – bent on sustaining their different identities against what they have taken to be the intrusive secularism of the centre and the creeping secularisation of the whole.69 There is one final point. Whether it be deemed an essentially industrial or post-industrial, urban or de-urbanised, rationalising or enchanted society, the British nation has also changed in other significant ways over the past century. For instance, a higher proportion of the population than ever previously recorded is of non-British ethnic origin.70 There are more elderly people than ever there were.71 Finally, women play a greater public and professional role in our society than they once did.72 These unambiguously exogenous social factors have also had undeniable religious consequences every bit as significant as those traditional sociological favourites of industrialisation, urbanisation and rationalisation. Not all of them bode badly for the surviving social significance of religion. Not unless, as David Martin once put it, our fullest conception of significant social activity fails to extend beyond an image of a middleaged white man digging a hole in the road.73 Let us assume that it is, in fact, fuller than this. In which case social change need not necessarily be synonymous with religious decline. It is at least worth considering the possibility that very recent social change has, in fact, not been so. None of this proves that secularisation theory is either true or false, still less that Britain has reached a post-secular stage of social development. It merely suggests that the question of secularisation is still an open one: that the forces for it were and are powerful, but so too were (and 69

70

71 72

73

See especially Green, ‘The Revenge of the Periphery?’, pp. 89–115; S. J. D. Green, ‘Religion and the Limits of Pluralism in Contemporary Britain’, Antioch Review, 43 (1991), 571–86; also Bruce, God Save Ulster!, ch. 9; and Tariq Modood, ‘British Asian Muslims and the Rushdie Affair’, Political Quarterly, 61 (1990), 143–60; also Tariq Modood, ‘Establishment, Multiculturalism and British Citizenship’, Political Quarterly, 65 (1994), 53–73. See Social Trends (London, 1996), p. 40. The figure is around 6 per cent of the population. Note also that the under-sixteen population of ethnic minorities, at around one-third of the total, represents a much higher proportion than the norm, at around one-fifth. Ibid., p. 39. The proportion of those over 65 has risen from 12 per cent to 16 per cent during the years 1961–94. That of the over-80s has doubled. Ibid., pp. 81–90. In the crudest terms, the proportion of economically active women over the age of sixteen has increased by around one-fifth since 1971. There is every reason to think that it will go on increasing. Personal information.

26


are) those against it. Scholars may reasonably differ over which of these two confronting dynamics they accord immediate, or more lasting, predominance. There is less justification for simply ruling one out of court on the grounds of the mere assertion of the other. By the same token, there is nothing to be gained from dismissing them both on the basis that neither has yet been proved. Thus a truly historical account of recent religious change, one which avoids teleology and is suspicious of futurology, will decline that challenge (if such it be) and accept the muddy reality of social indeterminism; that is, it will describe the mundane forms of complex social development of a society in which a common perception of religious decline has been so important that to ignore it would be to do violence to the facts of the matter; but also of a society where the sum of religious transformations is very far from exhausted by a chronicle of its widely acknowledged failures. None of these failures has been more widely chronicled than the eclipse of mainstream denominational Christianity in our time. Every account of secularisation concentrates upon the presumed significance of that fact. That is reasonable enough. Certainly, no assertion of anti- or postsecularisation can ignore it. No history of modern British religion would make sense in its absence. This is true not simply on the grounds of common sense and through simple observation. It is also profoundly important in our understanding of more complex arguments about the social significance of contemporary religious change in Britain. For comparative sociology increasingly points to different paths of religious change, even different causes of religious decline, in Christian as opposed to nonChristian, countries.74 Similarly, it suggests the possibility of a divergent religious road for pluralist, as opposed to uniform, Christian societies in this respect.75 The fact that nineteenth-century Britain was both denominationally Christian and institutionally pluralist in its public religious culture consequently was of enormous importance for its subsequent development and similarly, for its contemporary understanding. But that is to beg the historical questions: about the extent to which pre-First World War Britain was a Christian society, albeit denominationally divided; and concerning the ways in which it gradually ceased to be so during the next generation or so.

74

75

Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective, ch. 3; see the evidence also in Peter Clarke (ed.), The World’s Religions: Islam (London, 1990), esp. chs. 11 and 12; and the various chapters in Friedhelm Hardy (ed.), The World’s Religions: the Religions of Asia (London, 1990). Martin, A General Theory of Secularization, pp. 12ff.; esp. p. 59; also Martin, Tongues of Fire, ch. 1; and Stark and Bainbridge, The Future of Religion, chs. 4, 20 and 21.


27

II Chapter 2 sketches an answer to each of those questions. It also establishes the essential background to a more particular quest pursued in the second part of the book. This is an attempt to explore how contemporaries – churchmen, politicians and even social scientists – conceived of the relationship, as they saw it, between the institutional crises of mainstream protestant denominationalism and the altogether broader, indigenous, cultural degeneration that seemed to underlie them.76 The third section of the book is devoted to a detailed analysis of how England’s postwar generation came both to comprehend the two – that is, institutional decline and cultural disintegration – and also to resist them, specifically, to attempt to put off the ‘passing of Protestant England’ as they saw it unfolding around them. Finally, it will consider the extent to which they succeeded or failed in these efforts and try to assess the significance both of those successes or that failure for the understanding of their consequences.77 The result will be something rather different – at once obviously less, but also it is hoped more – than a conventional narrative of English religious history since 1920. Those in search of a straightforward account can continue to find admirable recourse elsewhere.78 In what follows the reader is offered both a general interpretation and many particular elucidations of the story. Chapter 2 combines a thematic outline with a chronological thumb-sketch. The rest of the book is made up of case studies. These illuminate specific moments and consider particular trends. They also constitute related essays and free-standing exercises in historical analysis. They are related in the sense that they insist upon the real connections between denominational decline, the passing of prevailing religious sensibilities and a more general secularisation of English society, each as understood by the participants themselves and as subsequently explained by historians and sociologists of religion. They are free-standing to the degree that they presume no necessary causal direction between social structure and individual agency in the passing of protestant England or even of its wider cultural consequences, as subsequently interpreted. They are meant to be read cumulatively. But they can be considered alone. 76

77 78

This is referred to, alternatively, as the demise of ‘popular protestantism’ or the death of English ‘puritanism’. It is not meant to suggest that these were ever coterminous phenomena, certainly not in the nineteenth century. Rather, it is suggested that common sensibility thus characteristically comprehended them both, anyway, in the twentieth century. For which see pt III, ‘Resistance, revival and resignation’, below, esp. chs. 7 and 8. Above all, in Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000.

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This is not a trivial observation. It is intended that the whole should add up to more than the sum of the parts. But the fragmentary nature of the record is properly left unconcealed. The ‘passing of Protestant England’ was seldom a self-evident process. For the most part, it was critically disclosed. Yet what each moment and every event added up to was often unclear. Variations of fortune have confronted Christians of every stripe, in every land, down the ages; less so, a sense of final, if particular, eclipse. Concerned English churchmen, then engaged politicians and finally detached social scientists had first to unmask that potentially world historical diminution of the faith from a mass of contradictory evidence about its contemporary indigenous passage. Some did so before others, a few more precisely than the rest, but none in exactly the same way. Moreover, just as so significant a development, thus defined, necessarily constituted a social dynamic, painstakingly established, it was also a much feared outcome, openly resisted. Not by everyone, of course; a few openly welcomed the day. Others just stood by. But many more were clear in their determined opposition to what they saw as telling evidence of moral degeneration. As a result, they fought against it, restoring sacred institutions and reviving religious sensibilities along the way.79 In so doing they also changed the course of modern English religious history. Probably they did not do so with as much effect as they wished. Certainly, they did not alter the culture merely in the ways they had anticipated. But their efforts had a general and noticeable impact all the same. Only when they effectively ceased to try, and as observers of the indigenous religious scene noted not only their collective despair but also its broader consequences, did the idea of the secularisation of English society – that is, an irresistible process against which it was futile (perhaps even counter-productive) to struggle – finally take hold, first in educated, later in popular, understanding of the matter. This occurred around 1960. By then the prophets of doom had turned into wise observers of contemporary cultural trends.80 For them, protestant England was no more. To them, England had become a post-religious society. Among them, it stood as an example of the way of things more generally to come. But was it? Had it? Did it? Historians and sociologists still dispute the simple meaning – let alone the broader applicability – of these questions. They cannot be answered here. A fresh verdict on each will be offered towards the end of this volume. For now, it is perhaps best just to begin at the beginning. 79 80

It is in no sense suggested that these ‘resisters against the night’ were confined to those discussed below. See Richard Harries, The Churches in a Secular Society (Oxford, 2002), ch. 1.

2

Religion in the twilight zone: a narrative of religious decline and religious change in Britain, c. 1920–1960

To those teetering upon the brink of their ‘third age’, any history of modern religion – certainly one concerned with the characteristic forms of religious organisation, religious practice or religious belief common in Britain between 1920 and 1960 – constitutes something of an intellectual and emotional ‘twilight zone’.1 This is because it is a subject in which detached historical understanding and engaged personal reminiscence are inextricably entwined. Objective analysis, whether in painstaking study of church attendance figures or by laborious extraction of popular religious attitudes from nebulous social surveys, points to the general decay of religion in twentieth-century British society. Subjective recollection, possibly through vague memories of a time when ministers of religion were men (never women) of unquestionable social standing, or even fond reminiscences of a lost world in which respectable men, women and children unselfconsciously obeyed the Word and bore witness to the deeds of Christ, has tended even more determinedly still in that direction. More determinedly but not more clearly: while most agree about the lamentable state of Britain’s historic Christian churches, there is altogether less intellectual concurrence about the courses, causes and chronology of our broader religious inheritance. Conventional wisdom insists that Britain today is one of many secular societies. It is an unusually irreligious country. But when did it become so? Also how? And with what effect? About such pressing matters, there is altogether less consensus of opinion. Indeed, there is scarcely any broadly accepted explanation of those questions at all.2

1 2

I owe this arresting phrase to E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London, 1987), at p. 3. I have deployed it to slightly different effect here. For perhaps the most striking contrast, compare Steve Bruce, Religion in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1995), chs. 1 and 2, with Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London, 2001), chs. 2 and 8. The most recent edition of Brown’s work (2009) appeared too late for me to use here.

29

30


For some, no account of religious change in Britain from the end of the First World War can make sense of subsequent developments unless it is explicitly informed by the immovable fact that, from the time of the 1927 Prayer Book controversy, and no later, ‘England had ceased to be a Christian nation’.3 According to that understanding of things, the moment of decline this parliamentary farce highlighted was not just any period of decline, an era analogous to the frustrating tenth century, or to the indulgent pre-Reformation, or even the neglectful Georgian age. It was the era of decline, the crucial moment in which, probably for the first time in human history, certainly in recorded British history, religion tout court ceased to be a vital social phenomenon. From that moment, so the argument goes, it ceased to be significant forever. This was also the moment that sociologists have come to identify as marking the age of secularisation in British society, the critical juncture at which the material changes forged by industrial urbanisation, those human relations defined in divided labour and experienced through the disenchanting logic of bureaucratic rationalism, together finally put paid to the intellectual, political and social pretensions of organised religion.4 That process was not, of course, unique to Britain at that time. To the contrary, it was common to all the advanced societies of Europe and North America, actually the product of similar historical causes. But it was, by general agreement, peculiarly effective in the British instance. To be sure, few British ecclesiastical historians acknowledged A. J. P. Taylor as much of an authority on the religious history of these islands. All the same, still fewer religious histories of Britain published during the twenty years after that gnomic judgement dared to extend the serious part of their narrative

3

4

See A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965), p. 259, for this notably dismissive account. Recent analyses include Matthew Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars (Oxford, 2004), ch. 4, esp. pp. 140–53; also G. I. T. Machin, ‘Parliament, the Church of England and the Prayer Book Crisis, 1927–8’, in J. P. Parry and Stephen Taylor (eds.), Parliament and the Church, 1529–1960 (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 131–47. For a context, see alternatively Roger Lloyd, The Church of England 1900–1965 (London, 1966), ch. 13; or Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 276–81. For the contemporary, Anglican, response see Church and State: Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on the Relations between Church and State (London, 1935), passim. Bryan Wilson, Religion in Secular Society: a Sociological Comment (London, 1966), esp. pt 1; Bryan Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford, 1982), pp. 153–9; David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford, 1978), pp. 1–11; Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, ‘Secularization: the Orthodox Model’, in Steve Bruce (ed.), Religion and Modernization: Historians and Sociologists Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford, 1998), pp. 8–30.

Religion in the twilight zone

31

much beyond the outbreak of war in 1914.5 It was almost as if the old reprobate had turned out to be right.6 Hence the path-breaking significance of Adrian Hastings’s seminal History of English Christianity, 1920–1985.7 This book emboldened revisionist historical analysis and revived contrary memories alike. Together, these pointed to an altogether different version of recent religious events, one in which little or none of the surviving evidence squared with a presumption that Stanley Baldwin indifferently presided over the fortunes of a post-Christian people. Hastings furnished chapter and verse – anyway, six hundred solid pages – to suggest that he did not. As a result, a vague but long-standing appreciation that the history of modern British religion was never ‘exhausted’ by an acknowledgement of decline quickly developed into a vogue now capable of discovering not merely appreciable survival but real prosperity in native forms of twentieth-century faith.8 So much so that some religious historians began to point to evidence of a recovery in British religious organisation, even of British religious sensibility, after 1920. According to this (very new) form of academic wisdom, the British not only did not cease to be Christian from around that time. In fact, they became markedly more Christian for some time afterwards. It was not that decline had never happened. Down to around 1939, it probably had. But it had subsequently been reversed. In the words of Callum Brown: During the late 1940s and the first half of the 1950s, organised Christianity experienced the greatest per annum growth in Church membership, Sunday school enrolment, Anglican confirmations and Presbyterian recruitment of its baptised constituency since the eighteenth century . . . leading to peaks of membership in 1955–1959 for virtually all British Protestant churches . . . Marking the mood, religious revivals spread across Britain, aided by new technology and new forms. The Billy Graham crusades of 1954–6 were especially noteworthy, producing mass audiences in football stadia, military barracks and mighty congregations of tens of thousands . . . with remote congregations participating in 5

6

7

8

See e.g. Alan D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914 (London, 1976), esp. ch. 2 and the conclusion; also, more recently, Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914 (Houndsmills, 1996), ch. 4. Taylor’s lifelong irreligion is set out in A. J. P. Taylor, A Personal History (London, 1983), pp. 58–61 and discussed in Adam Sisman, A. J. P. Taylor: a Biography (London, 1994), pp. 41–2. Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–1985 (London, 1986); however, all references elsewhere are to the last, fourth edition; A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000 (London, 2001). Ibid, pp. xv–xxiii; see Hugh McLeod, ‘Religion in the City’, Urban History Yearbook (1978), 8–22, for the use of the word ‘exhausted’; as an example of ‘The Hastings Effect’, see Doreen Rosmen, The Evolution of the English Churches, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, 2003), chs. 10–12.

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cinemas. . . . Radio evangelism was also permitted in the early 1950s on BBC radio. Accompanying all of this was a revival of tract distribution and district visiting on a scale not witnessed since the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.9

In what follows both these views will be vigorously challenged. It will be argued that Britain generally, and England specifically, had not ceased to be a Christian country by c. 1920. It still remained, not merely through formal organisation but in common sensibilities, a protestant land. Christianity continued ‘to permeate public life – in royal ceremonies, in the newly invented rituals of Armistice Day, and on the religious broadcasts on the BBC’.10 And protestantism still informed the collective moral order, through sustained associational loyalties and surviving ethical codes.11 But it will also be insisted that Britain had ceased to be a Christian country by 1960. Moreover, the passing of this Christian, protestant, identity constituted something more than mere religious change in these islands. Rather, it amounted to the onset of secularisation: that is, to the gradual but irreversible diminution in the social significance of religion. This was true throughout the kingdom generally, but in the largest of its historic nations more especially during those years.12 England may have been initially ahead of the rest of the realm in this peculiar game. But each contestant was playing by similar rules. Anyone who doubts that conclusion should look at the fate of contemporary Ireland.13 9

10 11

12

13

Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, pp. 172–3; see also Gerald Parsons, ‘Contrasts and Continuities: the Traditional Christian Churches in Britain Since 1945’, in Gerald Parsons (ed.), The Growth of Religious Diversity: Britain from 1945, vol. I (London, 1993), pp. 46–55. This issue is taken up at greater length in ch. 7, below. Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, p. 10. The argument is set out below, see pp. 60–80; also in ch. 4, at pp. 144–55. For some of the challenges that it then faced, see S. J. D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, c. 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 9 and Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth 1870–1930 (Oxford, 1982), ch. 8. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 491–504; see also the evidence adduced in chs. 7 and 8 below, at pp. 256ff. and 281ff. To that degree, the argument outlined below also diverges from the more recent thesis, advanced by Professor Hugh McLeod, in his book, The Religion Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007). However, a closer reading of that work suggests that, although it insists upon a transformative significance for the religious history of the 1960s – implicitly denied here – it actually traces an altogether more gradual genesis for that change (or those changes) than its title might otherwise indicate; see esp. chs. 1 and 2. Michael P. Hornsby-Smith, ‘Social and Religious Transformation in Ireland: a Case of Secularisation?’, in J. H. Goldthorpe and C. T. Whelan (eds.), The Development of Industrial Society in Ireland (Oxford, 1994), pp. 265–90; R. F. Foster, Luck and the Irish: a Brief History of Change, 1970–2000 (London, 2007), ch. 2; finally, David Sharrock, ‘Catholic Church Faces New Crisis: Ireland is Running Out of Priests’, The Times, 27 February 2008, p. 35.


33

What all this means is that no account of the social history of religion in Britain between 1920 and 1960, however revisionist by aspiration, can fail to be guided by the prevailing perspective that this era constituted, if not the only instance, then certainly a crucial moment in the decline of indigenous religious life. The evidence of membership rolls, the figures for church attendance and the surviving records of popular attitudes point to unambiguous conclusions. They are powerful indicators; and read rightly, they all point in one, downward, direction. In the same way, individual memories may lie, but so many personal accounts and so consistent a drift in popular recollection are unlikely to have been wholly self-deceiving. And they all tend in the same way.14 However, it is no evasion of the central issue – indeed it may prove to be the best means of addressing that matter squarely – to observe that this was not only a moment of decline. The religion of Britain (and England) changed as well as declined during the years from 1920 to 1960. Moreover, even as it declined that descending path was never a smooth, downward, ride. It was frequently bumpy. And it was sometimes halted or anyway, resisted. There were periods of revival, though, in truth, these tended to be short. There were also years of stability, which tended to be longer. No less significantly, religion in Britain had not died by 1960. Quite a lot of it survived. So much so, that a good deal of the decline of religion in Britain during this era probably is better understood as the actual decline in the religion of Britain, more especially still of England; above all, of its traditional, protestant, lay religion. That was caused less through the demise of the religion in Britain than by the transformation of British religion into something altogether more diversified, more catholic, more non-Christian, even more pagan. It was religion all the same. These aspects of domestic faithfulness did not, in every case, diminish. Some actually enjoyed the moment of their greatest modern revival.15 For all these reasons, the history of religion in Britain between 1920 and 1960 is arguably best approached less through blanket coverage of its various moribund forms, but rather through several, self-consciously open-ended avenues of inquiry into its changing (but also declining) nature. In this chapter I propose to address three: first, to consider the degree to which the characteristic, public, forms of British life were 14

15

This I take to be the principal argument in Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), ch. 5. Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 10–11; Hastings, A History of English Christianity, chs. 36 and 37; Roy Wallis, The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life (London, 1984), esp. chs. 3 and 4; Eileen Barker, New Religious Movements: a Practical Introduction (London, HMSO, 1989), pt I.

34


effectively desacralised during these years; secondly, to evaluate those important connections between their desacralisation and the religious deinstitutionalisation of so many British people at this time; finally, to address any links between such popular deinstitutionalisation and the extent of a more general de-Christianisation of British society during this era.16 It should go without saying that these are not the only questions worthy of serious attention in the religious history of Britain during this period. Similarly, it must at all times be understood that even these questions are rarely susceptible to one simple answer, applicable at all times and in all places throughout Britain. For if the religious histories of early- and mid-twentieth century Scotland, Wales and Ireland (later Northern Ireland) were inevitably related to that of England, they were never coterminous with it. Their defining features and their driving forces were always significantly different, sometimes quite dramatically so.17 Still, for all their limitations, both of scope and of coherence, these remain important questions. Certainly, they were perceived to be so at the time. As such, they demand general answers, however carefully qualified. Their resolution, even as so tentatively conceived, should go some of the way towards resolving the wider issue of what the (generally) presumed decline of British religion actually consisted in, between 1920 and 1960; that is, what it really amounted to and what its broader social significance truly was.18

I The political importance of religion in Britain declined markedly between 1920 and 1960. Indeed, it is arguable that its specifically political significance declined far more, that is, both far more quickly and far more extensively, than its wider social, cultural or existential importance. This was not because religion became wholly depoliticised during this time. There is much evidence to suggest that the opposite was true. Rather, it 16

17

18

On the theme of the ‘de-Christianisation’ of British society, see esp. Alan D. Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain: a History of the Secularisation of Modern Society (London, 1980), pt 2; cf. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford, 1994). A point made most effectively in David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: from the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge, 1996), chs. 3, 5 and 7. Not least in positing the real possibility of a general secularisation of society, tempered not simply by geographical variation but also social continuity or even religious revival. For the theoretical possibilities of that kind of distinction see Edward Shils, ‘Center and Periphery’ in Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago, 1975), ch. 1.


35

was because British politics became progressively more desacralised. Rid of the religious essentials in their erstwhile existence, the denominational divisions of British political life figuratively evaporated during the years immediately following the First World War.19 To be sure, many of the long-standing denominational divisions of British society did not actually disappear at that time. In some places they may even have widened. But the degree to which underlying ecclesiastical disputes defined the substantive content of British political life declined dramatically everywhere outside Ulster and lowland Scotland. Moreover, they declined very quickly after 1920, to an extent and with an effect that surprised even the otherwise most exasperated of contemporary, secular souls.20 There were three reasons for this development: first, the resolution of the Irish question; secondly, the decline of the nonconformist conscience; finally, the rise of the Labour Party. Of these, the first was much the most important. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to overstate the significance of Irish independence, more precisely the creation of an Irish Free State, in the decline of denominationally determined British political life.21 There lies a paradox. The issue of Home Rule had bitterly divided British political society from the 1880s onwards. The possibility of secession led the United Kingdom to the brink of civil war on the eve of 1914.22 Both questions were habitually defined more as matters of sovereignty than as issues of religious faith. But neither – to put it mildly – lacked a religious dimension.23 The reason was simple. Roman Catholicism, more than anything else, defined Irish resistance to English cultural imperialism. Moreover, it did so long before such repudiation assumed an explicitly political, still more a specifically nationalist, form. The Irish priesthood, perhaps uniquely 19 20

21

22

23

Hastings, A History of English Christianity, ch. 5; Stephen Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics (London, 1975), chs. 8–10. Anon., ‘Mr Churchill’s Visit to America: Views on Prohibition’, The Times, 18 March 1930, p. 9: ‘Mr Churchill said that . . . it was a matter for [national] congratulation that . . . the drink traffic question . . . was more and more passing out of the arena of controversial British party politics’. Anthony Howard, ‘The Churches’, in John Raymond (ed.), The Baldwin Age (London, 1960), pp. 143–59, at pp. 145–6; Hastings, A History of English Christianity, chs. 1 and 2. For the use of different effect in Northern Ireland, see Thomas Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland, 1920–1996 (Houndsmills, 1997), ch. 1, esp. pp. 40ff. Never better recounted than in A. T. Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis (London, 1967); see esp. chs. 12–18. For a summary, see Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland, pp. 1–4: for an alternative – controversial – view, see Joseph Lee, Ireland 1912–1985 (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 1. The basic narrative can be found in Alan O’Day, Irish Home Rule, 1867– 1921 (Manchester, 1998), chs. 9–11. Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland, ch. 4; Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland, pp. 11–15; and, more generally, Alvin Jackson, Home Rule: an Irish History, 1800–2000 (London, 2003), chs. 1, 2 and 12.

36


so in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, proved a clergy at once loyal to the traditional teachings of a post-Vatican Council church, yet capable of nurturing some of the most defiant cultural sentiments, radical political aspirations and even emerging nationalistic organisations of their own people.24 So successful was it in doing these things that, in many mainland (still more Ulster, loyalist) minds, Irish – priestly – Catholicism had become virtually synonymous with Irish – political – nationalism by the turn of the twentieth century.25 As cultural protest merged into political resistance, so the growing threat was increasingly defined in an Irish nationalist and Catholic presence in the House of Commons. Seventy, occasionally eighty or more, Irish, nationalist and Catholic Members of Parliament put themselves at continual loggerheads with the broader aims of the imperial Parliament.26 They were sometimes supported by Irish, Catholic, Labour Members from England, especially after 1906. More remarkably, these Catholic nationalists and radicals were frequently able, despite their religion, to tap the sympathy and even the intermittent political support of dozens of Scottish, Welsh and even English, nonconformist, Members for their sectarian cause.27 Consequently, the parliamentary as well as the territorial challenge that Irish nationalism posed to British rule in Ireland entailed not merely a constitutional but also a profoundly religious dimension. It was not simply the case that Ulstermen opposed Home Rule on the grounds of their devotional distaste for the Bishop of Rome. It was also just as frequently a fact that Anglican bishops, culturally liberal in most other regards, fought against Home Rule because of the harm they feared it might do to the church.28 To be sure, the bishops were invariably Olympian and the Ulstermen always remote. But the mainland Roman Catholic population was 24

25

26

27 28

Roy Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (Harmondsworth, 1988), pp. 298–9, 301, 307– 8, 316–17, 378, 384, 386–7, 394, 398, 417–19; also Kevin Collins, ‘The Catholic Church and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1840–1916’, University of Leeds, M.Phil. Thesis, 2001, pt III, passim; and E. R. Norman, The Catholic Church in Ireland in the Age of Rebellion, 1859–1873 (London, 1965), ch. 3; finally, Desmond Kennan, The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: a Sociological Study (Dublin, 1983), chs. 1–2 and 5. Foster, Modern Ireland, pp. 446–53, 488–90 and 495–7; Collins, ‘The Catholic Church’, chs. 8 and 9; D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, 3rd edn (London, 1995), chs. 8 and 9. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 141; R. V. Comerford, ‘The Parnell Era, 1883–1891’ and F. S. L. Lyons, ‘The Developing Crisis, 1907–1914’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), Ireland under the Union. Vol. II, 1870–1921 (Oxford, 1996), chs. 3 and 6. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 58–9; O’Day, Irish Home Rule, ch. 9. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 59; on the broader religious dimensions of the Home Rule crisis of 1912 onwards, see Keith Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: the Christian Church, 1900–2000 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 87–91 and 98–101.


37

continually affected, and often profoundly disturbed, by the question of Ireland during the years immediately prior to the formation of the Free State.29 Naturally, being a Catholic did not, in itself, entail a susceptibility to nationalist sentiment. No less an English example than the Duke of Norfolk remained a staunch friend of Ulster and an implacable opponent to Home Rule, let alone independence, throughout the years of the crisis.30 Generally, however, to be an English, Scottish or even a Welsh Catholic implied ambiguous feelings about the matter. Most of them, after all, were Irish by origin: this was true for perhaps 80 per cent of the mainland Catholic community – some 21/2 million strong – at the time.31 For the majority of these men and women, a certain sympathy for the nationalist cause, however reticent or residual, was all but inevitable, indeed expected. A polite political ambivalence in this respect was the minimum required of them by many of their kinsfolk. That ambivalence necessarily rendered them politically suspect in the eyes of many of their English, protestant compatriots. When the ambiguities of national loyalty were exacerbated by a craven unwillingness to fight in England’s wars after 1914, these sentiments became malignant. They transformed nebulous anti-Catholicism into a more pointedly directed distaste for the Irish. Individual Roman Catholics proved their patriotism, fighting like lions in the trenches. But the Irish nation demonstrated its disloyalty by declining conscription in 1916.32 As reticence turned to rebellion in a treasonous rising against the Crown in the Easter of that year, anti-Irish, anti-Catholicism enjoyed one of its last great, and violent, flings in Great Britain.33 Temporal and spiritual peace was restored not by the emergence of cultural and ecclesiastical tolerance but through the formation of the Free State itself, in 1922.34 This was true in part because the new 29

30 31

32 33

34

Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 140–1; K. S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London, 1963), ch. 3; David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Irish in Britain, 1870–1921’, in Vaughan (ed.), Ireland under the Union, II, ch. 22. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 59; see also p. 133. Ibid., pp. 134–8; for a broader view, see Sheridan Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church in England, 1780–1940’, in Gilley and W. J. Sheils (eds.), A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present (Oxford, 1994), pp. 346–62, esp. at 361–2; also, Fitzpatrick, ‘The Irish in Britain’, passim. Taylor, English History, pp. 103–4; Charles Townsend, Easter 1916: the Irish Rebellion (London, 2005), pp. 338–40, 341–2 and 357. Best described in Townsend, Easter 1916, chs. 6–8; for a narrower, but sharper, view see Peter Hart, The IRA and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923 (Oxford, 1998), ch. 3; and for the mainland response, D. G. Boyce, Englishmen and Irish Troubles: British Public Opinion and the Making of Irish Policy, 1918–1922 (London, 1972), pp. 32–3. Foster, Modern Ireland, ch. 21; Eunan O’Halpin, ‘Politics and the State, 1922–1932’, in J. R. Hill (ed.), Ireland, 1921–1984 (Oxford, 2003), ch. 4.

38


‘quasi-republic’ never became the champion of radical nationalism that English imperialists feared and which their opponents, whether at home or abroad, expected.35 The powerful inertia of an overwhelmingly agricultural economy, the long-standing survival of an essentially rural society and the skilfully redirected influence of the church together ensured that post-revolutionary Ireland quickly reverted to a (long impregnable) social and political conservatism.36 As the external threat declined, so much of its internal representation disappeared. In the pre-1918 House of Commons there were upwards of eighty Catholic Members. After 1918, there were ten. Seemingly overnight, the imperial Parliament suddenly became a much more English as well as a much more ‘protestant’ institution, more so than it had been at any time since before 1829, even perhaps before 1801.37 This was an important change in itself. Scarcely less important was the political attitude that the mainland Roman Catholic Church now assumed on behalf of its ‘new’ British flock. In public, this proved to be a characteristically studious exercise in prudent aloofness tempered only by occasional, specific exaction. The church, as Professor Hastings put it, ‘expected loyalty on the schools question that is, the demand for segregated, Catholic, denominational schools] and [generally] got it’, but ‘otherwise hardly tampered with politics’.38 In this, it was unusual, certainly by comparison with other branches of Western Catholicism at the time.39 It was also wise. Such salutary neglect permitted an otherwise vulnerable ecclesiastical organisation to concentrate upon the urgent task of its institutional development in Great Britain, largely free from the taint of explicit theological ultramontanism or implicit political disloyalty. It also effectively freed the Roman Catholic population of Great Britain to engage in British

35

36 37

38 39

Foster, Modern Ireland, chs. 21 and 22. Of course, it was never a supporter of the British Empire either, even in extremis; see Brian Girvin, The Emergency: Neutral Ireland, 1939–1945 (London, 2006), esp. chs. 2–5. For a sense of the potentially disastrous, interlocking, crisis that might have been, see the seminal essay by John Gallagher, ‘Nationalism and the Crisis of Empire, 1919–1922’, in Christopher Baker, Gordon Johnson and Anil Seal, Power, Profit and Politics: Essays on Imperialism, Nationalism and Change in Twentieth Century India (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 1. Foster, Modern Ireland, ch. 22; Girvin, The Emergency, ch. 2. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 181; J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660– 1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics under the Ancien Régime, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2000), esp. chs. 5 and 6. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 143. See Martin Conway, ‘The Christian Churches and Politics in Europe, 1914–1939’, in Hugh McLeod, The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. IX: World Christianity, c. 1914–2000 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 151–78; and, more specifically, Hubert Sedan (ed.), History of the Church, vol. X: The Church in the Modern Age (London, 1981), chs. 7, 12 and 18–23.


39

politics in as many different ways as their own, secular, interests, habits and consciences dictated.40 There lay another paradox. For the ‘Catholic factor’ in British society did not disappear at all. Indeed, if anything, national separation, together with physical ghettoisation, enhanced it. Of a mainland Roman Catholic population of about 21/2 million in 1920, around 900,000 lived within the diocese of Liverpool. Nearly half a million more were resident in and around London, 300,000 of those within the Westminster diocese alone. Most of the rest were based either in Scotland, above all in Glasgow, or were spread around the industrial towns of the West Riding of Yorkshire and the Tyneside conurbation. Very few were found in the south and west, or populated any of the rural areas of England and Wales.41 Demographic concentration on this scale posed real threats to the prosperity and security of the ‘British’ Catholic population: of alienation, from discrimination and owing to a general paucity of mainstream economic and educational opportunities. Albeit largely by default, it also ensured the continued existence of a minimally threatening political, in the sense of parliamentary political, presence of Roman Catholicism throughout the country as a whole. This was because the old English ‘constituency system’ of ‘first-past-the-post’ parliamentary representation effectively ensured that ghettoised Catholics were represented by relatively few Catholic Members of Parliament; not too many to look dangerous, just enough to prevent invisibility. True, in the towns and cities where there really was a major Catholic presence – Glasgow, Liverpool, parts of London, even of Newcastle and Leeds – Catholicism was a political issue, and remained one, well into the 1960s. Elsewhere, it was scarcely noticed at all.42 Perversely, postwar de-ghettoisation, by spreading the Catholic population fairly thinly across many more constituencies, thereby minimising the ‘Catholic’ influence in each individual constituency, produced very few Catholic Members of Parliament. So much was this so that, although the Roman Catholic population grew substantially in the years up to and after the outbreak of the Second World War, and although the Roman Catholic Church as an institution grew even more substantially still, Roman Catholic representation in

40 41 42

For the earliest evidence, see Mark Benney, A. P. Gray and R. H. Pear, How People Vote: a study of Electoral Behaviour in Greenwich (London, 1956), pp. 111ff. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 134–41. See, variously, H. Mess, Industrial Tyneside (London, 1929), pp. 135ff.; P. J. Waller, Democracy and Secularisation: a Political and Social History of Liverpool, 1868–1939 (Liverpool, 1981), pp. 308ff.; and Derek Fraser (ed.), A History of Modern Leeds (Manchester, 1980), chs. 16 and 17.

40


Parliament scarcely grew at all over the whole period.43 In 1922 there were ten Catholic Members of Parliament. By 1949 this figure had risen to just fifteen. As late as 1964 there were just twenty-four. Yet by this late date, Roman Catholics constituted something like 12 per cent of the total population of England and Wales.44 None of this is to suggest that Roman Catholics were not active in British politics after 1920. They were. Indeed, in some of the great industrial cities of twentieth-century Britain they constituted the backbone of urban, socialist politics.45 But nor does it prove that they were the victims of political discrimination and oppression. Not, at least, in mainland Britain; Northern Ireland was a very different story.46 What it does point to is the fact that, insofar as they were politically engaged after this time, a slow but significant alteration in the nature of their social position, allied to the simple but essential fact of the relative and continuing insignificance of their numbers, ensured that as a matter of sociological fact if not necessarily of personal volition, Roman Catholics participated in British politics increasingly as undifferentiated agents in what was becoming an altogether more secular form of partisanship.47 The result, in the short run, was a greater political diversity within the Roman Catholic parliamentary presence. Certainly, Edmund Talbot, Conservative Chief Whip, was rarely found in cahoots with James Sexton, the legendary socialist member for St Helen’s, in the years between the wars.48 In the long term this amounted to nothing less than the disappearance of the ‘Catholic factor’ altogether in British (and especially in English) politics, an event

43

44 45 46

47

48

Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 141ff.; on Catholics in postwar British politics, see David Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain: Forces Shaping Electoral Choices (London, 1969), pp. 127–30. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 142. Declan McHugh, Labour in the City: the Development of the Labour Party in Manchester, 1918–1931 (Manchester, 2006), p. 148. Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland, pp. 43–53 and ch. 2; also Thomas Hennessey, Northern Ireland: the Origin of the Troubles (Dublin, 2005), ch. 1. Finally, see the very important essay by Moran Mulholland, ‘Why did Ulster Discriminate?’ in Sabine Wichard (ed.), From United Irishmen to Twentieth-Century Unionism (Dublin, 2004), pp. 187–206. Peter Catterall, ‘The Party and Religion’, in Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball (eds.), Conservative Century: the Conservative Party Since 1900 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 653–4. None of which prevented continuing distaste for their Roman Catholicism; see Mark Pottle (ed.), Daring to Hope: the Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham-Carter, 1946–1969 (London, 2000), p. 324, entry for 4 November; this records her ‘father’s hostility to Roman Catholicism’. It is even apparent in Winston Churchill’s portrait of A. J. Balfour; see Winston Churchill, Great Contemporaries (London, 1937), at p. 239. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 149–53. In fact, Catholics seem to have diverged least from a ‘class-based’ model for voting during the period; see Catterall, ‘The Party and Religion’, p. 654.


41

perhaps symbolised by the appointment of a Roman Catholic, William Rees-Mogg, as editor of the influential Times newspaper in 1967.49 Nor was the ‘Catholic factor’ the only denominational dimension to disappear from contemporary public life. Indeed, it was probably not the first. That dubious honour fell to the avowedly liberal, or rather, the politically Liberal, ‘nonconformist conscience’.50 What that phenomenon truly was, and the extent to which it really defined the ethical boundaries of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English political argument, is a subject too vast to broach here.51 But if the ‘nonconformist conscience’ was ever about anything more than the collective conscience of individuals who happened to be called nonconformists, it represented the intellectual basis of an ethical crusade which, if it always grounded its wider concerns in individual reason, invariably pursued its particular ends through the political mechanism of the parliamentary Liberal Party.52 Although it pursued its particular imperatives within the institutional framework of an avowedly national political party, the ‘nonconformist conscience’ drew its greatest strength from, and mounted its most specific challenge to, established authority from within the narrower bounds of Welsh, liberal, nonconformity. For in Wales nonconformity was the religion of a true majority: perhaps 80 per cent of the regular worshipful, as late as 1920.53 And in Wales, protestant nonconformity was the religion of an emerging ruling class, of the solicitors, teachers and trades unionists who made up the most important cadres within the pre-war parliamentary Liberal Party.54 That mattered. It mattered because it made Liberal nonconformity the overwhelming political force in Edwardian Wales. And it made 49

50 51

52

53 54

Anon., ‘Mr W. Rees-Mogg, Editor of The Times’, The Times, 13 January 1967, p. 1. This makes no mention of his faith. For Rees-Mogg’s own account (of his faith, not of that appointment) see An Humbler Heaven: the Beginnings of Hope (London, 1977), pp. 2–9, esp. at pp. 4–5. D. W. Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914 (London, 1982), p. ix suggests that the phrase came into common parlance in the 1890s. For clues, see ibid., ch. 1. For its heyday, see Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics, pp. 229–36. On its later manifestation, see Keith Robbins, ‘Free Churchmen and the Twenty Years Crisis’, in Keith Robbins, History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London, 1993), ch. 11. John Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party (London, 1966), pp. 35ff. and 65ff.; J. P. Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 200–28; D. W. Bebbington, ‘Nonconformity and Electoral Sociology, 1867–1918’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 633–56. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 53–4. On what it wrought, see R. Tudor Jones, Congregationalism in Wales (Cardiff, 2004), ch. 11. Gilbert, David Lloyd George, pp. 48–52; Jones, Congregationalism in Wales, ch. 10; and for effect, Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 1868–1922, 3rd edn (Cardiff, 1980), esp. ch. 6.

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Welsh nonconformity a crucial feature of Edwardian Liberalism. This is not to say that the ‘nonconformist conscience’ was wholly, or even predominantly, Welsh. It was not. Most of its campaigns were nationwide efforts – whether over drink and empire, education and the franchise – with universal implications.55 But it is to acknowledge that the most important of its specifically Edwardian adventures, namely, the disestablishment of the Anglican church in Wales, was (by necessity) as much of a particular regional, as of generally national, concern.56 Moreover, it is proper to concede that the solution – unqualified and unambiguous disestablishment – effectively robbed British nonconformity of its most explosive ethnic and cultural grievance at the very moment that terminal decline of the British Liberal Party deprived it of its historically essential political vehicle.57 To be sure, the reasons for this converging collapse were highly complex. Personalities were important, albeit negatively so. They scarcely tell the whole story. A shift in the class basis of a genuinely democratic politics (for the first time after 1918) hurt the Liberals more than most.58 Demographic developments undermined the relative importance of Wales – indeed, the whole of the Celtic fringe – in British social life during the second third of the twentieth century.59 Nonconformity split its political loyalties between the Conservative and Labour Parties.60 So too, increasingly (though with diminishing significance), did the Welsh. Thus, albeit for very different reasons, nonconformist politics went down the same diversifying, diverging and diminishing path as its (unacknowledged) Catholic equivalent.61 Yet it was finally less by contingent circumstance, whether through exhausted ethical crusade or as satiated ethnic resentment, than through a sea-change in the basic assumptions of educated opinion that the 55

56 57

58

59 60 61

Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience, chs. 3 and 5–7; Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics, chs. 2–4; see also the documents collected in David M. Thompson, J. H. Y. Briggs and John Munsey Turner (eds.), Protestant Nonconformist Texts. Vol. IV: The Twentieth Century (London, 2007), Pts V, VI and VII. G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1869–1921 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 305–10. Taylor, English History, pp. 220–1; Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 14–15. For a contemporary view, see Herbert Hensley Henson, Quo Tendimus (London, 1924), pp. 133ff. Lloyd George viewed it simply as a ‘much less educated electorate’. See Mark Pottle (ed.), Champion Redoubtable: the Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham-Carter, 1914–1945 (London, 1998), p. 156; ‘Diary’ for late November/early December 1923. Charles Loch Mowat, Britain between the Wars, 1918–1940 (London, 1955), pp. 225–6; Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales, 1880–1980 (Cardiff, 1981), pp. 230–1. Catterall, ‘The Party and Religion’, esp. at pp. 647–9. Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics, ch. 10.


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nonconformist dimension in British public life was rendered first impotent and then irrelevant. For so long as the governing classes of the nation were first both meaningfully Anglican and manifestly conservative, political nonconformity made good, radical sense. But, increasingly, they were neither. The one thing that a 1920s’ radical like Ramsay MacDonald and a 1930s’ Conservative like Winston Churchill had in common was their indifference to the fate of the Church of England.62 So long as the state was presumed corrupt – because aristocratic and Anglican – enraged morality could argue for its secular and ecclesiastical limitation. But this was an ethical understanding of British politics set firmly on the wane as early as the 1870s.63 It made no sense of the career of Neville Chamberlain: Unitarian, Unionist and true founder of the British welfare state.64 From these subtle but vital shifts in the prevailing ethical order, once legitimate questions about whether the prime minister drank whisky or played golf on Sundays gradually came to seem increasingly petty.65 More subtly, insofar as these or any other aspects of personal morality retained at least some of their political implications – and they did, throughout the 1920s – they shed all specifically nonconformist dimensions. It was, after all, Stanley Baldwin who allegedly insisted on forming ‘a Cabinet of faithful husbands’, after the fall of David Lloyd George.66 More importantly still, much of those surviving nonconformist ethics – true, ironically, more in its Welsh manifestation than any other – came more and more to be associated in the public mind, and perhaps especially the English public mind, with that unwholesome exaggeration of the public importance of private taboos otherwise known as moralistic cant.67 So British political 62

63 64

65 66

67

See David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London, 1977), where no reference is made to the Enabling Act, Welsh disestablishment and the Prayer Book controversy; or Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, 1900–1955 (London, 1992), where the Church of England makes no appearance at all, not even in the index. Jonathan Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1856 (Cambridge, 2006), chs. 1 and 2. David Dilks, Neville Chamberlain, vol. I: Pioneering and Reform, 1869–1929 (Cambridge, 1984), chs. 1, 7 and 34. Robert Self, Neville Chamberlain: a Biography (Aldershot, 2006), chs. 1–6. For an intriguing pen portrait, see R. A. C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (Harmondsworth, 1993), ch. 1. On nonconformist ‘pettiness’ more generally, see Howard, ‘The Churches’, pp. 144–5; and ch. 4, below, esp. at pp. 170ff. Cited most recently in John Charmley, Churchill, the End of Glory: a Political Biography (London, 1993), p. 203. Charmley believes the comment was actually directed against F. E. Smith. But Baldwin may never have said it at all. It makes no appearance in Philip Williamson’s magisterial study Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999), esp. pp. 154–5, 182–3, 212–18 and 282–5. And, for a few, with ingenuous pacifism and inglorious defeatism, see Stuart Ball (ed.), Parliament and Politics in the Age of Baldwin and MacDonald: the Headlam Diaries,

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radicalism shed much of its nonconformist heritage. Scott’s Manchester Guardian became, in effect, a secular newspaper. And nonconformity repudiated its radical heritage. The chapel vote increasingly went to the Tories.68 That British politics, and especially party politics, became so much more secular at this time was only partially a function of simultaneous changes in the status of Roman Catholics or in the standing of the nonconformist conscience in Britain. It was to a greater degree still the product of wider, endogenous alterations within the British political system itself. The most important contemporary transformation was the emergence in national parliamentary significance of the Labour Party. It enjoyed a very rapid rise after 1920.69 The first Labour Member had been elected to Parliament as late as 1906. On the eve of war, there were still only thirty-nine Labour members, fewer than one-tenth of the total. Nor did the electoral liberation of the working man in 1918 immediately put this dismal fact right. Just fifty-nine Labour Members were elected that year.70 Yet only five years later, some 191 socialist members formed the core of the first Labour administration in British history.71 If this was a striking national political development (and it certainly was), then it was also a peculiarly international phenomenon. For the British Labour Party was one of the very few major left-wing political movements in interwar Europe that remained almost entirely uninfluenced by politicised anti-clericalism, even by any discernible measure of parliamentary anti-establishmentarianism.72 On the contrary, the Labour Party was (and long remained) notable both for its religious eclecticism and ecclesiastical conservatism. Why?

68

69 70 71

72

1923–1935 (London, 1992), p. 238; entry for 13 May 1932. This whole issue is treated at greater length in ch. 4, below, at pp. 144–55. Catterall, ‘The Party and Religion’, p. 648; Peter Catterall, ‘The Free Churches and the Labour Party in England and Wales’, University of London, Ph.D. thesis (1989), pp. 279–82; cf. Bebbington, ‘Nonconformity and Electoral Sociology’, passim. See also T. J. Nossiter, ‘Recent Works on English Elections, 1832–1935’, Political Studies, 18 (1970), 525–8. Matthew Wooley, Labour Inside the Gate: a History of the Labour Party between the Wars (London, 2005), ch. 1. Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, 3rd edn (Houndsmills, 2008), ch. 2. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald, pp. 294–300; cf. Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin: a Biography (London, 1969), ch. 11, esp. pp. 250–5; John Shepherd and Keith Laybourn, Britain’s First Labour Government (Houndsmills, 2006), ch. 3. Ibid. Similarly, Wooley, Labour Inside the Gate, where the words ‘anti-clericalism’ or ‘disestablishmentarianism’ never appear. Compare with Charles Sowerwine, France Since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society (Houndsmills, 2001), pp. 32–3, 41–4, 84 and 137; or Maurice Larkin, France since the Popular Front: Government and People, 1936–1996, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1997), pp. 170ff. This comparison could also be made for Italy, Spain or even Germany at that time.


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One explanation is clear. British socialists were not anti-clerical or even anti-establishment. This was because they believed that their interpretation of that creed was not only compatible with, but actually constituted the best modern expression of, historic Christianity.73 Certainly, many early British socialists, and especially Labour Party stalwarts, were driven by the conviction that, in the words of one of their most illustrious sons, ‘socialism’ represented the ‘best possible means’ in the modern world of making ‘a reality of Christian principles in everyday life’.74 Such a view was common among those active nonconformists who moved in Labour Party circles after 1914. The great Yorkshireman, Arthur Henderson, was a classic example of the breed.75 In a slightly different way, David Lowe, early champion of Scottish Labour, was another.76 In another sense still, Aneurin Bevan, legendary Welshman, was one of the last.77 So numerous and influential were they and men like them that it eventually became no more than a commonplace to observe that the British Labour Party owed more, in its political theology, to Methodism than it did to Marx.78 In fact, this was only ever part of the truth, especially the religious truth. It scarcely explains why the Labour Party was almost immediately popular among Roman Catholics and why, at the very least, it became increasingly acceptable to the Church of England, still less why the powers in both churches, in turn, were progressively more amenable to the Labour Party.79 Part of the explanation for the seemingly instantaneous denominational eclecticism of the British Labour Party lies in the social geography of twentieth-century British political radicalisation. Put simply, the working 73

74 75

76 77

78

79

C. R. Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective (London, 1937), pp. 26–9. And note the famous words of James Connolly: ‘it is not Socialism but Capitalism that is opposed to religion’ – in his ‘Labour, Nationality and Religion’ (1910), quoted in O. D. Edwards, The Mind of an Activist: James Connolly (Dublin, 1971), pp. 33. Harold Wilson, Memoirs: the Making of a Prime Minister, 1916–1964 (London, 1986), p. 182. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 75; Mary Agnes Hamilton, Arthur Henderson: a Biography (London, 1938), pp. 5–9 and 35–40. Henderson, of course, joined the Labour Representative Committee in 1903. W. W. Knox, ‘Religion and the Scottish Labour Movement’, Journal of Contemporary History, 23 (1988), 609–30, at pp. 611ff. Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan, vol. I: 1897–1945 (London, 1962), pp. 25–9. Cf. John Campbell, Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism (London, 1987), ch. 1, which makes nothing of Bevan’s early religion. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 129; Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective, pp. 26–7. More generally, see Stephen Yeo, ‘A Phase in the Social History of Socialism, c. 1885–1895’, Bulletin for the Society for the Study of Labour History, 22 (1971), 6–7. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 267–8; Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, pp. 279–84. Note the remarks of Harold Wilson, recorded in The Times, for 30 March 1964, at p. 10: ‘My own party owes much not only to its Nonconformist background but to other religious denominations as well.’

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classes shifted their political allegiance from Liberal to Labour earliest, and most uniformly, in the major urban, industrial areas of the country: in Strathclyde, in the south Wales valleys, in west Yorkshire, east Lancashire, Tyneside and, to a much lesser extent, the west Midlands.80 With the notable exception of south Wales, these were also among the most Roman Catholic areas of Britain. That was not pure coincidence. The early Labour Party boasted a significant, if indistinct, Irish Roman Catholic presence.81 That constituted a good reason for the emerging organisation to pay considerable political respect to the Roman Catholic Church in Britain.82 Desperately striving for significant electoral presence in the country, the party could ill afford to offend the church hierarchy; certainly not in 1920 and not, in truth, for several decades afterwards.83 So it took great care to avoid such offence, honouring its priests where appropriate, observing its injunctions where necessary, even supporting its ambitions where these were mutually advantageous.84 Nowhere, perhaps, was this institutional compromise, or common organisational bargain, more carefully acknowledged or more assiduously cultivated than in Scotland. There, political radicalism had originally emerged as an offshoot of the Scottish protestant churches, notably in the informal alliance of the Scottish Trades Union Congress and the Scottish Christian Social Union, forged during the 1890s.85 Up to the Great War, Roman Catholic involvement in Scottish Labour politics was minimal.86 The attitude of the church was ambiguous; that of the people indifferent. Both shifted with the resolution of the Home Rule question in 1922, and more so still with the Labour Party’s final (if somewhat reluctant) commitment to ‘put Rome on the rates’, that is, to support the development of segregated Catholic schools after 1928.87 Under the aegis of Catholic institutions, such as the Glasgow Observer, and Catholic priests, such as Father John McQuillan, Catholic Scotland moved decisively to Labour, expressing its overwhelmingly working-class social composition in a predominantly socialist, political organisation.88 But 80 81

82 83 84 85 86

David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906 (Manchester, 1983), pt II. See esp. J. J. Smyth, Labour in Glasgow, 1896–1936: Socialism, Suffrage, Sectarianism (East Lothian, 2000), ch. 4; also Callum G. Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 138ff. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 142–3; Knox, ‘Religion and the Scottish Labour Movement’, p. 611. Knox, ‘Religion and the Scottish Labour Movement’, pp. 622–3; Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland, pp. 144–5. Smyth, Labour in Glasgow, ch. 3, esp. pp. 109–10; Knox, ‘Religion and the Scottish Labour Movement’, pp. 622–3; Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland, pp. 144–5. Knox, ‘Religion and the Scottish Labour Movement’, pp. 615ff. 87 Ibid., p. 619. 88 Ibid., pp. 618–19. Ibid., pp. 617–18.


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it did not do so unconditionally. The Church demanded, and its loyal supporters exacted, continuing political silence on sensitive moral issues such as birth control, abortion or segregated schools. Even socialists as principled as John Clarke or James Maxton were prepared to pay that price.89 After all, it obeyed a certain socialist logic. Economic egalitarianism and social welfare were not incompatible with traditional Catholic teaching. Individual licence and ethical experimentation emphatically were. So the Labour governments – and not just the Scottish Labour Members of Parliament – of the 1920s and 1940s concentrated heavily on the former. Only in the mid-1960s, and significantly after the fortunes of Roman Catholicism in England had begun to wane, did the party effectively dare to move away from the church, and from much of its own continuing working-class, Catholic, base in major questions of social and sexual morality.90 But what of the Church of England? By historic repute, that quintessential bastion of ancien régime privilege and rural backwardness held no obvious brief, either by doctrinal persuasion or through social inclination, for the modern, egalitarian and overwhelmingly urban Labour Party. Traditional Anglicanism was, after all, supposed to represent the ‘Tory Party at prayer’.91 Yet, viewed from another perspective, postwar English socialism proved much less of a threat to the church than the Edwardian Liberal Party had ever been. This was because it was paradoxically much less the political expression of organised nonconformity than its radical forebear of such recent vintage. Individual Labour Party stalwarts, from Arthur Henderson through to Harold Wilson, were nurtured within and (to greater or lesser degrees) remained part of the nonconformist tradition. But institutional connections between the various branches of nonconformity and Labour were fewer, and the denominational base of the Labour Party was altogether broader, especially after

89 90

91

Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 142–3. On ‘young’ Labour and the Roman Catholic Church, see Duncan Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 127–8, 141 and 159; and, for a case study, Michael Savage, The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics: the Labour Movement in Preston, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 50–4, 110–12, 122–3, 136, 144, 158–61, 163–4, 249–57. On the Church of England and the Conservative Party, to 1914, see Catterall, ‘The Party and Religion’, pp. 641–5. That insult is analysed – its origins remain strikingly elusive – in Robert Blake, The Decline of Power, 1915–1964 (London, 1985), p. 429. For the Church of England and pre-war politics, see alternatively, Lloyd, Church of England, pt 1 and pp. 290–9; also Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 13–20. For a broader view, see E. R. Norman, Church and Society in England, 1770– 1970: a Historical Study (Oxford, 1976), ch. 6.

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1918.92 So, while many erstwhile Liberal nonconformists got involved in the postwar Labour Party, the party as such took a much less active role in nonconformist church affairs than had its Liberal predecessor. In this way, it soon became much less identified with ‘political nonconformity’, or even with the political expression of nonconformist social aspirations, than the pre-war Liberal Party had ever been.93 Such negligent benevolence was reciprocated. The Church of England never campaigned overtly, or even manoeuvred covertly, against Labour. Few interwar churchmen denounced indigenous socialism per se, least of all in its patriotic, organised, dispensation. Those who did, such as W. R. Inge, Dean of St Paul’s from 1911 until 1934, were invariably marginalised – and this within the church itself – as unrepresentative reactionaries.94 Others who might otherwise have wished to do so, such as Hensley Henson, interwar Bishop of Durham, generally chose their targets, and even their language, with a very specific and neutralising care.95 Some even went as far as to welcome this new development within their midst. A ‘Memorial of the Clergy’, signed by 500 priests and presented to Labour Members of Parliament on 13 March 1923 openly acknowledged its 143 Members as ‘the official opposition’, as a fact of ‘momentous and far-reaching consequences for the nation’. It also openly embraced the opportunity which this departure represented for ‘more serious consideration and adequate [response] to the pressing problems of our time’.96 More surprisingly still, the Church discovered rather to the wonder, even to the consternation, of some of its more conservative members that it actually had something to offer the Labour Party. The most obvious possibility lay in the Christian socialism of its Anglo-Catholic wing. 92

93

94

95

96

Peter Catterall, ‘Morality and Politics: the Free Churches and the Labour Party between the Wars’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 667–85; Catterall, ‘The Party and Religion’, pp. 646ff. Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, pp. 141, 157, 172–3, 228, 261, 318, 380 and 414; also (on Liberals), pp. 22, 81–3, 131, 152, 191, 207–8, 229, 261, 285, 302, 304–5 and 434. An issue largely ducked in the official life of Inge by Adam Fox, Dean Inge (London, 1960), chs. 16 and 17; but brought out prominently in Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England on pp. 120–1, 128–39 and 147–50. For a rather different interpretation, which makes much more of Inge’s response to his dilemma, see ch. 3, below, pp. 110–28. Herbert Hensley Henson, Retrospect of an Unimportant Life (Oxford, 1943), ch. 11. See the remarks in Ross Landau, Love for a Country: Contemplations and Conversations (London, 1937), pp. 113–15 for a detached analysis. Later accounts include Owen Chadwick, Hensley Henson: a Study in the Friction between Church and State (Oxford, 1983), ch. 7; and Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 105, 128–39 and 163–4. As subsequently related in anon., Editorial, Theology, 65, no. 499 (January 1962), 1–2.


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Neither phenomenon was, of course, new to the postwar establishment. Neither, in itself, was a necessary force for political radicalism. What was new was the willingness of an increasing number of Anglo-Catholic Christian socialists to interpret their long-standing commitment to the ‘religion of the incarnation’, and especially to its injunctions against the ethical indifferentism of modern capitalism, as determining moral grounds for a public declaration in favour of Labour; specifically, to insist upon the similarity of ends implied in ‘the chief purpose of the Labour movement, namely to end the suffering and deprivations to which millions of our fellow citizens [were] subjected by the industrial order’ and the peculiar goals of ‘our particular calling with its pastoral experience’. Pre-war Christian socialist zealots, such as Charles Gore, had customarily held back from the brink of explicit affiliation.97 Their postwar successors were less reticent. In 1918 William Temple announced to the Canterbury Convocation that he had joined the party.98 Three years later, his contemporary, friend and fellow Anglican, R. H. Tawney, published a major treatise in denunciation of the acquisitive society, which surreptitiously concluded that all men of goodwill, and certainly all good churchmen, should do the same.99 Only a minority, of course, actually did. But it was a significant, and a vocal, minority. It included some of the best born as well as the finest brains in the Church. By 1960 it may even have achieved something like an ascendancy in the higher echelons of its theological and, to a lesser extent, its political establishment.100 Whatever the causes of this shift in such elevated sensibilities, its consequences for British public life were remarkable, at once historically unprecedented and without significant contemporary parallel. They permitted the development into indigenous political maturity of an explicitly socialist movement of implicitly ecumenical, indeed, avowedly 97

98

99 100

Mark Bonham-Carter and Mark Pottle (eds.), Lantern Slides: the Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham-Carter, 1904–1914 (London, 1996), p. 143; entry for 13 February 1908: ‘I went to St Paul’s yesterday afternoon and heard Stepney, who surprised me and still more his congregation (I should think) by declaring himself and his Church on the side of the socialists.’ In the event, Gore resigned as Bishop of Oxford in 1919, possibly in order to join the Labour Party; see Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, p. 19, n. 54. F. A. Iremonger, William Temple: Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Letters (Oxford, 1948), pp. 332–3. In fact, Temple’s relationship with the Labour Party was extremely complex. He declared his loyalty as early as 1908, resigned on becoming a bishop in 1921 and thereafter became increasingly critical of its sectarianism of spirit; see Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 104–13. Landau, Love for a Country, pp. 110–13 offers some interesting, contemporary insights on this matter. R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (London, 1921), pp. 227–42. Blake, The Decline of Power, p. 429; more generally, see the remarks of Norman, Church and Society in England, ch. 9; also Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London, 1990), p. 300.

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multi-denominational, ecclesiastical purposes.101 For the next two generations, the Labour Party tacitly supported all the major churches and, just as importantly, received support, albeit largely individual and informal support, from almost all of them.102 This mutually benevolent accommodation was inspired by patrician establishmentarians like Temple, yet it found room for working-class Anglicans such as George Lansbury.103 It promoted staunch Irish Catholics, such as Joseph Tinker, yet found a home for upper-class papist converts like Frank Pakenham.104 It made good use of plebeian dissenters such as Philip Snowdon while tapping the talents of public-school nonconformists like Anthony Crosland.105 But if it was denominationally open-minded, politicised Labour was never – not then, anyway – fashionably indifferent about religion per se. Religion and respectability, above all religion and respectable morality, had long gone hand in hand in traditional British society. They continued to meet in radical British politics. Of fifty-two inter-war Scottish Labour Members of Parliament, only eight claimed to be secularists.106 There was nothing very peculiar about Scotland in this respect; this was something like the British norm at the time. Nor did it change quickly after the end of the Second World War. As late as 1963, it was no trivial event when one candidate for the leadership of the Labour Party accused his opponent of not believing in God.107 Yet it was the very religious eclecticism of Labour that truly desacralised British politics after 1920. This was because a multi-denominational Labour Party demanded a multi-denominational Conservative Party. Which was what happened, in England above all, but also to a lesser extent, in Wales and Scotland. That subtle but significant development in turn effectively unified mainland British politics in a way, and to a

101 102

103 104 105 106 107

Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, pp. 31–2, 37–8, 144, 163, 169, 172–3, 199, 201–2, 214–16, 235, 261 and 398. John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843–1945 (London, 1994), ch. 6; also Alan M. Suggate, ‘The Christian Churches in England Since 1945: Ecumenism and Social Concern’, in Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheils, A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present (Oxford, 1994), ch. 24. On Lansbury, see Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 58, 330, 332–5 and 425. Ibid., pp. 142–3. An Autobiography, by Philip, Viscount Snowdon, vol. I: 1864–1914 (London, 1934), chs. 1–4; Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland (London, 1982), ch. 1, esp. pp. 3–7. Knox, ‘Religion and the Scottish Labour Movement’, pp. 611–12. Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson (London, 1992), p. 257. In fairness, Pimlott refers to a ‘right-wing rumour’ (i.e. a rumour emanating from supporters of George Brown). It may or may not have come from George Brown himself. The Wilson camp ‘calmly denied’ the accusation.


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degree, that they had not been for more than a century.108 This was important in itself. But it also permitted another change which had further, and wider, consequences. More than anything else, it allowed the interwar Church of England to reassert its erstwhile national status in public life.109 With the ‘Catholic question’ marginalised by territorial division, and with the nonconformist challenge halted by institutional decline, the church was able, perhaps for the first time since the 1820s, to reclaim both a significantly privileged and a relatively uncontroversial place in the spiritual and moral self-definition of the nation.110 This was a curious institutional revival in many ways, more the product of its opponents’ weaknesses than of its own strength. But it was, also, at least in that limited sense, an independent institutional advance. Certainly, to the extent that the Church did rise, it did not do so on the back of an advancing administrative and managerial state. Archbishop Temple, perhaps, might briefly have wanted it to do so. But his wishes were never granted.111 On the contrary, the spiritual and temporal became effectively more separated in this period, less because of the so-called Enabling Act, more because of social change.112 As a direct consequence, the church became an increasingly autonomous spiritual institution, paradoxically more capable of ‘represent[ing] the religious aspect of the nation’.113 Perhaps the best contemporary example of such seemingly novel freedom arose out of Archbishop Davidson’s plea for peace, reconciliation 108

109

110

111

112

113

Note the striking lack of a religious theme in John Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin, 1902–1940: a History of the Conservative Party, vol. II (London, 1978); also the comments in Blake, The Decline of Power, pp. 425–7. Report of the Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State (London, 1916), pp. 249ff. For contemporary reaction see W. R. Inge, The Church in the World (London, 1927), ch. 1, esp. at pp. 23–7; and for historical analysis, Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 14–17. This – important – aspect of Inge’s thought is pursued at length in ch. 3 below, esp. at pp. 125–8. W. S. Pickering, ‘The Persistence of the Rites of Passage’, British Journal of Sociology, 25 (1974), pp. 64ff. Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, p. 11; Howard, ‘The Churches’, pp. 148–56. William Temple, Christianity and Social Order (London, 1942), chs. 1 and 2 and also Iremonger, William Temple, ch. 25, furnish some evidence of such ambition. Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (Houndsmills, 1986), p. 15 insists on its (deleterious) achievement. A more sober view can be found in Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 4–5 and ch. 6. For a still more recent and sympathetic account of Temple’s thoughts on these matters, see Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. 167ff. On the ‘Enabling Act’, see Lloyd, Church of England, chs. 1 and 2; also Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 62–3; ‘Life and Liberty’ can be followed in Iremonger, William Temple, chs. 14–17 and Kenneth Thompson, Bureaucracy and Church Reform (Oxford, 1970), chs. 5 and 6. Cyril Foster Garbett, The Claims of the Church of England (London, 1947), pp. 189 and 191–7. For similar observations from a socialist source, see R. H. Tawney, ‘A Note on Christianity and Social Order’, in his, The Attack and Other Papers, ch. 12.

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and compromise during the General Strike of 1926. The Crisis: an Appeal from the Churches may or may not have been an exercise in vain bleating at the time.114 But it subsequently won the Church a political place in national life that it has retained virtually up to the present day: of an institution widely acknowledged as within the political nation but above party politics.115 The question was what to do with its new-found freedom. One possibility was to think aloud. Hence the so-called revival of Anglican social thought during these years. This was an attempt, or rather a vaguely related series of attempts, to apply the supposedly timeless imperatives of Christian charity to the changing realities of an industrial society. Mildly socialist in its inspiration, its leading figure was, unsurprisingly, Temple. The most concrete achievement of these efforts was the Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship (COPEC).116 But there were other versions. ‘Woodbine Willie’ Studdert-Kennedy forged an Industrial Christian Fellowship that was certainly anti-capitalist. It was probably anti-socialist too.117 Maurice Reckitt’s ‘Christian Sociology’ steered a different path again, while T. S. Eliot attempted, first in The Idea of a Christian Society and still more in Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, to outline a Christian social thought compatible with traditional, conservative politics.118 The positive achievements of all these thinkers and their thoughts are very difficult to gauge. It is tempting, given the absence of powerful evidence to the contrary, to judge them at nought.119 Certainly COPEC quickly passed, in confusion, with

114

115 116

117

118

119

The observation of Inge, as later published in his Diary of a Dean: St Paul’s 1911–1934 (London, 1949), p. 111. The best modern account of the ‘ecclesiastical politics’ of the General Strike is that found in Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, ch. 3; cf. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, ch. 10. Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. 180ff. Christianity and Industrial Problems, Being the Report of the Archbishops’ Fifth Committee of Inquiry (London, 1918). For COPEC, see Iremonger, William Temple, ch. 21. For a different perspective, see Garbett, The Claims of the Church, pp. 208ff. For a modern view, compare Norman, Church and Society in England, ch. 7, with Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 16–17. G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, Lies! (London, 1918), pp. 21ff.; William Purcell, Woodbine Willie (London, 1962), pp. 83ff.; Lloyd, Church of England, pp. 302–5. And, for a modern account, Gerald Studdert-Kennedy, Dog-Collar Democracy: the Industrial Christian Fellowship, 1919–1929 (London, 1982), chs. 2–4 especially. In some ways, best approached through his own history; see Maurice B. Reckitt, Maurice to Temple: Scott Holland Lectures, 1946 (London, 1946), chs. 6–7; T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London, 1939), see esp. chs. 1 and 3; T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (London, 1948), esp. ch. 6. For a more positive view, see Studdert-Kennedy, Dog-Collar Democracy, ch. 4. There is a thoughtful summary in David L. Edwards, Introduction, to T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London, 1982), pp. 9–39.


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many of Temple’s other enthusiasms. The Industrial Christian Fellowship was lively but woolly.120 Christian sociology was essentially an academic enterprise.121 Eliot never pretended to be anything other than a thoughtful reactionary.122 And Tawney spent much of the latter part of his life arguing that someone should produce a definitive volume of modern, Christian social ethics. But he signally failed to write such a work himself.123 Possibly more significant was the discernible degree to which the Church, now effectively invulnerable to the principled assault of denominationally directed political opposition, was increasingly able to guide public opinion in matters of presumed ‘national’ importance. True, this rarely took the form of a genuine, leading role. Much of its contemporary work has been caustically interpreted as no more than the vain attempt to curry secular favour by clothing such enlightened developments within the garb of dogmatically justified creeds.124 Yet, for all its limitations, the Church did retain an important role in British public life, and especially from the late 1920s onwards. Indeed, it increasingly objectified, as nothing else then quite could, the moral certainty of the new establishment in the emerging social order. This meant that to the degree to which public opinion became politically progressive, or welfare-orientated, between the wars, ecclesiastical interpretation of that opinion could afford to be progressive too, and could even afford to translate, thereby to fortify, mere secular opinion into something like theological demonstration.125 No one performed this service more willingly, or more effectively, than the ubiquitous Temple, successively as Archbishop of York and then as Archbishop of Canterbury to 1944. His Citizen and Churchman, published during the war, was at once a defence of the old established church and an apology for the new welfare state, the one craftily construed and the other brilliantly described as if they were two sides of the same coin. That volume remains a fitting monument to this way of thinking, even of acting. Yet for all the apparent public acclaim and the ostensible social importance gained through that translation of political progressivism into 120 121 122

123

124 125

Lloyd, Church of England, pp. 299–309; Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 175. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 175. As famously set out in T. S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London, 1928), p. 7: ‘the general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion’. Though see his Acquisitive Society (London, 1921); also R. H. Tawney, Equality (London, 1931; 4th edn, 1964), for two roundabout attempts to do something like that. Norman, Church and Society, passim, but with particular emphasis in chs. 7 and 8. Ibid., chs. 8 and 9.

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sacred clothing, such popularity and influence was bought at a hefty price.126 This was first paid by Temple’s successor, Archbishop Fisher, Primate from 1945 to 1961. He discovered the hard way that such subtle transposition invariably restated only what was already acceptable to the public. When he tried to employ similar methods to different ends, first against the liberalisation of the marriage laws and later (more bizarrely still) against the introduction of premium bonds in the 1950s, he found that they cut little moral ice. These efforts only made him look politically silly.127 Worse was to follow. Countering the contemporary spectre of ‘the bomb’ by observing that ‘[t]he very worst [it] could do would be to sweep a vast number of people at one moment from this world into the other, more vital world, into which anyhow they must all pass at one time’, he arguably entered the realms of the bizarre. By the time of his retirement, it had become almost acceptable to observe that ‘Dr Fisher’s views do not automatically command respect, or even attention’.128 In fact, the possibilities of political and ecclesiastical ecumenicalism then afforded by the demise of denominational politics were perhaps of greater long-term significance than the relative luxury of Anglican moral autonomy enjoyed during the years of nonconformist eclipse. This may now seem a rather curious observation. For ecclesiastical ecumenicalism, or ecumenicalism strictly defined, was in this period more an aspect of ecclesiastical conversation than specific achievement. Apart from the rather dubious significance of the final reunification of the Church of Scotland in 1929, its one major milestone was the reunification of most of the Methodist churches in 1932.129 It made some progress, but achieved no remarkable breakthrough, in the mutual 126

127

128

129

William Temple, Citizen and Churchman (London, 1941), notably ch. 4. This is often, wrongly, believed to be the moment at which Temple invented the phrase ‘the Welfare State’; in fact, he had done so as early as his Christianity and the State (London, 1928), pp. 169–70. For a commentary, see Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 1–2. See Peter Catterall (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries: the Cabinet Years, 1950–1957 (London, 2003), p. 554; entry for 26 April 1956. ‘Yet Archbishops bleat away about Premium Bonds! Oh that there might in England be, a Duty on Hypocrisy! A tax on Humbug. On excise, oh solemn plausibilities.’ On Fisher and the bomb, see Peter Vansittart, In the Fifties (London, 1995), p. 204. For a more sympathetic view, see Edward Carpenter, Archbishop Fisher: His Life and Times (Norwich, 1991), esp. pt V, chs. 30–2. Fisher’s contemporary ecclesiastical politics are considered in detail in ch. 7, below, esp. at pp. 263–4. For a more sympathetic view, see Carpenter, Archbishop Fisher, esp. pt V, chs. 30–2. And, for the insult, anon., ‘NEVER So Good’, The Spectator, no. 1864, 15 January 1960, 63. Robert Currie, Methodism Divided: a Study in the Sociology of Ecumenicalism (London, 1968), ch. 8.


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understanding of both established church and nonconformist denominations, and between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.130 But that was about all. As an institutional dynamic, it may well have been inspired, as so many modern sociologists insist, by general organisational decline.131 Alternatively, it might have originated, as some ecclesiastical historians tend to prefer, in contemporary mission work, notably in the Student Christian Movement (SCM).132 Whatever the case, it undoubtedly could not have proceeded as far as it did, nor have been as important in its implications as it eventually was, without the political ecumenicalism of denominational cooperation in matters of common interests.133 It was that prior development which made ecclesiastical cooperation possible within the state, or, more precisely, for the state in its relations with the churches – with all the churches – and with all their attendant organisations and other concerns. This development was, more than anything else, the product of precisely that degree of denominational desacralisation which had cooled the religious temper of English politics after 1920. But it had other consequences, all of its own. Within the dignities of the Constitution, it made possible the presentation of a common institutional front in recognition of shared moral concerns. The leaders of the principal dissenting churches had been formally excluded from the victory celebrations of 1919; they never were again.134 The efficient working of the state meant active compromise in the recognition of wider concerns. The best, and most important, instance of this new spirit found concrete expression in the 1944 Education Act. The peculiar genesis and wider consequences of that Act are considered in detail elsewhere.135 What can be said here was how, conceived from a religious point of view, it resolved – almost at a stroke – the most bitter and protracted ecclesiastical dispute of later Victorian and Edwardian England.136 That was because the Act 130 131 132

133 134

135 136

Hastings, A History of English Christianity, chs. 5, 11 and 18. Currie, Methodism Divided, ch. 9. On which, see Lloyd, Church of England, pp. 171–7, 196–200 and 296–9; also the remarks in J. Davies McCaughey, Christian Obedience in the University: Studies in the Life of the Student Christian Movement of Great Britain and Ireland, 1935–1950 (London, 1958), pp. 174–81. Suggate, ‘The Christian Churches in England Since 1945’; and for the earlier periods, Lloyd, Church of England, ch. 19. In the event, King George V and Queen Mary actually attended a ‘post-armistice’ Thanksgiving Service of the Free Churches in the Albert Hall, on 16 November 1918; see Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 100. See ch. 6 below, pp. 211ff. For a more general appraisal, see Michael Barber, The Making of the 1944 Education Act (London, 1994), ch. 3. As recounted in R. A. Butler, The Art of the Possible (London, 1971), ch. 4 and Butler The Art of Memory: Friends in Perspective (London, 1982), pp. 143–63. For no less

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provided, as had no exercise in state-sponsored educational provision before it, for a form of public education that was both Christian in its essential content yet also acceptable to all the major religious parties in the land. This was achieved by the determination of its progenitors, above all through the ingenious efforts of R. A. Butler, actively to seek and substantially to win the agreement of all the relevant individuals and organisations to its necessarily nebulous religious clauses. At one level, the result was an ingenious example of political obfuscation. But, at another level, it was also the ingenuous product of that degree of ecumenical understanding which had developed between the churches during the previous generation. Butler, a devout Anglican, appreciated and exploited this development. By a supreme irony, his boss, Winston Churchill, the quintessential Edwardian pagan, doubted its contemporary force and pleaded for delay, arguing that it would be ‘the greatest mistake’ to raise ‘the 1902 Controversy during the war’.137 The Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Dr Hinsley, almost proved him right, threatening his church’s outright opposition to the Bill following the King’s Speech in 1943.138 But in the event, the junior minister proved a shrewder judge of wider ecclesiastical and religious opinion.139 The Bill passed into law unscathed, and the institutional alienation of the non-established churches from the educational organisation of the British state finally came to an end.140 Something else passed too. This was the political significance of religious affiliation in Great Britain. True, it lived on, all too strongly, in Northern Ireland. There, to the end of this era and right up to the present day, denominational religion defined ethnic allegiance, with automatically divisive political consequences.141 Less dramatically, it survived in many parts of urban Scotland. The Protestant League polled 25 per cent

137 138 139

140

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interesting an account, viewed from ‘the other side’, see Kevin Jeffreys (ed.), Labour and the Wartime Coalition: from the Diary of James Chuter Ede, 1941–1945 (London, 1987), pp. 113, 115, 118, 131–3, 139–42, 148–52, 157–60, 168–70, 172–85. Churchill to Butler, 13 September 1941; cited in Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, p. 364. For the real limits of that threat, see the remarks of Sir Frederick Mandler, Religious Instruction Controversy (London, 1942), p. 3. As set out in R. A. Butler, ‘The Church and Education’, in David Nicholls (ed.), Church and State in Britain since 1850 (London, 1967), pp. 211–14; citing H.C. Deb., 19 January 1944, series 5, vol. cccxcvi, pp. 227ff. Its provisions are succinctly summarised in R. P. Findall (ed.), The Church of England, 1815–1948; a Documentary Study (London, 1972), ch. 100, pp. 431–3. This is not to say that there was no political fall-out; for the adverse effect on subsequent relations between the Catholic Church and the Conservative Party, see Catterall, ‘The Party and Religion’, pp. 653–4. For a general history, see Maurice Lovine, Northern Ireland: Faith and Faction (London, 1991), chs. 8–13.


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of the votes, some 67,000 in total, in elections to Glasgow Town Council in 1933.142 Protestant Action did still better, winning over 31 per cent of the popular poll, in Edinburgh, five years later.143 But such allegiances did not long post-date the end of the Second World War in most of the northern kingdom.144 They became increasingly untypical for the rest of Britain. This was even true in Wales. There, in 1920, religious affiliations still determined political loyalty. By 1960 the overwhelming socialist bias of the Welsh voter increasingly revealed the unimportance of chapel in Welsh political life.145 Finally, the force of religious affiliation seeped out of the life of English politics. It had never been so divisive there. But it had always been important. This was true according to the notion, still powerful in 1918 and even residually significant as late as 1945, that membership of a religious organisation constituted a sine qua non for legitimate political participation, not so much because it defined political allegiance, but rather because it furnished that profession and those who laboured in it with an ethical and social substance which they would otherwise have grievously lacked.146 These assumptions were certainly reflected in what the interwar chairman of the Conservative Party, J.C.C. Davidson, termed more out of fear than in approbation, ‘the latent Puritan spirit of the British people’. This, he noted, was something ‘not confined to the Church nor in fact to any church . . . but . . . is in the blood’.147 That spirit demanded not only ‘the highest ethical standards of men in public life’ (it still allegedly does), but insisted that those necessary personal qualities be institutionally rooted and religiously sanctified (emphatically, no longer so).148 Minimally, it required that men in public life not only express themselves through the virtues of Christian morality, but also demonstrate their conventional 142 144 145

146

147

148

143 Ibid. Knox, ‘Religion and the Scottish Labour Movement’, p. 621. Harvie, No Gods and Precious Few Heroes, ch. 4; T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000 (London, 1999), ch. 23. Robert Pope, Building Jerusalem: Nonconformity, Labour and the Social Question in Wales, 1906–1939 (Cardiff, 1998), chs. V and VI, also the Conclusion; R. Merfyn Jones and Ionn Rhys Jones, ‘Labour and the Nation’, in Duncan Tanner, Chris Williams and Deian Hopkins (eds.), The Labour Party in Wales, 1900–2000 (Cardiff, 2000), ch. 13. Perhaps even as late as 1964; see the remarks in anon., ‘Mr Wilson and the Christian Aim’, The Times, 30 March 1964, p. 10: ‘If a Christian does not feel that the political party to which he belongs represents the best means of achieving the Christian aim, he has no right to belong to it.’ Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Memoirs of a Conservative: J. C. C. Davidson’s Memoirs and Papers, 1910–1937 (London, 1969), p. 188; Davidson to F. S. Jackson, 18 November 1923. This passage, and its broader implications, are considered at length in ch. 4, below, esp. pp. 136ff. See Lord Nolan, Standards in Public Life: the First Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life (London, HMSO, 1995), passim. There is no mention of the value of religious adherence in this report.

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loyalty to those virtues through specific institutional commitment. As Lord Hugh Cecil once put it: ‘Religion is the standard by which the plans of politicians must be judged.’ This long remained true, whether they were Tories, Liberals or socialists, whether indeed they were Anglicans, dissenters or Catholics.149 Those rare birds who resisted its imperatives usually paid a price. One was F. E. Smith, whose marital infidelities, but perhaps still more whose pagan sensibilities, so offended Stanley Baldwin’s ‘puritan spirit’.150 Another suspect, to 1939 at least, was Winston Churchill.151 A third, albeit in a rather different way, was David Lloyd George.152 What linked these men, the interwar ‘gangsters’ of British politics, was not merely, perhaps not even primarily, their (various) drinking, gambling or extra-marital habits. It was the damning sense of the lurking irreligion that their immorality implied.153 More than anything else, this was what rendered them so unacceptable to respectable, and religious, English opinion between the wars.154

149

150

151

152

153

154

Lord Hugh Cecil, Conservatism (London, 1912), p. 117. He was, in fact, particularly concerned to counter the Labour Party’s claim, then quite common, of the sanction of the New Testament for its politics; see Catterall, ‘The Party and Religion’, p. 137. Philip Williamson and Earl Baldwin (eds.), Baldwin Papers: a Conservative Statesman, 1910–1947 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 26, Baldwin to Joan Dickinson, 16 November 1916, where he offers this ‘self-description’. For Baldwin’s views on F. E. Smith, see Charmley, Churchill, pp. 203–4. Baldwin’s religion is considered in ch. 4 below, esp. pp. 138–49. F. E. Smith’s relations with Baldwin are considered at length in John Campbell, F. E. Smith: First Earl of Birkenhead (London, 1983), pp. 667, 678–80, 689, 697, 715–20, 730, 765 and 804–6. Charmley, Churchill, ch. 19; Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (London, 1994), ch. 1, esp. pp. 14–15. Note the very perceptive remarks in Simon Ball, The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World They Made (London, 2004), ch. 6, esp. pp. 216–17. For the intimate connections between these three men, otherwise conceived, see Richard Toye, Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness (London, 1983), passim; also Campbell, F. E. Smith, pp. 142–3, 177, 188, 231, 262–6, 314, 390, 423–35, 439–40, 445–6, 459, 500–4, 529, 539–45, 622, 641, 655, 659–63, 680, 695–700 and 834–6. On Lloyd George’s irreligion (as opposed to his ostensible faith), see Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 121–2. On Lloyd George’s early ‘religious’ life, see Bentley Brinkerhoff Gilbert, David Lloyd George: a Political Life; The Architect of Change, 1863–1912 (Columbus, OH, 1987), pp. 35–42; on his later indifference to the ‘nonconformist conscience’, see Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 23. See Baldwin’s justification for his intervention at the 1922 Carlton Club meeting, as related to a journalist from the People, in May 1924: ‘I spoke because I was determined that never again should the sinister and cynical combination of the chief three of the coalition Mr Lloyd George, Mr Churchill, and Lord Birkenhead [F. E. Smith] – come together again.’ Cited in Toye, Lloyd George and Churchill, p. 247. See also Baldwin’s remarks to Mackenzie King about ‘three dangerous men’ on 20 October 1923; Mackenzie King, Diary, cited in Williamson and Baldwin (eds.), Baldwin Papers, p. 119.


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Few of these prejudices survived the Second World War, or not, anyway, in the same form.155 This is not to suggest that post-1945 British politics were aggressively secular, still less joyously libertine. Few historians recognise them as such. The post-war Labour Party was still dominated by men who were, or had been, either church or chapel members.156 In its general ethos, it retained something of a nonconformist bias.157 On the other hand, the Conservative Party of the 1950s was headed by men who were regular church attenders. It retained something of an Anglican tint, certainly for so long as the Cecil family remained important in it. But in neither postwar party did the specific denominational allegiances of representative leaders substantially reflect the institutional imperatives of their political rank and file.158 More important still, in neither party was membership of a church required of a would-be political activist. Naturally, the organised faithful in both camps continued to trust that God was on their side. But much more rarely did they invoke His direct support in order to demonstrate that assurance.159 Still less often did they demand public display of such faith from their anointed leaders. In that way, the motivation, the organisation, even the language of English politics was gradually de-Christianised. So, inevitably, the political impetus to religious organisation declined with them. From the 1950s, the churches spoke more and more to a nation of the politically unattached.160 Even earlier, politicians began to address themselves increasingly to a people politically indifferent between the churches.161 Both were obliged to 155

156 157

158

159

160 161

They did up to 10 May 1940. See John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, 1937–1955 (London, 2004), pp. 96–7; entry for Friday, 10 May 1940: ‘Rab (Butler) said he thought the good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history . . . a half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people . . . American dissidents like Lady Astor and Ronnie Tree.’ Martin Francis, Ideas and Polemics Under Labour, 1945–1951: Building a New Britain (Manchester, 1997), pp. 17–18. Even as it repudiated the ‘puritan’ morality of erstwhile nonconformity. What remained was a kind of ‘anti-metropolitanism’, also anti-communism and anti-commercialism, variously represented in the political personae of Harold Wilson, Denis Healey and Anthony Crosland. See the remarks on these questions in Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had it So Good: a History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London, 2005), pp. 218–20 and 365. Note the complete absence of any kind of religious analysis in Robert McKenzie’s contemporary classic, British Political Parties: the Distribution of Power within the Conservative and Labour Parties (London, 1955). There is nothing, even in the index. Nor, after 1956, was this meaningfully true of the Liberal Party either. See, for amusing corroboration, Jo Grimond, Memoirs (London, 1979), chs. 9–12; also Peter Barbaris, Liberal Lion: Jo Grimond, a Political Life (London, 2005), pp. 6, 12, and 79. David Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain: Forces Shaping Electoral Choice (London, 1969), pp. 124–34. Ibid., ch. 2.

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direct their attention towards a population bereft of any specific institutional attachment towards any particular church, or for that matter, towards any particular party.162 British politics became secular politics and the ‘sacred’ passed out of British public life. It is arguable that during the forty years after 1960, the ‘political’ went that way too.163 II Institutional decline did not begin in 1920. The best modern guesses put the high point of organised religious affiliation in England and Wales at around 1905. But the various, related, problems of diminishing membership, dwindling church attendance and shrinking Sunday school rolls can be traced back as far as the 1880s for all the major protestant churches in Britain.164 For some, such as the Wesleyan Methodist Church (at least outside Wales), they can probably be discerned earlier still.165 Whatever the case, a sense of impending crisis – of a failing Christian mission, of shrinking faithful constituencies and of a generally diminishing social significance – was unmistakable among all the English and Scottish churches, with the possible exception of the Roman Catholic Church, well before the outbreak of the First World War.166 So much was this so that, for all their genuine consternation at the impending political danger and appalling human consequences of the ensuing conflict, British churchmen and ministers were by no means entirely downcast by the immediate onset of hostilities in Europe.167 Some even surreptitiously 162 163 164

165 166

167

Ibid., ch. 6. For some of the reasons why see Nevil Johnson, Reshaping the British Constitution: Essays in Political Interpretation (Houndsmills, 2004), ch. 10, esp. pp. 220–3. On which, the fundamental source remains Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), ch. 4 and appendix, pp. 128–95; now supplemented by the evidence collated in Peter Brierley, ‘Religion’, in A. H. Halsey with Josephine Webb (eds.), Twentieth Century British Social Trends (Handsworth, 2000), pp. 650–74. For the fairly bullish performance of the Church of England, to 1914, see Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England, p. 28. For a general account, see McLeod, Religion and Society in England, ch. 4; also Hastings, History of English Christianity, pp. 34–6. On the Scottish case, see Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland, pp. 121ff. and 147ff. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England, pp. 31–2; see also the more general remarks in Currie, Methodism Divided: ch. 3; also Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 652–3. H. Wilson Harries and Margaret Bryant, The Churches of London: an Outline Survey of Religious Work in the Metropolitan Area (London, 1913), ch. 1, esp. 3–4; for more general observations, see C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London, 1909), ch. 9. Some of the reasons why are discussed in S. J. D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 9. Anon., ‘A Nation at Prayer: The Primate and the People’s Duty’, The Times, 3 August 1914, p. 8; for a general discussion, see Lloyd, Church of England, ch. 10, also Hastings, History, pp. 45–8.


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looked upon this otherwise catastrophic event as an opportunity for general spiritual awakening.168 A few did not even bother to hide their otherwise ungodly feelings on the matter. Consider the anonymous preface to the first postwar Crockford’s Clerical Directory. Remarking, in 1920, upon ‘the sorrows and horrors of war’, its author nevertheless insisted that, horrible as these misfortunes had been, they had nevertheless performed at least some good service, in sweeping away that ‘comfortable complacency’ which had come of ‘long peace and prosperity’. Moreover, he continued, they had also presented the Church with a golden ‘opportunit[y] . . . to accomplish a more mighty work than it has had a chance of undertaking for generations’. That ‘work’ was, of course, the Christianisation of the nation. For generations it had been lamely fought in the otherwise peaceful councils of the land. Now violent catastrophe afforded the church with the opportunity to reverse a long, dark age of organisational crisis and evangelical failure.169 At one level, this was just fighting talk, no more than a piece of inspired bravado in the face of mounting practical difficulties. At another level, it encapsulated a quite genuine contemporary sentiment: of a vague but none the less powerful feeling, fairly prevalent in postwar ecclesiastical circles (whether established or dissenting), that something like a fresh start actually was possible and that something approaching a reversal of pre-war decline could be achieved. We now know that it did not come about, or at least that no clean break with the dismal recent past, or indeed anything like it, ever occurred. On the contrary, the steady downward path of institutional decline continued unbroken, indeed little deflected, by all the efforts of the next forty years.170 So great was the general disappointment at this dreary failure that it subsequently became a received wisdom, among engaged professionals and detached historians alike, that the First World War had somehow marked a watershed in the fortunes of organised religion in England. Even a normally sober-minded historian like Stephen Koss once insisted that ‘it is no exaggeration to 168

169

170

See, for instance, the essays collected in F. B. Macnutt, The Church in the Furnace: Essays by Seventeen Temporary Church of England Chaplains on Active Service in France and Flanders (London, 1917). For an early reckoning, note the remarks of Donald O. Wagner, The Church of England and Social Reform since 1834 (New York, 1934), pp. 295–6. On the famous ‘National Mission of Repentance and Hope’, from 1916 onwards, see Lloyd, Church of England, pp. 226–31. Anon., preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1920 (Oxford, 1920), p. 100. For the particular case of the army, both of detailed inquiry into the religious belief of soldiers and of the possibility of the subsequent ‘Christianisation’, see the interdenominational report of D. S. Cairns (ed.), The Army and Religion: an Enquiry into its Bearing upon the Religious Life of the Nation (London, 1919), passim. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, chs. 4 and 5. For an analysis of whether or not there ever was a subsequent revival, see ch. 7 below, pp. 251ff. More generally, see Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 652–6.

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say that the war . . . dealt a shattering blow to organised religion [and] that . . . [t]he churches never recovered from the ordeal, either in terms of communicants or self-possession’.171 There is, in fact, very little contemporary evidence to suggest that this was so.172 Surviving organisational statistics point to no sharp break in the pattern of associational membership, worshipful attendance, financial contributions or even popular adherence to the sanctity of the rites of passage, after 1918. Indeed, those for Scotland, at least, point to a small rise during the war, of about 1 per cent for the Church of Scotland and 2 per cent for the United Free Church, which was sustained for some little while afterwards.173 Similarly, there was no sign, at least no visible sign, to suggest that all of a sudden ‘the people’ ceased to believe in God, the devil, the after-life and the ultimate triumph of good over evil as a result of all the carnage that ensued, between 1914 and 1918. Some, hyper-sophisticated minds no doubt did have their confidence in a transcendental order of justice shattered by the events of the Great War.174 But most, it would seem, did not. On the other hand, nor did the war turn significant numbers back to religion or to divine witness either, not in 1920 and not after 1945.175 The general drift was still downwards. And the path of the postwar priesthood seemed headed more in the direction of precipitous oblivion.176 The clergy’s social standing was profoundly and irreversibly diminished in the immediate wake of the hostilities. Proof of that decline first surfaced in the simple question of numbers. The Church of England suffered most strikingly of all. Total beneficed Anglican clergy at the outbreak of war numbered over 14,000. This figure was virtually unchanged at the end of hostilities. But within a year it had gone down by over a thousand. Despite massive efforts and considerable changes 171

172

173 174

175 176

Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics, p. 31. See also the remarks in Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain, p. 77; and, most recently, Martin Pugh, We Danced All Night: a Social History of Britain between the Wars (London, 2008), pp. 7–9. See the remarks of W. R. Inge, ‘Religion in England after the War’, Yale Review, new series, 10, (1920–1), 297–310. A later summary of the evidence can be found in Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 652–5. For a sensible discussion, see Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. 155–7. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 128 and 134; and for nonconformist recovery, pp. 143 and 150. Even here, a certain balance is required; this is beautifully achieved in Hugh Cecil, The Flower of Battle: British Fiction Writers and the First World War (London, 1995), pts I and II. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 128–9, 134–5, 143–4, 150–1, 153, 157–8 and 164–5. For the crude figures, see Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 198, 205 and 209. For some subtle analysis, see Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 65ff. and 119–24; also Lloyd, Church of England, pp. 337–42.


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in the prevailing mechanisms of ministerial recruitment, it continued to fall throughout the 1920s, before stabilising at a figure of around 12,500 in the mid-1930s. There it remained until after the Second World War, when it fell again to little more than 11,000 by 1957; and then once more down to just 10,370 in 1960.177 The downward pattern for curates was less immediately obviously, but in some ways proved more dramatic still. Numbering around 4,500 in 1925, their strength remained, in absolute terms, pretty well undiminished until the outbreak of the Second World War. Thereafter the figure collapsed, falling to little more than 2,500 in the mid-1950s, before recovering to level out at around 3,000 in 1960. In all, total clergy in the Church of England, whether beneficed or nonbeneficed, resident or non-resident, curate or parochial, declined from something over 20,000 in 1920 to a figure little more than 13,000 in 1960.178 These figures were striking enough in themselves. They were even more disturbing when plotted against general demographic trends. Between 1920 and 1960 the total population of England and Wales rose from 37,887,000 to 46,105,000, two world wars notwithstanding. This represented an overall increase of 9,218,000 and a proportional addition of more than one-quarter. Within that general increase, the adult proportion of the population, roughly speaking those persons over the age of 20, rose more steeply still. Numbering perhaps 23 million in 1920, it had shot up to well over 32 million in 1960. Had the church kept pace both with the general increase in population, and with the changing demographic structure of the country during these years, the number of clergymen should have increased by well over one-third in the same period. In fact, it diminished by about the same proportion. As a result, the ratio of Anglican clergymen to the total number of laymen (male and female, young and old, Anglican and non-Anglican) in England and Wales more than halved, from 1:1720 to 1:3538, while the proportion of Anglican clergymen to adult males collapsed even further from about 1:575 to 1:1237.179 Contemporaries noticed this change. For the first time in living memory, the Anglican clergyman became a relatively scarce figure on the 177 178 179

Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 198–9; Lloyd, Church of England, pp. 339– 42. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 198–9; Garbett, The Claims of the Church, pp. 130–1. David Coleman, ‘Population and Family’, in A. H. Halsey and Josephine Webb (eds.), Twentieth Century British Social Trends (Basingstoke, 2000), ch. 1, esp. pp. 70ff.; Anthony Russell, The Clerical Profession (London, 1980), pp. 212ff.; and note the remarks in Garbett, The Claims of the Church, pp. 130–1.

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urban, and even occasionally in the rural, landscape.180 Probably for the first time since the Reformation, he ceased to be the typical professional figure in the characteristic English community, ceding his standing to the schoolmaster or to general practitioners of medicine.181 Most concerned professionals lamented that eclipse. The Archbishops’ Committee on the Supply of Candidates for Holy Orders, set up especially to look into this question in 1926, blamed ‘the secularization of our modern life generally, and of our educational system in particular’ for turning so many of the young away from their proper calling.182 Successive prefaces to Crockford’s continually lambasted both the upper church and the laity for failing to appreciate how a material decline in clerical incomes and a hefty rise in clerical taxation during the interwar years had sapped the already exiguous economic incentive to enter the priesthood.183 But so much elegiac complaint was seldom, if ever, accompanied by any practical proposals for substantial redress of the grievance. Everyone agreed that the losses of the 1920s amounted to nothing short of an institutional crisis. Unfortunately, no one knew what to do about it. Just one year after the publication of the bishops’ rather wordy report, Crockford’s concluded that with ‘no appreciable improvement’ in sight to the numbers of candidates offering themselves for holy orders; with those recruits coming forward often ‘quite unable to provide themselves with an adequate education’; and with an Anglican ministry teetering on an average age of sixty, ‘it [would] not be too much to say that if the history of the ten years is continued for another ten, the effective maintenance of the parochial system will . . . become impossible in all but a few favoured localities [and] that [a]nything that [could] fairly [be] called the Church of England [will] have ceased to exist’.184 That calamity was avoided between the wars. In fact, there was a slight pickup in clerical numbers by the end of the decade. As a result, 180

181

182 183

184

Lloyd, Church of England, pp. 351–9; Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 65–7 and 193–4; cf. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England, pp. 132–8. More broadly, see A. Tindall Hart, The Country Priest in English History (London, 1959), ch. 9. Russell, The Clerical Profession, pp. 248ff.; more broadly, Duncan Gallie, ‘The Labour Force’, in Halsey and Webb (eds.), Twentieth Century British Social Trends, ch. 8, at pp. 288–9. As cited in anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory 1927 (Oxford, 1927), p. vii. Anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1921–2 (Oxford, 1921), pp. iii–xviii, at viii; anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1925 (Oxford, 1925), pp. iii–xvii, at pp. xv–xvi; anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1930 (Oxford, 1930), pp. iii– xvi at pp. vii–viii; anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1934 (Oxford, 1934), pp. iii–xvi, at p. x; anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1938 (Oxford, 1938); and also Lloyd, Church of England, pp. 343–4, pp. iii–xiv, at pp. vi and ix. Anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1927 (Oxford, 1927), p. viii.


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the overall figures remained stable during the 1930s. It is difficult to pinpoint the precise reasons why this recovery occurred. Some necessary building closures and a certain amount of shrewd amalgamation brought the number of absolutely necessary appointments down to a more manageable figure. A few, rather more publicly heralded, schemes to increase the supply of clergy – notably the Sponsor Scheme, which subsidised the university education of some lucky potential ordinands, and the rather more controversial Voluntary Clergy Scheme, which permitted ‘men of approved character and mature years’ to be ordained without the normally required academic and other qualifications – just about stemmed the outward flow of personnel.185 But the dam broke after the Second World War. At that point, clerical numbers began to diminish in absolute terms and quite independently of population trends. Clergymen became rare, old and, perhaps too, less important members of the community. True, the major nonconformist churches only endured a relative decline in the strength of their various ministries, even after 1945. The United Methodist Church, with more than 4,000 ministers in 1932, the year of amalgamation, claimed much the same figure in 1960.186 The number of Baptist pastors, 2,046 in 1920, remained steady, at 2,049, in 1960.187 The figure for Congregationalist ministers, somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 in 1920 was similar, possibly a little lower, in 1960.188 Only the Unitarians endured an absolute decline. Boasting some 300 ministers in 1920, their numbers had dropped to around 200 by 1960.189 The raw figures concealed a profound, and highly significant, relative diminution of the nonconformist ministry in mid-century Britain; a decline of a slightly lesser statistical degree than that suffered by the church but, for essentially peripatetic churches, of possibly even greater organisational and institutional significance. Moreover, the decay of their lay preaching strength was absolute in its extent. The Methodists, with nearly 35,000 committed volunteers in this office, could muster only just over 20,000 in 1960; the Baptists, having more than 5,000 in 1920, claimed around 4,000 forty years later. For the Congregationalists, things were worse still: they too had 5,000 lay preachers just after the First World War, but only just over 3,000 by 1960.190 What held for England (and to a lesser extent Wales) did not immediately follow for Scotland or Northern Ireland. The professional body of the Church of Scotland doubled in this period, from around 1,500

185 186 188

Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 73. 187 Ibid., p. 206. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, p. 198. 189 Ibid. 190 Ibid., pp. 198, 201 and 209–10. Ibid., pp. 209–10.

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to 3,000.191 That of the Free Presbyterian Church in Northern Ireland increased more steeply still.192 What the English (and Welsh) evidence highlighted was something far from entirely absent in Scotland, despite its contrary numerical trends. This was the decline in the public esteem and professional standing of clergymen after the First World War. That doleful development was not entirely unprecedented. The parlous reputation of the Anglican clergy during the constitutional and ecclesiastical crisis of the 1830s points to a real historical pedigree for popular anticlericalism in modern Britain. Nor was it unknown in pre-First World War society. The venomous portraits of Anglican clergymen in Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists proved that widespread hatred of men of the cloth long pre-dated European hostilities.193 But it was heightened and generalised after the war. It became a common observation rather than a radical insight.194 Moreover, it was increasingly applied to all clergymen, and ministers, across the (protestant) board. Rowntree and Lavers’s classic study of English Life and Leisure in the 1940s found that even a residual sense of respectful deference had all but been eroded. Indeed, they discovered a popular mentality that actually presumed that clergymen and ministers were men not motivated by high ideals, but ‘just [out] for a job . . . as another man might be a bank manager’. As a result, they were increasingly viewed as men who preached not a profound faith but ‘pure chicanery’. Finally, they were widely denounced as hypocrites who blithely told ‘working folk how to behave’, when they had ‘never done an honest day’s work in their li[ves]’. So ‘widespread’, in fact, was the ‘dislike of the minsters of the Anglican and Free Churches’ that two master sociologists had few doubts in attributing it to the rise of a more general ‘anti-clericalism’ in contemporary British society.195 If so, what had caused it? Rowntree and Lavers pointed to a critical ‘reduction in the difference between the degree of learning . . . of . . . Protestant . . . and particularly Anglican clergy . . . and the average member of their congregations’. This shift in the relative educational attainments of clergy and congregation had, in their view, ‘tended 191 192 193 194 195

Ibid., pp. 209–10. On which, see Steve Bruce, God Save Ulster! The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism (Oxford, 1986), pp. 39ff. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (London, 1914), esp. chs. 17 and 41. For contemporary evidence, see the observations of W. R. Inge, documented below, in ch. 3, at pp. 128ff. B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: a Social Study (London, 1951), ch. 13, at pp. 345–9. The significance of these findings, and the force of contemporary reactions to them, are considered at length in ch. 5, below, at pp. 200–3.


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to lower the esteem . . . in which they [the clergy] are held’. But what had caused that? Over the long term, they insisted, it was the inevitable product of a general increase in educational standards.196 In the short run, it was more probably a side-effect of those very innovations in the changes in recruiting methods, and indeed recruiting constituencies, which the Anglican church had been obliged to adopt from the late 1920s onwards.197 Certainly, a great many individuals had been accepted for ordination into the Church during the 1930s and 1940s whose educational standards, except for a short period at theological college, were not much above secondary school standard.198 No less significantly, that diminution of the intellectual differential between clergy and laity during this period was almost exactly paralleled by a decrease in the gap between their relative earnings. The improvement in real wages for most manual labourers after 1929 meant that by the later 1940s a vicar was often paid, after deductions and other allowances had been made, ‘less than an artisan’, while a curate frequently received ‘scarcely more than an errand boy’.199 But the creeping proletarianisation of the clergy did not lead to any consolidation of social loyalties between the great mass of the laity and the bulk of the Anglican clergy. On the contrary, it was accompanied by the growth of an even greater sense of social distance between them. This was because, at least according to popular perception, those remaining differences, differences by now ironically as much the product of pretension as reality, were ever decreasingly matched by any noticeable personal distinction that might once have justified their existence. In sum, the post-Second World War clergy were, or seemed to be, little wealthier (at least in terms of their professional earning power) and little more educated (in terms of their academic qualifications) than the public they formally served; and yet they continued to be, or at least they continued to appear to be, of a different – presumptively elevated and anachronistically privileged – social class.200 This was partly a question of who they were and partly a reflection of what they did. In England, at least it had quite a lot to do with who they were. The massive growth of the Anglican public schools (from which the Church recruited many of its clergy) up to the beginning of 196 197 198 199 200

Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 348. Russell, The Clerical Profession, pp. 266ff. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 348; Russell, The Clerical Profession, pp. 242ff. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 348. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–1951 (London, 2007), p. 409; Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 70. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 348–9.

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the First World War had been accompanied by a very significant drop, of up to one-third, in the number of church day schools (from which the Church had also once recruited many of its clergy), between 1903 and 1923.201 This development, coupled with the continuing primacy of patronage and connection in the system of church selection, ensured that the social constituency from which the church recruited its ministry during the interwar years actually became, in some respects, more upper and upper-middle class than before. So much was this so that some contemporaries began to speak about the possible, emergent, ‘evils of a class ministry’, at this time.202 Of course, they may have been exaggerating. Alternatively, they may thereby have acknowledged the significance of what had long been true. Whatever, this kind of discussion pointed to a genuine problem. As and when allied to the (by no means wholly uncorroborated) sense that such surviving social distinction was increasingly not matched by differentiated educational attainment, the concept of a ‘class ministry’ furnished an ever fuller store of ammunition for the popular caricature of the Anglican churchmen as an anachronistically privileged dolt. Here lay the origins of that image of the clergyman as the ‘fool of the family’, palmed off to an agreeable country pile, perfectly captured by Alec Guinness through his portrayal of the asinine Reverend d’Ascoyne in Kind Hearts and Coronets, the Ealing comedy which appeared in 1949 just two years before the publication of Rowntree and Lavers’s gloomy social survey.203 What was either increasingly true, or ever more unfairly presumed, of the Church of England and its priesthood can have accounted for little in the diminishing numbers, and the declining social esteem, of the Free Church ministry. England’s nonconformist denominations, after all, had rarely recruited their ministers from the upper classes.204 Their pastors had by no means always been significantly more highly educated than their various flocks. They had often been poorer.205 For their fall in numbers, only one explanation is plausible: that of the increasing unwillingness of suitable individuals to assume this role. For the evaporation of 201 202 203

204 205

Annual Report of the Board of Education for 1922–3, appendix 4, p. 173; cited in Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 75. Anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1921–2, p. viii; for some of the reasons why, see Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 68–9 and 75–6. For a context, see Jeffrey Richards, Film and the British National Identity: from Dickens to Dad’s Army (Manchester, 1997), ch. 5, esp. pp. 135–9; and for the broader impact, Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema in 1950s: the Decline of Deference (Oxford, 2003), ch. 3 and pp. 39, 71 and 344. Kenneth D. Brown, A Social History of the Nonconformist Ministry in England and Wales, 1800–1930 (Oxford, 1988), ch. 1. Ibid., ch. 4, esp. pp. 147–62.


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public esteem towards those who did, once again only one interpretation suffices: of the passing of popular respect for people who aspired to the office. The surviving evidence seems to fit these melancholy interpretations of the situation. College enrolment books suggest that fewer men wished to enter the ministry. More of those who did chose it as a second career, sometimes even as a late second choice. Finally, it seems that the turnover of younger personnel increased, that the average age of the ministry rose and that the financial and other rewards of such service diminished.206 Thus popular characterisation of the vocation may not have been very far from the truth. There was something moribund about the modern profession of a (protestant) ministry in England.207 Moreover, while the decline in the numbers of the Anglican priesthood in early and midcentury need not have necessarily proved synonymous with a falling off in the effectiveness of its ministry – even Crockford’s was willing to allow for the possibility that the late Victorian church might have been overendowed in personnel – so great a contraction among the relevant official classes within the Free Churches could scarcely have been understood in any other way. Indeed, given the intimate connection between the very existence of a nonconformist ministry and the continuing increase of a dissenting flock, the one might reasonably have been understood to have reflected the other. That was what contemporaries believed. They presumed a direct correlation between the numerical health of the ministry and the organisational vigour of the church. Little evidence survives to suggest that they were seriously wrong. On the contrary, for the Free Churches as well as for the Anglican Church, the decay of the official and semi-official ministry did coincide with a diminution of the regular laity.208 What, then, of the numbers? The institutional decline of the Church of England is the most difficult to calculate. This was because it kept no figures for its membership. That anomaly was partly a product of administrative laxity. It was also partly a reflection of a traditional selfperception. After all, the Church considered the entire nation to be its proper congregation. It saw no reason to publicise a figure that would amount to something less. As a result, most calculations of the 206

207 208

Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 263; Russell, The Clerical Profession, pp. 264 ff. For a modern view, see Stewart Ranson, Alan Bryman and Bob Hinings, Clergy, Ministers and Priests (London, 1977), ch. 2. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 345–9; Russell, The Clerical Profession, pp. 280ff. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 203 and 209–10; Russell, The Clerical Profession, pp. 284ff.; Brown, A Social History of the Nonconformist Ministry, ch. 7.

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organisational standing of the Church of England during this period are derived from two inexact and unsatisfactory but quite indispensable, forms of data: the Easter Day communion record (literally the number of persons counted at communion in the Church on Easter Sunday); and, after 1924, the electoral roll (the number of confirmed, active, parishioners registered on a specific document for ecclesiastical electoral purposes).209 Quite apart from their other flaws, these two types of information were never exactly comparable. Still, together they provide some sort of substitute for membership analysis. Both point to relative decline in this period. Easter Day communicants stagnated at just under 2.2 million over the forty years from 1920 to 1960. And the electoral roll actually fell, from 3,537,020 in 1924, to 2,861,887 in 1960.210 But if the Church fared poorly in this era, old (and new) dissent did significantly worse. The critical importance of this simple fact can hardly be overstated. Long in seemingly irreversible decline, the Methodist Church rallied briefly following ecumenical reunion, to peak at about 750,000 in 1937–8. Thereafter, its membership ebbed away gradually, falling to 622,916 in 1960. The Baptist Church endured a similar slump. It boasted 254,908 members in 1920, but claimed only 198,577 in 1960. So too did the Congregationalists: there were 288,784 of them in 1920, but only 193,341 remaining in 1960. Most of those who left these older established and larger denominations did not, so far as we can tell, generally pass into the newer, and smaller, sects.211 Some of these younger societies did enjoy an absolute and relative increase in numbers during these years. But many, and perhaps most, did not. For instance, the Moravians, claiming some 6,000 regulars in 1916, had ceded over half of their membership by 1960. The so-called New Church, formed in 1787, and commanding a membership of 6,486 in 1920 had shrunk to 4,081 in 1960. And the Church of Christ, founded as late as 1827, with 16,011 members in 1920, had been whittled away to a rump of 7,821 in 1960.212 209 210

211

212

Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 128–31; Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 652–6. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 128–31; Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 614– 15. Grimley points out correctly that Easter Day communicants actually rose from 2,097,000 in 1916 to 2,245,102 in 1939. But as he acknowledges, the small (absolute) increase actually amounted to a significant (relative) decline. See Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, p. 11. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 143–4 and 150–5; Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 654–5; Rupert Davies, ‘Since 1932’, in Rupert Davies, A. Raymond George and E. Gordon Rupp (eds.), A History of the Methodist Church in Britain, vol. III (London, 1983), pp. 362–4; A. C. Underwood, A History of the English Baptists (London, 1947), pp. 273–4; R. I. James, Congregationalism in England, 1662–1962 (London, 1962), pp. 355–61. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 157–8; Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 654–5; Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 265.


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What was true of so many formal, religious organisations was also the case for a plethora of informal, quasi-religious organisations, previously maintained and encouraged by the churches. Of those, much the most important were the Sunday schools. For them, some measure of decline was, of course, wholly predictable and quite unavoidable, the inevitable product of inexorable demographic trends. In 1877, when the Sunday school movement was at the peak of its national popularity, the under-fifteens constituted around 36 per cent of the national population. By 1931, that proportion had fallen to a little under one-quarter. By 1961, it had dropped further to just over one-fifth.213 Thus, although Sunday school membership declined significantly between 1871 and 1931, it did so generally in line with related population movements. However, during the thirty years from 1930 to 1960, a period in which the marginal diminution of the juvenile population was actually rather small, Sunday school figures plummeted. In the Church of England they halved, from about 2.1 million to a little over 1 million. In the dissenting churches they more than halved: Methodists, from 1.3 million to under 600,000; Baptists from about 500,000 to around 200,000; and finally, Congregationalists, worst of all, from nearly 600,000 to not much more than 200,000.214 These figures need to be interpreted carefully. For one thing, they are radically incomplete. They also are limited to the measurable, institutional fortunes of the major traditional protestant denominations of English society. Still, what was true of England roughly held for Wales as well. Indeed, the decline of organised religion in Wales, often accompanied by and indeed poignantly expressed through the decline of the Welsh language in which it had once been so characteristically transmitted, explains much of the especially doleful progress of nonconformist association in twentieth-century Britain. But the pattern was not repeated in Scotland. In 1926, something like 43 per cent of the adult population (those aged over twenty years) were communicant members of the Church of Scotland. As late as 1947, that figure still stood as high as 36 per cent. In 1960, it remained up at around one-third of the total. All the churches in Scotland, taken together, accounted for over two-thirds of the population, so calculated, in 1920, for as much as 57 per cent in 1947, and still more than 40 per cent in 1960.215 True, their popularity had declined, as in England and Wales, but from a much higher peak 213

214 215

Christie Davies, ‘Moralisation and Demoralisation: a Moral Explanation for Changes in Crime, Disorder and Social Problems’, in Digby Anderson (ed.), The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Britain and America (London, 1992), esp. pp. 9–13. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 167, 183, 187 and 190–2. On which generally, see Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland, chs. 6 and 7; also the evidence addressed in Brierley, ‘Religion’, p. 657.

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and to a still healthier trough. Even in England, some (small) churches actually prospered, both in absolute and relative terms. To take just three examples: the Latter Day Saints, better known as the Mormons, enjoyed a period of steady if unspectacular church growth between 1920 and 1960. Their membership increased over this period from 6,797 to 17,332.216 The Seventh Day Adventists tripled their membership over this period, rising from about 3,000 in 1920 to close to 10,000 by 1960.217 And the Jehovah’s Witnesses expanded by a factor of more than ten. Claiming just 3,000 members as late as 1932, their numbers had ballooned to more than 40,000 by 1960.218 But the most striking variant of all, whether conceived in terms of increasing denominational numbers, a developing ecclesiastical influence or more generally transforming social effects, was the contemporary growth of the Roman Catholic Church..219 Moreover, while Catholicism naturally continued to be a powerful force in Scotland and Northern Ireland, its most striking contemporary growth actually occurred in England. The enumerated Roman Catholic population in England and Wales just after the First World War was 1,890,078, something like 5 per cent of the national total.220 Forty years later, the crude figure had virtually doubled, to 3,553,000, and its proportion had risen to something around 8 per cent of the population.221 It may, in fact, have been larger still at this later date. National enumeration figures were based until 1955 upon estimates made by the local parish priests of the number of Catholics living in their parishes. These were underestimates for the most part.222 Subsequent calculations, made after the introduction of standard parish returns and with the aid of baptismal data and independent demographic analysis, put the Roman Catholic population in 1960 as high as 51/2 million, or very nearly one-eighth of the total for the country at that time.223 Whatever the precise figure, it was indubitably a growing population. It was growing by conversion: some 16,000 adults converted in 1959.224 It was growing by baptism: there were 147,109 Roman Catholic baptisms 216 217 218 219

220 221 222 223 224

Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, p. 158; Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 654–5. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, p. 158; Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 654–5. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, p. 158; Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 654–5. For a pre-history, see Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England, pp. 45–7; for the crude numbers, Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, p. 153; for a narrative, Hastings, A History of English Christianity, chs. 16 and 31. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, p. 153; Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 654–5. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, p. 153; Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 654–5; Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 475. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, p. 154, n. 2. Ibid., p. 153; Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 561. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 561 and 580.


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in England and Wales, around 15 per cent of the total, in 1960.225 And it was growing by marriage: 44,000 marriages, something like one-eighth of the whole, were solemnised in Roman Catholic churches in 1961.226 These numbers were, of course, more than coincidentally related. The single most important factor in conversion was potential, or actual, marriage. Catholic marriages, protected by stricter laws and customs against contraception than their protestant counterparts, were then still more fertile.227 The Roman Catholic population of mid-century Britain was, accordingly, large, growing and young.228 Certainly, nothing struck Rowntree and Lavers so forcefully as the relative youthfulness of the Roman Catholic population of York and High Wycombe, both by comparison with their major protestant counterparts, whether established or nonconformist, and indeed by comparison with the general population as a whole. To take the latter figure first: those under fifty years of age constituted about 64.5 per cent of the population of England and Wales in 1948; those over fifty years of age, 35.5 per cent. Both in York and High Wycombe, the age distribution of the worshipful Anglican population was almost exactly the same: some 64 per cent under fifty in York and about the same number in High Wycombe. The nonconformist population displayed a markedly older age profile in both places: just over 55 per cent was under fifty in High Wycombe, and just under 55 per cent in York. But the Roman Catholic population boasted a flock in which some 71 per cent of the total in High Wycombe, and over 77 per cent in York were under fifty years of age. It was on the basis of these figures that the two sociologists predicted ‘distinctly bleak . . . longterm prospects’ for the nonconformist churches in York and High Wycombe, and ‘no particular change in . . . expected . . . attendances’ for the Church of England, but a ‘vigorous and expanding’ Roman Catholic congregation ‘for some decades to come’.229 That so rosy a prediction might have been made on the basis of evidence from an old industrial city like York and a new residential suburb like High Wycombe was, in itself, striking testimony to the advance of English Roman Catholicism more generally in the immediate preand postwar eras. For the Roman Catholic population of England had not only grown numerically but expanded geographically during these years, branching out into the south and east of England, into the suburbs and, more pointedly, into the middle classes. This was a genuine, 225 227 228 229

226 Ibid.; cf. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, p. 224. Ibid., p. 561. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 563 and 580. Ibid., p. 563; cf. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 349–51. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 341–5 and 349–51.

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indigenous, growth and dispersal. The (not inconsiderable) postwar Eastern European and, especially, Irish immigration of the era had if anything tended to reinforce the older ghetto frontiers. It was thus an older, more established, perhaps even more English, Catholic population that broke out of the pre-war confines, reaching places like Aylesbury, Bedford, Cambridge, Dunstable, Luton and Slough in the Northampton diocese, and, of course, High Wycombe and York. This process was anything but complete by 1960. A discernible difference remained between the social significance of Roman Catholicism in the north and in the south of England. The industrial north was still the Catholic heartland. In places like Merseyside, the West Riding, Tyneside and Teesside, Roman Catholics constituted about 20 per cent of all households and a much greater proportion of the regularly devout. By contrast, in Kent, the figure remained as low as 4 per cent. Yet at the same time, the proportion of the Catholic population contained within the ecclesiastical province of Liverpool fell from 58.4 per cent in 1911 to just 37.8 per cent in 1951; that of Westminster and Southwark grew from 26.2 per cent to 52 per cent; in places like the Northampton diocese, it rose by a much higher proportion still. As it did, so Roman Catholicism became, by 1960 at the latest, a truly national religion in England, if not yet of England.230 This was true of its priesthood as well as its laity. Their numbers increased mightily over the period. In 1920 there were just under 3,000 secular and just over 1,500 regular clergy in England and Wales. By 1940 these two figures had grown to 4,468 and 2,157, respectively. Twenty years later, they had risen substantially again, to 5,637 and 2,954 in each case.231 This was a rate of advance which reflected the expansion of the Catholic laity and, in so doing, exceeded the proportional growth of the general population. It was sustained as healthily among the regular as within the secular clergy. The contrast with the fate of nonconformist lay preachers could scarcely have been more striking. Once again, there was a direct relationship between the change in the numbers and a shift in public attitudes. But in this instance, it was to the advantage of the Catholic clergy. The evidence collected by Rowntree and Lavers was most instructive. They found a highly educated priesthood, an especially hard-working ministry and a profound degree of ‘respect’, both within ‘their congregations’ and often beyond them. By a supreme irony of social, educational and even psychological change, the English had come to value, even to admire, an ecclesiastical body within their midst, which they had been encouraged to fear and despise for nearly four hundred years up to that point. This was not the least of the reasons why it had 230

Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 473–6.

231

Ibid., pp. 275–6.


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become, in the words of Professor Hastings, ‘good to be an English Catholic Bishop in 1960’.232 It would, of course, be absurd to claim that Roman Catholicism had replaced the various strands of protestantism, as the ‘religion of England’, by 1960. It had not. Despite the integration of many individual Catholics into the mainstream of English economic, social and political life, Roman Catholicism remained, in many ways, an alien religion. Indeed, much of its strength continued to be drawn from such ‘foreignness’. The priesthood, and for that matter, its laity, were continually replenished from external sources. Its religious code and moral ethos demanded, and to a remarkable degree still exacted, different forms of behaviour from its flock, including the required conversion of spouses, exclusive nurture of children from mixed marriages in the faith, and of course a Catholic schooling for Catholic children (though as late as 1967 probably no more than 60 per cent of English Catholics of school age were actually educated in Catholic schools). Moreover, for all its growth to 1960, and for all its organisational, liturgical and demographic health in 1960, Roman Catholicism was still a minority religion. It remained, in fact, the religion of a relatively small part of the population; possibly 15 per cent of the total, perhaps less.233 Neither the institutional growth of Roman Catholicism to 1960, nor its social prosperity by that date, negated the decline of the mainstream Anglican and nonconformist churches over the same period.234 Nor, equally, did the growing protestant sects of postwar British society make up anything like proportionate institutional ground.235 Each suggested evidence of the changing order of religious organisation in mid-century Britain: of a greater diversity, of a growing decentralisation, of a profound and significant alteration in the pattern of indigenous religious affiliation; perhaps too of a greater differentiation between the regions of Britain, measured by their various commitments to religious organisation, tout court. But proof that religion still thrived? Reason enough to conclude that it had simply shifted its characteristic forms of institutional expansion? The numbers simply do not add up, not even in Northern

232 233 234 235

Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 349–51; Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 561. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 561ff.; cf. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, p. 153. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 128–60. For the contrary argument, namely that they did (and do), see Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkeley, 1985), chs. 3 and 4 and 21. For the evidence, see Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, pp. 46–50.

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Ireland.236 By any reasonable calculation, fewer people – and certainly a much smaller proportion of the population – were either members of, or anyway regular participants in, organised religious life in 1960 than in 1920.237 Exactly what all of this analysis actually establishes remains a matter of heated debate among contemporary historians and sociologists. For many it amounts to the concrete, empirical substantiation of the theory of secularisation in modern Britain. For some it establishes nothing more important than the fact that ‘religion’ in Britain, as elsewhere, had simply ceased to be ‘the monopoly of any groups explicitly labelled religious’ and had moved, sociologically speaking, out into wider society: into the home, into general culture, into civil institutions.238 This debate, at times as much semantic as analytical in content, and often more conceptually sophisticated than empirically disciplined, will not be resolved here.239 In any case, it is probably best approached by indirect methods. For the true importance both of the general decline in church membership, attendance and participation and of the more limited, but significant, diversification within and decentralisation of that, remaining, organised religious constituency is, perhaps, better appreciated by a consideration of precisely who it was – which social, sexual, or age group – that had effectively ceased to be ‘religious’ in this, admittedly inexact, but hardly unimportant sense. On this latter question, most authorities agree. It was the young, especially those under the age of forty, who had given up the churches by 1960, who indeed had been giving them up in ever increasing numbers since 1920.240 That was why the churches were in decline. It was, in other words, not so much the case that old people were leaving the churches, as that young people were not joining them.241 In the earlier part of the period this failure was generally limited to the children of those 236 237

238

239

240 241

This argument is addressed in Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, ch. 4, esp. pp. 63ff. See the data, most easily laid out, in Brierley, ‘Religion’, pp. 654–5. For a discussion of why new religious movements more often fail than succeed, see Bryan R. Wilson, ‘Factors in the Failure of New Religious Movements’, in his The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism: Sects and New Religious Movements in Contemporary Society (Oxford, 1990), ch. 11. On which, see Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York, 1970), p. 42, among contemporary critics; for later debates, see Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, chs. 4 and 5. Most vividly joined in the essays collected in Steve Bruce (ed.), Religion and Modernization: Historians and Sociologists Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford, 1998), passim. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 344–5; Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London, 1955), pp. 242–3. Though there was some evidence of old people joining churches as they became old; see Michael Argyle, Religious Behaviour (London, 1958), pp. 67ff.


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who were not themselves church attenders. By the 1950s the malaise of indifference had extended to the offspring of regular adherents.242 This was true even in some of the most traditionally religious regions of the United Kingdom. A survey carried out in Falkirk, Scotland, in the mid1960s revealed that around 27 per cent of children ceased to attend religious services by the age of ten; that figure had risen to 66 per cent by the age of 13. The religious population was ageing and, inexorably, gradually dying out.243 There were, of course, significant social variations. There was (and is) relatively little evidence that working-class males anyway had ever much engaged in regular religious worship after the obligatory period of Sunday school attendance. 244 It was the middle classes who were more generally recruited to the Victorian and Edwardian churches, especially to the established and protestant dissenting churches, and particularly in England.245 To a considerable extent, that discrepancy of affiliation and attendance between the classes continued to be true in Great Britain up to 1960 and beyond. The Falkirk study found church membership strongest among upper-middle-class professionals.246 Other surveys generally produced similar results; hence the emergence of a typical pattern of diminishing discernible institutional allegiance the further investigation proceeded down the social scale.247 But there was one important change. This was ominous for the future of churches. Gorer found that the greatest clump of the non-affiliated by c. 1950 was actually to be found among the large, and increasing, section of the English population who could not place themselves in any particular section of the English social system.248 Studious non-attendance (as opposed to lack of affiliation) was by then as highly concentrated among the upper-middle classes as within the lower-working classes of English society.249 Institutional alienation and outright rejection was, it seemed, moving up and across English society as never before.250 242 243 244

245 246 247 248 250

I develop this point at length in ch. 7, below; see pp. 267–72. P. L. Sissons, The Social Significance of Church Membership in the Burgh of Falkirk (Edinburgh, 1973), pp. 311–25; also Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland, pp. 196–7. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 37–42; Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. 194–210. For evidence from the contemporary sources, see the rather unjustly neglected study of London, in Richard Mudie-Smith (ed.), The Religious Life of London (London, 1904), esp. pp. 15–18 and 28–9. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 33–4 and 42; Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, 200–5. Note the later remarks in Gorer, Exploring English Character, pp. 242–3. Sissons, The Social Significance of Church Membership, pp. 60 and 71; Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland, pp. 165–6. Summarised in Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, pp. 154–6; Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland, pp. 165–6. 249 Ibid., pp. 242–3. Gorer, Exploring English Character, pp. 241–2. Ibid., p. 242.

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As a result, regional variation gradually became a more important determinant of religious attachment than social class in mid-twentieth century Britain. Among the more ‘religious’ sections of the population in 1950 – what Gorer identified as the ‘fervent’ (those worshipping more than once a week) and the ‘regular’ (at least once a week) – the south of England generally, and the great metropolis particularly, were the least favoured places of residence; the small town or village, especially in the Midlands or north of the country, the most preferred spots.251 Perhaps this pointed to a new distinction between the cosmopolitan and the rustic, the progressive and the conservative, the thriving and the declining which the old social, and in particular occupational, categories had obscured. If so, that development was not in itself especially new. Big towns had long been less religious, anyway in this sense, than small ones.252 Whether in city or country, centre or suburb, another, unrelated distinction – that between the married and unmarried – was proving just as important.253 Increasingly, regular attendees at church and chapel worship were drawn from the single and the widowed.254 The married, especially the relatively young married, those aged between twenty-five and forty-four, came less and less often.255 Again, such a disproportionate presence of the unattached had always been a characteristic of church and chapel congregations. It simply became more so still. This dynamic alone might have accounted for the more advanced age profile of the worshipful population in postwar England.256 For all that, the single most important variation between the observant and the absent continued to be defined by gender. This was true for every category of church attender covered by Gorer’s survey. Among the ‘fervents’, women outnumbered men by seven to five. Among the ‘regulars’, the corresponding figures were eleven to seven. Within the category of those deemed by Gorer ‘intermittent’, women predominated by a factor of eleven to six among those who attended a place of worship ‘about’ once a month, and by thirteen to nine among those who went less than once a month, but more than once year. On the other hand, men were in a majority (albeit a small one) among those who only made the required effort once or twice a year (probably at Christmas or, more rarely, Easter); and very substantially the larger group – 48 per cent to just 31 per cent – of those who never crossed a sacred threshold.257 Gorer’s representative national survey largely corroborated Rowntree and Lavers’s intensive, local, study. They had found hefty majorities of women among the 251 256 257

252 Ibid., p. 243. 253 Ibid., p. 241. 254 Ibid. Ibid., p. 241. Ibid., pp. 242–3; cf. Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, ch. 7. Gorer, Exploring English Character, pp. 242–3.

255

Ibid.


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religious congregations of contemporary York and High Wycombe. Of the two, this was, perhaps curiously, more true of York, where the imbalance was in their judgement ‘undue . . . in all cases’, than of High Wycombe where, though everywhere considerable, it was ‘in no . . . case . . . really striking’.258 More significantly still, it varied across denominations. This was again more noticeable in York. There, the Roman Catholic congregations, which were 44 per cent male (compared to 47.6 per cent in the general population), were very nearly ‘properly balanced’. But the local nonconformist societies, with just 39 per cent of males in their congregations, were seriously ‘gender-distorted’. The Church of England, with slightly over 40 per cent male presence, lay somewhere in the middle. In neither town, and in no significant religious society, were the numbers of males and females equal.259 So was religion becoming more of a ‘female’ activity in mid-twentieth century England? Almost certainly not. To understand why is to gain a vital clue into what was happening to the religious congregations of England between 1920 and 1960. In fact, women were giving up attendance more quickly, and with more important social consequences, than men during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Yet this development was largely lost on contemporary chroniclers. How so? Both Gorer and Rowntree/Lavers assumed that the numerical predominance of females in the religious congregations of England during the 1940s and 1950s was something new, or that insofar as it was not new, it was certainly greater in 1950 than it had been a generation or more earlier.260 Both presuppositions were false. The most recent research, conducted by this author among others in the industrial towns of the West Riding of Yorkshire, has established that the numerical predominance of women over men as members of the late Victorian and Edwardian churches was greater still.261 In Bradford, Halifax and Keighley, for instance, it was of the order of two to one, and never less than three to two, in most protestant (church and dissenting) associations around 1870.262 True, those women were disproportionately unmarried or widowed. For all that, there were still many more married women than men amongst the church-affiliated population.263 258 260 261

262 263

259 Ibid., pp. 344–5. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 345. Ibid., p. 344; Gorer, Exploring English Character, pp. 241–3. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. 205–9; also R. E. Chadwick, ‘Church and Chapel in Bradford and District, c. 1880–1914: the Protestant Churches in an Urban Industrial Environment’ (University of Oxford, D. Phil. Thesis, 1986), ch. 6. For more recent evidence, see Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, ch. 7. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. 205–9; Chadwick, ‘Church and Chapel in Bradford and District, c. 1880–1914’, ch. 6; Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, ch. 7.

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And they were disproportionately middle class. Yet at the same time, there were many more working-class women than men among the associated devout. Thus to speak of ‘working-class irreligiosity’ in these late Victorian towns is profoundly misleading, unless gender qualified.264 To be sure, figures for late Victorian membership were not strictly comparable with evidence for mid-twentieth century attendance. But in this respect at least, we have no reason to believe that patterns of behaviour seriously diverged between the sexes. More female members almost certainly did mean more female attenders in the late Victorian church or chapel. If so, then it cannot be unreasonable to conclude that what was – or more accurately what seemed – peculiar to the nonconformist societies of York in 1950 was actually common to religious organisations generally in Yorkshire eighty years earlier. It is at least plausible to infer that the later diminution of regular church-goers among the young, the married young, and the middle- and upper-working-class married young came to a greater extent from among the female, married, middle- and upper-working-class young, after 1920.265 These are tentative observations. They do not establish unqualified truths. The comparisons which they invite, still more the conclusions which they suggest, are far from ambiguous. According to their most radical interpretation, a view rooted in a common Victorian understanding of married women as the religious representation of their families in public acts of worship, the decline of regular female attendance in the churches and chapels of mid-twentieth-century England points to the pervasive de-institutionalisation of indigenous religious sentiments generally, even to something close to collective demise.266 A more guarded reading of the data, a view grounded in wider appreciation of the institutional and non-institutional alternatives increasingly available, suggests that this unquestionably critical section of the worshipful population now found more and more of its relevant needs met by other forms of religious worship, or at least other kinds of religious witness.267 These may have increasingly rendered redundant traditional church attendance but they did not therefore necessarily entail a concomitant diminution in wider, if more nebulous, religious belief, either among married women in particular, or in the nation in general. Either way, something very significant had happened; something which can scarcely be subsumed under the descriptive bromide of mere religious change. But what? 264 265 266 267

Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. 208–9. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 344. For the evidence as it stood, c. 1960, see Argyle, Religious Behaviour, ch. 7. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 42–3. Cf. the remarks in Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, pp. 117–23.


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III Whoever these people were who increasingly chose not to attend weekly religious services after 1920, their reasons for non-attendance need not have been defined by the declining importance of religious belief in their lives. More than 30,000 public houses closed down in Britain between 1939 and 1962, for want of custom. But people had not given up drinking. Rather, they had found a different source – the off-licence – from which to meet their needs. In much the same way, the range of alternatives available to regular Sunday worship after 1922 increasingly included what would now be called ‘virtual participation’ in a religious service, rather than actual attendance in a church. Technological development meant that it was possible first to listen to a service on the wireless, and then much later to watch a service on the television, without actually being there.268 Naturally, no contemporary priest or minister – and few laymen – openly equated the two forms of activity. Similarly, no subsequent observer ever presumed that the rise of religious broadcasting in itself either explained or even accounted for the extent of growing contemporary non-attendance. That is for the simplest of reasons. It does not. The decline of regular church-going long preceded the rise of public religious broadcasting, whether on the radio or the television. All that said, the numbers were, and are, impressive. As early as 1940 about 10 per cent of the adult population, well over three million persons, were generally believed to be regular listeners to the BBC’s Sunday morning service; and rather more, over 11 per cent, to its Sunday evening service.269 Both programmes were transmitted on the respectable ‘Home’ service. The introduction of a Sunday half-hour service on the popular ‘Light’ programme in 1946 immediately raised this figure to something over 20 per cent.270 That level of support was sustained well into the 1950s, until the introduction of televised religious broadcasting. Meeting Point, a programme made up largely of talks and discussions, claimed a viewing audience of around 7 per cent of the population in 1957.271 This figure slowly declined, so the programme was first complemented and finally replaced by Songs of Praise, a regular televised service. Introduced in 1962, that programme immediately claimed an audience of over 268

269 270

Kenneth M. Wolfe, The Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation, 1922–1956: the Politics of Religious Broadcasting (London, 1984), ch. 1 and passim. Sandbrook, Never Had it So Good, p. 122; Dean Inge once caustically observed that ‘no method of taking a collection at a broadcast service had yet been invented’. See his Assessments and Anticipations (London, 1929), p. 221. Wolfe, The Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation, ch. 13. 271 Ibid. Ibid., see also appendix 7, pp. 553–4.

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5 million people each Sunday. Albeit somewhat less popular, it continues to this day.272 It is easy – certainly in retrospect – to deride the importance of these novel religious media. Watching the television is not the same as being present at a sermon. Listening to someone else sing is not like praying. For many Christians, there is nothing quite like the fellowship of communion. Yet, after every proper qualification has been made, the mere existence of those audiences remains significant, doubly so, since contemporary research by the BBC suggested that, in the 1950s at least, most of its ‘religious’ listeners, and later viewers, came from the working classes and were non-church-goers. Radio, and subsequently television, had become in effect their only forms of contact with organised religion. But who exactly were they? No one knows for certain. Common-sense and anecdotal evidence suggest that they must have included housebound believers: people who might otherwise have, or had previously, gone to church but no longer could or did. Undoubtedly, they also included some occasional worshippers who, in effect, supplemented their irregular ‘live’ witness with a more frequent, broadcast, form. Finally, it is at least plausible that they numbered many of the recent non-churchgoing, working-class and lower-middle-class women; those ‘regulars’ of an earlier generation who had once gone to church, but who now fulfilled their religious needs through the media of radio and television. At least some of the decline in organisational membership and even more in weekly church attendance seems to be traceable to the changed behaviour of this, apparently once loyal, religious constituency. If that was so, then their de-institutionalisation did not in itself constitute, or even necessarily presage, a broader process of intellectual or emotional de-Christianisation.273 Then again, non-attendance at church or chapel was itself a spasmodic affair. True, fewer persons – women as well as men, middle class as well as working class, single as well as married – attended church regularly each Sunday for the simple act of religious worship. But very similar numbers, and indeed proportions, of English men and women, of all ages, classes and marital states, chose to have their children baptised, chose to be married and chose to bury their dead in church. Those numbers scarcely changed at all between 1920 and 1960. Baptisms continued at the rate of about 70 per cent of live births (becoming, curiously, a more Anglican rite towards the end of the period). Religious marriages held steady, at around three-quarters of the total (though their denominational basis widened markedly). Burials remained – overwhelmingly – the work 272

Ibid.

273

Ibid.


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of sacred authorities; established, dissenting and Roman Catholic. In Scotland the numbers baptised and married in church actually rose after the 1930s and continued to do so well into the 1950s, as the traditional habits of domestic baptismal and marriage rites passed out. Similarly, Christmas midnight services, something of a rarity before the outbreak of war, became common practice north of the border in the years that followed.274 But by precisely the same token none of this evidence establishes the existence of anything more than a residual degree of religious belief. In the Scottish case, it may even point to the decline of traditional forms of religious sentiment. In both instances it was accompanied by a continued, and similarly impressive, level of personal organisational affirmation and allegiance; that is, of a self-defined attachment to a specific religious denomination – true even when that sense of loyalty was not matched by any regular act of worshipful affiliation. The Scottish example need occasion no surprise in this respect. But English experience is surely worthy of note. Something like three-quarters of the population considered themselves attached to one, that is to one particular, religious denomination, as late as 1950. Of those, nearly three-fifths named this body as the Church of England. No doubt such affiliation, in many if not in most cases, involved a fairly minimal degree of self-identification. But the remaining two-fifths identified other protestant denominations, the Roman Catholic Church, a ‘Christian’ affiliation or the Jewish faith. Their commitment was probably somewhat greater. Among those who made up the one-quarter of the population who did not consider that they ‘belonged’ to any church, Gorer found that an inability ‘to place themselves in the [contemporary] English social system’ was actually a much more important factor within the causes of their disengagement than any professed lack of religious belief.275 His conclusions were powerfully, if indirectly, substantiated in the contemporaneous investigations of Rowntree and Lavers. They argued that the fairly deep-rooted distaste which they had uncovered, both for most of the religious ministry and for many of their regular worshipping laity among the general population, was curiously not matched by a general contempt for the churches, still less by a widespread disregard for religion, among the same, otherwise anti-clerical absentees. On the contrary, and somewhat to their surprise, they found that the public continued to have a fairly high regard for the churches, at least conceived in the abstract, and certainly treated them with a ‘tolerance’ which was in marked contrast 274 275

Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland, p. 276. Gorer, Exploring English Character, p. 237.

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with the ‘hostility’ which the clergy ‘so often evoke[d]’.276 Moreover, they discovered that even amid those effectively ‘indifferent’ to the fate of the churches, there was ‘not infrequently, a spiritual hunger, a wish . . . to believe . . . in something’, which amounted to something like the basic religious quest. No doubt, the basic forms of that quest had profoundly – perhaps irreversibly – altered. Such amorphous religious aspirations sustained few supportable moral injunctions. These forms of abstinence that had defined the devout – against sexual licence, intoxicating liquor and Sabbath sports – now encompassed only the fanatical fringe.277 ‘Puritan England’ was dead and buried by 1950.278 What was altogether less clear was the degree to which so general a ‘spiritual search’, even among those who still defined themselves by traditional denominational affiliations, actually retained any recognisable Christian inspiration. Some of the surviving evidence suggests that it did. For instance, very nearly two-thirds of the population continued to say private prayers to an intercessionary deity. Almost one-third claimed to do so regularly. Oddly enough, ‘prayer-givers’ formed no easily definable social, residential, marital or even gender-specific group within the population, unlike church-goers.279 Indeed, they were not synonymous with the churchgoing population. This at least suggests that some of those who attended church did not really believe in the efficacy of prayer, while some of those who did not attend church did. Paradoxically, there is no reason to believe that such apparent perversity was not a precise reflection of the truth. There was still more than an element of social respectability, if not of political necessity, surrounding some aspects of church-going activity in postwar Britain. By the same token, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest something like a constituency of intensely religious individuals who, nevertheless, refused to attend the churches of their day. Anti-clericalism, after all, had never been incompatible with devout faith. Nor was criticism of lay hypocrisy in this respect the same as the absence of wider Christian belief. The problem, from the point of view of the churches, was that for so many of those ‘prayer-givers’, what they were praying for, and who they were praying to, had less and less to do with the traditional Christian story.280 276 277 278

279 280

Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 351–3. Ibid., pp. 352–4. Hence, of course, the kind of discussion initiated by such findings and documented at length in ch. 4 below, at pp. 141–4. An aspect of English cultural history dealt with at length in ch. 4, below, esp. pp. 176–9. For pertinent contemporary observations, see Garbett, The Claims of the Church, ch. 12, esp. pp. 265–7 and 271–5. Though see the remarks of Gorer, Exploring English Character, pp. 244ff. Ibid., pp. 252ff.


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In that way, contemporary research established three very important, if seemingly contradictory, propositions about the state of popular belief in postwar Britain: first, that the majority of the population, certainly more than two-thirds and probably around three-quarters, still believed in God; secondly, that a similar majority believed in the after-life; and thirdly, that about the same proportion again did not believe in hell. Thus it seemed like an ever more de-institutionalised population increasingly now preferred to believe in the rewards, but not in the penalties, of historic Christian doctrine. Worse still: widespread belief in the existence of a deity was not generally squared with a common assumption about His essentially Christian forms. ‘God’ had come to mean many different things to the British people by 1950. He was defined in the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Passion and the Resurrection by little more than 10 per cent of the population.281 The same was true of the after-life. A genuinely scriptural heaven appealed to a mere 11 per cent of respondents in Gorer’s survey: notions of a ‘beautiful peace’, of the absence of pain, of a ‘rejoining with one’s loved ones’, even of ‘reincarnation’, or more remarkably still, to a ‘world like this world’ appealed to many more individual ‘believers’.282 Finally, disbelief in the existence of hell, in the doctrine of predestination, or even in the notion of the judgement, was so widespread as to lead Gorer to conclude that a mere 6 per cent of the population of England and Wales – a figure smaller than its then churchgoing population – really believed in the ‘full Christian dogma’.283 What did contemporaries make of this? For Gorer, perhaps the most theoretically radical of these observers, it constituted proof that ‘England’ had indeed ceased to be a Christian country. In his view, the religion of England had recently become something closer, ‘as a system’, to ‘Confucianism’, than to ‘any of the major historic religions of Christianity’.284 Moreover, in addition to so significant an alteration of basic ontology and morality, indigenous religious belief now included the possibility of astrology, superstition and ghosts in an essentially ‘magical . . . view of the universe’, which inspired perhaps one-quarter of the population.285 To Rowntree and Lavers, all of that was evidence less of self-conscious change than unfulfilled yearning: of the incoherent and undirected passions of a population that had ‘rejected so much of the . . . New Testament . . . Christian story . . . that no church could recognise [it] as Christian . . . at all’, and yet which had not really forged an alternative faith 281 283 284

282 Ibid., pp. 253ff. Ibid., pp. 251ff. Ibid., p. 255; cf. R. C. Churchill, The English Sunday (London, 1954), p. 9, for a very different estimate. 285 Ibid., p. 269. Gorer, Exploring English Character, p. 253.

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of its own, whether Confucian, magical or merely secular.286 And what of the historians? Hastings believed that it suggested a people who had moved away from their historic – by which, he really meant Victorian – evangelical, protestant, biblical Christianity and were now groping closer towards a more homely, conventional and Catholic faith. 287 None of these interpretations is without merit. Each draws attention to the unquestionable truth that neither the widespread desacralisation of British public life nor the institutional decline of mainstream British religious organisations after 1920 had resulted in the simple demise of religion in British society by 1960. Each also pointed to real and plausible forms of change in that religion. Sometimes this suggested a changing Christianity, an evolving religiosity or even a new spirituality; perhaps also, to a world increasingly characterised by ‘believing without belonging’, albeit accompanied by a few tears along the way. Most significantly of all, each allowed for the possibility of genuine theological and cultural departure in the religion of mid-century Britain without assuming its progress either to a more rational, mechanistic, secular view of the world, or to an increasingly literate, profound and satisfying faith. That said, none of them is entirely compatible with each other. Nor do any of them fully account for what hindsight tells us about the fate of religious belief and practice in England down to the present day. This is why they have generally failed to secure widespread contemporary consent. Paradoxically, they have satisfied neither the ‘pessimists’, who argue for wholesale secularisation, nor the ‘optimists’, who resist any presumption of decline.288 If the narrative outlined above has established anything, it has surely pointed to a profound ‘separation of spheres’ that increasingly defined the role of religion in English life after 1920. Thirty years ago, the American sociologist, Daniel Bell, tried to capture the significance of that development in what he called the notion of disjunction.289 This idea identified just such a separation of spheres – that is, of the economic, social and cultural spheres – in truly modern societies as a means which allowed for the autonomy of material and spiritual life in everyday existence. It happily acknowledged the secularisation of British public life and unreservedly 286 287 288 289

Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 355. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 667ff. I owe this phrase to Callum G. Brown, ‘Did Urbanization Secularize Britain?’, Urban History Yearbook, 15 (1988), 1–14, at p. 1. Daniel Bell, ‘The Return of the Sacred? The Argument on the Future of Religion’, British Journal of Sociology, 28 (1977), 419–49; reprinted in Daniel Bell, The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys, 1960–80 (Cambridge, MA, 1980), ch. 17. All references are to the original publication.


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accepted the decline of organised religion in British social institutions after 1920. But it insisted that neither had caused, or even anticipated, the demise of religious sentiments within the English people more generally. Bell initially conceived of this idea as a way of resisting orthodox ‘secularisation theory’, or rather, as a way of explaining how the desecularisation of public life could be – actually had been – complemented by the survival of religious sentiments in the private sphere. Bell’s arguments were rooted largely in contemporary American evidence.290 But the intellectual possibilities which they furnished have since been more broadly applied to the British model, not least in the writings of Davie and Brown, and not entirely without justification. Some sort of religious life has survived its political and institutional eclipse in this country. The English are still something short of becoming a wholly faithless tribe.291 For all that, there was a profoundly striking correlation between the separation of spheres (so conceived) and an altogether more far-reaching separation of persons (as described above) into recognisably religious and increasingly irreligious over the same time span. Put another way: there had once been a continuum of religious commitment and religious indifference that defined virtually the whole nation. Sometime in the 1950s, that tenuous bond finally broke.292 The final severing of that mystical chord wrought the secularisation of protestant England. Its consequences are still with us. Indeed, they have only grown more apparent with time. Its uncertain course defines the vital purpose of this book. Subsequent chapters will be devoted to the task plotting that tortuous path. Even the ‘secularisation’ of public life was far from complete by 1960. It could scarcely have ever been so in a nation still headed by a Christian monarch and saddled with an established church. Edward VIII had suffered for that fact in 1936; so too, to a slightly lesser extent, did Princess Margaret as recently as 1955.293 The Church of England was righteously aggrieved by Parliament’s assertion of its continuing right to interfere in ecclesiastical affairs, reaffirmed during the Prayer Book controversy of 1927–8. Still, that possibility remained, at least in theory, thirty years later.294 And so on. But religion ceased to define, to delineate and to 290 291 292 293

294

Bell, ‘The Return of the Sacred?’, pp. 426–9. Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, pp. 189ff.; cf. Bruce, Religion in Modern Britain, ch. 4. The fundamental argument advanced in ch. 7 below, esp. at pp. 264–72. But was Edward robbed? Did the people actually think otherwise? For that argument, see Susan Williams, The People’s King: the True Story of the Abdication (London, 2003), esp. chs. 10–14. On which, see the remarks of Archbishop Fisher, observed below on pp. 263–4.

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determine public affairs very quickly after 1920. This sombre truth may have contributed to the subsequent decline of English religious institutions. It was certainly influenced by their decay, as they in turn became less significant in the nation on account of their diminished numerical – and thereby sociological – importance. But neither secularisation (so defined) nor decline (so traced) caused the disappearance of religion in British social life. Religious belief or beliefs in Britain continued virtually unabated. However, they also continued, increasingly, undisciplined. What Gorer ostensibly ‘celebrated’, and Rowntree and Lavers openly feared, was almost certainly not something wholly new, but rather something largely unprecedented which none the less contained much that was old, which had once – indeed quite recently – been strictly controlled, but which was now increasingly free to express itself within the population. To appreciate the significance of this observation we need only relax the (false but widely held) assumption that the people of Britain had been superstitious in their pre-industrial past and gradually became more rational in the post-industrial deliverance. That is a modern, secular, and essentially an academic, assumption.295 It was not a mistake that Victorian churchmen and ministers ever made. They knew that the people were prone to magic, to idolatry and to what they considered to be false beliefs. That was why they preached and acted against those vices, in their sermons, in their schools, in their pastoral work. The surviving evidence suggests that they were probably right to do so. For as these institutional mechanisms of popular purification diminished in social significance, so the people in all probability resumed many, if not all, of their traditional un-Christian, even pagan beliefs.296 Moreover they found them becoming increasingly reproduced in a popular literary culture, in newspapers, magazines, novels and the like. All of this made it still harder for the church to appeal to a faith which was increasingly alien to the very people whom it was otherwise trying to convert. That cultural hiatus accounts for at least some of the distaste with which the people more and more viewed the very clergymen who were attempting to return them to a fold from which they were ever more detached.297 Hence the paradoxes of religion in Britain by 1960. The United Kingdom was a nation that had preserved so many of its public religious forms. It retained a definably Christian Constitution. Each of 295

296 297

Most famously advanced in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. ix–xi and p. 800. A point brought out, at length, below in ch. 3, at pp. 128–34. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 345–6.


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its branches of government remained, unambiguously, Christian. The ‘better’ social institutions still upheld a determinedly Christian, moral ethos.298 But religion already counted for relatively little – much less than in the United States, or even (anyway, then) in France and Italy – in the conduct of its public life.299 It also was a country which, at least in the largest part of its kingdom, sustained a surviving, even a thriving, established church. The first servant of that church – the Archbishop of Canterbury – retained social precedence over the first executive officer of the state – the prime minister. The senior officers – the other bishops – in that church maintained their position in the House of Lords, and thereby in the legislative branch of the state. On a broader front, the Lambeth Conference of 1958 attracted more Anglican bishops from around the world than ever before.300 But few truly believed that the church then determined the social, the cultural, even the spiritual life of the people to any great extent. Indeed, many tolerated its continuing existence, including its seemingly anachronistic privileges, and its increasingly incongruous status, solely because they assumed that it did no positive harm precisely by doing so very little in this respect.301 What was true of the Church of England was also true, by extension, of the other churches in Britain. Perhaps the Roman Catholic Church really did affect the way its people felt, spoke and acted. But there were still relatively few Catholics. And most of these were still not really ‘English’.302 This last point suggests an important caveat. For all its common features, decline so defined was still a phenomenon subject to profoundly significant regional variation in Britain between 1920 and 1960. So too was survival. Wales remained a more religious country than England; Scotland more religious than Wales; Northern Ireland more religious than any other part of the Union. More religious in every sense: in its public life, in its leading social institutions, in the characteristic beliefs of its people.303 So it was England that became the odd country in the Union. But, of course, it was also England that became the characteristic abode of the people. The inexorable patterns of internal migration and indigenous population growth, more than anything else, ensured that by 1960, the English were not only the most faithless people in the union, 298 299 300 301 302 303

Contemporaneously observed in Colin MacInnes, ‘A Godless Nation’, New Society, no. 5, 14 May 1963, p. 14. A point made at the time in Alasdair Macintyre, ‘God and the Theologians’, Encounter, 21, no. 120, (September 1962), 3–10, at 7. Lloyd, Church of England, ch. 26, pp. 539–50. For a thoughtful discussion, see Johnson, Reshaping the British Constitution, ch. 4. Perhaps now even less so still; being increasingly Polish! On this very important exception, see the evidence summarised in Bruce, Religion in Modern Britain, pp. 60–70.

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but also – much more than they had been in 1920 – the most numerous, and thus the most typical too. As late as 1960, the continuing faithfulness of the ‘Celtic fringe’ could be passed off as an interesting, if unremarkable, local development. After 1969, and the emergence of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, it would become a defining sore of British political life, no less the defining characteristic of the extent to which religious enthusiasm of any kind was deemed uncharacteristic of the nation as a whole.304 That wretched observation suggests a final, concluding qualification. Everything written so far has constituted an essay about the history of religion in Britain generally, and England particularly, to c. 1960. But this was not a date of great significance. Lady Chatterley aside, nothing critical happened in 1960. No notable event presaged the end of religion in British, or even English, life. On the other hand, it is not fanciful to suggest that the general, social significance of religion in Britain may have bottomed out around then. Viewed from a strictly Christian perspective, this will seem an odd conclusion. Understood in terms of the overreaching argument of this book it may even appear perverse, indeed contradictory. For the protestant churches of Great Britain went on declining, indeed, declined more quickly still, after 1960. The Roman Catholic Church first began to stagnate and then to diminish, up to the day before yesterday. Biblical belief went into free-fall. These – especially, perhaps, the last – were enormously significant developments. In my view, their significance is still fully to be appreciated.305 But religion in Britain, after 1960, could no longer be understood solely from a Christian point of view. After 1945, and especially during the 1950s and 1960s, the old industrial towns of England – Bradford, Leeds, Manchester, and in a different way London, witnessed the influx of a non-Christian, new Commonwealth population, mainly Muslim, but also Hindu, Sikh, and others.306 There are today perhaps two million ‘other’, non-Christian, religious persons living in England. They have, to date, proved much more religiously observant than the indigenous population among whom they have settled. Some of the consequences of their continuing and different religiosity were witnessed in the towns and cities of England after the publication of the Satanic Verses in 1989; others, albeit in a very

304 305 306

Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, p. 98; Bruce, God Save Ulster!, p. 249; Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. 342ff. For a preliminary discussion, see Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. 370–9. Ceri Peach, Alasdair Rogers, Judith Chance and Patricia Daley, ‘Immigration and Ethnicity’, in Halsey and Webb (eds.), Twentieth Century British Social Trends, ch. 4, esp. pp. 137–59.


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different way, through the events of July 2007.307 It would be foolish to presume that either of these constituted only a last gasp, or even a merely passing manifestation, of their implications. Surely wisdom in such matters must begin in the realisation that what so offends the more extreme elements of Britain’s religious minorities today is not the majority’s Christianity, public or private, but rather its all too obvious secularism. 307

Discussed at length in S. J. D. Green, ‘The Revenge of the Periphery? Conservative Religion, Multiculturalism and the Irony of the Liberal States in Modern Britain’, in Ralph McInerny (ed.), Modernity and Religion (South Bend, IN, 1994), pp. 89–114. For another perspective, see McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, chs. 10 and 11.

Part II

Disclosures of decline

3

The ‘soul of England’ in an ‘age of disintegration’: Dean Inge and the ‘trial of the churches’ in the wake of World War I

In the late summer of 1926 William Ralph Inge, sometime Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, long-standing Dean of St Paul’s cathedral and recent recruit to the staff of the London Evening Standard, published a new book. It was his seventh in as many years.1 Unlike much of this prolific churchman’s previous literary output, England had been specially commissioned as part of a major series. That multi-volume project, prestigiously edited by the Rt Hon. H. A. L. Fisher, Warden of New College, Oxford, was portentously dedicated to the analysis of ‘Historical Forces in the Modern World’. It was conceived as a collection of discrete studies comprehending all the significant ancient, modern and putative nations.2 The announced aim of so much coordinated effort was to furnish intelligent lay readers with a truly

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A shorter version of this chapter was first delivered as a paper to the Peterhouse Historical Society on 13 March 2007. I am most grateful to John Bew, Scott Mandelbrote, Magnus Ryan and other members of the society for helpful criticisms on this occasion. The research was made possible by the generosity of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge, in making Dean Inge’s papers freely available to me. I am especially grateful to Magdalene’s librarian, Dr Ronald Hyam, for his many kindnesses in this respect. [M]agdalene [C]ollege [C]ambridge, [O]ld [L]ibrary, [W. R.] Inge, Diary, vol. XXX, 1–10 September 1926; William Ralph Inge, born 1860, oldest son of William Inge, sometime Provost of Worcester College, Oxford; educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge; Craven, Bell and Porson Scholarships: first-class honours in both parts of the Classical Tripos; Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, 1888–1905; Vicar of All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, London, 1905–7. Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, 1907–11; Dean of St Paul’s, 1911–34; LL.D., 1918; KCVO, 1930; died 1954. The most recent life remains that of Adam Fox, Dean Inge (London, 1960). As is rightly noted in Matthew Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars (Oxford, 2004) p. 23, ‘almost nothing has been written about Inge in forty years’. The (by no means uninteresting) exception is A. N. Wilson, ‘The Gloomy Dean’, in A. N. Wilson, Penfriends from Porlock (London, 1988), pp. 170–86. William Ralph Inge, England (London, 1926); vol. II of The Modern World: A Survey of Historical Forces, ed. H. A. L. Fisher.

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balanced survey [replete] with such historical illustrations as are necessary, of the tendencies and forces, political, economic and intellectual, which are moulding the lives of contemporary states.3

But its underlying purpose pointed to nothing less than the pursuit of world peace. By that, Fisher and his associates meant Pax Britannica tempered by the League of Nations. The Warden fervently believed that a hitherto elusive goal might be achieved through enhanced mutual understanding, at least insofar as the best and the brightest in the anglophone world then conceived of that state.4 Inge’s offering was one of the first volumes to appear, followed shortly after complementary accounts of Germany by G. P. Gooch, and Turkey by Arnold Toynbee. Later contributors included H. St J. Philby on Arabia and a young Keith Hancock, perhaps less controversially charged with making sense of his native Australia.5 By the time of Fisher’s freak death, fourteen years later, similar scrutiny had been afforded to no fewer than twenty-four further countries, most of them, incidentally, by then at war with one another. The real extent to which the envisaged outcome of these endeavours ever fulfilled any of the attendant high hopes of its initial inspiration must therefore remain in some doubt.6 None of this is to attribute any blame to Warden Fisher for the outbreak of worldwide hostilities in 1939. It is, however, important to appreciate that England’s chronicler interpreted his own task in rather narrower terms. Inge did his duty and Fisher seemed generally pleased with the results.7 In 300 tightly argued pages the Dean outlined his country’s past achievements and traced the evolution of the land and its inhabitants; 3

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As revealed in the second edition of England. See William Ralph Inge, England (London, 1933), p. iii. Briefly explained in David Ogg, A. L. Fisher, 1865–1940: a Short Biography (London, 1947), pp. 118–19. Inge, England (1933), p. iv; Ogg, Fisher, ch. 7. See also the remarks in F. Russell Bryant (ed.), Coalition Diaries and Letters of H. A. L. Fisher, 1916–1922: the Historian in Lloyd George’s Cabinet (Lampeter, 2006), pp. 46ff. Inge, England (1933), p. ii. There is a recent, and detailed, consideration of Hancock’s great survey by Saul Dubow, ‘W. K. Hancock and the Question of Race’, in Wm. Roger Louis (ed.), Ultimate Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (London, 2009), pp. 249ff. He died following injuries received on being knocked down in the street by a motor vehicle (or it may have been a bicycle), on 18 April 1940. See Ogg, Fisher, p. 141; also the remarks by Lettice Fisher, in Foreword, H. A. L. Fisher: an Unfinished Autobiography (Oxford, 1940), p. x. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXX, 28 June 1926: ‘criticism of My England . . . by H. A. L. Fisher favourable on the whole’. We can only speculate how he would have responded to similar efforts, solicited but not in the end forthcoming, from General Smuts on South Africa and Winston Churchill on the United States of America. For Fox’s verdict, see Inge, pp. 191–2.

Dean Inge and the ‘trial of the churches’

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the development of national character and empire; and finally, the onset of industrial revolution and the processes of urbanisation, even the emergence of modern, parliamentary democracy. But for all his superficial assiduousness, England’s author made no claim to have produced a ‘balanced survey’, any more than he offered this latest work to the world as a ‘handbook . . . or [a] guide’ to his native race. Still less did he pretend to have written a ‘work of [original] research’.8 To the contrary: he freely acknowledged his commitment to a very selective narrative in which ‘the only thing I have contributed of my own is a personal view and my reasons for holding it’. Just in case anyone still misunderstood him, he added: ‘I have made no attempt to be impartial.’9 This caveat constituted no more than fair warning. Anyone looking for a measured account of our island story would have been instantly brought short. Perhaps Inge believed that the simultaneous appearance of Trevelyan’s much heralded national History relieved him of the obligation. Alternatively, he may have thought that Baldwin’s equally famous patriotic paean – also issued in 1926 – absolved him even of the necessity of being polite.10 Much more likely, he conceived of neither balance nor tact as contractual burdens placed upon him in the first place. In any case, Dean Inge told a partisan tale and spelled out its implications exactly as he saw them. To considerable effect: while others among Fisher’s benighted series passed alternatively through the ranks of unread classics or, more commonly into the realm of instant oblivion, England created an instantaneous – and lasting – indigenous, intellectual uproar.11 Composed at high speed during the General Strike and issued as ‘a candid warning’ to a ‘country [then] in [grave] danger’, England attempted neither the gentle celebration of a glorious past that marked some of the great national historian’s less reflective works, nor that cosy conception of all things Anglo-Saxon which motivated the subtler contemporary effusions of a wily politician.12 Indeed, at first sight, it read more like 8 9 10

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Inge, England, pp. vii–viii. Ibid., p. viii. All subsequent references will be to the 1926 edition, unless otherwise stated. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXX, 29 January 1926 offers a glimpse into Inge’s relationship with Trevelyan: ‘I am always flattered by the esteem which he seems to have for me.’ On which, note G. M. Trevelyan, History of England (London, 1926) and Stanley Baldwin, On England and Other Addresses (London, 1926). See esp. the section ‘On the Nation and the Churches’, in this latter volume, at pp. 195–211. Anon., ‘England’, Church Times, 1 October 1926, p. 371; William Ralph Inge, Vale (London, 1934), pp. 90ff.; Fox, Inge, pp. 190–1; Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 131ff. Inge, England, pp. viii–ix; see also his Epilogue, pp. 273ff. For a trenchant and timely defence of Trevelyan’s habitual intellectual seriousness, see David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: a Life in History (London, 1992), esp. ch. 5. On some of Baldwin’s broader

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a fierce denunciation of most of Inge’s fellow countrymen.13 The result was less an unexceptionable success, or even an obvious failure, but more a complex sensation. For England proved to be a bitterly controversial bestseller. Few, it seemed, talked of anything else during the months after its first publication. Fewer still ever viewed its author in quite the same way again.14 Some critics and many readers loved it. Neither of these groups was necessarily confined to the usual suspects. The liberally inclined Nation acclaimed England as ‘the best book [Inge] has written to date’, just for good measure also commending its presentation ‘as a model of . . . scholarship and style’.15 Others loathed it, again, as much according to specific taste as ostensibly obvious inclination. The otherwise conservative Saturday Review denounced the book as ‘an exercise in pessimism carried to the verge of absurdity’, pointing out, in passing, ‘a plethora of ordinary errors of fact’.16 Not a few commentators remarked upon the propriety of the publication of so polemical a book by a man of the cloth. Precisely the same passages hailed in the Spectator as ‘admirable straight-talking’ on matters other ‘social philosophers and historians (usually) shirk’ were condemned in the Guardian as ‘a harvest of hate’, presented with a ‘petulance of manner’ unworthy of one charged with ‘preaching the Gospel of Love’.17 Only the New Statesman affected merely to condescend, haughtily highlighting the inadequacies of an author unable or unwilling ‘to trouble himself . . . even with the most basic elements of the problems he essays to discuss’. All the same, Fetter Lane’s (anonymous) correspondent devoted two full columns to detailed criticism of what he pretended to ignore.18 Inge later insisted that England had been generally ‘well-received’ on publication.19 Perhaps memory had eased the passage. At the time, he was genuinely taken aback by the ‘mixed . . . reception’ it was afforded

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14 15 16 17

18 19

purposes, see Philip Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Vales (Cambridge, 1999), esp. chs. 8 and 9. That said, for an interesting analysis of the real parallels between Baldwin and Inge, and above all, concerning their Englands, see Andrew Jones and Michael Bentley, ‘Salisbury and Baldwin’, in Maurice Cowling (ed.), Conservative Essays (London, 1978), pp. 25–40 at pp. 34–8. Inge, Vale, pp. 89–90; Fox, Inge, pp. 191–2. Anon., ‘Whither’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 39, no. 25, 25 September 1926, 738–40. Anon., ‘Inge-land’, The Saturday Review, 142, no. 3198, 11 September 1926, 289. W. Beech-Thomas, ‘The Soul of England’, The Spectator, no. 5124, 11 September 1926, 381–2; R. Ellis Roberts, ‘He is an Englishman’, The Guardian, no. 4214, 10 September 1926, 717. Anon., ‘Inge on England’, New Statesman, 27, no. 700, 25 September 1926, 677–8. Inge, Vale, p. 90.


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in the periodical press.20 Possibly that was why he drew such comfort from the unambiguous approval his efforts were afforded by the book buying public.21 Some nine thousand copies passed hands during the first ten days after publication.22 A second impression was released within a month of its first appearance and a third, one month after that.23 A cheap trade version was launched the following year. A new, revised – for which, read more emollient – edition waited only until 1933.24 That text was then republished one last time in 1953, just a year before Inge’s death at the age of ninety-four.25 Much as he suffered from the occasional ‘impudent and insulting’ notice that such controversial writing inevitably inspired, gross earnings of £11,000 in 1927 sugared some part of the pill. Around four-fifths of his annual income at the time was earned from this kind of work; Inge was a man who, as his most recent biographer has tactfully put it, ‘may have been a mystic but was no ascetic’.26 Part of England’s early commercial success was certainly traceable to its lugubrious subject matter. Then, as now, the English seem to have enjoyed reading unflattering accounts of themselves. Much more was owed to the pre-existing, popular reputation of its author. Inge had proved himself a publisher’s banker many times over by September 1926.27 England was actually the second of his big earners that year. Lay Thoughts of a Dean had sold 3,000 copies within two weeks of its publication, earlier in the summer.28 Both were dwarfed by the continuing commercial success of two collected volumes of Outspoken Essays. The first series ran through five impressions in just one year, 1919. The second recorded sales of 4,500 on the very day of its publication, in 1922. As late as 1924, Longman’s was still issuing 25–35,000 of each annually just to keep pace with demand.29 First impressions suggested that England’s author had stuck to best business practice with this latest literary offering. 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXX, 31 December 1926. Ibid., cf. W. R. Inge, Diary of a Dean: St Paul’s, 1911–1934 (London, 1949), p. 14; entry for 20 September 1926. Later sales proved less spectacular; see Fox, Inge, pp. 190–1; also Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, p. 138. Fox, Inge, p. 191. England was still a bestseller, by any calculation. William Ralph Inge, England, new and rev. edn (London, 1933); Fox, Inge, p. 191. William Ralph Inge, England, rev. edn. (London, 1953). MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXX, 31 December 1927; Matthew Grimley, ‘Inge, William Ralph’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xxix (Oxford, 2004), pp. 241–3, at p. 243. Inge left £98,198 4s 9d at his death. To plagiarise the late Lord Clark: ‘that was quite a lot of money in those days’. See Fox, Inge, chs. 13 and 16 for a general account of his earlier success. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXX, 13–19 August 1926. Ibid., vol. XXIX, 8 March 1924. Inge, Vale, p. 83 refers to total sales of 70,000 copies by 1934.

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Certainly, its chapters gave every appearance of furnishing the public with more of what they wanted, so much so that it is hard to escape the conclusion that much of England’s appeal lay in Inge’s shameless repetition of what had by then become long familiar arguments. Pessimistic prognostications that had for a decade made ‘the gloomy Dean’ notorious were here laid out for inspection once more: about the rise of the ‘Yellow Peril’ and the end of European predominance; concerning the progress of the United States ‘to the centre of world . . . commerce’ and the decline of the British Empire; even on the spectre of over-population, still worse of demographic degeneration, implied in the distressing tendency of the stupid to breed faster than the smart.30 That was the uncontroversial stuff. Those avowedly partisan polemics which had increasingly come to mark the Dean’s writings, sometimes rendering him the archetypical reactionary of progressive distaste, were no less prominently present too. Page after page of England gave vent to Inge’s righteous rage against what he called the monstrous creed of ‘syndicalist socialism’ and ‘the systematic sabotage’ it now wrought across civilised society generally, and British democracy in particular. Chapter and verse proclaimed an old patriot’s fear of recently ‘politicalised trade unions’, berating above all the ‘novel enormity’ entailed in their ‘conscious . . . antagonism . . . to the rest of the community’. Finally, a wealth of accumulated statistics confirmed at least one concerned citizen’s alarm at what had of late become a ‘large class’ of the ‘submerged’. Here was a ‘dangerous . . . deadweight on society’, all too easily measured in the ‘doles and pensions’ exacted from the ratepayers to support them.31 Only one touchstone, it seemed, was missing. Though it promised his readers an informed examination of ‘the present condition and future prosperity’ of organised religion in Great Britain, Inge’s account contained little systematic treatment of either issue. Even its central chapter, ostensibly devoted to detailed consideration of ‘the Soul of England’, concentrated for the most part on those secular aspects of ‘national character’ that had alternatively attracted or appalled foreign commentators on the contemporary English scene. Boutmy and Chevrillon, similarly Stoddard and Santayana, had recently covered much of the same ground.32 30

31 32

Inge, England, pp. ix–xi and chs. 3 and 4, passim. The obvious parallels with Spengler’s Decline of the West were openly acknowledged there, though Inge claimed not to have read that work until finishing his own; see p. ix. Inge, England, pp. 209ff. and 250ff. This proved the most controversial aspect of the book, particularly among Churchmen; see n. 17 above; also Inge, Vale, p. 90. Inge, England, ch. 2; see esp. pp. 41–2, 66ff., 72–7 and 87; also 185 and 267. The ´ principal works in question were: Emile Boutmy, The English People: a Study of Their ´ Political Psychology, trans. E. English (London, 1904); André Chevrillon, Etudes anglaises


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To their more extended observations Inge added a few, unapologetically engaged, remarks of his own: alternatively about Albion’s historic honesty, fair-mindedness and stoicism or concerning its equally longstanding reputation for idleness, gluttony and hypocrisy. Warming to the same theme, Inge’s critics, both hostile and friendly, threw in their interpretative penny’s worth too.33 Few reviewers paid much attention to those cursory observations they could find about England’s innate and altering sacred sensibilities, scattered throughout the text.34 Eighty years on, fewer still pay much heed either to England or its author, tout court. Perhaps this should not altogether surprise us. The reckless futurologist who predicted that ‘a hundred years hence England will once more be predominantly agricultural, with a smaller population than at present’ had long ago forfeited any serious claim to be a demographic or economic seer.35 And the ‘enlightened sociologist’ (his words) who so openly advocated mass sterilisation as the best way to deal with ‘invalids, [the] feeble-minded, the vicious and criminal[, indeed] all [those] who, for one cause or another, cannot or will not make good’ similarly repelled the bitterly informed consciences of a post-Nazi era.36 In truth, the outlandishness of so many of Inge’s scientific, social and political ideas ensured that neglect of his counsel followed almost immediately in the wake of his greatest fame. He wielded little demonstrable influence after retiring from St Paul’s, in 1934.37 By the time of his death, twenty years later, he was virtually a forgotten figure.38 Today, his name is invoked only as the emblematic case of interwar reactionary sensibilities. Some regard him as a rebarbative Tory or nostalgic ‘Little Englander’, in unattractive anticipation of Arthur Bryant. Others concentrate on his ill-tempered opposition to the progressive clerical conscience of the day, characterising him as Bishop Henson’s bulldog, locked in a forlorn struggle against the modernisation of Anglican attitudes after 1918.39 So low has his reputation sunk that even otherwise impeccably

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

(Paris, 1922); Lothrop Stoddard, Social Classes in Post-War Europe (London, 1925) and George Santayana, Soliloquies in England (London, 1918). Inge, England, ch. 2, passim; on which see the reviews cited in n. 11 and 15–18 above. Indeed, none of the reviews cited above, in nn. 11, 15–18 and 33, so much as mentioned the religious question; given what follows, this may now seem extraordinary. Inge, England, p. 280. W. R. Inge, ‘How Civilisations Die’, The Spectator, 132, no. 5002, 18 May 1924, 747–8. Inge, Vale, pp. 112ff. where Inge anticipated such a fate; Fox, Inge, pt III describes it in detail. Fox, Inge, ch. 20, esp. pp. 261ff. On the parallels between Inge and Bryant, see Julia Stapleton, Sir Arthur Bryant and National History in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford, 2005), pp. 71–2 and 112. For another account of Bryant, see Reba Soffer, History, Historians and Conservatism in Britain and America: from the Great War to Thatcher and Reagan (Oxford, 2008), ch. 4.

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recalcitrant authorities – think of Maurice Cowling – maintain careful critical distance from one whose claim to serious attention now seems drastically denuded.40 But where posterity condescends, it also invariably errs.41 It has surely done so again in this case. For the prevailing image of Inge is a caricature at best, perniciously false at worst. No curious researches are required to establish that the Dean was famous in his own day more for his determinedly liberal churchmanship than for a supposedly regressive politics.42 Even his secular conservatism turns out on close examination to have been rather complex. England was commissioned by an Asquithian Liberal, one who, like Inge, moved in Reginald McKenna’s political circles. They thought of the Dean as an ‘old Whig’. No one who truly knew him ever called Inge a Tory.43 He became a Conservative voter only from 1924 onwards. Even then, he much admired Ramsay MacDonald, calling him ‘an extremely astute man . . . more like Gladstone than anyone we have had lately’.44 At an absolute minimum, Inge’s reputation requires some rethinking. Many of his daily expostulations, so disturbing to delicate modern sensibilities, take on a different hue when judged in historical context. Eugenics was then the preferred social science of the progressive intelligentsia.45 Fears of widespread deindustrialisation were shared with men like Keynes.46 Concerns about

40

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44 45

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On Inge’s often strained relationship with Henson, see Owen Chadwick, Hensley Henson: a Study in the Friction between Church and State (Oxford, 1982), pp. 109, 127, 137ff., 149–50, 165, 217, 225, 270, 279, 297, 299 and 309. More generally see Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 7–16 and 128–39. Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, vol. III: Accommodations (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 192–202. One, at least partial, exception to this rule is Keith Robbins. See his England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: the Christian Church, 1900–2000 (Oxford, 2008), esp. at pp. 163–6. As famously observed in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. xi, but not just about the labouring classes. Fox, Inge, ch. 5 furnishes a short account; Inge, Vale, pp. 7–23, 55–63 and 105–10, an exegesis and a justification. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXIX, 20 June 1923: ‘McKenna asked me what I called myself as a politician. I said “I don’t know. I am always on the cross-benches”. He said “I know what you are”. What? “The Last Whig”. Yes.’ So, indeed, he had described himself during a slightly earlier correspondence with Temple; see F. A. Iremonger, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: his Life and Letters (Oxford, 1948), p. 322. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXIX, 21 March 1924. Lyndsay Farrell, The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement, 1865–1925 (New York, 1985); G. R. Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain 1900–1914 (Leyden, 1976); Donald Mackenzie, ‘Eugenics in Britain’, Social Studies of Science, 6 (1976), 499–532. Many other works might be cited. As these were expressed, above all, in J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London 1919); J. M. Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. II: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 1–2 and ch. 2.


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welfare abuse reached into most enlightened ministerial circles of the age.47 More importantly, to do justice to the full range of Inge’s postwar political persuasions is also to reveal critical aspects of his thought now almost entirely neglected but of lasting intellectual value. These were rarely those for which he otherwise became famous. Inge was an amateur exponent of ‘hard science’. He added nothing to Galton’s legacy, still less to Pearson’s contemporary findings. Mutatis mutandis, the draconian sociology he professed was altogether more rigorously advocated by Blacker.48 Judged as a theologian, he was a relatively minor figure. But Inge was a contemporary historian, and also cultural critic, of genius. Concerning those things that he really knew, namely the transformative forces at work on the English religious mind during the early years of the twentieth century, he left work of truly prophetic quality. Much of its potential impact was lost on his peers. Even its most basic content has been largely ignored during the years since his death. Yet its prescience and force make it worthy of subsequent reconstruction. What follows is an attempt to piece both back together again. In that way it is hoped to render explicit the social, cultural and indeed moral history that underlay Inge’s understanding of the ‘present condition and future prospects of organised religion’ in England during the first third of the twentieth century.49 By the same means, it is also hoped to demonstrate just how closely Inge’s thoughts on these grave matters both informed his activities and marked the national debate during the crucial decade after 1918.50 Finally, it is hoped to determine just how effectively Inge exploited his moment of fame; specifically, to evaluate both the content and the consequences of what he said during the years in which he exerted an unprecedented and unrepeated influence over those aspects of English life that concerned him most.51 England, rightly read, stands at the centre of this enterprise. But it cannot stand alone. This is not least because it was never meant to 47

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49 50

51

For the especially poignant example of Neville Chamberlain – simultaneously progressive and penny-pinching – see Robert Self, Neville Chamberlain: a Biography (Aldershot, 2006), ch. 6. Inge, Vale, pp. 74ff., Mackenzie, ‘Eugenics in Britain’; and, more generally, Adrian Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c. 1860–1990 (Cambridge, 1994), esp. pp. 263–70. Inge, England, p. 76; Inge’s own promise to do so, ‘in a later chapter’, was never really fulfilled. Above all in William Ralph Inge, ‘Our Present Discontents’, William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays (First Series) (London, 1919), ch. 1. This essay was first published in August 1919; see also Fox, Inge, chs. 12 and 13. Fox, Inge, ch. 16 describes this period of his life with real sympathy. See ibid., p. 211, for the notion of an identifiable ‘break’, in 1927.

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do so. Inge wrote ceaselessly. Perhaps as a result, he not only repeated himself but also changed his mind. Sometimes he simply contradicted himself. More commonly, he demonstrated the effect of a coherent mind in subtle transformation. He became ever less the gnomic seer, ever more a shrewd observer of contemporary social change. He also assumed in all of those later writings an acquaintance with his earlier works. This was no mere arrogance. By and large, the presumption was justified. Few who ever read him turned to, or from, his writings just once. In this way, Inge not only created an audience that reacted to him but one to which he, increasingly, responded. To that degree, he became, if not the victim of his own success, then a writer necessarily cast in an ever more intricate negotiation with his own reputation. So analysis of England must be supplemented by similar study, both of his other major publications, also of the various and voluminous journalism, and of the still more frequent sermons, talks and other addresses that he delivered throughout the 1920s.52 There is something else. A proper understanding of Inge’s public utterances can only be achieved through a careful evaluation of the private considerations that informed them. These are easily identified. Yet they have, for the most part, remained curiously neglected. Inge published only an abridged and anodyne version of his Diary during his lifetime. The unexpurgated original constitutes a largely unexplored treasure-trove of modern ecclesiastical, political and even intellectual history: scarcely less, a vital key to an understanding of the hidden hopes and fears of one of its most preeminent contemporary interpreters. It will be extensively exploited here.53 I England represented the most intellectually significant intervention on matters of vital national importance yet attempted by a scholar and critic then at ‘the very height’ both of his ‘popular . . . reputation’ and ‘public . . . influence’. This was a very commanding height in 1926. That was Inge’s own view, recorded in his private journal at the end of 1924.54 It was also a general impression confirmed by the ‘celebrity . . . treatment’ 52 53

54

Ibid., ch. 16, passim. Inge, Diary of a Dean. For those reasons, I have made only occasional use of this source. The full, unexpurgated Diary (to which I have made frequent recourse) is made up of 38 volumes, ranging from pocket books to eleven bound octavo volumes (1917–43). It is located in the Old Library of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Quite why it is there is less clear, though Inge was a friend of three successive Masters of Magdalene (Donaldson, Benson and Ramsay) and his son Richard was an undergraduate at the college (1934– 37). Inge himself neither attended nor held any official position at Magdalene. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXIX, 26–31 December 1924.


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that he received – comparable, he believed, to that which had been supplied to ‘Shaw [and] Kipling’ – on a lecture tour of the United States, the following year.55 Definitive proof, if any were still needed, was furnished by Prime Minister Baldwin’s flattering reference to England, made while speaking at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet during the weeks immediately following its publication.56 A few intellectual minions, like R. Ellis Roberts, still belittled him as no more than a ‘lesser Victorian’, or just a ‘gloomy . . . W. S. Gilbert’.57 But great contemporaries happily recognised a fellow colossus. None more so, in fact, than Shaw himself, who openly celebrated: ‘our most extraordinary . . . Churchman, our most extraordinary thinker, our most extraordinary man, as complete a free-thinker as Mr H. G. Wells, Mr Gilbert Chesterton and myself’.58 Nor was this high opinion then confined to the elderly and established. Invited to speak at a dinner given by the Poetry Circle of the Lycaeum Club (London) in November 1920, a young T. S. Eliot confessed himself flattered to have been included among ‘lions of various sizes, from Dean Inge to Edith Sitwell and myself’.59 Scholar of Eton and King’s, Cambridge, Inge had been widely acknowledged as a brilliant young man from the early 1880s. His academic reputation was established with the Bampton Lectures on Christian Mysticism, delivered in 1899. The long-awaited study of the Philosophy of Plotinus was hailed as a major work on its publication, in 1918.60 This great contribution to learning secured him a ‘long coveted’ fellowship of the British Academy in 1921.61 In between times, Inge served as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge between 1907 and 1911. He was subsequently offered, only to decline, Regius Chairs in the same subject at both of the ancient universities.62 No less haughtily, he also turned down the post of Principal of Hertford College, Oxford, where many years earlier he had lived as a tutorial fellow. This was because he was repelled by the ‘small . . . and wretched’ accommodation that impoverished society then offered prospective leaders of their equally 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Ibid., 2–9 May 1925. Ibid., vol. XXX, 9 November 1926. Not long after the publication of his own, related, volume; this, however, makes no mention of Inge. R. Ellis Roberts, ‘He is an Englishman’, p. 717. Bernard Shaw, ‘Our Great Dean’, Everyman, 22 November 1919. More generally, see Fox, Inge, pp. 119ff. T. S. Eliot to Sydney Schiff, 30 November 1920, reprinted in Valerie Eliot (ed.), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. I: 1898–1922 (New York, 1983), pp. 422–3. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXVII, 31 December 1918; Inge, Vale, pp. 47–55. On its genesis, see Fox, Inge, pp. 133–8. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXVIII, 17 March 1921: ‘I have been elected FBA [, a] distinction which I have long coveted.’ Fox, Inge, ch. 10 and pp. 180ff.

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unaugust house.63 Students of dramatic irony may still have reason to regret this decision. One of his first charges would have been a young Evelyn Waugh.64 More remarkable was Inge’s subsequent career as a cultural critic. After 1911, down to his retirement from St Paul’s in 1934, he became one of the leading arbiters of the nation’s moral intelligence. Retrospective prejudice suggests that being dean must have helped. As a matter of fact the purely ecclesiastical dimensions of that role attested more to Inge’s peripherality in the religious politics of the age – a marginality he both acknowledged and resented – than to the ostensible centrality of its position within the contemporary church.65 Dean Inge he may have been. But ‘our last . . . great Protestant’, as Shaw called him (albeit by way of backhanded compliment), was a distinctly heterodox Anglican. He held even that office only by way of an old Congregationalist’s calculated efforts in institutional mischief-making.66 Asquith’s ambiguous generosity quickly proved a double-edged sword for an uncommonly scholarly churchman. Inge maintained unusually progressive theological opinions. He was also a clever man with no tolerance for fools. The little experience he ever gained as parish priest left him with a generally ‘low opinion’ of ‘my clerical brethren’. For good measure, it also furnished him with a still lower estimate of those invariably ‘bigoted . . . laymen’ they spent so much of their time serving.67 Such feelings were often reciprocated. So much mutual disregard wrought profound professional consequences. The deanship of St Paul’s was the only position of authority William Inge ever held within the Church.68 So controversial a public persona also made for many unhappy personal relationships. Certainly, 63 64

65

66

67

68

MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXVIII, 7 April 1922. Waugh’s experiences at Hertford – notably his conflict with his history tutor, C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, are recorded for posterity in E. Waugh, A Little Learning (London, 1964), ch. 8. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXVII, 31 December 1918; ibid., vol. XXVIII, 31 December 1919; ibid., [n.d.] August 1920; ibid., 27–31 December 1921; ibid., 28–31 December 1922; in other words, an almost annual complaint during the years immediately after the war. Shaw, ‘Our Great Dean’; Inge, Vale, p. 67, refers to his appointment as a ‘staggering surprise’. It surprised Henson too; see Chadwick, Henson, p. 109. But for Asquith’s high opinion of Inge, which happily survived the England controversy, see the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections, 1852–1927, vol. I (London, 1928), p. 233. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXVIII, 25 November 1920, among many other references. See vol. XXVIII, [n.d.] July 1920, for his contrasting opinion of the dissenting clergy. In fairness, he had Lord Hugh Cecil, in particular, in mind on this occasion. Inge’s vicariate occupies four lines of his autobiography, Vale, on p. 46. For a slightly fuller analysis, see Fox, Inge, ch. 9. Ibid., vol. XXIX, 20 December and 25–31 December 1923: ‘I am now reconciled to [remaining] in the Deanery. Mrs Inge always loved it.’ See Inge, Vale, p. 134.


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Inge was the object of more than the usual quotient of ad hominem abuse then common among senior figures in the Anglican establishment. More remarkably still, much of that vitriol emanated not just from AngloCatholic enemies, but also on occasion from evangelical friends among his own, ordained and irregular, colleagues.69 So wide a circle of important adversaries also left Inge largely ‘out of the swing’ of clerical influence after 1918. This often made him ‘despair of the Church of England’. But Inge was shrewd enough to appreciate that the very institutional peripherality which made his official position so difficult – at times indeed ‘almost intolerable’ – paradoxically enhanced his ‘influence amongst educated folk generally, without regard to denomination’.70 Unbelievers and the uncommitted alike responded positively to his self-consciously learned liberal apologetics, whether about the existence of heaven and hell, or the immorality of predestination and divine punishment. Nonconformists and ecumenicalists were agreeably disposed towards his ingenuous advocacy of greater Christian cooperation, more particularly to his many practical proposals to facilitate greater interdenominational accommodation between Anglicans and dissenters. As a result Inge was a regular invitee on various lay and dissenting platforms both before and after the war. In the same way he gained easy access to many, otherwise inaccessible, organs of opinion.71 In 1920 he addressed the Wesleyan Conference on the subject of ‘re-union’.72 The following year, he preached at Putney Presbyterian Church on ‘the Holy Spirit’.73 All of this made him a remarkable churchman. But it did not in itself ensure his standing as a significant public figure. Pontificating from the ‘pulpit of St Paul’s’ no longer commanded the sort of national attention that it had ‘in the days of Donne, or even in the days of Church’. By the 1920s, the voice of the Dean, qua dean, no longer reached ‘the ears of all or most of our intelligent people’.74 Inge knew that if he wished to do just that, he needed access to another, preferably secular, medium of public communication. This was the instrument of popular journalism.

69 70

71 73 74

Fox, Inge, pp. 116–17, 129–30, 142ff., 190–1, 201–3 and 213–14, furnishes some examples. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, [n.d.] August 1920. A position susceptible to double-edged compliments; see T. J. P., ‘Dean of St Paul’s Essays’, The Church Family News, 31 October 1919: ‘The Dean of St Paul’s occupies a place by himself in the ecclesiastical, theological and literary life of the day.’ 72 MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXVIII, [n.d.] July 1920. Fox, Inge, pp. 125ff. Ibid., 2 November 1921. Anon., ‘England and Dr Inge’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 1285, 16 September 1926, 603.

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Little more than an occasional dabbler in this medium before the outbreak of the war, Inge turned himself into a prolific practitioner of Fleet Street’s subtlest arts during the years after 1918.75 In quick succession, he became a regular columnist: first for the Sunday Express (from 1919), then the Evening Standard (1921) and finally, the Morning Post (1924).76 His was not a unique experience. Those years marked a high point for the so-called ‘feature’ writer in English journalism. As often as not, these men were ‘brought in from the outside’. But even in the judgement of many otherwise sceptical of his intentions, Inge quickly succeeded in becoming ‘one of the first living masters’ of that compromising craft. This was to have fateful effects during the years that followed.77 Journalism made Inge rich. It also made him famous. Finally, it pointed to the possibility of an influence otherwise denied him. There was a price to be paid. Enemies were generally just envious. But friends were more ambivalent about this new aspect of the Dean’s life. Some suggested that such labour was really ‘rather infra dig’.78 He occasionally concurred. When the Standard was taken over by ‘HarmsworthBeaverbrook Management’ in 1923, Inge briefly considered ‘giv[ing] up writing’ for what he believed would inevitably become a ‘rather low paper’.79 But such principle proved flexible. The money was ‘uncommonly good’.80 And proprietors generally bent to him, not he to them. This was because Inge came to journalism as a successful author. In the wake of the first series of Outspoken Essays, he was positively ‘besieged with requests for articles’.81 Their prolific publication over the next twenty years enabled him to treat the press largely on his own terms. During the years of his pomp, Raymond Thompson, of the Evening Standard, guaranteed Inge ‘a perfectly free hand’, H. A. Gwynne, at the Morning Post, something not far short.82 The result, contrary both to fear and expectation, was a torrent of ‘light and witty . . . pieces’, running with a few interruptions down to the end of the Second World War.83 It was also an exercise in deadly serious social and political propaganda. Popular journalism not only increased the size of Inge’s audience. It also extended the range of persuasive possibilities. This might have 75 76 77

78 79 81 83

Fox, Inge, ch. 17, passim, for a balanced account of the origins, course and significance of this phase in Inge’s life. Ibid., pp. 195–7, for the sequence of events. Anon., ‘England and Dr Inge’, p. 603; Fox, Inge, ch. 17. On the broader phenomenon, see the (all too well-informed) observations of A. J. P. Taylor in English History, 1914– 1945 (Oxford, 1965), at p. 235. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXVIII, 11 March 1921. 80 Ibid., vol. XXVIII, 11 March 1921. Ibid., vol. XXIX, 28 May 1924. 82 Ibid., vol. XXIX, 28 May 1923. Ibid., vol. XXVII, 31 December 1919. Inge, Vale, pp. 85–90. Early attempts to retire are recorded in Fox, Inge at p. 209; also subsequent recidivism noted from p. 239.


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proved corrupting. Yet Inge tried hard not to abuse his new position. He exercised a restraint often lost on ‘unwise brethren’ (not infrequently, his clerical critics) by contriving, even after 1918, to distinguish sharply between subjects appropriate and issues impertinent for ‘a preacher . . . in a pulpit’.84 That self-denying ordinance kept his sermons strictly to matters spiritual. He told his countrymen what he thought about ‘parties and politics’ only with his ‘pen’, never by ‘voice’.85 But this injunction did not run the other way. Inge saw no good reason why it should. Accordingly, his ‘writing for the masses’ touched upon questions sacred as well as profane, both easily and often. Indeed, his first series of articles for the Evening Standard was dedicated to the exposition, defence and propagation of liberal theology within the Church of England.86 For all that, the real point of such effort was the ‘pursuit . . . of influence’, both ecclesiastical and lay.87 From the very moment that he discerned, in the critical and commercial successes of Outspoken Essays, that ‘he had the public ear’, Inge sought every morally defensible means of pushing his new-found intellectual advantage home. Discerning, somewhat to his surprise, that ‘the public is coming round to my way of thinking’, he accepted an unprecedented number of speaking invitations at the same time.88 These took him far and wide across the land. He often processed in triumph. He was particularly pleased by his return to Oxford in October 1920, nearly twenty years after effectively being ‘banned . . . from its pulpit’.89 No less comforting was the fact that ‘not any empty seat could be found either on the floor or in the galleries of St Mary’s Church that day’.90 Just occasionally, he set forth in trepidation. He would scarcely have been human not to have felt a little anxious before addressing Wigan’s Educational Society – this on the topic of ‘English literature and education’ – in the wake of the ‘continuing . . . coal dispute’, and within weeks of England’s controversial commentary on the General Strike.91 Yet, in the event, ‘an astonishing crowd, quite some two thousand’, turned up to hear him speak. Many more ‘had to be turned away’.92 Above all, Dean Inge wrote a regular column. Calculating reason convinced him that his opportunity to influence the public mind could best 84 85 86 87 89 90 92

Anon., ‘England and Dr Inge’, p. 603. Ibid., Inge, Vale, pp. 85–6; see also Inge’s pointed remarks in England, p. 191. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXVIII, 4 September 1921. Inge, Vale, p. 86. 88 MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXVII, 16 December 1919. Inge, Vale, p. 85. Ibid., vol. XXVIII, 31 October 1920: ‘No doubt Scott Holland kept me out when he was Regius Professor.’ Fox, Inge, p. 180, concurs (if less definitively). 91 Ibid., vol. XXX, 4 October 1926. Ibid., vol. XXVIII, 31 October 1920. Ibid., cf. Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 120ff., which sets out what has come to be the conventional view of Inge’s strident opposition to the strikers. Perhaps that orthodoxy is now in need of some sort of revision.

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be exploited in this way. That demanded frequent written publications in addition to continued public appearances. The fact of the matter, itself a reflection of profound if unacknowledged social change, was that ‘the press [had] by now to a large extent taken the place of the pulpit platform as a popular educator’. The Evening Standard promised him an audience of some 400,000 readers every week.93 Even his books did not reach that far. A readership so large suggested to Inge the possibility of significantly affecting the course of contemporary social development. Hence his continual references to – indeed the fundamental justification of – an author in search ‘of a very large public’; similarly, about a critic ‘whose public esteem . . . was advancing by the year’; even concerning a polemicist cheered by ‘abundant evidence that I am exercising more influence than ever before’, that fill his diary after 1921.94 Such self-puffery reflected a certain vanity. But it did not amount to self-deception. There really was such evidence, in fact rather a lot of it. The ire of his adversaries constituted quite sufficient proof at the time.95 But it begs some deeper questions: ‘influence’ to what end? More specifically, what was Inge saying? And to whom? Finally, with how much effect?

II The ‘gloomy Dean’ famously believed himself to be living through an ‘age of disintegration’. Whether he traced the origins of that melancholy era back to the Golden Jubilee or vouchsafed for its malevolent influence only from the years immediately following the death of Queen Victoria, is less important than his certainty that a fundamental faultline, what he called a breakdown in the ‘dynamics . . . of civilisation’, long preceded European hostilities in 1914.96 No less clear was his insistence that this deformation described a process which, while fully comprehending the contemporary fate of British civilisation, was not limited to indigenous degeneration alone. To the contrary. To appreciate what ‘the age of disintegration’ truly meant was to understand just how generally and swiftly ‘five generations of population growth, industrial revolution and 93

94 95 96

Ibid., vol. XXIX, 27 February 1925. A point particularly impressed upon Inge by McKenna, this as a reason for maintaining his column in what was otherwise ‘a vulgar little paper’. Ibid., vol. XXVIII, 27–31 December 1921; 7 April 1922, 28–31 December 1922; Fox, Inge, ch. 16, passim. Inge, Vale, pp. 86–7. Fox, Inge, pp. 200–4. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXVII, 31 December 1919; anon., ‘The Spirit of the Age: Striking Speech by the Dean of St Paul’s’, Yorkshire Post, 18 October 1913; Inge, ‘Our Present Discontents’, p. 26. Inge, England, pp. 158ff.


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enhanced overall living standards’ might be about ‘to come to an end’.97 Minimally, it was to acknowledge that there was no reason – indeed, only irrational superstition continued to foster the conviction – that such beneficent complication of the human condition would simply go on, indefinitely, into the future. There was, in fact, a high probability that it could not be sustained for much longer, not in England, or anywhere else either.98 In a broader sweep, it was to envisage a process of disintegration that comprehended nothing less than the combined effects of a crisis of capitalism, the collapse of democracy and widespread criticism of religion, throughout the advanced world. The United States might temporarily seem secure, but it would soon inevitably plunge into the same abyss. How the Wall Street crash must secretly have pleased him.99 For all that, Inge’s overriding concerns were local. The traditionalist in him might sincerely deplore the Russian Revolution. The romantic he remained openly mourned the passing of the central European empires after 1918.100 But he was a patriot above all else.101 It was the plight of England that disturbed him most. That he chose to paint its contemporary agony with such a broad brush perhaps explains the extent of his appeal. The critic of individualism found otherwise curious favour among Fabians.102 An implacable opponent of franchise reforms appealed at least to the private sensibilities of Lloyd George.103 Any good Tory could respond to a cry of the ‘Church in Danger’.104 But it also points to the limit of his persuasiveness. For Inge not only frightened the conventional, he also alienated the polite and he confounded the optimistic. Moreover, he did so with varying degrees of success. Describing the ‘crisis 97 98 99 100 101

102

103

104

Inge, England, p. 161. See also his Assessments and Anticipations (London, 1929), p. 183. For a recent commentary, see Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. 178–80. Inge, ‘Our Present Discontents’, pp. 24–5. Inge, England, p. 123; for his long-term view, see ibid., p. 277. On Inge’s visits to the United States, see Fox, Inge, pp. 87–9 and 186–8, finally p. 204. Inge, Outspoken Essays (First Series), pp. vii–viii; Inge, ‘Our Present Discontents’, p. 4. Inge, England, pp. viii–ix and p. 290: ‘never . . . have I been tempted to wish that I was other than an Englishman’. Hence the lesser W. S. Gilbert? Reflecting the sentiments expressed in HMS Pinafore? See nn. 17 and 57 above. Bernard Shaw, ‘Our Great Dean’: ‘he is Malthus . . . modernised . . . against individualism [and] democracy’. More broadly, note the fellow-feeling described in Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation (New York, 1969), p. ix. This book was originally published in 1923. On Lloyd George’s low opinion of the post-1918 electorate, see Violet Bonham-Carter, ‘Diary’, late November to early December 1923, in Mark Pottle (ed.), Champion Redoubtable: the Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1914–1915 (London, 1998), p. 156: ‘It’s a new electorate, very different to [sic] that of 1906, much less educated.’ Though for Inge’s notably restrained response to the Prayer Book Controversy of 1927– 8, see Fox, Inge, pp. 213–18.

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of capitalism’ in his time, he often worked from strikingly simple assumptions. Much of his economic pessimism was rooted in an unwarranted conviction about the imminent exhaustion of coal (and, to a lesser extent, iron ore). By the same token, most of the chapter on ‘industrialism’ in England was actually devoted to the population question, that is, the differential rates of fertility between the classes, which preoccupied social commentators otherwise more sanguine than Inge.105 For all that, his most important arguments were rooted in an early identification of what later became known as the revolution of rising expectations. In his own words: ‘it [has] become more and more difficult to earn enough to pay for the comfort and amusements which the worker expects, especially as he demands a shorter working day in order to enjoy his improved condition’. These thoughts exercised even the most impeccably well-informed economists of the time.106 Inge’s critique of democracy was fundamental to his analysis of disintegration. Yet here again, his political emphases were more subtle than a superficial reading of his immediately postwar writings might first suggest. At one level his objection to democracy as a form of government was absolute and unbending. It was grounded in the simple assertion of varying human aptitudes. This proved, to his own satisfaction, that any presumed ‘equal capacity for government’ was a self-evident nonsense.107 It was a view that scarcely marked him out from most of his peers, whether Liberal or Conservative. But Inge’s understanding of the pathology of democracy also reflected a more carefully considered view of the dynamics of democracy’s modern, social dispensation. In this way of thinking, English parliamentary democracy as it had actually evolved post-1918 reflected a still profounder change in prevailing indigenous social relations, pointing to a transformation of order and attitudes better grasped through Tocqueville’s description of ‘equality of conditions’.108 Inge’s critique of democracy, properly understood, read altogether more like the pessimistic political analysis of mass society that German sociology had laid out long before him. This explains his insistence 105 106 107

108

Inge, England, pp. 196ff.; cf. Inge, Outspoken Essays (First Series), Preface to the Second Edition, pp. viiiff. Inge, England, p. 219; Keynes, Economic Consequences, ch. 6. Inge, England, p. 248; and at greater length, Inge, ‘Our Present Discontents’, pp. 7– 13; also Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 128–39, for a recent commentary. Inge, ‘Our Present Discontents’, p. 11. On ‘equality of conditions’, see Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, 2000), pp. 3, 6–7, 12–13, 267, 276, 292, 272, 480, 483–4, 503, 508, 535–9, 545, 564–76, 607–8, 610–11, 615, 618, 666, 707.


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that ‘modern democracy’, in destroying ‘natural hierarchies’, had created ‘unnoticed agglomerations of human beings’. It also underlies his description of the same as a ‘disintegrating force’ that ‘dissolves communities into individuals and collects them again into mobs’.109 Finally, it points to his conception of how those very social processes, manifestly capable of producing obvious chaos on the Continent, had surreptitiously engendered similar disharmony in England. The mistake was somehow to believe that England had escaped Europe’s agony just because there had been –to date – no similar revolutions here: ‘[i]t [was] certain that as soon as the labouring classes obtained the franchise . . . the whole industrial system [would] begin to totter’. So only a fool could have failed to foresee how the 1918 Representation of the People Act would ferment a ‘new discontented and dangerous class, imbued with the notion that material comfort is all that matters in life, and that they themselves are unjustly deprived of it’.110 From which subsequent social unrest had flowed. But what kind of social unrest? And with what effect? Contemporary critics generally concerned themselves most with the validity or otherwise of Inge’s economic pessimism.111 Subsequent historians have invariably excoriated his more obviously anti-democratic sentiments.112 Few – then or since – have taken much notice of the sociology of religion that underlay his arguments about ‘the trial of the churches in post-war England’.113 As a 109 110 111

112 113

Inge, England, p. 248; and, at greater length, Inge, ‘Our Present Discontents’, p. 11. Inge, England, p. 219. A view traceable to lectures given as early as 1911 and subsequently published in The Church and the Age. These gained Inge a life-long epithet, ‘The Gloomy Dean’. In truth, they were directed at matters far beyond the purely economic, and he quite specifically repudiated the charge of pessimism; see Fox, Inge, pp. 121–3. There is now a major history of interwar English economic, social and even psychological pessimism. See Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London, 2009). Professor Overy’s account, interestingly, makes relatively few references to Inge. His contemporary significance is simply noted, largely in passing, on pp. 16, 48, 106, 133, 166, 205, 336, 345 and 347 of this book. Other figures, such as C. P. Blacker, Cyril Burt, Lord Robert Cecil, Sigmund Freud, Edward Grover, J. A. Hobson, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, Ernest Jones, Sir Arthur Keith, John Maynard Keynes, Kingsley Martin, Gilbert Murray, Philip Noel-Baker, Canon Hugh Sheppard, the Webbs, H. G. Wells and the Woolfs loom much larger. This might be thought to be rather an eccentric decision, given Inge’s contemporary (and subsequent) reputation. But the analysis offered below suggests that Professor Overy’s neglect may be well placed. Interwar English pessimism drew little from Inge’s earlier inspiration. And his views developed quite separately (and rather differently) from what might be called its intellectual mainstream; as will be seen below. Above all, Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 129–30. W. R. Inge, ‘The Social Message of the Modern Church’, Yale Review, new series, 15, 1926, 726–45; at 226: ‘The Churches are on . . . trial.’ Even Cowling is oddly silent about this in Religion and Public Doctrine, vol. III, pp. 192–202.

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result, most readers then and since have missed a crucial aspect of his social analysis as it evolved during the decade after 1918, not least, the fact that it did evolve. For if Inge was a critic of democracy, he was never an anti-democratic reactionary. He understood much better than all of that ilk the kinds of social changes that had produced modern parliamentary democracy in England. This made him a tempered critic of the regime, doctrinally opposed to, but pragmatically engaged with, this new and dangerous form of political life. As the years passed his theoretical opposition faded more into practical engagement with what English democracy actually wrought. By 1926 he was largely reconciled to what Baldwin and others had made out of England’s emerging dispensation. The superficial tone of England differs markedly from the Prime Minister’s parallel reflections. But the substantive content is strikingly similar. England also diverges from Inge’s early prognostications. Outspoken Essays were all but apocalyptic in their implications. England is scarcely soothing. But it is balanced. This difference matters.114 It matters first because England defined the fundamental problem of industrialism as ‘the population question’. This question Inge now took at least to be theoretically soluble, as, indeed, a question being addressed at that very moment, by new methods of birth control.115 It matters secondly because this later work presumed that the ‘problem of democracy’ might also be managed in Baldwin’s England. English democracy did not have to lead to socialism, or even to secularism. This was the reason why Inge eschewed Henson’s desperate tactic of disestablishment as the only means of protecting a vulnerable church from the inevitable depredations of future Labour governments.116 It matters finally because it shows how the caricature class warrior of earlier expostulations was sufficiently placated by the victory of what he understood to be ‘national’ over ‘sectional’ interests during the General Strike to be able to acknowledge that the working man had in the past perhaps ‘received less than his due’; similarly, to denounce the ‘unpatriotic manner’ in which the ‘new rich’ too often spent their money. This was why Inge was able to insist – against Santayana – that there remained, in Baldwin’s England anyway, at least sufficient recognition of an ‘underlying community’, one with real 114 115 116

Cf. Jones and Bentley, ‘Salisbury and Baldwin’, pp. 34–8; Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 130–4. W. R. Inge, ‘The Population Question’, The Spectator, 132, no. 4990, 16 February 1924, 239–40. Inge, England, pp. 199ff. Herbert Hensley Henson, Disestablishment: the Charge Delivered at the Second Quadrennial Visitation of his Diocese, together with an Introduction (London, 1929); see esp. pp. 3–6; and for the ‘concealed motive’, see Chadwick, Henson, pp. 203–4; cf. Inge, Diary of a Dean, p. 139; entry for 22–4 June 1929: ‘In my opinion the cry for disestablishment is dying down.’


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‘reciprocal obligations’, cutting across class, for the ‘soul of England’ to have triumphed over ‘sectarian selfishness’.117 Disregard the obvious political bias implied in this analysis. What is more important is that it points to the fundamental truth that Inge was never wholly disparaging of industrial civilisation, nor, indeed of the liberal régime more generally. True, the delicate aesthete in him decried the ‘squalid and hideous . . . towns it created’. Similarly, this old-fashioned patriot berated the ‘syndicalist socialism’ that these places so often nurtured. But the hard-nosed Whig acknowledged those ‘rising real wages in an ever growing stream of commodities and the steadily widening range and ever increased quality of their consumption’ that urbanisation had made possible.118 That was why Inge ultimately rejected contemporary agrarian romanticism. True, he insisted on the need to ‘preserve . . . agriculture’ within ‘urban . . . civilization’. But he eventually repudiated, indeed he denounced as ‘a false ideal’, any plans for a general return to the land.119 In the same way, he openly admired the high civilisation and happily acknowledged the mass education that commercial society had permitted. Finally, he eschewed any temptation he might otherwise have felt for social and political authoritarianism out of a genuine respect for the freedom guaranteed by a republic of letters.120 That capacity for sociological subtlety was vitally important in the evolution of Inge’s postwar political teaching. Above all, it determined Inge’s understanding of what had actually become of ‘the Soul of England’ by 1926.121 Most of his contemporaries read this critical chapter alternatively as a study of national character, conceived as an interpretative snapshot (which was true but obvious) or as a timeless elegy (which was most definitely false).122 Construed correctly, it was an essay devoted as much to historical change as to essential continuity within the English character. One aspect of that analysis has been widely acknowledged by subsequent historians. This has emphasised the purely degenerative aspects of such change as outlined in Inge’s immediate postwar writing. It has focused on the image of the rebarbative, industrial type, in particular, on the modern working man and his soulless, sensual materialism, as described in Outspoken Essays.123 Given Inge’s earlier concern 117 118 121 122

123

MCCOL, Inge, Diary, 10 May 1926; also Inge, England, pp. 67–7, 69–70, 193–4, 260 and 287; cf. Santanyana, Soliloquies in England, passim. 119 Ibid., pp. 172–3. 120 Ibid., pp. 218–19. Inge, England, pp. 217–18. For a definition of that phenomenon, see Inge, England, pp. 39–40. See esp. anon., ‘Ingeland’, p. 289; also R. Ellis Roberts, ‘He is an Englishman’, p. 717. For all that, the profoundly historical nature of Inge’s analysis is clearly set out in England, pp. 41–2, 46, 49, 71–2, 74–5, 85–6, and 285ff. Inge, ‘Our Present Discontents’, p. 20; see also the comparable remarks in Inge, England, p. 77.

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with imminent national social ‘disintegration’ and developing ‘disharmony’, this later effort might have been expected to highlight a concomitant and predictable moral decline as part of the essential history of early twentieth-century England.124 But it did nothing of the kind. Whatever Inge believed to be the (continuing) dynamic of degeneration, whether in British imperial policy or indigenous economic relations, his understanding of the recent evolution of national character, anyway as described in England, was informed by a presumption of indigenous moral progress.125 Inge, being Inge, was unable to celebrate any unambiguous achievement in this respect. Thus the learned e´ litist railed against the ‘vacuity of . . . mind’ revealed in popular reading devoted to ‘vice, crime and . . . games’.126 In the same way, a censorious moralist denounced ‘something pathological’ in the almost universal passion for ‘betting and gambling’.127 But the philosophical fatalist who doubted, in 1919, whether centuries of ‘civilisation’ had ever had ‘the slightest impact on human nature’, had evolved into a subtly different animal, something like a civil historian, capable of identifying how ‘the great social experiment [embodied] in the attempt to give the whole population an education’ had enabled ‘a large class of manual workers’ to enjoy ‘the . . . benefits of culture as never before’ by 1926.128 That development, in turn, pointed not only to a change in Inge, but to a transformation in his understanding of what one unfriendly critic called ‘Ingeland’.129 Inge conceived of this process quite subtly, that is as a historical development subject to both regional and class differences over time; similarly, as an aspect of change varying according to the effect of passing aristocratic, bourgeois and democratic regimes on the ‘ethical . . . condition’ of the people, down the ages.130 But about its essential dynamics, he was quite clear. Every proper qualification made, English ‘national character’ had changed, and recently too. But it had ‘not deteriorated’, as many so glibly thought.131 In fact, it had enjoyed a real measure of ‘moral . . . improvement’.132 124 125 126 128 129 130 131

132

Anon., ‘Post-War Morals: Dean Inge’s Scathing Censure’, The Times, 17 April 1922 furnishes some evidence of just that. Inge, England, pp. 45–6, 48–9, 53–4 and 285–6, among many other examples. 127 Ibid. Inge, England, p. 284. Inge, ‘Our Present Discontents’, p. 19; cf. Inge, England, pp. 284–7. The contemptuous phrase invented by the anonymous reviewer in The Saturday Review. Inge, England, pp. 41–2 and 64–5. Whose number, in fairness, included an earlier version of Inge himself; see Inge, ‘Our Present Discontents’, p. 1; but cf. Inge, England, pp. 286–7 for a clear (albeit self-) refutation! Ibid., p. 285.


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These gains were both general and visible. They were noticeable even among those sections of the community that might otherwise have been considered prime suspects for backsliding. These included northerners in general and the urban working classes in particular. One hundred years of the civilising process had furnished each with sufficient ‘self-respect’ to render them not only more ‘restrained’ but actually more ‘humane’ than ever before.133 Even ‘younger men’ were more ‘amiable and kindly’ than their predecessors.134 Above all, ‘the emancipation of women, and the education they now receive [had] assimilated their mental outlook’ to that of the male sex.135 This had not only afforded them a novel degree of ‘intellectual’, and with that, ‘social equality’.136 It had furnished society with a new and powerful vehicle of cultural advancement and ethical enlightenment more generally. Inge had become a ‘protofeminist’.137 There was just one problem. So much recent moral progress had gone hand in hand with religious decline. This was Inge’s sensational discovery – so sensational that he immediately tempered its force. It was not that, strictly speaking anyway, the people had lost their religion. That remained ‘sound enough as far as it goes’. It was instead that their faith had lost its erstwhile connection with traditional, institutional forms of Christian life.138 By 1926 it had become quite clear that such common cultural improvement and organisational disaffiliation were not merely connected but actually related. This, Inge believed, was true quite generally for northern Europe, where ironically, ‘sexual equality’ had proved ‘injurious to the interests of institutional observance’, far more so than in ‘the Latin Countries when the position of women had changed less’.139 But it was especially so in England, where the classes as well as the masses, women as well as men, now went to church and, for that matter, obeyed their clergy and acknowledged the creeds far less than before. More pointedly still, far less than recently before. In Inge’s view, ‘organized religion’ had probably ‘never been more influential’ in England than during the second third of the nineteenth century. Now, each and 133 135 136 137

138 139

134 Ibid., p. 287. Ibid., pp. 48, 57, and 285. W. R. Inge, ‘The New Age; How to Face it: The Future of Democracy’, The Guardian, 21 August 1919. Ibid. On this occasion Inge described himself as ‘still a Whig’. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXIX, 25 October 1923: ‘Met Mrs Graham Murray, a clearheaded and interesting woman of emancipated views; she wanted to discuss birthcontrol at dinner’. Inge wrote to congratulate Dr Marie Stopes on the publication of her book Married Love in 1918. His (public) support for her birth-control clinic when it opened in 1921 was surely one of the few causes he shared in common with Dr Hewlett Johnson; see G. I. T. Machin, Church and Social Issues in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford, 1998), pp. 19 and 88. Inge, ‘The Social Message of the Modern Church’, p. 229. Inge, England, p. 287.

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every ‘organized religious body’ in the land was ‘losing ground’. That was true without exception. It was also a state of affairs ‘unlikely to be reversed’.140 What was happening? What had gone wrong? What might be done about it? These were the greatest questions of the age. Perhaps as a result, they admitted of no obvious answer. But one thing was clear. The age of disintegration most of all constituted ‘a trial of the churches’. Inge said so, repeatedly. Again and again he cited what he deemed to be powerful evidence that, by 1926, ‘organised religious bodies were losing ground’; that this was true everywhere, and that there seemed ‘no hope of [it] being halted’.141 Worse still, all the evidence seemed to suggest that the English public were increasingly not just indifferent to the fate of their churches. They now ‘[held] them in contempt’.142 As a result, the ‘clerical profession’ had fallen on ‘evil times’.143 Its numbers had diminished, perhaps by a factor of 20 per cent. Its income and status had been similarly reduced. It was not just that people no longer needed their priests. They were ‘happy to let [them] starve’.144 It also looked as if the basic axiom of Victorian civilisation, that is, the supposition that moral progress reflected religious growth, had been put into reverse.145 Some contemporary observers pointed to such ‘tendencies [as evidence of] the gradual disappearance of religion from its age-long position as one of the most potent factors to social life’.146 A few, largely confined to the ‘literary . . . e´ lite’, even celebrated the fact and actually looked forward to the day. Inge – still God’s servant, for all his maverick ways – insisted that ‘the decay of Christianity’ it implied might be ‘more apparent than real’. At a minimum, simple common sense suggested that any ‘serious thinker, whatever his personal convictions [should] be slow to believe in such a rapid and subversive change to human nature’.147 More to the point, this meant that little sociological insight was to be gained from the ‘shallow rationalism’ of ‘Leslie Stephen . . . and his ilk’.148 For institutional decline, in itself, pointed to nothing more than ‘passing 140 141 142 143 144

145 146 148

Anon., ‘The Victorian Age: Dean Inge on Lost Power’, The Times, 10 November 1922; Dean Inge, ‘The Year 1925: A Glance Forward’, Morning Post, 31 December 1924. Inge, England, p. 287; Inge, ‘The Social Message of the Modern Church’, pp. 226–7. Inge, ‘The Social Message of the Modern Church’, p. 241. W. R. Inge, ‘The Clergyman and the Future: Setting the Church Free from Endless Anxieties and Humiliations’, Evening Standard, 1 February 1921. Ibid, And for some analysis, Inge, Preface to the Second Edition, Outspoken Essays (First Series), p. ix. Fox, Inge, p. 209, however, notes that between 1927 and 1931 Inge saved £20,000 from his net income. So there were exceptions! See, above all, William Ralph Inge, ‘The Victorian Age’, in Inge, Outspoken Essays (Second Series) (London, 1921), ch. 9; also Inge, England, pp. 110ff. 147 Ibid., p. 288. Inge, England, pp. 287–8. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXVIII, 2–17 April 1921.


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fashion’. Subtler observation suggested that ‘the strictly religious aspect of Christianity was no less powerful than it ever was’. Beyond Bloomsbury there had been no decline ‘in the homage paid by our nation to the character and person of our Lord’.149 In fact, ‘popular religious books’ continued ‘to have a wide sale’. Certainly, ‘any life of Christ sold like a popular novel’.150 Inge’s insistence upon a strict separation between organisational dynamics and collective experience in his analysis of the ecclesiastical crises of the 1920s marked no particular intellectual breakthrough in itself, not even for Inge; he had been there before.151 Even his mature efforts to explore that distinction, namely by addressing the true content of the emerging common consciousness so directly, were not without precedents. What was unusual, both among clerical and lay commentators at the time, was the breadth and depth of his understanding of the underlying problem. For his was then a rare voice, at least within the church, in arguing that the fate of established institutions could not be detached from the plight of postwar protestant denominations more generally. More strikingly still, he was unique in insisting the future of organised Christianity, tout court, would depend upon its willingness (or otherwise) to embrace the insights of science and spurn the temptation of sentiment. Thus inspired, Inge set himself intellectually and polemically against all sides. He began by criticising every conventional explanation for contemporary religious decline.152 Many then pointed to what they presumed to have been the catastrophic effects of the recent war. So much so, that the so-called ‘failure of Christianity’, that is, of organised Christian witness, became something of a commonplace in middle-brow conversation after 1918. It did seem a plausible explanation of why an everincreasing number placed ever-decreasing faith in institutions that had proved so ineffective in preventing so great an enormity.153 Inge poured scorn on that view. In his judgement, all the evidence suggested that ‘the Great War’ had made little or ‘no difference at all to the religion of the people’. Even cursory observation established that ‘the congregations . . . in my cathedral [were] neither larger nor smaller [in 1918] then they were in . . . 1914’. Moreover, detailed investigation confirmed 149 150

151 152 153

Inge, ‘The Year 1925: a Glance Forward’; Inge, England, p. 289. Ibid.. Early in 1927, Inge was offered £2,500 for a book of reminiscences. On turning the offer down, he was invited to write a Life of Christ for a slighter lesser sum; see Fox, Inge, p. 192. Inge, ‘Our Present Discontents’, pp. 1–2. Anon., ‘Dean Inge on Religious Revival’, The Times, 14 July 1919. W. R. Inge, ‘Progress or Petrification in Church Teaching?’, Evening Standard, 15 September 1921.

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that, down to 1920 anyway, ‘[t]he amount of money subscribed to religious institutions, and in support of appeals for religious objects [had] neither increased nor diminished to any appreciable extent’. Finally, ‘the best padres [still] hesitated when they [were] asked whether the experience of war [had] made the average men more or less religious. They simply [could] not say.’154 Others, by contrast, insisted that ‘the churches’ . . . sickness [was] much older than the war’. Some of the more influential among these critics pointed to the supposed shortcomings of institutions that had achieved ‘no success in mitigating the bitter antagonism of class against class’ in early twentieth-century England.155 For Inge this sort of analysis mistook symptoms for causes. Worse still, it conceived of organised religion as part of the modern social problem. That was an error ‘intelligent revolutionaries’ never made. Hence their unrelenting hostility to historic Christianity.156 By contrast, too many modern churchmen had fallen over themselves into this trap.157 The most gullible of these ‘useful idiots’ were the denizens of COPEC.158 This was because, for all their self-conscious progressivism, indeed for all their crass attempts to render scripture relevant to the problem of industrial society, their principal achievement, apart from ‘blacklegging against their own class’, had been to achieve a ‘vulgarisation of Christianity’ and ‘secularisation of the gospel’ sufficient to render ‘the Church’ at once subordinately ‘useful to whatever party seemed temporarily in the ascendant’, and correspondingly ‘contemptible’ to everyone else ‘who valued the truth’.159 To Inge ‘truth’ in these matters began with an open acknowledgement that many, perhaps most, of the ‘non-religious appeals’ of Christianity had ‘lost their cogency . . . in our day’. This meant accepting as a given fact that recent social change had forged secular institutions capable of fulfilling many, perhaps most, of the social functions that the churches once performed, in politics, about moral order, even concerning the

154 155 156 157 158

159

W.R. Inge, ‘Religion in England after the War’, in Inge, Lay Thoughts of a Dean (London, 1926), pp. 302–22, at pp. 302–3. Inge, ‘Progress or Petrification in Church Teaching?’ Inge, ‘The Social Message of the Modern Church’, at pp. 226–7. Ibid., p. 227; Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, p. 7. W. R. Inge, ‘Church Leaders of Today: as They Are Seen by a “Gentleman with a Duster”’, Evening Standard, 27 January 1922. Most recently described in David J. Jeremy, Capitalists and Christian Business Leaders and the Churches in Britain, 1900–1960 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 62–9 and 183ff. Inge’s observations are repeated on p. 64. Inge understandably regarded this innovation as having achieved its worst results in the 1920s; the evil of Anglo-Catholic socialism receded somewhat during the next decade. See Inge, Vale, pp. 23–4. Inge, ‘The Clergyman and the Future’; Inge, ‘The Social Message of the Modern Church’, p. 241.


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education of the people more generally.160 But it was also to understand how ‘the religion of the people’ had itself changed during the last century. That demanded an altogether subtler appreciation of what the ‘age of disintegration’ had actually done to English religious sensibility during the intervening years. Few had hitherto taken this problem seriously because fewer still had even identified, let alone properly appreciated, its underlying causes. Inge meant to fill this gap in contemporary historical understanding. His thoughts on these questions were both original and disturbing: too original to be widely accepted at the time, too disturbing to be broadly acted upon by the appropriate authorities. But they repay our subsequent attention. Even as failed interventions in the debate, they received plenty of attention and brought about profound, if largely unintended, consequences for English religious life during the years that followed. Inge’s most profound ruminations began with a surprisingly openminded view about the moral consequences of modernity. So much selfconscious intensification of activity had made ‘England the richest and greatest nation in the world’.161 Just for good measure, it had also ‘spread the English language’ and native institutions ‘[across] the whole [globe]’; so ‘improved the means of transport [as] to [bring] the most distant lands . . . nearer together’; and, as if in passing, ‘brought cheap comforts within the reach of nearly the whole of the people’. Moreover, it had done all of this, ‘for the first time in history’. The unprecedented ‘concentration on production’ that it inevitably entailed might eventually have been carried too far. But Inge was quite clear that this revolution in material standards had been the achievement neither of slave-masters and serfs, nor Pharisees and infidels, but of ‘patriots . . . and Christians’.162 Their historic self-justification, characteristically expressed in the doctrines of laissez-faire and individualism, had never served merely as cover for spiritual impiety or personal greed, still less for collective false consciousness. Rather, it had been inspired by a ‘genuine idealism’ and deep, practical concern. It was genuine for being essentially religious in inspiration: originating in ‘the [Christianity] of John Calvin and his followers’; evolving into ‘nineteenth-century English Puritanism’; finally constituting as ‘manly, independent and energetic a form of religious [faith] as [had] ever been’.163 160

161 162 163

Ibid.; also Inge, England, p. 288. For a more recent and more theoretically informed consideration of this development, see Bryan Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford, 1982), ch. 6, esp. pp. 153–68. Inge, England, p. 214; Inge, ‘Our Present Discontents’, p. 18. Inge, England, pp. 217–18. W. R. Inge, ‘Mr Massingham’s Religion’, The Spectator, 133, no. 5026, 25 October 1924, 595–6, at 595.

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By identifying the genesis of industrial England with the emergence of a puritan people, Inge broke no new theoretical ground. In his insistence on understanding this promethean society and its characteristic sensibility together, and that more in terms of a common social practice than specific theological doctrines, he self-consciously repeated many of the educated commonplaces to which he and many others had been introduced by Boutmy and Santayana. Indeed, he happily quoted them both, often at length.164 But what the French sociologist construed as a timeless expression of ethnic differentiation (‘the Englishmen has himself in hand more than any other European’) and the American philosopher memorialised in the passing glory of a doomed master tribe (‘[i]t will be a black day for human [kind] when scientific blackguards and fanatics manage to supplant him’), Inge construed more accurately as an essentially historical aspect of indigenous cultural life.165 The English had not always been puritans. Within collective memory, they had been an ‘undisciplined, gluttonous [and] lazy people’.166 Their recent transformation suggested that the ‘new kind of asceticism’ which Inge’s immediate forbears had laboriously achieved – what Weber called ‘this worldly asceticism’ – was not something in the blood.167 The ‘fierce . . . work . . . ethic’ it entailed was a hard-won product of selfimposed discipline. Ironically, it was a social institution initially intended to take the place of ‘fast days and penances’ and all those other ‘mortifications of Catholicism’ that the English had turned their backs upon, from the seventeenth century onwards. Only later had it become the vital tool of a worldwide maritime empire.168 In the same way, the ‘cool weather’ that others so admired in a collective consciousness characteristically working at ‘low . . . but efficient . . . pressure’ constituted less the genius of a ‘uniquely . . . anchored soul’ than the ‘useful result’ of turning Christianity to commercial account, after circa 1750.169

164

165 167 168

169

Inge, England, pp. 71–2; Inge, Vale, pp. 98–9. The (considerable) mutual regard between Inge and Santayana is dutifully recorded in George Santayana, My Host the World, vol. III of Persons and Places (New York, 1953), at p. 117. 166 Ibid., pp. 47 and 215. Inge, England, pp. xii, 45 and 47. Inge, ‘Mr Massingham’s Religion’, p. 595. Whether Inge had actually read Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is not clear. Ibid. For an introduction to this enormous subject, see Andrew Porter, ‘Overview, 1700–1914’, in Norman Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire: the Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford, 2005), ch. 3; and, more generally Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004), passim. Many of the other essays in the Etherington volume are also of value; see esp. chs. 3–8. Inge, England, pp. 67–8; cf. Santayana, ‘The British Character’, in Santayana, Soliloquies in England, pp. 31ff.


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Nor were the English destined to remain puritans for very much longer. Puritanism might indeed have ‘flourished under the industrialism which it created’.170 Tawney certainly said so. Indeed, he had written as much, in 1926 too.171 Yet for Inge, this historic English ‘Puritanism had been broken up by its own creation’.172 Tawney et al. had missed that critical, contemporary implosion.173 This was because they failed to understand how industrial civilisation, perhaps peculiarly the product of a particular religious dynamic, also contained the gems of a more general, anti-Christian spirit.174 What would later be described as ‘the cultural contradictions of capitalism’ – how the ‘godly life’, so conceived, perversely promoted the very ‘luxury and self-indulgence’ it once ostensibly spurned – had, for Inge, already begun their subversive social work. He eschewed the glib phrase. But he understood its paradoxical processes.175 Theoretically, these pointed to the juxtaposition of that ‘life of accumulation’, which characteristically constituted the ‘career of the father’, and the ‘regime of . . . luxury spending’ that invariably ‘blighted the days . . . of his children’.176 Reality sported countless ‘vulgar . . . unworthy . . . millionaires’, the ‘most dangerous class in the community’, currently to be found ‘in any centre of fashion on either continent’. These men and women represented a ‘terrible . . . indictment of the system’ that produced them. Their very existence was almost enough to make ‘any fair-minded person a socialist’.177 For many, it already had.178 For many others it had done something more significant still. That development Inge identified in what he took to be broad-ranging ‘moral revolt’, common across ‘a whole generation’, against ‘Puritan 170 171

172 173 174 175

176 177

178

Inge, ‘Mr Massingham’s Religion’, p. 595. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: a Historical Study (London, 1926), esp. pt. IV. This famous book originated in the first series of Scott Holland Memorial lectures delivered in 1922. It contained a preparatory note to Dr Charles Gore, to whom it was also dedicated. Inge, ‘Mr Massingham’s Religion’, p. 595. Inge, ‘The Clergymen and the Future’. Inge, ‘Mr Massingham’s Religion’, p. 596. The modern concept was first outlined by Daniel Bell in The Cultural Conditions of Capitalism (New York, 1976), esp. ch. 1. However, the echoes of Thorsten Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1899), are clear enough. That said, I know of no clear evidence that Inge ever read Veblen. Inge, ‘The Social Message of the Modern Church’, p. 230. Ibid., p. 231. Iremonger even attributed to Inge the adage that ‘any young man who knew something of the miseries of the poor must be hard-hearted if he did not become a socialist; but that when he grew up, if he did not discard the socialist card he must be very soft-headed’. Iremonger, Temple, p. 331. Inge, ‘The Social Message of the Modern Church’, p. 231. Though note, Inge, England, pp. 52 and 252.

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standards of work and Puritan ethics more generally’, after 1918.179 This, he believed, was a cultural change of transformative significance. At its most self-conscious, it pointed to a fundamental shift in educated sensibilities.180 At its most far-reaching, it constituted nothing less than an open rebellion against the whole social order embodied in what were increasingly conceived as the ‘unlovely products of Puritanism’.181 Inge was sceptical about much of the motivation behind this ‘contemporary campaign’ against ‘Victorian . . . hypocrisy’: contemptuously in the case of Strachey’s impolite polemic; ruefully in the matter of ‘Mr Massingham’s Religion’.182 But if he simply ignored Strachey, he took the challenge of Massingham’s new faith very seriously indeed. For if Bloomsbury amounted to little beyond itself, the Nation spoke to intelligent classes quite generally. Massingham’s attitude was ‘characteristic of his generation’. Indeed, in its heady mixture of ‘romanticism and sentimentality’ – that is, in its basic assumption of human benevolence and unqualified commitment to social amelioration – it defined a whole new way of being seen to be good.183 Perhaps in spite of himself, Inge still recognised the real moral force of at least some aspects of this revolution. Minimally, he was willing to acknowledge that the ‘Calvinist had seldom inquir[ed] too closely [about] whether his [worldly] activities were really beneficial or not; worse still he had never take[n] nearly enough pains to set his values right’.184 Undoubtedly, much of the modern cure was worse than the inherited disease. Certainly, the postwar obsession ‘for having a good time’ often ‘failed to distinguish between good and evil’.185 As a result, time-honoured taboos had too often been lost in mindless ‘contemporary licentiousness’. Recent assaults on the ‘monogamous family’ were a case in point: ‘justified in our fiction, [un]reprobated in our society’, all the while ‘filling up the pages of our daily newspapers’.186 But other dimensions of ‘twenties’ progressivism amounted to no more than the gradual relaxation of an otherwise stifling conformity. Thus ‘one by one’ the ‘old . . . restrictions on “Sunday Amusements”’ had – rightly – fallen by the wayside. ‘[B]icycling, golf and tennis’ had become common on

179 180 182 183 185 186

Inge, ‘Mr Massingham’s Religion’, p. 595; Inge, England, p. 286. 181 Ibid., p. 596. Inge, ‘Mr Massingham’s Religion’, p. 595. Ibid., pp. 595–6; Inge, England, p. 217; Again, the extent to which Inge had read Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians is unclear. 184 Inge, England, p. 286; Inge, Vale, p. 102. Anon., ‘Post-War Morals’. W. R. Inge, ‘Sunday Amusements’, Sunday Express, 15 April 1921. Inge, ‘Mr Massingham’s Religion’, p. 595; cf. Inge, Vale, p. 21.


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the Sabbath, cricket, curiously, less so.187 One thing was clear: ‘Puritanism of the old school had almost ceased to exist’. That amounted to a fundamental ‘change . . . in the national character’.188 For good or ill? Intriguingly, Inge made no definitive judgement in this grave matter. On the one hand, he feared the ‘disappearance [of] so virile and stern an element of . . . English temperament’.189 Indeed, he felt sure that even such beneficial social relaxation as it implied had also succeeded ‘in pulling up a good deal of wheat with the chaff’.190 Yet, at the same time, he openly celebrated the real extension of intellectual freedom that this departure had made possible. While some celebrated man’s imminent liberation and others recognised only moral decline around them, Inge insisted not merely upon the reality but actually in the desirability of ‘periodic ebb and flow’ in matters of ‘licence and restraint’.191 Self-consciously standing out both against facetious freethinkers, and also against so many who merely lamented the intellectual anarchy they associated with its attendant atheism and immorality, Inge countered by insisting upon the ‘earnestness, seriousness, and thoughtfulness combined with a wholesome distrust of mere traditionalism and partisanship’ that he found ‘all over the country and especially in our universities’, immediately postwar; apparent even among ‘young . . . evangelicals’ and ‘improving . . . non-conformists’; even, indeed, among ‘ordinary men . . . and women’.192 So far, so even-headed, in fact, so intellectually orthodox. The sudden tempering of Victorian puritanism and the concomitant institutional ‘downgrad[ing] of the free Churches of England’, were interpreted in many respectable quarters as a golden opportunity for the reassertion of a modern, broad-based, establishment in England.193 As early as 1916, an appendix to the Archbishops’ Report on Church and State noted that, in this unprecedented situation, nonconformists themselves were becoming ever more inclined to treat the Anglican Church as a proper focus for the nation’s Christian faith. Consequently, The Church has more chance today of coming to be regarded as representative of the great majority of the nation than it has since the time of the Wesleyan 187 189 191 192 193

188 Inge, ‘Mr Massingham’s Religion’, p. 596. Inge, England, p. 71. 190 Ibid. Inge, England, p. 71. Anon., ‘Modern Churchmen: Dean Inge’s Plan for a Constructive Policy’, The Church Family Newspaper, 23 June 1922. W. R. Inge, ‘The University Pulpit’, The Cambridge Review, 20 November 1925, pp. 119–23. W. R. Inge, ‘The Condition of the Church of England’, in Inge, The Church in the World: Collected Essays of William Ralph Inge (London, 1928), pp. 1–26, at p. 23.

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movement in the eighteenth century or perhaps since the Puritan movement of the seventeenth century.194

One part of Inge’s mind happily endorsed this panglossian analysis. In an essay first published in 1927, he even looked forward to ‘another opportunity’ that might yet be afforded to ‘the Anglican Church’ to ‘lead [and] represent [the] religion of the English people’, once more.195 But another, perhaps the more temperamentally dominant aspect of his personality, feared for its probable, and pessimistic, implications. These pointed merely to a pyrrhic victory: in effect, to the triumph of a church merely in slower decline than its major rivals. They also highlighted the mixed blessings of an apparent renewal marred by real internecine strife, not to say, massive self-deception. Thus, while many celebrated Davidson’s ‘Appeal to All Christian People’ made of Lambeth in 1920, Inge excoriated the bigotry of the Anglo-Catholic bishops, whose greater concern for their ranks and offices had discouraged ‘hundreds of nonconformist ministers from then entering the ministry of the Church’.196 In so doing Inge revealed more than his long-standing anti-Tractarian prejudices.197 He believed that the division of society which the contemporary agony of industrialism had laid bare furnished the best, ‘perhaps . . . the last[,] opportunity’ the churches would ever have to ‘unite the country’ under Christian auspices. In these circumstances he believed that the Establishment’s failure ‘to put aside . . . such [internal] divisions’ as superficially separated its adherents constituted nothing less than a ‘conspiracy of the clergy . . . against the laity’, forgivable only in its certain failure. He also insisted that the real effect of such self-regarding Anglo-Catholic pretension was simply to ‘magnify the sacerdotal theory of priestly office’, at precisely the moment when the masses (at last in receipt of a ‘sound secular education’) had definitively ‘ceased to believe in it’.198 Material comfort, not to say moral liberalism, might have stripped the English people of their erstwhile puritanism. But the liberal culture to which they had thereby gained access had no less assuredly relieved them of any residual respect they might once have maintained for the priesthood. Inge identified this latter process as ‘the decadence 194 195 196 197 198

Report of the Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State, 1916, appendix A, at p. 249; Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, p. 165. Inge, ‘The Conditions of the Church of England’, p. 23; cf. Inge, England, p. 234. W. R. Inge, ‘The Lambeth Conference and Church Reunion: Some Hopes and Fears’, Evening Standard, 24 August 1920; anon., ‘Dean Inge on Religious Revival’. Anon., ‘Christian Co-Operation’, The Times, 4 September 1920; on Inge’s lifelong anti-Tractarianism, see Grimley, ‘Inge’, pp. 241. Inge, ‘The Clergyman and the Future’; Inge, England, pp. 219–20.


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of clericalism’.199 It was, he insisted, not merely an ‘inevitable . . . aspect’ of social change. It represented a moral development ‘far from discreditable . . . to anyone’. Indeed, to appreciate its force required no more than the intelligent realisation that ‘a whole system of public worship designed for a state of society in which few persons could read’ necessarily found little resonance among communities in which ‘the parson is no longer better instructed than his congregation’. The ‘inveterate reader’, increasingly ‘exposed to speeches, lectures, and sermons’, generally, preferred to ‘perform his devotions at home . . . by taking a book down from the shelf’.200 This development explained no small part of the ‘trial of the churches’ after the war. It also accounted for at least some measure of his own postwar popularity. More importantly, Inge insisted that what linked the ‘passing of Puritanism’ to the ‘decadence of clericalism’ in a general, downward spiral was the concomitant ‘decay of institutionalism’.201 By this he meant something for the most part easily observable and yet also partially invisible. What was obviously observable was the increasing marginalisation of the church in British social life. Sadly, most contemporary efforts aimed at reversing that trend had tended to have the opposite effect. The result was ‘a common . . . religion’ by now ‘institutionalised and externalised out of all self-recognition’. Church and chapel buildings lay stranded in deserted city centres; liturgical ‘services . . . multiplied beyond all reason’. An enveloping substratum of ‘guilds, leagues, clubs and societies’ filled the lives of ‘statistically minded bishops’. But each simply hollowed out ‘the life of piety’ it was meant to serve.202 There was something else too. Almost unnoticed in the collapse of traditional ecclesiastical organisations that these lamentable processes implied was a more profound subversion of religious authority. This was best understood not so much in the shakiness of inherited hierarchies as in emerging forms of common practice. That development, in turn, pointed to the significance less of the various inadequacies of existing church provision, but more to the force of unprecedented and unregulated spiritual demands – specifically, to new expressions of the religious life. Inge conceived of this force and those demands as what he took to be the evolution of a peculiarly modern, ‘personal religion’, in postwar 199 200

201 202

Inge, ‘The Clergyman and the Future’. Inge, England, pp. 219–20. The degree to which Inge entirely approved of this process – certainly to the extent that it facilitated significant social mobility – might however, be doubted. Tawney certainly did doubt his commitment in that sense; see R. H. Tawney, Equality (London, 1964), pp. 45–6. Inge, ‘The Clergyman and the Future’. Cf. Inge, ‘Our Present Discontents’, p. 19. Inge, ‘The Condition of the Church of England’, p. 26.

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England.203 The possibilities of that faith filled him at once with high hopes and deep dread. Rightly understood, they promised that the ‘trial of the churches’ might yet lead back ‘to the path of the original gospel’. Wrongly interpreted, they suggested a ‘recrudescence of superstition’ in twentieth-century Britain reminiscent of the dark ages. The stakes were that high.204 With this insight, his analysis broke both new historical and sociological ground.

III Inge took it as axiomatic that the ‘seat of authority in religion’ (by which he meant historic Christianity) rested in one or more of just four places: the church, the Bible, human reason or mystical revelation. He also assumed that the rise, first of biblical criticism, and then of scientific method more generally, had shifted a considerable weight, in effect, the balance of that authority, away from the two former and towards the two latter sources of this command.205 These developments reflected other radical changes in what Inge called ‘modern thought’ to which, all the evidence now suggested, the Church (indeed all the churches) had been slow to adapt. Self-consciously following Lecky, Inge summarised those changes as: 1 the decline in the sense of the miraculous implied by the new conception of natural law; 2 the growth of new ideas of God, man and the universe, and a consequent new moral movement resulting in a decay of belief in witchcraft, in rejection of religious persecution and of ghastly notions concerning future punishment; 3 the decline of the belief in the guilt of error, and the rejection of an asceticism which had paralysed the progress of mankind; 4 the operation of the rational spirit, which had gradually secularised every department of political life and formed habits of thought which affected all judgements; 5 the rise of the industrial and democratic spirit in Europe.206

Inge believed that what for Lecky and Victorians like him had remained a largely theoretical argument had become an essential aspect of common experience. The maturing of industrial civilisation, mass education and modern democracy had made all this happen. But its impact had been 203 204 205

Inge, ‘The Social Message of the Modern Church’, pp. 231–2. Inge, ‘The Condition of the Church of England’, p. 25–30; anon., ‘Dean Inge on Childish Superstitions’, The Times, 7 June 1920. 206 Ibid., pp. 4–5. Inge, ‘The Condition of the Church of England’, pp. 2–3.


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altogether more complicated than the old rationalist ever predicted.207 In his ministry and on his travels, Inge had discovered not just a decline in religious authority (that was obvious) and a diminution in protestant spirit (clear enough too) but the new and exotic fruits of their converging course. These were, as yet, less well appreciated. But they were manifold and profound. For instance, ‘during the half century before the war’, belief in eternal damnation had ‘lost its place’ in the centre of common, Christian life.208 As a result English congregations were simply ‘no longer interested’ in talking about heaven and hell.209 But that transformation ‘had not been the result of science’. It had, in fact, proved wholly compatible with a revival of ‘belief in spirits and ghosts’ and other ‘dismal substitutes for Christian belief’.210 There had also been a pronounced ‘change, towards greater caution and indifference’ in common attitudes towards prayer.211 ‘As a matter of fact’, Inge asserted, ‘we pray less often, and with less assertiveness, than our grandfathers did.’212 Not that this had made us any more rational. Hence ‘prayers for fine weather and, alternatively, rain were now seldom used [and, indeed, were] often spurned by educated congregations’. But prayers for the ‘recovery of friends in sickness’ continued unabated.213 There were probably two reasons for these otherwise divergent developments. The first Inge took to be obvious, if necessarily somewhat suppositional: that ‘we have, perhaps’, more confidence ‘in the results of human action’ than we once did; accordingly, that we now trust less in the necessary benevolence of ‘divine intervention’.214 No less important, he judged, was the nineteenth-century assault on biblical literalism that had furnished educated, and even semi-educated, men and women with a more subtle notion of divine presence.215 In particular, the ‘doctrine of divine immanence’ had ‘in our own lifetime’ not only invested natural law with a ‘new sensitivity’, but no less effectively broken down ‘the old dualism of the natural and the supernatural’. Put another way, it had brought God closer to home, diminishing much of the mystery, but also

207 208 209 210

211 212

Ibid., p. 4. For Lecky on the English religious tradition, see W. E. H. Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (London, 1879), vol. II, ch. 9. MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXIX, 22 February 1925; anon., ‘Otherworldliness: Dean Inge on Immortality’, The Times, 16 October 1919. Anon., ‘Otherworldliness’; cf. Inge, ‘The Condition of the Church of England’, pp. 4–5. Anon., ‘Otherworldliness’; cf. Inge, Preface to the Series Edition, Outspoken Essays, p. ix, for his insistence on the modern, but in his view, ‘unnatural conflict between science and religion’. W. R. Inge, ‘The Efficacy of Prayer’, Daily Mail, 12 November 1920. 213 Ibid. 214 Ibid. 215 Ibid. Ibid.

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some of the majesty, of an erstwhile elusive deity. The result, Inge concluded, was ‘some gain and some loss’. Its effect had been to ‘spread a weak conception of the Divine over everything instead of concentrating it at a few points’.216 Taken together, these variegated, and also unregulated, intellectual and cultural changes had wrought curious, even paradoxical, consequences for popular, religious sensibilities. Sociological legend, even then, insisted that protestantism had historically ‘disenchanted the world’. In truth, organised Christianity only ever contingently rid common religion of its essentially magical motivations.217 Moreover, this had been a partial victory, continually dependent upon institutional surveillance.218 It was precisely this surveillance that was now increasingly suspect. Thus the ‘trial of the churches’ was actually twofold: one aspect was easily identified in the ‘decay’ of existing institutional structures; another altogether more subtly endured through a ‘strange recrudescence of [ancient] superstitions’.219 So widespread was this latter phenomenon in postwar England that the Lambeth Conference felt bound to pronounce on this issue in 1920.220 Most bishops at that time were content to blame its scourge on the trauma of wartime loss. In other words, they trusted in the passing of the threat.221 As an account of the efflorescence of ‘prayers for the dead’ immediately after 1918, this seemed plausible enough.222 Even Inge was willing to acknowledge that much, albeit in a characteristically ‘less respectful’ tone.223 As he put it: ‘war has a tendency to depress the high kind of religion [while] elevating the lower’.224 To that extent

216 217

218

219 220

221 222 223 224

Ibid. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London, 1970), pt III; see also Gerth and Mills, ‘Introduction: the Man and His Work’, at pp. 51–2; cf. Inge, ‘The Condition of the Church of England’, pp. 4–5, or, for a modern view, Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971). Inge, ‘The Condition of the Church of England’, pp. 4–5. For what remains a classic account of how, see Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, vol. II (London, 1970), chs. 4 and 5; and, for a case study, S. J. D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 8. Inge, ‘The Condition of the Church of England’, pp. 251–6; Inge, ‘The Lambeth Conference and Church Reunion’; anon., ‘Dean Inge on Childish Superstitions’. Anon., Conference of Bishops on the Anglican Commission, held at Lambeth Palace, 5 July to 7 August 1920: Encyclical Letter from the Bishops and the Resolutions and Reports (London, 1920), ch. 5; pt 7, pp. 116–23. Anon., ‘Prayers for the Dead: the Dean of Manchester on the Doctrine of the Future Life and its Relation to Spiritualism’, The Times, 16 October 1919. Inge, ‘The Lambeth Conference and Church Reunion’. Inge, ‘Religion in England after the War’, p. 304; anon., ‘Dean Inge on Optimism and Pessimism’, The Times, 21 April 1924. Anon., ‘Dean Inge on Religious Revival’. On upper-class ‘necromancy’ as a passing fashion, see Inge, England, pp. 77–8.


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‘those superstitions’ that had arisen ‘out of the war’ might reasonably be expected to prove ‘transitory’ in nature.225 But at this point, agreement between Inge and the establishment ended. The Dean also insisted that, as a general explanation of a widespread phenomenon, this interpretation of modern paganism was false. He also argued that, as a prognosis of the underlying disease, it was little short of disastrous. First, it ignored the evidence of a major revival of ‘childish superstitions’ before the outbreak of hostilities.226 Secondly, it supplied no reasons to explain why that cult was proving, if anything, more common among the rich than the poor; even within the more educated rather than the ignorant.227 Above all, it failed to account for the sheer range of irrational beliefs now increasingly ‘prevalent . . . about numbers, days of the week and so forth’. In short, it offered no coherent understanding of why so many subjects not merely of a richer but of a more cultivated society conceived of God as the kind of person who ‘might send some dire calamity’ to His errant disciples for: (a) dining as one of thirteen; (b) walking under a ladder; or (c) getting married in May.228

To comprehend this change was to appreciate the full force of that shift from ‘authority’ to ‘experience’ in common religion which best described the cultural dynamics of the age. Thus informed, the contemporary historian might accurately be able to trace the significant connection between an easily recognisable expansion of personal liberty, implied in the passing of Victorian puritanism, with the surreptitious growth of unreflective licence, entailed in the unanticipated flowering of pagan credulity. Only in that way too might a concerned churchman properly acknowledge the real vulnerability of true faith, that is, intelligent Christianity, in postwar England. Neither failing membership rolls nor incipient anti-clericalism proved that the English had suddenly become an un-Christian people. But the dynamic of contemporary cultural change, together with the drift of modern sensibilities, demonstrated all too cogently just how they might soon become an indifferent nation, even an irrational tribe.229 That sense of his having discovered an otherwise unacknowledged domestic religious crisis accounts for much of the urgency of Inge’s 225 226 227 229

Anon., ‘The Spirit of the Age’; see also W. R. Inge, ‘The Nature of Religious Faith’, The Guardian, 5 November 1920. Inge, ‘The Nature of Religious Faith’; Inge, ‘The Lambeth Conference and Church Reunion’; anon., ‘Dean Inge on Optimism and Pessimism’, 21 April 1924. 228 Ibid. Anon., ‘Dean Inge on Childish Superstitions’. Inge, ‘The Condition of the Church of England’, pp. 25–6; Inge, ‘Religion in England after the War’, pp. 303–4 and, more generally, Inge, ‘The Nature of Religious Faith’.

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polemical writings during the 1920s. It also points to the underlying reasons behind his implacable opposition to so much of the progressive social and political posturing that characterised self-consciously enlightened Anglican thinking in the immediate postwar era. Most commentators have put this down to Inge’s innate conservativism, or his antidemocratic prejudices, even to his simple lack of compassion for the plight of the contemporary industrial poor.230 Such criticisms contain some measure of the truth. But they miss the essential point. This was Inge’s insistence that the crisis he perceived amounted to nothing less than a great contemporary battle – no less fierce for being surreptitiously waged – ‘between Christianity and secularism’ within industrial civilisation. In this conflict, a church that had lost its prescriptive right and was, increasingly, ‘taunted . . . by its enemies . . . with the fact that the majority of the population do not attend our ministries’ would surely also lose any contest which took ‘the ballot box’ as ‘a proper guide to absolute truth’.231 How might it win? At a minimum, victory demanded enhanced cooperation with other, liberal-minded organisations; hence some part of Inge’s determined postwar ecumenicalism. Certainly, the full force of his contemporary argument, specifically his insistence after 1920 that the continuing denominational division of English protestantism was ‘nothing short of a national disgrace’, is comprehensible only when the full extent of that crisis, as Inge saw it, is conceived in relation to the ulterior logic of its best solution, again, as Inge peculiarly saw the problem. Yet his assertion that there was ‘no longer’ any significant ‘doctrinal, liturgical or organisational difference’ between the ‘various . . . sects’ was far from self-evidently true.232 Even less straightforward was his seemingly ingenuous observation that Christendom would never be divided ‘when good men prayed; in the singing of hymns; in learned and intellectual work; in social work and in work for moral improvement’.233 Behind the apparent banality of these remarks lay a thoroughgoing critique not so much of institutional obstructionism – odious as it was – but of religious sentimentality, little understood to the extent that this remained. What Inge was truly driving at was his hope for a sufficient 230

231 232 233

As suggested in Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, esp. pp. 128–39; also Grimley, ‘Inge’, p. 242. For a partial recantation, see Inge, England, new and revised edition (1933), Preface, pp. v–vi. There, he explicitly repudiated the ‘too strident conservatism’ that had marred his earlier work; cf. n. 43. Inge, ‘Church Leaders of Today’; Inge, ‘The Social Message of the Modern Church’, p. 232. Inge, ‘The Lambeth Conference and Church Reunion’. For a slightly different formulation of the same, see Inge, ‘The Condition of the Church of England’, pp. 19–20. Inge, ‘The Social Message of the Modern Church’, p. 230.


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stripping away of doctoral, liturgical and organisational distinctiveness across the denominations generally, sufficient, that is, to achieve a Christianity compatible with science; above all, with ‘scientific ethics’, or what he called the ‘morality of tomorrow’.234 The fundamentals of that reasoning were anything but pragmatic. Indeed, they began in a conviction that ‘science has come to be the chief revelation of the will and purpose of God . . . made to our generation’.235 But they assumed pragmatic purpose in Inge’s appreciation that what alienated contemporary men of science from religion – here, he had Pearson particularly in mind – was the ‘sentimentality . . . of traditional theology’. Thus a ‘rapprochement’ between ‘science and the philosophy of religion’ could be achieved only if the latter joined the former in the great modern struggle, what he called the ‘struggle of the future’ and by which he meant that of ‘science against sentimentalism’.236 This, for Inge, was as much a religious as a secular struggle. For if he always upheld the authority of reason against the whims of popular preference, so he no less assuredly deferred to the timeless majesty of divine mystery against the transient claims of human sympathy. It is thus doubly unfortunate that the truly Manichean contest this presumed has come down to us primarily through Inge’s eugenicism, above all, in his polemical espousal of the ‘population question’.237 We should in justice observe that what so angered him about Lambeth was the ‘celibate bishops’ insistence that the only acceptable form of ‘birth control . . . was abstinence’.238 No less striking was his condemnation of a body of men then unwilling to consider any extension of the grounds for divorce ‘to other grave offences besides adultery’.239 More generally, it is important to acknowledge how Inge’s ‘scientific ethics’ entailed as much concern about ‘recognition of the altered states of women’ and, for that matter, the end of ‘cruelty towards animals’, as they demanded robust attitudes towards the delicate matter of human reproduction. As he himself later put it, ‘in my attitude towards birth control, euthanasia, and other big questions, I [was] with some reservations on the side of the new morality against the old’.240 The vital point, for Inge, was to emphasise the possibility of a form of religion – in doctrine and of morality – to which intelligent men (and women) might reasonably subscribe. We might conclude 234 236 237 238 239 240

235 Ibid. Ibid., p. 235. See Inge, ‘Mr Massingham’s Religion’ for his genealogical reconstruction of Rousseau’s ‘The Gospel of Sentimentalism’. Inge, England, p. 197; outlined on pp. 197–204 and in many other places! MCCOL, Inge, Diary, vol. XXVIII, [n.d.] July 1920. Ibid.; see also Inge, ‘The Lambeth Conference and Church Reunion’. Inge, Vale, p. 93; Inge, England, p. 200.

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by noting that he enjoyed some measure of success at the next conference, ten years later. But just as it had been Gore’s church that described the problem, so it proved to be Temple’s vision of its development that dominated establishment thinking during the years of Inge’s dotage. In that sense, his overall mission must be counted a failure.241 His mission, but not perhaps his vision; for Inge’s prognosis of events defined the course of ecclesiastical debate for a decade or more after 1926. His understanding of a crisis in Christian authority became commonplace. So too did his perceptions about declining protestant sensibilities. But above all, his way of arguing about these matters, that is, through secular organs and even to secular purposes, triumphed. In that way, Inge also opened up the possibility not merely of public discussion concerning religious decline – there was plenty of that during the 1930s – but informed debate about contemporary religious change. Moreover, in first detaching protestant decline from common disenchantment, similarly in separating religious change from general demoralisation, Inge placed the emerging sociology of religion into the intellectual mainstream. He also succeeded in transforming British preoccupations about the future of protestantism from questions of high policy to matters of middle-brow opinion. Suddenly, these became issues about which everyone might express an opinion. During the years that followed, almost everyone did. That was to have important consequences. This was because in so generalising the problem, Inge also partially tamed it. And in taming it, he made the previously unthinkable at least potentially plausible. Certainly, after Inge, no one thought of the possibility of a post-protestant society as an inconceivable outcome of contemporary social change. Many, indeed, came to think of it as the most likely future scenario. 241

Inge, ‘Church Leaders of Today’; ‘The Church of England today is largely what Gore made it . . . Bishop Temple is a politician to his fingertips.’ For a contrasting view of Inge’s contemporary significance, see Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 128–39.

4

The strange death of puritan England

In 1935, at the very height of the Abyssinian crisis, as diplomatic relations between His Majesty’s government and Mussolini’s dictatorship soured and talk of League of Nations sanctions against Il Duce’s regime charged the international atmosphere, an imaginative Italian journalist called upon his fellow countrymen to come to the defence of their brave, new, Roman Empire – simultaneously to take a principled, if Mediterranean, stand against ‘perfidious Albion’ – by collectively desisting forthwith from all such ‘pernicious British habits as tea-drinking, snobbery, golf-playing, Puritanism, clean-shaving, pipe-smoking, bridge-playing and that inexplicable apathy towards women’ which so characterised the Anglo-Saxon male. Whether even that much collective ‘self-denial’ would have been sufficient to ensure Italy’s claim to great power status through the middle of the twentieth century may be doubted.1 That it described what were then widespread continental views concerning the peculiar moral character of Italy’s newly intransigent foe need not be questioned. In fact, many in interwar Britain would happily have acknowledged this description, though scarcely the implied normative judgement, of longstanding indigenous attitudes. Yet just eight years later, with the allies on the verge of (comparatively) easy victory over what had (unexpectedly) proved to be the weakest of the axis powers, Archbishop William Temple, Primate of All England, outlined a very different, albeit equally unflattering, portrait of the ethical standing of his compatriots. These Britons – men again, for the most part – were no longer misogynistic, in any case celibate, killjoys. On the contrary, they were people increasingly characterised by a disturbing ‘sexual self-indulgence’. They were increasingly infected by other forms of sensual licentiousness as well. An abysmal appetitive degeneration had been accompanied by the ‘alarming collapse of [basic] honesty’ throughout the land. The cumulative effect had been 1

Author unknown; cited in James Ramsden (ed.), George Lyttleton’s Commonplace Book (Gettrington, 2002), p. 72. Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: a Political History (New Haven, CT, 1997), section 12; see esp. pp. 385ff.

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such that conventional British ‘behaviour’, so ‘strictly regulated down to the last war’, had sunk into a widespread state of dissolution. Indeed, it had declined to the point where what had become ordinary habits threatened to ‘injure . . . the broader . . . war effort itself’.2 Had so much really changed so quickly? Probably not. Politically progressive prelate he might have been, but Temple was still a churchman. This was at a time when Anglican dignitaries still tended towards moral nostalgia. Moreover, he was scarcely alone in observing a profound alteration in the customary tone of English life after 1939. In fact, by wartime standards, his was actually an unusually balanced analysis. The Archbishop tempered bracing criticism with genuine praise. He specifically extolled what he called the ‘magnificent’ spirit that the country had so recently sustained, ‘at least in some respects’. He also qualified his seemingly ingenuous commitment to wholesale ‘religious recovery’ with some hard-nosed analysis of what recent social disruptions had actually wrought in ‘family relations’ and moral norms more generally.3 In a different way, fascism’s otherwise ludicrous apologist still succeeded in relating his rabid anglophobia to a more serious aspect of early twentiethcentury European social criticism. For what by the 1930s tended to propaganda had begun in putative social science. This was the discipline of Anglo-Saxon studies – a long-standing tradition of continental inquiry into the English character. Whether construed as academic endeavour or indulged by way of passing amusement, this wide-ranging form of intellectual activity also survived Mussolini’s transient threat. That was not least because, either conceived gravely or adduced just for fun, most of its substantive conclusions converged. Of nothing was this more true than continental perceptions about an Englishman’s religion.4 Consider an influential inquiry into ‘English . . . political psychology’ ´ published by the distinguished French social scientist, Emile Boutmy. This renowned scholar defined the genius of ‘Englishness’ by what he 2 3

4

Anon., ‘Primate’s Call to Men: Honesty and Sex Morality: Alarming Collapse’, The Times, 12 July 1943. Ibid. This intervention was passed over in Iremonger’s official Life, published just five years later. See F. A. Iremonger, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Letters (Oxford, 1948), ch. 10. Studied, that is, as a people apart from mainstream European civilisation. As a genre it made perfect sense by way of comparison with indigenously inspired English exceptionalism, a way of thinking perhaps first rendered completely respectable in Macaulay’s History of England. It may be said to have been inaugurated by Hippolyte Taine in his Notes on England, trans. Edward Hyams (London, 1995); see esp. chs. 2, 3 and 8. These observations were originally composed between 1860 and 1870. A faint whiff of that tradition still survives in François Bédarida, La Société anglaise du milieu du XIXe siècle a` nos jours (Paris, 1990). Note in particular Bédarida’s extensive treatment of the history of English puritanism on pp. 80–6, 101–6, 226–30, 349–57 and 444ff.


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took to be a unique capacity for ‘efficient . . . self-control’. By that he meant to highlight a common capacity for discipline in body and soul that he believed to be at once economically galvanising and imaginatively constricting. This complex quality had forged a people capable of leading the industrial revolution, yet aesthetically stunted; similarly moralistic, but curiously inhumane. He traced its origins to a ‘permanent [indigenous] religious feeling’ and, specifically, to a particular form of Christianity that informed the national will. This he identified as ‘a Protestantism of the most pronounced type’. He called it ‘puritanism’. He also insisted that, for good or ill, ‘the heart of [this] nation’ throbbed in ‘Puritanism, Presbyterianism and Wesleyanism’, including even the part which assumed an otherwise ‘Anglican . . . cast’.5 Tapping into the same interpretative vein, Wilhelm Dibelius, Professor of English at the University of Berlin, defined his subjects through much the same ‘religious force’. Thus, for him, ‘Puritanism dominate[d] the English Soul’. It was a creed of ‘incomparable intensity’ and generality. For if once it had been the ‘dogma of a party’, even the prejudice of ‘the middle classes’, by the turn of the twentieth century its ‘life forms’ had come to affect the ‘entire nation from top to bottom . . . through aristocracy [to] bourgeoisie and even proletariat . . . excepting [in fact] only those of . . . the very lowest social grade’. Again, to both benevolent and malevolent effect: at once ‘moralising . . . public life’ and ridding common existence of the ‘worst passing of natural man’, but also ‘clothing [native] culture . . . in an all-pervasive joylessness’ and contaminating personal relations through ‘pious . . . cant’.6 Curiously perhaps, in pointing to so powerful a religious basis of postVictorian Englishness, neither of these indubitably learned observers made much of the surviving divisions between establishment and dissent, still less of diverging liturgical forms or competing doctrinal provisions in native, protestant sentiment. To Boutmy and Dibelius, English protestantism was (in essence) one thing. To that degree, they may have (unwittingly) corroborated Newman’s critique of a thin, indigenous faith.7 But this, assuredly, was not their intention. Rather, they meant to highlight just how general, indeed how common, was the underlying sensibility. 5 6

7

´ Emile Boutmy, The English People: a Study of Their Political Psychology, trans. E. English (London, 1904), pp. 29ff., 44–5, 52–3 and 108–11. Wilhelm Dibelius, England, trans. Mary Agnes Hamilton (London, 1930), pp. 399–401. This book, originally published in German in 1922, was based almost entirely on research carried out before the outbreak of the First World War. John Henry Newman, History of My Religious Opinions (London, 1865), ch. 5; though note his observations on ‘The Anglican Church’, pp. 319–42. This was, of course, a reissue of the polemical Apologia Pro Sua Vita. For its context and an account, see Ian Ker, John Henry Newman, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2009), ch. 14.

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What it proved, they believed, was just how far beyond organisational division and dogmatic dispute the sway of an English, puritan attitude truly extended. For Dibelius especially, what distinguished English purity from German religiousness was its ‘common [as opposed] to individualistic . . . aspect’.8 That may have rendered the final product somewhat insipid. But, by the same token, it afforded the English people as a whole a set of distinct, lofty and broadly acknowledged conceptions of what Boutmy recognised as ‘uprightness and decency in questions of money, a highly developed sexual morality and a deep religiousness that [transcended] all its pharaism’.9 The result was a strange and remarkable race: a people at once capable of taking its mission to the world – against slavery, for free trade – yet curiously oblivious to any lessons that might have been learned from travelling so far across it.10 It was also, and for much the same reason, a low-key national faith, broad in witness but vague in detail. And there was more. The English were moralistic and improving, yet far from obviously compassionate. They were well educated but seldom subtle; also self-consciously righteous, if little bothered with the complexities of truth. All this made for the natural expression of what Boutmy called the perpetual ‘provincial in Europe’. Yet the same material could be interpreted more generously, and no contemporary did so more effectively than George Santayana. To some degree, he simply rewrote Boutmy and Dibelius with affectionate effect. The Englishmen he admired were neither especially intelligent nor passionate, but rather conventional. They were habitually governed by their ‘inner atmosphere’, which was neither particularly ‘spiritual nor mysterious’. For all that, the ‘cool . . . weather’ that informed their souls gave them a sense of direction beyond ‘mere principle’, guiding their lives ‘manfully . . . and . . . ethically’, through a ‘religion beyond religion’. This was the unselfconscious puritan, the ordinary ethicist, the unapologetic Anglo-Saxon.11 What outsiders painstakingly examined, insiders instinctively accepted. Most early-twentieth-century Englishmen happily acknowledged the designation ‘puritan’, not least, for the clear guidance it offered them in otherwise complicated matters. It was their ‘common puritan blood’ that enabled Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling to identify the better, that is, the more difficult, option when confronted by any pressing moral

8 10 11

9 Boutmy, The English People, p. xxviii. Dibelius, England, p. 403. Ibid., p. 101. George Santayana, ‘The British Character’, in George Santayana, Soliloquies in England, 1914–1918, ed. Ralph Ross (Ann Arbor, MI, 1967), pp. 29–32, at p. 31; Boutmy, The English People, p. 101.


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dilemma.12 Moreover, that this was a truly common English quality, they and their like seldom doubted. Davidson not only assured Jackson that ‘Puritanism’ was something that ‘flowed’ through every ‘English[man’s] blood’.13 He also insisted that this was true both of the churched and unchurched among them. Boutmy noted that puritanism’s effects were ‘the monopoly neither of dissenters . . . nor . . . protestants’. Local knowledge went further still, suggesting that its blessings were not even confined ‘to church or chapel-goers’.14 This was less of a far-fetched claim than it might now seem. Young Frank Leavis – no instinctive admirer of establishment Tories – proudly recalled the ‘fierce protestant conscience [that] burned’ through his father Harry. It struck him as quite unremarkable that this life-giving flame should have been entirely ‘divorced from any orthodox religious outlet’.15 Harry, piano-maker and political radical as he may have been, was at least a man of respectable morals. But the spell of puritanism extended as far as the Edwardian libertines. Nothing else can quite explain Maynard Keynes’s depiction of Bloomsbury as a ‘group of idealists . . . in the English puritan tradition’, namely, men and women above all concerned ‘with the salvation of their souls’.16 Perhaps the very elasticity of indigenous interpretation encouraged outsiders to believe in the historical indestructibility of the phenomenon of English puritanism. Certainly, few foreign observers noticed much change in English religious attitudes up to 1945.17 True, such survey material as then existed suggested that the natives had become ever less of a church-going people during the intervening decades.18 But as the French journalist, Pierre Maillaud, argued, this amounted to little. For him, Attlee’s England remained not merely a ‘Christian country’, but a protestant land. ‘Puritanism’, he insisted, still ‘ran right through [it].’19 By then, however, many natives begged to differ. From no later than the 12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19

Philip Williamson and Earl Baldwin (eds.), Baldwin Papers: a Conservative Statesman, 1908–1947 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 26; Baldwin to Joan Dickinson, 16 November 1926. Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Memoirs of a Conservative: J. C. C. Davidson Memoirs and Papers, 1910–1937 (London, 1969), p. 188; J. C. C. Davidson to F.S. Jackson, 18 November 1923. See ch. 2 above, pp. 57–8. Boutmy, The English People, pp. xi–xii; Davidson Memoirs and Papers, p. 188. Cited in Ian MacKillop, F. R. Leavis: a Life in Criticism (Harmondsworth, 1995), p. 29. J. M. Keynes, ‘My Early Beliefs’, in J. M. Keynes, The Collected Work of J. M. Keynes, vol. X: Essays in Biography (Cambridge, 1972), p. 437. Though note the remarks in Dibelius, England, pp. 492–3. Compare those remarks with similar observations in W. R. Inge, England (London, 1926), pp. 71ff. and 286–90. For fuller discussion of this early investigation into indigenous cultural change, see ch. 3, above, pp. 110ff. B. S. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress: a Second Survey of York (London, 1941), ch. 13. For a fuller discussion, see ch. 5 below, pp. 193–5. Pierre Maillaud, The English Way (London, 1945), p. 62.

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end of the Second World War, they began to insist upon something fundamentally different – indeed, recently altered – in common, English moral life. The England that they observed still remained a Christian culture, in some vague ‘ethical sense’.20 But the educated consensus suggested that it was no longer a puritan society. About this change, some were not merely sure but actually glad. Decrying the ‘prudish ascetic[ism]’ that he took to be both characteristic of the type and alien to ‘the English people proper’, George Orwell rejoiced that, by 1947, a superficial and deleterious ‘puritanism’ was in terminal decline among his compatriots. It had been effectively reduced to the despised ranks of ‘small traders and manufacturers’.21 Would that his mind’s eye could have been turned towards Councillor Roberts’s grocery in Grantham.22 Others were simply content to trace their own liberation from the curse. Bitterly recounting ‘that denial of life’ proclaimed in the ‘deplorable . . . Puritanism’ of his Cornish Sunday school, the historian A. L. Rowse ruefully remarked upon the ‘years which it had taken him to recover’ from the insistent ‘effort to be good’ that this teaching had instilled.23 No doubt we should rejoice in the knowledge that he succeeded.24 More subtle critics neither declaimed over the corpse nor gloated by its graveside. Yet they seldom doubted the significance of what had happened. Attempting ‘a contemporary . . . perspective’ on the ‘character of [postwar] England’, Ernest Barker noted the continuing presence of ‘the puritan within us’. He even hazarded a guess that it would, in all probability, never ‘entirely leave us’. But he still contended that this stern taskmaster no longer represented ‘the only thing within us’. More, he insisted that it no longer constituted the most important aspect of English ethical existence.25 That view found widespread corroboration among many, indeed most, subsequent commentators; so much so that by the time John Marlowe essayed perhaps the first self-conscious history of the Puritan Tradition in English Life, less than a decade later, it 20 22

23 24

25

21 Ibid., p. 16. George Orwell, The English People (London, 1947), p. 14. As recalled in Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London, 1993), pp. 10–12; a more subtle account of the same can be found in John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, vol. I: The Grocer’s Daughter (London, 2000), ch. 1, esp. at pp. 23–5. The specifically religious aspect of that milieu is perhaps best brought out in Brenda Maddox, Maggie: the First Lady (London, 2003), ch. 1 (‘Methodism Means Method, 1925–1939’). A. L. Rowse, A Cornish Childhood (London, 1942), pp. 156–7. Or did he? For a profound analysis of Rowse’s more ambivalent relationship with that ostensibly hated sensibility, see Richard Ollard, A Man of Contradictions: a Life of A. L. Rowse (London, 1999), esp. pp. 10, 23, 287 and 291–2. Much can also be gleaned from a fascinating account of Rowse’s schooldays published in Valerie Jacob, Tregonissey to Trenaren: A. L. Rowse, The Cornish Years (St Austell, 2001), ch. 2. Ernest Barker, ‘An Attempt at Perspective’, in Ernest Barker (ed.), The Character of England (Oxford, 1947), pp. 565–6.


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had become axiomatic among the thinking classes that native puritanism was a thing of the English past.26 This view naturally contained a considerable element of wishful thinking. But it was grounded in the realities of post-1945 life. Notwithstanding all the material austerity that necessity had forced upon them, the British, but most notably the English, had by then become a culturally permissive people.27 This was most obviously true of their sexual habits. These were not then especially adventurous. An outbreak of bigamy failed to survive the years of hostilities.28 But the British were increasingly forgiving, at least about serial monogamy. A fundamental change in prevailing attitudes to the sanctity of marriage unmistakably outlived the re-establishment of peace. In 1913 there were just 577 divorces in England and Wales. In 1947 there were 60,000.29 Injudicious wartime romance accounted for only a small part of that increase. In fact, the figure began to rise as early as 1920. It more than doubled during the years to 1940.30 It has never really stopped rising since.31 With such numbers came a certain moral leeway. The sure road to public ruin up to 1914, divorce was divested of much of its erstwhile social stigma during the following thirty years. A ‘guilty party’, George Riddell, was raised to the peerage in 1921, albeit in the teeth of opposition from George V.32 An innocent one, Josiah Wedgwood, was appointed to the Cabinet in 1924, both firsts.33 Of course, there were limits to interwar indulgence in this respect. Edward VIII all too poignantly discovered them.34 The

26

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28 29 30 31 32 33

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John Marlowe, The Puritan Tradition in English Life (London, 1956); see esp. ch. 9 on ‘The Decline of the Puritan Tradition’. Note similar conclusions in J. D. Scott, Life in Britain (London, 1956), esp. ch. 3, ‘Religion’. For a contemporary account, see Douglas Goldring, ‘The New Morality’, in Douglas Goldring, The Nineteen Twenties: a General Survey and Some Personal Memories (London, 1945), ch. 5. Donald Thomas, An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War (London, 2001), p. 183. See Lyttleton, Commonplace Book, p. 63, where the difference is noted. D. E. Butler and A. Sloman, British Political Facts, 1900–1975 (London, 1975), p. 266. In 1920, there were 3,747 divorces; in 1940, 8,396. Ibid. For the relevant legal background, see Stephen Cretney, Family Law in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2003), chs. 6–8. A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965), p. 170. Ibid. Also T. O. Lloyd, English History 1906–1992: Empire, Welfare State and Europe (Oxford, 1993), p. 149. George V’s views on marriage and divorce are outlined in Kenneth Rose, King George V (London, 1983), pp. 365–7. Specifically attributed to the force of the ‘nonconformist conscience’ in Cuthbert Headlam’s diary. See Stuart Ball (ed.), Parliament and Politics in the Age of Churchill and Attlee: the Headlam Diaries, 1935–1951 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 100, for 2 December 1936. For a contrary view, see Susan Williams, The People’s King: the True Story of the Abdication (London, 2003), ch. 12.

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wilier Harold Macmillan preferred not to test their bounds.35 But when Anthony Eden dissolved his marriage in 1947, he did so in the reasonable hope that this would not prevent subsequent assumption of high office. About that much at least, he was quickly proved correct.36 Then there was the question of drink. The Victorians had continually baulked at the challenge of conducting their own ‘noble experiment’.37 But the assertion of a ‘dry England’ still kindled some of the wilder passions of Edwardian Liberalism.38 With the outbreak of the First World War it passed into the ‘borderlands of the practical’.39 Strict licensing laws, first introduced ostensibly to prevent interruptions of wartime production, remained a long-term legacy of the conflict.40 Nationalisation of public houses and the whole of the ‘brewing interest’ were seriously discussed in Cabinet throughout the spring of 1915.41 Eventually thwarted in his plan, Lloyd George still persuaded King George to pledge himself not ‘to touch another drop of alcohol until the end of the war’.42 Wretched Queen Mary, denied her daily drop of Moselle, resentfully remarked ‘we have been carted’.43 She was not altogether wrong. But, the 35

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39 40 41

42 43

Macmillan’s marital dilemma is carefully chronicled in Alistair Horne, Macmillan, vol. I: 1894–1956 (London, 1988), pp. 84–90. It was passed over in his memoirs. But so too, in truth, was his entire marriage. For what there is, see Harold Macmillan, Winds of Change, 1914–1939 (London, 1966), pp. 116–17. This incident goes unmentioned in Eden’s Memoirs. But then none of its three volumes covers any aspect of the years 1945–51. For details see David Carlton, Anthony Eden: a Biography (London, 1981), pp. 270–1; also D. R. Thorpe, Eden: the Life and Times of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon, 1896–1977 (London, 2003), pp. 338–9. For some of the reasons why, see Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: the Temperance Question in England, 1815–1872 (London, 1971), ch. 15; also Lilian Lewis Shiman, The Crusade against Drink in Victorian England (Basingstoke, 1988), ch. 9. The phrase ‘noble experiment’ is often attributed to J. Edgar Hoover, by way of an apology for American prohibition, 1919–1933. Yet, it is noticeable only by its absence in Richard Gid Powers’s biography, see J. Edgar Hoover: Secrecy and Power (New York, 1987). The arguments for were set out in, inter alia, James Long, The Coming Englishman (London, 1909), ch. 17, ‘The Story of Drink’; and countered, with characteristic force, in F. E. Smith, ‘Licensing Policy’, F. E. Smith, Unionist Policy and Other Essays (London, 1912), pp. 219ff. For a modern assessment, see G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 362–5. David Willoughby, ‘The Public House’, in David Willoughby, About It and About: Articles from Everyman (London, 1920), p. 235. Not that the author approved – see pp. 236–9. Taylor, English History, p. 37. For a modern contemporary commentary on its (lack of) progress, see Asquith’s letters to Venetia Stanley in Michael and Eleanor Brock (eds.), H. H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley (Oxford, 1982), pp. 307–9, 527–8, 530 and 567–8; entries of 25 March, 1 April, 8 April and, finally, 23 April 1915. An episode curiously neglected in the relevant chapter of David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol. I (London, 1934), see esp. chs. 7 and 8. As recorded in Violet Bonham-Carter’s diary, 22–3 May 1915; see Mark Pottle (ed.), Champion Redoubtable: the Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham-Carter, 1914–1945 (London, 1998), p. 36.


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royal couple’s reluctant example proved widely influential. It was quickly followed by Kitchener, then in short order by Haldane and Runciman.44 Bonar Law was a lifelong abstainer anyway.45 With the removal of Asquith in 1916, the coalition Cabinet became more self-consciously abstemious than at any time before or since.46 But that proved to be the sum of it. There were no more comparably ambitious attempts at regulation, still less schemes for public ownership after 1918. Partly as a result, Britain fought the Second World War thoroughly well oiled. Not only did a prodigious imbiber preside over national fortunes from 1940; he inspired a people by then officially guaranteed in its favourite tipple.47 The introduction of rationing on 30 November 1939 made particular provision for the exclusion of beer, for the purpose of sustaining national morale. Public spirits were lifted still higher by a ‘helpful intervention from the brewing industry’, just two weeks later, assuring armed forces and civilians alike that barley stocks were ‘ample’ for the foreseeable future.48 So they proved, right up to the bacchanalian revelries of May 1945.49 Above all, there loomed the great matter of the Lord’s Day. Or rather, so it once had. Nothing so defined Victorian puritanism as its commitment to the sabbath. In part this was because the obligation was so wide-ranging. The nineteenth-century Sunday was conceived not simply as a day of worship, but also as a moment for domestic fulfilment and an opportunity for rest. As such, its spiritual promise precluded not only paid labour but also private amusement.50 Otherwise perfectly rational people took this injunction to extraordinary lengths, some, for specifically religious reasons. Viscount Simon remembered how his father had been brought up ‘to shave . . . last thing on Saturday night’, thereby avoiding such labour as might despoil ‘the sanctity’ of the ‘following morning’.51 44 45 46

47

48 49 50

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Ibid. See also Bentley Brinkerhoff Gilbert, David Lloyd George: a Political Life, vol. II: Organiser of Victory, 1912–1916 (London, 1992), pp. 151ff. R. J. Q. Adams, Bonar Law (London, 1999), p. 15. Taylor, English History, pp. 69–70; John Stevenson, British Society, 1914–1945 (London, 1984), pp. 71–2. For a detailed, contemporary, account, see Henry Carter, The Control of the Drink Trade: a Contribution to National Efficiency (London, 1918), pts II and III. For Churchill’s views on the ‘drink problem’ in 1915, see Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, 1900–1955 (London, 1992), pp. 176–7. His attitude to drink in general is perhaps best brought out in his study of fellow imbiber F. E. Smith. See Churchill, Great Contemporaries (London, 1930), ch. 11. Cited in Thomas, An Underworld at War, p. 26. Brilliantly described, from personal memory, in Robert Blake, The Decline of Power, 1915–1964 (London, 1985), p. 305. M. J. Quinlan, Victorian Prelude: a History of English Manners, 1700–1830 (New York, 1941), ch. 2; Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969), esp. pp. 273–90, and at p. 280; John Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday (Manchester, 1980). Viscount Simon, Retrospect (London, 1952), p. 15.

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Others observed the sabbath by way of respect for social convention. Young Robert Bryon’s generally liberal-minded parents refrained that day from the corrupting influence of card games.52 Respectable children everywhere endured what one of them recalled as a strict prohibition against ‘any play . . . anywhere, at any time’.53 Even for adults, these were seldom merely trivial restrictions. J. H. Thomas recalled how political activity ceased that day, especially among radicals.54 Military exercises were similarly frowned upon, notably among nonconformists, after even 1914.55 Yet so-called ‘continental’ habits crept up on the English during the interwar years. Self-consciously ‘decent’ people not only increasingly skipped church but took part in organised sports too.56 ‘Roughs’ more obviously indulged their pleasures unmolested and even unchastised,57 so much so that by 1950 Parliament felt free to authorise that ‘amusement parks’ in the Festival of Britain should remain ‘open to the public . . . on Sunday afternoon’.58 I The simple reality of all these changes was clear enough. It was more difficult to explain them. Many observers identified the most important cause as the decline of denominational nonconformity in England after 1914. Indeed, at least one contemporary historian, Denis Brogan, insisted upon its defining significance in the emerging ‘social landscape of the 1940s’.59 Others noted the still earlier demise of the Liberal Party: seemingly triumphant as recently as 1906, effectively moribund by 1924.60 52

53 54 55 56

57

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James Knox, Robert Byron: a Biography (London, 2003), p. 41. Such injunctions and the religious habits they thereby sustained were widely recalled, barely one generation later, with a kind of amused contempt; see, for instance, Harold Nicolson, ‘The Edwardian Weekend’, in Harold Nicolson, Small Talk (London, 1937), pp. 36–7. Clifford Hill, ‘Memoir of an Agricultural Labourer, Gardener and Chauffeur, 1904– 1975’, in Thea Thompson (ed.), Edwardian Childhoods (London, 1981), p. 49. J. H. Thomas, My Story (London, 1937), p. 18. Stephen Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics (London, 1975), ch. 6. Some sense of that contemporary decline is captured in R. C. Churchill, The English Sunday (London, 1954), chs. 1 and 2, also 9–11. For a historical analysis, see Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday, conclusion. See, inter alia, Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939 (Oxford, 1981), chs. 5–7; Stephen G. Jones, Workers at Play: a Social and Economic History of Leisure, 1918–1939 (London, 1986), ch. 7; and George Cross (ed.), Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930s (London, 1990), pt 4; Wigley, Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday, pp. 192ff. Albeit, after much debate; see Harold Macmillan’s Diary in Peter Catterall (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries: the Cabinet Years, 1950–1957 (London, 2003), p. 32; entry for 27–8 November 1950. Denis Brogan, The English People (London, 1943), p. 57. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, 1935), passim.


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Conventional wisdom suggested – and still suggests – that such massive and interrelated institutional and organisational transfigurations must have played some part in the melancholy fate of puritan England. Certainly, the loudest voices of Victorian puritanism bellowed out of the dissenting sects. Yet Arnold’s depiction of a puritan ideal as interchangeable with chapel nonconformity constituted an error, not an insight.61 Puritanism’s preferred political vehicle might indeed have been Gladstonian Liberalism. But the notion that the two were synonymous was nothing more than propaganda, whether for or against the forces of later Victorian progress.62 Neither is sufficient to account for the passing of what once amounted to a truly national sensibility. This constituted the eclipse of a form of common feeling whose peculiar strength was rooted in what Davidson called its essentially ‘private [even] latent quality’.63 Its cause must have been similarly general, and equally profound. That point can be made more strongly still. So-called Victorian puritanism was altogether more institutionally and ideologically flexible, actually more a vehicle of ‘sweetness and light’ than its critics ever acknowledged. A ‘common . . . puritan sensibility’ also proved both adaptable and resourceful during the early twentieth century.64 It survived the death of nonconformist Liberalism. Indeed, it transcended both. English puritanism’s most eloquent champion during the interwar years was Stanley Baldwin, himself a lifelong Anglican and Tory.65 Yet its political possibilities also seized the attention of his socialist rival, Ramsay MacDonald.66 Baldwin’s famous essay on ‘Religion and National Life’ presumed the compatibility of a universal puritan sympathy with his own party preferences. Many accepted the logic of this argument. Think of the 61

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Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1969), ch. 4; see the observations of Clyde Binfield, So Down to Prayers: Studies in English Nonconformity, 1780–1920 (London, 1977), ch. 8; and more broadly, see Dale A. Johnson, The Changing Shape of English Nonconformity, 1825–1925 (New York, 1999), pt II. David M. Thompson (ed.), Nonconformity in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1972), pt IV; G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1869–1921 (Oxford, 1987), chs. 2 and 4. Davidson Memoirs and Papers, p. 188, entry for 18 November 1923. Clyde Binfield, ‘Hebrews Hellenized? English Evangelical Non-Conformity and Culture, 1840–1940’, in Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Shiels (eds.), A History of Religion in Britain (Oxford, 1994), p. 322–45; also John Wolffe, God and Great Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843–1945 (London, 1994), ch. 7. As exemplified in his collected speeches: On England and Other Addresses (London, 1926); Our Inheritance: Speeches and Addresses (London, 1928); This Torch of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses (London, 1935); and Service of Our Lives: Last Speeches as Prime Minister. See the important interpretation of Baldwin’s religion in Philip Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999), ch. 9. For MacDonald’s own idiosyncratic religion see David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London, 1977), pp. 53–5.

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Chamberlain family.67 But MacDonald’s earlier ‘Plea for Puritanism’ was conceived in the hope that others among the elect might be persuaded to turn their ‘admirable . . . private . . . characters’ to still more deserving ‘social causes’. Many were – remember Arthur Henderson.68 This is not a trivial point. When push came to shove in the great ‘Sabbatarian debates’ of 1931–2, ‘puritanism’ found eloquent defenders on both sides of what was an otherwise bitterly class-divided House of Commons.69 Perhaps that was why a profound understanding both of puritan England and its passing proved so elusive during the 1940s. Still, hindsight should beware of belittling contemporary confusion. It is not as if hindsight has done much better. In many ways it has actually fared worse. It has all but forgotten the transformative crisis of the 1940s.70 And in its characteristically uncritical celebration of that presumed liberation wrought by the ‘Beatles generation’, it has bequeathed to its successors a merely caricatured understanding of Britain in the 1950s. Even now that decade is often derided as a period of complacent conservatism, rather than acknowledged for the era of rapid – and for many, liberating – social change that it truly was.71 So much historical misconception has wrought similarly perverse intellectual consequences. To consult the historiography of interwar Britain forged since the 1960s is, for the most part, to enter a world in which sabbatarianism and the drink question, even the law and custom concerning marriage and divorce, seem barely to have aroused common passions, let alone to have engaged the most important social and political questions of the day. To recognise that they did, and that this was because, in Barker’s words, ‘religion [then] remained . . . the key that unlock[ed] most doors in English life’, is to begin to appreciate both the full extent and the real impact of the progressive corrosion 67

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Stanley Baldwin, ‘Religion and National Life’, in Stanley Baldwin, The Torch of Freedom, pp. 77–87; Stanley Baldwin, ‘The Contribution of the Baptists’, in The Torch of Freedom, pp. 100–5. David Cannadine, ‘The Bourgeois Experience in Political Culture: the Chamberlains of Birmingham’, in Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Dietle (eds.), Enlightenment, Passion and Modernity (Stanford, CA, 2000), pp. 148–64. James Ramsay MacDonald, ‘A Plea for Puritanism’, Socialist Review, 5, no. 48, February 1912, 27–33; Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000 (London, 2001), p. 129. For these events, see section III of this chapter below, pp. 166–75. A typical example can be found in Arthur Marwick, Britain in the Century of Total War: War, Peace and Social Change, 1900–1967 (London, 1968), ch. 6. An exception is G. I. T. Machin, Churches and Social Issues in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 1998), ch. 4, esp. pp. 122ff. For a recent restatement of the orthodox view, see Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History, 1945–1989 (Oxford, 1990), chs. 4 and 5. More interesting insights can be gleaned from Peter Vansittart, The Fifties (London, 1995), chs. 9–16. But serious analysis begins with Christie Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain (New Brunswick, NJ, 2004), ch. 1.


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of puritan England during the years immediately up to 1945.72 But to comprehend puritan England’s final agony fully, it is important also to savour its salad days too. In this respect, these otherwise confused contemporaries retained a distinct advantage over the self-satisfied souls who blithely followed them into the permissive paradise of later years. This was because they remembered them both. Whatever their shortcomings as contemporary chroniclers, the early elegists of puritan England knew one thing well. This was that they were themselves living proof that a ‘pronounced Protestantism’ was not in fact constitutive of the race, not even as Boutmy had slyly insinuated, the necessary religious palliative for its ‘natural . . . violence and brutality’.73 English puritanism was a historical phenomenon, one whose time had both come and gone.74 Most serious commentators during the pivotal years of the 1940s traced its origins a very long way back into national history. The Rev. A. T. P. Williams, charged with the crucial chapter on ‘Religion’ in Barker’s famous survey, actually identified a ‘strong . . . puritan . . . strain’ within medieval English Catholicism.75 Others began their narrative with the Elizabethan reformation.76 All acknowledged that the ‘hot Protestantism’ which sixteenth-century ecclesiastical politics inspired barely survived the 1650s. That was why the very notion of indigenous ‘puritanism’ was almost completely absent from eighteenth-century English literature, and similarly from foreign accounts of domestic sensibilities. This alone gives the lie to any notion of a continuous relationship between a protestant ethic and the development of capitalism in England.77 It also points to a defining feature of Victorian puritanism: it was self-consciously novel. Or rather, it was

72

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75 76 77

Ernest Barker, Britain and the British People (Oxford, 1942), p. 116; cf. inter alia, A. J. P. Taylor, English History, chs. 5 and 9; Lloyd, Empire, Welfare State and Europe, chs. 6–8; or, more specifically, Noreen Branson, Britain in the Nineteen Twenties (London, 1975), and Noreen Branson and Margot Heinemann, Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (London, 1971), passim. Boutmy, The English People, p. 109. Above all, Marlowe, The Puritan Tradition, chs. 2, 8 and 9; but see the earlier observations of Leland Dewitt Baldwin, God’s Englishman: the Evolution of the Anglo-Saxon Spirit (London, 1943), pp. 65–6. For the striking absence of puritanism in foreign views of English character prior to 1850, see Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 129–34. The Rt Rev. A. T. P. Williams, ‘Religion’, in Barker (ed.), The Character of England (Oxford, 1947), pp. 56–84, at p. 58. Dewitt Baldwin, God’s Englishman, pp. 56–7; Marlowe, Puritan Tradition, ch. 2. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), pts II and III; Patrick Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), chs. 1 and 20. For what little evidence there is, see Langford, Englishness Identified, pp. 129–36.

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a feature of national character that had to be rescued from virtual oblivion in the nineteenth century. Indeed, it was only as a self-consciously revived, thereby also subtly transformed, ideal that puritanism became the principal moral educator of the Victorians – the critical basis of Sunday-school teaching, self-help manuals, also avant garde social and political criticism.78 This last observation is vital. But it needs to be fleshed out. Postwar historiography has characteristically attributed the modern efflorescence of Victorian puritanism first to the evangelical movement within the Church of England, then to the Promethean force of so-called new dissent beyond it.79 This understanding is not so much untrue as incomplete. To scarcely less an extent, Victorian puritanism was the product of a contemporary literary as well as a religious revival. Thus Bunyan was first restored by Southey, subsequently championed by Macaulay; from there, he became his countrymen’s common teacher in the century down to 1918.80 A similar story could be told for Milton.81 Partly as a result, native puritanism re-emerged, indeed came into prominence, in Victorian England almost as much beyond as within the confines of conventional religious institutions. Its vital moral teaching grew out of, and achieved real social significance within, a recognisable debate between educated and popular nineteenth-century British culture. That dialogue subjected what had once been little more than a sectarian creed to what Raphael Samuel has called a ‘vast metaphorical inflation’.82 Effectively removed from an erstwhile concentration upon doctrine (by then, given up to latitudinarianism), and increasingly abstracted from ancient quarrels about church government (itself diminished by the dissolution 78

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As unforgettably described by Raphael Samuel in his ‘The Discovery of Puritanism, 1820–1914; a Preliminary Sketch’, in Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew (eds.), Revival and Religion since 1700: Essays for John Walsh (London, 1993), pp. 201–47. J. D. Walsh, ‘Origins of Evangelical Revival’, in G. V. Bennett and J. D. Walsh, Essays in Modern English Church History (London, 1966), pp. 129–51 at pp. 132–6; W. R. Ward, Religion and Society in England, 1790–1850 (London, 1972), chs. 2 and 3; Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (London, 1974), ch. 1. Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Southey’s Edition of Pilgrim’s Progress’, in his Critical and Historical Essays, vol. I (London, 1873), pp. 408–24. So it was in G. O. Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (Oxford, 1876), p. 109; and, in another way, David Masson, The Life of John Milton, 6 vols. (London, 1859–80); see J. G. Nelson, The Sublime Puritan: Milton and the Victorians (Madison, WI, 1963), pp. 82ff. Samuel, ‘The Discovery of Puritanism’, p. 206. See also Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, 2001), ch. 2; S. J. D. Green, ‘Religion and the Rise of the Common Man: Mutual Improvement Societies, Religious Associations and Popular Education in the Industrial Towns of the West Riding of Yorkshire, c. 1850– 1900’, in Derek Fraser (ed.), Cities, Class and Communication: Essays in Honour of Asa Briggs (London, 1990), pp. 25–43.


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of the confessional state), Victorian puritanism forged a domestic dogma increasingly made over to the regulation of ‘personal conduct’.83 This became all but universal in later-Victorian life. It was, at least in part, what later persuaded first John Caird, the Scottish cleric, and then his most famous disciple, Stanley Baldwin, actually to define religion itself as ‘consisting, not so much of doing sacred acts as doing secular acts from a spiritual motive’.84 All of which also rendered religion, generally, and puritanism, particularly, modern in outlook. This self-conscious modernity informed the nineteenth century’s principled rejection of the eighteenth century: a past repudiated not merely for its generally lax religious life, but also for its narrowly patrician notions of rank and fashion, polish and politeness, even of masculinity and femininity.85 In their place, English puritanism substituted not simply austere conceptions of piety (though it certainly did that) but also revolutionary notions of the soul (the repository of conscience), of character (the engine of improvement) and finally of mind, more particularly of high-mindedness (the rational basis of public duty and self-sacrifice). That intellectual revolution found perhaps its first, and certainly its best, expression in Carlyle’s masterly Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. It was also reflected in a general shift of sensibility faithfully reproduced in multitudinous examples of the new genre of working-class autobiography. Together, these made a national hero of the Lord Protector. But, as Maurice Cowling has recently put it, they also opened up the possibility of heroism to every man, at least to every protestant Englishman, in a sacred realm now righteously restored to him.86 This was why the social sentiments that English puritanism typically expressed were as much democratic as bourgeois. Yet, in their alternate emphasis on duty and merit, they could still pass muster among the more earnest sections of the nineteenth-century aristocracy.87 Thus it was a common puritanism that linked Samuel Smiles to Richard Cobden, and each, albeit tentatively, to Lord John Russell.88 In that way Victorian puritanism pointed to something altogether more profound 83 84 85 86

87 88

Samuel, ‘The Discovery of Puritanism’, pp. 206–7. Baldwin, ‘Religion and National Life’, p. 80. I owe this insight to Samuel, ‘The Discovery of Puritanism’, p. 208. Thomas Carlyle, Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1895), esp. vol. III, pp. 142, 186 and 307; also vol. IV, pp. 15–77. Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine, vol. III: Accommodations (Cambridge, 2001), p. 9. Dibelius, England, pp. 491–2. See Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance (London, 1859) which actually mentions Cobden on pp. 20–1 and Russell on pp. 24 and 450–1; similarly, Samuel Smiles, Life and Labour, or Characteristics of Men of Industry, Culture

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than a world made safe for manufacturers. For it promised nothing less than an unprecedented moralisation of life, that is, of the whole of every life. This possibility may now seem rather constricting. Contemporaries found it, on the contrary, liberating. That was because it represented an understanding of things which made the otherwise utopian end of a progressive purification of ordinary existence seem both necessary and possible. It was necessary because the sanctification of the commonplace also highlighted the latent devilry in normal life. It was possible because, for all the ubiquity of evil, puritanism’s promise assured all believers that God had endowed each man, through his conscience, with a capacity for what Carlyle called ‘soul-effort’, that is, with an ability for righteous striving. Not only extraordinary but also simple men, so armed, could confront the evil of the world and, to a degree anyway, replace it with good.89 That haughty goal informed the whole of Mr Gladstone’s ‘severe life’.90 But it also furnished lesser mortals with what Boutmy described as a ‘peculiar . . . fund of strength’. This curious, common allocation granted each individual a divinely allocated measure of righteous resourcefulness, ready to be deployed in ‘practical life’ for the regeneration of society as well as the salvation of each soul. Hence the unquenchable sense of optimism that accompanied this mindset, and also the ingenuous passion which it implied. Naturally, Victorian puritanism tended to express itself through a certain kind of ‘personal austerity’. In this way, it certainly ‘disdained . . . mere . . . forms’. But it did so precisely because of a belief that frivolity constituted a missed opportunity, while those superficial appearances concealed vital truths. To reject both frivolity and superficiality was therefore not merely to see things as they really were, it was also to understand that ‘moral progress’ was actually possible. By extension, it was to appreciate how collective moral pressure, legitimately applied, could actually increase the sum of individual freedom, separately enjoyed. This was the English paradox: what Maillaud later described as ‘that peculiar acceptance of church and chapel interference in their ways of living grounded in the conviction that in England anyway . . . the protestant religion is a powerful instrument of personal liberation’.91

89 90 91

and Genius (London, 1887); again, respectively, on pp. 46, 199 and 379, also pp. 224 and 316. Carlyle, Cromwell’s Letters; cited in Cowling, Accommodations, pp. 4–12. M.R.D. Foot (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. I: 1825–1832 (Oxford, 1968), p. 595; entry for 29 December 1832. Boutmy, The English People, p. 52; Maillaud, The English Way, p. 204.


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Not everyone agreed. John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty specifically to warn his fellow countrymen about its potentially pernicious effects.92 But to appreciate why so many did consent, it is important not to confine historical attention to those Victorian goals that have since come to seem morally quaint: lifelong marital fidelity, temperance and sabbatarianism. They were scarcely more significant, even in their time, than many that now appear eminently rational, such as women’s rights, public health and animal welfare. Recent research has highlighted the very close links between the suffrage movement of Edwardian England and the purity campaigns for water, food and fresh air of the 1880s and 1890s.93 In much the same way, the now seemingly curious connection between political equality and sexual continence represented for contemporaries little more than natural growth. As Christabel Pankhurst once famously put it: ‘Votes for women and chastity for men.’94 So much regulation of individual existence through moral exhortation forged a world of severe ethical standards and strict cultural frontiers. This was grounded in an overwhelming preoccupation with work and an indefatigable belief in the possibility of good money. These, in turn, explicitly rejected the interrelated evils of unearned inheritance, dishonest acquisition and, above all, gambling. It was a model universe unforgettably described in Arnold Bennett’s Staffordshire sagas.95 Even at its best that form of life necessitated a certain sanctimoniousness of manner. At its more repellent, it made for simple hypocrisy. Still worse, the tight society of chapel, school and lecture-hall sometimes sustained not merely a righteous façade but also a morose existence. As Dibelius put it: ‘By insisting on looking at every issue, no matter how remote, from some religious or ethical angle, [puritanism] has clothed English life in a universal matter-of-factness and . . . lifelessness.’96 Hence, perhaps, English philistinism: in no respect did puritanism more obviously deny the broader possibilities of life than in its repudiation of art for art’s sake. To be fair, this was a doctrine first nurtured in a profound iconoclasm. But it was often expressed in a language of 92

93 94 95

96

J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London, 1859); for its genesis, see Francis E. Mineka and Dwight M. Lindley (eds.), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vols. XIV–XVII, The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1849–1873 (Toronto, 1972), vol. I, p. 294, letter of 15 January 1855; also John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (London, 1873), pp. 251–6. Samuel, ‘The Discovery of Puritanism’, pp. 233–7. Cited in Samuel, ‘The Discovery of Puritanism’, pp. 238–9. See especially his Anna of the Five Towns, ed. Peter Preston (London, 1997); note Bennett’s explanatory comments in ‘The Potteries: a Sketch’, pp. 200–2; ‘Clay in the Hands of the Potter’, pp. 203–8; and ‘My Religious Experience’, pp. 209–11; also his Sketches for Autobiography, ed. James Heyburn (London, 1979), ch. 1. Dibelius, England, p. 401.

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uncomprehending stupidity. Thus the legendary mayor of a Lancashire cotton town, on being presented with two nude statues for civic display: ‘Art is art and nothing can be done to prevent it, but there is the lady mayoress’s decency to be considered.’97 Yet, even in this respect, English puritan attitudes were often altogether more complex than either contemporary criticism or subsequent caricature allowed. That ‘appreciation for good things’, which Goethe had discerned in the eighteenth-century Englishman, never entirely deserted his nineteenthcentury counterpart.98 A distaste for aestheticism did not preclude an appreciation of culture. Indeed, in some cases, an acquired distrust for the visual actually placed a novel premium on the literal. The early (intellectual) career of H. H. Asquith bore eloquent witness to that fact.99 Considered even at its most extreme, the repudiation of diabolic imagery never denied all the pleasures of the eye, certainly not those joys faithfully traced to nature. Recall how ‘the Calvinist discipline’ of John Buchan’s home never dimmed its ‘sense of beauty and interest [in] the earth’.100 The puritan revival exerted an almost talismanic influence over early twentieth-century Britain, right up to the outbreak of the First World War, precisely because it comprehended all the classes at a time of otherwise profound social division; more still, because it transcended denominational disputes in the first great age of religious pluralism; but, above all, because it constituted the raw material of national self-definition and moral self-confidence. To the 1920s and beyond its sway was not merely pervasive, it was also self-consciously progressive. A self-conscious puritanism stood in the vanguard of change within a rapidly transforming society. In its own terms, it represented nothing less than the ethical dimensions of progress. To many it symbolised the best of British civilisation. It gave most Englishmen both an extraordinarily coherent and also an inherently evolutionary sense of who they were; that is, of what they once had been, had since become and might yet achieve. Perhaps no one expressed that hope more eloquently than Neville Chamberlain, writing to his sister, Ida, shortly after the outbreak of war in November 1939:

97 98 99

100

Ramsden (ed.), Lyttleton’s Commonplace Book, p. 17. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters, ed. T. J. Reed (Oxford, 1999), p. 57. The Earl of Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections, 1852–1927, vol. I (London, 1928), chs. 7 and 9; J. A. Spender and Cyril Asquith, Life of Herbert Henry Asquith, Lord Oxford and Asquith (London, 1932), ch. 3. John Buchan, Memory Hold the Door (London, 1940), p. 16.


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Have you read ‘A Regency Chapter’ by Miss Mayne, about Lady Desborough and Lord Grenville chiefly, but giving a very vivid and interesting picture of manners and customs at the time in the great aristocratic families? No doubt that was not typical of England as a whole but nevertheless it must have set a certain standard. I get a very strong impression of the tremendous distance we have travelled in the last 100 years, in interests, in knowledge (ignorance of common facts was almost incredible), in general fulness and variety of life, but above all in self-control. They never seemed in those days to think it necessary to exercise any discipline over themselves. They just did what they felt inclined and everyone thought it quite natural.101

Perhaps he was lucky to be spared Temple’s rude wartime awakening in this respect.102 Perhaps, too, a certain myopia had protected him from life’s less pleasant aspects.103 For puritan England never comprehended the whole nation, not even during the years 1840 to 1940.104 Still, no one ever thought that it did, least of all the puritans themselves. To them above all, the otherwise obvious truth that the world continued to be divided into the saved and the damned needed no detailed empirical corroboration.105 That England – even England – still contained both the respectable and the rough was confirmed through simple observation.106 Thus the marriage of doctrine and fact ensured that Victorian puritanism always assumed a dichotomous persona. Its vital spirit pronounced a confident confrontation with the world. But practical activity described a more subtle compromise with the complexity of things. To 1940 anyway, puritanism prevailed, but by negotiation. This was especially true in the wider British context. Put another way, all true Britons were puritans, but some were more puritan than others. The most uncorrupted were usually to be found on the Celtic peripheries of the United Kingdom. Writing to his friend H. T. Baker 101 102

103

104 105 106

Robert Self (ed.), The Neville Chamberlain Diary-Letters, vol. IV: The Downing Street Years, 1934–1940 (Aldershot, 2005), p. 472; Chamberlain to Ida, 19 November 1939. Robert Self, Neville Chamberlain: a Biography (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 445–9 furnishes an excellent account of the speed of Chamberlain’s final illness and the suddenness of his death – a true watershed in British history (p. 448). Ibid., ch. 1 for an admirable evaluation of Chamberlain’s character; cf. R. A. C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (Houndsmill, 1993), ch. 1. For some sense of what did, see John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843–1945 (London, 1994), chs. 3 and 4. A dichotomy never better described than by Philip, Viscount of Snowdon, in his Autobiography, vol. I: 1864–1919 (London, 1934), ch. 1, esp. pp. 20ff. Though for contemporary efforts to break it down, see Sidney and Beatrice Webb (eds.), The Break Up of the Poor Law: Being Part One of the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission (London, 1909), chs. 1–3; and B. Seebohm Rowntree and Bruno Lasker, Unemployment: a Social Study (London, 1911), ‘Introduction’, and chs. 2–4.

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from north of the border in April 1898, Raymond Asquith remarked upon his recent subjection to ‘the rude assault of a Scottish sabbath’. Most Englishmen of the time would have instinctively known what he meant.107 Those who ventured into early-twentieth-century Wales – and some did – found similar rigour by no means confined to the Lord’s Day. Goronwy Rees recounted how Monday evenings in pre-war Aberystwyth were exclusively dedicated to the doings of the Band of Hope: ‘a temperance organisation designed to strengthen [us] against all kinds of temptation . . . solemn oaths to abjure all forms of swearing and alcoholic liquor’.108 Then there were Wednesday evening prayer meetings, Thursdays seints and so on.109 Such severely austere regimes were rarer in England. In part this was because the peculiarly English form of Victorian puritanism constituted more of a social and political compromise in itself; it commanded the allegiance of the aristocracy more by public example than through private conviction. This was undoubtedly true of the self-consciously sophisticated within their ranks. The legendary (anyway, well-publicised) ‘Souls’ avoided divorce. They scarcely abjured adultery.110 In a slightly different way, religious asceticism conquered only part of the educated English soul, which invariably tempered its polite puritanism with a surreptitious Hellenism.111 Finally, as everyone knew, many of the poor, especially the urban poor, had scarcely ever been exposed to God’s light. That was why the Salvation Army first came into existence.112 Yet such compromises were, paradoxically, as much a source of strength as of weakness to English puritanism before 1914. Naturally, the more fervent among the Scots and Welsh lamented the moral laxity of their English cousins. But the failings of the centre more commonly proved to the periphery only that its far-flung relations were more faithfully British – because more chaste, more teetotal, more sabbatarian – than their Anglo-Saxon

107 108 110

111

112

John Jolliffe (ed.), Raymond Asquith: Life and Letters (London, 1980), p. 45, Raymond Asquith to H.T. Baker, 21 April 1898. 109 Ibid., p. 21–2. Goronwy Rees, A Bundle of Sensations (London, 1960), p. 21. Angela Lambert, Unquiet Souls: the Indian Summer of the British Aristocracy (London, 1984), pp. 37–8 and 73–4. See also Baldwin, God’s Englishman, pp. 171–3 for specific criticisms of Dibelius on this matter. Robert Ogilvie, Latin and Greek: a History of the Influence of the Classics on English Life from 1600 to 1918 (London, 1969), chs. 4 and 5; also Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1981), ch. 2; and Maurice Bowra, ‘A Classical Education’, in Maurice Bowra, In General and Particular: Essays (London, 1964), at p. 59. Baldwin, God’s Englishman, pp. 175–6; for a modern account, see Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914 (Basingstoke, 1996), ch. 2 and pp. 164–5, 167 and 170. On the Salvation Army, see K. S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London, 1963), ch. 4.


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counterparts. This may have sustained their superficial moral vanity; it rarely fed any underlying sense of alienation.113 More to the point, such relatively minor disparities across British culture commonly reminded all three nations of what they shared. Such recollection assured still sterner Ulstermen of what bound them to the mainland. Above all, it sustained all four peoples in an implacable opposition to Roman Catholic, Irish nationalism.114 In a different way, the real but limited tribute that idealistic English puritanism paid to intransigent Anglo-Saxon realities also ensured its long and tight hold over domestic public opinion, more broadly conceived. This kept not merely atheists but also aesthetes and libertines firmly at the margins of national life, even at the fringes of intellectual life. Many among the thoughtful were influenced by T. H. Green – new liberal, educational reformer and temperance activist, few by Walter Pater – Platonist, humanist and Uranian.115 What went for decadents was true of ‘Bloomsbury’ too. Seldom more than marginal preferences, they could both still be effectively refuted. Many thought that this was what G. M. Young’s Portrait did for Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. Rarely adding up to more than ‘a little local difficulty’, they might also be comprehensively confounded. G. M. Trevelyan long fondly believed that the abdication crisis had done just that.116

II But the balance of such advantage shifted dramatically after 1918, in a seismic movement of indigenous culture. This began with the 113 114

115

116

For its ironic, contemporary, acknowledgement, see Frank Fox, The English, 1909–1922 (London, 1923), p. 91. D. W. Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914 (London, 1982), ch. 5; John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain, 1840–1945 (London, 1994), pp. 140–53. T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principle of Political Obligation, ed. Paul Harris and John Marrow (Cambridge, 1986); see esp. Introduction, pp. 1–12; I. M. Greengarth, Thomas Hill Green and the Development of Liberal Democratic Thought (Toronto, 1981), ch. 1; cf. Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (London, 1893), ch. 18; also Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford, 1986), esp. pp. vii–xviii. Note the important essay by T. S. Eliot, ‘Arnold and Pater’, in T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London, 1951), pp. 430–43. Trevelyan’s attitude to Bloomsbury generally and Strachey in particular is sensitively explored in David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: a Life in History (London, 1992), pp. 39–40 and 44–5. The full ambition of Young’s project was perhaps best brought out in G. M. Young (ed.), Early Victorian England, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1934), the two-volume compendium which he first edited and from which ‘Portrait of an Age’ was extracted in 1936. See esp. Young’s preface to vol. I, pp. v–vi. The best case for Strachey’s essays was probably made by Michael Holroyd in Lytton Strachey: a Critical Biography, vol. II: The Years of Achievement (London, 1968), ch. 6.

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transfiguration of the geopolitics of the Union. The creation of an Irish Free State in 1922 initially assuaged much of Britain’s ‘Roman Catholic problem’.117 But it also brought home to the remaining British peoples – on both islands – just how much their otherwise truer faith now varied from one part of the kingdom to another. That newly apparent divergence furnished an altogether broader significance for Welsh disestablishment from 1920.118 These unanticipated developments were themselves exacerbated by more general movements of population, wealth and even social cachet to the south and east of Great Britain. To an unprecedented degree, interwar England evolved differently, that is, more speedily and more prosperously, from the rest of the British Isles.119 By 1945 such characteristic differences had also come to describe a more general difference of outlook, especially of moral outlook. For many, that now amounted to more than an occasionally disagreeable Sunday. This transformation also reflected the peculiarities of religious decline in the south and east of Great Britain. Even in England these were highly complex and far from clear-cut. According to the most reliable statistical evidence, organisational Christianity as a whole held up pretty well during the interwar years. That success may have been more apparent than real; more a matter of membership figures than regular attendance. Rowntree’s second survey of York certainly suggested as much.120 More strikingly still, both the superficial tone and at least some of the more important realities of English faithfulness altered, to the permanent disadvantage of a kingdom-wide, puritan consensus after 1920. Among the intellectually sophisticated a strident irreligion gathered renewed pace during these years. For a few, such licence permitted Hellenism with a vengeance, a modern celebration of Greek, actually Athenian, morality entirely removed from any Spartan, let alone Roman, notions of duty.121 117 118 119

120

121

See ch. 2 above, pp. 34–41. E.R. Norman, Church and Society in England, 1770–1970 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 188–201 and 269ff.; also Machin, Politics and the Churches of Great Britain, pp. 305–23. For contemporary observations on economic divergence, see Baldwin, God’s Englishman, p. 182; for subsequent analysis, Derek Aldcroft, The Inter-War Economy: Britain, 1919–1939 (London, 1970), ch. 3. For cultural differentiation, note the remarks in the Headlam Diaries, pp. 570–1, entry for 1 February 1949. And for scholarly corroboration, consult Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 271ff. B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty and Progress: a Second Social Survey of York (London, 1941), pp. 417–28. The most easily digestible figures can be found in Peter Brierley, ‘Religion’ in A. H. Halsey (ed.), British Social Trends since 1900: a Guide to the Change of Social Structure of Britain (London, 1988), ch. 13 and pp. 521ff. Noted in Rowse, A Cornish Childhood, p. 164; celebrated in Taylor, English History, at p. 169; soberly summarised in Davies, Strange Death of Moral Britain, pp. 49–50. On the implications of hedonistic Hellenism see, above all, Martin Green, Children of the Sun: a Narrative of Decadence in England after 1918 (London, 1977), ch. 2; also the


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For many more, it entailed the progressive secularisation of many erstwhile sacred ends. In that way old puritan causes found new atheistic promoters, notably in local government reform and the development of Britain’s welfare state. Hence, for example, the ethical inspiration for William Beveridge.122 Even among the religiously committed, a previously unbending sectarianism increasingly lost ground to an emollient ecumenicalism. Organised nonconformity moved towards the centre of national life. It was part of the official victory celebrations in 1945 as it had not been in 1919. Many recognised this as an unambiguously good thing.123 They neglected to notice that the same departure persuaded some of the more able and ambitious within dissent to desert back to the Anglican fold. Archbishop Joost de Blank was merely among the most candid in describing this process as a moment of ‘personal liberation . . . from an unreasonable and unreasoning Puritanism’.124 At the same time, English protestant sensibility itself underwent a profound, and related, alteration. This change reflected something more than that shift from ‘atonement’ to ‘incarnation’ which characterised Anglican political theology from the 1880s onwards.125 For it constituted a shift in educated sensibilities that extended far beyond Anglicanism and indeed continued outside organised religious life itself.126 It was perhaps first identified in what Dean Inge contemporaneously described as ‘Mr Massingham’s Religion’, what he took to be the eponymous faith of the then editor of the Nation.127 By this he meant to highlight a more general shift from reason to sentiment in English religious thinking.128 That alteration was grounded

122 123 124 125

126

127 128

remarks of Robert Skidelsky, ‘Oxford in the 1920s’, in Robert Skidelsky, Interests and Observations: Historical Essays (London, 1993), pp. 139–41. Lord Beveridge, Power and Influence (London, 1953); compare the force of chs. 1 and 8. See ch. 2 above for a consideration of these events, esp. pp. 41–60. Cited in Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 271. Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: the Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988), Epilogue. Perhaps best pursued among contemporaneous writing in Charles Gore (ed.), Lux Mundi: a Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (London, 1890), esp. chs. 1, 2, 6, 7, 9 11 and 12; Charles Gore, The New Theology and the Old Religion (London, 1907); see esp. ‘Sermons’, pp. 181ff. For an interpretation, see James Carpenter, Gore: a Study in Liberal Catholic Thought (London, 1960), chs. 7–9. Perhaps best captured in the writings of R. H. Tawney. His most famous work, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: a Historical Study (London, 1926) was dedicated to, and included a Prefatory Note by, Charles Gore; see 2nd edn, 1936, pp. xxi–xxiii. There is an interesting consideration of this relationship in J. M. Winter (ed.), History and Society: Essays by R. H. Tawney notably in Winter’s Introduction, at pp. 18–24. W. R. Inge, ‘Mr Massingham’s Religion’, The Spectator, 133, no. 5026, 25 October 1924, 595–6. For a detailed consideration, see ch. 3, above, esp. at pp. 123–8. See ch. 3 above, esp. pp. 128–34.

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in a new religious sensibility which emphasised the inner aspect, or the capacity for feeling, and thus the compassionate potential, in indigenous protestant thought. This forged a public doctrine increasingly ill at ease with puritanism’s inherited taboos. Of none of these was that anxiety more immediately apparent than in questions concerning the matter of Sunday.129 It was not that anyone actually advocated a generalised ‘secularisation of the Sabbath’. In fact, continued concern for the proper integrity of that day extended far beyond the realms of those commonly called ‘puritan’. This should scarcely surprise us. Precisely because English worship was so communal, and English religious organisations largely voluntary, the ‘maintenance of the Lord’s Day’ constituted, in the words of Bishop Henson of Durham, nothing less than ‘the very backbone of the working system of the church’.130 Conscious of just how important it was, earlier generations had protected the sabbath in law, first in 1677 and then again in 1780.131 The nineteenth century’s great achievement had been to transcend legislation by custom: that is, to make the sabbath actually more significant, because more different, but in mores rather than through coercion. To this end the Victorians had self-consciously rendered the seventh day distinct not just from their own, laxer, past but also from more indulgent, contemporary foreign practices.132 That was why the Bishop of Norwich referred, in 1921, to an inherited ‘Sunday Observance’ as a ‘priceless British characteristic’ and similarly, why he denounced any dilution of its purity in the shorthand pejorative of a ‘continental Sunday’.133 The problem was that the Continent was forever getting figuratively closer. In truth, it had been doing so since the early years of the twentieth century. The curse of a ‘creeping continental Sunday’ was a common enough complaint, especially in nonconformist magazines, well before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914.134 But so many such woeful observations were probably more significant than real evidence of contrary practice, at least until that time. For most Englishmen, a ‘brighter’ 129 130 131 132

133 134

Wigley, Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday, pp. 182ff. Anon., ‘Church Assembly: the Observance of Sunday’, The Times, 19 November 1926. Wigley, Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday, p. 205. The Victorians relied much more on the force of argument; for just a sample, see Richard Winter Hamilton, Horae et Vindiciae Sabbaticae, or Familiar Disquisitions of the Revealed Sabbath (London, 1848); James Augustus Hersey, Sunday: its Origins, History and Present Obligation (London, 1860) and the Rev. James Galfellian, The Sabbath Viewed in the Light of Reason, Revelation and History (Edinburgh, 1852). Anon., ‘How to Spend Sundays’, The Times, 19 March 1921. See, for instance, the Rev. Arthur Myers, ‘Are We to Have a Continental Sunday?’, Keighley Wesleyan Methodist Church Magazine, no. 20, January 1911 (no page number).


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Sunday waited until the sabbath became the ‘regular day for [a] football match . . . amongst the troops’; scarcely less noticeably, a normal day of work for women in the munitions factories back home.135 Fighting taught some that foreigners were not necessarily less religious for being otherwise disposed that day. Common labour convinced many more that a ‘freer and more . . . enjoyable’ sabbath need not be incompatible with their continuing religious obligations either.136 So it was that informed commentators increasingly came to talk about ‘Old’ and ‘New’ understandings of the sabbath during the years immediately after the end of the First World War. Some, like Henson, simply noted the facts, namely, (i) [t]he exigencies of war [above all, necessary work,] (ii) [d]isgust with every kind of authority [since its end,] and finally (iii) [i]mproved travelling facilities

and then drew pessimistic conclusions.137 Others pointed to the broader significance of wide-ranging economic, cultural change: to industrialisation and urbanisation and with them the agglomeration of large numbers of people in towns, increasingly needful of ‘fresh air and exercise’.138 Liberal-minded clergy (and, at least in this respect, Henson was not so very illiberal himself) increasingly argued in favour of adapting old laws (and habits) to new conditions (and customs), even to ‘organising games after morning church’ as a way of ‘guid[ing] the new movement’ into righteous ways, through ‘sympathetic . . . provision’.139 Opposition came from the usual quarters. In May 1923 the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of England unanimously passed a resolution ‘[u]pholding Sunday [as] a day of rest and worship and rejecting all movements . . . towards [the] promoting of Sunday trade or any other menace to the . . . freedom of this day’.140 But it also emerged from new institutions. That was how the venerable Lord’s Day Observance Society found its activities complemented by those of the Congress of the International Alliance for the Defence of Sunday (backed by the then Archbishop of Canterbury), also the Imperial Sunday Alliance and Sunday Lay Movement (sponsored by the new Bishop of London, the Duke of Northumberland and Mr Arthur Henderson).141 135 136 137 138 140 141

Anon., ‘Sunday Games: Innovation Favoured by Demobilised Men’, The Times, 25 February 1919. A Correspondent, ‘Sunday: The Old and the New’, The Times, 27 September 1919. Leading article, ‘Sunday Observance’, The Times, 19 November 1926. 139 A Correspondent, ‘Sunday: The Old and New’. Ibid. Anon., ‘Presbyterian Assembly’s Protest’, The Times, 18 May 1923. Anon., ‘A Weekly Bank Holiday: the Decadence of Sunday’, The Times, 22 April 1919; anon., ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury and Sunday Defence’, The Times, 21 June 1926.

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In these ‘new’ conditions, ‘old’ traditions turned to subtly different justifications for His Special Day. Old-fashioned sabbatarians could scarcely argue that industrial urbanisation was a figment of the progressives’ fevered imagination. But they did insist that: ‘all the most recent evidence of munitions workers’ experience . . . bore out the fact that too long a period of labour produced . . . overstrain, bordering on collapse and thus on mere “physiological” grounds, it “paid” to observe Sunday’.142 Two could play at that game. Strict observationists were initially confounded by the argument that bright and dull Sundays were ever more defined by the ‘ownership (or otherwise) of private gardens’; those who had them could play tennis to their heart’s content, those who did not were forced to sit in idleness inside.143 In response, they quickly turned the argument of ‘class advantage’ on its head by repeatedly pointing out how public entertainments would entail a seven-day working week for the poor, and ever cheaper commercial amusement for the bourgeoisie.144 Perhaps as a result, liberalisation in these matters flowed and ebbed. Newspapers fortunately found themselves deemed ‘works of necessity’, and their Sunday sale regularised from 1920. In some quarters reading them that day became a respectable activity.145 But a photographer was fined 5 shillings for breaking the law against Sunday trading by selling a snapshot to a young woman at a beach in Rhyl, in 1922: she, 5 shillings also, for ‘aiding and abetting’ him.146 Meanwhile, the more general argument raged and simmered. Speaking to the Church Assembly in 1926, Sir George King portentously proposed that ‘the secularisation of the Lord’s Day has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished’. This was his response to a recommendation by the Church Commission to permit organised games on Sunday on lands under its control.147 Selfconscious progressives countered by tracing such restrictive practices to the ‘Puritans of the Elizabethan Age’; alternatively to ‘Methodists and Evangelicals’ of earlier generations; anyway, by insisting that their ‘killjoy’ view was unsubstantiated’ in the Fourth Commandment.148 Populist politicians blamed foreigners. Sir Herbert Neild, Member of Parliament, identified Americans as the agents of corruption among the leisured 142 143 144 145 146 147 148

A Correspondent, ‘Sunday: Its Modern Opportunity’, The Times, 26 April 1919. Anon., ‘Reforms Demanded by Traders’, The Times, 11 May 1922. Quite specifically, one of the arguments used in Myers, ‘Are We to Have a Continental Sunday.’. Anon., ‘Newspapers as “Works of Necessity”’, The Times, 26 April 1920; Taylor, English History, pp. 234–5. Anon., ‘News in Brief’, The Times, 29 March 1922. Anon., ‘Church Assembly: The Observance of Sunday’. A Correspondent, ‘Sunday: The Old and the New’.


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classes and denounced eastern Europeans for doing the same to the erstwhile observant masses of Islington.149 Shrewder statesmen hedged their bets and kept in with both sides. Stanley Baldwin embraced every form of modern media technique to get his ordinary partisan message across for six days of the week. But he craftily assured the Lord’s Observance Day Society that he ‘had no intention of addressing any political demonstration on [any] Sunday’ during the 1929 general election campaign.150 Then one, unmistakable, development caught the public eye and lit a metaphysical fuse which blew the proverbial keg. This was the visible decline of England’s once treasured Sunday schools.151 That proceeded precipitously after 1914. Enrolment figures peaked at six million, or 16 per cent of the total British total, in 1906.152 These numbers halved during the next thirty-five years, falling to around three and a half million, or around 8 per cent of the total, in 1941.153 Such decline represented not just a collapse of collective conscience but also the growth of recreational choice. Mid-Victorian Sunday schools were at least in part so popular – accounting for up to 80 per cent of the relevant juvenile population at that time – because of the lack of available alternatives.154 Twentieth-century cities furnished secular amusements capable of competing with their charms, including parks, bands and even organised games.155 Even chapel sports could scarcely match the attractions of emerging professional varieties.156 Technological change contributed too: first the bicycle and then cheap train transport allowed people to get away somewhere nice on the sabbath, in any case somewhere nicer than Sunday school. These losses were also, again in part, related to a general ageing of the population.157 They were general in impact. But they particularly undermined the nonconformist churches. Dissenting

149 150 151

152

153 154 155 156 157

Anon., ‘Sunday Observance’, The Times, 24 September 1924. Anon., ‘Political Notes’, The Times, 19 February 1929. Whose true, historical, significance is now perhaps best appreciated in K. D. M. Snell and Paul S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: the Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 9. Christie Davies, ‘Moralization and Demoralization: a Moral Explanation for Changes in Crime, Disorder and Social Problems’, in Digby Anderson (ed.), The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Britain and America (London, 1992), pp. 1–13 at p. 11. Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain (New Brunswick, 2004), p. 44. Wigley, Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday, conclusion. Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain, pp. 44ff. S. J. D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 367–79. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 105–6; John D. Gay, The Geography of Religion in England (London, 1971), pp. 113–15.

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societies invested more in the potential returns of Sunday school.158 They lost more by their eclipse.159 Puritan England lost most of all. For that part of the secularisation of the sabbath expressed in the decline of the Sunday schools had other, and altogether broader, social implications as well. Sunday school was the place where ordinary people had learned the basic tenets of protestant doctrine.160 Fewer and fewer people now imbibed them. As a result, ever larger swathes of urban youth no longer even knew about the faith, let alone practised it. Sunday school had also been the place that inculcated the idea of an upright, benevolent and righteous life into Victorian and Edwardian children. At least at some level that meant a churched life. Its success in sustaining a church-going adult population may not have been particularly great. This was altogether less remarkable than the fact that so much effort had ever been exerted to uphold the ‘comparative clearness, truthfulness, kindness and beneficent goodwill of the people’.161 Even the attempt to do so seemed to have been abandoned. Hence the sense of impending doom which coloured much contemporary denunciation of postwar sabbath-breaking and pleasure-seeking.162 The increasingly pitiful plight of once so valuable a national asset provoked a vigorous contemporary debate. This argument spilled over into the pages of The Times during July and August 1930. Some contributors seemed to be little more than fatalistic. J. E. C. Welldon, Dean of Durham, noting that ‘no feature’ of contemporary ecclesiastical life was ‘clearer’ than that of the ‘diminishing attendance of children at Sunday Schools’, suggested that these institutions might just ‘have had their day’ and that the responsibility they once assumed for inculcating the nation’s youth into the divine mysteries should now ‘pass to the day schools’.163 But Ernest G. Braham, General Secretary of the National Sunday School Union, furiously rebuked the charge, openly doubted the capacity of day schools to fill the breach, and insisted on the continuing viability of traditional means.164 Others concerned themselves more with the question of culpability. Specifically, who, or what, was to blame? And what might be done about it? Mr Robert Brownlow fixed responsibility solely on ‘indifferent . . . modern parents’. This was no doubt partially true, but not very 158 159 160 161 162

163 164

Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 105–6. Davies, ‘Moralization and Demoralization’, pp. 10–11. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, ch. 5. For a detailed consideration of ‘The Bishops’ Report’, see ch. 6 below, pp. 221–2. R. F. Horton, ‘Methods to be Employed by the Church to Retain Young People When They Reach the Ages of 14 to 17’, in R. F. Horton, The Nation’s Morals (London, 1930), pp. 57–64, at p. 58. J. E. C. Welldon, ‘Decline of Sunday School: the Alternative’, The Times, 26 July 1930. Ernest G. Braham, ‘Decline of Sunday Schools’, The Times, 6 August 1930.


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helpful. So puritan England sought altogether more specific cause and no less particular a remedy. It found the guilty party in the cinematograph. It sought a solution in its legal suppression – on Sundays, anyway.165 Nothing, perhaps, could have been better designed to invoke the ire of interwar English puritan opinion than the cinema. It was new-fangled, indubitably post-Victorian.166 It was also foreign, specifically, of American origin.167 It was self-evidently frivolous, that is, time-consuming and God-denying. And it was very popular. Throughout the 1930s British cinemas boasted perhaps 18–19 million weekly attendances. Worst of all, it was a popular entertainment to which lax youth was increasingly drawn on Sundays. With so much damning evidence, it required no great genius to see cinema as the emerging secular replacement for proper worship and rest.168 Given such attitudes, it entailed little more than a touch of righteous paranoia to seek a solution in the force of prohibitory law. But cinema, for obvious reasons, was not specifically covered by the 1780 legislation, which only affected theatres.169 In fact, such legal control to which it was then subject had little to say about this question. The Cinematograph Act of 1909 had concentrated more upon public safety (in the provision of appropriate space) and public morals (in the regulation of particular content). No part of that legislation explicitly forbade performances on Sundays. So these began to occur. In response, some local authorities surreptitiously opted for regulation rather than repression. From 1916 onwards, London County Council and local cinema owners tacitly conspired in what became the most notorious example of this form of public-spirited collusion. As a result, profits were made, jobs created and large numbers of otherwise restless youth kept off the streets. In turn, each justified the other through tight censorship, strict control and an increasingly indulgent 165 166

167 168

169

Robert Brownlow, ‘Decline of Sunday Schools’, The Times, 2 August 1930. For a general account, see G. I. T. Machin, ‘British Churches and the Cinema in the 1930s’, in D. Wood (ed.), The Church and the Arts, Studies in Church History, 28 (Oxford, 1992), passim; Machin, Churches and Social Issues in Twentieth-Century Britain, pp. 56–7; Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain, pp. 46–7. Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), ch. 11, pp. 431ff. Ibid., p. 419. In fairness, the then Bishop of Croydon, E. S. Wood, affected to be pleased by this development; see Machin, Churches and Social Issues in Twentieth-Century Britain, p. 55. Wigley, Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday, p. 205. Curiously this piece of legislation passes unremarked upon in both the most recent standard history and the most extensive cultural history of the age; see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 48–9, 308–9, 326, 465–7 and 608–13; also John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), pp. 355–9, 372 and 372–93.

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subsidy, paid voluntarily out of private revenues to worthy public bodies, otherwise chronically short of cash. By 1930 the extent of this transfer amounted to around £200,000, distributed annually among London hospitals alone.170 That scarcely rendered Sunday cinema a charitable activity. But it did create a body of opinion increasingly in favour of progressive change. Not that the traditionalists were bereft of arguments or allies. For English puritans, Sunday cinema was an anathema. It was also, they believed, an unlawful activity effectively, if not explicitly, outlawed by the 1843 Theatres Act.171 To theatre and music-hall proprietors it also represented unfair discrimination. The jealousy of the latter combined with the wrath of the former made for a powerful body of resurgent opposition to this new cultural departure. As Sunday cinemas became more successful, extending to perhaps 200 picture palaces outside London by 1930, and as Sunday schools ever more obviously lost out in the battle for juvenile attention, so grievances long dormant came out into the open. Stung by such unprecedented competition, music-halls and theatres applied for Sunday licences. Sabbatarian organisations opposed them, at which their owners invoked the anomaly of Sunday cinema.172 The sabbatarians seized their opportunity to strike against an emerging enormity. In December 1930, they took London County Council to court over the question, and won.173 But this was a pyrrhic victory. An aggrieved council, now expressly denied the discretion to authorise the regulated Sunday opening of cinemas, pointed out that the very same ruling, Rex v. Streatham Astoria, paradoxically furnished them with no powers specifically to forbid such practices. Clyde Wilson, Chairman of the London County Council Theatre and Music-Hall Committee, invited cinema owners to test the law on their own account.174 When their courage failed them, they soon found previously unknown supporters rallying to their side. That same month, a body that would later identify itself as the Manchester and Salford Sunday Games and Freedom League held a series of meetings to protest against ‘novel restrictions of legitimate recreations on Sunday’, specifically, at ‘picture palaces’ and ‘boxing competitions’. Dr George Howell explicitly identified the ‘non-conformist conscience’ as the villain 170 171 172 173 174

Leading article, ‘Sunday Entertainment’, The Times, 24 January 1931. Anon., ‘Sunday Opening of Music Halls: Four Applications Granted’, The Times, 13 June 1929. Ibid. Anon., ‘Sunday Opening of Theatres: Important Legal Decision’, The Times, 5 December 1930. Anon., ‘Sunday Opening of Theatres’.


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of the piece, and ‘the freedom of the people’ as its hapless victim.175 Battle lines had been drawn. Hostilities were planned for the most public forum of them all, Parliament. The government of the day was desperate to avoid a conflict. This was one struggle that Ramsay MacDonald’s minority administration was determined to do without. Its reticence was scarcely remarkable – Britain was divided enough in 1930. Wise heads insisted that the political landscape was figuratively corpse-strewn enough for any decent protagonist’s lasting content.176 But as the Freedom League began (disingenuously) to denounce its own members for their failure to ‘attend during service on a Sunday’, as allegedly laid down in the 1677 Act, and as private Members of Parliament resolved to introduce a bill to extend Sunday openings to all regulated places of public entertainment, without invidious discrimination, so the government determined to act. By so doing, it now sought to lance the boil of sabbatarian controversy once and for all in sponsoring a measure of qualified reform, on its own account.177 The problem was that it simply could not do so as a government. The lines of moral division cut across party. The effective demise of the parliamentary Liberal Party exposed the previously hidden truth that such disagreements perfectly split both the contemporary Labour and Conservative Parties. As a result, the Cabinet was able neither to introduce a suitable compromise bill under its own name, nor sufficiently confident to resign office in the reasonable expectation that a new minority Conservative administration would be able to do the same. In the event it chose to hide its embarrassment behind a liberalising bill, privately sponsored by the Home Secretary, but tacitly supported by Mr Chamberlain of the Unionists and Sir John Simon of the National Liberals. This was designed to extend the possibility of Sunday opening to cinemas but not theatres (all subject to local agreement), explicitly excluding both Scotland and Northern Ireland from all its provisions.178 So began the ‘war of the Sunday cinemas’. It lasted from April 1931 to July 1932.

175 176

177

178

Anon., ‘Sunday Cinemas’, The Times, 11 December 1930. Its actual priorities are well enough set out in Robert Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump: the Labour Government, 1929–1931 (London, 1967), ch. 3; see also David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London, 1977), ch. 21. Anon., ‘Failure to Attend Divine Service: Sunday Observance Cases to Be Tested’, The Times, 6 January 1931; anon., ‘Law of Sunday Observance: Manchester Councillor Admonished’, The Times, 15 January 1936. Wigley, Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday, p. 205. Anon., ‘Entertainment on Sunday: a Local Option; Text of Government Bill’, The Times, 11 April 1931; Machin, Churches and Social Issues in Twentieth-Century Britain, p. 56.

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III The social and cultural significance of the political debates which unfolded from the early summer of 1931 can scarcely be overstated. In effect they decided the fate of puritan England. Yet even the most basic facts of this controversy are largely neglected in the existing historiography. The great contest was reduced to a ‘little fuss’ in A. J. P. Taylor’s mercurial English History.179 That is at least something. It was ignored altogether in McKibbin’s later account, even in his chapter on the ‘Cinema and the English’.180 Specialist histories have taken cognisance of a real debate.181 Still, Machin misleadingly concludes that the national government ‘easily passed’ its Sunday Entertainments Bill, ‘allowing cinemas (but not theatre) to open on Sundays’, in July 1932.182 This was most definitely not true. As a result, his narrative offers no explanation of why so many so-called ‘further bills’ were refused, from April 1931 onwards, before even that concession was finally enacted.183 This is not to deride the relevant literature. It merely furnishes admirable proof of just how profound the defeat of July 1932 eventually proved to be. But it was not inevitable, even as a parliamentary procedure. Its causes, courses and consequences deserve to be explored in detail. When Home Secretary Clynes introduced the Sunday Performances (Regulation) Bill in April 1931, he first explained both its intended limitation to ‘certain places’ of entertainment (specifically, cinemas not theatres). Then he went on to describe its enabling (rather than coercive) purposes. In this way, he also emphasised its status as a bill that presumed the possibility of subsequent law, permitting local authorities to act according to local needs and aspirations in this respect. He spelled out (as if no one believed him) that no one was going to be forced to do anything they did not want to do. The specific aim of the government (to the degree that the government actually supported the bill) was, he insisted, to do no more nor less than to ‘harmonise the law with the general mass of public opinion’ in the matter. For all his convoluted rhetoric, this was not an absurd claim. The 1780 legislation was draconian. It allowed for fines up to £200 against those in breach of the law. It was also very largely unenforced. Even its most basic terms had been 179 180 181 182 183

Taylor, English History, p. 316. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, ch. 11, passim. See, for instance, Stephen G. Jones, The British Labour Movement and Film, 1918–1939 (London, 1987), ch. 5. Machin, Churches and Social Issues in Twentieth-Century Britain, pp. 56–7. Ibid., pp. 56ff. Jones, The British Labour Movement, pp. 116–19 does offer an account, though he takes little note of the extent (and passion) of Labour opposition to the eventual measure.


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subject to qualification long before the emergence of cinema. In 1889, London County Council had resolved to take no action against Sunday concerts ‘not given by way of profit’. Eight years later the same authority extended the privilege of permitting payment at such events for reserved seats, in other words, to specific, regulated, forms of Sunday trading and the labour associated with such entertainments. The same principle had been invoked to extend this privilege again to cinemas during the First World War. So, Clynes argued, everything had proceeded swimmingly until the eruption of a protest against this, very limited, incursion into ‘the traditional English Sunday’, two years previously. Naturally, the government had no wish to undermine that ‘venerable institution’. At the same time, it had every interest in the provision of ‘reasonable recreation’ for the people, ‘especially in large towns’. Indeed, its present, moderate, proposal – a middle course – was actually endorsed by the Council of Christian Ministers on Social Questions.184 Placed in the unusual position of supporting a socialist administration from the opposition benches, Neville Chamberlain adopted, if anything, a more legalistic pose still. Ignoring both religious opposition and the moral arguments (either way), he insisted that the proposals amounted to nothing more than the ‘clarification of the law’. Moreover, they constituted nothing more than the ‘deployment of explicit legislation’ to uphold a practice many had believed to be ‘within the law’ for some twenty years previously. They neither entailed nor implied the slightest desire to force anything on anyone who did not wish it to ‘be enforced’, especially, ‘from one part of the country to another’.185 Finally, Sir John Simon put in his piece for the National Liberals. With characteristic guile, he simultaneously urged members to act only ‘in accordance with their judgement’ on this ‘urgent, insistent and very important question’, while mischievously taunting opponents of reform with the soiled legacy of 1780. This Act was passed, he insisted, only in the wake of the Gordon Riots – the first ‘such similar attempt to put pressure on the House . . . from the outside . . . in the supposed interests of religion’.186 Speaking for what by now represented the unofficial opposition, Mr J. I. Macpherson, Liberal Nationalist Member for Ross and Cromarty, rose diffidently to the challenge. He noted first that, in his experience, no bill had ever come to the House in such ‘strange and disquieting’ circumstances. He accused the government in passing of cowardice for ‘refusing 184 185 186

Parliamentary Debates, 5th Series, vol. 251, House of Commons, 8th volume of Sessions 1930–1 (hereinafter 251, H.C. Deb. 5s.); Clynes (columns) 634–42. 251, H.C. Deb. 5s., Chamberlain, 652–62. 251, H.C. Deb. 5s., Simon, 662–70.

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to sponsor a bill’ that (most of) its members clearly supported. Then he cut straight to the heart of the issue. If it was not ‘a matter of principle’ then it could only be a question of public opinion. But in this calculable question, the government had got things plain wrong. There was no such majority in favour of change. Even in London, most boroughs (fully 131) that had tried to institute such a policy had found ‘public opinion’ firmly set against it. So the substance of the bill was unfair. It discriminated against law-abiding citizens. It discriminated between one form of entertainment and another. These were cogent arguments. In retrospect, they look suspiciously more logical than those which were advanced by higher authorities. They also proved mightily convincing to many in the House. In the event, the bill passed its second reading, but only by 258 votes to 210.187 The expected Act was lost in the financial crisis of autumn 1931.188 So it was that a new national government found itself confronting the same insistent and important question in the spring of 1932. Just like its predecessor, the government was unable to sponsor any agreed bill under official auspices. Once again, a Sunday Cinema Bill emerged into the light of day as a private measure, albeit with significant, Cabinet-level support. But that meant significant, Cabinet-level opposition too. None spoke more eloquently against the proposal than Sir Thomas Inskip, Attorney-General. Noting that ‘religious opinion was [indeed] at the bottom of . . . the opposition to this measure’, he turned the argument against Simon and his ilk by declaring himself ‘proud . . . of a religious opinion’ that remained ‘strong enough’ to ‘inform public opinion’ about what would be the ‘ultimate effects of any such measure’. Many of his colleagues agreed, more, in fact, than the year before. The bill passed its second reading by just 235 votes to 217, a ‘bare majority of’ just 18.189 This was, in effect, a defeat. Wise heads in government quietly acknowledged that the necessary (equal) division of pros and antis at committee stage would ensure that, as a private bill, it would have very little chance of passage through Parliament before the summer recess.190 The same senior figures now urged compromise. By this, they meant permitting a restoration of Sunday opening to those (very limited) parts 187 188

189 190

251, H.C. Deb. 5s., Macpherson, 643–51; Davidson, 757–62. For the most extended recent account of which, see Philip Williamson, National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and Empire, 1926–1932 (Cambridge, 1992), pt III. Parliamentary Debates, 5th Series, vol. 264, House of Commons, 6th volume of Sessions 1931–2; Stanley, 833–44; Inskip, 863–73; Davidson, 961–4. Anon., ‘Cinemas on Sunday’, The Times, 14 April 1932. Machin, Church and Social Issues, describes the Bill as ‘defeated’, on p. 56. This was not, strictly speaking, true. But it contains enough of the truth to confound pedantic objection.


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of the country that already practised it.191 But such compromise was rejected on both sides.192 Facing potential humiliation, the government now resolved to act quickly. It finally introduced its own, compromise bill, that is, a real government measure. Long-standing opponents of reform within the administration – most prominently, the Home Secretary, most notably Inskip himself – were thus alternatively bullied or cajoled into supporting the new proposals, precisely because they were now in a government bill. To that degree, a united front was presented to the Commons. More to the point, government supporters were issued with a three-line whip. Sir Charles Oman may have been alone in denouncing, but he was surely far from singular in lamenting, the shoddy resort of a government to using the whips ‘on a question of conscience’.193 So it was that an even more than usually cagey Home Secretary introduced what became the final Sunday Cinema Bill at the end of May 1932. His arguments were largely defensive. He appealed as much to mutual exhaustion as sustainable logic. He denounced the paranoid ‘bogey . . . of a Continental Sunday’ and reminded everyone (perhaps himself most of all) that the English people still remained – and would for the foreseeable future remain – ‘a religious nation’, whatever Parliament decided that day.194 Above all, he pleaded for a final settlement. His opponents were more impressed by the extraordinary reversal that he (and Sir Thomas Inskip) had dishonourably wrought. This was not least because, as Sir Basil Peto insisted, they had certainly not explained it. Just one month earlier, Inskip had pleaded with the House to stand back from any measure that would deny future generations ‘one of the few glimpses’ vouchsafed to earthly men ‘of the Heavenly city’ that assuredly awaited them.195 Now he and Samuel were openly advocating that it (and they) do just that. Had so much really changed this side of paradise between April and May 1932? Or had they abandoned their opposition by ceding ‘principles for expediency’?196 Perhaps as his socialist colleague R. T. Davis believed, the government had been got at by a press campaign. Whatever, the Home Secretary and Attorney-General were now jointly guilty of ‘secularizing the British Sunday’.197 All sweet words to the contrary,

191 192 193 194 195 196

Anon., ‘Cinema on Sunday’. Anon., ‘Sunday Cinemas Exhibition’, The Times, 26 April 1932. Parliamentary Debates, 5th Series, vol. 266, House of Commons, 8th volume of Session 1931–2 (hereinafter 266, H.C. Deb. 5s.), Oman, 761–2. 266, H.C. Deb. 5s., Samuel, 715–24. 266, H.C. Deb. 5s., Peto, 724–34; cf. Inskip, 863–73. 197 Ibid., Davis, 740–6. 266, H.C. Deb. 5s., Peto, 724–34.

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this measure would legalise Sunday trading, legalise Sunday labour and, for that matter, ‘prefer American cinema to British drama’.198 These were the embittered reflections of a defeated man. The proposal duly passed its second reading, comfortably enough, by 237 votes to 61.199 Still, the undisguised disgust of its opponents was shared by many guilty-minded government supporters. Captain Crookshank denounced a ‘preposterous . . . bill’ which achieved so little in conceding so much. Accordingly, he voted against a measure he had earlier supported.200 Moreover, ‘puritan England’ never conceded for one moment the supposedly limited nature of the change entailed. After all, the legislation presumed unlicensed access to museums, picture galleries and zoological gardens from every Sunday onwards, and similarly, their right to charge patrons for those activities.201 It now extended this right to cinemas in London and ninety-seven other so-called ‘privileged areas’.202 Though it made no provision, in itself, for the increase of this number, it specifically allowed for local polls to establish local provisions at a future date in favour of Sunday opening, if that accorded with local opinion. Thus, it not only retrospectively ‘legalised illegality’, as Peto put it.203 The Act also furnished the means to extend a facility previously practised in a small minority of English towns – Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle excluded – to any place that wanted to do so.204 By 1934 nearly all London cinemas were open on Sunday and around a quarter of those in England as a whole. Significantly, perhaps only 7 per cent remained open that day in Scotland and Wales.205 Nor were consequences of this great defeat confined to the immediately observable results of this legislation. For the events of the summer of 1932 proved a catastrophic, symbolic humiliation for puritan England. Once feared, it was now increasingly despised, even ridiculed. Throughout the debates of 1932, opponents of the various bills were routinely denounced as ‘killjoys’, ‘hypocrites’ and worse.206 In its aftermath, they and their dogmas were derided and discounted as never before. Some worrying signs appeared even at the time. That same April, The Times had described Neville Chamberlain’s budget as an act of ‘puritanical 198 199 200 201 202 203 205 206

Ibid., Peto, 724–34. Ibid., Division, 797–800; anon., ‘Sunday Cinemas’, The Times, 28 July 1932; Machin, Politics and the Churches, p. 56. 266, H.C. Deb. 5s., Crookshank, 780–4. Anon., ‘Entertainment on Sunday’. Anon., ‘Sunday Cinemas: Entertainments on Sunday’. 204 Anon., ‘Sunday Cinema: an Enabling Bill’. 266, H.C. Deb. 5s., Peto 724–34. Machin, Churches and Social Issues in Twentieth-Century Britain, p. 57. 266, H.C. Deb. 5s, 715–99 passim; see also the many, various – and frequently vituperative – interventions of Robert Boothby, Member of Parliament.


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severity’, a pejorative use of the term that would have been inconceivable in such a respectable organ of public opinion only a decade earlier.207 Later in the year, the journalist Gerald Barry published an anthology of ‘ludicrous’ puritan objections to increasingly pervasive public habits. There, he and (presumably) his readers drew considerable satisfaction from exposing the sanctimonious opposition of Councillor Jones of Rhyl to the visit of a team of diving experts, including one described as a ‘Dare-devil’. Denying them permission to put on a public display in the [municipal] swimming baths on Sunday, Councillor Jones declared that while ‘I knew that the devil was coming to Rhyl, I did not think he would come in name’.208 Such rhetorical sticks broke many metaphorical bones in the English soul during the early 1930s. Neville Chamberlain may not have spotted the incipient damage quite so acutely as others. Councillor Jones was perhaps reasonably ridiculed for uncovering sin in every nook and cranny of existence. But beyond such complacency and underneath the hysteria lay an altogether more serious concern. That was the fear then identified in a blurring of ethical distinctions. Sociologically speaking, this pointed to the normalisation of vice. Something like it began to happen in English ethical life during this decade. In An Autobiography, published in 1934, Philip Snowdon recalled the West Riding village of his youth as a place strictly divided between ‘the chapel and . . . the public house’.209 The Manichean worldview that these memories implied was grounded in something more than nostalgia. Indeed, it was broadly corroborated in the best social scientific literature. Seebohm Rowntree’s study of poverty in late Victorian York contemporaneously confirmed much of the polarity that Henderson’s reminiscences later projected.210 Yet Rowntree’s later account in Poverty and Progress, undertaken in 1935, portrayed an altogether more complex place. During the intervening years, the line between the righteous and the reprobate had become altogether less clear.211 This had little or nothing to do with local circumstances. It owed a great deal more to the broader disappointments of transatlantic prohibition. Abolished as an (almost) universally derided failure in the United States at the outset of Roosevelt’s presidency, its earlier promulgation had enthused British teetotal opinion in 1919.212 Denied a local 207 208 209 210 212

Leading article, The Times, 20 April 1932; cited in Self, Chamberlain, p. 201. Gerald Barry (ed.), This England: the Englishman in Print (London, 1933); see esp. ‘The Heavenly Twins’, pp. 39–47. Snowdon, Autobiography, p. 22. 211 Ibid., pp. 363–7. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress, see esp. ch. 1. For a succinct account of the ‘American Experiment’, see Esmond Wright, The American Dream: from Reconstruction to Reagan (Oxford, 1996), pp. 239–42. For a domestic

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amendment to the Constitution, it had pursued all manner of new commitments in parliamentary regulation of the drink trade. These were genuinely ambitious. Those of the ‘Temperance Council of the Christian Church’ alone amounted to nine points: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Sunday closing; reduction of the hours of sale at week-ends; reduction in the number of licensed premises; increase in the powers of local licensing authorities; the control of churches; the abolition of grocers’ licences; the prohibition of sales of alcohol to young people; the extended use of ‘local option’: no change, reduction, no licence; other alterations to the liquor trade.

They were also controversial. The Times could discern ‘little wisdom in the attitude’.213 At the same time, many postwar measures, notably the Licensing Act of 1919, which effectively increased the number of licences and extended the sway of the drinking house, were denounced as ‘retrograde and mischievous’, having all but been framed by the ‘trade . . . itself’.214 That division of opinion reflected long-standing disagreements. Yet it also described contemporary attitudes. For it was by no means the case that so-called ‘temperance reform’ simply pitted the old against young. A Cambridge Union motion ‘that this House would welcome the prohibition of alcoholic liquors in this country’ was only just defeated by 211 votes to 203 in November 1920.215 Nor was it merely a matter of balancing reactionary against progressive opinion. COPEC’s plans for the ‘practical expression’ of Christian ideals, published in April 1924, rated the ‘drink problem’ only just below ‘unemployment’ – and well above ‘birth control’ and ‘capital punishment’ – in the order of pressing social problems.216 Opposition to the liquor trade remained a galvanising Liberal issue throughout the 1920s. Like sabbatarianism, it found supporters among both the Conservative and Labour Parties as well.217

213 214 215 216 217

view, see Keith Middlemas (ed.), Thomas Jones: Whitehall Diary, vol. I: 1916–1925 (Oxford, 1969), pp. 74–5, 88 and 104; entries for 8 February 1919, 2 July 1919 and 3 February 1920. Anon., ‘Leader’, The Times, 21 September 1919. H. H. Croydon et al., ‘The Liquor Traffic: Churches and the Trade on Bill’, The Times, 25 October 1919. Anon., ‘Cambridge Union: “Small Wet” Vote’, The Times, 17 November 1920. A Special Correspondent, ‘COPEC Ideals: Plans for Practical Expression’, The Times, 19 April 1924. Middlemas (ed.), Jones: Whitehall Diary, pp. 205, and at pp. 313–14; entries for 2 April 1926 and 30 March 1925. Labour’s rather ambivalent view is summarised in Harrison,


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Such resistance was confounded less by the realignment of politics set in motion after 1920 than through the more prosaic redefinition of postwar social habits that profoundly changed public attitudes to drink. First, convictions for drunkenness dropped, continuously from 1924, dramatically after 1928. By 1930, they stood at roughly one-quarter of their pre-war level.218 No one knew precisely what had caused so dramatic an alteration. Some pointed to the increased price of alcohol. Others suggested the significance of new and improved ‘alternatives to the public house’. Just a few, mirabile dictu, insisted on the consequences of an altogether novel, and unprecedentedly responsible, attitude to drink – or to an increasing unwillingness to drink to excess – which supposedly characterised ‘young people’ in the postwar generation. Perhaps more important was the emergence of clubs other than working-men’s clubs as places where responsible people, old and young, increasingly chose to drink, above all in Conservative clubs.219 By no means were all counter-temperance organisations politically Conservative. Some, such as the Consumers Defence League (CDL), were avowedly apolitical. It was specifically formed to promote: ‘proper and adequate accommodation in well-ordered premises which anyone may enter with the object not of excess but of reasonable refreshment and sociability’.220 But the very existence of bodies such as the CDL shifted the balance of political polemics against regulation. That made the job of Conservative anti-temperance politicians so much easier. Speaking to the Annual Dinner of the Allied Brewers Traders’ Association in 1930, Winston Churchill, Member of Parliament, ‘congratulated’ the nation for its recent achievement in removing ‘the whole drink traffic question . . . from the realm of controversial British party politics’. This was scarcely true. But in the immediate wake of his speech, the Conference of the Association of Conservative Clubs set about lobbying both party and Parliament for a significant relaxation in existing laws, above all, for the reduction of taxation on beer and the end to petty restrictions on its sale in clubs. Sir Robert Blaker, Tory Member for Spelthorne, expressed what had become an increasingly common view by 1933, when he reflected on ‘the great amount of soreness . . . shared . . . amongst

218 219 220

Drink and the Victorians, p. 403. And some Conservatives were actually willing to break the coalition over the 1921 Licensing Act; see John Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin (London, 1978), p. 148. Leading article, ‘Increased Sobriety’, The Times, 23 September 1929. Described more generally in Martin Pugh, The Tories and the People, 1880–1935 (Oxford, 1985), ch. 8. Anon., ‘Consuming and Licensing Commission: Appointment of Royal Commission on Licensing and Consumers’ Defence League’, The Times, 25 October 1929.

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decent, sober, people at the restrictions [in these matters] still placed upon them today’.221 As those restrictions began to be removed, so the arguments of these new (and very different) liberals seemed increasingly to be confirmed. That, ironically, was one result of Rowntree’s second survey of interwar York. His scientific findings confirmed much of the emerging anecdotal evidence. They proved that the working classes of York spent a considerably smaller proportion of their income on alcohol than before – now about one-tenth, rather than one-sixth of their disposable resources.222 Given that drink was more expensive than in earlier decades, this meant that they were actually drinking less; moreover, less of what surreptitiously had become a progressively weaker concoction.223 Partly as a result, convictions for drunkenness in York, as in the rest of the nation, had fallen far below their Edwardian average.224 Ironically, the moralistic teetotaller was far from pleased by these developments. That was because the social scientist in him had discovered that this new pattern of collective behaviour was generally less the product of admirable, individual, ‘self-restraint’ than of exogenous financial discipline, still worse, of financial discipline tempered by the lure of sensual counter-attractions. In fact, local publicans blamed falling trade primarily on the higher price of liquor, coupled with reduced licensing hours.225 But the police increasingly pointed to alternative amusements such as cinemas, wireless sets, even gardens as the most important cause.226 And their more subtle explanation better accounted for how a decrease in the average quantity of alcohol consumed per head had been accompanied by an increase in the number of people actually drinking. The young, that is, those born after 1901, had added little to the ‘class of drunkards’ whom Rowntree so deplored. But, in so doing, they had effectively created a new class, that of the moderate drinker. This dismayed him scarcely less.227 There was something else. The emerging nation of temperate imbibers had also become a race of occasional gamblers. It was not that no one had ever had a flutter before 1914. But the institution of gambling now assumed popular, permanent and legally recognised forms. The so-called ‘modern craze’ of football pools accounted for much of that development. 221 222 223 224 225 226

Anon., ‘Mr Churchill’s Visit to America: Views of Prohibition’, The Times, 18 March 1930; anon., ‘Licensing Hours’, The Times, 9 December 1933. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress, pp. 360–9. Ibid., p. 369; see also D. E. Butler and J. Freeman, British Political Facts, 1909–1960 (London, 1963), at p. 326; and the remarks in Lloyd, English History, p. 265. George B. Wilson, Alcohol and the Nation (London, 1940), pp. 11, 253 and 286. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress, pp. 363 and 372. 227 Ibid., pp. 363. Ibid., p. 370.


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It also replaced gambling at grounds, which had always been prohibited. Greyhound racing, introduced into Britain from the United States in 1926, similarly became a regular part of life in many working-class communities. The result was that, by 1935, the average family spent around 2s 6d per week on various forms of gambling.228 Puritan England deplored this development. As early as 1925, the Council of the National Liberal Federation passed a unanimous motion expressing its ‘alarm at the undesirable growth of the gambling habit amongst all sections of the community [and argued for] an urgent need for legislative action to check this [emerging] evil’.229 Perhaps the Council found it easier to denounce gambling rather than drink in the presence of H. H. Asquith.230 But it was not alone. Two years later, the Social and Industrial Commission of the National Assembly of the Church of England reported unfavourably on the increase of betting in society, not least because while (public) drinking remained a largely masculine activity, their eminences’ research suggested that up to three-quarters of women now engaged (to some degree anyway) in this peculiarly novel vice. This meant that immorality was now extending its sway to previously inviolate sections of the population.231 Perhaps that was why G. M. Trevelyan concluded that ‘[g]ambling now perhaps does more harm than drink’ in his influential English Social History, published in 1944.232 But the figures went on rising. A resolution of the 1948 Lambeth Conference drew particular attention to ‘the grave moral and social evil that [had] arisen through the [increased] prevalence of gambling’.233 Rowntree himself devoted an entire chapter to this ‘new . . . organised and . . . pernicious . . . rejection of reason [and] faith’, in a further study of English Life and Leisure, published in 1951. His conclusions were not optimistic.234

228 229 230

231

232 233 234

Anon., ‘Gambling on Football Grounds’, The Times, 8 April 1919; Rowntree, Poverty and Progress, pp. 370–1; also Thomas, An Underworld at War, p. 3. Anon., ‘The Vitality of Liberalism’, The Times, 16 May 1925. On Asquith’s failure to take the pledge in 1915, see Taylor, English History, p. 37. His habits were recorded in the Private Papers of Douglas Haig; cited in Roy Jenkins, Asquith (London, 1964), p. 412. Anon., ‘The Growth of Betting’, The Times, 9 September 1927; by contrast, Mass Observation, The Pub and the People (London, 2nd edn, 1970), p. 134 found that as late as the 1930s barely more than 16 per cent (or 1 in 6) of pub-drinkers were women. G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History: a Survey of Six Centuries: Chaucer to Victoria (London, 1944), p. 571. Resolution 44; see Norman, Church and Society, pp. 334–41. B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: a Social Study (London, 1951), ch. 2, see esp. pp. 147–56. For a modern assessment, see Machin, Churches and Social Issues, pp. 118–25.

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IV These were the people – less bridge-players than dog-fanciers, still of course tea-drinkers but unquestionably beer-swillers too, though strikingly chaste in matters of sexual morality – who went to war against the Axis powers in 1939.235 The extraordinary capacity they revealed for dignified endurance in that struggle is not doubted here. To be fair, Temple never doubted it then.236 Their vital and continuing puritanism, however, was brought into question. That was what Temple feared at the time. There were many reasons for his concerns. To some extent, these can be traced to the changing nature of the war itself. Anglican bishops were, after all, far from alone in interpreting its cause, at least as first construed, in terms of a ‘defence of Christian . . . civilisation’.237 The developments of June 1941 famously sullied that commitment for some, though not all.238 Surreptitious social change did for others. ‘Puritan England’ certainly found little to celebrate in a struggle that seemed increasingly to be waged not only by the dissolute and degenerate but on behalf of domestic drunkenness and sexual licentiousness.239 Moreover, by 1943 puritan England was under assault from another, new and unforeseen, temptation. This was the ‘black market’. The child of wartime rationing, this institution gave birth to a very different kind of moral order. It certainly had a much greater effect on common standards of honesty than any real or imagined outbreak in collective libidinousness ever did.240 For rationing, as the disgruntled chairman of Mile End Conservative Association put it in May 1945, made ‘criminals . . . out of thousands of decent men and women . . . in all walks of life’.241 Of course, it also had its proper function. For a few years, it rightly won many 235 237

238

239

240 241

236 The Times, 12 July 1943. Machin, Churches and Social Issues, ch. 4. See, inter alia, H. H. E. Craster (ed.), Viscount Halifax: Speeches on Foreign Policy (London, 1940), pp. 102–3, 334, 362, and 368; also Lord Lothian, The American Speeches of Lord Lothian, July 1939 to December 1940 (London, 1941), pp. 10, 34, 71 and 139; finally, A. J. Toynbee, Christianity and Civilisation (London, 1940), pp. 22–7 and Arthur Bryant, The English Saga, 1840–1940 (London, 1940), esp. ch. 10, ‘Way of Redemption’, pp. 315–34, at p. 334. An extended correspondence is cited in Thomas, An Underworld at War, p. 16. This, generally underappreciated, aspect of the early war effort is considered at length in Keith Robbins, ‘Britain, 1940 and “Christian Civilization”’, in Keith Robbins, History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London, 1993), ch. 14. Anon., ‘Convocation of Canterbury’, The Times, 14 October 1943; anon., ‘Moral Laxity: Archbishop’s Appeal to Public Opinion’, The Times, 26 October 1943; anon., ‘Sexual Morality and Drinking: Bishop of London on Western Laxity’, 22 October 1943, reflect the ‘moral scare’ of October 1943. Nor was this effort limited to the war itself; see the observations made in ch. 5 below, at pp. 190–2. Cited in Thomas, An Underworld at War, p. 16.


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admirers. It fed an entire population, many better than they had ever been fed before. It also conserved precious resources for generally more pressing purposes.242 But it was continued, apparently without an end, in a country unthreatened by occupation after American intervention.243 It was also maintained among a people by then enjoying a continuous rise in real wages.244 Officially, they had little to spend their money on, save National Savings Certificates.245 Unofficially, they turned to the ‘spiv’ and his products.246 More than anything else, this was what dismayed Temple in 1943. He denounced many new and ‘peculiar social habits’, including a ‘decline of moral standards’, an increase in ‘sexual immorality’, even the reemergence of ‘public drunkenness’. But what he really feared was the emergence of a quite generalised culture of dishonesty. That also explained why such exhortations were doomed to fail. The man from Mile End understood his people better. He appreciated how their complaints pointed to a critical alteration in common culture quite different from that deplored by the bishops after 1939.247 It is perhaps best encapsulated in what might be called the eclipse of the ideal of austerity. In part, this departure reflected an all too natural desire for passing pleasure among the potentially doomed. To that degree it represented a change that might reasonably be thought to be temporary. But only to that degree, for it constituted much more of a permanent change in popular attitudes towards consumption. Grand social theorists take this shift to be entailed in the very nature of commercial civilisation itself.248 They may be right. But for most twentieth-century Britons it was first made clear by the vexatious activities of their own wartime government. As weekly wages continued to outstrip price inflation, the general paucity of goods increasingly appeared to the ordinary man as something publicly imposed rather than socially endorsed. This was especially true after 1942, when rationing was applied 242

243 244 245 246 247 248

R. J. Hammond, Food and Agriculture in Britain, 1939–1945: Aspects of Wartime Control (Stanford, CA, 1954), chs. 2–5; W. K. Hancock and M. M. Gowing, British War Economy (HMSO, 1949), chs. 3, 5–6 and 18; the experience is described in Juliet Gardiner, Wartime: Britain, 1939–1945 (London, 2004), pp. 144–62, 487–91, and 506–7. David Reynolds, Rich Relatives: the American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945 (London, 1995), pt I. Hancock and Gowing, British War Economy, pp. 163–5, 169, 325, 342, 502 and 571. Ibid., chs. 12 and 17. Thomas, An Underworld at War, pp. 141ff.; Gardiner, Wartime, pp. 505–7. For postwar, see David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–1951 (London, 2007), pp. 255ff. All but passed over in Iremonger, Temple, ch. 29. After David Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, in David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. by Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1988), pp. 253–67.

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to clothing as well as to food. Particularly galling in this respect was its application to women’s clothing. Officialdom took upon itself the right to define – and indeed to proscribe – what it deemed frivolous impersonal attire. Not everyone agreed with such sententiously authorised opinion. More to the point, fewer still acknowledged its right to pass definitive judgement in these matters. The Civilian Clothing (Restoration) Order may have reflected Whitehall’s most profound conclusions about the number of frills appropriate for a woman’s knickers, but many women disagreed and were willing to take the risks necessary in order to express that disagreement publicly.249 In the wake of such measures, the British generally, and the English especially, rejected the ideal of abstinence more broadly. Just as Rowntree feared they would, they increasingly defined ‘self-denial’ solely in terms of the denial of the self.250 Popular notions of freedom came within a generation to be associated altogether more with the possession of things rather than through control of the appetites. This was what Rab Butler understood when he ingenuously chided Stafford Cripps for the anachronism implied in his anti-sensuous Puritanism.251 It was also what so many felt when, during the worst years of postwar privation, they went to gawp at (as much as to buy from) Jack Cohen’s self-service stores (Tesco) popping up around the country.252 When the Conservatives campaigned for office under the slogan of ‘setting the people free’ in 1951, they guilefully responded to the future force of a truly transforming impulse. In the event, Conservative governments not only abolished rationing, but by sponsoring the Wolfenden Report, they also indirectly altered sexual attitudes.253 Successive Tory administrations presided over both the inauguration of commercial television and the introduction of premium bonds.254 No socialist condemned them for doing so. Indeed, socialism’s most advanced contemporary thinker placed himself, in this respect anyway, resolutely on their side.255 All of these social changes were traceable 249 250 251

252 253

254

255

Thomas, An Underworld at War, pp. 139ff. For a more detailed consideration of this development, see ch. 5 below, at pp. 198–203. Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 1945–1962, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London, 1968), p. 166; entry for 15 March 1949: ‘Butler told him so to his face. Cripps was amused. You do not realise how adaptable I am. I could become the champion of luxury and private enterprise overnight.’ Kynaston, Austerity Britain, p. 256. Morgan, The People’s Peace, pp. 119ff. and p. 177. On Wolfenden (and his no less remarkable son), see Sebastian Faulks, The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives (London, 1996), pp. 209ff. Morgan, The People’s Peace, pp. 478ff. and p. 146; also, Macmillan in his Diaries, at pp. 145, 487, 554 and 560, entries for 27 February 1952 and 1 October 1955 and 26 April 1956 and 16 May 1956. Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956), pp. 66ff.


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in part to the decline of organised religion in England after 1914, but only in part. All owed something to the diminution of protestant sectarianism in England after 1914; but again, only something. They are more fully explained by these broader social and cultural changes that forged within a generation a very different country in which an erstwhile, common puritanism was increasingly confined to the wilder Celtic shores and the madder conceits of utopian radicals. What remained of it increasingly came to be seen, both by constitution and convention, as something decidedly un-English.256 256

Cf. Scott, Life in Britain, p. 69 with Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London, 1990), p. 189. See also Peter Mandler, The English National Character: the History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, CT, 2006). This history of the English people makes just four, fleeting references to ‘puritans’ (none at all to puritanism) on pp. 95, 115, 168 and 211: proof of the impact of recent historical change, if not necessarily of the historicity of contemporary analysis.

5

Social science and the discovery of a ‘post-protestant people’: Rowntree’s surveys of York and their other legacy

Writing to his granddaughter, Miss Greta von Kulnett in July 1951, Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree – world famous businessman, celebrated philanthropist and pioneering sociologist – confessed to having recently experienced a certain uncharacteristic ‘excitement’ at the veritable ‘stir’ his latest book had ‘created in England’. He was not exaggerating. Earlier that summer, one newspaper had described English Life and Leisure: a Social Study as the equivalent of ‘social dynamite’.1 Other organs of opinion also acknowledged its immediate importance. Some, he noted, had done so only by ‘attack[ing] it heavily’. But the majority had judged its merits quite ‘favourably’. And there had been very good news in the shops. A first run of 7,500 copies ‘sold [out] very quickly’. In fact, it was gone within a few weeks of the book’s initial publication. Postwar paper shortages ensured that interim permission was granted for only another 2,000 volumes at Longman’s first bidding. But a further imprint, of up to 5,000 volumes, was planned as quickly as economic considerations allowed.2 In the event, sales of English Life and Leisure topped 10,000 by the end of the year.3 No wonder young Miss Greta expressed as much surprise as delight in her dutiful reply. For what Rowntree was describing was the commercial and (as he saw it) critical success of a far from obviously sensational exercise in social scientific investigation.4 English Life and Leisure was certainly a handsome product. In appearance, at least, it seemed in every way a 1

2 3 4

[B]orthwick [I]institute for [A]rchives, [U]niversity of [Y]ork, [P]apers of B. [S]eebohm [R]owntree, held by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, [Box] 6, [Fiche] 15, Rowntree to Kulnett, 30 July 1951. The newspaper in question was not identified and sadly has not been traced. Ibid. For recent remarks on the effect of continuing paper shortages in Britain, after 1950, see David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–1951 (London, 2007), p. 503. BIAUY, PSR 2/13, N. W. J. Brock to G. R. Lavers, 5 December 1951; sales to 5 December 1951, recorded as 10,627. In a letter of 8 June 1954, Rowntree claimed that this was the only book he ever wrote ‘that made a profit’; cited in Asa Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action: a Study of the Work of Seebohm Rowntree (London, 1961), p. 322.

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The discovery of a ‘post-protestant people’

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natural successor to Poverty and Progress, itself the distinguished followup to Rowntree’s first famous survey, Poverty: a Study of Town Life, published some fifty years earlier.5 These had been best-sellers in their own time too, intellectually acclaimed by austere academics and pragmatic policy-makers alike.6 But these earlier books had addressed pressing, and immediate, problems, from urban deprivation in the wake of the Boer War, to social security on the eve of the welfare state.7 This latest work could plausibly claim no such intellectual or political priority. To be sure, it was an undeniably serious work. It was also one to which he and his much younger collaborator, Commander G. R. Lavers, had devoted ‘the past three-and-half-years’ in virtually unrelieved effort. Inspired by Rowntree’s idiosyncratic concern to determine the adequacy or otherwise of the ‘means [then] provided’ for the ‘satisfactory recreation of citizens’ in Attlee’s Britain, English Life and Leisure was a far-ranging survey that utilised 200 carefully chosen case histories to describe and evaluate the social significance of gambling and drink, smoking and sex, also theatre, cinema and radio broadcasting, and finally reading, adult education and religious affiliation through the busy lives and idle moments of ordinary people in York and High Wycombe between 1947 and 1948.8 It also offered comparative commentary on the same subjects, chosen from a selection of Scandinavian countries – namely, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland – to offer some measure of experimental control to its conclusions.9 Notwithstanding the reputation of its senior author, 400 pages of jokefree sociological analysis, so tenaciously pursued down so many arcane avenues, suggested something short of page-turning prose. In truth, English Life and Leisure was not racily written.10 Still, modest to a fault in everything all his life, Rowntree remained if anything too modest about 5

6

7

8 10

B. S. Rowntree, Poverty: a Study of Town Life (London, 1901); B. S. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress: a Second Social Survey of York (London, 1941); B. S. Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: a Social Study (London, 1951). BIAUY, PSR 4/26, Rowntree to Caradog Jones, 18 January 1952; and for some evidence, see H. R. Seeger, ‘Poverty’, Political Science Quarterly, 18, no. 1, March 1903, 156–61; anon., ‘The Poverty Line’, The Times, 9 September 1941, p. 5, among many, many other examples. Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, p. 298; A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914– 1945 (Oxford, 1965), p. 237; Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: the Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York, 1991), esp. ch. 12; Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History, 1945–1989 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 37ff. By contrast, for an account of Rowntree’s unimportance in wartime Britain, see Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London, 1975), pp. 58–9. 9 Ibid., ch. 15. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, ch. 1 and passim. Scarcely Rowntree’s style; for a succinct (and sympathetic) account of his personality, see Brian Harrison, ‘Rowntree, (Benjamin) Seebohm (1871–1954)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), vol. XLVIII, pp. 33–7, esp. at pp. 36–7.

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the early impact of his latest intellectual intervention, even in private correspondence. English Life and Leisure really was ‘widely circulated’ at the time. It really did create ‘a [very] distinct stir’ in postwar educated English circles.11 It was accompanied into the world by a trenchant Times leader – actually, an outraged defence of native ‘ways of life’ – penned on the very day of its publication, on 3 June 1951.12 Its findings were furiously debated at the York Convocation of the Church of England late that summer.13 The book’s conclusions were subjected to two pages of studious commentary in the anonymous preface to Crockford’s Clerical Directory for 1952.14 Finally, an extended notice, which appeared in Theology during the same year, judged its domestic impact as something comparable to the ‘sensation’ let loose in the United States by the recent appearance of ‘the [notorious] Kinsey Report’ on adult male sexuality.15 Perhaps it is best to be clear at the outset. To describe Seebohm Rowntree and Alfred Kinsey as social scientists is immediately to establish what was very probably the only thing they ever had in common.16 For all that, the explicit parallel drawn at the time between Rowntree’s painstaking study and Kinsey’s eponymous work was not necessarily far fetched. But if respectable opinion grudgingly acknowledged the importance of English Life and Leisure, it did not willingly accede to the force of Rowntree and Lavers’s most prominent findings. Far from it: Crockford’s denounced it as a ‘disturbing book’, flatly rejecting its discovery of widespread ‘anticlericalism’ among England’s postwar laity.17 The Times explicitly denied Rowntree’s portrait of ‘a largely pagan country’, insisting that the ‘standards and ideals’ of British life remained ‘generally Christian’, and countered his conclusions by suggesting that English values remained ‘too complex to be discussed [simply] in terms of . . . religious . . . decline’.18 Not even the proprieties of private correspondence precluded vigorous expressions of dissent. Archbishop Garbett, while fulsomely thanking Rowntree for a complimentary copy of ‘your . . . fascinating book’, pointedly observed that he would be ‘unlikely to share the opinions expressed 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

BIAUY, PSR 1/133, B. S. Rowntree to Mrs Gary Brainerd, 19 December 1953. Anon., ‘Ways of Life’, The Times, 4 June 1951, p. 5. Anon., ‘A Controversial Book’, The Times, 20 September 1951, p. 3; The Official YearBook of the National Assembly of the Church of England, 1953 (London, 1952), pp. 275–9. Anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1951–52 (Oxford, 1952), pp. iii–xxii; see esp. ‘A Disturbing Book’, pp. xvi–xviii. R. P. C. Hanson, ‘Reflections Upon English Life and Leisure’, Theology, 55, no. 379; January 1952, 10–14, at 10. For Rowntree, see Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action or Harrison, in ODNB; for Kinsey, see inter alia, James H. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: a Biography (New York, 2004), passim. For a sense of the latter’s impact in contemporary Britain, see Peter Vansittart, In the Fifties (London, 1995), pp. 154–5. 18 The Times, 4 June 1951, p. 5. Crockford’s, 1951–2, xvi.


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in the chapter on religion’, when, that is, he ‘got round to reading’ them. This was because, ‘so far as the Church of England was concerned’, Garbett could see evidence of a ‘change for the better’, especially among young people.19 Few contemporary scientific students of religion expressed much similar optimism. Yet professional, that is, academic, opinion about the book was, if anything, more damning still. In fact, with the exception of an anonymous panegyric in the Times Literary Supplement to a ‘sociological study of the first importance’, the scholarly response to English Life and Leisure was almost universally negative.20 It might even be described as contemptuous. Such disdain was achieved, in part, through studied neglect: neither the British Journal of Sociology nor Sociological Review deigned even to notice Rowntree’s last major contribution to the discipline.21 Scarcely less significant was the explicit condemnation of Rowntree’s intellectual peers. Geoffrey Gorer haughtily dismissed a no doubt ‘well-meaning book’ that simply could ‘not be taken seriously as a work of sociology’, lacking as it did any ‘consistent theoretical framework, methodological [coherence] or indeed [any] sort of scientific completeness’.22 Not to be outdone in her derision, Barbara Wootton insisted that English Life and Leisure was a work that ‘all serious students must at once disown’. This was because it was not a ‘scientific survey at all’. It amounted to no more than a ‘moral appraisal’ posing as a scholarly study. It was a treatise in which the words ‘objectionable’ and ‘wholesome’ appeared far too frequently for intellectual satisfaction. Worse still, its organisation reflected a ‘complete disregard for the first canon of scientific investigation’, namely, that such study should be set out in sufficient detail to enable all interested parties to evaluate it. Finally, the contentious thesis had been based on ‘sketchy data’, much of it ‘acquired at second hand’, and all of it ‘quite unconvincingly’ presented.23 For most professional critics, the principal intellectual problem posed by English Life and Leisure seemed to lie less in the careful evaluation of 19

20 21

22 23

BIAUY, PSR 2/119, Garbett to Rowntree, 4 June 1951. For Garbett’s alternative explanation of the phenomenon of declining attendances at the time, see anon., Preface, Crockford’s, p. xvii; and for his broader view, The Claims of the Church of England (London, 1947), chs. 12–13. Anon., ‘English Life and Leisure’, Times Literary Supplement, 8 June 1951, pp. 349–50. The British Journal of Sociology first appeared in 1950. The Sociological Review reappeared, after a war-time hiatus, in a second series, from 1953. No mention, let alone notice, of English Life and Leisure appeared in either journal down to 1960. Geoffrey Gorer, ‘The Life Beautiful’, The Listener, vol. 45, no. 1164, 21 June 1951, 1004–5, at 1004. Barbara Wootton, ‘Review of English Life and Leisure’, The Political Quarterly, 22, no. 4, October–December 1951, 206–7.

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its conclusions than in a speedy scholarly death. This was true both for the book itself and the enterprise it represented. The preferred method of professional elimination, in this instance, was that of donnish outrage, tempered by schoolmasterly ridicule. Noting his surprise that it contained no chapter on ‘the benefits of vegetarianism or the evils of flesh eating’, Gorer denounced what he characterised as an exercise in propaganda for ‘the school-marm state’. He hoped that English Life and Leisure would malevolently ‘influence’ only that small band of the ‘previously . . . convinced’.24 Wootton began with a pious expression of ‘sadness’ that ‘so esteemed . . . a social investigator’ should have ‘allowed his name to appear’ on so shoddy an exercise in social investigation. She concluded by ‘wonder[ing] out loud’ whether both investigators – old men denouncing the doings of the young, puritans opposed to gambling, teetotallers against drink, philistines at the theatre – might not have found so many ‘things’ in postwar England just a bit ‘less distressing’ if only they had not been, anyway by 1947, two confused chroniclers ‘so immensely remote from the world of their explorations’. But such pitiful distance best accounted for their otherwise risible proposals ‘to prohibit the impact of [immoral] American magazines, forbid jokes about drink on the radio and persuade the young never to become smokers’.25 Yet English Life and Leisure did not suffer the ignominious intellectual fate that so many self-consciously sophisticated souls wished for it in 1951.26 Still less did conventional Christian piety confound its gloomy scientific prognosis.27 Shorn of the superficial Edwardian moralism that irritated so many of its postwar critics, the massive, empirical substance of Rowntree’s last book survived to become a seminal source for the sociological sub-discipline of contemporary cultural studies.28 Divested of their committed concerns, its comparative institutional investigations furnished the essential framework for the study of native patterns of religious behaviour and decline.29 These vindicated Rowntree beyond the grave. His last book continued to be read, and his findings frequently 24 26 27

28 29

25 Wootton, The Political Quarterly, p. 207. Gorer, The Listener, 1005. Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, pp. 327–8; Harrison, ‘Rowntree’, ODNB, vol. XLVIII, p. 36. For a measured, modern account, see Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheils (eds.), A History of Religion in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1994), chs. 24–6; and, for a slightly different argument, consult Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford, 1994), chs. 2 and 3. For a truly fascinating survey, now rarely cited by sociologists of religion, see Alasdair Macintyre, Secularization and Moral Change (Oxford, 1967). Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, p. 327; J. D. Scott, Life in Britain (London, 1956), ch. 1; Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957), esp. pt II. Subsequently extended, indeed veritably codified, in Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since


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cited, long after his death. It still is. Not that he ever seriously doubted the worthiness of the work. Even his intellectual modesty had its limits. Undaunted by contemporary criticism, Rowntree and Lavers quickly ‘made up their minds’ to devote all their subsequent work to the theme of ‘the Spiritual Life of the Nation’. This, they concluded, was a topic arising naturally ‘out of the researches upon which English Life and Leisure was based’, and constituted ‘the main social problem’ of British life, as they saw it, by mid-century.30 The final fruits of that last labour perished with their principal author. To this day, they have never been published.31 Perhaps as a result, that partial professional embarrassment which attended these earlier efforts still loomed large in conventional consciousness at the time of Rowntree’s death on 7 October 1954.32 But the intellectual worm turned soon afterwards, quickest of all on matters relating to native religious observance. This turn of events should not altogether surprise us. Even the most scathing of early critics, whether of the methods or conclusions of English Life and Leisure, had made something of an exception for the undoubted value of the raw figures of indigenous religious attendance and affiliation that it contained.33 Some even picked up on the possibilities of their immediate, broader interpretation. These included the frankly eccentric efforts of William Astor to enlist ‘all the Protestant Churches’ of the day in a worldwide coalition of ‘anti-atheistic organisations’, more effectively to combat the looming Soviet threat.34 But they also extended to the thoughtful reflections of Lord Hailsham, who took their substantive conclusions as proof that ‘historical Protestantism’ had failed in its ‘corporate objective’ by mid-century.35 Most serious observers even came round to Rowntree’s quiet insistence that, by 1951, ‘the real trouble’ for ‘the Church’ in England (by which he meant denominational, protestant, Christianity more generally) had progressed

30 31 32

33

34 35

1700 (Oxford, 1977), appendix. Note their generous acknowledgement of Rowntree and Lavers, on p. 11, n. 8. BIAUY, [R]owntree [P]apers, B.S.R. SLN/1, [B]. [S]eebohm [R]owntree, ‘The Spiritual Life of Nation’, unpubl. mimeo, 2 pp., p. 1. Ibid., ‘Draft Format of the Book on the Deepening of the Spiritual Life’, unpub. mimeo, 12pp. Anon., ‘Mr Seebohm Rowntree: Philanthropist and Sociologist’, The Times, 8 October 1954, p. 11: ‘a somewhat heterogeneous study of English Life and Leisure [was] not characterised by the scrupulous thoroughness of the work of his best years’. See, for instance, anon., ‘Men and Morals’, The Economist, 9 June 1951, 1370; also, the notably generous notice, at least insofar as the religious sections of the book were concerned, afforded by William Beveridge, The Spectator, no. 6415, 8 June 1951, 755–6. BIAUY, PSR, 2/127, William Astor to B.S.R., 22 Sept. 1951. Viscount Hailsham, ‘Mr Nicholls in Search of Truths’, The National and English Review, 1952, 237–40.

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far beyond ‘“the visible” decline of [the] organised churches’. Within a decade, his fundamental argument, namely that underlying such melancholy institutional degeneration ‘a basic change in [common] beliefs [had] taken place’, and a ‘majority of the population had either explicitly . . . or . . . instinctively . . . rejected so much of the Christian story as related in the New Testament that no church could recognise them as Christians at all’ had become something of a sociological orthodoxy.36 In that way, Rowntree’s pioneering efforts were gradually absorbed into the mainstream sociological literature. For example, the third (and final) edition of Carr-Saunders’s Survey of Social Conditions in England and Wales referred to English Life and Leisure first in its chapter on religion.37 Repeated use was made of Rowntree and Lavers’s broader findings in its summary conclusions.38 Their book was a continuous presence in Michael Argyle’s path-breaking enquiries into the Social Psychology of Religion, first published in 1958. Both the peculiar precision of Rowntree’s methods of calculation and the unique value of his chronological accounts, running from 1901 through 1935 to 1948, were openly acknowledged.39 Finally, English Life and Leisure formed the essential backdrop – both as statistical backbone and methodological example – to Gorer’s exploration of ‘Religion and Other Beliefs’ in his contemporary construction of modern English Character. The reality of that particular debt was no less apparent for the obvious irony of its later acquisition.40 But in belatedly achieving academic respectability, Rowntree’s most important exercise in religious sociology paradoxically endured something akin to intellectual eclipse. There were no further editions of English Life and Leisure. Indeed, by the time of Asa Briggs’s revisionist biography published in 1961, the ‘stir’ it once created had long been forgotten.41 During the decades since, the truly seminal significance of Rowntree’s researches into the causes, courses and chronology of the secularisation of modern English society passed first into general knowledge and then 36 37

38 39

40 41

BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/1, B.S.R., ‘The Spiritual Life of the Nation’, p. 1. A. M. Carr-Saunders, D. Caradog Jones and C. A. Moser, A Survey of Social Conditions in England and Wales, as Illustrated by Statistics, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1958), ch. 18, pp. 255–64. Ibid., see esp. p. 258 and passim. Michael Argyle, Religious Behaviour (London, 1958), see esp. pp. 6, 25 and 77; in subsequent editions the title of the book was changed and much of its substance amended and updated. Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London, 1955), ch. 14; see esp. p. 271, n. 3. Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, p. 322. See, ibid., pp. 322–7, for an extended commentary on the genesis, publication and impact of English Life and Leisure.


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faded from ordinary memory.42 This is because they were not so much repudiated as tamed. In that way they became commonplace. A suitably amended version of Rowntree’s thesis became part of the intellectual furniture of any educated English sensibility. But the furore of 1951 was forgotten.43 Of course, Rowntree himself is not a neglected figure and nor is the greater part of his scientific work. To the contrary, his century-old insights into the ‘life-cycle of . . . poverty’ inform enlightened administrative policy still.44 But his no less urgent concern for what he took to be the imminent passing of a protestant people in postwar England seems lost in polite recollection. This is true even for those most committed to his legacy. A commemorative plaque, unveiled by Chancellor Dame Janet Baker at the opening of the Seebohm Rowntree Building at the University of York on 28 June 2002, publicly acknowledged his lasting contributions to the modern scientific study of poverty and also ‘industrial relations, unemployment, agriculture, gambling and leisure’. It made no mention of religion.45 That omission matters. This is not just because it represents a serious gap in our understanding of the whole of one man’s work. It also reflects an altogether broader failure, part of that collective cultural amnesia embodied in our continuing inability to understand when we became irreligious and how much that fact once disturbed us. What follows is an attempt to put the record straight. A serious historical effort is needed to recover a true sense of the shock that Rowntree provoked barely fifty years ago when he revealed the English to themselves as a ‘post-protestant people’. We take that fact as an uncontested truth now. No one did then. This explains why English Life and Leisure was such a controversial book at the time. It also points to some measure of its continuing importance.

42

43

44

45

Gilley and Sheils (eds.), History of Religion, make no mention of him, nor does Davie, Religion in Britain. Even G. I. T. Machin, Churches and Social Issues in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford, 1998), offers only passing reference to Rowntree’s work (and significance) in this field; see pp. 4, 31, 85, 137–8 and 228. See esp. Alan D. Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain: a History of Secularization in Modern Society (London, 1980), pp. 122ff. For reasons that will become clear below, I find his characterisation of Rowntree and Lavers’s 1951 findings, specifically, about the emergence of what he calls ‘cognitive acquiescence’, or ‘negligible commitment coupled with nominal acceptance of prevailing beliefs and social habits’, rather far from the mark. See, for instance, A. H. Halsey, Changes in Britain and Society: from 1900 to the Present Day, 4th edn. (Oxford, 1995), at pp. 102 and 142: ‘Rowntree’s famous life-cycle of traditional working-class poverty is still with us.’ This was proved by the reissue of a ‘Centennial Edition’ of Poverty, in December 2000. Author’s observations, 28 March 2007. It is flanked by what is, in all other respects, a fascinating display of Rowntree’s writings and other relevant memorabilia.

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I Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree never set out to be a sociologist of religion. He became a chronicler of English secularisation only with infinite, personal regret. By his own account, related in an extended correspondence with Caradog Jones in 1952, the sociological urge first came upon him more out of a ‘great sympathy with working people’. This vocation came to him while teaching at adult schools in York. It assumed a specific purpose subsequent to his reading of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour in London, above all, in his determination to make ‘a comparable social survey in York’. That work achieved its most important result in what he was never too modest to describe as the ‘first . . . scientific . . . definition of poverty’ ever formulated. Note: scientific, not sentimental; and not especially radical either. In his own words: ‘I based my poverty line on a dietary [level] more austere than that provided in workhouses and prisons. I didn’t want people to [go around] saying “Rowntree’s crying for the moon”.’46 Yet it is still worth remembering that Rowntree taught from the days of his earliest majority in nonconformist Sunday schools and that his scientific concerns were, from the first, informed as much by an underlying interest in more general questions concerning ‘social conditions [and] education’ and ‘how people spent their leisure’, than in simple calculations about the extent of material poverty, still less in the specific formulation of social policies designed to alleviate its worst effects.47 The generality of his intellectual concerns should scarcely surprise us. Nor should their religious inspiration. Rowntree was a lifelong, practising believer. He was also a man who found it next to impossible to conceive of a ‘godless universe’. So far as we know, he never wavered in his personal religious commitments. Nor did he cease to argue for the social benefits of right religion, properly and broadly practised. As he once so disarmingly put it: ‘in some future century, men may become so highly civilised’ as to be able to ‘regulate their lives according to an ethical system shorn of all supernatural religion with which to give it authority. But that time was not yet.’ This remained his view in 1951.48 The exact and dispassionate study of religion was for Rowntree always an urgent ethical and social, and not merely an abstract, scientific matter. 46 47 48

BIAUY, PSR 4/27, Caradog Jones to B.S.R., 16 January 1952; B.S.R. to Caradog Jones, 18 January 1952. Ibid., 18 January 1952. Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, p. 39. The book also contains a full bibliography of Rowntree’s writings, on pp. 344–8. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R. SLN/1, B.S.R., ‘The Spiritual Life of the Nation’, unpub. mimeo, p. 2. On Rowntree’s Quakerism and how it became, if anything, more unorthodox in later life, see Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, pp. 3ff.


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For just as he studied, so he also propagated the faith. He may have spent the second half of his life chronicling religious decline. But he hoped for a ‘religious revival’ in twentieth-century Britain.49 This dual commitment, at once objective and subjective, was precisely what led so many of Rowntree’s postwar critics to doubt the ‘scientific’ standing of his findings in English Life and Leisure. In this respect, they protested too much, not least, because in repudiating the Edwardian moralist, they traduced the religious radical. Whatever else he was, Rowntree was never an ‘establishment’ man. Most of all, in their failure to distinguish between the inescapable ethicism that always informed Rowntree’s personal faith and the unprecedented separation between those two that the professional social scientist had actually identified in the (very different) paths of moral and religious life in postwar England, the critics missed the truly remarkable significance of much of what his broader scientific discoveries then pointed towards.50 Paradoxically, it was precisely because he was such an old-fashioned moralist that Rowntree understood so well the importance of the contemporary divergence between indigenous ethics and traditional religion. That better enabled him to chronicle the change that they invariably missed, and no less, to apprehend its implications, all but lost on his critics.51 This point may be put in a slightly different way. Rowntree was a believer. But he was not just any kind of believer. He was a Quaker. He defined religion ‘as no more (nor less) than that “conscious recognition of an uplifting spiritual power”, accompanied by the sincere “effort to place oneself under its influence”’.52 This made him an unusual member of England’s Christian community, even in 1951. It also furnished him with a rather caustic view of England’s ecclesiastical institutions, one which he acquired long before that date. He may have come to the view, openly expressed in the surviving draft format of ‘The Spiritual Life of the Nation’, that ‘the churches in [their] present form will never get the people back’.53 But then, he had never had much time for the ‘respectable Churches’, and their ‘stultifying . . . ceremonialism’ anyway.54 By the same token he was a strict sabbatarian. He

49 50 51 52 53 54

BIAUY, RP, B.S.R. SLN/1, B.S.R., ‘The Spiritual Life of the Nation’, p. 1. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/2, ‘Draft Format of the Book on the Moral and Spiritual Life’, p. 5; cf. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure. Though he may not have been the first to gain the insight; this was, perhaps, Inge. See, ch. 3 above, esp. pp. 115–18. BIAUY, RP B.S.R.; REL/12, Lectures and Addresses on Religion, B.S.R. ‘Is Religion Worthwhile?’, 4 June 1936. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/1, B.S.R., ‘The Spiritual Life of the Nation’, p. 1. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., REL/12, Lectures and Addresses on Religion; B.S.R. ‘Man’s Contract with God’, New Earswick, 15 January 1922.

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disapproved of ‘continental intrusions’ (i.e. golf and motoring) into the English way of life in this respect. But he never believed that Sunday could only be kept sacred by conventional acts of ‘public worship’.55 He had long taught that its true purpose, the cultivation of the ‘better side of our nature’, could be just as effectively achieved by ‘visiting family and friends’ or, indeed, by taking ‘a book out into the country’. This was the view he expressed in his private notebooks as early as 1899.56 It therefore should come as little surprise that the alleged censorialist of English Life and Leisure was fully capable of distinguishing religious decline from moral regression. Rowntree’s postwar critics assumed that he insisted upon a continuous connection between irreligion and immorality. In this, they were simply mistaken. He had previously rejected any such connection. During an exchange of letters with Canon S. J. Marriott in 1940, he specifically refuted a clergyman’s sententious insistence that there had been a profound and recent ‘deterioration in the moral fibre of the working classes’. Then he set out the results of his own inquiries, actually, the researches reproduced in Poverty and Progress. These established that, according to all the most reliable indices of crime, vice and selfishness, there had actually been something of an improvement in this aspect of society.57 He repeated that view, albeit more tentatively, in the published version of his work, which appeared the following year.58 Still, intuitive Victorian that he remained, Rowntree then insisted that these improvements rendered the evidence of organisational decline in English institutional religion, detailed in chapter 13 of that volume, all the more puzzling. It did not constitute a ‘necessary . . . proof’ that religion ‘play[ed] a correspondingly smaller part in the life of the people’ than his earlier findings had suggested. But it was a curious ‘fact’ all the same. Precisely because it remained an unexplained development, it could ‘not be disregarded by any serious minded person’. No one ever accused Rowntree of being anything other than a very serious-minded person. So it was that he resolved to unravel this mystery – and all of its potential implications – at the earliest possible opportunity.59 II English Life and Leisure may not have addressed the most pressing political problems of 1951. For all that, it was, in many ways, a very timely book. 55 56 57 58 59

Ibid., ‘Is Religion Worthwhile?’, 4 June 1936. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R. 93/1/1/10, Ms. Notebook Used at Alcomb and Other Adult Schools, Book 4, ‘The Sabbath’, 9 February 1899. BIAUY, B.S.R. 2/133, Marriott to Rowntree, 6 August 1940; ibid., B.S.R. to Marriott, 8 August 1940. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress, see ch. 13. Ibid., p. 417. Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, p. 301.


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Attlee’s England was assuredly an austere place – potatoes were rationed in 1947 – but the king’s subjects then enjoyed more (paid) leisure than at any time in their previous history. By 1949 the five-day week had become ‘almost universal’. The average working week for the typical manufacturing operative had been reduced from around fifty-four hours on the eve of the First World War to about forty-seven a generation later.60 Workers were also better remunerated. Mean earnings in 1949 stood at about 240 per cent above their 1937 level.61 This more favourable financial package also invariably included one week’s paid holiday – some, in fact, enjoyed a fortnight – plus six public holidays per year.62 Perhaps for the first time in British history, collective idleness was no longer merely a function of unemployment. It had become an aspect of affluence.63 Put another way, it had become a different kind of problem. Many of the most forward-thinking social planners in postwar Britain believed so. A study also undertaken in 1949 by two researchers from the Social Medical Research Unit, found that English youth, at least as represented by one outer London borough, was increasingly characterised by vigorous physical health and torpid moral ambition. Certainly, it was ‘the lack of creative or constructive leisure pursuits amongst these lads’ that was most striking to their older onlookers.64 This may also have been a sententious opinion. But it was a strikingly common view. The (then rather young) sociologist Mark Abrams, investigating adolescent leisure habits two years earlier, found that of boys aged sixteen to twenty, around a quarter happily admitted to spending their spare time ‘doing nothing’.65 What was worse, ‘nothing’ translated better as ‘mischief ’. Partly as a result, many Britons saw increasing evidence of moral decline all around them. They were not entirely incorrect to do so. The ‘black market’ not only survived the end of hostilities. It thrived in the 60

61

62 63 64 65

Kynaston, Austerity Britain, pp. 246 and 409; Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, pp. 298–9; and, for contemporaneous surveys, see Delisle Burns, Leisure in the Modern World (London, 1932) and H. Durant, The Problem of Leisure (London, 1938), among others. Kynaston, Austerity Britain, p. 409. For an early summary, see G. D. H. Cole, The PostWar Condition of Britain (London, 1956), ch. 17. The underlying problem was more precisely calculated in J. C. R. Dow, The Measurement of the British Economy, 1945–1960 (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 343ff. On the rise of the ‘affluent worker’, see Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 132–3. Kynaston, Austerity Britain, p. 409; Morgan, The People’s Peace, pp. 32–3, though note the remarks in Cole, The Post-War Conditions of Britain, p. 46. Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, p. 300; McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, pp. 132–3; Cole, The Post-War Conditions of Britain, p. 46. Kynaston, Austerity Britain, pp. 368–9; Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, p. 300; for an earlier summary, see A. E. Morgan, The Needs of Youth (London, 1939). Kynaston, Austerity Britain, p. 368. On Abrams, the contemporary sociological pioneer, see Mark Abrams, The Population of Great Britain (London, 1945), and Social Surveys and Social Action (London, 1951).

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new dispensation. Crime increased on pre-war levels.66 Theft, by 1947, reached five times the level of just ten years earlier.67 As traditional forms of respect declined, so common dishonesty rose.68 The ‘spiv’ became a semi-respectable figure in society. A sense of malaise became widespread. For some this amounted to a ‘feeling that society, which broadly speaking had held together during the war, was no longer working so well, was even starting to come apart’.69 In these trying circumstances, thoughtful contemporaries turned to social scientists to explain just ‘what [was] going on’.70 This was neither as remarkable, nor obviously as futile, an expectation as subsequent experience has ruefully suggested. Britain in the 1940s was a planned society to a wholly unprecedented and generally unrepented degree.71 It was also a place in which young scholars, practising new disciplines, came to influence government policy and educated attitudes as never before. Just recall the early career of Michael Young.72 So Seebohm Rowntree – venerable and marginal a figure as he may have been by 1947 – was entering well-charted waters in writing English Life and Leisure when he did. But if his concerns were typical, his ‘take’ was peculiar. That particularity can easily be misunderstood. It certainly was at the time. Yet his presuppositions were neither anachronistic nor reactionary. In fact, his early findings about ‘How Honest is Britain?’ were strikingly moderate.73 But they were definitely personal. This was true, above all, in his determination to relate social change and moral attitudes to an increasingly uncommon religious life. They also led him to reach what proved to be profoundly controversial conclusions.74 66

67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74

Kynaston, Austerity Britain, pp. 254–5, refers to the emergence in March 1948 of the Spiv’s Gazette, a humorous magazine which among other things gave details of the Spiv’s Union; also to a story told at the time of ‘the Bishop of Bradford and an ecclesiastical colleague discussing a 40 pound ham they had secured and which they were going to share between them’. Kynaston, Austerity Britain, pp. 267–8. For a broader context, in John Stevenson, British Society, 1914–45 (Harmondsworth, 1990), pp. 372–80. Kynaston, Austerity Britain, p. 252; also Vansittart, In the Fifties, ch. 11. Kynaston, Austerity Britain, p. 252; though note earlier developments in Juliet Gardiner, Wartime: Britain, 1939–1945 (London, 2004), ch. 21. Kynaston, Austerity Britain, p. 109. Ibid., p. 232. For another account, see Keith Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State, vol. I: Britain in Search of Balance, 1940–1961 (Basingstoke, 1986), chs. 1–5; and for some – truly significant – unenamoured memory of the fact, see Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London, 1993), pp. 11–12. E.g. Michael Young and Theodor Prager, There’s Work For All (London, 1945); also Young, Labour’s Plan For Plenty (London, 1947). Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. xiv–xv and ch. 6, passim. Note the comparative optimism detailed in Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, at p. 327. BIAUY, PSR, B.S.R., SLN/2, ‘Draft Format of the Book on the Deepening of the Spiritual Life’, p. 2.


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These were only the more so for being both timely and unsettling. The fate of Christian Britain was then a major contemporary issue.75 This was not least because of what Rowntree himself had made known through his research in Poverty and Progress. But, above all, it was a product of the furore that greeted the so-called Bishops’ Report, published that same year.76 This had made so-called ‘popular observance’ a fashionable subject for modern social scientific surveys. They often suggested disturbing developments. For instance, ‘Mass Observation’ furnished some troubling statistics about religious beliefs, church attendance and attitudes to the establishment in the immediate postwar period.77 Still, the vital question remained unanswered. Had Britain ceased to be a ‘Christian country’ during the war? Rowntree believed that the detailed survey he conducted of religious behaviour and attitudes in York and High Wycombe during 1947 and 1948 provided the key with which to open that, previously impassable, door. Even his surliest critics acknowledged that it established a new, empirical basis for serious study of the problem previously lacking from all sociological analysis.78 Well into the mid-twentieth century, ‘the usual way’ of studying religion invariably involved little more than simply ‘asking people how often they went to church’.79 In a culture that continued to pay public cognisance to the value of regular worship, this method inevitably led to distorted, that is to say, exaggerated, results for popular religious observance. It was found that in one English survey – Odhams’s study, also of 1947 – ‘people who claimed to go to church “weekly” actually missed an average of seven Sundays a year’.80 Similar inaccuracies were generally suspected among the otherwise extensive British Institute of Public Opinion inquiries of the following year.81 Rowntree counted for himself. He deployed what were once novel, but which had by then become tried and tested, techniques. And he never just asked. He always measured for himself.82 To be sure, even his methods were fallible. The problem of ‘twicers’, namely, persons who ‘went 75

76 77

78 79 82

Ibid., p. 3–4; see the tentatively inclusive essay by the Rt Rev. A. T. P. Williams, ‘Religion’, in Ernest Barker (ed.), The Character of England (Oxford, 1947), ch. 3, esp. pp. 22–4; also note the remarks in McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, pp. 292–5 and see Kynaston, Austerity Britain, pp. 125–6. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress, pt III, ch. 13, pp. 331ff., esp. pp. 417–21. Mass Observation, Puzzled People (London, 1947), pp. 21–2, 42, 51–2, 65, 77, 83–4, 120–2; note also some of the earlier surveys, namely, First Years Work (London, 1939), pp. 104–5 and Britain (Harmondsworth, 1939), pp. 229ff. Anon., ‘Men and Morals’, The Economist, 9 June 1951, 1370; Gorer, ‘The Life Beautiful’, The Listener, vol. 45, 1004; and anon., Preface, Crockford’s, p. xvii. 80 Ibid., p. 6. 81 Ibid., pp. 6–7. Argyle, Religious Behaviour, pp. 5–6. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, ch. 13, is noted at pp. 341–55; and commented on in Argyle, Religious Behaviour, at p. 25.

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to church more than once on a given Sunday’ continued to defy even the most sophisticated scrutiny.83 But they permitted calculations that were unquestionably more reliable than any others known at the time. Not for nothing were they repeated by Stockwood in his survey of Bristol, published two years after English Life and Leisure.84 Above all, they supplied information sufficient to establish genuinely reliable chronological comparisons. His survey of religious behaviour in late Victorian York may have formed but a small part – barely five pages – of Poverty: a Study of Town Life. But the church census that he organised for 17 and 24 March 1901 furnished a unique insight into the extent of the ‘measurable influence of the Christian churches’ in the life of one late Victorian city’s working population.85 By faithfully repeating the same experiment on 27 October and 3 November 1935, and then again twelve years later, Rowntree created a body of material capable of providing real insight into the changing outcome of at least one important test for popular devotion across half a century of contemporary English history. No one else had done anything like so much, so well, to that date.86 The accumulated evidence made for gloomy reading, especially to one of Rowntree’s religious sensibilities.87 Every proper qualification made – including carefully discounting the differential effects of the weather on each respective census – it demonstrated that there had been a massive reduction in adult attendance at places of worship in York between 1901 and 1948: from 17,060 in 1901 to 12,270 by 1935, and finally down to 10,220 by 1948.88 Worse, this decline in raw numbers had occurred notwithstanding the fact that the population of York had, in the interim, actually increased, from 48,000 in 1901 to 72,248 in 1935, and 78,500 in 1948.89 In other words, ‘attendance, which represented 35.5 per cent of adult population in 1901, [had fallen] to 17.7 per cent in 1935 and 83

84 85

86

87

88

Moreover, this was not necessarily the same church or even the same denomination. Most studies discount for this phenomenon, with greater or lesser degrees of transparency. For an early discussion of the problem, see Argyle, Religious Behaviour, pp. 25–6. Ibid., p. 6. Rowntree, Poverty, pp. 344–8. See esp. p. 344: ‘it is of obvious interest in connection with the present social investigation that some rough idea of the extent [of the direct influence of Christianity as social and moral force] should be formed’. Rowntree, Poverty, pp. 417–22. See esp. p. 420: ‘The [two] most striking factors [of this comparison] are (i) that the number of adults attending [church] has fallen . . . notwithstanding: [that the] adult population has risen; and (ii) [that this diminution] is not spread evenly along the different denominations.’ BIAUY, PSR, B.S.R. 93/x, Miscellaneous Correspondence and Memorabilia; B.S.R. to B. Phillip Rowntree, 17 March 1940: ‘I profoundly believe [that] Christianity is the only hope for the world.’ 89 Ibid., p. 343. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 342.


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13.0 per cent in 1948’. By the same token, ‘the proportion of attendances at church by adults was only a little over one-third of the proportion of attendances in 1901’.90 All of this had happened in York, in an ancient, archiepiscopal city, where popular piety might otherwise have been expected to have remained above the national norm.91 A controlled count at High Wycombe proved that things were, indeed, worse elsewhere. A more generous allocation of ecclesiastical resources there – one church for every 834 persons seventeen years or over, compared to York’s one for every 1,137 adults – produced an ever lower yield of Sunday observances: a total of 3,427 attendances, equivalent to approximately 10.5 per cent of the adult population.92 The implications were unavoidable. And Rowntree’s conclusions were brutally clear. The English had become an institutionally indifferent nation. Church-going in Attlee’s England was a minority pursuit.93 Closer examination of the material only made things look worse. Those losses had been endured, quite disproportionately, among the nation’s protestant churches. This was true for York especially, but of High Wycombe only to a slightly lesser extent. Moreover, that melancholy development seemed to have accelerated after 1935. During these thirteen years, allegiance to the Anglican establishment had diminished both absolutely and proportionately. Its actual attendances had more than halved; its share of the ‘worshipful’ pot was reduced by about one-quarter.94 The Free Churches had lost similar, if less substantial, ground.95 Only the Roman Catholic Church had gained any advantage.96 What made this especially discouraging was that all the available evidence about the age distribution of these respective congregations suggested that the Catholics alone could look forward to ‘vigorous and expanding congregations’ during the decades ahead.97 By contrast, the nonconformist churches in York, very nearly half of whose regular attendees were fifty years or over, almost certainly faced a ‘distinctly bleak’ future. They could not then, and had not for some time, succeeded in attracting ‘sufficient of the younger age groups’ to their various services.98

90 91

92 93 94 97

Ibid. Though, in fact, there was no reason to harbour such a belief. Indeed, the contrary was true. See Edward Royle, ‘Religion in York, 1831–1981’, in York: 1831–1981; 150 Years of Social and Economic Change, ed. Charles Feinstein (York, 1981), ch. 8, esp. pp. 225ff. I am grateful to Professor Edward Royle for a helpful discussion on this subject. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 345, 404. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R. SLN/1, B.S.R., ‘The Spiritual Life of the Nation’, p. 1. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 343. 98 Ibid. Ibid., pp. 344–5.

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Rowntree was convinced that his most recent findings pointed to a relatively recent change in England which, while it might have parallels in Western Europe, was not common throughout the rest of the anglophone, protestant world. In an attempt to prove this point, he engaged in a protracted correspondence with his American friend, John D. Rockefeller, Jr during the winter and spring of 1948. The results were initially inconclusive. They established only that neither the Baptist nor Presbyterian ministers (those most familiar to Rockefeller) actually kept detailed records about attendance (as opposed to membership), at least of the kind that Rowntree sought. Still, the ‘general consensus of opinion’ among informed American sources was that the ‘percentage of membership attendance’ had remained much the same as that experienced ‘thirty or forty years’ earlier.99 This was helpful comment but scarcely definitive analysis. The full meaning of English developments was not properly appreciated until a British Weekly survey of the ‘Decline of Nonconformity’, published four years later, in March 1955. That, subsequent, account – openly acknowledging its debt to Rowntree – finally established that while numerical losses of membership had been real but limited over the period 1901 and 1948, church attendance per person of the population ‘had diminished by a factor of three’ over the same period.100 Church attendance, which was considerably in excess of formal institutional membership across the whole range of the dissenting organisations in 1901, remained marginally so in 1935. But this was very rarely the case by 1948.101 That conclusion corroborated the trend to which Rowntree’s findings had earlier pointed. It also confirmed, if not the peculiarity, then the especial severity of the English example. This meant that the very nature of English protestant, and especially nonconformist, observance was changing. Chapel attendance was gradually being reduced to a pious rump, and an increasingly ageing pious rump at that.102 The great mass of the indigenous population – who may never have been very religious but who had, and not so long previously, commonly practised at least some recognised form of protestant, Christian faith – was now increasingly ‘outside the influence of regular . . . congregational . . . worship’ altogether.103 So significant a development in English religious life demanded an 99 100 101 102 103

BIAUY, B.S.R., 1/141, JDR to B.S.R., 29 April 1948. Anon., ‘The Decline of Nonconformity’, British Weekly, vol. 135, no. 3565, 10 March 1955, pp. 1 and 12. Ibid. For a theoretical discussion, see Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 75–9 and 120–1. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 344. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/1, B.S.R., ‘The Spiritual Life of the Nation’, p. 1.


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explanation. But it also called for more subtle interpretation. Above all, it pointed to what Rowntree now conceived of as the essential, that is, the novel and vital task of contemporary cultural criticism. This was the task to which, he insisted, he had been driven by the sheer force of the evidence collected for English Life and Leisure.104 That suggested a new kind of sociological study, one dedicated not merely to an explanation of why the people no longer attended their churches but to the interpretation of precisely what kind of religion (if any) they now professed. Such a study should also include serious investigation of what kind of religion (if any) they now practised from the unprecedented privacy of the modern domestic hearth.105 Rowntree’s purposes in pursuing this new and complex intellectual strategy were never wholly ‘scientific’. To some degree anyway, he always aimed to arm a movement for ‘religious revival’ in the land.106 But the methods by which he chose to fulfil his scientific duties were altogether more objective than many contemporary critics allowed. He may have harboured a moralistic disapproval at the sight of so many young people seemingly ‘wasting their lives’ in postwar Britain.107 He most definitely insisted that ‘all the social evils . . . of our time – gambling, drink, sexual promiscuity, a lack of intent in work etc., etc.’ were but ‘symptoms of a [broader] spiritual malaise . . . in our midst’.108 To that degree, he had – belatedly – come to the view that there was a connection between growing irreligion and now-extensive immorality in postwar Britain. But, perhaps for precisely those reasons, he appreciated every bit as much as any of his unbelieving colleagues that the all too obviously diminishing social significance of religious organisations in Attlee’s England could not be detached from the substantial evidence of ‘a widespread . . . rejection of Christianity as a divinely ordained religion’ among his fellow countrymen. Indeed, through the religious angst that drove his inquiries into this, ‘the most basic problem of our age’, Rowntree might in retrospect be judged to have conceived of his scientific obligations, if anything, more rigorously than they did.109

104 105 106

107 108 109

Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 345. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/1, B.S.R., ‘The Spiritual Life of the Nation’, p. 2. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/5, untitled ms, ‘Spiritual Life of the Nation’, p. 1: ‘The people are ready for a religious revival’; p. 2 ‘men today will [still] respond to religious appeals if they feel that they have a direct bearing upon life.’ BIAUY, PSR, 1/133, B.S.R. to Mrs Gary Brainerd, 15 December 1953. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/1, B.S.R., ‘The Spiritual Life of the Nation’, p. 2. Cf. Beveridge, Spectator, 8 June 1951, 756; ‘the thought that the mainly deplorable human beings described in the case histories are now all equal voters in our democracy is frightening’.

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Rowntree’s task demanded that he first study the plight of contemporary religious organisations conceived as organisations. As a result, the superficial tone of some of his later inquiries was cast almost as much in the language of business administration as spiritual apprehension. It even argued that ‘the churches’, by 1952, found themselves ‘in the position of a manufacturer whose goods no longer met with consumer acceptance’. Their fate, at least in part, was, accordingly, the product of ‘competition [so] much fiercer than that they had to face thirty or forty years ago’.110 By that Rowntree meant the great competition to fill the recreational hours of the people. The treasured good of paid leisure had increased in the twentieth century. Products designed to fill it had multiplied accordingly. In this battle to provide for customers at last able to choose, the churches had performed poorly by comparison with their secular rivals.111 Everyone knew that. Rowntree sought to measure the precise extent of their lapse. In so doing, he recast the prevailing conception of religious organisations that informed his earlier analysis. In 1901, he had incorporated his ‘Church Census’ as part of a ‘Supplementary Chapter’, dedicated to the voluntary sector in Edwardian York.112 Forty years later, it formed a somewhat larger part of an altogether more extensive section of the book, dedicated to the study of ‘Leisure-Time Activities’.113 By this he meant not so much to belittle the social significance of religion as to highlight the unprecedented importance of free time in his ‘account of the condition of the working-classes in York’.114 His view presumed no blue-eyed conception of this novel phenomenon. To the contrary, his later researches demonstrated just how little of it was even then enjoyed by ‘the working-class wife within the family’ and also just how many working-class men spent ‘the whole of Sunday morning in bed’ – seemingly oblivious either to their sacred or secular obligations.115 110 111 112

113

114 115

BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/5, B.S.R., untitled MS on ‘Aspects of the Spiritual Life of the Nation’ (1952), pp. 1–2. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R. SLN/2, Draft Format of the Book on the Deepening of the Spiritual Life’, chs. 1–6, pp. 1–7. Rowntree, Poverty, ‘Supplementary Chapter’; pp. 306–87; this included sections on ‘Public Houses and Clubs’, ‘Education’, ‘Trade Unions’, ‘Co-operatives’, ‘Friendly Societies Socialists and Life Insurance’; ‘Poor Relief’ and the ‘Probable Effects of an Old Age Pension on the Poverty of York’, in addition to the ‘Church Census’. Rowntree, Poverty, pt III, ch. 13, ‘Leisure-Time Activities’, pp. 329–449, at p. 329: ‘No account of the conditions of the working classes in York [is] complete without reference to their leisure[, for] the way in which communities spend their leisure is a criteria of national character.’ Why? ‘Because work and [the] hours [it] occupied [were] largely determined by conditions [beyond their control] but they can do what they will with their own leisure hours.’ Interestingly, he listed the first such possibility as that of ‘the churchgoer [to] attend his church’. Ibid., p. 329. Ibid., ‘How Some Typical Families Spend their Leisure’, pp. 428–9.


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All the same, Rowntree was determined to account for the influence of an increasingly important dimension of social life. He believed the use of leisure defined broader, popular attitudes. What he observed, as most reviewers of Poverty and Progress noted, was a marked diminution in traditional religious observance and a corresponding rise in novel, secular deployments.116 The proportion of the adult population attending church services halved between 1901 and 1935.117 This fall had been general, that is, common across the classes and between the sexes.118 It had been more marked still for weekday services – when the churches had to compete with ‘cinemas, public dances, the theatre and the music hall’ – than for Sunday worship.119 But it was still noticeable on the sabbath.120 For all the pre-war taboos on public entertainment, an increasingly substantial proportion of the population stayed away that day.121 In 1941 Rowntree pointedly refrained from explaining why this might have been the case.122 No less striking at that time was his continuing private reticence – better call it tentativeness – in this matter. He subscribed in a very general way to the common notion of a contemporary ‘failure of the churches’, or to the view that organised religion had less ‘grip . . . on the people’.123 But this was an obvious point. Indeed, as Alec Vidler observed at the time, it was no more than ‘a hackneyed theme’.124 Rowntree also remarked, albeit in similarly vague terms, on the possibly deleterious effects for religious observance of ‘improved material conditions’ and the ‘quickening . . . tempo of contemporary life’.125 Finally, as a Quaker, he could scarcely have been expected to ignore the coincidence of ‘diminished church attendance’ and the fact that ‘so many nations’ – actually, the greater part of historic Christendom – were then ‘at war’. This was not least because, as a result, perhaps ‘90 per cent of these [then serving as] soldiers had ceased to have any living connection with Christianity’.126

116

117 119 121 122 123 124 125 126

Anon., ‘A Glance Behind the Façade: Progress and Poverty in a Great City’, Times Literary Supplement, 30 August 1941, 422; A Critic, ‘A London Diary’, The New Statesman and Nation, 22, no. 548, 23 August 1941, 178; Tom Harrisson, ‘Human Planning’, The New Statesman and Nation, 22, no. 553, 27 September 1941, 301–2. 118 Ibid., pp. 420–1. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress, pp. 420 and 424. 120 Ibid., pp. 425–6. Ibid., pp. 424–5. With the possible exception of the Roman Catholic Church; see anon., ‘Flight from Church Attendance’, Catholic Herald, 29 August 1941. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress, pp. 417–18 and 423–4. Rowntree to Canon Tupper Carey, c. August 1939; cited in Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, p. 302. A. R. Vidler, ‘Editorial’, Theology, 42, no. 247, January 1941, 1–4, at p. 1. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., REL/12, Lectures and Addresses on Religion; B.S.R., ‘Place of Religion in the World’, 7 September 1941. Ibid., ‘Why Be Religious?’, 21 March 1943.

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What was much more significant was the fact that Rowntree generally ignored most of the obvious contemporary explanations of the phenomenon. He said little or nothing about Christian disunity. Indeed, he held out no hopes for the contemporary ecumenical movement.127 He conceded that there had been no great ‘progress in the moral fibre’ of the nation over the intervening fifty years. But he did not point to any significant decline of ethical standards either.128 He sadly reported the fact that, by the winter of 1940, ‘self-denial’ had for so many ‘come to mean’ nothing more than ‘rationing’. But he rejoiced in much of the common spirit, if not, of course, the collective purpose, that wartime experience had imbued in the native soul.129 As a result, it is very difficult – indeed, it is impossible – to avoid the conclusion that his views on this vital question substantially altered after the war. He honestly believed the English had become markedly less Christian during the last decade of his life. No less important, all the evidence suggests that his understanding of the phenomenon under observation changed too. Rowntree concluded from his researches that English religious attitudes had changed – that the English had become significantly less religious, more generally, during the years after 1940. So much so, in fact, as to point not merely to ‘an internal crisis in our religious system but [to] an external crisis of the system itself’. It all added up to ‘a crisis of belief’, tout court. 130 Rowntree and Lavers were good social scientists. They were aware that there were no ‘specific . . . records’ that could definitively demonstrate ‘whether [or not] the present picture was more or less favourable than that which we should have drawn had we undertaken our work in Britain, say, fifty or sixty years ago’.131 Still, they were determined to place the results which they published in 1951 in a very different context from anything that Rowntree had previously attempted. The intellectual departure this represented was perhaps made clearer still in the report which Rowntree submitted on his ‘Investigation into the Moral Fibre of the British People’, to the trustees of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on 31 May 1947. There, at least in the most general terms, he outlined what he believed to be the ‘respective effects’ of the 127

128 129 130 131

Ibid. And of course he was absolutely opposed to ‘sectarianism’; see Rowntree’s remarks on this and other relevant matters in his correspondence with Canon Tupper Carey, cited in Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, p. 302. BIAUY, PSR, 1/141, B.S.R. to J. D. Rockefeller Jr, 3 January 1948. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., REL/12, Lectures and Addresses on Religion, B.S.R., ‘Lent’, 10 January 1940. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/1, B.S.R., ‘The Spiritual Life of the Nation’, p. 1. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/1, G.R.L. to Rev. J. R. W. Scott, 13 May 1953.


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moral state of the nation generally and its effects on church attendance particularly: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) (vi) (vii) (viii) (ix) (x) (xi)

Two [World] Wars A rise in real wages over the last century The emancipation of women The growing power of labour and of the Labour Party A decline in the position of the aristocracy and the altered position of the wealthy The ‘Higher Criticism’ and Darwinism generally Improved means of transport, especially motor cars General insecurity (however defined) Contraceptives Consumerism; and finally The decay of craftsmanship.132

More ambitiously still, Rowntree sought to relate those very general causes to common, contemporary ‘unchurched religious’ attitudes. This was the aspect of his study that drew the greatest clerical and professional ire. That it should so have disturbed the nation’s churchmen can scarcely have surprised him. Rowntree concluded his statistical survey of modern church-going by recording his truly startling findings about ‘how non-church-goers regard the clergy and their congregations’, famously judging that ‘amongst persons who do not go to church . . . we have found so widespread a dislike of the ministers of religion of the Anglican and Free Churches that it can only be described as anti-clericalism’.133 What he actually meant to highlight in that passage was an increasingly common perception that, erstwhile peculiar, clerical duties now constituted no more than an ordinary occupation, one, moreover, increasingly carried out by men of all too ordinary education and, for that matter, equally unremarkable personal moral standing.134 What he, in fact, provoked was a contemporary sensation. It was to this passage of the text, above all, that Crockford’s took exception. The Church’s anonymous apologist responded by insisting that ‘the parson’s job continues to benefit . . . from the unexpected kindness of those who [whilst outside the church] remain . . . well-disposed to its offices’.135 Others proceeded by a slightly different tack. R. P. C. Hanson, writing in Theology, insisted that the idea of a protestant clergy now sunk so low in ‘general education’ as to be ‘unable to [sustain] that respect of the people’ was a 132 133 134 135

BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/3, B.S.R., ‘Investigations into the Moral Fibre of the British People’, Report to Trustees, 31 May 1947, pp. 1–5. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 345–6; cf. Puzzled People, passim. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 345–9. Anon., Crockford’s, Preface, p. xvi.

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‘completely unfounded . . . accusation’.136 He conceded that such standards had indeed ‘fallen . . . precipitously . . . during the last thirty years’. But he observed that they remained at a level ‘far above that of the average member of the Church of England’. Whether or not he thereby substantiated his case remains quite unclear.137 In all this polemical heat, too many ‘interested parties’ missed much of the sociological light shed by Rowntree’s most controversial point. What he had discovered was less an outbreak of bishop-baiting comparable to the urban riots of 1831, than evidence – anecdotal evidence to be sure – but repeated, frequent anecdotal evidence all the same – of an altogether longer-term, broader-hewn, cultural transformation. This pointed to the chronic decline of clerical authority in mid-twentiethcentury England.138 Even the somewhat rosier picture that he depicted of popular attitudes to the Roman Catholic clergy of the age actually corroborated rather than qualified this conclusion. It may have suggested a significant diminution in collective fears surrounding the supposed pretensions of the priesthood that had once defined so much of the content of English, urban protestantism. But in so doing, it established no discernible appreciation in common regard for any kind of ecclesiastical office.139 There was more. The decline of deference towards the protestant ministry particularly that Rowntree discovered in postwar England pointed to the effective disappearance of common obedience to prescriptive religious authority more generally. It was not just that people sustained no particular regard for the mainstream churches any longer. Puzzled People had reflected that much.140 The real problem went deeper. The old, quasi-religious organisations were now similarly suspect. For instance, popular attitudes towards the religious mission of Sunday school had become generally negative. These bodies were increasingly conceived as ‘outmoded institutions’, from which ‘no good is to be expected’, except for their traditional function of ‘keeping the children quiet on Sunday afternoon while working-class fathers sleep’.141 Finally, informal Christian transmission was in decline too. This was because specific religious instruction had become rare in the home ‘often for the reason given by so many parents among those whose stories [were] related in our case histories, namely “it isn’t fair to treat as a fact something I am [myself] far from sure about”’.142 136 138 139 141

137 Ibid. Hanson, Theology, 55, 12. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 351–3. 140 Puzzled People, passim. Ibid., pp. 349–53. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 359–60.

142

Ibid., p. 357.


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Rowntree’s attitude toward all of these developments was strangely ambivalent. The modern attitude to Sunday schools he thought ‘[un]wise’.143 Popular views about the clergy he recorded simply ‘as the view expressed to us’.144 But the passing of parental influence in the home he alternatively doubted, as no more than nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ which never were, or positively celebrated as the transmutation of a formal profession of Christianity into something closer to its proper practice. This he described as the emergence of: tolerance, unselfishness and mutual respect between parents and children, and a recognition of the value of the personality of the very young [which had taken] the place of that despotism, often far from benevolent [that had more usually characterised] . . . earlier generations.145

The substantive conclusions that he reached from such evidence were none the less far reaching. All the traditional sources for the authoritative teaching of Christian doctrine – or anyway, of protestant dogma – now lay in varying degrees of common abeyance. Neither of the new instruments for their latter-day propagation, whether religious broadcasting as it developed under the auspices of the BBC or scriptural instruction as laid down in the 1944 Education Act, could as yet be shown sufficiently to have replaced them. As a result, religious knowledge, belief and practice had become almost entirely self-sustaining, and indeed self-defining, social and cultural phenomena in modern England. What the people believed could no longer be deduced from what they had traditionally been taught. Perhaps they still adhered to some form of, residual, Christianity. Perhaps they now acknowledged no religion at all. It was even theoretically possible that they had recently acquired a ‘whole new system of belief’. No one knew for sure. To find out, a new generation of investigators was going to have to ask the people – directly – themselves. This is what Rowntree and Lavers set out to do.146 III No aspect of English Life and Leisure initially attracted greater professional opprobrium than the method that Rowntree and Lavers designed to facilitate this great task, set out in the book’s introduction. This was surely far from perfect. The criteria by which 975 case 143 146

144 Ibid., p. 345. 145 Ibid., p. 357. Ibid., p. 359. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/1, B.S.R., ‘The Spiritual Life of the Nation’, p. 1. For a fuller discussion of the developments, see chs. 6 and 7 below.

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histories were reduced to a sample study of 220 specific examples were never revealed.147 Rowntree’s private papers furnish few further clues.148 Precisely how Lavers went about the scheme of ‘indirect interviewing’ that involved ‘making and . . . developing the acquaintance of an individual until his or her confidence is gained and information required . . . without the person concerned ever knowing that an interview . . . was being sought’ remained – and remains – something of a secret.149 Equally, the degree to which the strictly statistical information collected in York and High Wycombe was, or was not, related to the more general, anecdotal material, collected from all over the country, was not made clear.150 In sum, it was a flawed method.151 But at least it was a method. There were worse precedents. It achieved a degree of precision wholly unobtainable from earlier ‘mass-observation’ surveys, and not even attempted in the purely descriptive accounts of changing English religious sensibilities furnished by Barker, Orwell and others at much the same time.152 Moreover, many of those most critical at the time achieved little more themselves at a later juncture. Gorer’s especially negative judgement must be balanced by Argyle’s observation that Gorer, in limiting his own research to a questionnaire posed to readers of the Sunday People in 1950, drew dubious conclusions about common beliefs from a very unrepresentative sample of the English population.153 That was almost certainly true. All the same, Argyle in turn confined his own methodological vulnerability to the summary and comparison of others’ findings. So it was that English Life and Leisure, scorned by so many on its first appearance,

147 148 149

150 151 152 153

Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, Introduction, pp. xi–xvi furnishes as much evidence as survives, and that is not very much. That is, I have found none in them! Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, Introduction, pp. xii–xiii. On the other hand, Lavers remained – and remains – something of a joke within the sociological profession. This is unfair; not only did he ‘undertake . . . the bulk of the interviewing’ but, following a creditable naval career, obtained a London University external degree, gained considerable experience in statistical techniques and was competent in German, Italian, French and Spanish. For further remarks on Lavers, see Briggs, Social Thought and Social Action, p. 322. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. xiii–xiv. And, for particularly sharp comment on this point, see Wootton, Political Quarterly, 22, 207. Though this may be pitching criticism at simply too high – impossibly high – a level; for this point, see Harrison, ‘Rowntree, Seebohm’ in ODNB. Sir Ernest Barker, Britain and the British People (Oxford, 1942), ch. 5; George Orwell, The English People (London, 1947), esp. pp. 14–20. Argyle, Religious Behaviour, p. 14; for Gorer’s apologia, see Gorer, Exploring English Character, pp. 3–7.


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continued to be used by the same expert authorities, well into the 1960s and beyond.154 Above all, this was because of what it actually discovered. That was the – seemingly novel – social phenomenon characterised by Rowntree as the emergence of a majority population outside the churches that could no longer either be bribed or bullied back into conventional religious affiliation. Bribery no longer sufficed since there were so many other things to do on a Sunday. In one of his more curious exercises in quantitative cultural analysis, Rowntree actually calculated their number. He came to a figure of twenty (there were surely more still).155 Bullying no longer worked because the ‘people no longer . . . believe in hell’. In fact, only a tiny minority acknowledged their ‘personal survival after death’ at all. They could therefore no longer ‘be frightened into conversion’.156 More to the point, they no longer believed much of the biblical story at all. Certainly, they subscribed to virtually none of the punitive aspects of traditional Christian teaching.157 For all his criticism of Rowntree’s methods, Gorer produced wholly compatible results in his own survey, published four years later. Indeed, he was more emphatic still. While Rowntree was only willing to conclude that ‘very likely a majority of the population’ now rejected the New Testament story, Gorer insisted on calculating the figure, at fully 94 per cent.158 In a different way, Rowntree’s analysis of the concomitant common collapse of a specific, biblical, dogma into vague Christian ethics – as he put it, ‘moral standards remain . . . vestigially . . . Christian’ – found widespread corroboration in the writings of many other, often anti-Christian, cultural commentators at the time.159 Further, it was Rowntree who first pointed to the organisational dynamic that not only explained the transformation of the one into the other, but also interpreted its broader consequences. His researches 154

155 156 157 158 159

Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain, p. 122; Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, p. 11; Bryan Wilson, Religion in a Secular Society: a Sociological Comment (London, 1966), ch. 1. BIAUY, B.S.R., 4/31, B.S.R. unpub. ts. ‘What Men and Women Can Do on Saturdays and Sundays’, 2 pp. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/1, B.S.R., ‘The Spiritual Life of the Nation’, p. 1. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 354. Gorer, Exploring English Character, p. 255; cf. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 353–6. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 367 and 372; Gorer, Exploring English Character, ch. 14, passim; Argyle, Religious Behaviour, ch. 12; and see, once again, the remarks in Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain, pp. 122ff. Finally, for a recent view, note the remarks in Richard Hoggart, The Way We Live Now (London, 1995), ch. 12.

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established that the decline in non-membership attendance at English churches and chapels between 1901 and 1948 had been accompanied not merely by a diminution in public regard for those, by now, benighted clergymen who presided over them, but also in a common collapse in respect for the ever-declining, lay rump formally affiliated with these institutions. Non-church-goers increasingly expressed not merely an unprecedented disregard for officialdom, but an altogether novel ‘dislike for people who still . . . went . . . to church’.160 In part, this was because popular sensibilities so often insisted that modern churchmen and women rarely lived up to their principles. It was more still because non-church-goers now argued that it was possible to live a good life outside the church. Indeed, they believed it highly probable that the unchurched professed a truer faith than their devotionally conventional neighbours.161 This insight enabled Rowntree to appreciate just how different so-called ‘vestigial Christian ethics’ were from traditional, protestant teachings. So too did his related observations about another cultural development. The people no longer read the Bible.162 Richard Hoggart later elucidated how this habit had come under competitive assault by the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century.163 But Rowntree identified part of a parallel process in his own, earlier, investigations. He had begun by counting attendances at churches, chapels, mission halls and Bible classes.164 But Bible classes, in severe decline by 1941, had virtually ceased to exist ten years later.165 At the same time, scriptural study had virtually disappeared in the Sunday schools, certainly in Church of England Sunday schools.166 The result was a youthful population that did not so much reject revealed truth as reveal itself unaware even of its basic content.167 Gorer appreciated that much too. His studies established the existence of a wealth of contemporary pagan, mystical and other superstitious beliefs – nothing less, he insisted, than a fully fledged magical universe – that accounted for the worldview of perhaps a quarter of the adult 160 161 162

163 164 166 167

Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 346; and for the evidence, see pp. 346–9. Ibid., p. 347. Ibid., ch. 11, passim; though note p. 308, ‘one Head Librarian [reported] that one of their most successful recent books had been a biography of Cosmo Gordon Lang, the former Archbishop of Canterbury’. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, pp. 93–100. 165 Ibid., pp. 426–7. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress, pp. 344–8. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, pp. 360–1. Ibid., p. 361; cf. Gorer, Exploring English Character, pp. 246–7. For a trenchant analysis of both its causes and consequences, see Christie Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain (New Brunswick, NJ, 2004), esp. pp. 43–7.


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population by mid-century.168 Rowntree was prepared to travel little distance along that particular interpretative road. But such apparent neglect did not mean that he was unaware of the phenomenon. He just took a rather different view of what it meant. This was because his understanding of the emergence of ‘a post-protestant people’ presumed not merely the unambiguous reality of religious change but also a more complex fear of cultural decay. Panglossian advocacy of ‘welfare state religion’ left him cold. Perverse anthropologists, delighting in the discovery of infidel population, only earned his contempt.169 Yet Rowntree was no religious reactionary. On the contrary, he was willing to concede much by way of doctrinal and institutional reform in his pursuit of spiritual revival. This was because the sheer weight of the evidence that he had collected also suggested to him – certainly, interviewee after interviewee attested to the fact of – people not so much proud of their personal liberation from ‘clerical pretension’ and ‘rigid dogma’ but cast out into a general and increasing ‘spiritual hunger’. What he had found was a nation living outside the churches and beyond Christian teaching but far from happy with its new existential lot.170 From Rowntree’s particular perspective, so much common misery presaged a rueful kind of collective hope. But the cosmic optimism of a lifelong Quaker also comprehended the contemporary pessimism of a more pragmatic social scientist. So much unassuaged aspiration furnished no good reason to suggest that religious renewal might actually occur. Hence his damning verdict: ‘we are . . . living on the spiritual capital of the past’.171 Had he lived to witness the widely acclaimed onset and commonly concluded failure of Christian revival during the decade that followed the publication of English Life and Leisure, he would not have been in the least surprised. For what he had unearthed through this and other related writings was not so much ‘believing without belonging’, nor even ‘cognitive acquiescence’, but institutional exhaustion and intellectual confusion. That was why in 1951 he described ‘our present situation’ as ‘one of real . . . peril’.172 By then the English had ceased to be even part-time protestants. But they had not become anything else. Moreover, there was no hard evidence to suggest that they ever would do so, not in the foreseeable future and not under any likely cultural scenario. To that degree, Rowntree’s social science trumped his religious beliefs. His scientific findings proved perfectly compatible with the ‘pessimistic’ 168 169 170 171

Gorer, Exploring English Character, pp. 259ff. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 372. BIAUY, RP, B.S.R., SLN/1, B.S.R., ‘The Spiritual Life of the Nation’, p. 2: ‘We must seek something broader . . . than purely Christian . . . doctrine.’ 172 Ibid. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 372.

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conclusions in the so-called ‘British School’ of the sociology of religion, as they developed from the mid-1960s onwards.173 The senescent fogey, that last gasp of Edwardian Liberalism, cast adrift in the new Jerusalem of Attlee’s England, turned out to be, if anything, ahead of his time. This was true not just about the attendant evils of smoking.174 173

174

Best summarised in Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, ‘Religion: the British Contribution’, British Journal of Sociology, 40, no. 3 (1989), 493–520. Rowntree and Lavers’s study does not appear in their otherwise exhaustive bibliography. Finally banned in public places in England on 1 July 2007.

Part III

Resistance, revival and resignation

6

The 1944 Education Act: a church–state perspective

It is easy to forget that it was once ‘customary to genuflect whenever the Butler [Education] Act was mentioned’.1 Contemporaries harboured few doubts about its long-term importance. Speaking to the Conservative Party conference, on 15 March 1945, Winston Churchill claimed for his government ‘the greatest Education Act in the history of the country’.2 He also passed over his own, early and continued opposition to the proposed legislation. Even those then less inclined either to selective memory or unsubstantiated hyperbole tended to agree. James Chuter Ede, a genuinely tireless proponent of progress, testily countered that so admirable an outcome was actually ‘more the result of the coalition’, that is of Labour’s enthusiasm for Butler’s plans, than of the Prime Minister’s belated enlightenment. He still happily acknowledged that the Act had gone ‘a long way to unify the educational system of the country’ and in so doing had given the ‘whole service . . . a fresh start on improved lines’.3 For a generation after, the majority of informed commentators and critics concurred; some with Churchill’s fine words, more with Ede’s measured assent.4 The majority of early chroniclers also acclaimed its eponymous author.5 The occasional champion can still be found.6 1 2

3 4

5

6

Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London, 1990), p. 362. Labour and the Wartime Coalition: from the Diaries of James Chuter Ede, ed. Kevin Jeffreys (London, 1987), p. 210, entry for 15 March 1945; this aspect of the speech, effectively an early election address, passes unnoticed in Gilbert’s Life; see Martin Gilbert, The Road to Victory: Winston S. Churchill, 1941–1945 (London, 1986), pp. 1251–2. Ede, Diaries, pp. 210 and 202; entries for 15 March 1945 and 31 December 1944. Annan, Our Age, pp. 362–3; Marjorie Cruikshank, Church and State in English Education, 1870 to the Present Day (London, 1964), p. 169; A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914– 1945 (Oxford, 1965); H. C. Dent, 1870–1970: a Century of Growth in English Education (London, 1970), p. 116; Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000, fourth edn (London, 2001), ch. 29. Anthony Howard, RAB: the Life of R. A. Butler (London, 1987), ch. 10; and for earlier accounts, see Patrick Cosgrave, R. A. Butler: an English Life (London, 1981), ch. 6; Gerald Sparrow, R. A. B.: Study of a Statesman (London, 1965), ch. 5; and Francis Boyd, Richard Austin Butler (London, 1956), ch. 6. See the remark cited in Howard, RAB, p. 139: ‘an obscure Conservative back-bencher, Sir Edward Campbell, the MP for Bromley, suddenly remarked during the debate on the Third Reading of the Education Act on 12 May 1945, “We called the old Act, the Fisher Act. How are we going to remember this bill? Shall we not call it The Butler Act?”’ See, for instance, David Eccles, ‘Education Act’, in A Rabanthology, ed. Mollie Butler (York, 1995), pp. 23–6; or, more soberly, Keith Middlemas, Power, Competition

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But the prevailing orthodoxy is hostile. Variously berated for its failure to deal with the ‘real problem[s]’ of social justice, economic modernisation or even administrative efficiency, the Butler Act is now widely condemned as, at best, a missed opportunity, or worse, as the egregious product of political myopia and social inertia, each disingenuously harnessed by Butler’s sly conservatism to effect little in much. In the words of Kenneth O. Morgan: ‘It is one of the mysteries of the wartime period that the 1944 Butler Act . . . ever came [to be] regarded as a bold, egalitarian measure.’ 7 Why? Because it ostentatiously raised the school-leaving age from twelve to fifteen. But it put off the much more important question of higher education for all. It also effectively reinforced inequality of access to secondary schooling.8 Not that the ‘new right’ sets much store by its legacy either. For them, it extended the range of educational opportunity only by way of making universal an impoverished version of liberal education. Moreover, it did so at the expense of that more widespread technical instruction that the nation so badly needed.9 Both sides agree that it left the structures of English educational provision essentially unchanged. Hence the magisterial judgement of Dr Adrian Wooldridge who, while conceding that ‘the 1944 Education Act did something to promote equality of opportunity’, insists that it was, in all its most important respects the work of a quintessentially Tory politician who reformed in order to preserve, pandering to a litany of cherished conservative beliefs – of traditional religion, the virtue of variety and decentralisation, the value of hierarchy and privilege – and left the balance of power in the educational world unaltered, with the LEAs [local education authorities] retaining their autonomy and the churches preserving their accumulated powers.10

Perhaps it was. Yet the contempt of hindsight often reveals more about the preoccupations of the present than the concerns of the past. As a result its disillusionment can also conflate, and thereby confuse, those purposes. Few contemporaries (pro- or anti-Butler) would have

7 8

9 10

and the State, vol. I: Britain in Search of Balance, 1940–1961 (Basingstoke, 1986), p. 366. Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History, 1945–1989 (Oxford, 1990), p. 19; see also pp. 40 and 113. A. H. Halsey, A. F. Heath, and J. M. Ridge, Origins and Distinctions: Family, Class and Education in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1980), ch. 2; Robert M. Blackburn and Catherine Marsh, ‘Education and Social Class: Revisiting the 1944 Education Act with Fixed Marginals’, British Journal of Sociology, 42 (1991), 507–36. Correlli Barnett, The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities, 1945–50 (London, 1995), esp. pp. 288–91. Adrian Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c. 1860– 1990 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 259–60.

The 1944 Education Act

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bracketed the continued autonomy of LEAs, which it broadly facilitated, with the statutory preservation of accumulated ecclesiastical powers in the postwar British educational system, which it specifically enforced. Most informed observers would then have regarded the two – for good or ill – as polar opposite outcomes of any likely legislative reform. Certainly, contemporary conventional wisdom presumed that more of one must entail less of the other. That they actually flourished, together, enhanced and renewed for a generation after 1944 was a conscious and creative achievement of political balance, not a lazy concession to administrative convenience. Take another example. No aspect of the 1944 Education Act was more remarkable, that is, more unexpected and more far reaching, than the preservation of so-called ‘accumulated church powers’ which characterised its final provisions. Yet while this simple fact has often been noted, its causes have rarely been considered, and their implications still less frequently explored, in the subsequent historiography.11 To the extent that any recognisable judgement has emerged, opinion seems divided between those who deem that survival to have been inevitable and those who regard it as unfortunate.12 Wartime observers would have been greatly surprised by so much interpretative neglect. Whether in celebration or remorse, most would have shared the view of Canon W. T. Brown, Special Adviser to the Wakefield Divisional Association of Church Schools, that ‘the most important contribution of the new Education Act is in its provisions dealing with voluntary schools and religious education’; similarly, with his judgement that those ‘provisions . . . are more generous’ for the Church ‘than seemed likely even three or four years ago’.13 Whatever else it was, the 1944 Education Act was an instrument of Christian stewardship. It was the result of a bill advanced by a Christian minister, a measure passed by a Christian Parliament and a piece of legislation explicitly directed towards the elusive goal of creating a truly Christian population in Britain. It is important to remember that it enacted compulsory Christian education for the first time in all maintained schools, not least because this was a point fully understood by 11

12

13

For a pioneering effort, see C. Cannon, ‘The Influence of Religion on Educational Policy, 1902–1944’, British Journal, Educational Studies, 12 (1964), 144–58; more broadly, note the remarks in Matthew Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State Between the Wars (Oxford, 2004), ch. 6, esp. pp. 203–9. Howard, RAB, p. 127. And for Butler’s own view, surely relevant, see R. A. Butler, The Art of the Possible (London, 1971), ch. 6, esp. pp. 123–5; and R. A. Butler, The Art of Memory: Friends in Perspective (London, 1982), ch. 9, esp. p. 163. W. J. Brown, The Church and the Education Act (Dewsbury, 1944), pp. 4 and 16.

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some of its most articulate contemporary opponents. This was an aspect of the Act specifically emphasised by H. C. Dent, then Headmaster of Westminster City School who, during the course of an increasingly irritated correspondence with Archbishop Temple, could not resist observing that, for all the official guff about a principle newly established whereby ‘pupils are to be educated in accordance with the wishes of their parents’, the actual outcome was statute law which quite explicitly ‘denie[d] the aid of the state to those groups of educationalists who might wish, with the approval of parents, to provide a purely secular education’.14 Furthermore, it was a protestant Act. It was a piece of legislation conceived with the interests, prejudices and sensibilities of indigenous Anglicans and nonconformists – but not Roman Catholics – in mind. As Butler blithely put it: ‘I warned the Catholics that this particular settlement was not their pigeon.’15 The new régime eventually provided for an equitable subsidy of Roman Catholic, so-called ‘aided’, schools.16 But it did so only at a level around one-half of what the Roman Catholic hierarchy had initially demanded.17 More: the so-called ‘agreed syllabus’ for religious instruction in the renamed ‘controlled schools’ frightened its bishops into believing that the peculiar charms of their faith would eventually be ‘crowded out of the state system’.18 They were not altogether wrong. As a result, by December 1943, they had come to ‘dislike . . . the whole trend of opinion which the Bill represented’ and, in particular, ‘the threat to family life and the liberty of the individual’ that it implied.19 Their problem was that the protestant majority in England and Wales simply did not see things that way, still less did its representatives in Parliament.20 All of which is far from saying that this protestant majority judged the provisions of the Education Act in the same way. They did not. The Act may indeed have arisen out of previously unresolved ‘difficulties between the Nonconformists and the Anglicans’.21 But what emerged from its provisions was not a settlement of those disagreements. It cannot be stated too strongly that, in many respects anyway, the eventual

14 15 16 17 18 19 21

Lambeth Palace Library, William Temple Papers (hereafter cited as LPL/WTP), vol. xxi, f. 72: H.C. Dent to Temple, 18 September 1943. Trinity College, Cambridge, Butler Papers (hereafter cited as TCC/BP), G15/86/87: R. A. Butler, ‘Political Diary’, 9 September 1943. Cruikshank, Church and State, pp. 143–4, 154–9, 161–8. TCC/BP, G15/37: R. A. Butler, ‘Note’, 25 May 1943. TCC/BP, G15/85: Butler, ‘Political Diary’, 9 September 1943. 20 Ibid. TCC/BP, G15/177: Butler, ‘Diary’, [n.d.] December 1943. TCC/BP, G15/86: Butler, ‘Political Diary’, 9 September 1943.


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Act ‘did not satisfy’ the Free Churches.22 They unhappily acquiesced to it. They did so for the general good of ‘positive advance in educational reconstruction’. Even at the time, they also insisted that the ‘grant[ing] of large sums of public money towards the improvement of Denominational School Buildings without any extension of public control’ openly ‘clashe[s] with the principle of democratic government’; just as they denounced the ‘injustice’ of leaving the question of single school areas so visibly ‘unsolved’.23 But they put up with it, faut de mieux. To that extent, 1944 was actually something of an Anglican triumph: a reassertion not simply of the Christian principle in English and Welsh education, nor merely of the priority of protestantism in official thinking, but of the peculiar privileges of the Church of England in these vital aspects of national life.24 I That was what was so unexpected – by Canon Brown and many others – in 1940. This was for the simplest of reasons. In scarcely any aspect of its existence was the priority of the Church of England so precariously placed just before the outbreak of the Second World War as in its historical command of English education.25 Ecclesiastical benevolence, denominational disputatiousness and administrative accident combined had made the Church the principal provider of public elementary and, to a lesser extent, secondary education during the nineteenth century. But statutory intervention from 1870 onwards, and especially after 1902, had progressively weakened this role. What emerged was what became known as the ‘dual system’ of English education: one in part provided by the state, and another part furnished by voluntary organisations, above all the churches, and especially the Church of England.26 The obligation of voluntary societies to provide for and keep their own buildings, particularly as interpreted by the 1921 Education Act, provoked a precipitous 22 23

24 25 26

LPL/WTP, 21/191: R. D. Whitehorn, moderator, Free Church Federal Council, unpublished letter to The Times, 11 November 1943. Free Church Federal Council, A Statement on the Educational Proposals Published in the Board of Education’s White Paper on ‘Educational Reconstruction’ (HMSO, 1943), p. 1. More generally, see the remarks in Stephen Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics (London, 1975), p. 222. Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 204ff.; see his discussion in ch. 1 for the broader arguments in interwar England. Ibid., pp. 204–5; F. A. Iremonger, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: his Life and Letters (Oxford, 1948), pp. 571ff.; Howard, RAB, p. 112. Cruikshank, Church and State, chs. 2–6; J. Murphy, Church, State and Schools in Britain, 1800–1970 (London, 1971), ch. 7; Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (London, 1972), pp. 103–6.

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decline (of something like 20 per cent) in the number of non-provided schools, and a still more marked decline (around one-third) in the average attendance of pupils at those schools, up to 1938. By the outbreak of the war, only half of elementary schools, some 10,553 out of a total of 20,906, continued as so-called ‘non-provided’ schools. Moreover, these educated only around 1.25 million people, as opposed to more than 3 million children provided for in the council schools.27 The imbalance between secondary schools was by then greater still, at around 70,000 versus 423,000 pupils.28 Such precipitous decline, only accompanied by ever-increasing costs, led the Bishop of Durham to wonder out loud, in 1936, whether there might not soon be more ‘unwisdom’ in defending those remaining schools – as ‘limitless liabilities undertaken with strictly limited resources’ – than conceding them all to a ‘unified system of national education in which religious teaching [was] properly safeguarded’.29 He was far from alone in this view. Whatever the dictates of principle or pragmatism, many had come to conclude that ‘it was only a question of time when nearly all non-provided schools, other than Roman Catholic, would cease to exist’.30 So great a shift of resources, both in material and manpower, necessarily reflected an equally significant alteration in the balance of educational influence between church and state; more accurately, between England’s many churches and its still more multitudinous LEAs.31 This was accompanied throughout the interwar years by a more nebulous but equally unmistakable inversion in the balance of social prestige between the clerical and teaching professions.32 Whether or not the ‘fool of the family’ really was now going into the church, teaching was attracting more intelligent, and correspondingly more ambitious, recruits. As Sir Frederick Mandler, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), put it in 1942: ‘Times have changed since 1870 . . . the clerical profession can no longer claim any particular intellectual advantage over the teaching profession.’33 What even Temple conceded to be the erstwhile ‘natural tendency’ for an incumbent ‘to regard the 27 28

29 30 31 32 33

Butler, The Art of Memory, pp. 151–2; Howard, RAB, p. 112. Anon., ‘Church Schools: Assembly’s Debate on Policy; Proposed Transfers’, The Times, 2 November 1942, p. 7; more generally, see P. H. J. H. Gosden, Education in the Second World War: a Study of Policy and Administration (London, 1976), pp. 87–92. Leading article, ‘Church Debates’, The Times, 21 November 1936. On the wider turmoils of the dual system by 1940, see Gosden, Education in the Second World War, pp. 271ff. Brown, The Church and the Education Act, p. 6. William Temple, Our Trust and Our Task: Being the Presidential Address to the Annual Meeting of the National Society, on 3 June 1942 (London, 1942), p. 6. On which, see the remarks of W. R. Inge reported in ch. 3 above, esp. at pp. 117–18. Sir Frederick Mandler, Religious Instruction Controversy (London, 1942), p. 9.


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schoolmaster as part of his parochial staff’ was becoming harder and harder to sustain.34 The outcome more commonly was an increasingly bitter division between two ever more separated callings. That sense, which Temple described as the ‘unhappy prejudice in the minds of teachers . . . that their position in Church schools is one of less dignity than in other schools’, lingered on.35 Where it did, acrimony often followed, and for good reason. Nearly 10,000 headships remained out of reach to teachers who did not profess the doctrines of the Church of England. Moreover, in those schools the provision of religious education entailed the subjection of reluctant teachers to what were virtually religious tests. Even the lessons themselves were set for prescribed times of the school day. For many educators these were intolerable intrusions into personal advancement, intellectual integrity and professional independence.36 The opportunity now seemed ripe to put such grievances right. Mandler again: ‘If ever teachers were in a good bargaining position they are in one today’.37 One reason for Mandler’s confidence in this respect was his belief that all impartial, and indeed much otherwise committed opinion, now sided with the teachers against the clergy in these matters. He insisted that: [E]very Minister of Education, every administrator, every teacher, every intelligent churchman and every honest politician knows quite well that the dual system lies like a tank trap across the highway to educational advance . . . a weird, outmoded . . . dichotomy which [causes] administrative impotence and [prevents] real equality of opportunity for . . . ordinary children.38

Nor was he entirely deceiving himself. Whether sufficiently ‘intelligent’ or not, some churchmen were coming round to his point of view. Writing to Temple at much the same time, the Reverend Canon Tissington Tatlow of the Institute of Christian Education felt bound to point out that, for Board of Education officials, LEA directors, His Majesty’s Inspectors and teachers anyway, church schools . . . always seem to mean . . . one thing and that is bad schools [also] places where . . . too many . . . children must go . . . and thus be educationally handicapped for life because it is not possible for the Educational Authority to remove the bad school and replace it by a good one.39

This was why thoughtful Anglicans knew that in defending the approximately 8,500 church schools that remained to them, they faced an uphill task. Lady Bridgeman put it to the annual meeting of the Defence of 34 36 39

35 Ibid., p. 7. William Temple, Our Trust (London, 1942), p. 6. 37 Ibid., p. 3. 38 Ibid., p. 2. Mandler, Religious Instruction Controversy, p. 9. LPL/WTP, 19/138: The Reverend Canon Tissington Tatlow to Temple, 24 June 1942.

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Church Schools, in October 1942 that: ‘Church Schools are now opposed by the NUT and the TUC and the Free Church Council . . . [W]e will face a tremendous struggle if we [hope] to keep them at the present time.’ This was not least because their own researches had established that, by that date, nearly half of incumbent Anglican clergy ‘took little or no interest in them’.40 The specific inadequacy of such schools was variously defined. One thing was quite clear. They were disproportionately old and unkempt, the overwhelming majority having been built in the previous century, and too many poorly maintained thereafter. Official estimates of schools ripe for reconstruction listed 541 voluntary and just 212 council properties. That figure represented no fewer than one in twenty of those then sponsored by the Church of England.41 They were often overcrowded, certainly more often than their ‘provided’ cousins. Whether or not that deficiency still left them ‘perfectly good in all other respects’, as the Bishop of Oxford contended, was very much a matter of opinion. But prevailing prejudices were turning against his robust opinion in these matters by 1942.42 For some, their ‘unfitness for purpose’ was a question of contestable administrative efficiency. For others, it was bound up with precious professional pride. For many more, it had become a matter of objective science, more specifically, of educational theory. That theory increasingly viewed the failure to divide pupils at eleven, four times more likely in the case of church than of council schools, as constituting a form of educational deprivation in itself.43 In a different way, science now roundly condemned the lack of space for ‘indoor . . . physical training’, again altogether more characteristic of non-provided than of provided schools, as ‘likely to injure . . . a very large number of children’.44 Common sense and arcane learning together ensured the Church’s particular prominence on the list of so-called ‘black-listed schools’. This was presented by Butler to Temple as a matter of lamentable and undoubted fact ‘one hot morning in the conference room at Kingsbury [during] the summer of 1942’.45 As a result, church schools generally, and the dual system in particular, retained few friends. Following Lady Bridgeman, Temple 40 41 42 43 44 45

Anon., ‘Church Schools: Future of the Dual System’, The Guardian: The Church Newspaper, no. 505, 9 November 1942, 327. R. A. Butler, ‘William Temple and Educational Reform’, in Butler, The Art of Memory, pp. 143–63; Howard, RAB, p. 112. Anon., ‘Church Schools: Primate’s Proposal for State Help: Vote in Assembly on Change of Status’, The Times, 20 November 1942. LPL/WTP, 20/49: Sir Maurice Holmes to Temple, 14 November 1942. LPL/WTP, 20/47: Canon A. R. Wilkinson-Browne to Temple, 14 November 1942. TCC/BP, G15/84: Butler, ‘Political Diary’, 9 September 1943.


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ruefully acknowledged the opposition as ‘combin[ing] nearly all forces except the Roman Catholics and that . . . not very great . . . part of the [Anglican] laity which cares’.46 Never lacking the paranoid touch, Mandler made occasional and bitter reference to the support of ‘reactionary . . . groups . . . in the House of Commons’.47 But neither he nor anyone else believed that its defenders formed anything like an interested majority. Plans for its putative reform had been circulated since before the war. These assumed a serious form in Herwald Ramsbottom’s Green Book, finally published in June 1941.48 With that, many believed, the proverbial writing was daubed all over the wall. One thing alone seemed to stand between the dual system and oblivion in the summer of 1942. Canon Brown called this white knight ‘public opinion’.49 This was not a very helpful piece of analysis but it hinted at something important. It was the view, widespread from 1940 onwards, that England was suddenly in danger of becoming an irreligious country. More specifically, it was the belief that the principal cause of this precipitous decline lay in the poor quality of contemporary religious education, and that, in these circumstances, the last thing it should abandon was its religious schools. It all began with a leader in The Times. Its (anonymous) author noted among the ‘incidental results of the [recent] evacuation scheme’ the disturbing ‘discovery that large numbers of town children are being brought up with no religious knowledge at all’. He cited the example of a country parson who had found that, within his makeshift class of twelve-yearolds, nineteen of thirty-one pupils did not know who it was who had been ‘born on Christmas Day’.50 The origins of this ignorance – the spectacular decline in Sunday school enrolment, in the region of 50 per cent between the wars – somehow eluded him.51 What he latched on to was the fact that ‘in some of the schools provided by the state there is no religious teaching’. This, he argued, was a ‘grim fact [for] a country professedly Christian’. So grim, in fact, that it pointed to the need for a complete ‘recast[ing] of the state scheme of education’.52 These sentiments quickly became commonplace in contemporary clerical circles. They were repeated virtually verbatim in the Preface to Crockford’s 46 47 48 49 50 51

52

LPL/WTP, 20/101: Temple to Mr Gibbons, 20 November 1942. Mandler, Religious Instruction Controversy, p. 1. Butler, ‘William Temple and Educational Reform’, p. 154. Brown, The Church and Education Act, p. 6. ‘Religious Education’, The Times, 17 February 1940. On this decline and its wider effects, see Christie Davies, ‘Moralisation and Demoralisation: a Moral Explanation for Changes in Crime, Disorder and Social Problems’, in Digby Anderson (ed.), The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Britain and America (London, 1992), pp. 1–13. ‘Religious Education’.

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Clerical Directory in 1941.53 More importantly, they became the basis of the famous ‘Five Points’, outlined by the two English Primates in The Times on 13 February 1941.54 They require the most careful interpretation. For the so-called ‘scandal of the evacuees’ bore many of the hallmarks of a contrived controversy. The extent and the significance of ‘popular . . . ignorance’ that it revealed in the most elementary matters of ‘religious knowledge’ can have surprised few informed observers at the time. Certainly, they did not surprise the Bishop of Liverpool. Noting in passing that such cluelessness was far from confined to the young – was, in fact, every bit as much apparent among adult conscripts of similar vintage – he redirected informed attention to its long-standing causes, not least, paradoxically, to the ‘dual system’ itself.55 This had inaugurated a ‘bifurcated’ system of religious instruction in England from as early as 1870. Or rather, that was the euphemism. The so-called Cowper–Temple clause had effectively enabled denominational teaching to continue in the voluntary sector while permitting anything from undenominational instruction to simple neglect, that is, no religion at all, to prevail in provided schools.56 Such variety of provision had scarcely mattered when the overwhelming majority of children had also attended Sunday school. But now they did not. The spectre of an irredeemably ignorant people suddenly loomed large.57 So, curiously, did its solution. What had sustained public neglect of religious education was religious division. The abject failure of the various churches – especially the established and unestablished protestant churches – to agree on precisely what aspects of protestant Christianity should be taught in maintained English schools had ensured that so little of any of it had been taught at all to many English boys and girls for two generations.58 But two decades of ecumenical effort had begun to 53 54 55 56

57

58

Anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1941 (Oxford, 1941), pp. xiii–xiv. Anon., ‘True Christian Education: Archbishops’ Appeal; Effective Training for Citizenship’, The Times, 13 February 1941. Bishop of Liverpool, ‘Christianity and the Nation’, The Guardian, no. 4960, 27 December 1940, 625. Butler, The Art of the Possible, pp. 95–6; and for the significance of Cowper-Temple by 1942, see the remarks of Eden to Butler, as set out in the Rt Hon. Lord Butler, The Education Act of 1944 and After (Longmans, 1966), p. 4: ‘Are you willing to abrogate Cowper-Temple-ism . . . as set out in the Spens’s Report?’. See, finally, the remarks in Gosden, Education in the Second World War, pp. 273–6. On the interwar decline of Sunday school scholars, see the evidence collated in Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 167, 183, 187, 190. Iremonger, William Temple, pp. 570–1; Butler, The Art of the Possible, pp. 97–8.


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yield sweeter fruit in this respect. As early as 1924 the Cambridgeshire LEA had forged an ‘agreed syllabus’ with the various religious denominations for use in its council schools. By 1930 eight other counties had followed its lead.59 Ten years later, the Bishop of Liverpool urged his brothers to sink their differences and ‘agree . . . a national syllabus’, to be administered, if necessary, by a ‘national administrative authority’.60 Few churchmen were then willing to go that far. But common sense and common cause together suggested that the time was ripe to agree on something. The so-called Bishops’ Report reflected that view. It was the first product of both real and presumed agreement between the churches: real, in the sense that it was issued with the genuine consent of ‘leaders of the Free Churches’; presumed, to the degree that it insisted (against much of the evidence) that the convictions it expressed were ‘increasingly . . . shared by the teaching profession’. What convictions? First, ‘Our ever-deepening conviction that [the] present struggle [constitutes] a fight . . . to preserve [those] elements of human civilization [whose] origins lie in the Christian faith’. This was why it was so distressing that ‘we find on every side profound ignorance of the Christian faith itself’. Hence, ‘[t]he urgent need now is to strengthen our foundations [in that faith] by securing effective Christian Education in our schools’. And, to this end, ‘[f]ormer denominational and professional suspicions must be put aside and all those who care for the place of Christianity in our common life must stand together’. Fine words, of course. But what was their point? Actually, there were five points: 1 In all schools a Christian education should be given to all scholars (except in so far as [at] present any parent may wish to withdraw their child from it). Moreover, that religious instruction should [only] be entrusted to teachers willing and competent to give it. 2 [To that end] religious knowledge and the imparting of it should be an ‘optional subject’, not merely an ‘additional option’ in the . . . training for the Teachers’ Certificate, i.e. it should count in the gaining of the certificate. 3 [Moreover] where only one or few teachers in the school are duly qualified to give Christian teaching, it should be permissible [to do so] at any period within school hours, so that the same teachers may teach several classes at different periods.61 59 60 61

Butler, ‘William Temple and Educational Reform’, p. 151. Liverpool, ‘Christianity and the Nation’. Religious instruction in provided schools was, until that time, only given at the very beginning and very end of the school day, to facilitate the easier removal of pupils, according to parental conscience.

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4 [And] the importance of religious teaching [should] be recognised through inspect[ion] by H.M. inspectors. 5 [Finally] the timetable should be arranged . . . in all schools so . . . as to provide for an act of worship on the part of the whole school at the beginning of the day.62

These were at least concrete proposals. But they had little or no hope of implementation. Then providence – anyway politics – intervened. One day in the summer of 1941, the Prime Minister summoned R. A. Butler, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to see him for a short chat. Butler relates the rest: [Churchill] saw me after his afternoon nap. [He] was audibly purring. He said ‘You have been in the House 15 years and it is time you were promoted.’ I [replied] that I had only been there for 12 years but he waved this aside. He continued: ‘I want you to go to the Board of Education. I think you can leave your mark there . . . it is true that you will be outside the main stream of the war but you will be independent. . . . Besides you will be in the war. You will move poor children from here to there’ and he lifted up imaginary children from one side of his writing pad to the other. ‘This will be difficult’, he concluded. I then said that I had always looked forward to going to the Board of Education if I was given the chance. At this he looked ever so slightly surprised, which showed that he felt in war a central job such as the one I [was] leaving is the more important. [But] he seemed genuinely pleased that I had shown so much pleasure and seemed to think the whole appointment quite suitable.63

II There would have been no wartime Education Act but for Richard Austen Butler.64 He, more than anyone else, wanted it. He, often against considerable odds, fought tirelessly for it. Finally, he alone secured it, much 62 63 64

Anon., ‘True Christian Education’. TCC/BP, 513/158: R. A. Butler, ‘Note’, [n.d.] August 1941; repeated in Butler, The Art of the Possible, p. 50; also more accurately in Howard, RAB, pp. 109–10. Richard Austen (RAB) Butler, Baron Butler of Saffron Walden (1902–82); born at Attock Serai, Punjab, India, on 9 December 1902, eldest son of Sir Montagu Butler (1873–1952) and Anne Gertrude-Smith (1876–1954); educated at Marlborough and Pembroke College, Cambridge; First Class in Modern and Medieval Languages, 1923; President of the Union (1924); First Class in Modern History, 1925; Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 1925–9; MP for Saffron Walden, 1925–65; Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for India, 1931; Under-secretary of State at the Foreign Office, 1938; President of the Board of Education, 1941; Chairman of the Conservative Research Department, 1945; Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1951; Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons, 1955; Home Secretary, 1957; Foreign Secretary, 1963; might have been Prime Minister in 1953, 1957 and 1963; Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1965–77; married Sydney Courtauld, 1926 (died 1954) and Mollie Montgomerie, 1959; ten children, through both marriages. A sphinx or a pussycat? His elusive personality is unforgettably captured by Enoch Powell, acolyte


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in the manner and largely to the ends for which he had worked.65 True, he did not formulate the most important plans, either for educational reorganisation or for a general extension of educational opportunity. These can be traced back at least as far as the Hadow Report of 1926.66 More importantly, he laboured right down to 1944 under circumstances in which the sheer range, and frequent incompatibility, of the competing interests involved in this question ensured that no measure actually undertaken could ever have accorded with the intelligible wishes of any wholly rational, or at least coherently motivated, person. To that degree, pragmatic compromise was a simple prerequisite of action.67 But the eventual result accorded more closely with Butler’s vision, and was more clearly the product of Butler’s effort, than of any other involved party. He was not bluffing when he responded so enthusiastically to Churchill’s lukewarm offer. He really did believe that ‘education’ was one of the ‘two [major] problems’ in contemporary British government ‘most needing solution’. The other, interestingly, was ‘India’. There is nothing in the contemporary record to suggest that he considered the former any less pressing than the latter.68 What did Butler mean by ‘needing solution’? To some extent, of course, he meant merely what every other informed observer also insisted upon. He meant the provision of a better education service: more efficiently organised, more consciously directed to the maximum development of every pupil’s potential, more carefully geared to the requirements of a modern society. To such amorphous ends, he could deliver bromides with the best of them. For instance: We are determined to make England a better place. A start might well be made in education . . . mak[ing] entrances more easy for those who need the chance . . . recruit[ing] a wider range of leaders for the egalitarian England of tomorrow.69

65

66

67 68 69

and admirer in Rex Collings (ed.), Reflections of a Statesman: the Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London, 1991), see pp. 325–8. On which, see Kevin Jeffreys, ‘R. A. Butler, The Board of Education and the 1944 Education Act’, History, 49 (1984), 415–31, a definitive refutation of ‘revisionism’ in this respect. Note too the remarks in Chris Patten, ‘R. A. Butler: What We Missed’, in A Rabanthology, ed. Butler, pp. 93–118, esp. p. 105. On Hadow, see Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind, pp. 224ff; and on contemporary reactions to it, note the remarks of Eustace Percy, Some Memories (London, 1958), pp. 101–2. See the remarks in Murphy, Church, State and Schools, pp. 113–15. Or, for an elegant restatement of the same, see Butler, ‘William Temple and Educational Reform’, p. 163. TCC/BP, G15/4: R. A. Butler, ‘Note’, 8 May 1941. On Butler and the Vice Royalty, see Butler, The Art of the Possible, pp. 111ff. R. A. Butler, A Future to Work For (HMSO, 1942), p. 1.

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But that was not all he meant. For Butler was a subtle politician. Moreover, his political position at that time, both within the government and the Conservative Party, was both curious and precarious. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to observe that, alone among middle-ranking ministers, he had some reason to fear either a Labour or a Conservative victory after the war. ‘Tarred with . . . Chamberlain’s brush’, he was no ally, or even an admirer, of Churchill. Indeed, he had tried harder than most to prevent that ‘great . . . adventurer’s’ accession to the premiership.70 Partly as a result of the events of May 1940, but more as the product of a peculiar mismatch of temperaments, Butler also toiled under the considerable burden of Anthony Eden’s immovable enmity. There is every reason to believe that it was the returning Foreign Secretary, rather than the new Prime Minister, who engineered his removal to the Board of Education. The President’s new deputy, James Chuter Ede, certainly thought so.71 No doubt a certain passivity of character – one which would eventually prove fatal for his higher ambitions – induced Butler to do what he was told on this occasion.72 Yet he knew well enough that unless he could make his mark, and quickly, in the coalition government, he faced the prospect of being marginalised in future Conservative administrations, certainly, in any government led by Anthony Eden.73 Out of the mainstream of the war, but much more importantly out of immediate control of his superiors, Butler figured that he just might be able to make that indelible impression which could render him politically significant for a further generation to come. He figured right. It should go without saying that his motives were far from wholly personal. They were not even entirely selfish. Butler hoped to do something for the good of the coalition government, and by implication, for the Conservative Party. Such ambition may or may not have been quickened by the eerie prescience of his friend, the American Ambassador John G. Winant, a melancholic creature who later took his own life, but not before explaining to me that Churchill would be succeeded by a socialist government when the war was 70 71 72 73

John Colville, The Fringes of Power. Downing Street Diaries, 1939–1955 (London, 1985), p. 122; 10 May 1940; also Butler, ‘William Temple and Educational Reform’, p. 152. Jeffreys (ed.) Labour and the Wartime Coalition, p. 39, 12 January 1942. Eden had been Foreign Secretary from 1935 to 1938. On that ‘passivity of character’ and what it finally wrought, see Howard, RAB, pp. 318–19. Though considerably more senior to Butler at this stage of their respective careers, Eden was only five years older (born 1897). From 1945 onwards, they were in many ways equals and rivals. Their relationship was never easy. See Butler’s characteristically cryptic remarks in The Art of the Possible, pp. 253–4; also the altogether more trenchant account in Cosgrave, R. A. Butler, pp. 11–13.


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over and that I had better use the immediate period to reform the educational system.74

What is unquestionably true is that these sorts of personal and partisan calculations became an increasingly insistent aspect of the official impetus towards change in the wake of the eponymous Beveridge Report, otherwise known as Social Insurance and Allied Services, in 1942. Butler himself submitted a paper to Cabinet in precisely those terms as early as August 1942. In it he argued for ‘educational benefits’ that might be obtained for as little as ‘£100 millions a year’ as ‘an alternative’ to the ‘possibility of Beveridge at a projected £650 millions’.75 He eventually won the support of his senior colleagues because, in the words of Lord President Anderson, they were ‘not yet ready for Beveridge’, fearing not just its cost but a possibly deleterious ‘effect . . . on national character’.76 Conversely, it was precisely in the guise as cynical inoculation against the prospect of wider social change that Butler’s education measure provoked its most far-reaching and determined opposition within the war Cabinet. This did not come from Churchill at all, legend notwithstanding.77 It was the work of Herbert Morrison, who as late as February 1944 argued strenuously that no ‘Education Bill should go forward’, solely because ‘a Tory minister would be in charge of it’.78 Still, personal ambition and party politics accounted for only so much. Butler may have been a conventional Tory turned educational reformer. He was also an unusually thoughtful and committed churchman. He really wanted to do something for the good of the Church, and for English religious life more generally. Even Selbourne, one of his most persistent critics within the government, had no hesitation in identifying him as ‘a very keen Christian as well as a keen educational reformer’, also, pointedly, as one who ‘recognise[d] that no education is worth having unless it is based on religion’.79 In the same way, Leslie Bridgeman considered him openly ‘sympathetic to church people’.80 More to the point, Butler believed that the 1902 Education Act had inflicted ‘infinite damage’ both on the Conservative Party and upon the Church of England. He was 74 75 76 77

78 79 80

Butler, ‘William Temple and Educational Reform’, p. 152. TCC/BP, G15/88: Butler, ‘Political Diary’, 9 September 1943. Jeffreys (ed.), Labour and the Wartime Coalition, p. 92, 7 August 1942. TCC/BP, G13/160: copy of P.M.s. minute, M/895/1, 13 September 1941; but note G13/161: Holmes to Rab, 16 September 1941, ‘I do not think we need be unduly cast down . . . demand [for] a measure of educational reform . . . will be irresistible’. Jeffreys (ed.), Labour and the Wartime Coalition, p. 169: 10 February 1944. LPL/WTP, 19/319: Selborne to Temple, 14 September 1942. Anon., ‘Church Schools: Primate Proposal for State Help; Vote in Assembly on Future Status’, The Times, 20 November 1942.

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determined to rectify its deleterious effects on both.81 His motives in this respect were never merely tactical. He did not take lightly the importance of ‘instilling the citizen of the future with a [proper] code of Christian ethics’. Indeed, he argued that given the recent ‘surge . . . of . . . frankly materialist opinion’ which the war had unleashed, it was now imperative ‘to rally our forces’ so that ‘old faiths’ could again be made ‘vivid to the [next] generation’. Otherwise, he insisted, ‘our civilisation [will] take a turn for the worse’.82 Hence his observation, made in all candour and with complete sincerity, that there was ‘no more important feature of the government’s proposals for educational reconstruction than those which made provision for religious teaching’.83 These may have sounded like traditional Tory views. But they entailed a distinct change in contemporary Conservative stewardship of the social order. Certainly, nothing so defined Butler among Tory politicians of the time as his profound reaction to events of May and June 1940. Butler believed that these had amounted to something very much more than a transfer of power from Mr Chamberlain to Mr Churchill. They pointed to the need for a reformed, anyway a renewed, domestic regime. That sense – of a world changed forever and of the urgency of an intelligent response to this transformation – was picked up very quickly by Butler’s personal private secretary, ‘Chips’ Channon. As early as October 1940 Channon noted in his diary that his boss was a man ‘obsessed by the postwar new order’; moreover, one who thought that ‘our whole system will be drastically modified’ in its wake.84 This sentiment is also powerfully echoed in Butler’s own observation that ‘one of the objectives’ of the ‘religious settlement’ in educational reconstruction had been ‘to relieve English politics of the squire and parson monopoly in rural areas’; not, he hastened to add ‘because I, as a Conservative wish to remove it, but because economic circumstances and the decline in the influence of the Anglican Church has already removed it’.85 What was to be done? Put simply, a new ‘welfare state’ was to be brought to the aid of the traditional institutions of British society.86 How? Through what Butler gnomically called ‘good legislation’. By 81 82 83 84

85 86

TCC/BP, G15/88: Butler, ‘Political Diary’, 9 September 1943. R. A. Butler, Address Delivered on 30 March 1943 to the Third Annual Congress of the Free Church Council (Cambridge, 1943), p. 2. The Times, 31 August 1943. Chips: the Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, ed. Robert Rhodes James (London, 1967), p. 268: 7 October 1940, corroborated by Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London, 1975), p. 172. TCC/BP, G15/88: Butler, ‘Political Diary’, 9 September 1943. Famously, of course, an ‘invention’ of William Temple himself; see William Temple, Christianity and the State (London, 1928), pp. 169–70.


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this he meant ‘the codificat[ion] of existing practice’. He also meant a sufficient degree of formalisation in such practice in order to permit ‘improve[ment] for future use’.87 In the context of educational reconstruction, what he had in mind was the achievement of real progress – a raised school age and free secondary education for all – under the auspices of the existing system of administration; put another way, a shoring up of the dual system by the use of public money. His problem was that, in the summer of 1941, there were absolutely no grounds in public sentiment, whether at the level of perceived interest or of convergent argument, to secure the necessary consensus to proceed on that basis. Butler’s challenge – what became his towering achievement – was to create it, ostensibly by consultation, actually by obfuscation. The result was to be a classic example of the art of the possible, carried out on the grandest possible scale. In that great task, Butler acquired by peculiar good fortune an invaluable ally in Archbishop Temple, from February 1942 onwards.88 His admirable luck in this respect was less a function of Lang’s unexpected retirement – though, that in truth, probably was something of a boon – than Temple’s wholly unanticipated sympathy and guile.89 It is very difficult, in retrospect, to appreciate just how unexpected these benefits were.90 Parliamentary Conservatives were initially appalled by Temple’s appointment to Canterbury, Butler included.91 This was because 87 88 89

90

91

TCC/BP, G15/37: R. A. Butler, ‘Note’, 25 May 1943. On Temple’s appointment, see Iremonger, Temple, pp. 474ff.; on Tory reactions to it, see Angus Calder, The People’s War (London, 1965), pp. 558–9. Butler, ‘William Temple and Educational Reform’, p. 143: ‘Until he gave his help, all denominations were attacking my plan . . . without his assistance, I might not have been successful.’ William Temple (1881–1944); born 15 October 1881, at the Bishop’s Palace, Exeter; younger son of Frederick Temple and his wife, Beatrice Blanche (1845–1915), daughter of William Lascelles, himself son of the second Earl of Harewood; educated at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford; First Class as in Mods and Greats; President of the Union; ordained priest in 1908 by Archbishop of Canterbury, two years after the Bishop of Oxford had declined to do so, on account of Temple’s self-confessed doubts about the virgin birth and physical resurrection of Christ; Headmaster of Repton School, 1910; Rector of St James’s, Piccadilly, 1914; Canon of Westminster, 1919; Bishop of Manchester 1920; Archbishop of York, 1929; Archbishop of Canterbury, 1942; Editor of Challenge, 1915–18; Secretary of National Mission of Repentance and Hope, 1916; Chairman of Interdenominational Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship (COPEC), 1924; Chairman of Commission on Christian Doctrine, 1925; author of Nature, Man and God (1934), Readings of St John’s Gospel (1939 and 1940), Christianity and Social Order (1942); credited with the (nominal) invention of the ‘welfare state’, 1928; subsequently recalled by R. A. B. Butler as ‘a genial and untidy person, all bulge and brain . . . certainly the last intellectual amongst the Anglicans’. See Butler, ‘William Temple and Educational Reform’, p. 143. TCC/BP, G14/23: R. A. Butler, ‘Note’, 21 January 1942.

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everything that made Temple’s succession to Canterbury so agreeable to self-consciously enlightened, Anglican, opinion offended instinctive, Tory, prejudice. The Guardian hailed ‘a great spiritual leader of [supreme] intellectual gifts . . . a critical student of politics . . . particularly appreciative of the . . . deeper social problems of the age’.92 But Chips Channon saw only the worst kind of crypto-socialist, ugly and fat to boot.93 That view may have been petty, but its consequences were far from trivial. So great was the Conservatives’ distaste for this unwarranted change, and so considerable their distrust of Temple’s ability ever to represent faithfully the thinking of the ‘conservative wing of the Church’, that Butler soon found, despite his preference for dealing with one man from each of the relevant religious constituencies, he was compelled to hold simultaneous discussions with the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London, Durham and Chichester, for fear of arousing the ‘indignation of certain Conservative MPs’ that any ‘Temple solution should prevail’.94 Inconvenient as this limitation must first have been, the tactical handicap it entailed ultimately proved a huge strategic advantage for Butler. For while many Conservatives would vouch for nothing from the Church unless it also had the signatures of Garbett and Fisher upon it, Temple’s long history of ecumenical involvement gained him considerable credit among the nonconformists, while his equally colourful background in radical politics assuaged the fears of many on the Labour benches.95 Moreover, as things developed, he proved altogether closer to the President’s ways of thinking in most of the crucial aspects of the negotiations than his sceptical Tory partner had ever envisaged. That flexibility of approach, even delicacy of method, soon won Butler over. His change of attitude – for such it surely was – was embodied in a note he sent to Temple on 5 February 1943, subtly drawing the Archbishop for the very first time into his confidence, as he ostensibly warned him that the draft measure of reform might see the light around Easter of that year: ‘You have taken so wise and courageous a line in educational reform [that] I think you are entitled to know what is in the mind of the government. But I am not informing anyone else’.96 So what was Temple’s line? It was apparently very simple: to preserve the dual system. The Guardian spoke truer than it knew in acclaiming him 92 93 94 95

96

Leader, ‘The Primacy’, The Guardian, no. 5021, 27 February 1942, 69. Chips, ed. Rhodes James, pp. 337, 352, 368, 396, 27 September 1942, 8 March 1943, 22 June 1943, 26 October 1944. TCC/BP, G15/176: R. A. Butler, ‘Diary’, [n.d.] December 1943. On which, see Iremonger, William Temple, esp. chs. 24 and 21. On Labour, see Labour and the Wartime Coalition, Introduction, pp. 1–16; and more generally, R. S. Barker, Education and Politics: a Study of the Labour Party (Oxford, 1970), pp. 75–80. TCC/BP, G15/24, R. A. Butler, ‘Note’, 5 February 1943.


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a man ‘with the interest of the Church at heart’.97 He had certainly not become the Primate of All England in order to preside over the dissolution of its ecclesiastical empire. Speaking to the National Society in June 1942, he stated quite bluntly: ‘[Recent] exigencies [have] impressed upon us more forcibly than ever before that the education must be religious [both] in its basis and texture. The [principal] instrument of religious education [so defined] up to now [has been] Church schools.’ It therefore followed that: ‘All good Churchmen . . . should uphold in any system now administered . . . mainly . . . by the state, those principles . . . which were the chief characteristics of Church schools. [That] could be done only by the dual system and in no other way.’98 Given that Temple had publicly declared, and as recently as April 1942, his belief that ‘the government’ had as its ‘object’ nothing less than ‘the end of the dual system’, all seemed set for conflict rather than progress.99 However, all was not as it seemed. This was because Temple’s capacity for righteous foxiness was at least the equal of Butler’s.100 Temple’s publicly declared commitment to the maintenance of religious education, church schools and the dual system was both real and flexible. It was real in the sense that he actually believed in the virtues of duality for its own sake, as affording ‘a measure of liberty and autonomy’ that recent continental developments proved to be more valuable than ever. To that degree his opposition to any putative ‘national system’ was both sincere and implacable.101 However, it was flexible in that Temple understood the priceless inheritance of independence as much in terms of means as ends. His defence of ‘duality’ did not entail the continued survival of every last church school. This was sensible. The Church’s own researches suggested that the price of maintaining the status quo into the next decade would be prohibitive. In one county alone, boasting 150 church schools, some £220,000 would have to be spent to repair existing plant ‘up to the desired . . . standard’.102 But the Church did not have that kind of money.

97 98 99 100

101 102

Leader, ‘The Primacy’. Anon., ‘Primate on the Dual System’, The Guardian, no. 5036, 12 June 1942, 108. LPL/WTP, 19/15: Temple to Canon Alfred Woodward, 20 April 1942. Happily acknowledged, forty years on, by Butler himself; see his remarks in ‘William Temple and Educational Reform’, p. 158. ‘There [were] considerable misgivings . . . that Temple and I . . . manoeuvred the whole [thing] as a secret plot. Temple besought me not to refer to any help I had given him as he said, “I am regarded already in some quarters as a quisling and any comments by you will only intensify that feeling”.’ Anon., ‘Primate on the Dual System’. Anon., ‘Church Schools: Assembly’s Debates on Policy: Proposed Transfers’, The Times, 2 November 1942.

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It did, however, have considerable powers of bargaining. Paradoxically, the very weakness of its financial position actually enhanced those powers. This was because the Church, united, could prevent reform. It could also, redirected, facilitate major change. Temple’s ambition was to extend the influence of the Church of England over the whole of English society, more generally conceived. He regarded education as a vital instrument with which to do this. Yet he understood well enough that the kind of religious education he believed in – ‘education that is . . . itself religious’ – made sense only if every child received its blessings. Accordingly for him the task ahead lay partially in preventing a ‘wholesale transfer of Church schools to the state’; no less, in extending for the first time and to real effect distinct Christian principles to the organisation and ethos of the state schools. In this effort he understood very well that flexibility about the one might yet ensure real progress for the other.103 There was something else too. Temple appreciated better than most the long-term significance of the decline of the Sunday schools, and no less, the long-term effect of their ever-diminishing role as a source for adult church recruitment.104 This he rightly acknowledged as an irreversible development. But he believed that what could not be held back might yet be assuaged. Thus, if schools – that is, provided or non-provided day schools – could become religious and moral communities in their own right, then they could just possibly act in future as agencies for mature religious commitment too. That was why he so strongly advocated the raising of the school leaving age to sixteen; equally why he commended it as part of a process of ‘strengthening the religious foundation of education in all its stages’.105 This was how his ends and Butler’s aims, though not identical, came to converge by spring 1943. III There were three main components to Butler’s legislative strategy: first, he insisted upon the primacy of the religious question in all substantive deliberations about government education policy; secondly, he argued for the voluntary principle in every significant issue of institutional transfer; finally, he stood for Christian progress at all times – this as part of the price of achieving political balance. The first may seem obvious. It was not so. Religion, as any number of educational psychologists would 103 104 105

Anon., ‘Religion in Education: Dr Temple on the Future of Church Schools’, The Times, 4 June 1942. Ibid. Parliamentary Debates, 5th series, vol. cxxviii, House of Lords, 4th vol. of Session, 1942–3, 4 August 1943, ‘Educational Reconstruction’; Temple, cols 996–1007.


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happily have testified in the summer of 1941, was not the only substantive problem then confronting national educational policy. For many, it was already a relatively minor point, far less important, they believed, than so many secular concerns about the school-leaving age, the payment of fees in state-maintained grammar schools or even the availability of advanced technical instruction.106 Even traditionally minded Conservatives had other matters on their minds. Not the least of these was the future of the public schools, then seemingly endangered by the precipitous decline in enrolments over the previous generation. Indeed, when the question of going to the Board of Education was first raised with Butler, he was specifically implored by his friend, Ambassador Winant, not to resolve the religious question but rather ‘to keep the public schools’, whether by ‘try[ing] . . . to . . . cheapen them [or] pour[ing] more people into them’.107 This was a concern which Butler fully shared. He was, after all, an Old Marlburian. He also held to more than purely religious notions about the advantages of plurality in educational provision.108 Still, he considered that this ‘other’ problem might best be solved by ignoring it; that is, by hiving it off to a separate body, namely the Fleming Committee.109 That judgement was quickly vindicated. The establishment of this body, with seemingly wide-ranging powers of review, enabled Butler effectively to uncouple the problem of the public schools from the question of wartime educational reorganisation. It also permitted him to concentrate administrative attention upon the maintained sector, and therefore, inevitably upon the religious aspects of the ‘dual system’. This cunning manoeuvre was carried out formally at the Lord President’s Committee on 18 December 1942. Only the old-Haileyburian Attlee expressed ‘disappoint[ment]’ that ‘we had left [out] the public schools’. Morrison alone voiced serious ‘doubts’ about ‘educational reform’ as a whole.110 Churchill had, by then, been ‘considerably mollified’ following the apparent ‘approval’ of Butler’s plans by so many ‘High Church Tories’ such as Stuart, Wolmer and the various Cecils.111 More general Conservative 106

107 108

109 110 111

Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind, pp. 224ff.; also Adrian Wooldridge, ‘The English State and Educational Theory’, in The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain, ed. S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 231–57, esp. 238–40. TCC/BP, G13/4: R. A. Butler, ‘Note’, 8 May 1941. The story of how he came to be a Marlburian, and its effect, are amusingly related in Butler, The Art of the Possible, pp. 9–11. Neither his father, nor his sons, attended that school. Butler, The Art of the Possible, pp. 119–230; Howard, RAB, pp. 121–3; and especially the remarks in Addison, The Road to 1945, p. 239. Labour and the Wartime Coalition, pp. 14–15, 18 December 1942. Ibid., p. 103, 4 November 1942.

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opposition had also eased. As a result, the Chief Whip loftily concluded that so tedious and worthy an effort would probably not create serious division against the government in Parliament. It might even give honourable members something blameless to do. Therefore, ‘it was splendid to have it available’.112 This did not mean that education had suddenly become uncontroversial territory; far from it. But such controversy had its uses. For in so directing common concerns towards the particular problem of the dual system, Butler was able to bring out into the open – thereby shrewdly to exploit – an underlying truth that few previously had fully acknowledged. This was that the so-called ‘religious controversy’ in English education was only a part, and by no means necessarily the most important part, of a dispute between the principal Christian denominations within the realm. To almost as great a degree still, it was a symbol of tension between religious denominationalism in general and the relevant, aggressive, secular authorities in particular; more simply, between the Church of England and the LEAs, or at village level, between clergymen and teachers. Only in what became known as the ‘single-school areas’, that is, in rural communities served solely by an Anglican school, was it ever really reducible to a question of an ‘oppressive churchy atmosphere’ and aggrieved nonconformist parents.113 This was partly because the overwhelming majority of non-provided protestant schools in pre-war England were in fact Anglican establishments. By 1938 there were barely more than 300 nonconformist schools left in England and Wales, catering for fewer than 40,000 pupils. For the purposes of public administration, they scarcely existed at all.114 But it was mainly because the essentially theoretical question of the future of the large and rising number of Roman Catholic schools – there were nearly 1,300 of these serving more than 300,000 pupils around the same time – did not for all practical purposes exist either.115 Put another way, the matter was virtually closed. No one perceived this so keenly, nor resented it so greatly, as the ubiquitous Mandler. He complained, as early as 1942, that people keep talking as though the problem of Catholic schools was not there and [that] a settlement of the religious difficulty can be secured which leaves the Roman Catholic schools outside [its] scope.116

Official silence on the Catholic question fuelled Mandler’s suspicion that ‘there is no present intention on the part of the churches to transfer 112 113 114 116

Butler, ‘William Temple and Educational Reform’, p. 161. Cruikshank, Church and State, pp. 139–40. 115 Ibid. Brown, The Church and Education Act, p. 6. Mandler, Religious Instruction Controversy, p. 3.


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their schools to the local authorities’. In this, he was at least partially correct. But the same problem could be interrupted in a slightly different way. During the related delays, Butler had formulated a means by which otherwise defiant Catholic intransigence might actually be brought within the bounds of a plausible, that is, of a plausibly progressive, public policy. Temple noted, somewhat ironically, that ‘our Roman Catholic brethren’ then enjoyed considerable freedom ‘to concentrate all of their energies upon their defence of their schools’. That liberty, together with the fact that these schools tended to be ‘planted in areas where Roman Catholics abound’, and were funded by a peculiarly Catholic ‘form of taxation’, ensured that no wartime British government ever seriously considered any attempt to sequester them.117 Similar expressions of resistance, and also parallel principles of fairness, suggested that protestant schools should be treated in the same way. This is what Butler meant when he declared that: ‘[t]o apply compulsion for the sake of unification of administration would neither be equitable nor in accordance with our national traditions’.118 With that, the voluntary principle was born. It may be stated simply: no non-provided school, having proved that it could attain a certain minimum standard of physical ambience and intellectual attainment, would be compelled to transfer its physical plant and human resources over to local authority control. By the same token, no school would be prevented from doing so. Still, an imperative of consent did not entail a virtue in the status quo. About this, the progressive prejudices of the President were clear. It was essential that education, conceived generally, take ‘first place in any plans for reconstruction that are brought in’. The fundamental basis for ‘educational change’ was ‘administrative reorganisation’.119 So those bodies which could not be compelled to hand over their schools might still be ‘encourage[d]’ to do so.120 What better way to encourage them than to offer a financial inducement to the churches to transfer their schools, voluntarily, to local authority control? Hence the crucial meeting between Butler and Temple on 1 May 1942. There, for the first time, Butler outlined the basis of what would become the final settlement. First, he conceded ‘practically the whole of the Bishops’ “Five Points”’: specifically, the daily act of corporate worship, religious instruction in all schools performed by willing and competent teachers according to an agreed syllabus and subject to national 117 118 120

LPL/WTP, 20/6: Temple to the Reverend H. K. Traviskis, 18 September 1942. 119 LPL/WTP, 19/5/6: Butler to Temple, 1 April 1942. The Times, 16 April 1942. LPL/WTP, 19/7: Board of Education, ‘The Dual System and the Archbishops’ Five Points: Outline of a Scheme’, n.d. unpub. memo., p. 1.

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inspection; finally religious knowledge as an ‘optional subject’ in the course of the teachers’ certificate. Then he outlined the projected terms for what would eventually become a new division among non-provided sectors into ‘category A’, or ‘controlled’ schools, i.e. those eligible for 100 per cent of maintenance costs in return for local authority control of management and appointment of teachers and, crucially, ‘category B’ or ‘aided schools’, that is, those eligible for just 50 per cent of maintenance costs from public funds but able, in return for furnishing the rest of such moneys from private sources, to retain at least some of their traditional denominational purposes, a majority of ‘foundation managers’ on their governing bodies and ecclesiastical control of appointments, both to headships and assistant posts.121 The difficulty for Butler lay in justifying the use of public money in this way, especially as no increase in public control, quid pro quo, was ensured. To be sure, Anglican thinking, as represented by the National Society, insisted that since: Church people have contributed since 1870 to the maintenance of state schools [otherwise] unsatisfactory to them through rates and taxes . . . it was [therefore] not unreasonable to hope that . . . public money [might] now be made available to bring their premises in line with modern standards.122

The problem was that this persuaded no one else. Only a little more convincing was a later memorandum, which suggested that ‘[t]he justification for such a grant lies in the fact that the cost of these [renovatory] services will, under the new order of education, be at least double what it was at the time of the settlement of 1902’.123 At least in public, Temple was willing to sing from the same song sheet.124 Butler preferred not to leave himself so vulnerable. It would be better, he reasoned, to insinuate that what was envisaged was a measure for enhanced public control of educational services. So over the next few months, Butler was happy to let it become known, anyway understood, that the creation of category B, that is, aided school status, had been inspired by the peculiar needs, and particular demands, of the Roman Catholic authorities. He also allowed it to be widely presumed that all, or at least the overwhelming majority, of church schools would in fact opt for controlled status. This assuaged 121 122 123 124

LPL/WTP, 19/18: Temple, ‘Interviews with the President of the Board of Education’, 1 May 1942. LPL/WTP, 19/125: anon., ‘Draft Memorandum of the National Society in Regard to the Dual System’, 1942, p. 1. LPL/WTP, 338: anon., ‘Memorandum of the National Society (Further Revisions)’, 30 September 1942, p. 1. Iremonger, William Temple, pp. 572–3.


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nonconformist opinion on one of its principal sticking points. That was its insistence on the appointment of the headmaster by the local authority, thereby allowing ‘nonconformist children to thrive in a non-churchy atmosphere’.125 Hence the view taken by The Times as early as November 1942 which predicted the relevant figure of ‘seven out of eight’, namely, that seven-eighths of church schools would eventually seek local authority control.126 It was equally the opinion of Chuter Ede who, rather more forcefully, insisted that ‘we must [achieve] the surrender of 8,000 church schools (i.e. eight out of nine) to make the job worthwhile’.127 Perhaps this is why Anthony Howard, in his official Life of Butler, asserted that the ‘eventual total’ of ‘aided schools’ was ‘foreseen neither by Butler nor by Temple’.128 But it surely was; indeed, it was effectively planned by them. How can we be so sure of this? It is quite clear that, whatever he had in mind concerning the special requirements of the Roman Catholic hierarchy – and generally his thoughts in this direction tended towards the unsympathetic – Butler made the offer of ‘voluntary status’ specifically to Temple, and in relation to the Church of England. Secondly, and more strikingly still, it can be established from the contemporary record that both he and Temple harboured from the very beginning a rather different interpretation of the extent to which such a transfer would make it ‘worth his while to proceed with the proposal’. In May 1942, Butler had a figure of no more than ‘something like two-thirds (i.e. around 5,500) of present Non-Provided schools’ in his head.129 By 1944 it had all become for him a matter of ‘achiev[ing] the right balance’. To that end, he was convinced that it was quite ‘wrong . . . to attempt to interpret this balance in terms of numbers or percentages’.130 This was probably just as well, for as early as November 1942, Temple had confidently (but privately) predicted that ‘on the new basis’ the Church ‘ought to keep at least half of our schools’.131 It very nearly did.132 So the Butler–Temple ‘voluntary principle’ became almost as much a means for obscuring wider purposes as of achieving common consent to them. Or rather, it became a means of effecting consensus through 125 126 127 128 130 131 132

TCC/BP, G15/37: Butler, ‘Note’, 25 May 1943. The Times, 29 October 1942; for Temple’s rebuttal, see LPC/WTP, 20/33: Temple to Wilkinson-Browne, 16 November 1942. British Library, Add. MS, 59697, Ede Diaries, p. 14, 15 September 1943. 129 LPL/WTP, 22/53: Temple ‘Interview’, 1 May 1942. Howard, RAB, p. 127. LPL/WTP, 22/53: Butler to Temple, 13 May 1944. LPL/WTP, 20/35: Temple to Eastaugh, 13 November 1942. Compare Howard, RAB, p. 127, which posits a figure of around one-third with J. W. C. Wand, Anglicanism: in History and Today (1961), p. 173, which cites 3,434 ‘aided’ and 4,411 ‘controlled’ schools, as of 1961.

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complexity. Moreover, so pliable an application of principle did not have to be limited to the question of institutional transfer. Quizzed by Temple on the almost equally sensitive issue, about whether so-called ‘unreserved’ teachers might ‘volunteer’ to provide occasional denominational instruction in controlled schools, should they be willing and capable, Butler replied as follows: The Bill will not preclude an unassessed teacher from volunteering to give instruction if she is willing and able . . . If I were to say this explicitly in the Bill I am quite certain that there would be an outcry from the Free Churches and the teachers . . . who would resist it accordingly. So long as the point is implicit and not explicit – as is my intention – I have no doubt that you will find teachers volunteering for the job.133

The point of all this obtuseness was not the pursuit of deviousness for its own sake. Nor did it serve merely as a way of preserving the dual system intact. Instead, it was designed to improve the performance of Christian schools, similarly to improve the performance of Christianity in schools, throughout England and Wales. Of the former, Butler said this: I would not have ventured into the minefield of religious controversy except for the sole reason that non-provided schools need more public money if necessary general educational advance is to be secured. [Accordingly,] changes in the system of their control must be made. [Thus,] what is strictly necessary for this purpose must be done . . . but it would be foolish in the extreme . . . to attempt . . . a reversal of our long-established religious education policy.134

Of the latter, he believed that: now is the [right] time to secure . . . a permanent and acceptable place for the teaching of religion in our primary and secondary schools . . . for out of the crucible of common suffering . . . has come a certain unity [of feeling] which provides [an] opportunity for a statesman in war-time . . . to resolve one of the main problems affecting the spiritual well-being of our children.135

His underlying aim, after all, was Christian progress. Beyond church schools, his preferred mechanism was the agreed syllabus. This was to be the method of instruction both in ‘controlled’ and ‘provided’ schools from 1944 onwards. Its essence was a synthesis of denominationally uncontested, common Christianity that could be taught by competent teachers to children of any religious persuasion, bar Roman Catholics and 133 134 135

LPL/WTP, 20/349: Butler to Temple, 6 May 1943. LPL/WTP, 20/198: Butler to Temple, 2 February 1943. Butler, Address to the Free Church Council, pp. 1–2.


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Jews. Its great merit was that it resisted precisely that reduction of religious knowledge to academic criteria which the teachers had demanded. Mandler had called for a ‘national syllabus’, drawn up by ‘national representatives of the churches, the local authorities and the teachers’, and imparted only by professional teachers unrestricted by religious tests.136 He got joy in neither respect. Agreements stayed local and reserved teachers remained the norm in controlled schools after 1944.137 The Assistant Masters Association advised against any ‘statutory provision’ for a daily act of collective worship as both ‘unnecessary [and] undesirable’. Their pleas were ignored.138 At the same time, Butler refused to countenance any concession to denominational sectarianism in religious instruction, whether as implied either in the Bishop of Oxford’s schemes for pluralistic denominational instruction, or in Bishop Bell’s advocacy of the so-called Scottish system.139 In his own words ‘It is not part of the function of the state to train children in the dogmas of the various religious denominations so as to attach them to the worshipping communities for which the denominations stand.’ Similarly: The Scottish solution . . . tends to so wholesale a dependence of teachers’ appointments and professional advancement on personal religious adherence . . . as would not only be repugnant to the great body of teachers in this country, but would also be unacceptable to most LEAs too.140

IV Butler’s legislative strategy was outstandingly successful. No finer testimony to its success need be sought than the striking similarity between the Act that was passed in May 1944 and the bill that was introduced into Parliament in December 1943; or for that matter, between the bill and the White Paper on ‘educational reconstruction’ first published in July 1943.141 In this respect, the very concentration of educational reform on religious matters proved a bonus because it rendered the ‘controversial parts of the bill’ in a curious sense ‘non-political’, not so much because 136 137 138 139 140 141

Mandler, Religious Instruction Controversy, p. 9. Murphy, Church, State and Schools, ch. 7; Cruikshank, Church and State, ch. 6. Incorporated Association of Assistant Masters in Secondary Schools, Memorandum on The Education Bill (1944), pp. 4–5. On the ‘Scottish system’, see Cruikshank, Church and State, pp. 158ff. LPL/WTP, 20/198: Butler to Temple, 2 February 1943. See the remarks in Cruikshank, Church and State, pp. 161–9, esp. at p. 164; also those in Addison, The Road to 1945, at p. 172.

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they truly lacked a political dimension but rather because, as Butler caustically remarked of his colleagues: ‘whereas . . . it has been very difficult to obtain agreement between the parties on matters which involve property or the pocket . . . on religious questions there is a feeling that it is [all] an out-of-date wrangle’. Naturally, this was not Butler’s own view of the matter. As he observed, in the very next sentence of his notes: ‘this is a further example of how political interest is shifting from the soul of man to his economic position, which all seems very unhealthy’.142 Nor was it the whole story. The voluntary mechanism, allied to agreed principles, was supposed to neutralise serious opposition from the various protestant factions in Parliament. Still, very little was actually left to chance. Nonconformist opposition to the bill, which found voice in the eloquence of Sir Geoffrey Shakespeare, was preempted by a Methodist Statement on the Education Bill, first ‘regretting’ its various defects, but eventually commending its ‘excellent qualities to the nation’.143 In the same way, Tory Anglican misgivings were soothed through the continually primed interventions of Henry Brooke.144 The one famous reversal, over Mrs Thelma Cazelet Keir and the salary scales of female teachers, was the product more of a rare lapse of front-bench foresight than an early example of back-bench feminism.145 Yet precisely because the strategy was so successful, it is easy to lose sight of the real goal to which so much effort was directed. Howard, in his official Life, characterises the 1944 Act as an ‘essentially Erastian’ measure.146 This is an almost exact inversion of the truth. In its gross misconception of official priorities, it also feeds the subsequent misjudgement of those otherwise shrewder analysts of the Act who have criticised its bias towards traditional curricula and privileged diversity. That is why it is important to insist upon the essentially religious inspiration of Butler’s various purposes, similarly, on the ecclesiastical ends of his most crafty manoeuvres. Modern, utilitarian ends in education were 142 143 144

145

146

TCC/BP, G15/84, Butler: ‘Political Diary’, 9 September 1943. Leslie Church, Edwin Finch and A. W. Harrison, Methodist Statement on the Education Bill, 27 January 1944 (1944), p. 1. LPL/WTP, 21/223: A. R. Woodard to Temple, 9 December 1943; also LPL/WTP, 21/225: Willink to Temple, 10 December 1943; this correspondence reveals the clear plan to use Brook in precisely this fashion, and Butler’s prior approval of it. Recounted in Thelma Cazelet Keir, From the Wings (London, 1967), pp. 143–5; ignored in Butler’s Memoirs, but related by Howard, in RAB, at p. 136. Its contemporary significance may be judged from the fact that it was the only aspect of the education measure to be noted in Alexander Cadogan’s diary; see David Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 1938–1945 (London, 1971), p. 615. Howard, RAB, p. 135.


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a long way removed from the preoccupations of one who stressed that the ‘forces of materialism . . . can be kept in their proper place . . . if we make a decided advance on [the educational] front’.147 Similarly, later consideration about distributive justice in education made little sense to a man who insisted that ‘my contacts in all the major cities of England show me’ that it was ‘precisely’ such a ‘traditional, diverse and Christian’ educational system ‘that the British public want if only it [can be] dressed up in the [garb] of non-privilege and social equality’.148 The late Maurice Cowling was on much firmer ground when he called Butler’s Act ‘a moment . . . of Anglican resistance’.149 It was certainly an instance of attempted religious renewal. What its eponymous author was trying to do in 1944 was to draw church and state together in pursuit of Christian education for all. In this analysis, 1870 and 1902 had pulled them apart, disastrously and needlessly. Disastrously because they had left church schools to fend for themselves in an increasingly hostile environment, burdening them with ever more intolerable costs; needlessly, because they had cast provided schools in the caricature of a creeping secularism when in fact, as many churchmen privately admitted, perfectly decent Christian instruction could be, and often was, imparted within them.150 The Butler Act was an attempt to ‘codify’ best existing practice by bridging the formal gap that previous legislation had gratuitously forged. In that way, it was hoped to secure the provision of a traditional, Christian education through the novel instruments of a secular welfare state. Butler’s method was ingenious. Instead of abolishing the ‘dual system’, which would have needlessly inflamed clerical opinion just as pointlessly as it pandered to teachers’ prejudices, or of formalising doctrinal division along the Scottish lines, which would have had precisely the opposite effect, his measure pursued reform not so much in preservation as through complication. Some contemporaries saw the point. Bishop Bell, during the course of a somewhat mischievous analysis of the White Paper, argued that its principal achievement would be to transform the ‘Dual System . . . into a Triple System’.151 This was to pay Butler a real, if backhanded, compliment. For in the President’s mind, so too 147 148 149 150 151

LPL/WTP, 19/27: Butler to Temple, 8 May 1942. TCC/BP, G14/107: Butler to Lieutenant-Colonel J. M. Alport, 2 May 1945. Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, vol. III: Accommodations (Cambridge, 2001), p. 691. LPL/WTP, 19/138: Tatlow to Temple, 24 June 1942. LPL/WTP, 21/80: George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, ‘The Dual System: White Paper Plan’, unpub. memo, [n.d.] September 1943.

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increasingly in Temple’s judgement, complication was the key to assimilation. As Temple put it, ‘state subsidy’, tempered by increased public control and bracketed with sound Christian teaching in all schools, might not only ‘save [the Church] a very good deal [of money] but at the same time [would] get it into the position of a cooperative colleague with the government and the LEAs and so immensely extend our influence’.152 However, Cowling also refers to 1944 as a ‘last attempt’ by Britain’s ‘Christian state’ to legislate for a ‘Christian people’.153 This is no less pertinent an observation. For if it is now customary to deride the secular purposes of the Act, it is well nigh axiomatic to presume the failure of its religious aspirations. Butler himself had come to this view by the time of the publication of his autobiography in 1972.154 But, as ever with that ‘old-oriental’, timing constituted a crucial part of this later judgement.155 Such pessimism was entirely absent – indeed, was explicitly contradicted – in the very positive remarks which characterised his foreword to the then standard account of the 1944 Act, published by Marjorie Cruikshank, in 1964.156 With good reason: pleasant surprise at the outcome of Butler’s efforts was not an uncommon view among interested churchmen, as late as the early 1960s. It certainly informed Bishop Wand’s positive analysis of what he deemed the ‘generous aid [then] offered by the state to the church’, outlined in his influential study of Anglicanism published in 1961.157 Still, many of the hopes invested in the 1944 Act were doomed from the outset, not least Temple’s vision of a Christian community sustained by state schools.158 Equally, some of the fears highlighted by critics of the legislation contained more of the truth than mere goodwill conceded at the time. The Bishop of Oxford was not just being hysterical when he decried a White Paper that could be ‘read from end to end’ without ever encountering the words ‘Christianity, Christian, even Christ’.159 More subtly, the Reverend A. H. Rees demonstrated real prescience in predicting the emergence of agreed syllabuses that would teach ‘some 152 153 155 156 157 158

159

LPL/WTP, 19/366: Temple to Glenday, 13 October 1942. 154 Cowling, Accommodations, p. 691. Butler, The Art of the Possible, p. 124. Chips, ed. Rhodes James, p. 178: 23 November 1938. R. A. Butler, Foreword, to Cruikshank, Church and State, p. vii. Wand, Anglicanism, pp. 172–3. For an early, and damning, verdict see B. Seebohm Rowntree and R. G. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: a Social Study (London, 1951), pp. 288, 318, 331, 358–9; for a more sober-minded assessment, see Institute of Christian Education, Religious Education in Schools: the Report of an Inquiry Made by the Research Committee of the Institute of Christian Education into the Working of the 1944 Education Art (London, 1954), chs. 2, 3, 6 and 8. Anon., ‘The White Paper: a Church Education League Meeting’, The Guardian, 26 November 1943.


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kind of national Christianity . . . more concerned with being national than being Christian’.160 No less revealing was the extraordinary expectation invested in the idea of teaching itself at this time by many, otherwise quite sensible, authorities. In celebrating the introduction of obligatory ‘religious instruction in accordance with an agreed syllabus . . . in all-controlled schools’, the normally sober-minded Guardian portentously concluded that ‘in the nature of the syllabus . . . so much of the future of English Christianity will hinge’.161 Butler was too sensible to make any such claims for his handiwork. He understood, in 1944 anyway, that much more depended on the continuing efforts of parents, voluntary organisations and the churches themselves to instil such ideals into their younger charges.162 Formal instruction could only ever do so much. So the legacy of his Education Act came to be intimately bound up with the religious history of England during the 1950s and after. 160 161 162

Anon., ‘Religion in the Schools: Church and Agreed Syllabus; Assembly Debate’, The Times, 17 February 1944. Leading article, ‘The Schools’, The Guardian, 28 January 1944, 333. Anon., ‘The Education Bill in the Commons: Mr Butler on His Reform Proposals’, The Times, 20 January 1944, p. 2. For its author’s verdict twenty years on, see Butler, ‘The Education Act and After’, esp. pp. 15–22.

7

Was there an English religious revival in the 1950s?

Take them at their own estimate, and the confounded general reader must wearily conclude that most of the important truths about our supposedly common past have been revealed to ‘revisionist’ historians alone.1 Ancient wisdom once acknowledged how the ‘Fall of Rome’ plunged Western civilisation into centuries of darkness.2 Contemporary academic judgement prefers to describe a ‘world of late antiquity’. This, it is argued, emerged well before the eclipse of the western empire and survived long into the reign of Charlemagne. It can be understood without ‘involving an intervening catastrophe [or] pausing [even] to pay lip service to the . . . notion of decay’.3 Modern theorists once insisted upon the world-historical importance of the French Revolution, interpreted alternatively as the ‘End of History’ or the birth of freedom.4 More knowing 1

2

3

4

Identifiable less as a modern school (who would admit to being pre-revisionist?), and scarcely more in terms of a coherent doctrine, than by that self-conscious disposition against teleology, grand theory and indeed all non-contingent explanation that has marked most professional historians since Butterfield. See H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), esp. chs. 2 and 3; and, for a later generation, J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (London, 1960), pp. xx and 185–214. Perhaps the most memorable statement of the whole approach remains that of Conrad Russell, ‘Parliamentary History in Perspective 1604–1629’, History, 61 (1976), 1–28, at p. 1, para. 1. Taught, above all, by Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1994), vol. I, p. 31; vol. II, pp. 404–9; vol. III, pp. 1062–84; with results chronicled in J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West, 400–1000 (London, 1952), preface and chs. 1 and 2. Most notably that of Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: from Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London, 1971), passim; and, in particular, Peter Brown, ‘The World of Late Antiquity Revisited’, Symbolæ Osloenses, 72 (1997), 5–30, at 14–15; also G. W. Bowersock, P. Brown and O. Graber (eds.), Late Antiquity: a Guide to the Post-Classical World (Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. ixff. A very recent restatement of the same general thesis can be found in Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: a History of Europe from 400–1000 AD (London, 2009), pt 1. For a modern, critical discussion, and a notable attempt to restore the ‘ancient wisdom’, see Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation (Oxford, 2005), ch. 1. From Hegel to Hobsbawm; cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London, 1900), section IV, ch. 3, esp. pp. 461–77 and E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848 (London, 1962), ch. 3.

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An English religious revival?

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scholars currently acknowledge little more than an aberrant interruption in the development of Europe’s predominant pre-Victorian power.5 What such relentless learned correction – J. H. Hexter once identified it as the revisionist genre of ‘splitting’, by contrast with pre-revisionist ‘lumping’ – has made common in self-conscious professional predisposition towards so much of the distant past has now begun to strike a chord in fashionable accounts of more recent experience.6 Concerning no historical development is this divergence between self-conscious expert, pitted against increasingly bemused layman, more marked than about the fate of religion in the advanced societies. There is surely no conventional wisdom more commonplace than the observation that we are now altogether a less faithful people than we once were. Further, that the loss of this vital quality, together with the passing of so many associated relationships, has been a long-standing process, itself the complex product of broader social change across the whole of the twentieth century, and perhaps much of the nineteenth century too. Finally, that these changes together constitute nothing less than a general ‘secularisation of society’, namely, the multi-faceted decline in the social significance of religion that will eventually bring about the demise of religion, both in England and elsewhere.7 Not so, say the revisionists. Some of their number – perhaps more among the sociologically than the historically inclined – even argue against the idea of decline, tout court. They insist that religion has simply changed during our lifetimes: by definition, in characteristic focus, even according to common behaviour in what has become a post-modern, post-industrial, society. This approach is best exemplified by Professor Davie and her followers. Let us call it the ‘believing without belonging’ school.8

5

6

7 8

Charted through Stephen Laurence Kaplan, Farewell to Revolution: the Historian’s Feud: France 1789–1989 (Ithaca, NY, 1995), esp. chs. 5 and 6; analysed by T. C. W. Blanning, in Stephen Laurence Kaplan (ed.), The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution (Chicago, 1996), ch. 1; and acted upon – anyway, written about – in Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (Harmondsworth, 2003), chs. 8–11. J. H. Hexter, On Historians (London, 1979), pp. 241–3 (where the idea is attributed to Professor Donald Kagan). For an extended, and cogent, defence of the whole attitude, conceived from the characteristic viewpoint of the professional historian, per se, see the argument in Richard Pares, ‘The Historian’s Business’, in Richard Pares, The Historian’s Business and Other Essays (Oxford, 1958), ch. 1, esp. at pp. 3–4. Alan D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914 (London, 1976), ch. 2. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford, 1994), ch. 6 and pp. 191–2; for a slightly different argument, but pursued to a similar conclusion, see Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkeley, 1985), esp. chs. 1–2 and 19.

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Others, generally more cautious scholars, unwilling to attribute no significance to the evidence of diminished affiliation, attendance and the like among traditional religious organisations, still contend that the reality of what we see before us is something other than it seems. This, they insist, is because the history of Christian experience is better understood in terms of ebb and flow rather than decline and fall. To capture that difference, they propose a ‘non-linear model’ of change, which better describes that history not merely across the centuries but for this century too. Even for Britain: for just as there has been religious decline, so there were also religious revivals in twentieth-century Britain. In fact, there was a religious revival in Britain as recently as the 1950s. True, everyone but the revisionist historians themselves seem since to have forgotten all about it. But then again, everyone except the revisionist historians is invariably mistaken in such matters anyway.9 Whether that process of ebb and flow has now come to an end, they are less certain. That it actually continued right up into the years of living memory, they are quite clear. This fact alone, they conclude, renders virtually all orthodox modern ecclesiastical historiography effectively redundant.10 Consider only the most striking example of this historical revisionism. In The Death of Christian Britain, Professor Callum Brown (politely) condemned an entire generation of conventional ‘[h]istorians and sociologists’ (laymen, seemingly, forgiven for their ignorance) who, in his words, ‘have never come to terms with the growth of institutional religion in Britain between 1945 and 1958’. Their collective failure, he avowed, was constituted from both grave conceptual and empirical error. For it entailed nothing less than an inability even so much as to notice, far less to explain, how it was ‘that the late 1940s and 1950s witnessed the greatest church growth that Britain had experienced since the midnineteenth century’. The sheer extent of these empirical errors was, he believed, traceable in part to their reluctance to analyse the ‘relevant dates sufficiently carefully’.11 (If so, seldom can chronological inexactitude have wrought such calamitous consequences for broader understanding.) But the broader inadequacies underlying their interpretation 9

10

11

Callum Brown, ‘A Revisionist Approach to Religious Change’, in Steve Bruce (ed.), Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford, 1992), ch. 3. Note the title. Ibid., see esp. pp. 40–9. For a bit of salutary post-revisionism, see Richard Sykes, ‘Popular Religion in Decline: a Study of the Black Country’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 56, no. 2 (April 2005), pp. 297–307, esp. pp. 301ff. Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London, 2001), p. 170. For two, contemporary views – similarly benighted – see the Rt Rev. A. T. P. Williams, ‘Religion’, in Ernest Baker (ed.), The Character of England (Oxford, 1947), ch. 3; and J. D. Scott, Life in Britain (London, 1956), ch. 3.


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were, he insisted, to a still greater degree forged by that intellectual blindness that often afflicts narrow-minded scholars confronted by facts that contradict long-held presuppositions. He identified two such prejudices. The first was a general presumption that the process of secularisation was under way ‘long before 1945’. (Think of those seemingly definitive tables set out in Currie, Gilbert and Horsley; then recall Chadwick’s once compelling narrative, quite independently conceived.)12 The second was the widespread view that Britain was by then, that is, by 1960 at the very latest, ‘already a secular society’ (the informing assumption of Bryan Wilson’s Religion in Secular Society, and many subsequent works).13 Brown claimed to have refuted both of these presuppositions and replaced each with something closer to true knowledge. To do so, he insisted upon proper recognition of the great (British) religious revival of the 1950s. Revisionism with such a vengeance characteristically claims considerable authorial originality, whether of conception or in discovery. Yet it no less often simultaneously qualifies the claim, if for no other reason than to render its otherwise novel conclusions that much more argumentatively palatable. Professor Brown was no exception in either respect. His otherwise trenchant account of the ‘Return to Piety’ acknowledged a forerunner in Gerald Parsons’s re-evaluation of the fortunes of traditional Christian churches in Britain during the years immediately after 1945.14 Both he and Parsons, whether by explicit citation or through implicit borrowing, also drew substantial succour from Adrian Hastings’s landmark History of English Christianity, 1920–1985, first published in 1986.15 A truly pioneering work, Hastings’s comprehensive narrative had quite independently identified some of the seemingly positive features of those allegedly crucial years. It pointed to the same evidence of religious growth that Brown later emphasised. It also explicitly denied the secular teleology that his still sterner successor excoriated in other chroniclers. This enabled Hastings to conclude his 12

13

14

15

Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Ian Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 128ff.; Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, vol. II (London, 1970), ch. 8. Bryan R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society: a Sociological Comment (London, 1966), pt I, passim; also Bryan R. Wilson, Contemporary Transformations of Religion (Oxford, 1976), ch. 1, and his Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford, 1982), chs. 2 and 6. Gerald Parsons, ‘Contrasts and Continuities: the Traditional Christian Churches in Britain since 1945’, in Gerald Parsons (ed.), The Growth of Religious Diversity: Britain from 1945, vol. I (London, 1993), pp. 46–55; Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, pp. 170ff. Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–1985 (London, 1986), esp. pt V, pp. 403–504.

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pre-1960s’ account by noting an ‘undoubted revival in church life’, indeed ‘a modest religious revival, common to the whole nation . . . during the 1950s’.16 Far from constituting an isolated howl against the prevailing wind, Brown’s more recent surveys have quickly come to represent something closer to an emerging academic consensus in the matter.17 So let it be said that these later arguments do not lack all contemporary resonance. In 1945 the Bishop of Rochester chaired a Commission charged with a major evangelistic and advertising campaign intended to forge the ‘Conversion of England’.18 Twenty years later, Roger Lloyd was content to dismiss the results of these efforts as ‘a very damp squib’.19 Yet less than a decade after Christopher Chavasse, Bishop of Rochester, began that hapless quest, his normally sober-minded superior, Archbishop Fisher, felt moved to celebrate the unmistakable fact of a ‘massive . . . spiritual revival’ then at large throughout the land. Daring historical revisionism now increasingly takes that rather traditional headmaster at his word.20 If so, who was (and is) right? The answer to that deceptively simple question must be sought not merely in the surviving evidence from that era but through an explanation that renders those remains intelligible. This is no straightforward exercise. The record is ambiguous, and our grasp of its implications far from complete. But a start has to be made somewhere. Much is at stake in the outcome of this argument. I To insist that the critical contours of English religious history in the 1950s, rightly read, point to a profound reversal of immediately previous downward trends is to suggest that the traditional theory of secularisation is wrong. It is wrong because if that is true, then those slow, inexorable, processes of industrialisation and urbanisation, similarly of the division of labour and the diminution of the public sphere, summed up in Wilson’s notion of societalisation, cannot account for the non-linear course of religious change in twentieth-century Britain. It is also, either 16 17 18 19 20

Ibid., pp. 443 and 464–5. See ch. 2 above, esp. pp. 31–2. What follows is an extended argument in criticism of that view. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 431. Roger Lloyd, The Church of England, 1900–1965 (London, 1966), p. 474. Anon., ‘Start of a Spiritual Revival’, The Times, 16 June 1954, 4. Interestingly, this episode is entirely passed over in the official Life, which concentrated on the Prelate’s visit to Canada that year. See Edward Carpenter, Archbishop Fisher: his Life and Times (Norwich, 1991), ch. 36.


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explicitly or implicitly, to posit an alternative model for the dynamics of contemporary social change in Britain.21 Brown did both in his pioneering writings on this question.22 Such theoretical boldness also entails a broader duty to identify different causes, similarly to describe a novel context, for the dynamics of religious development in Britain during the 1950s. This obligation was only hazily fulfilled by Hastings. He was generally content to assume the self-evident significance of what he called ‘a very Anglican decade’, that is, one characterised by a pervasive ‘ecclesiastical social conservatism’, as a reaction to the ‘radicalism of Temple’, each as precursors to the catastrophe of the 1960s. So too Parsons; he relied mainly on the force of what he took to be simple, demonstrable fact.23 By contrast, Brown assumed these intellectual responsibilities with no less evident relish. His thesis also had the benefit of absolute clarity. It ran as follows. The period between the end of the Second World War and the late 1950s was ‘an age of austerity’. Specifically, it was an era of ‘economic retrenchment’, characterised by ‘rationing on foodstuffs, furniture and most commodities’. Partly as a result, it was also informed by an ‘intensely conservative’ national ‘mood’, once more resonant ‘with Victorian philanthropy in its task of educating working-class girls and preventing juvenile delinquency’.24 Nowhere were the effects of such general feeling more marked at that time than in what he calls ‘the discursive construction of femininity’. This was defined, above all, by the state’s postwar promotion of ‘pro-natalism’, that is, of a woman’s place being in the homes of a nation in need of an invigorated birth-rate to overcome its chronic contemporary labour shortage.25 In short, the ‘traditional values of family, home and piety were suddenly back on the agenda between the end of the war and 1960’. From that ‘social reaction’, the ‘[c]hurches benefited immediately’. Thus: During the late 1940s and first half of the 1950s, organised Christianity experienced the greatest per annum growth in church membership, Sunday School enrolment, Anglican confirmation and Presbyterian recruitment of its baptised constituency since the eighteenth century . . . leading to peaks in membership in the 1955–9 period for virtually all British protestant churches.26

21 22 23 24 25

Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective, pp. 45ff. See esp. Brown, ‘A Revisionist Approach to Religious Change’, passim. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 425; Parsons, ‘Contrasts and Continuities’, pp. 46–55. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, pp. 171–3. 26 Ibid., p. 173. Ibid., p. 172.

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In parallel: religious revivals spread across Britain . . . The Billy Graham Crusades of 1954–6 were especially noteworthy, producing mass audiences in football stadia . . . with remoter congregations participating in cinemas and churches by the development of closed circuit radio and television. Radio evangelism was also permitted in the early and mid-1950s on BBC radio.

Finally, ‘accompanying all of this was a revival of tract distribution and district visiting on a scale not witnessed since the late Victorian and Edwardian periods’.27 This is genuinely bold social analysis. It is also wholly inadequate social history. Perhaps only a child of the 1960s could refer to the previous decade as an ‘age of austerity’.28 It was, in fact, a period of continuous economic growth, cumulatively characterised not only by the progressive elimination of rationing but by the gradual (and often not so gradual) increase of consumer durables distributed throughout the population. In 1951 there were barely more than 750,000 combined television and radio licences in Britain. By 1960, the Post Office was issuing ten million television licences alone. As late as 1955 fewer than one-fifth of households boasted a washing machine. By 1958 that figure was closer to one-third; in 1966 it was more like two-thirds. Over the same period, car ownership tripled, transforming car owners from a privileged tenth to a more common third of the population.29 Whether all or any of this constituted a more general domestic economic ‘success’ or ‘failure’ is not our concern. That these years might still be condemned as a period of complacent social management, in which Britain did less well than it should have done – less well, anyway, than almost the whole of western Europe – need not be denied.30 We might only note how so many now remember those famous words that Macmillan never said – ‘You’ve never had it so good’ – conveniently forgetting what he actually did say – ‘Is it too good to last?’ – immediately afterwards.31 What matters is that the social history of this era is simply rendered incomprehensible if those 27 29 30

31

28 Ibid. Ibid., p. 171. Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: 1956–1963; A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London, 2005), pp. 105, 113–14, 360–1. For an influential indictment, see Sidney Pollard, The Wasting of the British Economy: British Economic Policy (London, 1982), esp. chs. 2 and 3; more generally, Roger Middleton, Government versus the Markets: the Growth of the Public Sector, Economic Management and British Economic Performance, 1890–1979 (Cheltenham, 1996), ch. 12; and, more specifically, Astrid Ringe, Nevil Rollings and Roger Middleton, Economic Policy Under the Conservatives, 1951–1964 (London, 2004), ch. 1. Implicitly corroborated in the official life; see Alistair Horne, Macmillan, 1957–1986, vol. II of the official biography (London, 1989), p. 149. Properly construed in John Turner’s subtler study, Macmillan: Profile in Power (London, 1994), ch. 6, at p. 228.


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real, that is the material, gains of the age are not even properly acknowledged. This is true if for no other reason than to enable us to appreciate just how these mundane advances were contrasted at the time with what so many contemporaries took to be their accompanying spiritual losses. It was, after all, that explicit difference between the (novel) materialism and selfishness of 1950s’ Britain and the declining values of established religion, traditional morality and social duty that John and Roy Boulting made most of in landmark social satires, from Pilgrim’s Progress to I’m Alright Jack.32 Part of the historical problem consists in associating so many years of unbroken Tory government (1951 to 1964) with the absence of economic and social change. This is a mistake easily made. Britain enjoyed or endured continuous Conservative administration throughout the 1950s.33 By the late Macmillan years, that had also come to seem like ‘stuffed-shirt’ government too, even by contrast with the – otherwise far from trendy – Labour opposition.34 Perhaps it is no coincidence that the secular use of the word ‘establishment’ dates from that time.35 But such appearances more frequently deceive than enlighten. Those ‘grey men’ of subsequent memory included R. A. Butler, author of the Education 32

33

34

35

Julian Pettey, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress: the Politics of the Boultings’ Films’, in Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan and Paul Wills (eds.), The Family Way: the Boulting Brothers and Post-War British Film Culture (Tonbridge, 2000), pp. 15–34. For the most sympathetic account in the scholarly literature, see John Ramsden, An Appetite for Power: a History of the Conservative Party since 1830 (London, 1998), chs. 13 and 14; an altogether cooler view, particularly of the ‘end-game’, can be found in Richard Lamb, The Macmillan Years, 1957–1963: the Emerging Truth (London, 1995), passim. On these ‘stuffed shirts’, see the various sensibilities described in situ, in Simon Ball, The Guardsman: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World They Made (London, 2004), chs. 9–11. On early 1960s’ Labour, the best source is now Lewis Baston, ‘The Age of Wilson, 1955–1979’, in Brian Brivati and Richard Hefferman (eds.), The Labour Party: a Centenary History (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 87–111. Though precisely when remains a matter for heated dispute. From some of the essays collected together by Hugh Thomas (ed.), The Establishment: a Symposium (London, 1959), it might be thought that Henry Fairlie first coined it, in 1955, but the editor (Thomas) insisted that he himself first spoke it, in 1954; see Thomas, Preface, p. 20. Other claims were made at the time for A. J. P. Taylor in 1953, and Asa Briggs earlier that year. The debate cannot be resolved here. It can be pursued through Henry Fairlie, ‘Political Commentary’. The Spectator, no. 6639, 23 September 1955, 379–81; and Bryan Magee, ‘The Establishment’, The Spectator, no. 6849, 2 October 1959, 446. Fairlie, himself, summarised it all in his ‘The Evolution of a Term: the Establishment’; first published in the New Yorker, 19 October 1968, now best consulted in Henry Fairlie, Bite the Hand that Feeds You: Essays and Provocations (New Haven, CT, 2009), pp. 68–91. There was a devastating critique by Alasdair Macintyre, ‘The Straw Man of the Age’, The New Statesman, 58, no. 1490, 3 October 1959, 433–4. Its provenance surely lends his argument greater credence still. If not, try Bernard Williams, ‘Fairlie, the Establishment and the BBC’, Encounter, 13, November 1959, 63–5, scarcely less damning.

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Act from which so much of Britain’s postwar sponsored social mobility flowed.36 Their number also included Quintin Hogg, who was the first Science Minister.37 Governments in which they and also Enoch Powell, Iain Macleod and Reginald Maudling played leading parts, presided over the development of new towns and the transformation of the suburbs, coincidentally too, over the management of an entire generation of New Commonwealth immigration and the birth of our present, multi-faith religious society. Albeit by ways which these various authors probably never intended, they even furthered the progressive liberalisation of the drink and the gaming laws, the development of commercial television and the commissioning of the Wolfenden Report.38 Scarcely less of an error is to confound the whole of British cultural history in this period with the daily offerings of the BBC. The age of The Brains Trust and What’s My Line? was no less the era of Lucky Jim and Look Back in Anger; also of Teddy Boys and rock-and-roll. Nor should it be assumed that Christian life during the 1950s was wholly immune to such ‘progressive’ tendencies. With pop music came Christian skiffle. Remember Canon E. C. Blake and the Twentieth-Century Light Music Group. In the same way, supposedly vile and amoral boys’ comics (usually American in origin) were contemporaneously challenged by ‘Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future’, hero of Eagle magazine. First launched on 14 April 1950, his express purpose was to inspire adventurous youth towards patriotic duty and Christian service. His creator and moving spirit was the Reverend Marcus Morris.39

36

37 38

39

On the ‘Ungrey Rab’, see Chris Patten, ‘R. A. Butler: What We Missed’, in Mollie Butler (ed.), A Rabanthology (York, 1995), pp. 97–118. On the genesis of the 1944 Act, see – alternatively – Lord Butler, The Art of the Possible (London, 1971), ch. 6 and S. J. D. Green, ‘The 1944 Education Act: a Church State Perspective’ in J. P. Parry and Stephen Taylor (eds.), Parliament and the Church, 1829–1960 (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 148–64. As described, elucidated and justified in Viscount Hailsham, Science and Politics (London, 1963); see esp. pp. 9–10. Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History, 1945–1989 (Oxford, 1990), chs. 4 and 5; Anthony Seldon, Churchill’s Indian Summer: the Conservative Government, 1951–5 (London, 1981), chs. 7 and 9; John Ramsden, An Appetite For Power: a History of the Conservative Party Since 1830 (London, 1998), chs. 13 and 14. On the context of Wolfenden, no less on the myth of sexual repression in the 1950s, see the fascinating discussion in Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis (Chicago, 2005), pp. 254–63. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, pp. 384–5 and 443. For a truly evocative memoir, see Katharine Whitehorn, ‘It Didn’t All Start in the Sixties’, in Wm Roger Louis (ed.), Yet More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (London, 2005), pp. 211–18. On the spectre of American horror comics, see the leader ‘Hopeful Vigil’, Methodist Recorder, 30 December 1954, 6.


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The point of such scattered observations is not to replace one caricature of a long-gone decade by another. Rather, it is to emphasise that in simply assuming a causal connection between what is actually a rather old-fashioned view of the 1950s and the revival of what he calls ‘evangelical discursive . . . Christianity’, Brown weakens the context of his argument. He also neglects much of the substantive content of organised Christian life in Britain during these years. To take just a single instance, one very important aspect of religious activity all but neglected in his account is that of church-building. Yet the 1950s have some claim to be considered as the last great era of church-building in this country.40 It is easy to assume that this was all by way of restorative effort. Much of it was. Some of that remains symbolically significant still – think of Coventry Cathedral. There were other examples too. The most obvious concentration was in the capital. When the Bishop of Stepney spoke to the London Church Congress of May 1954, he lamented the loss of some 90 per cent of diocesan buildings damaged by enemy bombing during the war. But he also rejoiced in the fact that most, if not all, were now in the process of being rebuilt.41 Yet his reaction hid more than it revealed. As a matter of fact, no major religious denomination ended the 1950s with more churches standing than when Britain entered the Second World War. Even as it rebuilt, the Methodist Church (for instance) went to considerable lengths to avoid the mere restoration of damaged pre-war plant. Instead, it self-consciously pursued a policy of closing down so-called ‘redundant’ churches throughout the country, often contrary to the express wishes of surviving congregations.42 According to the prevailing view, the key to contemporary church growth lay more in accommodating people in ‘the new centres of population’. This meant new towns, overspill suburbs and the great extra-urban sprawl more generally. It was certainly the principal intellectual basis for most of the 1950s’ church-building effort. That was famously proclaimed so in Birmingham’s so-called ‘ten-year programme’, inaugurated by Bishop Watson in 1956. This provided for fourteen parishes in the new estates of an everexpanding city. Similar schemes were also sponsored in Rochester, St Albans and Chelmsford. Even the ever frugal Methodist General Chapel 40 41 42

Lovingly described in Edward D. Mills, The Modern Church (London, 1956), ch. 2 and passim. In fairness, the subject is wholly ignored in Hastings and Parsons too. Anon., ‘Church on the Offensive: Message of the London Conference’, The Times, 20 May 1954, 8. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 465. Anon., ‘Redundant Methodist Churches: Wastage of Man-Power’, The Times, 17 July 1953, 2. President of Conference, Donald Soper, warned delegates that it might be necessary ‘to take such a coercive action as [is] legally possible’.

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Committee was content to authorise no fewer than 400 separate applications for new building schemes on these lines between 1946 and 1951.43 Such prodigious, suburban effort has come to seem misdirected in hindsight. It is widely condemned as a na¨ıvely optimistic commitment to a kind of bricks and mortar determinism – build fine churches and the people will come – comparable to that which informed the (largely urban) gothic revival of the previous century.44 Contemporaries looked at the matter quite differently. They saw new suburbs sprouting up all over the country. These were initially served only by what they understood as ‘secular bodies’. Consequently, they feared the gradual emergence of an entire generation furnished only by ‘a pagan start in life’. They acted accordingly.45 This was far from a self-evidently unintelligent response. It was by no means obviously absurd to envisage ‘fruitful fields for evangelisation . . . in the new towns’. In such places especially, as a contemporary Times leader put it, ‘[the] church was . . . one of the few places that [sustained] any . . . sense of community’ among numerous and otherwise displaced ‘aggregations of people’.46 Moreover, this later ecclesiological commitment was seldom pursued anything like so ingenuously as in the past. Indeed, its specific purposes often seemed all too realistically conceived. The ‘modern’ approach was ‘typified’ less by the grandeur of Guildford Cathedral and more, in the words of the Vicar of St Thomas, St Helen’s, by ‘efficiently . . . compact new churches . . . designed to serve 300 or 400 people out of 10,000–15,000 souls’. These were provided, as he put it, for ‘the real needs of unenthusiastic communities’, rather than erected in ‘any serious . . . hope . . . of [provoking] a religious revival’.47 So modest an approach may or may not have betrayed an underlying pessimism about the possibility of achieving still greater ends. For all that, about one aspect of so-called 1950s’ revivalism the revisionists are surely right. This is that such activity, namely, so much self-conscious effort aimed at revival, was indeed widespread and often grounded in a strikingly robust view about its likely future results. But perhaps this was less obviously an optimistic than an urgent view. In that understanding of things, a modern crusade, dedicated to achieving religious revival 43 44

45 46 47

E. Benson Perkins, ‘General Increase in Methodist Buildings’, Methodist Recorder, 1 February 1951, 7. J. F. White, The Cambridge Movement: the Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival (Cambridge, 1962), ch. 1; Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London, 1999), ch. 9, among many works. D. J. C., ‘Is Methodism Losing the Battle for New Residential Suburbs?’, Methodist Recorder, 19 June 1952, 10. Leader, ‘New Churches’, The Times, 11 May 1954, 9. Harry Bradshaw, ‘New Parish Churches’, The Times, 28 August 1954, 7.


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in England was both necessary and timely: necessary for a world so recently ravaged by war and secular despotism; timely in a country whose ‘religious life’ had, by 1951, seemingly reached ‘its lowest [ever] ebb’.48 As Sir Walter Moberley put it: ‘We have gone a long way [already] in secularising our public life. It is an open question how far we are still a Christian nation.’ Certainly, ‘if you walk[ed] down the Strand – or the Whitechapel Road – you would be rash – would you not? – in assuming that even 50% of the people you passed [were] believing Christians’.49 Most social scientists at the time would have pointed to a lower figure still.50 For all that, the various campaigns then aimed at religious revival were immensely ambitious. They strove for nothing less than the reconversion of the realm. For a short period, roughly from 1953 to 1955, many were noticeably hopeful about their chances. In the words of Greville P. Lewis, Connexional Local Preachers’ Secretary and worthy of the Methodist Chapel, Yeovil, ‘Britain in the age’ of the ‘New Elizabethans’ stood ‘on the verge of the greatest revival of religion since the fifth century’.51 Why? He never said. Prosaic historiography will have to fill in some of the gaps for him. About one thing all the committed parties were quite clear. This was in their insistence that, every apparent disproof and much contrary evidence notwithstanding, Britain remained a faithful nation. Despite the widespread shock about the ignorance of Christian principles, as revealed in the 1941 Bishops’ Report, and even in the face of popular distaste for a Protestant ministry, as betrayed by Rowntree and Lavers’s study of English Life and Leisure, published ten years later, self-consciously informed clerical opinion remained utterly convinced that Britain ‘had not become a pagan country’ during the first half of the twentieth century. It also insisted that, for all the suggestions of ‘indifference and apathy towards the work of the churches’, there was ‘no marked hostility to religion in Britain’. Rather, there was ‘an impressive degree of latent religious sentiment’ among the people.52 The urgent task was to tap it. Suddenly it seemed that the means might be at hand to do so. 48 49 50

51 52

Anon., ‘Religion in Day Schools’, Methodist Recorder, 25 January 1951, 8. Sir Walter Moberley, ‘Church and State in England Today’, The Listener, 47, no. 1202, 13 March 1952, 426–7. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, It still might be worth comparing their views with the more optimistic impressions set out in R. C. Churchill, The English Sunday (London, 1954), see esp. chs. 1 and 12. R. S. B., ‘Britain on the Verge of the Great Religious Revival’, Methodist Recorder, 21 February 1952, 6. Leader, ‘Survey of Religion’, Methodist Recorder, 1 March 1951, 8; B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: a Social Study (London, 1951), ch. 13. For a different, and more sanguine, ‘social scientific’, perspective, see G. Stephen-Spinks,

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No one seriously believed that the mere replacement – actually, the subtle redeployment – of physical plant would get the churches very far in this task. But recent technical advances in the various branches of the communications industry did seem to point to the possibility of a specifically modern solution to the perennial problem of translating widespread, undirected feelings into real, that is worshipful, commitment. To this degree, what was truly novel and even exciting about Billy Graham’s much-publicised evangelistic campaigns during 1954 and 1955 was less about doctrine than method. In fact, he was scarcely the first of his type. Both by provenance and purpose, he reminded many Britons – friend and foe alike – of Moody and Sankey. Perhaps as a result, early contact dispelled most initial fears. Contrary to uninformed rumour, he proved no rabble rouser. Indeed, as The Times special correspondent pointedly observed, he was ‘no [great] speaker’.53 Still less did he pose any nefarious intellectual challenge to indigenous doctrinal purity. Not least, because, as the British Weekly assured its readers, ‘he was not [actually] a very good theologian’.54 But his rallies were big. Possibly 120,000 people attended a culminating service at Wembley Stadium on 23 May 1954.55 That achievement needs to be placed in perspective. Father Patrick Peyton had drawn more than 30,000 to the altogether less prepossessing Birkenhead Park rugby ground for similar interdenominational revelries just two years earlier.56 The longer-term effects of Graham’s efforts were more marginal still. Even a six-week-long campaign in Glasgow the following summer yielded only a modest increase, less than 10 per cent, in average church attendances north of the border, during the following two to three years.57 Yet Graham’s first great crusade unquestionably roused substantial popular interest. For many, this fact alone pointed to the possibility

53 54 55 56 57

E. L. Allen and James Parkes, Religion in Britain since 1900 (London, 1951), esp. the concluding chapter, ‘Informed Opinion’. Anon., ‘Statistics of a Crusade: Dr Graham Takes Stock’, The Times, 30 March 1954, 2. Anon., ‘Dr Graham as Theologian’, The British Weekly, 27 March 1954, 6. Anon., ‘120,000 at Stadium’, The Times, 24 May 1954, 4. Anon., ‘300 Faint at Religious Meeting’, The Times, 6 June 1952, 6. Anon., ‘Church-going in Glasgow: Effect of Graham Campaign’, The Times, 22 September 1955, 4. For a notably cool account, see anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1955–6 (Oxford, 1956), pp. xix–xx. There is a much fairer appraisal in William Martin, A Prophet with Honour: the Billy Graham Story (New York, 1991), chs. 11 and 12. A detailed, sociological analysis was furnished at the time in Michael Argyle, Religious Behaviour (London, 1958), pp. 54–5. In some ways, the definitive account remains the contemporary chronicle of Frank Colquhoun, Haringey Story: the Official Record of the Billy Graham Greater London Crusade, 1954 (London, 1955); see esp. ch. 21. The obvious biases of this source are easily discounted.


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of renewed indigenous spiritual life. It suggested the genesis of something that extended far beyond the logistical good sense of ecclesiological rationalisation. So it was that the then Bishop of Barking was moved to note a contemporary ‘miracle’: of ‘Englishmen, talking about their religion’ for the first time in living memory. His observation was far from unique. After all, it was all rather remarkable.58 No doubt, evangelism in this mode achieved its effect as much through the medium of the message as by its specific content. Each and every aspect of Graham’s campaign was well publicised in advance, then extensively reported and finally broadcast. Not everyone approved of such techniques, not even among ostensibly sympathetic observers. An otherwise sensible Times leader wondered ‘whether the mechanism of modern advertising . . . is . . . properly . . . suited to the task of religious conversion’. A less than charitable Donald Soper, President of the Methodist Conference, even denounced what he called Graham’s allegedly ‘totalitarian methods’.59 On the other hand, some of the more traditionally staid were happy to lend him their unqualified support. Five Tory Members of Parliament, F. A. Burden, Nigel Fisher, Robert Jenkins, Gilbert Langdon and Thomas Moore, wrote to the paper of record openly celebrating his campaign as ‘the beginning of a Christian awakening’ in this country.60 The editor of the Methodist Recorder, implicitly rebuking his boss, noted ‘Graham’s . . . evident sincerity’. More strikingly still, he observed how this quality had ‘impressed all fair-minded people’, and most important of all, how his labours had furnished every church with ‘a great opportunity . . . for the future’.61 One man who really did know a thing or two about opportunity quickly decided that, whatever else might be the case, it all made for cracking good television. In July 1955 Lew Grade signed Graham up to appear on ABC the following winter, in a twenty-six-week session of religious broadcasts.62 All of which, paradoxically, gave the outlandish preacher his first taste of real competition. For perhaps nothing so defined the changing tone of British religious life in the mid-1950s as the onset of religious broadcasting. First on radio and then on television, respectable religious 58

59

60 61 62

Anon., ‘Talking about Religion: Results of the Haringey Campaign’, The Times, 12 January 1955, 10; cf. leader, ‘The Incoming Tide’, Methodist Recorder, 18 November 1955, 8. Leader, ‘The Issue of Dr Graham’, The Times, 24 April 1955, 7. Anon., ‘The President and Billy Graham’, Methodist Recorder, 4 March 1954, 13. For an altogether more balanced view, and one that has worn well with the passing years, see John Betjeman, ‘Billy Graham’, The Spectator, no. 6559, 12 March 1954, 282–3. ‘Greater London Crusader’, letter to The Times, 23 May 1954, 7. Leader, ‘The Next Step’, Methodist Recorder, 26 May 1954, 8. Anon., ‘Graham on T.V.’, The Times, 20 July 1955, 4.

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programming became a staple of the major networks, both old and new. By the end of the decade, religious programmes accounted for some seventeen hours of broadcasting time (ten for home audiences, seven for overseas) each week.63 Sophisticated modern prejudice might assume that the networks were wasting their time. If so, it would be mistaken. In the first major survey of audience reaction, nearly one-third of some 2,000 persons chosen at random claimed ‘regularly’ to listen to religious broadcasts; a further third ‘occasionally’. Radio’s Five to Ten reached nearly four million people daily; television’s View Points, nearly three million.64 Broadcasting anchors, such as Elsie Chamberlain, lone female chaplain to the armed forces and first woman Chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales, became household names through its provenance.65 But such popularity was bought at a price, one not entirely lost on Elsie Chamberlain herself. Religious broadcasts were never intended to replace denominational religious commitment. Yet early surveys suggested that, for some at least, they may have done precisely that. Nor were they designed to ‘improve’ liturgical form. But they did. Sometime in the mid-1950s, the English people suddenly ceased to think it worth their while to listen to a preacher. As a result, they stopped going to hear sermons.66 The supply if not of the latter, then certainly of the former, similarly slowed. The Methodist Conference, from 1954 onwards, began to report its ‘serious . . . concern’ at the annual diminution in its supply of suitably trained lay preachers. Not without reason; for with its decline, ‘at least some part of the raison d’être of the English Free churches passed away’ too.67 This was by no means the only part. Brown’s panglossian analysis of denominational membership statistics suggests a general prosperity in organised British Christianity up to the end of the decade.68 In so doing, it hides almost as much as it reveals. The greatest institutional growth 63

64 65 66

67 68

C. W., ‘Television: A New Religious Medium’, Methodist Recorder, 21 April 1955, 1. And for later accounts, Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. IV: Sound and Vision (Oxford, 1998), pp. 763–803; also Kenneth M. Wolfe, The Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation, 1922–1956 (London, 1984), pt 6. Anon., ‘Biggest Audience for Five to Ten: BBC Programmes on Religion’, The Times, 1 December 1959, 6. Anon., ‘Parish Unlimited’, The Times, 2 November 1959, 15. Leader, ‘Methodism Now’, Methodist Recorder, 6 January 1955, 8; leader, The Local Preacher’, Methodist Recorder, 7 June 1956, 10; anon., ‘Free Churches and Preaching: Danger of Emphasis Being Lost, British Congress Warned’, Methodist Recorder, 28 March 1957, 3. And, for an important Anglican perspective, Bishop of Swansea and Brecon, ‘Churches Today: A Problem of Communication’, Theology, 49, no. 428 (February 1956), 53–7. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 465. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, pp. 164–5, 167–8, and 191.


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among indigenous Christian organisations during the 1950s was actually enjoyed by the Roman Catholic Church. As a result, perhaps 10 per cent of the population of the United Kingdom were affiliated with that organisation by 1960.69 But even its contemporary good fortune was as much the result of Eastern European and Irish immigration as of local expansion.70 In other words, it was the product of a historically particular, denominational windfall. That kind of success was not repeated again until very recent years.71 Among protestant denominations, the ever-increasing distinction between the Celtic peripheries and the Anglo-Saxon centre – especially true for Northern Ireland, but to some extent also the case for Scotland – partially concealed the fact that most so-called religious growth in England anyway amounted to little more than a series of minor redistributions of membership among the practising religious towards the establishment. But even for the Church of England, the record was decidedly mixed. True, the number of Easter Day communicants, as a proportion of the population, grew by a full percentage point, that is, from 4 to 5 per cent, during the decade.72 Even to the extent that these otherwise occasional conformists really did constitute a new and eager faithful, they must have been shocked to find themselves increasingly served by a smaller, older and less educated ministry. By 1957 its average age had risen to between fifty and fifty-five. Half of the new recruits were non-graduates. Their supply, if not necessarily their qualifications, improved slightly from 1955. But it still failed to keep pace with the necessary replacement rate.73 These were generally bad years for organised English dissent. Methodist membership figures, which had held up well from the late 1940s, began an inexorable decline during 1954. An earlier year of ‘special evangelism’, in 1953, proved a desperate disappointment, adding just one-twentieth of 1 per cent to its membership rolls.74 Even Billy 69 70 71

72 73

74

Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 474; Currie, Gilbert and Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 153–5. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 473–4; Currie, Gilbert and Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 153–5. Above all, as a result of eastern Europe (and especially Polish) immigration into Britain following EU expansion. Still, one hesitates to cite any definitive figures for the real, and lasting, significance of these departures in the wake of the recent economic downturn (still continuing, winter 2009/10). Rumour has it that many of these Poles are now going back home. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, p. 164. George Willsden, ‘Challenge to the Church’, letter to The Times, 15 March 1958, 7; Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 46. For a similar sense of the complexity of – English things anyway – see Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), pp. 38–40 and 61–7. Leader, ‘Church Leaders’, Methodist Recorder, 18 February 1954, 8.

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Graham’s subsequent presence yielded no recognisable Wesleyan dividend. This was because contemporary suburban growth was more than offset by industrial and rural loss. Church correspondents in County Durham reported the chapel ‘increasingly replaced’ by ‘working men’s clubs’ in local miners’ loyalties. Rural stations found themselves unable to retain local preachers. Prayer meetings declined everywhere. A solemn Leader in the Methodist Recorder for 6 January 1955 rebuked ‘a church that is forgetting the mission to which God has called it’.75 So seriously had these various losses – and the resultant loss of nerve – become by 1958 that denominational authorities began negotiations for ‘closer union’ with the Anglican church.76 In the same way, if to a slightly lesser extent, Baptists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians enjoyed no significant gains during these years, whether of members, ministers or scholars. Indeed, they more frequently lost ground. That made at least some of them turn towards the panacea of amalgamation too. The origins of what became the United Reformed Church are to be found in a ‘pledge of mutual co-operation’, promising a ‘new and solemn relationship’ between the later two denominations, as early as 1951.77 Moreover, membership figures, whether good, bad or indifferent, described only half of the problem. The real difficulty for religious organisations in the 1950s should be sought elsewhere. If Rowntree and Lavers proved nothing else, they had established that what was truly significant about the institutional dynamics of English religion during the second third of the twentieth century no longer concerned minor movements in membership (up or down) but the massive decline of church attendance (which was general and inexorable). The latter, they believed, had fallen by a factor of about three, from 1901 to 1948.78 No survey of English religious habits undertaken during the 1950s ever pointed to any significant reversal of this trend. On the contrary, a major survey of the decline of nonconformity, undertaken by the British Weekly in March 1955, confirmed all the worst fears earlier raised. The Weekly’s correspondent freely acknowledged that ‘[s]ome hint of the situation was given in Rowntree and Lavers’. This had established that while the Free Churches accounted for ‘one attendance per 10 persons’ in 1901, their

75 76

77 78

Leader, ‘Methodism Now’, Methodist Recorder, 6 January 1955, 8. Norman H. Snaith and Eric Baker, ‘The Address of the Conference to the Methodist Societies’, in Minutes of the Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, Held in Newcastleupon-Tyne, July 1958 (London, 1958), pp. 73–5. Anon., ‘Mutual Help Pledged by Churches’, The Times, 18 May 1951, 3; cf. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, pp. 38–40 and 61–7. Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure.


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share had fallen to 1 in 18 by 1935 and 1 in 21 after 1948.79 What the Weekly discovered was that, while in 1901 chapel attendance was ‘in considerable excess of membership’, ‘it was rare to find congregations [significantly] larger than the membership of their [various] churches’ anywhere in English nonconformity as early as 1935. This explained how congregations had ‘halved . . . during that period’.80 They only got worse during the years which followed. Fond hopes that these losses were ‘largely confined to Wales’ were refuted by simple calculations made from the Statistical Returns of Baptist, Congregational and Methodist Handbooks for the period. They showed similar falls in the northern counties of England, not just in the industrial areas, but in many rural districts too, such as Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset.81 In this respect, nonconformist gloom was matched by established torpor. An influential article, written by Cecil Northcott and published in the Listener in 1957 came to many of the same conclusions. Northcott first corroborated Rowntree and Lavers’s findings, indeed pointed to one ‘mining and steel town in the North of England where average attendance had by then fallen to 8% of the adult population’. He then underlined the significance of the Weekly’s later survey by emphasising not just the Free Church losses but effective stasis in Anglican Easter Day attendance.82 Finally, he concluded that the most serious problem of all – as these figures now graphically revealed – lay in the emerging gap between the churches and all kinds of workers in the great industries. That was something which everyone noticed but all seemed powerless to plug.83 This was not least because the problem was not, as two perceptive articles in Theology for May 1958 pointed out, reducible to the question of the churches and the (supposedly alienated) working classes. It was rather about how the churches were now losing the patronage of those sections of industrial society that had previously supported them.84 This Northcott believed, suggested ‘big change[s] in social habits’.85 Unfortunately, they also revealed rather less about how such 79 80 82 83 84

85

Anon., ‘The Decline of Nonconformity’, British Weekly, 135, no. 3565, 15 March 1955, 1–12, at p. 1. 81 Ibid. Ibid. Cecil Northcott, ‘Churchgoing in Britain Today’, The Listener, 58, no. 1499, 19 December 1957, 1035–6. Ibid. R. H. T. Thompson, ‘The Church and the Protestant’, and R. A. Buchanan, ‘Religion and the Working Classes’, in Theology, 61, no. 455 (May 1958), 179–84 and 184–9; see also R. C. Thompson and the Bishop of Llandaff, ‘The Church and the Working Class’, Theology, 61, no. 458 (August 1958), 333–5. Northcott, ‘Churchgoing in Britain Today’, p. 1036.

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change might ever be harnessed to the good of traditional, ecclesiastical affiliation.86 II What was true of adult worship was truer still for juvenile education. Brown cites carefully calculated data to point to a small growth in the percentage of five- to fourteen-year olds enrolled in British Sunday schools between 1945 and 1958; this in the order of something under 5 per cent.87 But that cannot hide the fact that Sunday school affiliation and attendance declined steeply between the historic high of 1906 and 1961. They diminished both in terms of absolute numbers and as a proportion of the relevant population between 1951 and 1961. The principal effect of these changes was felt precisely by the cohort that came of age during this decade. In 1888 something like three-quarters of all children attended Sunday school. As late as 1957 a similar proportion of those over the age of thirty might plausibly have claimed the same experience. But among young people under thirty, this figure had fallen to little more than three-fifths.88 That is why Sunday school was so widely perceived to be an institution in profound crisis during the 1950s. More so in England than in Scotland, but quite generally and, as it eventually proved, terminally, everywhere.89 This was probably true among the Free Church Sunday schools, whose enrolment fell by one-quarter between 1940 and 1959.90 It was perhaps most spectacularly the case within the Methodist schools, where enrolment halved from 1932 to 1959.91 No contemporary ever doubted the ‘deepening decline’ of Sunday school attendance at this time. This was because the underlying trend reflected a diminution of the institution actually worse than the raw figures revealed. It was not simply that Sunday schools were failing to furnish new members for the churches. After all, they had always baulked at that task. They were also now losing the scholars that they previously had, and those at an earlier age than ever before. As Gerald Winsley, 86 87 88

89 90 91

The real point of E. R. Wickham, Church and People in an Industrial City (London, 1957), ch. 6. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, p. 168. Christie Davies, ‘Moralisation and Demoralisation: a Moral Explanation for Changes in Crime, Disorder and Social Problems’, in Digby Anderson (ed.), The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Britain and America (London, 1992), pp. 1–13, at p. 11; David Martin, A Sociology of English Religion (London, 1967), pp. 41–2. Cf. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, p. 168 and Currie et al. Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 167–92. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 176 and 190–1. Ibid., p. 187; see also Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 465–6.


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General Secretary of the Methodist Youth Department, put it: ‘There was a time when we were losing our youngsters [around six in every seven] at fourteen years of age . . . now we lose more than 50% between the age of ten and eleven’.92 What concerned him more still were the causes of this new outflow. These were far from obvious. Some contemporaries pointed to the novel attractions ‘of family excursions’ and other secular pleasures. They also remarked upon the ambivalent impact of the 1944 Education Act.93 But at least part of the problem was grounded in a much broader change ‘in the social habits of the population’. These, many believed, were traceable to a profound, if elusive, transformation of parenting that characterised young, married adults, during the 1950s. At the time, it was called the ‘new parenting’. It involved the unprecedented commitment of both parents to the nurture of their offspring. This was experienced by most of these young Britons less as a reactionary project, designed to condemn otherwise reluctant women to the rigours of traditional motherhood, and more as a path freely chosen by both partners, and forged in the wake of very different domestic conditions made possible by smaller families, better housing provision and the liberalisation of relations between the generations. To many of these self-consciously modern parents, Sunday school was no longer necessary. It did not even seem especially desirable.94 That was also why so many observers began to speak of English children almost as sovereign consumers of Sunday school services; now free to choose (alternatively to decline) among the erstwhile delights of an age-old institution. One correspondent then spoke of the ‘unprecedented freedom’ enjoyed by an entire generation of boys and girls who, apparently for the first time, could ‘decide for themselves . . . with no reprimand from their parents if they stayed away’. Increasingly, that was what they did. Perhaps they had been persuaded, as the contemporary conceit had it, more in the end of that special day as a source of ‘recreation rather than re-creation’.95 Certainly, there was something else to do on Sunday afternoons. For most, that meant the pictures. Legally licensed since 1932, if still occasionally subject to local obstacles – Blackpool Town Council voted against granting a licence for Sunday afternoon shows as 92 93 94 95

Anon., ‘Why Does Methodism Lose 6 out of 7 Young People?’, Methodist Recorder, 28 February 1952, 7. J. Kenneth Muir, ‘Facing Hard Facts about the Sunday Schools Today’, Methodist Recorder, 21 February 1957, 6. Sandbrook, Never Had it So Good, pp. 389ff.; McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, ch. 8. Anon., ‘Children in Church: New Ideas for Sunday School Participation in Worship’, The Times, 13 August 1956, 9.

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late as 1956 – the cinema gained more and more of a foothold on the English Sunday. This was especially true in London after the County Council’s decision in 1957 to liberalise its permitted opening hours still further.96 But it overcame opposition elsewhere too. An ingenious compromise, imposed upon movie theatres and churches alike by Sedgley Council, Staffordshire, the following year, that applications for Sunday opening be permitted ‘on condition that an opportunity be given for a person to deliver a short sermon from the stage during an interval in the performance’, proved, unsurprisingly, short lived.97 And there were other, newer, attractions too. Some did not involve going anywhere in particular. The private motor car furnished whole families with the means to avoid boring Sundays at home, if only by opening up the possibility of spending boring Sundays elsewhere. Ungrateful churches had complained of the deleterious effects of a ‘mobile population’ as early as the 1920s. Now they had real reason to rue the force of their own, prescient observations.98 To the degree that Sunday schools had once been effective recruitment agencies for the churches, the full institutional impact of these developments was delayed for a generation. But their immediate, and damaging, significance did not pass unnoticed, nor indeed, unchallenged. Some churches experimented by adopting different times. That meant morning rather than afternoon school. Some simply changed the name. For a while, hope was concentrated on so-called ‘junior churches’.99 The ever-inventive Bishop of Rochester, always alive to the ‘changing habits of the people’, even suggested a change in the day. His proposal was that schools should meet on Saturday. He was wise to confine such subversive thoughts to the obscure pages of the Rochester Review. The idea came to nothing. But its failure proved less a concession to outraged sabbatarians than evidence that such significantly altered popular mores increasingly comprehended the idea of a fully secular weekend. There may once have been a time when most people could not even refer to ‘the Continental Sunday’ without a shudder. But the ‘times had changed’ and that sensibility had passed with them. By 1953, ‘many . . . who [still] maintained that they were Christians’ had come to ‘use Sunday for nothing more than visiting entertainment and travels to the countryside’.100 96 97 98 99 100

Anon., ‘No Sunday Afternoon Films’, The Times, 5 July 1956. Anon., ‘Sermons in Cinema: Doubt on Sunday Opening Plan, Sedgley, Staffordshire’, The Times, 27 February 1958, 8. For a detailed consideration of ‘mobility’ in the 1920s (and its consequences), see ch. 4 above, pp. 155–61. Anon., ‘Children in Church’. Leader, ‘Sunday Observance’, Methodist Recorder, 29 January 1953, 8.


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This ‘difference of approach’ pointed not merely to the ‘widespread decline in religious observance’ that affected ‘every part of the community’ but to something more general still. No account of British moral life during the 1950s is complete without serious consideration of a peculiar development that was then widely noticed. It was first specifically remarked upon in a lugubrious preface of Crockford’s Clerical Directory in 1952. It had assumed the status of conventional wisdom by the time of Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain, published ten years later. This was the so-called ‘diminish[ing] influence of the churches in national life’. That decline, so the knowing had it, was marked not so much by numbers – received opinion had long presumed that the churches exercised an authority far in excess of the simple arithmetic of affiliation – as in the increasingly weak hold that the churches exercised over common behaviour and its appropriate legal sanctions, similarly, concerning respectable values and their informal enforcement.101 Conceived in that way, the decline of Sunday school only highlighted the passing of a righteous sabbath more generally. If some still blamed foreigners, cinemas and the war for all of this, others latched on to the idea of new, but no less nefarious, agencies of decay. Hence, presumably, the dismay expressed on 9 July 1956 by O. J. Taylor, Secretary of the Protestant Alliance, writing to one whose ‘custom of taking part in games on the Lord’s Day’ was, he believed, causing ‘widespread . . . public concern’. For good or ill, the Duke of Edinburgh seems to have taken no special notice of that particular dressing down.102 Nor, so far as we can tell, did Harold Macmillan, castigated on 10 January 1957 by Harold J. W. Legerton, Secretary of the Lord’s Day Observance Society, for presuming to demand a Sunday audience with his sovereign the previous week. This was for the minor matter of informing her about the composition of his new government.103 Such pointless interventions into the national debate now strike most of us as just anachronistically amusing. But the ‘Battle of the Bonds’, a conflict between virtually all the churches and the government over the question of premium bonds, waged throughout 1955 and 1956, seemed far from funny at the time. Archbishop Fisher’s principled opposition to

101 102 103

Anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1951–2 (Oxford, 1952), pp. iv–v; Anthony Sampson, Anatomy of Britain (London, 1962), ch. 11. Anon., ‘Letter to the Duke of Edinburgh: Concern over Sunday Services’, The Times, 9 July 1956, 5. Anon., ‘Matters of State on Sunday: Lord’s Day Observance Grieved’, The Times, 15 January 1956, 4; cf. Harold Macmillan, Riding the Storm, 1956–9 (London, 1971), pp. 189–91 – which mentions the fact, but none of the contemporary comment.

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the scheme has come to seem absurd with the passing years.104 Chancellor Macmillan complained even then, albeit only in his diary, about silly bishops ‘bleating . . . away’ on matters that did not concern them.105 Still, the Primate of All England enjoyed the full support of all the major Free Churches on this issue. That was all to no avail.106 These sorts of battles were generally avoided thereafter. The churches were only too well aware of the ever-increasing likelihood of defeat. We famously remember Princess Margaret’s disavowal of a civil marriage to Group Captain Townsend ‘mindful of [the Church’s] teachings’.107 Most of us have forgotten the Church Times’s assault on the ecclesiastical impropriety of Anthony Eden’s earlier remarriage, one that rebounded almost entirely to that paper’s discredit.108 Fisher’s subsequent advice to the convocation of York, that it specifically ‘not . . . ask parliament to establish by statute’ its declared opinion on the remarriage of divorced people in church as part of its revision of canon law, more accurately reflected that sense of marginality. His grounds for tendering such pusillanimous counsel were that this request, even in 1956 and with a large (and recent) Conservative majority in the House of Commons, ‘would almost certainly be lost . . . in parliament’. His words were heeded.109

III That was why the excited protestant of 1954 became a very cautious prelate, just two years later. Fool as some took him to be, Fisher quickly realised that there was going to be no religious revival in his native land after all. He had also come to appreciate that England in the mid-1950s presented a more subtle, indeed a more profoundly ambivalent, religious aspect than any happier state he had earlier hoped for. To that 104

105 106

107 108 109

See the punch-pulling account in Carpenter, Archbishop Fisher, pp. 405–6. Cf. Edward Carpenter (ed.), The Archbishop Speaks: Addresses and Speeches by the Archbishop of Canterbury: the Most Reverend Geoffrey Francis Fisher (London, 1958), ch. 9, ‘Gambling’. Peter Catterall (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries: the Cabinet Years, 1950–1957 (London, 2003), p. 533; entry for 26 April 1956. Anon., ‘Premium Bonds Will Not Do: Plan Condemned by Baptists’, The Times, 1 May 1956, 6. J. Clark Gibson, ‘Premium Bonds: United Calls for Church Action’, Methodist Recorder, 3 May 1956, 3. Ironically, premium bonds were the dream-child of Lord Mackintosh of Halifax, himself a Methodist. I owe this information to Professor Clyde Binfield. Most recently recounted in Christopher Warwick, Princess Margaret (London, 2002), ch. 7, at pp. 82–3. Catterall (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries, p. 180; entry for 13–15 August 1952. Anon., ‘Primate’s Warning on Remarriage: “Certain Defeat” in Parliament’, The Times, 18 May 1956, 6. Cf. Carpenter (ed.), The Archbishop Speaks, ch. 22, ‘Christian Marriage’.


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degree at least, he had become a much wiser man. England in 1956 was characterised neither by conspicuously revived religious institutions nor a massively haemorrhaging indigenous faith but by a rather different kind of religious decline; more complex, even baffling – neither then, nor now, easily described. For all the difficulties involved, some contemporary observers still consciously made the effort to do just that. Most still resisted the ‘paganisation thesis’ made popular in Geoffrey Gorer’s controversial contemporary study.110 Some still preferred to qualify for Rowntree’s pessimistic findings. But few arrived at sanguine conclusions. A thoughtful Times leader, published on 12 October 1957, referred to a modern religious atmosphere marked by ‘curiosity combined with ignorance’. This it took to be a by now pervasive state of affairs. By that it meant one which applied almost equally to the educated and the uneducated classes in society. This, in itself, marked a considerable departure from countless earlier studies which had continually highlighted only the inadequate religious knowledge of the lower classes.111 But there was another point. What its author depicted was less a vision of (potentially) redeemable apathy and more a state of (effectively) settled detachment. This was his way of describing a people that had, in his view, quietly but definitively given up on the traditional paths to salvation. These were, of course, loaded terms. By way of a non-judgemental translation, we might suggest that what he had identified was a novel separation of the ‘religious’ from the ‘irreligious’ in English society. It might also be suggested that this was the principal cultural current of the age.112 It was certainly a view that might be applied to the religious dimensions of British intellectual life during the 1950s. Even here, it is, of course, possible to point to elements of religious renewal. One contemporary, J. W. C. Wand, observed in 1958 how ‘one hears much less today about a conflict between religion and science’.113 There was also some evidence of a revived interest in, even the restored respectability of, religion among the English ‘educated classes’ during these years.114 C. S. Lewis famously remarked upon such a growth in postwar Oxford. He may even have been

110 111 112 113 114

Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London, 1955), ch. 14. Cf. R. C. Churchill, The English Sunday, ch. 3. Going back indeed to the famous Bishops’ Report of 1941 itself; on which, see ch. 6 above, esp. at pp. 219–22. Leader, ‘Christian Knowledge’, The Times, 12 October 1957, 7. J. W. C. Wand, ‘The Outlook for Christianity’, The Listener, 59, no. 1501, 2 January 1958, 3–4. Donald Rose, ‘Evangelism in the University’, Methodist Recorder, 8 May 1952, 4; anon., ‘Catholicism in the University’, The Tablet, 29 July 1955.

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part of its cause.115 R. J. White went so far as to describe, if scarcely to celebrate, something of a ‘religious revival’ in 1950s’ Cambridge.116 Yet as Crockford’s noted, with an acerbity borne of recent experience, no small part of that ‘much-talked of religious revival’ at Oxbridge turned out to be ‘very deceptive’. Tales of ‘full college chapels’, similarly of ‘packed meetings of religious societies’, often reflected nothing more significant than the general expansion of higher education after the war. The chapels may have been full. But the colleges were fuller still. More to the point, such numbers invariably offered little protection against that ‘strong body of [varsity] opinion’, perhaps not often ‘publicly manifested’, but when roused – for instance, on the occasion of the proposed separation of the Regius Chair of Hebrew from a canonry at Christ Church – capable of expressing real hostility to Christian principles. There were still eloquent defenders of Christianity at large in the ancient universities. Think of Herbert Butterfield, Dom David Knowles and C. S. Lewis. But there were more, and possibly more influential foes around too. Recall the often-expressed contempt of men like A. J. Ayer, A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Record, at best, a rather illmannered score-draw.117 Hastings observed how, during the 1950s, these worlds seemingly lived alongside each other (sometimes, like Lewis and Taylor, who literally lived alongside each other) while barely making contact with each other.118 For the most part, they did so peacefully enough. But not always; Crockford’s strictures were well matched by Wolfenden’s warning, in his capacity as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Reading, of the spectre of so many ‘young people . . . becoming fossilized in their development by a na¨ıve form of Christian belief which appears to have been revived in the past few years’.119 By that, he meant evangelical

115

116

117

118 119

C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. II: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949, ed. Walter Hooper (London, 2004), p. 701; letter to Sister Penelope, CSMU, 31 January 1946. For the influence of Lewis’s wartime religious broadcasts, see Justin Phillips, C. S. Lewis: in a Time of War (London, 2002), esp. pp. 280–5. R. J. White, Cambridge Life (London, 1960), pp. 133 and 190; though note the cooler, comparative view expressed in Dacre Balsdon, Oxford Life (London, 1957), pp. 277–8. Dare one suggest that this, otherwise inexplicable, discrepancy simply reflected the different perspectives of two very different authors? See McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, pp. 37ff. Anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1959–1960 (Oxford, 1960), pp. xvii–xviii. See also, Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 491ff. And note the remarks in Peter Vansittart, In the Fifties (London, 1995), pp. 135–7. They seem, for all that, to have maintained perfectly amicable social relations – at least to the end of the war. See Adam Sisman, A. J. P. Taylor (London, 1994), pp. 135–7. Anon., ‘Locked Minds of Young People: Warning on Na¨ıve Form of Belief’, The Times, 4 January 1956, 5.


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protestantism. Such fears were scarcely peculiar to him. They were not even unusual among contemporary churchmen.120 In general, necessary social relations seem to have been conducted at a level of mutual indifference. It was almost as if the agony of the 1840s and, for that matter, the antagonisms of the 1920s, had given way to something closer to polite contempt on one side (the unbelievers) and bemused impotence on the other (the faithful). Some of that distance was demonstrated during the minor scandal that surrounded the broadcast of Morals Without Religion, two outrageously atheistic (alternatively, compassionately humanist) broadsides aired on the Third Programme by Dr Margaret Knight, then a little-known lecturer in psychology at the University of Aberdeen. In their immediate aftermath, The Times was moved to remark on how ‘the [resulting] controversy’ – resulting, that is, from Mrs Knight’s insistence that it was wrong to instil religious belief into children, for fear of setting them at odds with the prevailing climate of opinion – had shed much ‘interesting light’ on emerging religious attitudes. However, this episode had proved most enlightening, The Times believed, not merely nor even especially about public opinion, generally conceived, but rather on the ‘contemporary attitudes’ of ‘many agnostics and atheists’, more strictly defined.121 Public opinion had, in fact, been bitterly divided on the matter. Initially most were opposed to, even shocked by, the expression of these views. On reflection, many declared themselves in favour of – at any rate 45 per cent declared themselves ‘favourable’ – to the airing of such beliefs. The self-consciously enlightened, by contrast, treated religion throughout as: ‘something to be dismissed with a sigh and a smile . . . and Christian revelation . . . to be regarded . . . as no more credible than Father Christmas’.122 That pointed to a real problem. Traditional churchmen were sometimes slow to realise this. Proffering some ‘Christian Advice’ about a proper reply to Mrs Knight’s strictures, Archbishop Garbett of York could not help observing that the broadcasts ‘contained nothing new . . . their substance . . . consisting of the stock-in-trade of atheists and agnostics for 120

121

122

Anon., Preface, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1955–6 (Oxford, 1956), p. x: there bewailing ‘the increasing number of fundamentalists amongst contemporary Anglican ordinands’. Leader, ‘Sceptics’, The Times, 22 January 1955, 7. Margaret Knight, ‘Morals without Religion’, The Listener, 53, no. 1350, 13 January 1955, 66–7; Margaret Knight, ‘Morals without Religion – II’, The Listener, 53, no. 1351, 20 January 1955, 109–10; Margaret Knight, and Jenny Morton, ‘Morals without Religion – III: a Discussion between Jenny Morton and Margaret Knight’, The Listener, 53, no. 1352, 27 January 1955, 151–3. More broadly, see McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, pp. 41–2. Anon., ‘Morals Without Religion: 1,500 Letters of Two Broadcasts’, The Times, 20 January 1955, 5.

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the past two centuries’.123 This put him into good protestant company. The Methodist Recorder similarly noted that ‘humanism has discredited itself, not for the first time’.124 All of which would no doubt have been very well taken so long as the real matter of substance had remained at the level of intellectual disagreement. But Mrs Knight’s argument had actually been concerned as much with trends as truths. She criticised Christianity more for being unfashionable than false. When Jenny Morton, speaking for ‘intellectual religion’, was invited to debate with the errant scientist, she stuck to much the same ground.125 That was because during the 1950s, the real matter of difference between the selfconsciously religious and the self-consciously irreligious had broadened beyond questions of recognisable disputation. In fact, it became something much less of an argument concerned with issues of doctrine than a phenomenon better described in divergent sensibilities. Precisely on that account, it also became much less tractable. That may seem paradoxical. It is still important. Old-fashioned ecclesiasts still comforted themselves with the thought that, in the words of the Bishop of Southwell, F. R. Barry, England remained a ‘deeply and pervasively Christianised nation’. Such beliefs were superficially vindicated by contemporary social scientific surveys, in which around threequarters of the population invariably claimed some sort of denominational allegiance. But open-eyed churchmen, ministers, and informed laymen could not help noticing the complete absence of whole swathes of the population from their Sunday congregations. That was true of the ‘working classes’, in the forlorn view of the new Bishop of London, H. C. Montgomery Campbell (this in 1955). It was also the case for ‘the young’ in the equally lugubrious account of Leslie Weatherhead, President of the Methodist Conference and Minister of the Congregational City Temple (that same year). Even the previously churched, as Wickham’s seminal study of Sheffield now suggested, were drifting away.126 The categories of the disaffected were not simply growing. They were also changing. Interpreting the results of the BBC audience research enquiry of 1954 in their famous Survey of Social Conditions in England and Wales, Carr-Saunders and Caradog Jones concluded that 123 124 125 126

Anon., ‘Morals Without Religion. Dr Garbett’s Advice on Christian Reply’, The Times, 17 January 1955, 4. Leader, ‘Complacent Humanist’, Methodist Recorder, 28 January 1955, 8. Knight and Morton, ‘Morals without Religion – III’, p. 151. Anon., ‘England Not a Pagan Country’, The Times, 14 September 1953, 4; anon., ‘Bishop of London Enthroned: Ancient Ceremony in St Paul’s’, The Times, 29 February 1955, 10; anon.; ‘Poor Attendance at Churches: Dr Weatherhead’s Appeal’, The Times, 5 July 1955, 6.


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non-attenders were made up, by mid-century, as much among those who had once attended church as those who never set foot inside a sacred portal.127 Their view corroborated the findings of Rowntree and Lavers, who had earlier identified at least part of the reason for that fall-off as the result of popular alienation from traditional English, that is, protestant churches.128 Those working on the ground often made the same point, albeit in a slightly different way. They began to talk of an emerging hiatus between ‘Christianity and Churchianity’ in the popular mind. By that, they meant to highlight the emergence of a new, popular emphasis on the individual apprehension of religion. This increasingly defined the phenomenon in more general notions of the good. It also gave common credence to an ever-growing conviction that the ever-smaller minority of regular attenders were, in Wetherhead’s words, ‘thin-lipped, laughterless spoil sports who drank vinegar and disapprove[d] of fun’.129 For organised Christianity, this was a potentially lethal combination. Not for nothing did Professor T. E. Jessop, Vice-President of the Methodist Conference, declaim in 1955 that ‘the English had to learn . . . that it was not by being moral but by being worshippers that they [became] properly . . . religious’.130 Hindsight should fault only his sense of dynamics. For all the contemporary evidence now suggested that the English were increasingly imbibing precisely the opposite lesson. Depressing proof of this turnaround was demonstrated in Margaret Stacey’s contemporary study of Tradition and Change in Banbury.131 Tradition seemingly prevailed all over the surface of this sleepy north Oxfordshire market town. Dr Stacey had no difficulty in identifying a common ‘Christianity [that] was’, in her words, still ‘undisputed but rarely discussed’ there.132 So confident was the general assumption of its ‘rightness’ in such a respectable place that those who did not regularly ‘attend . . . church’ still felt obliged to explain, even to apologise, for their habitual failure to fulfil an erstwhile acknowledged social obligation.133 For all that, very few of them went to church. Almost 94 per cent of the population claimed adherence to one of the six major denominations represented in the town. Only 21 per cent 127 128 129 130 131 132

A. M. Carr-Saunders, D. Caradog Jones and C. A. Moser, A Survey of Social Conditions in England and Wales, as Illustrated by Statistics (Oxford, 1958), ch. 18, at p. 26. B. Seebohm Rowntree and R. G. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: a Social Study (London, 1951), pp. 345–9. Anon., ‘Poor Attendance and Churches: Dr Weatherhead’s Appeal’, The Times, 5 July 1955, 6. Ibid. Margaret Stacey, Tradition and Change: a Study of Banbury (Oxford, 1960), see esp. ch. 4. 133 Ibid., pp. 57–71. Ibid., p. 57.

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were actually members of any church or chapel. Fewer still attended on an average Sunday. Why? Dr Stacey’s research pointed to four possible reasons. The first was because church-going was no ‘longer a sine qua non of social acceptance for newcomers’. Secondly, it was increasingly viewed as ‘time-consuming and onerous [even] for locals’, and especially for the young. Thirdly, there were now ‘alternatives’ – notably Sunday cinema. Finally it was, frankly, just ‘too dull’.134 Some of these were long-standing social developments. Others represented a novel alteration in general sensibilities. Together, they added up to a fundamentally diminished role for religion in the life of the town. As Dr Stacey put it: Organised religion holds its place in the official life of Banbury as it does elsewhere in the country. Banbury listens to religious broadcasts, teaches Christianity to its children in school, holds its annual Mayor’s Sunday when the Mayor and Corporation attend divine service . . . But its hold upon the daily and, indeed, the Sunday lives of the people is declining. [This is because] the frontiers of the traditional social structure and of religion within it are narrowing . . . organisations based on non-traditional attitudes are increasing and so is a passive attitude to religion. If England is due for a religious revival, there are no signs of its arrival in Banbury.135

What was true of Banbury was, by then, largely true elsewhere too. This was why religion’s own representatives had concluded by 1958 that ‘[t]he church . . . was on the defensive, had been on the defensive for a long time and would be on the defensive for as far ahead as an intelligent estimation could predict’.136 One perceptive reader of Dr Stacey’s research put the matter more pessimistically still. The ‘truth of the matter’, wrote Monica Furlong in The Spectator, was that the people of England ‘no longer show any enthusiasm’ for their faith. As a result, ‘Christianity [is] no longer a way of life in this country’.137 It was not just that adults ‘shied away from church’. An ‘ever diminishing minority’ of children attended Sunday school as well. In that way, Christian ways of life were no longer acquired ‘naturally and unselfconsciously’.138 Most now learned what little religion they ever imbibed in the infant and primary schools of the maintained sector. Then they promptly forgot it. And this was the good news. For all Butler’s promises, and for all the early expectations, many scripture lessons were, in the words of one leading expert, often ‘still 134 136 137 138

135 Ibid., pp. 72–4. Ibid., pp. 69–74. Leader, ‘The Lost Initiative’, Methodist Recorder, 29 May 1958, 8. Monica Furlong, ‘Fight the Bad Fight’, The Spectator, no. 1905, 28 October 1960, 638. Ibid.


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used for collecting milk money’.139 A more detailed survey of Religious Education Schools, published by the Institute of Christian Education ‘to celebrate’ the tenth anniversary of the 1944 Act, came to similarly pessimistic conclusions about its impact.140 It noted that little effort had been made to spread religious teaching throughout the school day; it lamented the unwillingness of most schools to devote more than between one and two hours teaching per week to the subject, and deplored the continuing (and widespread) practice of combining classes of different age groups for religious instruction.141 The result was too often a provision that made it ‘impossible to do really effective work on the academic or interpretative [side of religion]’ within the maintained sector.142 These sorts of comments, and others like them, inspired a major debate during 1957 about the state of ‘Christian knowledge’ in England. It was unsurprisingly inconclusive. There was much grandiose rhetoric about a ‘remarkable and lamentable . . . ignorance’ at large in the land. Most religious professionals denounced this as the product of scandalous neglect in the schools. Some educationalists openly celebrated it as the result of changing attitudes at home. Neutral onlookers simply accepted it as an irreversible development of modern life. Behind all of this lay an altogether simpler and starker message.143 This was that the majority of English men and women, especially younger English men and women were, by 1960, placed effectively beyond the reach of all of the conventional mechanisms by which protestant England had traditionally socialised its young. This process was not unique to the 1950s. It predated 1951. It assuredly outlived 1960. But it marks the most significant religious dynamic of those years. Within that broader framework, contemporary visions of revival proved to be brief delusions. (In fairness, few contemporaries were deceived for long.) They also, increasingly, came to seem like alien apparitions. These were things that not only came exclusively from the outside but truly belonged elsewhere too. The periodical literature of the time offers countless examples of just how much more impressed contemporaries were by the very different dynamics of organisational change observed across the Atlantic. America was the real home of anglophone religious revival in 139 140

141 143

Anon., ‘Stiffer Theology for Children: Something More than Better Stories’, The Times, 27 May 1957, 12. Professor W. O. Lester et al., Religious Education in Schools: the Report of an Inquiry made by the National Committee of the Institute of Christian Education on the Working of the 1944 Education Act (London, 1954). In fact, the report came to no specific ‘conclusion’ at all; see p. 142. 142 Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., pp. 9–11, 13–18 and 20–1. ‘Stiffer Theology’, The Times, 27 May 1957, 12.

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the 1950s. For some, this only made it more heartbreaking that the resurgence there of ‘an orthodox Christianity . . . that we in Britain would easily recognise’ – a new and viable ‘Protestant Christianity’, characterised by ‘simple prayers’ and ‘hearty hymn singing’ – proved impossible to transplant here. For others, it was proof of what now effectively separated the sensibilities of these, once closely associated, protestant peoples. It would take the new ‘sociology of secularisation’ to explain it all satisfactorily; in effect, by redesignating ‘religious America’ as the exception and faithless England as the norm. Still, explanation was not the same as acceptance. So when a young Alasdair Macintyre railed against ‘the irrelevance of the Church of England’, also against a country that ‘no longer had a religion’ and sustained ‘no shared symbols . . . no shared moral convictions . . . no common moral standpoint’ – that was in fact made up of no more than ‘a lot of people who happen[ed] to live in the southern part of Great Britain’ – he articulated an idea of what had become of the ‘English and their religion’ by the end of the 1950s which made much clarifying sense to many otherwise confused and angry minds.144 144

A. C. Macintyre, ‘The Irrelevance of the Church of England’, The Listener, 59, no. 1526, 26 June 1958, 1054–8. For the evidence of disparate developments between the United States and Great Britain at this time, see Argyle, Religious Behaviour, pp. 35–8.

8

Slouching towards a secular society: expert analysis and lay opinion in the early 1960s

‘That is Bill the Bible-Puncher. Here [for] a load out there that wants saving.’ So a gently ironic docker greeted Dr Billy Graham on his arrival at Southampton in May 1966. The great preacher himself had just reached the United Kingdom at the outset of what he proclaimed would be his ‘biggest [ever] crusade’ to Britain, planned for the summer of that year.1 Many of the natives might have had other things on their minds during the fateful weeks which followed. This was, after all, the moment of that World Cup.2 Still, Graham never doubted that his task assumed the proportions of a truly urgent mission. He had plenty of reasons for concern at the time. Since his last visit, some twelve years earlier, ‘the church had fallen behind’ on these islands. As a result, a metaphysical ‘ocean’ of ‘hate, lust, jealousy, and tragedy’ now ‘stretched landward’ from England’s south coast, ‘almost as far as the eye could see’. In such worsening circumstances, the ‘fuller face[d]’ and ‘slightly grey[ed]’ proponent of ‘Bible Rock’ publicly pledged a new and ‘massive effort’ to give Britain the ‘spiritual facelift’ it so desperately needed.3 God was not going to go down in this ancient protestant realm without a fight. By no means all the locals proved entirely grateful recipients of this kind of attention. Preaching in the learned city of Oxford, a few days after coming to England, Graham was rudely ‘heckled’ by militant members of the University Humanist Group.4 Nor were such objections confined to those of merely atheistical opposition to His purposes. The very same meeting that had attracted so much adverse publicity from such obvious quarters also inspired a rather more arcane protest from ‘theological students at Trinity’. They insisted that Graham, not being episcopally ordained, 1 2

3 4

Anon., ‘Dr Graham Begins His Biggest Crusade’, The Times, 25 May 1966, 12. For some sense of the broader impact, but for one written from a refreshingly unsympathetic perspective, see Bernard Levin, The Pendulum Years: Britain and the Sixties (London, 1970), pp. 234–6. Anon., ‘Dr Graham Begins His Biggest Crusade’. The mixed metaphor is to be found in the original. Anon., ‘Students Heckle Dr Graham’, The Times, 30 May 1966, 10.

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lacked ‘the explicit permission of the ecclesiastical authorities to preach in an Established Church’.5 Others, unable to strike, were content to sneer. The Rev. Peter Morgan, in emphasising that ‘mass evangelism is not a new phenomena [sic] in England’, also noted that the Graham phenomenon bore an ‘uncanny resemblance’ to the earlier efforts of ‘Moody and Sankey’. Indeed, the ‘large . . . rented . . . buildings’, the ‘hustling, compelling, gospel [services]’, and the culture of ‘instant decision’ all recalled a long-standing transatlantic tradition. But there was a real difference. While Moody and Sankey had ‘reached out’ to the ‘drunken, the destitute and the orphaned’, Graham confined himself to a ‘narrowly religious sphere’ of social engagement.6 Still, even this otherwise very superior priest was willing to acknowledge the ‘real if simple achievement’ represented by Graham’s ability ‘[t]o draw enough people night after night to Earls Court, to fill the Albert Hall twice over, [this] at a time when [secular] politicians have more or less dropped public meetings from their programmes’.7 A few, perhaps more charitably disposed or just hopeful of beneficial results, were much more forthcoming. Dr John Coggan, Archbishop of York, happily commended ‘a man . . . wholly sincere’ in his commitment, and capable of ‘reach[ing] people who might not otherwise be reached’ by the gospels. This alone, Coggan believed, made his efforts worthy of support; even if they ‘deployed methods we may not [always] like’.8 It was not, after all, as if Graham’s distinctive evangelical techniques were especially alien to the British people. They had first experienced the ‘promotion of, and publicity for, God’, as if He were ‘soup or a breakfast cereal’, more than a decade earlier.9 Reactions then, both for and against, had proved altogether fiercer than they would on this occasion. By 1966 Graham and his ‘commercial methods’ had almost become part of the local ecclesiastical scene. As a result, indigenous responses were much more muted – the occasional fanatics, on either side, apart – than twelve years before. There was even room for a bit of good-natured humour about it all. Writing in The Spectator towards the end of Graham’s ‘latest crusade’, the comic writer John Wells recalled first meeting Graham one ‘stuffy summer afternoon’ in 1952, as a member of the Eastbourne Crusaders’ Bible Club for Boys. He also insisted that ‘since that afternoon I have been an unquestioning admirer of Billy Graham both as an entertainer and as a beneficial influence on 5 6 7 9

Anon., ‘Oxford Students Protest Over Dr Graham’, The Times, 28 May 1966, 9. The Rev. Peter Morgan, ‘Dr Graham’s Crusade Differs Little from Moody’s’, The Times, 25 June 1966, 12. 8 Anon., ‘Dr Coggan’s Tribute’, The Times, 28 May 1966, 9. Ibid. Anon., ‘Dr Graham Begins His Biggest Crusade’.

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our society’. Just in case some of his readers may have missed the point, he added, ‘[much] as I have always admired the Catholic Church for the same reasons’.10 No one had expressed himself quite so glibly in 1954.11 Half a generation on, the change of tone was unmistakeable. Of course, Wells was a professional humorist. But even men paid to mock still picked their targets quite carefully in those days.12 Moreover, what Wells was really expressing was something less like affection and closer to condescension. And the implied superciliousness was of a slightly different order from that of the Reverend Morgan’s earlier pedantries. For it described not the retreat of hope but rather an absence of fear. Billy Graham posed little threat to ‘secular England’ by 1966. Proof of this harmlessness lay in the results of his recent public performances. The final rally of his Greater London Crusade attracted a crowd of 86,000 to Wembley Stadium on 3 July that year. Impressive enough; but not the 110,000 ‘actually . . . expected’, and far less than the 120,000 effortlessly achieved just twelve years earlier. Over the whole mission, some 39,000 ‘enquirers’ had come forward to seek further instruction, a figure not dissimilar to that of Graham’s 1954 visit. But, as the Reverend Gerard Irvine of St Cuthbert’s, Earls Court, acknowledged, ‘many of these were in fact the same persons who had “come forward” ’ before; alternatively, they were ‘already committed Christians and not converts’. To a greater extent than he publicly admitted, and to a far greater extent than ever before, Dr Graham was preaching to the converted. No one else was really listening.13 Why not? Graham thought he understood part of the reason. As he ruefully acknowledged, London had become a ‘swinging city’ during the years since his last appearance in the capital. Sex, nudity and licentiousness prevailed – or so everyone said. Naturally, Graham insisted that his presence proved that ‘many thousands were still swinging to a different tune’. But such defensive words reflected a real threat that he would once have confidently confounded. They were also curiously prophetic. Just one month later, John Lennon, while being interviewed by Maureen Cleave in the London Evening Standard, announced to the world that: 10 11

12

13

John Wells, ‘Matchstick Man’, The Spectator, no. 7202, 8 July 1966, 40. For the evidence, see Frank Colquhoun, The Haringey Story: the Official Record of the Billy Graham Greater London Crusade, 1954 (London, 1955), esp. ch. 21, ‘Final Reflections’; naturally, a biased source but, and this is the point, confidently biased. Wells, in fact, wrote a perfectly serious press column for the Spectator at the time; see Simon Courtauld, To Convey Intelligence: the Spectator, 1928–1998 (London, 1999), p. 119. Anon., ‘World Cup Cuts Dr Graham’s Final Audience’, The Times, 4 July 1966, 10.

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Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that. I am right. I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now . . . Jesus was alright but his disciples are thick and ordinary.14

Even then, Lennon’s ego was seldom reckoned small. But, in fairness, he was only responding to comparisons already made by others. Two weeks earlier the comedian Tommy Trinder had observed on television that: ‘The Beatles, ladies and gentlemen [are awesome]. They’re going to have Ringo for Pope. . . . They are. . . . [W]ell, they’ve already got John and Paul’.15 Transported back to the United States of America via the teenage magazine, Datebook, Lennon’s curious experience in inverse evangelism caused something of a media bunfight. As a result, Beatles’ records were temporarily banned on many radio stations. The group’s singles and even albums were widely boycotted. Faced with a potentially serious loss of sales, the ‘Beatles’ office’ felt compelled to deny that any offence had been intended. It insisted instead that the great man had ‘been quoted . . . out of context’, and maintained a ‘profound interest . . . in religion’.16 Writing about the episode in the Spectator just a few days later, David Frost – then in the first age of his mid-Atlantic fame – could not help reflecting on the ‘giant euphemism’ entailed in so disingenuous ‘a recantation’. The fact of the matter was that whether or not such boldly expressed views constituted something less than Lennon’s considered judgement in the matter, they quite adequately reflected the opinions of most of the Beatles’ fans at the time. As one of them put it: ‘Who goes to Church any more except squares?’17 Who indeed? Altogether subtler minds than those of these ingenuous youths were also exploring similarly subversive social sentiments. In the spring of that year, Time magazine ostentatiously broke a forty-three-year tradition of pictorial covers by issuing a black-fronted number bearing the red-letter question: ‘Is God Dead?’18 For once such journalistic hype reflected concurrent sociological analysis. During the very same summer, Bryan Wilson, Reader in Sociology at the University of Oxford, 14

15 16 17 18

Cited in David Frost, ‘John’s Gospel’, The Spectator, no. 7207, 12 April 1966, 198– 9; most references to that episode cited below are gleaned from this article; partly on account of its author (of interest in itself), partly on account of the (surprisingly thoughtful) interpretation offered therein. Frost, ‘John’s Gospel’, p. 198. This episode is related at length in Phil Norman, John Lennon: the Life (London, 2008), pp. 446–8, where the sense of surprise at the reaction caused is quite palpable. Frost, ‘John’s Gospel’, p. 198; Norman, John Lennon, pp. 447–8. Cited in anon., ‘Leading Article – God?’, The Listener, 75, no. 1936, 5 May 1966, 642; see a later reflection on the same issue by David L. Edwards, ‘Is God Dead?’, The Spectator, no. 7223, 2 December 1966, 730.


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published his seminal study on Religion in Secular Society.19 Studiously ignoring the existential provocation of Time’s ephemeral observation, he reached conclusions scarcely less stark than the lazy scribblers who preceded him: It is taken simply as fact that religion – seen as a way of thinking, as the performance of particular practices, and as the institutionalisation and organisation of those patterns of thought and action – has lost influence in both England and the United States in particular, as it has in other western societies.20

That was what Wilson meant by the secularisation of society. He specifically noted that the concept which it embodied was ‘employed neither to applaud its occurrence, nor to deplore it’. That made it no less true. Secularisation was something which had actually happened in the advanced societies. To the degree that this was so, Wilson conceived of his real task more in the exploration of religious response to such change than in the inexorable force of that transformation itself.21 Religion in Secular Society furnished plentiful evidence of religious decline in the West – whether in terms of the declining membership of and affiliation in religious organisations, the diminished status of the clergy or the dilution of religious attitudes throughout the advanced world. But it also examined the concurrent phenomena of ‘ecumenicalism, denominalisation and sectarianism’. These were interpreted as subsidiary reactions, best understood as the characteristic ‘responses’ of besieged institutions ‘in relation to [the] process [and] experience of secularisation’ going on around them.22 Wilson’s views quickly established themselves as the academic orthodoxy in the matter.23 Some initially questioned the universal applicability of his argument, suggesting that what was unquestionable for England was perhaps less obviously true for the whole of the Western world, continental Europe or even Scotland.24 A still smaller number raised the possibility that what was in fact then occurring in Western society was 19

20 22 23 24

Bryan R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society: a Sociological Comment (London, 1966). Wilson was Reader in Sociology at the University of Oxford from 1962 to 1993. At the time of his appointment he held the most senior post in that discipline in Britain’s most ancient university. 21 Ibid., pp. x–xi. Ibid., p. xi. Ibid., p. xi. I hope to treat these developments as historical phenomena in their own right in a future study. They were indeed anthologised just three years later in Roland Robertson (ed.), Sociology of Religion: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 152–62. Jean Séguy, ‘Review 267’, Archives de Sociologie de Religions, 23, January–June 1967, 236–7; John Highet, ‘Book Reviews’, Sociology, 1, 1967, 206–7. The parallels with S. S. Acquaviva, L’Eclissi del sacro nella civiltá industriale (Milan, 1961), are also worth noting, see esp. ch. 2.

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‘[n]ot the replacement of religious ideas of life by similar ideals . . . but merely the transformation, in a period of rapid social change, of the character of religion [itself]’.25 But most concurred with Wilson’s broad conclusions. So too did a more general readership. Reviewing Wilson’s book in the Spectator, the influential religious commentator, Robin Denniston, solemnly observed that, ‘a little over-simplification aside’, the evidence adduced in it, both statistical and quantitative, ‘told its own story’. The fact of the matter was that ‘[s]ecularisation at all levels has reduced to insignificance the religious practices of all but a tiny fraction of the [English] population’.26 In fact, Wilson had erred, if anything, on the side of complication rather than caricature. As a scrupulous sociologist, he properly avoided the question of God’s future state.27 As an honest researcher, he also repeatedly emphasised that the evidence pointed only to the diminished social significance of religion – not to the wholesale disappearance of religious life in advanced societies.28 Finally, he insisted upon the significance of the ‘religious response’ to the ‘changing social order’ which this development implied; in that way also, to the undoubted truth that religious organisations have not been ‘merely passive and acquiescent in the process’.29 So, while his own conclusions, both about the dynamic of such decline and the possibilities of renewal were simultaneously exact and tentative, other similarly respectable but perhaps less cautious observers saw in the same sequence of events something like a defining crisis for the future of indigenous, organised religion. This, by extension, highlighted the need for unprecedented institutional departure. Such, unquestionably, was the tone of a series of articles published in The Times, during the early summer of 1966. These were published under the collective – and provocative – title of ‘Christians Asleep’. They were directed in the first instance to the failing fortunes of the 25

26 27

28 29

Wilson, Religion in Secular Society, p. xv. See, for an example of this argument, Thomas Luckmann, ‘The Decline of Church-Orientated Religion’, in Robertson (ed.), Sociology of Religion, pp. 141–51. Although more far-reaching opposition was expressed, contemporaneously by David Martin, in his article ‘Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularization’, reproduced in Martin, The Religious and the Secular: Studies in Secularization (London, 1969), ch. 1. The significance, impact and evolution of Martin’s contrary arguments are considered below, at pp. 300–2. Robin Denniston, ‘Worthy Progress’, The Spectator, no. 7223, 2 December 1966, 730. Wilson pointedly refrained from expressing any view about the existence, or otherwise, of God; similarly, about the workings of divine intervention or providence, at any point in his professional life (private information). See, for instance, Wilson, Religion in Secular Society, p. xiv; and again, in Bryan R. Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford, 1982), pp. 149–50. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society, p. x.


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Church of England.30 But they presumed a crisis in organised religion more generally. The paper’s staff reporter took it as axiomatic that this venerable institution stood on a ‘slippery slope’ to decline. The facts and figures – from Easter communicants through to clerical candidates – proved as much.31 The archaic anomaly of ecclesiastical provision, whether in redundant buildings or (literally) misplaced clergy, only made things worse.32 Above all, the Church, from top to bottom, through its doctrines, liturgy and organisation, was ‘failing to communicate . . . intelligibly . . . with a secular society’.33 To achieve that, by implication novel, kind of (re)connection, ecumenical effort from on high and sociological awareness in the parishes (good things they might be in themselves) were only so much help. Something really drastic was going to have to be done.34 Mutatis mutandis, the same was true for all the churches in the realm too. Just how revolutionary the proper response might be was suggested through another series of articles (and an equally lively correspondence) concerning the possibility of a new, ‘non-church’ in England, published in the pages of the same newspaper during November 1966.35 There, the Reverend Ray Billington, following a lead by Malcolm Muggeridge, proposed the wholesale rejection of traditional ‘ecclesiasticism’ and its replacement by what he called a ‘non-church’. This, he believed, would be an organisation freed from organisational burdens, or indeed clergy, and devoted to Christian love (Nietzschian style), informal meeting places, and a due consideration of all contemporary ‘personal, social and economic problems’. It would be devoid of hierarchical leadership, in fact, bereft of any permanent institutional existence at all.36 After all, ‘only squares now went to church’. What was more, ‘many church 30

31 33 34 35

36

Anon., ‘[C]hristians [A]sleep I: Facts Make Sombre Reading in Graveyard of Ecclesiastical Hopes’, The Times, 18 May 1966, 11; anon., ‘CA II: Consciences Uneasy About Church’s Immense Capital Gains’, The Times, 19 May 1966, 13; anon., ‘CA III: Roots Go Deep but the Old Tree Could Do with Pruning’, The Times, 20 May 1966, 15; anon., ‘CA IV: Something is Badly Lacking in the Training of the Clergy’, The Times, 21 May 1966, 9; anon., ‘CA V: Colleges Put Their Faith in Theology, Parishes in Sociology’, The Times, 23 May 1966, 10; anon., ‘CA VI: No Doubt About Piece of Advice Towards Unity’, The Times, 24 May 1966, 10; anon., ‘CA VII: Scant Hope for Establishment with Complete Spiritual Autonomy’, The Times, 25 May 1966, 52. 32 Anon., ‘Roots Go Deep’. Anon., ‘Facts Make Sombre Reading’. Anon., ‘Facts Make Sombre Reading’. Anon., ‘Colleges Put Their Faith in Theology’. The Rev. Ray Billington, ‘Five Pointers for the Success of the Non-Church’, The Times, 19 November 1966, 10; A Correspondent, ‘Reasons for Non-Success of the NonChurch’, The Times, 26 November 1966, 10. The related correspondence can be followed in The Times: for 22 November 1966, on p. 11; 24 November, on p. 13; and 25 November, p. 13. Billington, ‘Five Pointers’.

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members [now] recognised’ that fact.37 True Christians were going to have to come to quite different arrangements in future. I What was going on? What had happened? And why so recently? Just eight years before Wilson’s elegiac report, a no less respected Oxford social scientist had discerned ‘some evidence’ of a revival of traditional Christian practices in postwar Britain.38 Scarcely more than a decade before the Reverend Billington decried his own church, the Primate of All England had pronounced it in the rudest good health.39 Dr Argyle’s fleeting discoveries of the mid-1950s proved illusory, even according to his own account.40 Similarly, Dr Fisher’s largely unsubstantiated hopes for Christian renewal among the ‘New Elizabethans’ were quickly dissipated.41 Perhaps as a result, the quiet disappointments of that era were soon consolidated into the noisy defeats of the 1960s. From the very beginning of the decade, all of the protestant churches of England found themselves locked into a process of real, significant and seemingly irreversible decline. This downward drift did not initially take the form of spectacular institutional collapse. It surfaced in a more subtle deprivation of public presence. But it was increasingly experienced in the bitter pill of diminished social prestige. By the mid-1960s organised religion in general was on the skids. The prospect of collective oblivion loomed distressingly large.42 It might profitably be acknowledged that traditional ecclesiastical organisations did not suffer entirely alone in this respect. So-called ‘established’ institutions more generally came under broad-ranging scrutiny, criticism and even abuse during these years.43 This was scarcely surprising. Britain, itself, was apparently in decline too. The ‘great power’ that ‘had lost an empire’ but failed ‘to find a role’ was only matched by an 37 39

40 41 42 43

38 Michael Argyle, Religious Behaviour (London, 1958), pp. 25 and 27. Ibid. See the reflections contained in Edward Carpenter (ed.), The Archbishop Speaks: Addresses and Speeches by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Geoffrey Francis Fisher (London, 1958), ch. 6, ‘The Church and Society’. A later edition of Religious Behaviour, entitled The Social Psychology of Religion (London, 1979), contained no mention of ‘religious revival’. See above, ch. 7, esp. pp. 264–72. For an indicative contemporary flavour, see Anthony Sampson, Anatomy of Britain (London, 1962), ch. 11, esp. pp. 172–3. On which, see above all, Hugh Thomas (ed.), The Establishment: a Symposium (London, 1959). There is surely something revealing about the fact that this, symptomatic, collection contained no article on the contemporary Church of England; indeed, it defined the modern establishment as ‘the assumption of the attributes of State Church by certain powerful institutions and people’, p. 20 (emphasis added).


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erstwhile industrial giant blighted in comparative economic decline.44 So-called ‘anti-establishment’ voices increasingly looked to blame all or any among inherited social institutions for this humiliating state of affairs. For some, that meant criticising England’s amateurish leadership. Harold Wilson made something of a penchant of this at the time. Others were content just to mock the toffs. Think of That Was the Week That Was (TW3).45 A few cast their critical nets wider in order to identify those continuing (and debilitating) class divisions – long rooted in England’s ancien régime but no less corrosively present among its backward-looking trade unions – that were contributing to the creation of a ‘stagnant society’.46 Confronted by this kind of predicament, the most earnest among these new ‘social anatomists’ looked to the possibilities of ‘modernising reform’. The more whimsical turned to ‘satire’.47 The churches in general, and the Church of England in particular, felt the force of these hostile winds. Contemporaries tended to notice the insults rather than the criticism. As late as 1966, the sociologist of religion David Martin complained that ‘our national church is more frequently the subject of literary wit than serious sociological discussion’.48 But one way or another, the tone of such observations sharpened at this time. By 1961 it had become quite common for outside observers openly to decry the anachronistic ‘arrogance’ of an ecclesiastical establishment claiming ‘to co-exist’ with a nation ever more removed from its doors.49 But that vituperation was by no means limited to the views of outsiders, or indeed confined to the relatively simple matter of declining 44

45

46

47 48 49

The infamous (or accurate) observations of Dean Acheson, delivered at the US Military Academy, West Point, on 5 December 1962; for a cool appraisal, see Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: a Life in the Cold War (Oxford, 2006), p. 631. Culminating, of course, in the notorious ‘White Heat of Technology’ speech in September 1963. For an account and a context, see Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson (London, 1992), pp. 269–70 and pp. 301–5. For TW3, see Humphrey Carpenter, That Was the Satire That Was: Beyond the Fringe, the Establishment Club, Private Eye and That Was the Week That Was (London, 2000), pt 3, ch. 2. TW3’s infamous ‘Consumer’s Guide to Religion’ is considered on pp. 244–6, 248, 252–3, 282 and 305 of this work, the ‘Singing Cardinals’ on p. 236 and the ‘Ten Commandments’ on p. 252. The connections between Wilson and TW3 are made quite explicit in Pimlott, Wilson, at pp. 269–70. Michael Shanks, The Stagnant Society: a Warning (London, 1961), see esp. ch. 3; for a complimentary account, see Anthony Hartley, A State of England (London, 1963), esp. chs. 5–7. Carpenter, That Was the Satire That Was; esp. the ‘Prologue’, pp. 3–15. And for a broader account, Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis in the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), pp. 70–3. David Martin, ‘The Unknown Gods of the English’, The Listener, 75, no. 1937, 12 August 1966, 677–9, at 677. Anon., ‘Tilt at Anglican Arrogance’, The Times, 5 September 1961, 13. The ‘tilter’ was Dr John Highet, then Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow and a national religious commentator at the time.

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institutional affiliation. Later the same year, Canon Stanley G. Evans publicly lamented the abject failure of ‘England’s cathedrals’ to confront the ‘key moral questions of the epoch’. These he defined as ‘nuclear warfare, racial discrimination and hangings’.50 This sense that England’s churches had become, as the contemporary cliché had it, ‘out of touch’, permitted irate objection to pass seamlessly into contemptuous caricature. This was not, of course, entirely new. Remember Kind Hearts and Coronets one last time. But it assumed a general coarseness of expression in the early 1960s that is far from wholly captured by fond recollections of those absurdly trendy clergymen sent up by Beyond the Fringe.51 For most real clergymen of the era, it was altogether more perniciously portrayed in the ordinary run of undistinguished broadcasting. So much so that in November 1961 ‘[m]embers of the Church assembly [collectively expressed their] object[ion] . . . to the image of the Anglican person as he appears on the TV screen’. In the words of the Reverend F. Bamber of Blackburn, ‘[h]e is [now] invariably . . . depicted as a well-intentioned blunderer, ineffectual and unable to understand the simplest of human problems’.52 There might have been a reason for this. Even by their own account, ministers and priests increasingly found themselves ‘jack[s] of all trades in an age of experts’.53 They were also the living embodiments of visibly declining institutions. It somehow made matters worse that the decline of England’s indigenous protestant churches seemed, to many, to be both palpable and recent. Certainly, it got publicly noticed, to an unprecedented degree, at this time. The Official Year Book of the Church of England for 1960 revealed that the number of Easter communicants for 1958 was down something like 45 per cent on the figure for 1956.54 A subsequent statistical survey of the Church of England, completed by the statistical unit of its Central Board of Finance, found a still more worrying concomitant (and long-term) diminution in Sunday school numbers for both boys and girls, down to 1959.55 Other, both systematic and cursory, studies revealed related difficulties with recruiting volunteers for

50 51 52 53 54 55

Anon., ‘Cathedrals Failing, Canon Says’, The Times, 30 October 1961, 11. On which, see Carpenter, That Was the Satire That Was, pp. 94ff. Anon., ‘Bias Against Parsons or TV: Appeal by Head of Church Committee’, The Times, 9 November 1961, 7. Anon., ‘Creating a Better Image of Clergy’, The Times, 2 February 1962, 9; based on a volume edited by the Dean of Westminster, The Man He Wants (London, 1962). Anon., ‘Church of England Numbers: 9,748,000 members confirmed’, The Times, 13 January 1961, 14. Anon., ‘Sunday School Decline: Cars Blamed. People No Longer Tied to Town’, The Times, 12 January 1962, 6.


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missionaries overseas and the like.56 More to the point: everything pointed one way and everything pointed down. Could this trend be reversed? Some students of the contemporary ‘managerial revolution’ thought it might.57 To their way of thinking, the fundamental problem of the churches – as of any large organisation in trouble – was to be found in the irrational allocation of its resources. According to the jargon, the Anglican establishment was no longer ‘fit for purpose’. It had become top heavy, immobile and out of date. Its structures no longer reflected the demand for, and supply of, ecclesiastical services properly understood. At least part of the reason for that failure lay in the inadequate flow of information. Much of the cause of this deficiency, in turn, could be traced to the fuddy-duddy prelates and pastors manning its services, many of whom were by now quite literally men in the wrong places. As a result, its goods were poorly marketed. The potential benefits of its products were similarly little known. Something was going to have to change. This kind of analysis, even then all too common in critical surveys of public services in Britain, began to surface in leading ecclesiastical circles at much the same time. It can be found in Crockford’s ferocious assault on an ‘ever increasing bureaucracy’ that marked the modern church; what it called a ‘sclerotic system’ that had created a new ‘class of ecclesiastical administration’, making the very notion of ‘lay control by elected representatives’ even more illusory.58 But it can be seen no less clearly in Crockford’s, ironically often simultaneous, side-swipes at the ‘deliberate cult of amateurishness’ that, it insisted, survived in the Church and enabled ‘clergymen as a whole’ still ‘to think that sufficient moral guidance’ (in the pastoral duties) might be obtained by ‘reading the Bible, saying one’s prayers and using a little commonsense’.59 Confronted by what might be called the paradox of ‘bureaucratic amateurism’, a new breed of ‘[ecclesiastical] planners’ demanded ‘a new religious census’. They sought a systematic survey of indigenous religious beliefs, practices and needs. What they hoped to gain from its findings was the information necessary to permit ‘organised Christianity . . . to do its 56 57

58 59

Anon., ‘Church of England Missions: Lack of Volunteers’, The Times, 2 May 1962, 7. The classic, contemporary, ‘managerial’ text remains Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management (London, 1955), see esp. chs 1–3. It actually refers to the Catholic Church on pp. 140–1 and 201 but not the Church of England. Other works of the time include: Noel Branton, Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Management (London, 1963), see esp. pt I. This list could be expanded almost without limit. Anon., ‘Dangers that Face the Church of England: Bureaucracy and Big Business’, The Times, 1 November 1962, 6. Anon., ‘Church’s Failure Due to “Cult of Amateurishness” Criticism in Crockford’s New Education’, The Times, 5 November 1964, 9.

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job . . . intelligently’. As the ubiquitous Bishop of Middleton put it, ‘such analysis of the Church’, including an exact ‘measurement of its relationship to the community by statistical and other methods of sociological study’ would ‘provide positive means for advance’.60 This might prove still more fruitful if that intelligence was tied, so the Bishop of Coventry suggested, ‘to modern methods’ of marketing, ‘notably broadcasting, newspapers and magazines’.61 The idea of wholesale organisational reformation, integrally allied to commercial principles of provision, found its apotheosis in a document that eventually became known as the Paul Report.62 Dr Leslie Paul’s magisterial Report on the Payment and Deployment of the Clergy was published by the Church Information Office in the early winter of 1964. It was almost immediately hailed as the Church of England’s ‘Beeching’.63 Its eponymous author neither acknowledged nor repudiated the parallel.64 But he proceeded along lines that Dr Beeching would otherwise happily have recognised. In that way, he reached three simple conclusions. The first was that while church membership and church-going were both declining as a result of ‘social influences of an all-embracing character’, those ‘great social changes’ had, in fact, hit the churches ‘most severely in the most densely populated areas’. As such, they (the changes) and it (the effect) both pointed to a fundamental misallocation of ecclesiastical resources sustained by a traditional, that is, the parochial system of distribution.65 Secondly, that in order to cope with this wide-ranging inadequacy, it would be necessary for the Church to create a new parochial form: specifically, the major or corporate parish. In order to achieve that, it would in turn be necessary to remove the distinction between beneficed and unbeneficed men in the Church. By extension, it would also be necessary to end the existing systems of private patronage, lifelong freehold and the rest in order to create a ‘common stipendiary fund’, from which all similarly engaged ‘church workers’ would be paid.66 Thirdly, that the Church might soon 60 61 62 63

64 65 66

Cecil Northcott, ‘Letter’, The Times, 16 January 1962; anon., ‘Sunday School Decline’, 7. Our Correspondent, ‘Modern Ways for Church: Bishop on How to Attract Public’, The Times, 23 October 1962, 6. Leslie Paul, The Deployment and Payment of the Clergy: a Report (London, 1964); see esp. ch. 12, ‘A Summary of Principal Recommendations’. The famous report by Dr Beeching, on the future of the (then nationalised) railway system in Britain. As a result, the system was reduced in size by about one-third. For a context, see Robert Blake, The Decline of Power, 1915–1964 (London, 1985), pp. 415–16. His own view of what he was doing is admirably set out in Paul, Deployment and Payment, pp. 11–16. See Leslie Paul, ‘The Paul Report Examined’, Theology, 68, no. 538, April 1965, 202–6. Paul, Deployment and Payment, ch. 12.


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be obliged to renegotiate the historic relationship between clergy and laity as this had developed since the Reformation. Best practice would increasingly downplay the decaying role of the former whilst tapping the (often neglected) possibilities of the latter, up to and including the ‘possibility of a . . . return to a purely congregational church with a voluntary ministry – in a sense, a return to the first century’.67 It speaks volumes for the massively altered ecclesiastical atmosphere of the age that the typical reaction to Paul’s proposals among thinking Anglicans was less uncomprehending outrage than qualified support. A trenchant editorial in Theology raised ‘Two Cheers for the Paul Report’. It reserved a third hurrah only by insisting that contemporary society’s greatest need lay in a ‘new understanding of the gospel . . . embodied in the common life of today’. In all other respects, it acclaimed the document as furnishing nothing less than ‘established . . . proof’ of the irrationality and ineffectiveness of ‘the present working arrangements of the Church of England’.68 In particular, it supported Paul’s proposals for the abolition of private patronage in the Church; similarly, for the end of the parson’s freehold. Then it peered beyond Paul’s working assumption that ‘the professional clergyman of the familiar type’ still ‘remained the backbone’ of a ‘modern Christian ministry’. To that degree anyway, the journal’s eggheads seemed prepared to embrace at least some of the possibilities of a ‘non-church’ church in the near future. But, at an absolute minimum, they were determined to prepare the intellectual ground for what they hoped might prove the ‘exposure’ of an ‘ecclesiastical state of affairs’ reminiscent of the abuses of the 1830s, prior to the ‘remedies’ then administered by the ‘Ecclesiastical Commission’ of famous (and enduring) memory.69 They awaited comparable reform of the twentieth-century church with similar relish. It says scarcely less about the tone of the times that the principal criticism of Paul’s analysis came not from within the Church – not even from the pen of an outraged, red-faced clergyman – but from a sympathetic sociologist.70 Bryan Wilson’s ‘examination’ of the Paul Report, also commissioned by the editors of Theology, treated Paul’s investigative efforts as if they were a ‘sociological review’ in their own right.71 As such, he found them wanting. First, he objected to a supposedly objective study that 67 68 69 70 71

Ibid. Anon., ‘Editorial: Two Cheers for the Paul Report’, Theology, 67, no. 525, March 1964, 1–2, at 1. Ibid. Bryan Wilson, ‘The Paul Report Examined’, Theology, 68, no. 536, February 1965, 89–103. Ibid., p. 89.

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treated ‘Anglicanism as if it was the only available religious affiliation in England’.72 Then, he questioned the force of an analogy that compared religious allegiance with, for instance, trade union membership.73 Finally, he took exception to the basic presupposition of an inquiry that, he believed, had reversed the proper order between the many and various processes of ‘contemporary social change’ and the actual or alleged ‘inadequacies of Church organisation’. None of this made for a plausible understanding of the recent failings of the Church (and, by extension, other churches) to maintain traditional levels of membership, affiliations and attendance.74 Wilson’s basic point was very simple. This was that the underlying process of secularisation was a far more significant cause of institutional decline than the inherited inadequacies of Anglican organisation.75 His secondary observations were more subtle. He argued that the very notion of ‘misallocated resources’, that is, in the organisation of parishes and the distribution of church workers, was misplaced in this context. This was because it described an apparent ‘discrepancy of activity’ that turned out to be altogether less obvious on closer examination.76 He also suggested that Paul’s proposed changes to the Church itself, above all, in the dilution of the professional standing of the clergy, might actually serve further to diminish the social prestige of that body in the wider community.77 He concluded by pointing out that the very kinds of institutional change Paul suggested for a future church would demand, in effect, the creation of an ecclesiastical civil service. This would almost certainly prove to be of higher social standing, by qualification, remuneration and status, than the erstwhile (and future) priesthood. That could have a truly calamitous impact.78 In his own words, ‘rational reorganisation “so-called” might very well destroy the one, peculiar, asset that the churches still retained: that of an elevated ministry, at once autonomously motivated and especially dedicated to its particular flock’.79 Subsequent exchanges between the two men, and indeed later correspondence between them and others, both throughout the pages of Theology and beyond, added much heat but perhaps less light to the ensuing controversy.80 This was perhaps unsurprising. After all, Wilson’s critique pointed, perhaps for the first time, to the real possibility of indigenous social change progressing beyond the capacity of institutional reform to reverse its most significant – and deleterious – consequences; 72 76 80

73 Ibid., p. 93. 74 Ibid., pp. 95–6. 75 Ibid., pp. 95ff. Ibid., p. 92. 77 Ibid., pp. 99–101. 78 Ibid., p. 102. 79 Ibid., pp. 102–3. Ibid., pp. 97–8. As such, see the ‘Letters to the Editor’ in Theology, for the period from February 1965 to the end of that year.


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conceived, at least, from the point of view of the churches.81 But Wilson, read rightly, said something else too. This was that Paul’s social analysis, shorn of its modern managerial verbiage, amounted to little more than the age-old complaint of a rural church cast among urban heathen. Recall Winnington-Ingram, in 1896. But, as Wilson insisted, the problem was very different now. It was not just that the Church ‘had never had the towns’.82 It was that the Church now had nobody at all, not, anyway, after the fashion that it was used to ‘having’ them. This was a view that found surprising resonance in advanced clerical circles during the early 1960s. Traditional concern for the absent working classes did not entirely disappear from the typical missionary literature of the age. But the characteristic tone of such tracts subtly changed. They tended to describe less the success (or failure) of publicly heralded assaults on traditional bastions of heathen resistance than the possibilities (or otherwise) of surreptitious incursions into indifferent territory, wherever it might be found. As one, well-known, advocate of the new approach put it: ‘the Holy Spirit is as communicable on the floor of a factory as [in] church’.83 More important still, orthodox ecclesiastical understanding of the kind of society from which the church was now detached also changed. That depicted less a world separated into urban and rural (Paul’s fundamental distinction), still less a community divided by riches and poverty, than a modern welfare state populated by an affluent people. This reinterpretation of modern social existence made a huge difference to the plight of the churches who still could not ‘get at them’.84 Put bluntly, the welfare state had put the churches out of a job. Few contemporaries described that development more faithfully than E. R. Wickham, Bishop of Middleton. Thus, he observed, in 1961: In the days in which society at large and the state made minimum provision . . . and care was left to voluntary groups, the church was the major agency of institutional provision for social work, for education, for the poor and aged, the sick and deranged and so on.85

But, ‘progressively and at an accelerating rate since the last war, society itself, through the social services of a welfare state, has set up a complex 81 82 83 84 85

Wilson, ‘The Paul Report Examined’, pp. 95–6. A. F. Winnington-Ingram, Work in Great Cities (London, 1896), p. 22. E. Moore Derby, ‘A Factory Chaplain’, Theology, 66, no. 475, January 1963, 19–21, at p. 21. Ibid., p. 19. E. R. Wickham, ‘The Justification of the Churches’ Engagement in Social Work: Its Dimensions and Modern Operation’, Theology, 64, no. 493, July 1961, 266–71, at 266. For a broader treatment, see McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, pp. 115ff.

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structure to serve personal and social needs’ with the result that ‘so many [of those] services once rendered by the Church are now undertaken by statutory [bodies]’.86 This had become an Anglican commonplace by 1966. It was repeated virtually word for word in the fifth of a series of talks delivered by Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, on the BBC Third Programme that year. This was called ‘On Being a Christian’.87 To be sure, neither Wickham nor Ramsey thereby absolved the churches of their continuing obligations to the remaining unfortunate. That was at least something. A truly abject ‘editorial’ in Theology for January 1962 openly mourned the passing of industrial society’s most ‘pressing problems’– namely, slums, unemployment and conditions of work. It even expressed doubt as to what the ‘pressing problems’ of the modern age might be, ‘given’ the ‘advent of the welfare state and the affluent society’.88 Wickham knew that the Church ‘left to its proper . . . religious . . . responsibility’ still had plenty of work left to do.89 And Ramsey felt sure that no small part of that labour would demand ‘bringing into the welfare state . . . the characteristically Christian thing – a love and reverence for the human personality’.90 Still, the problem of organisational marginalisation remained. For some, the prospect of such subordination was not merely distasteful. It even contained a still more pernicious possibility – that of complete exclusion. Mass affluence complemented by state-sponsored social security minimised the insecurities of life which voluntary organisation had once mediated.91 Together, they also fundamentally altered the priorities of common existence, as experienced in ever more self-sufficient, nuclear households. This combination was potentially fatal for traditional religious organisations. Referring, during the summer of 1960, to ‘the social revolution of the last ten or fifteen years’, the Reverend G. H. Babington, then priest-in-charge at William Temple Church, Sheffield, noted in passing the ‘substitutory impact’ of the postwar welfare state but made altogether more trenchant comment about ‘the age of the affluent society, with its motor cars, television sets and refrigerators’.92 This ‘new 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

Wickham, ‘The Justification of the Churches’ Engagement in Social Work’, pp. 266–7. Michael Ramsey, The Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘On Being a Christian’, The Listener, 75, no. 1932, 7 April 1966, 191–2, at 192. ‘Editorial’, Theology, 65, no. 499, January 1962, 1–2, at 2. Wickham, ‘The Justification of the Churches’ Engagement in Social Work’, p. 261. Ramsey, ‘On Being a Christian’, p. 192. Wickham, ‘The Justification of the Churches’ Engagement in Social Work’, pp. 261–2; cf. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society, pp. xivff. G. H. Babington, ‘The Message of the Church to an Affluent Society’, Theology, 63, no. 481, July 1960, 267–77, at p. 267. For a general discussion of this whole issue, see McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, pp. 107ff.


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prosperity’, he insisted, had changed the culture. There was no point in lamenting that fact. He specifically berated those churchmen of the time who did. But it had left organised religion with a fundamental problem. This was ‘how to baptise the refrigerator’.93 Babington was not being glib. The affluence of the 1950s was real and he understood its progress well. During that decade, average annual per capita income had almost doubled. Expenditure on electrical goods virtually tripled, that on the various forms of private motorised transport increased by a factor of more than nine. Some 600,000 television licences were issued in 1950; 10 million, a few years later.94 As a result, he believed, it was now ‘almost true to say that the poor [were] no longer with us’. Those quasi-religious organisations traditionally aimed at providing for the broader social needs of the ‘lower-classes’, notably ‘youth work and Sunday Schools’, were being rendered ever more redundant.95 More pointedly still, the broader outcome of such generalised prosperity was that ‘people not only spent more on household goods: furniture, carpets and television sets’, they also ‘spent more time at home then they used to’. That unprecedented privatisation of life had already and adversely affected the ‘cinema’ and ‘working men’s clubs’. By the early 1960s, these were experiencing considerable ‘decline in attendance’. But so too, and for many of the same reasons, were ‘the churches’.96 If the privatisation of life was permanent, then the Victorian ideal of the ‘big church’, designed to provide for ‘large crowds’, was also redundant.97 Here lay a profound paradox. England’s population was bigger then ever. But suburbanisation (to some extent) and household privatisation (to a greater degree still) together determined that the ‘large crowd’ no longer defined the ‘culture of . . . affluent society’. This was now increasingly constituted by many ‘small units’. So profound an alteration in the fundamentals of life did not necessarily render the churches irrelevant. To the contrary. The ‘new poverty of affluence’, that of neurosis, loneliness and disappointment, pointed to their potentially ‘redemptive’ functions within a ‘new quality of life’.98 Nor did it necessarily demand that the churches change their message. Evangelicalism did not have to become therapy.99 But it did cry out for ‘new methods of presenting that doctrine . . . in line with the changed state of society’.100 What were these ‘new methods’? Anticipating the Paul Report, Babington argued for an enlarged role for the laity within the successful churches of the future. Going beyond the specific proposals of a tentative sociologist, he also 93 95 97

Babington, ‘The Message of the Church’, p. 267. Babington, ‘The Message of the Church’, p. 268. 98 Ibid., p. 277. 99 Ibid., p. 267. Ibid., p. 270.

94 96

Ibid., pp. 267–8. Ibid., p. 269. 100 Ibid.

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identified underutilised possibilities for new ‘technologists’ and ‘industrial workers’ in this respect.101 Then he started getting radical. Secondly, Babington suggested that the Church should ‘establish cells within parishes’, making ‘the small group’ the ‘norm for church membership’. This was the solution to bringing ecclesiastical organisation into line with contemporary existence. Finally, he pointed to the television as ‘one way of preaching The Kingdom to a home-centred society’.102 This was stirring stuff. Earlier that very same year, more traditionally minded clergy in 600 parishes of the Norwich diocese had conducted a survey to discover whether television was ‘the cause’ of a ‘falling off’ in attendance in Sunday Evening services throughout East Anglia. They had certainly not intended to recommend the option.103 But the balance of contemporary argument quickly moved Babington’s way. Within a very short time, progressive clerical opinion had ceased to treat the televisual media as a threat and came to see them as vital resources for modern evangelism. So it increasingly highlighted the inadequacy of normal clerical performances on ‘the box’. It was all very well to appeal to the people directly, in their homes, at their leisure. But if the churches did so badly, then this effort might easily alienate more people, especially among the younger audience, than it attracted. The churches increasingly set about ‘improving their performance’ in this critical medium. The Archbishop of York met the singer Adam Faith on Meeting Point and discussed the great questions of life and death with him. Other, similar, experiments quickly followed. Few seemed to have much positive effect.104 One, especially innovative, churchman popped up to explain why. His name was Bishop John Robinson. The book he wrote about it all was called Honest to God.105

II It was, in so many ways, such an unremarkable effort. Honest to God was little more than an extended essay. In it Robinson advanced no original arguments, either about the nature of God or man’s continuing obligations to Him. Some ‘[s]ober-minded commentators’ pointed out that, 101 103 104 105

102 Ibid., p. 269. Ibid., p. 270. Anon., ‘News in Brief’, The Times, 2 April 1960, 4. Peter Forster, ‘All About Adam’, The Spectator, no. 6971, 2 February 1962, 139; Donald J. Drew, ‘All About Adam’, The Spectator, no. 6972, 9 February 1962, 171. John A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, Honest to God (London, 1963). There is a detailed account of this affair in Eric James, A Life of Bishop John A. T. Robinson: Scholar, Pastor and Prophet (London, 1987), ch. 6, pp. 115ff. For an early judgement, see Levin, The Pendulum Years, pp. 109ff.


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judged as a work of scholarship, it constituted no more than a successful exercise in ‘bringing to public notice . . . questions which have been vexing the world of theological study for a long time’.106 One, slightly catty, reviewer could not help remarking that the Bishop of Woolwich’s achievements, even in this regard, not only displayed clear evidence of ‘being somewhat hurriedly written,’ but seemed to rely ‘rather heavily on continual . . . quotation from Tillich, Bonhoeffer and Bultmann’.107 Another reflected on the supreme irony of an old ‘theological tradition’ – he meant the German, protestant, heritage – one which had once taught men to think so little of ‘man’s secular activity’ in God’s scheme of things, now come full circle in its contemporary, English dispensation by ‘finding no use for the word God’ as men came to terms ‘with the [modern] world.’108 A few were genuinely critical of what he said. The high churchman Eric Mascull berated Robinson for ‘not being revolutionary enough’. He had merely secularised theology, when the real task was to conceive of a ‘theology of the secular’. A lapsed Catholic, Alasdair Macintyre, denounced a superficially radical religious tract that advanced ‘no new social message for Christianity’.109 Even the less acute could not help noticing that the book made few concrete recommendations concerning Robinson’s preferred future state for the Church of England. Perhaps that was why the Reverend Bruce Kenrick rather mischievously suggested that its author ‘[m]ight wish to follow the Rector of Woolwich’s lead and become the first modern bishop not to be paid by the church’.110 Robinson could by then easily have afforded the relatively trivial loss of income involved. Honest to God sold 350,000 copies during 1963 alone.111

106 107

108 109 110 111

Rt Rev. F. A. Cockin, ‘Clerical Honesty’, The Listener, 72, no. 1850, 14 September 1964, 377–8, at 372. F. A. Cockin, ‘Review of Honest to God’, Theology, 66, no. 516, June 1963, 254–6, at 255. For an account of Robinson’s intellectual training, see James, Bishop Robinson, ch. 2. Note in particular the Bishop’s remarkable (on the face of it) course of readings undertaken during the long vacation of 1940 (i.e. during the ‘Battle of Britain’), outlined on pp. 12–14. Eric Mascull, ‘Faith and Fashion’, The Listener, 74, no. 197, 23 December 1965, 1019– 21, at 1021. Ibid. Alasdair Macintyre, ‘God and the Theologians’, Encounter, 21, no. 120, September 1963, 3–10, at 4; cf. Robinson, Honest to God, ch. 6. The Reverend Bruce Kenrick, ‘Clergy without Stipends?’, The Listener, 73, no. 1890, 17 June 1965, 886–9 at 889. Robin Denniston, ‘A South Bank Catechism’, The Spectator, no. 7007, 6 December 1963, 763. Robinson received over a thousand letters over the same period; see James, Bishop Robinson, p. 124.

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It also caused such a furore that Robinson and his collaborator, David L. Edwards, issued a second, discursive, volume, The Honest to God Debate, the same year.112 The editors of Theology loftily remarked that this debate eventually ‘proved of more intrinsic interest than the book itself’.113 But Bishop Cockin paid the author a greater compliment than he knew when, in discussing Robinson’s initial salvo, he observed that it was ‘by now well-nigh impossible to be sure whether one is reviewing the book or the controversy which has been stirred since its publication’.114 So, if Robinson was unoriginal and even slapdash, he was also very timely. Whatever it was he said, it must have been something that a lot of people were thinking. He certainly touched a raw nerve. That was how he managed to pen the controversial bestseller of the age. This was why ‘the consequences of publication’ were ‘out of all proportion to what the author [could] have anticipated or intended’.115 But what did he say? Not, in truth, exactly what he had originally planned to say. The as yet still obscure Dr Robinson first submitted an article for publication in the Observer newspaper on ‘A New Mutation in Theology’. Its wily editor substituted that title (apparently against the author’s wish) with the rather more catching ‘Our Image of God Must Go’.116 This piece of occasional journalism became the hastily written Honest to God. The rest is history.117 But it was a tale with a context. For one reason or another, the chattering classes had taken up the question of His past (and future) presence with some degree of vengeance around that time. As a matter of fact, Robinson was far from alone in catering to it. Professor David Thompson recalled a course of lectures entitled ‘Objections to Christian Belief’, given by Professor Donald MacKinnon, Harry Williams, Dr Alec Vidler and J. S. Beazley during February of that year in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge. They were attended by about 1,500 persons per week. This figure represented something between 12.5 and 20 per cent of the entire student body of the university. They were published by Constable in April 1963 and reprinted three

112

113 114 116 117

John A. T. Robinson and David L. Edwards, The Honest to God Debate (London, 1963); see also the account in James, Bishop Robinson, pp. 124–5. For another kind of context, see Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, pp. 190–1; or McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, pp. 87–8. Anon., ‘Editorial’, Theology, 67, no. 523, January 1964, 1–2 at 1. 115 Anon., ‘Editorial’, p. 1. Cockin, ‘Review of Honest to God’, p. 254. Anon., ‘A Spectator’s Notebook’, The Spectator, no. 7562, 1 November 1963, 551. John A. T. Robinson, ‘Our Image of God Must Go’, The Observer, 17 March 1963, 12; James, Bishop Robinson, pp. 115ff. The book was published on 19 March 1963, just two days after The Observer article.


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times in two weeks. All of this occurred before the appearance of Honest to God.118 It was to these kinds of people that Robinson had addressed his original arguments. This was scarcely remarkable. He had emerged from their sophisticated and sceptical milieu.119 He was in many ways at home among the Observer’s superior readership.120 The very first thing he told them was something that such people most generally like to hear; namely, that theirs was an altogether new, special age.121 More specifically, it was a secular age, characterised by a ‘humanistic’ e´ lite and a ‘pagan’ mass.122 The second thing that he told them was that in this unprecedented dispensation, increasingly defined by those sorts of attitudes, the ‘true defence’ of Christian faith demanded a ‘radical recasting . . . of the most fundamental categories of our theology – [of] God, of the supernatural and of religion itself’.123 Finally, he insisted that all of this would involve a complete rewriting of the doctrinal, liturgical and even organisational presuppositions of ‘Christian truth’. Just for starters, he promptly repudiated the ‘three-decker’ universe ‘of heaven above, the earth beneath and waters under the earth’; also the ‘supernatural’, ‘mystical’ and even, perhaps, the ‘religious’ aspects of religion and left his readers only ‘the radical ethic of the situation, with nothing prescribed – except love’.124 Even this most earnest ecclesiastic cannot have been entirely surprised that his message offended so many practising Christians at the time. A beautifully sly commentary by Robin Denniston reckoned that the range of the insulted comprehended not only orthodox high churchmen (for its assault on their Catholic faith), but also traditional Evangelicals (for its obvious doctrinal heresy) and finally, ‘central Church people’ (for its determined repudiation of ‘the simple faith of simple people’).125 This may not have bothered Robinson too much. Like so many concerned clergymen of the age, he professed to be more anxious about the twenty-four out of twenty-five in the population who ‘failed to observe the 118

119

120

121 124 125

David M. Thompson, ‘Epilogue’, in David M. Thompson Cambridge Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Enquiry, Controversy and Truth (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 187–8, at p. 187. For background, see McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, pp. 79–80. Though one should not overstate this aspect of his upbringing; certainly not according to subsequent perspective. Robinson was educated at Marlborough, Jesus College, Cambridge and Westcott House – a very conventional training for Anglicans of his class and generation. See James, Bishop Robinson, pp. 10–17. On which, see Richard Cockett, David Astor and the Observer (London, 1991), chs. 5 and 8. Curiously, the Honest to God furore passes entirely unmentioned in this account; an affair of the time, clearly. 122 Ibid., p. 8. 123 Ibid., p. 7. Robinson, Honest to God, p. 7. Ibid., pp. 11–12, 29–38 and 116–21. Denniston, ‘A South Bank Catechism’, p. 763; James, Bishop Robinson, pp. 115ff.

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statutory minimum by attending Holy Communion on Easter Day’.126 Yet his confession that ‘not infrequently, as I watch or listen to a broadcast discussion between a Christian and a humanist, I catch myself realising that most of my sympathies are on the humanist’s side’, still more his insistence that, ‘among one’s intelligent non-Christian friends, one discovers many who are far nearer to the kingdom of heaven then they can credit’, may have won him fewer new friends than he expected.127 As Eric Mascull observed, it often had the effect of simply ‘exasperating high principled atheists and agnostics’ as well.128 The second and third of Robinson’s arguments never commanded much general conviction. But his opening observations – about the state of the world in which Christian witness now found itself – struck a chord on both sides of the theological and observational divide. This tune endured. Almost overnight, it became educated common sense to describe contemporary England as a secular society. Introducing the Honest to God Debate, the Reverend David Edwards took it as axiomatic that ‘Christians should now enter into a real conversation with the more typical citizens of our secular society’.129 The Reverend Eric Mascull, who might have engaged in a very different debate given half a chance, none the less conceded from the outset that ‘we live in a thoroughly secularised age’.130 Even the Archbishop of Canterbury now openly acknowledged that what he preferred to call ‘humanism’ is ‘a very popular creed today’.131 So ordinary had this conclusion become that a leader in the Spectator for March 1964 remarked without qualification that ‘we now . . . live in a post-Christian society’.132 A few, determined, clergymen still manfully resisted the new state of affairs this conclusion implied. The Reverend Bruce Kenrick berated what he saw as a new ‘arrogance [or ignorance] on the part of those Church leaders who took it for granted that, because membership of the organised Church was declining, the country was becoming less and less Christian’.133 Some social commentators – Alasdair Macintyre was only the most prominent among them – insisted that while ‘Dr Robinson wrote as if the secularisation of the modern world [was] an accomplished and 126 127 129 130 131 132 133

Robin Denniston, ‘The State of the Church’, The Spectator, no. 7015, 7 December 1962, 902–3, at 902. 128 Mascull, ‘Faith and Fashion’, p. 1009. Robinson, Honest to God, p. 8. Edwards, ‘Introduction’, The Honest to God Debate, p. 24; James, Bishop Robinson, pp. 125ff. Mascull, ‘Faith and Fashion’, p. 1009. Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘Problems about Men’, The Listener, 75, no. 1930, 24 March 1966, 441–2, at 441. Anon., ‘The Millions Who Stay Away’, The Spectator, no. 7083, 27 March 1964, 403. Kenrick, ‘Clergy without Stipend?’, p. 886.


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recognised fact’, it was at least possible that ‘England [was] an untypical country’ in this respect. He also noted that even England was ‘far from being completely secularised’.134 Colin MacInnes, in the Spectator, and David Martin, in the Listener, agreed.135 Their problem was that they found themselves arguing the case against the best informed ‘clerical opinion’ of the age. And there was something else. In their opposition to the ‘secularising orthodoxy’, they pointed less to an untapped popular protestantism than to a ‘layer of folk religion’ still abroad in the land. This, as they rightly insisted, was not something remotely probed by standard survey questions concerning the divinity of Christ. However, it did not suggest much in the way of potential re-conversion either.136 What did it amount to? Many now resolved to find out. For perhaps the first time since Rowntree’s pioneering labours of the early 1950s, social scientists determined to discover what (if anything) remained of the erstwhile ‘Protestant Capital of the world’.137 The results of their explorations were published in scientific journals, magazines and even newspapers up and down the land during the early 1960s. Much of this work was summarised in the pages of New Society between late 1962 and mid-1965.138 Initial findings were far from clear. Early salvos, from Dr C. C. Harris of University College, Swansea and Dr John Highet of Glasgow, certainly pointed to the peculiar detachment of the English people from organised faith. In that way they tended to contrast metropolitan indifference with the continuing faithfulness of the Celtic fringe.139 Some studies, notably that by Dr D. S. Wright of the University of Warwick, on ‘How Schoolboys Feel about Religion’, at least partially corroborated 134 135

136 137

138

139

Macintyre, ‘God and the Theologians’, p. 7. Colin MacInnes, ‘A Kind of Religion’, The Spectator, no. 7023, 1 February 1963, 125–7, at 125; Martin, ‘The Unknown Gods of the English’. For the extraordinary response to the MacInnes article, see Alec Vidler, Nick Earle, T. Corbishley and Margaret Knight, ‘A Kind of Religion’, The Spectator, no. 7024, 8 February 1963, 163–4. Martin, ‘The Unknown Gods of the English’, p. 677. One of the first of these efforts was based, quite explicitly, on a sociological analysis of the four thousand letters Robinson eventually received as a result of Honest to God; see Robert Towler, The Need for Certainty: a Sociological Study of Conventional Religion (London, 1964), passim; also James, Bishop Robinson, pp. 126ff. Paul Barker (ed.), One for Sorrow, Two for Joy: Ten Years of New Society (London, 1972); see Barker, ‘Introduction’ for an outline of the ‘social scientific’ purpose of the magazine, as originally intended, pp. 11–21, at p. 11. Yet, curiously, the first editor made little mention of the ‘religious bias’ of the early articles in the magazine – a sure sign of just how quickly this particular controversy died down, scarcely less, evidence of how little this kind of publication took religion seriously, from around the mid-1960s onwards. C. C. Harris, ‘Church, Chapels, and the Welsh’, New Society, 1, no. 21, 21 February 1963, 18–19; John Highet, ‘Churchgoing in Scotland’, New Society, 2, no. 65, 26 December 1963, 13–19.

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traditional clerical opinion that, while few amongst the juvenile population expressed much interest in religion, ‘three-quarters indicated some degree of belief in God’. Still, and ominously as it turned out, Wright found ‘little evidence that [such] beliefs were in any way influenced by school activities’, that is, through morning assembly and compulsory religious instruction, as laid down by the 1944 Education Act.140 Later investigations demonstrated an ever-increasing proportion of agnostics and humanists among the university population at least, up to 34 per cent of Oxford in 1961.141 Then a pivotal study of ‘What Sort of People’ the English were, published in May 1963, found that fully 60 per cent then believed that ‘traditional Christian morality’ was effectively ‘moribund’ in modern English society.142 Not every reader accepted the apparent force of these findings. A. E. C. W. Spencer of the Newman Demographic Society denounced New Society itself, condemning the messenger as an insidious ‘mouthpiece of progressive, sceptical, agnostic and atheistic thinkers’ up and down the land.143 He may have had a point. When Ronald Goldman posed the question, ‘Do We Want Our Children To Be Taught About God?’ in New Society’s pages on 27 May 1965, he dutifully reported that the overwhelming majority still did. In fact, they still wanted their children to be taught the Christian version only. But he could not help adding how the trend – by geographical concentration (the south-east of England), age (young versus old) and education (advanced versus rudimentary) – still pointed downwards.144 Such trends seemed to matter more than the underlying facts when New Society sponsored a great national debate, designed to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of Butler’s great Education Act. It all began with a seemingly ingenuous reappraisal of the Act itself. This quickly developed into an altogether more formal reappraisal about the proper (religious) ends of education in an (apparently) secular society. It ended in a profound – if unsatisfactory – stand-off about the likely religious direction of the English people over the next generation. The controversy may be traced to an otherwise blamelessly balanced leader, studiously devoted to the timely question of ‘Religion in Schools’, and published in New Society on 16 April 1964.145 The editor’s argument was simplicity 140 141 142 143 144 145

D. S. Wright, ‘How Schoolboys Feel about God’, New Society, 1, no. 8, 22 November 1962, 27. A. S. ‘Some of the Answers’, New Society, 1, no. 37, 13 June 1963, 28. R. F. Kelvin, ‘Here is What Sort of People’, New Society, 1, no. 32, 9 May 1963, 8–14, at 10. A. E. C. W. Spencer, ‘Religion Rampant’, New Society, 1, no. 38, 28 June 1963, 28–30. Ronald Goldman, ‘Do We Want Our Children Taught About God?’, New Society, 5, no. 139, 27 May 1965, 8–14, at 10. Anon., ‘Religion in Schools’, New Society, 3, no. 81, 16 April 1964, 3.


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itself. That fateful anniversary, he insisted, could not ‘but help’ raise ‘the whole question of religious place in education’. There were, he observed, by then three broadly held views: first, that ‘all children’ should be so taught, ‘willy-nilly’; secondly, that ‘no religious instruction of any kind’ should be offered in state schools; thirdly, that ‘parents and children should be able to choose’ whether (and what kind) of religious instruction the young actually received at taxpayers’ expense. Noting what it presumed without justification to be the ‘obviously unsatisfactory’ compromise embodied in the 1944 Act – namely, that of vague prescription tempered by individual exemption – New Society then offered its thoughtful readers a clear alternative between a (frankly impractical) ‘parental choice’ and the (reasonably substantiated) ‘repeal of the present religious requirements of the 1944 Act’. The article concluded that the best way forward might simply be to ‘leave the matter to individual schools’, much like ‘games and other extra-curricular activities’. The only clear judgement it reached was that ‘the present situation is anomalous’. With that, the magazine waited for its readers’ response.146 This was not long in coming. Ironically, the first intervention was made by ‘a Catholic parent’, who lamented the methods of financing ‘schools fixed under the 1944 . . . Act’. He believed that burden thereby placed upon the Catholic hierarchy had effectively denied him and others ‘choice in education’.147 So idiosyncratic a reaction may have initially unnerved some of the journal’s core readership. But not for long; in fact, it seems only to have stimulated New Society’s more typical, that is, unbelieving, subscribers into vigorous dissent. G. T. Kingsley retorted that he saw ‘little justification for the plea that [an] effectively non-Christian majority ought to spend even more on denominational schools for religion which they reject’.148 David Tribe took the argument one stage further. In his own words, ‘[t]he job of a day school is to teach only subjects of universal validity and acceptability’. Since ‘most citizens today are not members of Christian communities’, he thought we should ‘settle for the role of religion as . . . an extra-curricular activity’.149 None of which would probably have mattered very much – New Society was, after all, something of a minority publication even in those days – had not the same debate passed seamlessly into altogether (religiously) more respectable journals. Theology devoted the substantial bulk of its 146 147 148 149

Ibid. ‘A Catholic Parent’ in ‘Welfare and Work: Denominational Schools: On from 1944’, New Society, 3 no. 81, 16 April 1964, pp. 18–19. G. T. Kingsley, ‘Religion in Schools’, New Society, 3, no. 82, 23 April 1964, 31. David Tribe, ‘Religion in Schools’, ibid., pp. 31–2.

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pages during the summer of 1965 to a debate on the question of religious education in schools. Superficially, this took the form of an open-ended examination into a benevolent piece of social engineering now ‘come of age’.150 In reality, it was organised in the wake of New Society’s earlier survey and, rather more specifically, in response to contemporary fears that the ‘threat to remove the specifically Christian element from the school curriculum’, recently made real in Sweden, might easily be replicated in England under a new socialist administration.151 That sense of what might be called aggrieved urgency was perfectly captured in the Bishop of London’s opening observation that ‘a few years ago it would have been almost an academic question to ask why there should be a religious basis of English education’.152 The elegiac implication of these remarks was clear: by now, it was not. In the Bishop’s own words, ‘[t]he religious provisions of the Education Act of 1944 were based upon [the] assumption that the nation limited religious education in its schools . . . Today, the assumption of 1944 does not go unchallenged’.153 Why was that? The Bishop himself offered few explanations. He was more concerned simply to re-affirm a robust defence ‘for retaining the Christian basis of education in [maintained] schools’.154 Ms Kathleen Bliss, Secretary of the Church Assembly Board of Education, was unwilling to acknowledge that many contemporary ‘Humanists’ rejected ‘religious instruction and worship in state schools [as] wrong in principle’. Still, she could not help noticing that a recent address by Mr Harold Pinter to a meeting during the course of National Secular Week, during which the acclaimed playwright had denounced the teaching of the Christian religion in the state’s schools as ‘an affront’, amounting to ‘brainwashing’, had in fact been addressed ‘[t]o an audience . . . only 19 . . . members strong (and according to The Times Educational Supplement one of them seemed to be a Christian)’.155 Bishop Cockin, however, took the ideas of the Act’s ever more numerous opponents seriously. He explored some of the possible reasons for its failure to restore a general consensus in favour of Christian values in postwar Britain. In so doing, he also pointed (subtly but sadly) to underlying social and spiritual changes throughout the realm that now threatened its continued provenance. He had no doubt that the 1944 Act 150 151 152 153 155

Bishop F. A. Cockin, ‘The Education Act Comes of Age’, Theology, 68, no. 541, July 1965, 315–22. Editorial, ‘Religion in Schools’, Theology, 68, 313–15, at 315. The Bishop of London, ‘A Christian Basis for Religious Education’, 68, 327–32, at 327. 154 Ibid., p. 332. Ibid., p. 327. Kathleen Bliss, ‘Should the 1944 Act be Changed?’, Theology, 68, 323–7, at 324.


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had been the product of a ‘sincere and widespread desire to make official acknowledgement of the Christian basis of [common] education as one contribution to making good the moral wastage of the war years’.156 Nor, of course, did the Bishop of London. He pointed to the 1943 White Paper with its reference to a widely acknowledged ‘desire to revive spiritual and personal values’ throughout the land.157 But Cockin knew the times had changed. So too had values. That meant Christians should now properly address themselves to the question whether ‘the methods adopted for the purposes were well designed to achieve [this] desired aim’. At least some part of the solution to this problem would necessarily involve a re-examination of the underlying basis of that informing presupposition itself. Did such a desire still exist? If so, was it still widespread? Finally, were the English people still sincere in wanting to educate their children as Christians? Perhaps not. Cockin noted that 1944 had been forged within ‘a spirit of interdenominational co-operation’ which had also ‘commend[ed] itself to the teaching profession’, as then constituted.158 A simple survey of the relevant opinion had proved ‘91 per cent [of it] in favour of the religious provisions of the Act’.159 Recent, anecdotal, evidence suggested that this degree of professional consensus no longer existed.160 More to the point, the latest psychological research indicated that the fundamental core of the agreed curriculum – biblical teaching – now proceeded upon an assumption of ‘ready-made acceptance of the authenticity, authority and relevance’ of that text, which had long ceased to operate.161 It was not so much that everyman had since become his (or her) own interpreter as that: the decline of religious belief and practice among the people in our country . . . above all . . . the disappearance of home religion [and] the loss of the Biblical background . . . had ceased . . . to make the typical Biblical reference immediately recognisable . . . and in so doing deprived . . . the use of such reference to national authority and relevance.162

This may have suggested the need for new methods of teaching religious faith in schools. No less importantly – and perhaps rather more profoundly – it also pointed to: a ‘thinning out’ of [common] Christian belief [and] the dilution of the idea of God, the effect of which [is] to rob many parents of any capacity, or even 156 157 158 159 161

Cockin, ‘The Education Act Comes of Age’, p. 316. Bishop of London, ‘A Christian Basis for English Education’, p. 329. Cockin, ‘Review of Honest to God’, p. 316. 160 Ibid. Bliss, ‘Should the 1944 Act be Changed?’, p. 323. 162 Ibid., p. 320. Cockin, ‘The Education Act Comes of Age’, pp. 318ff.

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inclination to provide the ground in which the religious ideals presented in school can root themselves in the life of the home.163

No wonder Billy Graham had so much trouble rousing the religious enthusiasm of these people the following year. III By no means all religious sociologists, let alone committed clergymen and evangelical missionaries, accepted the ‘secularisation thesis’ as outlined in Wilson’s academic survey.164 His severest scholarly critic at the time was Dr David Martin of the London School of Economics.165 Dismissing the very idea of general secularisation as just ‘the talk . . . of humanists and existential theologians’, he had repeatedly pointed both to the ‘unknown . . . Protestantism’, and to a surviving ‘layer of folk religion’, that still thrived under the radar of ‘contemporary . . . social surveys’.166 Martin acknowledged the increasing unimportance of those ‘formal [religious] arrangements’, represented by ‘churches, worship and liturgy’ in the devotional life of the people. But he insisted on the surviving significance of auxiliary organisations: Sunday schools, Scout troops, young wives’ clubs and the like.167 In the same way, he accepted as a matter of fact the passing significance of doctrine but alluded to the ‘vitality of song’, specifically to the ‘amateur choral choir’, in continuing the life of ‘English protestant culture’.168 Finally, he frankly conceded that ‘large sections of the population now believed both ‘in personal providence’ and ‘impersonal fate’; in effect, calling themselves Christian, and even thinking of themselves as protestants, whilst actually clinging to a ‘pre-Christian religion’, best interpreted through the ‘superstitious paraphrases of Catechism’.169 Aspects of this argument had long since been current in English Christian circles. Partly as a result, the self-conscious translation of protestant differentiation into common Christian witness had acquired something akin to official sanction many years earlier.170 Wisely so, for the very idea 163 164 165

166 169 170

Ibid. Note Martin, ‘Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularization’, and more generally, the articles collected in his, The Religious and the Secular, esp. pts I and II. Where, according to his own account, Martin enjoyed a lively contemporary debate on the matter with his colleague, Ernest Gellner. See Martin, The Religious and the Secular, p. 1. 167 Ibid., p. 678. 168 Ibid. Martin, ‘The Unknown Gods of the English’, p. 677. Ibid. The article was reproduced in Martin, The Religious and the Secular, ch. 8. Anon., ‘Dr Fisher Says “Out of Date”: Words, Catholic and Protestant’, The Times, 11 January 1961, 14.


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of protestantism itself had come to assume far from wholly admirable qualities in the eyes of many Englishmen (and women) of the age. This was particularly true for their vision of protestant dissent. As David Jenkins put it: ‘the image conjured up in the mind of the average [person] by the words “the Nonconformist Churches” [is] that of an angry and self-righteous father, turning his errant daughter and baby out into the snow’.171 In part that sour caricature reflected the broader decline of English nonconformity, both as a ‘centre of anti-establishment culture’ and a vehicle of progressive social and political ideals. This was what Christopher Driver meant when he referred to its ‘failure to assimilate with the best of the modern world’.172 But to no lesser degree, it reflected a much more general rejection of moralistic religion which the collapse of one particular strand of the indigenous protestant tradition only highlighted. This might better be understood as the failure of all inherited English, protestant faiths to comprehend the imperatives of contemporary existence.173 That mattered because Martin’s analysis, on more careful inspection, actually pointed to aspects of contemporary degeneration that went far beyond either institutional decline or dogmatic atrophy. In judging the vitality or otherwise of folk faiths, sociological commentators had long since learned to distinguish not just between institutionally grounded and vaguely apprehended beliefs, but also between what might otherwise have been dismissed as mutually contradictory attitudes. And there was more. They had come to appreciate the real differences in the characteristic, or at least the conventional, inherited faithfulness of men and women.174 Partly as a result, their studies increasingly concentrated on the religiosity of modern boys and girls. Every reliable account pointed to higher ‘religious scores’ among teenage girls.175 But as Martin turned his mournful gaze from ‘the contracting influence of the Sunday School’, even beyond the slowly diminishing significance of the ‘amateur choral society’, so he noted the changing cultural role of women in English society. At which point, he began to worry. He accepted as ‘a universal fact’ that in all hitherto existing societies ‘religious practice’ had ‘largely transmitted’ through the ‘female’. That fact, in turn, had demanded a traditional demarcation of roles, in which the young male had assumed the ‘instrumental and associative’, the young female ‘the expressive and

171 172 173 174

David Jenkins, ‘The Free Churches and the Future’, The Spectator, no. 7015, 7 December 1962, 903. Christopher Driver, A Future for the Free Churches (London, 1962), p. 84. Anon., ‘Teenagers and Religion’, The Listener, 75, no. 1930, 28 March 1966, 434. 175 Ibid. Martin, ‘The Unknown God of the English’, p. 679.

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the passive’ – and therefore the religious – functions of the household.176 Dr Martin could not help noticing that it was precisely this differentiation of roles that was now breaking down among ‘large segments’ of Britain’s younger population. He could also not help noticing that the ‘doctrinal confusion’ of ‘sexual motifs’ among ‘contemporary adolescents’ constituted something more than an affront to the uptight morals of their parents. In fact, it sounded the death-knell of received religion. Less than a decade later, Professor Martin effectively abandoned his erstwhile opposition to the secularisation thesis.177 176 177

Ibid. David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford, 1978), at p. xi and ch. 2, esp. These conclusions were based on Martin’s Cadbury Lectures, delivered in the University of Birmingham, for 1972–3. A not dissimilar argument is put – albeit in a very different way – in Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, pp. 179–80 and 191–2. I hesitate to say ‘entirely abandoned’. It is by no means clear that Martin has done that.

Conclusion: the passing of protestant England

‘The life of nations, no less than that of men, is lived largely in the imagination.’ This is, perhaps, particularly true of its religious life.1 It was definitely the case for the life of protestant England, c. 1920–1960. The characteristic faith of this land during those years will never be captured solely in the solid things that can be subsequently counted. It was sustained as much through those elusive images in the mind’s eye of committed Christians as in the concrete facts of common cultural life. Protestant England was never something that once just happened. Nor was it merely, as fashionable explanation now has it, a historical construct. It was also – and always – a living aspiration. In some parts of the land, it still is. No small part of the passing of protestant England should be sought in the exhaustion of that hope; alternatively, in the evaporation of an illusion.2 The precise origins of neither will ever be dated with any real degree of precision. Nor, indeed, can the emergence of protestant England itself. This has been traced to the eruption of Lollardy in the later medieval kingdom.3 Other accounts date it back no further than the popular impact

1

2

3

J. Enoch Powell, ‘Pride and Achievement’, in J. Enoch Powell, A Nation Not Afraid: the Thinking of Enoch Powell, ed. John Wood (London, 1965), ch. 13, at p. 136. There remains some doubt as to whether these words were first uttered at Trinity College, Dublin, at the end of 1964, or as a part of Powell’s famous St George’s Day address, delivered on 22 August 1961; on which, see Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: the Life of Enoch Powell (London, 1998), pp. 334–40, and p. 982, n. 1. It is clear that Powell presumed no peculiarly religious definition to his terms; but no less clear that his concept of English identity was Anglican. For commentaries worthy of the problem, see Roger Scruton, The Philosopher on Dover Beach: Essays (London, 1990), ch. 1; Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (New York, 1966), ‘Introductory: Toward a Theory of Culture’; and Mark Pattison, Memoirs (London, 1885), pp. 323ff. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 2nd edn (London 1989), ch. 3. For the contrary view, see Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975), pt III, and many subsequent works. More broadly, compare Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), esp. ch. 3 with J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), esp. chs. 7 and 8.

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The passing of protestant England

of nineteenth-century urban evangelisation.4 Contemporaries and chronicles alike have pointed to the significance of 1534 (separation from Rome), 1559 (the Elizabethan settlement), perhaps 1642 (the British civil wars) or even to the so-called ‘long eighteenth century’ more generally.5 A case can still be made for 1688; similarly, for 1715 or 1745.6 But this is only the beginning of the problem. For the true substance of the matter – what it was that made protestant England protestant England – has only proved more elusive still. Did it amount to nothing more than that which our sovereign willed? Or can it be discovered in how the people gradually came to understand themselves? Was it a matter of individual conviction or common practice? Finally, was it always a minority preference or did it ever become a pervasive way of life?7 Most accounts now accept that the English Reformation was part political imposition, part popular growth. The protestantisation of England was achieved by doctrinal purification and through liturgical simplification. It became both an organisationally plural and an individually demanding faith.8 It was once surely, very real. Both Englishmen and foreign observers certainly thought so, right down to the interwar

4

5

6

7

8

Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, (London, 1966), pt I, chs. 5 and 7; Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, pt II (London, 1970), chs. 4 and 5; K. S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London, 1963) passim; and, more recently, Douglas A. Reid, ‘Playing and Praying’, in Martin Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. III: 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 23, esp. pp. 785ff. Case studies include Nigel Scotland, Squires in the Slums: Settlement and Mission in Late Victorian London (London, 2007), esp. ch. 1; and S. J. D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1996), chs. 6–8. For an unjustly neglected contemporary account, see John Glyde Jr, The Moral, Social and Religious Condition of Ipswich in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century (Ipswich, 1850), pp. 188ff. Dickens, The English Reformation, chs. 7 and 9; Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–41 (Oxford, 1992), Epilogue; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT 1992), ch. 1; also Geoffrey Elton, The English (Oxford, 1992), ch. 5, esp. pp. 198–203. See, inter alia, Tim Harris, Revolution: the Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London, 2005), pt II; alternatively Julian Hoppitt, A Land of Liberty? England, 1689– 1727 (Oxford, 2000), chs. 2 and 12; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), chs. 5 and 6; also Colley, Britons, pp. 376–7. See Dickens, The English Reformation, pp. 380ff.; Elton, The English, chs. 4 and 5; Chadwick, The Victorian Church, pt I, ch. 7 and The Victorian Church, pt II, chs. 4 and 5; Keith Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: the Christian Church, 1900–2000 (Oxford, 2008), ch. 1; Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. 17ff., among many other works. For a provocative essay in synthesis, see Keith Robbins, Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness (London, 1998), chs. 5 and 10; also ch. 4 above, esp. pp. 147– 55. For a broader view still, there is much to be pondered in Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘The Puritan Spirit Through the Ages’, in Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Puritan Spirit: Essays and Addresses (London, 1967), ch. 1. For what remains, see the remarks of Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford, 1994), pp. 164–5.

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years.9 Yet each understood that some aspect of that reality was always constituted as an ideal and in aspiration; no less, that this was true as much in the causes of the partisans as in the minds of the masses. Thus when protestant England died, it passed both in form (outer expression) and in content (inner conviction). The English ceased not simply to be recognisable protestants around 1960. They ceased to think of themselves as protestants too. There was something else. They ceased to want to be protestants and to be thought of as protestants. Indeed, as they looked around the world – often no further than the farthest shores of their own islands – they drew novel satisfaction from the unexpected wisdom expressed by their emerging indifference in these matters.10 Part of that shift in common sensibilities was purely negative in origin. Protestant England, from the first, had necessarily defined itself against Catholic Europe. In truth, it was afforded little option in that matter. The external threat was real enough for nearly two centuries after papal excommunication in 1570.11 But post-revolutionary English antiCatholicism represented more of a conscious moral choice, in effect, the expression of genuine disapproval rather than mere defensive reaction.12 Ireland was, of course, a complicating variable in such otherwise simple certainties. There, the English were hoist by their own petard: determined

9

10

11

12

See ch. 4 above, esp. pp. 136–40; for the interwar survival, see the contemporary remarks in Cecilia M. Addy, The English Church and How it Works (London, 1941), pp. 190ff. There are modern accounts in Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, chs. 4 and 5; and Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000, 4th edn (London, 2000), pts II and III. For some of the reasons why, see Steve Bruce, Paisley (Oxford, 2007), chs. 1 and 8; on Ulster Protestantism in a comparative perspective, see Steve Bruce, Conservative Protestant Politics (Oxford, 1998), ch. 3. For a specifically British context, see Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. 340–50; also Robbins, Great Britain, ch. 13. For some results in England, see the various essays collected in Jane Garnett, Matthew Grimley, Alana Harris, William Whyte and Sarah Williams (eds.), Redefining Christian Britain: Post-1945 Perspectives (London, 2006). This book, despite its title, is about England, and while it makes frequent references to Anglicanism, the Church of England and the Catholic Church it makes none to protestantism or puritanism: Q.E.D. Elton, The English, pp. 140–4; Dickens, The English Reformation, pp. 365–7; Caroline Hibberd, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, NC 1983), chs. 1 and 10; Harris, Revolution, pt 1; Ernest Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688–1791 (Oxford, 1986), ch. 13; Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714–1780 (Manchester, 1993), esp. chs. 3–5; finally, John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), pt II. Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, chs. 6 and 7; E. R. Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (London, 1968), ch. 1 (and passim); Erik Sidenvell, After Anti-Catholicism? John Henry Newman and Protestant Britain (London, 2005), esp. chs. 1, 3 and 5. For a later flavour, and a sense of just how long this lasted, see, inter alia, Hugh E. M. Stuttfield, Priestcraft: a Study in Unnecessary Fictions (London, 1921). Almost any chapter will suffice!

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and confident acculturators, confounded and confused missionaries.13 Yet so spectacular a failure, so close to home, had its compensations. For as Ireland first resisted the truth and then rejected the Crown, so protestant, loyalist Great Britain recognised a hitherto underappreciated common ground among its own peoples; certainly, by comparison with those Romish and republican rebels in the western isles.14 No wonder Ulster felt so exposed in 1920.15 Still, the temptation to reduce such national self-definition to a purely insular understanding should be resisted. Not all of Europe was Roman Catholic, even in the wake of the Counter-Reformation.16 English ties to Dutch, and later German, protestant houses were extremely significant, from the late seventeenth century onwards. Indigenous attachments to a northern European protestant tradition were scarcely less important throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.17 The French Revolution and its aftermath defined what became known as ‘Victorian England’ against both the Catholic and Jacobin enormities of the Continent.18 As a result, English protestantism was increasingly able to cast itself not merely as an instance of truth but as the mark of

13

14

15

16

17

18

Paul Bew, Ireland: the Politics of Enmity, 1789–2006 (Oxford, 2007), ch. 2; cf. R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1988), ch. 13. For a studious overview, see R. B. McDowell, ‘Ireland or England’, in R. B. McDowell, Historical Essays, 1938– 2001 (Dublin, 2003), ch. 4. On the question of religion and (re)Catholicisation, see esp. John Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829–1860 (Oxford, 1991), chs. 3 and 4; also John Wolffe, God and Great Britain, 1843–1945 (London, 1994), ch. 4. Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. 135–44; Robbins, Great Britain, pp. 262– 7; Foster, Modern Ireland, chs. 18 and 19; Charles Townsend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, 1983), ch. 5; Charles Townsend, Easter 1916: the Irish Rebellion (London, 2005), chs. 1–4. For a sympathetic account of its plight, see A. T. Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: Aspects of Ulster, 1609–1969 (London, 1977), pt 5. For an unsympathetic view, consult J. J. Lee, Ireland: Politics and Society, 1912–1985 (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 1. There is a good synthesis in Bew, Ireland, ch. 9. On the historiography, see A. D. Wright, The Counter-Reformation: Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World (London, 1982), ch. 1; for a sense of the emerging nineteenthcentury problem, consult William J. Callahan and David Higgs (eds.), Church and Society in Catholic Europe in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), chs. 1–9; and Nigel Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, c. 1750–1830 (Cambridge, 2002), ch. 8. On which, see the various studies collected in Jonathan Israel (ed.), The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its Impact (Cambridge, 1991), esp. chs. 3, 8, 12, 15 and Epilogue; also J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossman (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands in Europe and Asia (London, 1968), chs. 1 and 2; and the pioneering work of W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992), chs. 1–6 and 8. Never better evoked than in Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783–1867 (London, 1959), ch. 6.

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moderation, even as an aspect of universal progress.19 It thereby became, and long remained, a religion of good, common sense. This made it widely acceptable even among those who secretly subscribed to few of its peculiar tenets. Think of Macaulay.20 This mattered in itself. It came to matter still more through the connection of protestant England to an anglophone international order. Pax Britannica did many things. Above all, it spread Britishness across the globe. With that went British protestantism.21 This even triumphed in places where British rule otherwise failed. The ensuing ‘battle of the faiths’ could have gone either way in the American hemisphere. But, in the event, Latin America faltered and the protestant north prospered.22 When Woodrow Wilson determined to make the world ‘safe for democracy’ in 1919, we took it for granted that democracy’s preferred faith was his own creed. And Lloyd George agreed with him.23 Most English protestants, anyway most of those actually living in England, probably sustained only a fleeting sense of such world-historical 19

20

21

22

23

On which see the extraordinary, contemporary, essay of the Rev Edwin Hatch, DD, ‘Religion and the Church’ in Thomas Humphrey Ward (ed.), The Reign of Queen Victorian: a Survey of Fifty Years of Progress, vol. I (London, 1887), ch. 10; also Emile Boutmy, The English: a Study of Their Political Psychology, trans. E. English (London, 1904), ch. 3; and Wilhelm Dibelius, England, trans. Mary Agnes Hamilton (London, 1922), book III. Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial Life, 1840–1914 (Manchester, 2000), ch. 5 is an important modern study. (T. B. Macaulay), ‘The State and its Relations with the Church’, Edinburgh Review, 69, April–July 1839, 251–80; T. B. Macaulay, ‘Dissenters’ Chapels Bill’, in G. M. Young (ed.), Speeches by Lord Macaulay, with His Minute on Education (Oxford, 1935). For a recent discussion see William Thomas, The Quarrel of Macaulay and Locke: Politics and History in the Age of Reform (Oxford, 2000), pp. 239–41 and 247–8. On the subtleties of Macaulay’s dubious faithfulness see, most recently, Robert E. Sullivan, Macaulay: the Tragedy of Power (Cambridge, MA, 2009), pp. 3, 13–17, 55–60, 165–6, 224–40, 314–15, 349–64 and 482. Dickens, The English Reformation, pp. 393–4; William Sachs, The Transformation of Anglicanism: from State Church to Global Conversion (Cambridge, 1973), ch. 5; Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: the Official Mind of Imperialism (London, 1961), ch. 1. For some sense of the real subtleties involved, see Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004), chs. 3, 6, 9–10, 11, and ‘Conclusion’. For an early anticipation of the triumph of the north, see Andres Bello, ‘American Politics (1832)’, in Ivan Jaksic (ed.), The Selected Writings of Andres Bello (Oxford, 1997), pp. 192–3. For early evidence, see Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: a History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 622ff. Broader considerations can be found in the essays collected in Leslie Bethel (ed.), Spanish America After Independence, 1820–1870 (Cambridge, 1987). On Wilson’s religion, see Earl Latham (ed.), The Philosophy and Politics of Woodrow Wilson (Chicago, 1958), at pp. 6–7, 29–30 and 152–4; of Lloyd George, see ch. 2 above, pp. 57–8. Their mutually uncomprehending encounter with the atheistical Clemenceau at Versailles is nicely described in Margaret Macmillan, The Peacemakers: the Paris Peace Conference and the Attempt to End War (London, 2001), p. 283.

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superiority. For them inherited, indigenous custom guaranteed sufficient respectability. To them, the great virtue of its related practices lay in their comprehensive provision, not so much because they were tolerant but because they were accommodating. Protestant England meant church and chapel; also Sunday school and common morality. These, taken together, were truly vital forces in nineteenth-century England since they went with so much of the grain of spontaneous, local development.24 Their collective strength extended far beyond the formal membership lists of a multivarious denominational existence. This was still more true because of the positively exuberant growth of so-called quasi-religious organisations in England after 1850. These bodies were attached to, and yet distinct from, their mother societies. They guaranteed, through the ‘associational ideal’, an influence and impact that mere numbers never calibrated.25 This was because these organisations sustained a way of life to which the majority of people instinctively aspired anyway. What has come down to us as protestant moralism, whether concerning sexual chastity or drink, even about sabbatarianism and gambling, as much reflected aspirational sensibilities as it confounded popular pleasures.26 For a nation that so self-consciously equated religious advance with ethical gain, these were aspects of common faith that transcended each and every sectional divide.27 That was crucial. For just a ‘protestant England’ was never bounded by xenophobic ignorance, nor can it be caricatured in bourgeois superiority. It comprehended the religion of the people as well as their betters. In that way, it forged a vital link – one which, incidentally, long survived the critical incursion of the 1840s – between rulers and ruled, have and have-nots and the educated and the vulgar.28 This was why Queen 24

25

26

27

28

Alan D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914 (London, 1976), ch. 4; K. D. M. Snell and Paul S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: the Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 9; E. R. Norman, Church and Society in England, 1770–1970: a Historical Study (Oxford, 1976), ch. 5; Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pt II. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, ch. 4. For a comment, see Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 102. On the hard facts, see Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), appendix A. See above ch. 4 esp. at pp. 135–55. For a broader context, see John Adair, Founding Fathers: the Puritans in England and America (London, 1982), ch. 12; also John Caffey, ‘Puritan Legacies’, in John Caffey and Paul C. H. Lion (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008), ch. 19. Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, ch. 1. For an extraordinary, contemporary, rendition, see W. R. Inge, ‘The Victorian Age’, in W. R. Inge, Outspoken Essays, (second series) (London, 1922), ch. 4. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. 22ff. and 200–10; Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England, pts II and III; James Beckford, ‘Politics and Religion in England and

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Victoria was so widely respected for her ordinary piety. So too, until quite recently, was her great-great-granddaughter.29 No less strikingly, those men and women – perhaps constituting half the nation, c. 1850–1950 – who found it impossible to acknowledge their sovereign’s authority in matters of doctrine happily conceded her obvious faithfulness concerning those things which truly mattered. At the same time, most of her subjects, even those who partook irregularly of their ecclesiastical obligations, freely accepted the underlying benevolence of received scripture and modern hymns.30 As a result, a vague but recognisable connection was retained between the beliefs of all but the most sophisticated and the habits of the barely literate. By a similar token, ordinary people sustained an institutional attachment to the sublime that often confounded their apparent neglect for its most obvious demands.31 This connection – and that attachment – no longer survive. Fullblooded atheism may still amount to no more than ‘the froth of the intelligentsia’.32 But the masses are more likely today to read their star signs than to recite the psalms. Few are even hatched, matched and dispatched according to the Common Prayer Book. Erstwhile religious taboos count for next to nothing. Add all of this up and the conclusion is unavoidable. England is no longer a protestant country.33 If the analysis outlined above is to be believed, it had effectively ceased to be a protestant country by around 1960. Mutatis mutandis, the process of that dissolution began around 1920. But why? And with what effect?

29

30

31 32 33

Wales’, Daedalus, 120 (1991), 179–201. For earlier accounts, see Wilhelm Dibelius, England, book III, passim; Leland Dewitt Baldwin, God’s Englishman: the Evolution of the Anglo-Saxon Spirit (London, 1943), pp. 160–3; and the Rt Rev. A. T. P. Williams, ‘Religion’, in Ernest Barker (ed.), The Character of England (Oxford, 1947), ch. 3. See, for instance, Robert Wilson, The Life and Times of Queen Victoria, 2 vols. (London 1887). This study refers to her (and her husband’s) ‘broad and liberal [understanding] of Church doctrines’, in vol. I, at p. 102. By contrast, Ben Pimlott’s The Queen: a Biography of Elizabeth II (London, 1996) makes nothing – absolutely nothing – of our present sovereign’s religion. For a truly evocative account, see the Rt Hon. Stanley Baldwin of Bewdley, The Englishman (London, 1940), pp. 14–15. More prosaically, consult David Daniell, The Bible in English: its History and Influence (New Haven, CT, 2003), chs. 36 and 37, also Ian Bradley, Abide With Me: the World of Victorian Hymn (London, 1997), ch. 8. Dibelius, The English, book III, ch. 5; Baldwin, The Englishman, pp. 12–15; Williams, ‘Religion’, pp. 82–4. The words of David Martin, cited in Keith Ward, The Turn of the Tide: Christian Belief in Britain Today (London, 1986), p. 12. Though contemporary, indigenous moralism certainly survives. For the evidence, see Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, pp. 11–12 and 74–6. Alternatively, consult a copy of the Sun almost any day of the week.

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I Church historians once believed that indigenous faith was destroyed by reason, under the guise of science and in the wake of Darwin. This put the process of dissolution back to around 1860. Few now either accept that cause, or indeed its putative course – though some continue to point to the corrosive effect of reason, disguised as biblical criticism, from about 1840.34 For two generations or more, social historians insisted upon the priority of social causes for social change of such magnitude, whether in the form of ‘industrial urbanisation’ or ‘societal bureaucratisation’. These developments pointed to the progressive ‘disenchantment of the world’. That process was generally traced to the last third of the nineteenth century. It was invariably deemed to have been completed by the outbreak of the First World War.35 But closer examination of the evidence has demonstrated that industrialisation often furnished the very means of religious expansion. This was true of nineteenth-century church-building.36 Similarly, urbanisation and the concentration of population it entailed, frequently provided more fruitful opportunity for mass evangelisation than earlier, rural, isolation had permitted. Moody and Sankey would have been unthinkable without it.37 The inadequacies of what might be called the ‘sociological model’, whether simply to date, or more crucially to explain, the complexities of so much variegated intellectual, political and social change has recently led some historians and sociologists to reject the secularisation thesis,

34

35

36

37

For the contemporary significance of Darwin, a succinct summary can be found in James R. Moore, ‘Free Thought, Secularism and Agnosticism: the Case of Charles Darwin’, in Gerald Parsons (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain, vol. I: Traditions (Manchester, 1988), ch. 8. On the ambiguous impact of biblical criticism, see Gerald Parsons, ‘Biblical Criticism in Victorian Britain: From Controversy to Acceptance?’, in Gerald Parsons, Religion in Victorian Britain, vol. II: Controversies (Manchester, 1988), ch. 11. There are also accounts of lasting value in Chadwick, The Victorian Church, pt I, ch. 8, and Chadwick, The Victorian Church, pt II, chs. 1–3. And much can be gleaned from Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1993), chs. 1–4. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, pt I, p. 1; Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England, chs. 2 and 8; Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London, 1974), ch. 8; Stephen Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis (London, 1976), Conclusion; Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, ch. 2. M. H. Port, Six Hundred New Churches: a Study of the Church Building Commission, 1818– 1856 and Its Church Building Activities (London, 1961), esp. ch. 10; Reid, ‘Playing and Praying’, pp. 793–800; Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, ch. 2. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, chs. 4 and 6; S. J. D. Green, ‘Church and City Revisited: New Evidence from the North of England, 1815–1914’, Northern History, 43, no. 2, September 2006, 345–60; cf. James Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society – South Lindsay, 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976), ch. 6.

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tout court. This book has been written in opposition to that view.38 It has insisted against this fashion that a significant process of secularisation really did happen, in Britain at that time. It has also argued that dates, however vague, can be attached to this process. It was suggested that ‘protestant England’ was real, and continued to be a significant social phenomenon, down to 1920 at least. This was because it defined an important continuum of common belief and practice in this country. Those beliefs and practices naturally varied, across the nation, between the classes, even within families. But it was a continuum because it actually joined the whole. In that way, it also defined the parts. What broke, during the 1950s, was precisely that continuum. This had the effect of separating, for ever, the ‘religious’ from the ‘irreligious’ in the country.39 This book has tried to explain why, and with what effect, this rupture occurred. In so doing, it insists on the political dimensions of contemporary religious change. To that degree it has also pointed to choices made, and roads not taken.40 This broader interpretation rejects a purely ‘intellectual model’ of decline. It does not assert that ideas do not matter. But it does insist on the importance of crude superstition as much as sophisticated unbelief after 1920.41 Similarly, it qualifies the ‘sociological supposition’. It does not suggest that broader social developments did not affect individual sensibilities. It happily concedes the significance of social change in this respect. However, it stresses less the amorphous impacts of industrialisation, urbanisation and even rationalisation and more the crisis of organisational dynamics that confronted almost every mainstream religious organisation after around 1910.42 Finally, it points to the importance of the years immediately after the end of the First World War. It does so less in terms of the direct effect of the great cataclysm itself which seems to have wrought profoundly ambiguous religious consequences, than of the indirect impact of that disaster upon the legal integrity and political composition of the United Kingdom. ‘Irish independence’ at once liberated Great Britain from an incomparable scourge to the west and reminded England of how (relatively little) of its inherited faith tied the Anglo-Saxon centre to its associated Celtic peripheries.43 At the same time, the demise of the Liberal Party (and the rise of Labour)

38 39 40 42 43

See ch. 1 above, esp. pp. 17–23. See ch. 2 above, esp. pp. 86–91 and ch. 7 above, esp. pp. 264–72. 41 See ch. 3 above, esp. at pp. 128–34. See ch. 2 above, esp. pp. 34–60. The substantive conclusion of Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, ch. 9 and Conclusion; for the evidence, see Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, appendix A. Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, chs. 3 and 4; ch. 2 above, esp. pp. 34–41.

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freed domestic politics from many denominational imperatives and most of their associated ethical baggage.44 The concurrence of those two developments was, of itself, little more than an historical accident. Yet there can be little doubt that their combined effect was to make possible that increasing sense of liberation from the ‘periphery’ which permitted the ‘centre’ to promote much of the social legislation of the interwar years that so offended traditional sensibilities.45 None of this determined the immediate capitulation of conventional religious authority. Few noticed so precipitous a decline at the time.46 It did, however, furnish the vital backdrop to the emergence of a common outlook that increasingly came to separate moral progress from religious injunction in interwar England. This constituted a massive, cultural, transformation, which Inge first noticed in the 1920s.47 Rowntree lived to document its effects a generation later.48 It bore no relation to the agnostic argument of an earlier era, not least because it was so rarely racked by doubt.49 It also heralded little in the way of a contemporary humanistic triumph.50 But it still marked a people’s conscious rejection of their Victorian inheritance – the belief that religious, moral and material progress moved together, and in direct relation, or not at all.51 What caused it? Inge pointed to the enhanced capacities of the people, especially women, both in the wake of late Victorian educational reform.52 Rowntree, by contrast, insisted on the diminished intellectual attainments of the clergy.53 Both were partially correct.54 Yet each of their analyses was also incomplete. This is because they were too narrowly conceived. Neither gave sufficient weight to the informal sources of common enlightenment. They were in good company. That is what most of the proponents of the 1944 Education Act did too.55 Few, even 44

45 46

47 49 50 51

52 54 55

See ch. 2 above, esp. pp. 34–60; also Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour, 1920– 1924: the Beginning of Modern British Politics (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 359ff.; Stephen Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics (London, 1975), chs. 8–10; and finally, E. R. Norman, Church and Society in England, 1770–1970: a Historical Study (Oxford, 1976), ch. 8. See ch. 4 above, esp. pp. 155ff. R. B. McDowell, McDowell on McDowell: a Memoir (Dublin, 2008), p. 67. Here, an indefatigiable observer (born 1913) notes that in the 1930s, ‘religion [remained] a very important element in the life of the land’. 48 See ch. 5 above, esp. at pp. 203–8. See ch. 3 above, esp. at pp. 115–28. Ibid., pp. 128–34; cf. Gorer, Exploring English Character, at ch. 14. See ch. 3 above, esp. at pp. 128–34. Inge, ‘The Victorian Age’, passim; B. Seebohm Rowntree and R. G. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: a Social Study (London, 1951), ch. 13; Gorer, Exploring English Character, ch. 14. 53 See ch. 5 above, esp. at pp. 200–3. See ch. 3 above, esp. at pp. 110–17. Neither, so far as I can tell, ever referred to the other! See ch. 6 above, esp. at pp. 237–41.

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at the time, heeded Butler’s timely warnings about importance of other, equally vital, variables.56 As a result nothing was done to stem the process by which the specifically religious, above all the particularly protestant, bases of common consciousness diminished sharply after around 1920, whether in the form of Sunday school attendance, Bible reciting or moral taboo.57 To be sure, calculable membership of mainstream religious organisations held quite steady between 1900 and 1950.58 It was the underlying foundations of that membership, more still of those concerning the relationship of membership to adherence and authority, that diminished so swiftly during these same years. Hence the profound paradox of English religious life at that time. Study after study emphasised its increasing institutional weakness.59 But report after report also insisted upon the survival of an indigenous Christian culture.60 Still, attempt after attempt to convert presumed goodwill into real commitment failed.61 What was so peculiar about the so-called ‘religious revival’ of the 1950s was not that it occurred (this should have surprised no one). Nor, indeed, that it failed (ditto). It was that it turned out to be such a lamentable failure – and such a deep disappointment – to all concerned. In its agony it presaged a future in which religion would never truly revive, even under the repeated influence of religious revival.62 Was this actually so? Is it, in fact true? No answer to either question can hope to be definitive. But there are many reasons for believing why, in England at any rate, the failure of the 1950s constituted something much more than a passing phase. This is because the failure of the 1950s is much better understood as the culmination of a long and slow process of indigenous social change, especially, of domestic religious decline. This point can be put in a slightly different way. The eclipse of mainstream, protestant organisation in England has been dramatic only since 1960.63 But it would be a huge mistake to identify the causes of that implosion solely in contemporary developments.64 They were

56 57

58

59 61 63 64

Ibid., pp. 240–1. For a pioneering effort, see Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of WorkingClass Life, With Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments (London, 1957), pp. 93–9, 135–6, 189–91; also Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT, 2001), esp. chs. 6, 11 and 13. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 128–9, 142–4, 149–51 and 153; Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London, 2001), passim. 60 Ibid., esp. pp. 253–7. See ch. 7 above, esp. at pp. 258–62. 62 Ibid., esp. pp. 269–72. Ibid., esp. pp. 254–60. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, chs. 35–7; Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, Conclusion. See ch. 7 above, esp. at pp. 246–53.

314


firmly grounded in long-standing trends.65 ‘Protestant England’ was a long time in the making. It reached its climax in the mid-Victorian era.66 It was undone during the second third of the nineteenth century.67 The emperor merely lost his (metaphorical) clothes during the decade when everyone else (literally) started shedding theirs. Perhaps the one thing that was really remarkable about those years was that some of his most trusted counsellors now came to the view that he might actually be better off naked.68 Does any of this matter? After all, the passing of protestant England need not have marked the demise of religion in Britain altogether.69 Some of the best contemporary social criticism continues to insist that it need not do so in the future. According to this way of thinking, religion per se has simply changed. This has enabled the sacred to survive in our society.70 It will go on changing. But it will also go on surviving. So much so determined revisionism more rarely acknowledges that the ‘secularisation thesis’ never presumed the complete disappearance – only the diminishing social significance – of religion.71 More strikingly still, it invariably fails to consider the extent to which contemporary religious change has itself constituted the process by which that state of affairs has come about. Religions are by no means equally powerful, or individually demanding. To insist on so much is to pass no comment on their comparative truthfulness. The sociology of religion rightly fights shy of such judgements.72 Today, perhaps, it less wisely avoids the question of their inherent ‘greediness’.73 Yet most of what now passes for religion in England makes few, if any, demands of its adherents and 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72

73

Ibid, at pp. 256–64; also the remarks in Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), chs. 2–3. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pt II. See ch. 2 above, esp. at pp. 76–91. For a contemporary corroborative judgement, see J. E. C. Welldon, The English Church (London, 1926), Preface, esp. at pp. v–vi. See ch. 8 above, esp. at pp. 290–5. Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, chs. 3–5; see also the remarks in Hastings, A History of English Christianity, ch. 42. Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, chs. 5–7. For a broader argument still, see Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkeley, CA, 1985), chs. 1–4 and 19–22. Bryan R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society: a Sociological Comment (London, 1966), p. xi; Bryan R. Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford, 1982), pp. 149–50. See Wilson, Religion in Secular Society, pp. 32–42. For an interesting discussion of the inevitable consequences, see Edward Norman, Secularisation: New Century Theology (London, 2002), ch. 19. Yet the theoretical basis for so doing has long existed within sociological theory. See especially Erving Goffman, ‘On the Characteristics of Total Institutions’, in Peter Worsley (ed.), Modern Sociology: Introductory Readings, ch. 47; and, indeed, pt VII of Worsley, on ‘Organizations’, more generally.

Conclusion

315

imposes negligible costs – alternatively does scant good – on and in society. That is why it is widely tolerated. Those faiths that do both – whether of the various forms of Islam among new Commonwealth immigrants or so-called ‘new religious movements’ within the indigenous population – tend to be less easily accommodated.74 Protestantism in its English dispensation was a demanding faith.75 It pitted every soul in pitiless combat with the cosmos. It demanded commitment to a creed and it left no doubt about the terrible costs of inadequacy in this respect.76 Yet if it exacted a high price, it also paid rich rewards. In its time, it offered every Englishmen the possibility of being some kind of hero.77 This, as James Fitzjames Stephen insisted against Newman, included the street-sweeper.78 It demanded great individual sacrifice, both of leisure and in pleasure. By way of return, it offered the certainty of salvation and the possibility of improvement.79 It also pointed to the realm of freedom beyond the confines of pure reason and a way of life immune from the corruption of sensual slavery. The English were at once – and not so long ago – willing to strike the necessary bargain this presumed. Some time between 1920 and 1960, they changed their minds. This has been to decisive effect.80 They have not been alone in making that choice. Theirs has, in fact, been quite a common preference. But it can only be inadequately explained by a subsequent easiness of life.81 Others, similarly fortunate, 74 75 76 77

78

79 80

81

Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, pp. 66–8 and 76; James Beckford, Cult Controversies (London, 1985), chs. 7–8. See ch. 4 above, esp. at pp. 136–41; also Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pt III. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, ch. 8; Nuttall, ‘The Puritan Spirit’, furnishes a timeless commentary. The great insight of Thomas Carlyle. See Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and Heroism in History: Six Lectures, Reported with Emendations and Additions (London, 1842), lecture 4, esp. at pp. 224–41. For a recent commentary, see Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in England, vol. III: Accommodations (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 9ff. For the saga of Stephen’s debate with Newman, see J. F. Stephen, ‘Dr Newman’s Religion’, Fraser’s Magazine, 70 (1864), 644ff.; also, ‘The Present State of Religious Controversy’, Fraser’s Magazine, 80 (1870), 547–70; and ‘On Certitude in Religious Assent’, Fraser’s Magazine, new series, 1 (1872), 23ff. For a modern commentary, see K. J. M. Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen: Portrait of a Victorian Rationalist (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 224–30. See ch. 4 above, esp. at pp. 149–50. For some of those consequences, see S. J. D. Green, ‘The Revenge of the Periphery? Conservative Religion, Multiculturalism and the Irony of the Liberal State in Modem Britain’, in Ralph McInerny (ed.), Modernity and Religion (South Bend, IN, 1994), pp. 89–115. Contemporary British trends in this respect can be plotted in Roy Fitzpatrick and Tirani Chandola, ‘Health’, in A. H. Halsey and Josephine Webb (eds.), Twentieth-Century British Social Trends (Basingstoke, 2000), ch. 3.

316


have chosen otherwise. To that degree, it might be wise to refrain from drawing any broader conclusions from recent English experiences.82 Still, a proper understanding of that history may have wider uses. Specifically, it will inoculate us against any notion of contemporary religious revival. The return of religion is a surprisingly popular view today.83 It was also a fashionable view in the 1990s; still more so in the 1980s.84 In one sense, this is how it should be. The notion of religious revival dies hard because religious revival is indeed perennial. Religions are always dying.85 That is why they are always being revived.86 But in the advanced world generally, and in England particularly, a century of decline and revival together have left the residual strength of common religious life noticeably weaker than it once was.87 There is every reason to believe that this process will go on happening, to similar effect, in the future, and not just in England.88 Religion will not disappear, not even in England. But the social significance of religion will go on declining. This will prove the enduring legacy of the passing of protestant England; far beyond England too.89 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89

Though see ch. 2 above, esp. at pp. 86–91. See, most recently, John Mickelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World (London, 2009), pts I and IV. See, for instance, Ward, The Turn of the Tide, ch. 1 and Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (London, 1980), pp. 356ff. More generally, see Ian Bradley, Marching to the Promised Land: Has the Church a Future? (London, 1992), chs. 2 and 9; or D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), ch. 8. Bryan Wilson, Contemporary Transformations of Religion (Oxford, 1976), p. 116. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society, pp. 174–9; John Kent, Holding the Fort: Studies in Victorian Revivalism (London, 1978), passim. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, chs. 37ff. See ch. 2 above, esp. at pp. 86–91. See Steve Bruce, ‘The Demise of Christianity in Britain’, in Linda Woodhead, Paul Heelas and Grace Davie (eds.), Predicting Religion: Christian, Secular and Alternative Futures (London, 2003), ch. 4; alternatively, see Garnett et al., Redefining Christian Britain, pp. 289–93.

Index

abdication crisis, 155 Abedin, Syed Z., 4; see also Sardar, Ziauddin Abrams, Mark, 191 accumulated church powers, 213 Acheson, Dean, 281 Acquaviva, S. S., 17, 277 Adair, John, 308 Adams, R. J. Q., 143 Addison, Paul, 43, 56, 181, 226, 231, 237 Addy, Cecilia M., 305 Akenson, Donald Harman, 10 Aldcroft, Derek, 156 Alderman, Geoffrey, 4 Allen, E. L., 253; see also Stephen-Spinks, G. and Parkes, James Allied Brewers Traders’ Association, 173 Alport, J. M. (Lieutenant-Colonel), 239 America compared to Britain, 271–2 compared to Latin America, 307 Anderson, Digby, 71, 161, 219, 260 Anderson, Sir John (Viscount Waverley), 225 Anglo-Catholics, 107 attitudes of, 126 Annan, Noel, 49, 179, 211 Anwar, Muhammad, 4 Appleby, R. Scott, 10; see also Marty, Martin E. Archbishops’ Committee on the Supply of Candidates for Holy Orders, 64 Archbishops’ Report on Church and State, 125 Argyle, Michael, 13, 76, 80, 186, 193, 194, 204, 205, 254, 272, 280 Arnold, Matthew, 145, 155 Asquith, Cyril, 152; see also Spender, J. A. Asquith, H. H. (Earl of Oxford and Asquith), 106, 142, 143, 152, 175 Asquith, Raymond, 154

Aston, Nigel, 306 Astor, David, 293 Astor, William, 185 Attlee, C. R., 45, 139, 141, 181, 191, 195, 197, 208, 231 austerity age of, 247–8 Autobiography, An, 171; see also Snowdon, Philip (Viscount) Ayer, A. J., 266 Babington, G. H. (the Reverend), 288–90 Badham, Paul, 18 Badone, Ellen, 9 Bainbridge, William Sims, 19, 26, 75, 243, 314; see also Stark, Rodney Baker, Christopher, 38; see also Johnson, Gordon and Seal, Anil Baker, Eric, 258; see also Snaith, Norman H. Baker, H. T., 153, 154 Baker, Janet (Dame), 187 Baldwin, Leland Dewitt, 147, 154, 156, 309 Baldwin, Stanley, 31, 43, 44, 51, 58, 97, 98, 105, 114, 138, 139, 145, 146, 149, 161, 173, 309 Ball, Simon, 58, 249 Ball, Stuart, 40, 43, 141; see also Seldon, Anthony Balsdon, Dacre, 266 Bamber, F. (the Reverend of Blackburn), 282 Bampton Lectures, 105 Band of Hope, 154 baptism, 82 Baptist Church, 70, 258, 259 Barbaris, Peter, 59 Barber, Michael, 55 Barker, Eileen, 17, 19, 33; see also Beckford, James A. and Dobbelaere, K.

317

318

Index

Barker, Ernest, 140, 146, 147, 193, 204, 244, 309 Barker, Paul, 295 Barker, R. S., 228 Barnes, John, 44; see also Middlemas, Keith Barnett, Correlli, 51, 212, 215 Barr, James, 10 Barrow, Logie, 20 Barry, F. R. (Bishop of Southwell), 268 Barry, Gerald, 171 Baston, Lewis, 249 BBC, the, 32, 81, 82, 203, 248, 249, 250, 256, 268, 288 Beatles, the, 59, 146, 248, 276 Beazley, J. S., 292 Bebbington, D. W., 41, 42, 44, 155, 316 Beckford, James A., 17, 20, 308, 315; see also Barker, Eileen and Dobbelaere, K. Bédarida, François, 136 Beeching, Richard (Dr), 284 Beech-Thomas, W., 98 Beier, A. L., 15; see also Cannadine, David and Rosenheim, James Beisner, Robert L., 281 beliefs biblical, 90 popular, 85, 88 religious, 3, 81–91 Bell, Daniel, 18, 22, 86, 87, 123 Bell, George (Bishop of Chichester), 237, 239 Bellah, Robert, 12, 76 Bello, Andres, 307 Bennett, Arnold, 151 Bennett, G. V., 148; see also Walsh, John D. Benney, Mark, 39; see also Gray, A. P. and Pear, R. H. Bentley, Michael, 98, 114; see also Jones, Andrew Berger, Peter L., 18 Bethel, Leslie, 307 Betjeman, John, 255 Bevan, Aneurin, 45 Beveridge Report, 225 Beveridge, William (Lord), 157, 185, 197 Bew, Paul, 306 Bible criticism of, 310 literalist view of, 129 reading of, 206 story of, 205 teaching of, 300

Billington, Ray (the Reverend), 279, 280 Binfield, Clyde, 145, 264 Bishop of Llandaff, 259; see also Thompson, R. C. Bishops’ Report, 221, 253 black market, 176–7, 191 Blackburn, Robert M., 212; see also Marsh, Catherine Blacker, C. P., 103 Blackman, Janet, 3; see also Neild, Keith Blake, E. C. (Canon), 250 Blake, Robert, 47, 49, 51, 143, 284 Blaker, Robert (Sir), 173 Blank, Joost de (Archbishop), 157 Blanning, T. C. W., 243 Bliss, Katherine, 298, 299 Bloomsbury, 139, 155 Bonar Law, Andrew, 143 Bonham-Carter, Mark, 49; see also Pottle, Mark Bonham-Carter, Violet, 40, 42, 49, 111, 142, 143 Booth, Charles, 188 Bossy, John, 305 Boulting, John and Roy, 249 Boutmy, Emile, 100, 121–2, 136–7, 138, 139, 147, 150, 307 Bowersock, G. W., 242; see also Brown, Peter and Graber, O. Bowra, Maurice, 154 Boyce, D. George, 36, 37 Boyd, Francis, 211 Bradley, Ian, 309, 316 Bradshaw, Harry, 252 Braham, Ernest G., 162 Brainerd, Mrs. Gary, 182, 197 Branson, Noreen, 7, 147; see also Heinemann, Margot Branton, Noel, 283 Brent, Richard, 8 Brewer, John, 163 brewing interest, 142 Bridgeman, Lady, 217, 218 Bridgeman, Leslie, 225 Brierley, Peter, 5, 13, 18, 60, 61, 62, 70, 71, 72, 76, 156 Briggs, Asa, 148, 180, 181, 182, 184, 186, 188, 190, 191, 192, 199, 200, 204, 249, 256, 306 Briggs, J. H. Y., 42; see also Thompson, David M. and Turner, John Munsey Britain Christian, 193, 253 identity of, 6 late Victorian, 7

Index British character, 97, 100–1, 125, 135–6, 153–5, 176 civilisation, 110 habits, 181 history, 8 nation, 6, 25 British Institute of Public Opinion, 193 British Journal of Sociology, 183 British Weekly, 196, 254, 258 Brivati, Brian, 249; see also Hefferman, Richard Brock, Michael and Eleanor, 142 Brock, N. W. J., 180 Brogan, Denis, 144 Bromley, J. S., 306; see also Kossman, E. H. Brooke, Henry, 238 Brooks, Chris, 252 Brown, Callum, 4, 16, 22–3, 29, 31, 32, 46, 60, 71, 77, 83, 86, 87, 244–5, 246, 247, 248, 251, 256, 257, 260, 292, 302, 308, 313 Brown, George, 50 Brown, Kenneth D., 68, 69 Brown, Peter, 242; see also Bowersock, G. W. and Graber, O. Brown, W. J., 213, 216, 219, 232 Brown, W. T. (Canon), 213, 215, 219 Brownlow, Robert, 162, 163 Bruce, Steve, 4, 5, 10, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 29, 30, 66, 76, 87, 89, 90, 208, 244, 305, 316; see also Wallis, Roy Bryant, Arthur, 101, 176 Bryant, F. Russell, 96 Bryant, Margaret, 60; see also Harries, H. Wilson Bryman, Alan, 69; see also Ranson, Stewart and Hinings, Bob Buchan, John, 152 Buchanan, R. A., 259 Bunyan, John, 148 Burden, F. A., 255 burial, 82 Burns, Delisle, 191 Burton, Alan, 249; see also O’Sullivan, Tim and Wills, Paul Butler, David, 174; see also Freeman, J., Stokes, Donald and Sloman, A. Butler, Mollie, 211, 250 Butler, R. A. (Lord), 55, 56, 59, 178, 211–41, 249, 250, 270, 296, 313 Butterfield, Herbert, 242, 266 Byron, Robert, 144

319 Cadogan, Alexander, 238 Caffey, John, 308 Caird, John, 149 Cairns, D. S., 61 Calder, Angus, 227 Callahan, William J., 306; see also Higgs, David Callinicos, Alex, 22 Cambridge Union, 172 Campbell, Edward (Sir), 211 Campbell, H. C. Montgomery (Bishop of London), 268 Campbell, John, 45, 58, 140 Cannadine, David, 97, 146, 155; see also Beier, A. L. and Rosenheim, James Cannon, C., 213 capitalism contradictions of, 123 crisis of, 111 Caradog Jones, D., 186, 268, 269; see also Carr-Saunders, A. M. and Moser, C. A. Carey, Tupper (Canon), 199, 200 Carlton, David, 142 Carlyle, Thomas, 149, 150, 315 Carpenter, Edward, 54, 246, 264, 280 Carpenter, Humphrey, 281, 282 Carpenter, James, 157 Carr-Saunders, A. M., 186, 268, 269; see also Caradog Jones, D. and Moser, C. A. Carter, Henry, 143 Catholic Church growth of, 195 numbers, 73–4 priesthood, 74–5 Catholicism anti-Catholicism and, 37 Irishness and, 35–6 youthfulness and, 73 Catholics British, 39–41, 72–3 Europe and, 305–6 Members of Parliament, 38, 39–40 morals of, 45–7 schools, 38, 46, 232, 297 socialism and, 40 Catterall, Peter, 40, 42, 44, 47, 48, 54, 56, 58, 144, 264 Cecil family, 59, 231 Cecil, Hugh, 62 Cecil, Hugh (Lord), 58, 106 Celtic fringe, 5, 42, 90, 295 Cesarani, David, 4

320

Index

Chadwick, Owen, 13, 15, 48, 102, 106, 114, 130, 245, 304, 310 Chadwick, R. E., 79 Chamberlain, Elsie, 256 Chamberlain, Ida, 152, 153 Chamberlain, Neville, 43, 103, 152, 153, 165, 167, 170, 171, 224, 226 Chamberlain family, 146 Chance, Judith, 90; see also Peach, Ceri; Rogers, Alasdair; and Daley, Patricia Chandola, Tirani, 315; see also Fitzpatrick, Roy Channon, Henry (‘Chips’) (Sir), 226, 228, 240 Charmley, John, 43, 58 Chavasse, Christopher (Bishop of Rochester), 246 Chesterton, Gilbert, 105 Chevrillon, André, 100 Christian civilisation, 176, 221 culture, 140, 269–70 doctrine, 203 ethics, 205, 226 fundamentalism, 10 investigations of, 193 knowledge of, 271 music, 250 Parliament, 213 progress, 236 socialism, 48–9 sociology, 52–3 understanding, 11 unity, 54–5, 107 Christian Mysticism, 105; see also Bampton Lectures Christmas, 78, 83, 219, 267 Church of Christ, 70 Church of England COPEC and, 52–3 criticisms of, 281–2, 283–4 decline of, 282–3 fortunes of, 43, 47–54, 125–6, 215–16 influence of, 230 Labour Party and, 48–9 ministry of, 257 nation and, 51–2, 125–6 Paul Report into, 284–7 privileges of, 215 schools of, 217–19 Tory Party and, 47 welfare state and, 53 Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons), 72 Church, Leslie, 238; see also Finch, Edwin and Harrison, A. W.

church-building, 251–2 Churchill, R. C., 85, 144, 265 Churchill, Winston, 35, 40, 43, 56, 58, 96, 141, 143, 173, 174, 211, 223, 224, 226, 231, 250, 253 Chuter Ede, James, 211, 224, 235 cinema American origins of, 163 battles over, 165–70 growth of, 163, 261–2 legal control of, 163–4 London arrangements for, 164–5 Cinematograph Act (1909), 163 Cipriani, Roberto, 17 Citizen and Churchman, 53, 54; see also Temple, William (Archbishop of Canterbury) Civilian Clothing (Restoration) Order, 178 Clark, J. C. D., 8, 38 Clarke, John, 47 Clarke, Peter, 26 Cleave, Maureen, 275 clergy anti-clericalism and, 44, 66, 83, 201–2 decline of, 62–5, 118, 126–7 social background of, 67 teachers and, 216–17 Clynes, J. R., 166, 167 Cobden, Richard, 149 Cockett, Richard, 293 Cockin, F. A. (Bishop), 291, 292, 298, 299, 300 Coggan, John (Archbishop of York), 274, 290 Cohen, Jack, 178 Cole, G. D. H., 191 Coleman, David, 5, 63 Colley, Linda, 6, 304 Collings, Rex, 223 Collins, Kevin, 36 Collinson, Patrick, 147 Colquhoun, Frank, 254, 275 Colville, John, 59, 224 Comerford, R. V., 36 Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship (COPEC), 52, 120, 172, 227 Confucianism, 85, 86 Congregationalists, 65, 70, 71, 256, 258, 259 Connolly, James, 45 Consumers Defence League (CDL), 173 continental Sunday, 158, 160, 169, 262 Convocation (of Canterbury), 49, 182

Index Convocation (of York), 264 Conway, Martin, 38 Corbishley, T., 295; see also Vidler, A. R., Earle, Nick and Knight, Margaret Cosgrave, Patrick, 211, 224 Council of Christian Ministers on Social Questions, 167 Courtauld, Simon, 275 Courtauld, Sydney, 222 Cowling, Maurice, 98, 102, 113, 149, 150, 239, 240, 312, 315 Cowper–Temple clause, 220 Cox, Jeffrey, 4, 9, 11, 13, 15, 32 Craster, H. H. E., 176 Cretney, Stephen, 141 Cripps, Stafford (Sir), 178 Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 64 1920, 61 1941, 219 1952, 182, 201, 263, 266 1962, 283 1964, 283 Crookshank, Harry, 170 Crosland, Anthony, 50, 59, 178 Crosland, Susan, 50 Cross, George, 144 Croydon, H. H., 172 Cruikshank, Marjorie, 211, 214, 215, 232, 237, 240 Cruttwell, C. R. M. F., 106 culture imperialism and, 35 permissiveness and, 141 Currie, Robert, 5, 7, 33, 61, 62, 63, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 220, 245, 257, 260, 308, 311, 313; see also Gilbert, Alan and Horsley, Lee Daley, Patricia, 90; see also Peach, Ceri, Rogers, Alasdair and Chance, Judith Dangerfield, George, 144 Daniell, David, 309 Darwin, Charles, 310 Daunton, Martin, 304 Davidson, J. C. C., 57, 139, 145, 168 Davidson, Randall (Archbishop of Canterbury), 51, 126 Davie, Grace, 20–2, 34, 76, 78, 80, 87, 90, 184, 187, 243, 304, 314, 315, 316; see also Heelas, Paul and Woodhead, Linda Davie, Paul, 4; see also Smith, John and Woodhead, Linda Davies, Christie, 71, 146, 156, 161, 162, 163, 206, 219, 260 Davies, John, 4, 5 Davies, Julian, 304

321 Davies, Rupert, 70; see also George, A. Raymond and Rupp, E. Gordon Davis, R. T., 169 de-Christianisation, 34 Defence of Church Schools, 218 degeneration, demographic, 100 de-institutionalisation of society, 34 Denniston, Robin, 278, 291, 293, 294 Dent, H. C., 211, 214 Derby, E. Moore, 287 desacralisation of politics, 10, 33–60 Devine, T. M., 57 Dibelius, Wilhelm, 137, 138, 139, 149, 151, 154, 307, 309 Dickens, A. G., 303, 304, 305, 307 Dickinson, Joan, 58, 139 Dietle, Robert L., 146; see also Micale, Mark S. Dilks, David, 43, 238 disaggregation, regional, 5 disenchantment of the world, 16, 130, 310 disestablishment, Welsh, 156 disintegration age of, 110–11 democracy and, 112–13 disjunction, theory of, 86–7 dissent, fortunes of, 257–8; see also nonconformity divorce attitudes towards, 141, 264 incidence of, 141–2 royalty and, 264 Dobbelaere, K., 17; see also Barker, Eileen and Beckford, James A. Dow, J. C. R., 191 drink abstinence from, 142–3 indulgence in, 143 new habits and, 174 politics and, 173–4 temperance agitation and, 171–4 Driver, Christopher, 301 Drucker, Peter F., 283 Dubow, Saul, 96 Durant, H., 191 Earle, Nick, 295; see also Vidler, A. R., Corbishley, T. and Knight, Margaret Easter Day communicants, 70, 257, 259 Eccles, David, 211 ecclesiastical decline, 60–80, 119 ecumenicalism, 54–5, 107–19, 132, 258 efforts in, 220–1 growth of, 157 response to secularisation, 277

322

Index

Eden, Anthony, 142, 220, 224, 264 education debate about, 296–300 dual system in, 215–16, 219, 220, 231, 239–40 problem of, 223 theory of, 218 voluntary principle in, 233, 235–6, 238 Education Act 1870, 239 1902, 56, 225, 234, 239 1921, 215 1944, 55, 203, 211–41, 250, 261, 296, 298, 312 Edward VIII, 87, 141 Edwards, David (the Reverend), 52, 276, 292, 294; see also Robinson, John A. T. (Bishop of Woolwich) Edwards, O. D., 45 Eliot, T. S., 52, 53, 105, 155 Eliot, Valerie, 105 Elizabeth II, 309 Ell, Paul S., 161, 308; see also Snell, K. D. M. Elton, Geoffrey, 304, 305 Eminent Victorians, 124; see also Strachey, Lytton England, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 112, 114, 116 English philistinism, 151–2 religion, 255, 268, 270, 293–4, 306–7, 315 English Life and Leisure: a Social Study, 66, 67, 69, 73, 75, 76, 79, 80, 84, 86, 88, 175, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 194, 197, 203, 204, 207, 253; see also Rowntree, B. Seebohm and Lavers, G. R. English Social History, 175 English, E., 100, 307 establishment criticised, 280–1 secular use of, 249 Etherington, Norman, 122 evangelisation new methods in, 289–90 new possibilities of, 252 Evans, Stanley G. (Canon), 282 Evening Standard, 95, 108, 109, 110, 275 exogenous factors in religious decline, 16 in social change, 7 Exploring English Character, 12, 68, 76, 77, 78, 79, 84, 85, 186, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 265, 312; see also Gorer, Geoffrey

Fairlie, Henry, 249 Faith, Adam, 290 Falkirk survey, 77 Farrell, Lyndsay, 102 Faulks, Sebastian, 178 Feinstein, Charles, 195 Festival of Britain, 144 Finch, Edwin, 238; see also Church, Leslie and Harrison, A. W. Findall, R. P., 56 Finke, Robert, 17 Fisher, Geoffrey (Archbishop of Canterbury), 54, 87, 228, 246, 263, 264, 280, 300 Fisher, H. A. L., 95, 96, 97 Fisher, Lettice, 96 Fisher, Nigel, 255 Fitzpatrick, David, 37 Fitzpatrick, Roy, 315; see also Chandola, Tirani Five Points, the, 220, 221–2 Flinn, M. W., 3; see also Smout, T. C. Foot, M. R. D., 150 Foot, Michael, 45 football pools, 174 Foster, R. F. (Roy), 32, 36, 37, 38, 306 Fox, Adam, 48, 95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 118, 119 Fox, Frank, 155 Fox, R. C., 17 Francis, Martin, 59 Fraser, Derek, 39, 148 Free Church Council, 218, 226 Free Church ministry, 68 Free Presbyterian Church, 66 Freedom League, 164, 165 Freeman, J., 174; see also Butler, David Frost, David, 276 Furlong, Monica, 270 Galfellian, James (Reverend), 158 Gallagher, John, 38, 307; see also Robinson, Ronald Gallie, Duncan, 64 Galton, Francis, 103 gambling growth of, 174–5 harm of, 175 Garbett, Cyril Foster (Archbishop of York), 51, 52, 63, 84, 182, 183, 228, 267, 268 Gardiner, Juliet, 177, 192 Garnett, Jane, 148, 305, 316; see also Grimley, Matthew; Harris, Alana; Matthew, Colin; Whyte, William; and Williams, Sarah

Index Gellner, Ernest, 300 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of England, 159 general strike, 52, 97, 109, 114 George V, 55, 141, 142 George VI, 191 George, A. Raymond, 70; see also Davies, Rupert and Rupp, E. Gordon Gerth, H. H., 16, 130; see also Mills, C. Wright Gibbon, Edward, 242 Gibson, J. Clark, 264 Gilbert, Alan, 5, 7, 33, 61, 62, 63, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 245, 257, 260, 308, 310, 311, 313; see also Currie, Robert and Horsley, Lee Gilbert, Bentley Brinkerhoff, 41, 58, 143 Gilbert, Martin, 211 Gilbert, W. S., 105, 111 Gill, Robin, 5 Gilley, Sheridan, 4, 5, 18, 37, 50, 145, 184, 187; see also Sheils, W. J. Girvin, Brian, 38 Gladstone, William, 8, 41, 102, 150 Glasgow Observer, 46 Glyde, John Jr, 304 God attitudes towards, 129–30 death of, 276 ideas about, 128 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 152 Goffman, Erving, 314 Goldman, Ronald, 296 Goldring, Douglas, 141 Goldthorpe, J. H., 32; see also Whelan, C. T. Gooch, G. P., 96 Gore, Charles, 49, 123, 134, 157 Gorer, Geoffrey, 12, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 88, 183, 184, 186, 193, 204, 205, 206, 207, 265, 312 Gowing, M. M., 177; see also Hancock, Keith Graber, O., 242; see also Bowersock, G. W. and Brown, Peter Grade, Lew, 255 Graham, Billy, 31, 248, 254–5, 258, 273–5, 300 Gray, A. P., 39; see also Benney, Mark and Pear, R.H Greeley, A. M., 12 Green, Martin, 156 Green, S. J. D., 4, 8, 9, 11, 14, 18, 25, 32, 60, 77, 79, 80, 91, 130, 148, 161, 162, 250, 304, 308, 310, 311, 314, 315; see also Whiting, R. C. Green, T. H., 155

323 Greengarth, I. M., 155 greyhound racing, 175 Grimley, Matthew, 30, 33, 47, 49, 51, 54, 95, 99, 102, 109, 112, 113, 126, 132, 213, 215, 305, 316; see also Garnett, Jane; Harris, Alana; Whyte, William; and Williams, Sarah Grimond, Jo, 59 Guardian, The, 98, 228, 241 Guinness, Alec, 68 Gunn, Simon, 307 Gwynne, H. A., 108 Haigh, Christopher, 303 Haldane, Richard (Lord), 143 Halsey, A. H., 315; see also Heath, A. F. and Ridge, J. M., and Webb, Josephine Hamilton, Mary Agnes, 45, 137, 307 Hamilton, Richard Winter, 158 Hammond, Phillip E., 19 Hammond, R. J., 177 Hancock, Keith, 96, 177; see also Gowing, M. M. Hanson, R. P. C., 182, 201, 202 Hardy, Friedhelm, 26 Harper, Sue, 68; see also Porter, Vincent Harries, H. Wilson, 60; see also Bryant, Margaret Harries, Richard, 28 Harris, Alana, 305, 316; see also Garnett, Jane; Grimley, Matthew; Whyte, William; and Williams, Sarah Harris, C. C., 295 Harris, Paul, 155; see also Marrow, John Harris, Tim, 304, 305 Harrison, A. W., 238; see also Church, Leslie and Finch, Edwin Harrison, Brian, 142, 172, 181, 182, 184, 204 Harrisson, Tom, 199 Hart, A. Tindall, 64 Hart, Peter, 37 Harvie, Christopher, 5, 57 Hastings, Adrian, 10, 12, 24, 27, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 58, 60, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 80, 86, 146, 156, 157, 161, 162, 211, 245, 246, 247, 251, 256, 257, 260, 266, 305, 313, 314, 316 Hatch, Edwin (Reverend), 307 Hay, D., 12 Haydon, Colin, 6, 305 Headlam, Cuthbert, 43, 141, 156 Healey, Denis, 59

324

Index

Heath, A. F., 212; see also Halsey, A. H. and Ridge, J. M. heaven, 85, 107, 129, 293, 294 Heelas, Paul, 316; see also Davie, Grace and Woodhead, Linda Heffer, Simon, 303 Hefferman, Richard, 249; see also Brivati, Brian Hegel, G. W. F., 242 Heinemann, Margot, 7, 147; see also Branson, Noreen hell, 85, 107, 129, 205 Hempton, David, 7, 9, 34, 35 Henderson, Arthur, 45, 47, 146, 159, 171 Hennessey, Thomas, 35, 40 Henson, Herbert Hensley (Bishop of Durham), 42, 48, 101, 102, 106, 114, 158, 159 Hersey, James Augustus, 158 Hexter, J. H., 242, 243 Heyburn, James, 151 Hibberd, Caroline, 305 Higgs, David, 306; see also Callahan, William J. High Wycombe, 73, 74, 79, 181, 193, 195, 204 Highet, John, 277, 281, 295 Hill, Clifford, 144 Hill, J. R., 37 Hilton, Boyd, 157 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 181 Hindu, 90 Hinings, Bob, 69; see also Ranson, Stewart and Bryman, Alan Hinsley, Arthur (Archbishop of Westminster), 56 historians, revisionist, 242, 243, 245–6 history, end of, 242 Hobsbawm, E. J., 3, 6, 7, 29, 242 Hodgetts, M., 4; see also McClelland, A. Hogg, Quintin (Viscount Hailsham), 185, 250 Hoggart, Richard, 184, 205, 206, 313 Holmes, Maurice (Sir), 218, 225 Holroyd, Michael, 155 Honest to God, 290–5, 299; see also Robinson, John A. T. (Bishop of Woolwich) Hooper, Walter, 266 Hoover, J. Edgar, 142 Hopkins, Deian, 57; see also Tanner, Duncan and Williams, Chris Hoppitt, Julian, 304 Horne, Alistair, 142, 248 Hornsby-Smith, Michael P., 4, 32

Horsley, Lee, 5, 7, 33, 61, 62, 63, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 245, 257, 260, 308, 311, 313; see also Currie, Robert and Gilbert, Alan Horton, R. F., 162 Houlbrook, Matt, 250 Howard, Anthony, 35, 43, 51, 211, 213, 215, 216, 218, 222, 224, 231, 235, 238 Howell, David, 46 Howell, George, 164 Hume, David, 177 Humphries, Stephen, 144 Hyams, Edward, 136 Idea of a Christian Society, The, 52; see also Eliot, T. S. incarnation, 49, 85, 157 individualism criticism of, 111 laissez-faire and, 120–1 Industrial Christian Fellowship, 52, 53 industrialisation bad effects of, 49 fears for, 102 genesis of, 122 good effects of, 115 problems of, 288 religious decline and, 16, 30 religious expansion and, 310 Inge, W. R. (Dean of St Paul’s), 48, 51, 52, 62, 66, 81, 95–134, 139, 157, 189, 216, 308, 312 Inglis, K. S., 37, 154, 304 Inskip, Thomas, 168, 169 Institute of Christian Education, 217, 240, 271 International Alliance for the Defence of Sunday, 159 Investigation into the Moral Fibre of the British People, 200 Ireland Home Rule, 35, 36, 37, 46 independence of, 35, 311 nationalism and, 35 republic of, 37–8 troubles in, 90 Iremonger, F. A., 49, 51, 52, 102, 136, 177, 215, 220, 227, 228, 234 irreligion, growth of, 156–7 Israel, Jonathan, 306 Jackson, Alvin, 35 Jackson, F. S., 57, 139 Jacob, Valerie, 140

Index Jaksic, Ivan, 307 James, Eric, 290, 292, 293 James, Wendy, 9; see also Johnson, Douglas H. Jeffreys, Kevin, 56, 211, 223, 224 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 72 Jenkins, David, 301 Jenkins, Geraint H., 5 Jenkins, Robert, 255 Jenkins, Roy, 175 Jessop, T. E., 269 Johnson, Dale A., 145 Johnson, Douglas H., 9; see also James, Wendy Johnson, Gordon, 38; see also Baker, Christopher and Seal, Anil Johnson, Hewlett (Dean of Canterbury), 117 Johnson, Nevil, 60, 89 Jolliffe, John, 154 Jones, Andrew, 98, 114; see also Bentley, Michael Jones, Caradog, 181, 188 Jones, Colin, 243 Jones, James H., 182 Jones, R. Merfyn, 57; see also Rhys Jones, Ionn Jones, R. T., 3, 41 Jones, Stephen G., 144, 166 Jones, Thomas, 172 Kagan, Donald, 243 Kaplan, Stephen Laurence, 243 Keir, Thelma Cazelet, 238 Kelvin, R. F., 296 Kennan, Desmond, 36 Kenrick, Bruce (Reverend), 291, 294 Kent, John, 316 Ker, Ian, 137 Kerr, Philip (Lord Lothian), 176 Keynes, J. M., 102, 112, 139 King, George (Sir), 160 Kingsley, G. T., 297 Kinsey Report, 182 Kinsey, Alfred, 182 Kipling, Rudyard, 105, 138 Kitchener, Alfred (Lord), 143 Kitson Clark, George, 7 Knight, Margaret., 267, 268, 295; see also Vidler, A. R.; Earle, Nick; and Corbishley, T. Knott, Kim, 18 Knowles, Dom David, 266 Knox, James, 144 Knox, W. W., 45, 46, 50, 57

325 Koss, Stephen, 35, 41, 42, 61, 62, 144, 215, 312 Kossman, E. H., 306; see also Bromley, J. S. Kulnett, Greta von, 180 Kynaston, David, 67, 177, 178, 180, 191, 192, 193 Labour Party, 35 Christianity and, 45 churches and, 49–50 rise of, 44 Roman Catholicism and, 46–7 Lamb, Richard, 249 Lambert, Angela, 154 Lambeth Conference 1920, 126, 130, 131, 132, 133 1948, 175 1958, 89 Landau, Ross, 48 Landes, David S., 16 Lang, Cosmo Gordon (Archbishop of Canterbury), 206 Langdon, Gilbert, 255 Langford, Paul, 147, 163, 304 Lansbury, George, 50 Larkin, Maurice, 44 Lasker, Bruno, 153 Latham, Earl, 307 Lavers, G. R., 12, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 175, 180, 181, 182, 185, 186, 187, 189, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 240, 253, 258, 259, 269, 312; see also Rowntree, B. Seebohm and Lavers, G. R. Laybourn, Keith, 44; see also Shepherd, John League of Nations, 96, 135 Leavis, F. R., 139 Lecky, W. E. H., 128, 129 Lee, J. J., 4 Legerton, Harold J. W., 263 Lennon, John, 276; see also the Beatles Lester, W. O., 271 Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 149; see also Carlyle, Thomas Levin, Bernard, 273, 290 Lewis, C. S., 265, 266 Lewis, Greville P., 253 Lewis, Philip, 4 Liberal Party demise of, 144 nonconformist conscience and, 41

326

Index

Licensing Act, 142 1919, 172 1921, 173 Life and Labour in London, 188; see also Booth, Charles Lindley, Dwight M., 151; see also Mineka, Francis E. Lion, Paul C. H., 308 Lipscomb, Patricia, 17 Lloyd George, David, 41, 42, 43, 58, 96, 111, 142, 143, 307 Lloyd, Roger, 3, 30, 47, 51, 52, 53, 55, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 89, 246 Lloyd, T. O., 141, 174 local education authorities (LEAs), 212, 213, 216, 232 London education authorities, 217 Long, James, 142 Lord’s Day Observance Society, 159, 263 Louis, Wm. Roger, 96, 250 Lovine, Maurice, 56 Lowe, David, 45 Luckmann, Thomas, 278 Lyons, F. S. L., 36 Lyttleton, George, 135, 141 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 136, 148, 307 MacDonald, James Ramsay, 43, 44, 102, 145, 146, 165 Machin, G. I. T., 10, 24, 30, 42, 45, 117, 145, 146, 156, 163, 165, 166, 168, 170, 175, 176, 187 MacInnes, Colin, 89, 295 Macintyre, Alasdair, 89, 184, 249, 272, 291, 294, 295 Mackenzie King, W. L., 58 Mackenzie, Donald, 102, 103 MacKillop, Ian, 139 MacKinnon, Donald, 292 Macleod, Ian, 250 Macmillan, Harold, 54, 58, 142, 144, 178, 248, 249, 263, 264 Macmillan, Margaret, 307 Macnutt, F. B., 61 Macpherson, J. I., 167, 168 Maddox, Brenda, 140 Magee, Bryan, 249 Maillaud, Pierre, 139, 150 Manchester Guardian, 44 Mandler, Frederick (Sir), 56, 216, 217, 219, 232, 237 Mandler, Peter, 179 Mansfield, Harvey C., 112; see also Winthrop, Delba

Margaret, Princess, 87, 264 Marlowe, John, 140, 141, 147 Marquand, David, 43, 44, 145, 165 Marriott, S. J. (Canon), 190 Marrow, John, 155; see also Harris, Paul Marsh, Catherine, 212; see also Blackburn, Robert M. Martin, David, 8, 15, 16, 18, 23, 25, 26, 30, 260, 278, 281, 295, 300, 301, 302, 309 Martin, William, 254 Marty, Martin E., 10; see also Appleby, R. Scott Marwick, Arthur, 7, 146 Mary, Queen, 55, 142 Mascull, Eric (Reverend), 291, 294 mass observation, 14, 144, 175, 193 Massingham, Henry, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 133, 157 Masson, David, 148 Masterman, C. F. G., 60 Matthew, Colin, 148; see also Garnett, Jane Maudling, Reginald, 250 Maxton, James, 47 Mayne, Miss, 153 McCaughey, J. Davies, 55 McClelland, A., 4; see also Hodgetts, M. McDowell, R. B., 306, 312 McHugh, Declan, 40 McInerny, Ralph, 18, 91, 315 McKenna, Reginald, 102, 110 McKenzie, Robert, 59 McKibbin, Ross, 6, 30, 163, 166, 191, 193 McLeod, Hugh, 9, 11, 13, 16, 31, 32, 38, 60, 91, 154, 257, 261, 266, 267, 281, 287, 288, 292, 293, 310, 314 McQuillan, Father John, 46 Memorial of the Clergy, 48 Methodist Church, 70, 251, 259 membership, 257–8 ministry, 68–9 Methodist Recorder, 255, 258, 268 Micale, Mark S., 146; see also Dietle, Robert L. Mickelthwait, John, 316; see also Wooldridge, Adrian Middlemas, Keith, 44, 172, 192, 211; see also Barnes, John Middleton, Roger, 248; see also Ringe, Astrid and Rollings, Nevil Mill, John Stuart, 151 Miller, Eugene F., 177 Mills, C. Wright, 16, 130; see also Gerth, H. H.

Index Mills, Edward D., 251 Milton, John, 148 Mineka, Francis. E., 151; see also Lindley, Dwight M. Moberley, Walter (Sir), 253 modernity, consequences of, 121 Modood, Tariq, 25 Moody and Sankey (Moody, Dwight L. and Sankey, Ira D.), 254, 274, 310 Moore, James R., 310 Moore, Thomas, 255 morals decline in, 190, 191–2 ebb and flow of, 125 future of, 132–3 progress of, 115–17, 150, 190 purpose of, 152–3 without religion, 267–8, 269 Moravians, 70 Morgan, A. E., 191 Morgan, Kenneth O., 6, 41, 42, 146, 178, 181, 191, 212, 250 Morgan, Peter (Reverend), 274, 275 Morning Post, 108 Morris, Marcus (Reverend), 250 Morrison, Herbert, 225, 231 Morton, Jenny, 267, 268 Moser, C. A., 186, 269; see also Carr-Saunders, A. M. and Caradog Jones, D. Mowat, Charles Loch, 42 Mudie-Smith, Richard, 77 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 279 Muir, J. Kenneth, 261 Mulholland, Moran, 40 Murphy, J., 215, 223 Muslims, 4, 25, 90 Mussolini, Benito (Il Duce), 135, 136 Myers, Arthur (the Reverend), 158, 160 National Sunday School Union, 162 National Union of Teachers (NUT), 216 Neild, Herbert (Sir), 160 Neild, Keith, 3; see also Blackman, Janet Nelson, J. G., 148 New Church, 70 new religious movements, 4, 18, 19, 33, 76, 315 New Statesman, The, 98 New Testament, 58, 85, 186, 205 Newman, John Henry (Cardinal), 137, 305, 315 Nicholls, David, 56 Nicolson, Harold, 144, 178 Nicolson, Nigel, 178

327 Nisbet, Robert, 316 Nolan, Michael (Lord), 57 Non-Church, the, 279–80 nonconformist conscience, 41 and Wales, 41–2 nonconformists ageing of, 73 politics and, 42 schools, 232 nonconformity; see also dissent decline of, 196 Norman, E. R., 36, 47, 49, 52, 53, 156, 175, 305, 308, 312, 314 Norman, Phil, 276 Northcott, Cecil, 259, 284 Nossiter, T. J., 44 Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, 52; see also Eliot, T. S. Nuttall, Geoffrey F., 304, 315 O’Halpin, Eunan, 37 O’Malley, Eorin, 5 O’Sullivan, Tim, 249; see also Burton, Alan and Wills, Paul Oakeshott, Michael, 15 Obelkevich, James, 4, 310 Observer, The, 292, 293 Ogg, David, 96 Ogilvie, Robert, 154 Ollard, Richard, 140 Oman, Charles (Sir), 169 Oppenheim, Janet, 20 oral evidence, 13 Orwell, George, 140, 204 Outspoken Essays, 99–100, 103, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 118, 129, 308; see also Inge, W. R. (Dean of St. Paul’s) Overy, Richard, 113 Pakenham, Frank (Lord Longford), 50 Palmer, Roundell Cecil (Viscount Wolmer and, subsequently, Third Earl Selbourne), 225, 231 Pankhurst, Christabel, 151 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 17 parenting, new, 261 Pares, Richard, 243 Parker, R. A. C., 43, 153 Parkes, James, 254; see also Stephen-Spinks, G. and Allen, E. L. Parry, J. P., 8, 30, 41, 43, 250; see also Taylor, Stephen Parsons, Gerald, 32, 245, 247, 251, 310 Passion, the, 85 Pater, Walter, 155

328

Index

Patten, Chris, 223, 250 Pattison, Mark, 303 Paul Report, 284–5, 286, 287, 289; see also Paul, Leslie Paul, Leslie, 284, 285, 286, 287 Pax Britannica, 96, 307 Peach, Ceri, 90; see also Rogers, Alasdair, Chance, Judith, and Daley, Patricia Pear, R. H., 39; see also Benney, Mark and Gray, A. P. Pearson, Karl, 103, 133 Percy, Eustace, 223 Perkin, Harold, 7, 143 Perkins, E. Benson, 252 Peto, Basil (Sir), 169, 170 Pettey, Julian, 249 Peyton, Father Patrick, 254 Philby, H. St J., 96 Phillips, Adam, 155 Phillips, Justin, 266 Pickering, W. S., 51 Pimlott, Ben, 50, 281, 309 Pinter, Harold, 298 Pollard, Sidney, 248 Pope, Robert, 57 population question, 114 Port, M. H., 310 Porter, Andrew, 122, 307 Porter, Vincent, 68; see also Harper, Sue Portrait of an Age, 155; see also Young, G. M. Pottle, Mark, 40, 42, 49, 111, 142, 143; see also Bonham-Carter, Mark Poverty: a Study of Town Life, 171, 181, 194, 198; see also Rowntree, B. Seebohm Poverty and Progress, 139, 156, 171, 174, 181, 190, 193, 199, 206; see also Rowntree, B. Seebohm Powell, Enoch, 222, 250, 303 Powers, Richard Gid, 142 Prager, Theodor, 192; see also Young, Michael Prayer Book controversy, 30, 43, 87, 111 prayers changes in, 129 use of, 84, 130–1 preachers, decline of, 256 premium bonds, 54, 178, 263, 264 Preston, Peter, 151 protestant attitudes, 300–1 belief, 3 churches, 4, 46, 195–6 failure, 185

legislation, 214 majority, 214–15 Protestant Action, 57 protestant England decline of, 314 nature of, 307–9 rise of, 303–4 protestant Europe, 306 Protestant League, 56 public houses, 142, 171, 173, 198 Pugh, Martin, 7, 62, 173 Purcell, William, 52 Puritan Tradition in English Life, The, 140, 141 puritanism decline of, 126–7 English, 122, 135–79 ethics of, 123–4 industrialisation and, 121 purity campaigns, 151 Puzzled People, 193, 201, 202 Quinlan, M. J., 143 radicalism, English, 45–6 Rafferty, Oliver P., 10 Ramsden, James, 135, 152 Ramsden, John, 51, 173, 249, 250 Ramsey, Michael (Archbishop of Canterbury), 288, 294 Ranson, Stewart, 69; see also Bryman, Alan and Hinings, Bob rationalism religious decline and, 16, 30 spirit of, 128 rationing, 143, 176, 177, 178, 200, 247, 248 Reckitt, Maurice B., 52 Reed, T. J., 152 Rees, A. H. (Reverend), 240 Rees, Goronwy, 154 Rees-Mogg, William, 41 Reid, Douglas A., 304, 310 religion affiliation and attendance, 77–8, 83–4, 194–6, 205, 258–9, 269–70, 313 authority in, 128, 134, 202 belief in, 81–91, 200, 203, 205, 243 broadcasting of, 81–2 changes in, 6, 7, 23, 207, 278 conversion and, 255 decline of, 5–6, 7, 17, 23, 29, 33, 118, 194–6, 207–8, 264–5, 270, 280 dispersal of, 11–12 economy of, 20

Index folk, 300 future of, 17 gender and, 78–80, 301–2 growth of, 23 historiography of, 4–5, 11–12 history of, 5 hostility towards, 266–7 ideas about, 7–8 incarnation of, 49 institutions of, 8, 10, 198 instruction in, 202 irrelevance of, 5–6 knowledge of, 219–20, 265 middle classes and, 77 modernity and, 21 moral progress and, 117–18 popular, 9–10 privatisation of, 12, 289 revival of, 31–2, 244–6, 247–8, 252–3, 265–6, 280, 313, 316 science and, 265 social significance of, 6, 16–17, 19, 22–3, 24, 198, 263, 278 state of, 100 working classes and, 80 young people and, 76–7 Representation of the People Act 1918, 113 Resurrection, the, 85, 227 Rex v. Streatham Astoria, 164 Reynolds, David, 177 Rhodes James, Robert, 57, 139, 226, 228, 240 Rhys Jones, Ionn, 57; see also Jones, R. Merfyn Richards, Jeffrey, 68 Riddell, George, 141 Ridge, J. M., 212; see also Halsey, A. H. and Heath, A. F. Rieff, Philip, 24, 303 Ringe, Astrid, 248; see also Rollings, Nevil and Middleton, Roger Robbins, Keith, 4, 5, 6, 7, 304 Roberts, Alfred (father of Margaret Thatcher), 140 Roberts, Andrew, 58 Roberts, Elizabeth, 13 Roberts, R. Ellis, 98, 105, 115 Robertson, Roland, 277, 278 Robinson, John A. T. (Bishop of Woolwich), 290–5, 299; see also Edwards, David (the Reverend) Robinson, Ronald, 307; see also Gallagher, John Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 196, 200

329 Rogers, Alasdair, 90; see also Peach, Ceri; Chance, Judith and Daley, Patricia Rollings, Nevil, 248; see also Ringe, Astrid and Middleton, Roger Roosevelt, Franklin, 171 Rose, Donald, 265 Rose, Jonathan, 148, 313 Rose, Kenneth, 141 Rosenheim, James, 15; see also Beier, A. L. and Cannadine, David Rosmen, Doreen, 31 Ross, Ralph, 138 Rowntree, B. Seebohm, 12, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 139, 153, 156, 171, 174, 175, 178, 180–208, 240, 253, 258, 259, 265, 269, 312; see also Lavers, G. R. and Lavers, G. R., 12, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 175, 181, 182, 185, 186, 187, 189, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 240, 253, 258, 259, 265, 269, 312 Rowse, A. L., 140, 156 Royle, Edward, 195 Runciman, Walter, 143 Rupp, E. Gordon, 70, 305; see also Davies, Rupert and George, A. Raymond Russell, Anthony, 63, 64, 67, 69 Russell, Conrad, 242 Russell, John (Lord), 149 Russian Revolution, 111 Sabbatarianism commitment to, 143–4, 158–61 debates about, 146, 263 relaxation of, 144, 262 Scottish version of, 153–4 Welsh version of, 154 Sachs, William, 307 Salvation Army, 154 Sampson, Anthony, 263, 280 Samuel, Raphael, 148 Sandbrook, Dominic, 59, 81, 248, 250, 261 Sandeen, Ernest, 10 Santayana, George, 100, 101, 114, 115, 122, 138 Sardar, Ziauddin, 4; see also Abedin, Syed Z. Satanic Verses, The, 90 Saturday Review, 98 Savage, Michael, 47 Scarisbrick, J. J., 303

330

Index

Schiff, Sydney, 105 Scotland, Nigel, 304 Scott Holland, Henry, 52, 109, 123 Scott, C. P., 44 Scott, J. D., 141, 179, 184, 244 Scott, J. R. W. (Reverend), 200 Scottish Christian Social Union, 46 Scottish Trades Union Congress, 46 Scruton, Roger, 303 Seal, Anil, 38; see also Baker, Christopher and Johnson, Gordon Searle, G. R., 102, 142 sectarianism, 277 secularisation British society and, 5, 15, 17, 28, 29–30, 32, 245, 275, 294–5 gospel and, 120 politics of, 10, 44–60 post-secularisation, 20–2 responses to, 277 stalling of, 17–18 theory of, 15–17, 76, 86–7, 243, 276–7, 278 secularism, 131–2 Sedan, Hubert, 38 Seeger, H. R., 181 Séguy, Jean, 277 Seldon, Anthony, 40, 250; see also Ball, Stuart Self, Robert, 43, 103, 153, 171 self-denial, death of, 178–9 Semmel, Bernard, 148 sermons, end of, 256 Seventh Day Adventists, 72 Sexton, James, 40 Shakespeare, Geoffrey (Sir), 238 Shanks, Michael, 281 Sharrock, David, 32 Shaw, George Bernard, 105, 106, 111 Sheils, W. J., 4, 5, 18, 37, 50, 145, 184, 187; see also Gilley, Sheridan Shepherd, John, 44; see also Laybourn, Keith Shils, Edward, 34 Shiman, Lilian Lewis, 142 Sibree, J., 242 Sidenvell, Erik, 305 Sikh, 90 Simon, John (Viscount), 143, 165, 167, 168 Sisman, Adam, 31, 266 Sissons, P. L., 77 Sitwell, Edith, 105 Skidelsky, Robert, 157, 165 Sloman, A., 141; see also Butler, David

Smiles, Samuel, 149 Smith, F. E., 43, 58, 142, 143 Smith, John, 4; see also Davie, Paul and Woodhead, Linda Smith, K. J. M., 315 Smout, T. C., 3; see also Flinn, M. W. Smyth, J. J., 46 Snaith, Norman H., 258; see also Baker, Eric Snell, K. D. M., 161, 308; see also Ell, Paul S. Snowdon, Philip (Viscount), 50, 171 Social and Industrial Commission of the National Assembly of the Church of England, 175 social history Britain, of, 5, 6 religion, of, 3, 7, 8, 9–11, 14 Social Psychology of Religion, 186, 280 societalisation, theory of, 246 Sociological Review, 183 Soffer, Reba, 101 Songs of Praise, 13, 81 Soper, Donald, 251, 255 soteriology, doctrine of, 8 soul-effort, 150 Souls, the, 154 Southey, Robert, 148 Sowerwine, Charles, 44 Sparrow, Gerald, 211 Spectator, The, 98, 270, 274, 276, 278, 294, 295 Spencer, A. E. C. W., 296 Spender, J. A., 152; see also Asquith, Cyril Stacey, Margaret, 269–71 Stanley, Venetia, 142 Stapleton, Julia, 101 Stark, Rodney, 19, 26, 75, 243, 314; see also Bainbridge, William Sims Stearns, Peter N., 3 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 315 Stephen, Leslie, 118 Stephen-Spinks, G., 253; see also Allen, E. L. and Parkes, James Stevenson, John, 143, 192 Stewart, A. T. Q., 35, 306 Stoddard, Lothrop, 100, 101 Stokes, Donald, 40, 59; see also Butler, David Stone, Lawrence, 15 Strachey, Lytton, 124, 155 Stuart, James (Viscount), 231 Studdert-Kennedy, Gerald, 52 Student Christian Movement (SCM), 55 Stuttfield, Hugh E. M., 305

Index Suggate, Alan M., 50, 55 Sullivan, Robert E., 307 Sunday amusements, 124–5 Sunday Express, 108 Sunday People, 204 Sunday schools debate over, 162–3 decline of, 161–2, 230, 260–2 mission of, 202–3 superstitions childish, 131 recrudescence, 130, 131 worldview of, 206–7 Survey of Social Conditions in England and Wales, 12, 186, 268, 269 Swatos, William H., Jr, 17 Sykes, Richard, 244 Taine, Hippolyte, 136 Talbot, Edmund, 40 Tanner, Duncan, 47, 48, 50, 57; see also Williams, Chris and Hopkins, Deian Tatlow, Tissington (Reverend Canon), 217, 239 Tawney, R. H., 49, 51, 53, 123, 127, 157 Taylor, A. J. P., 6, 30, 31, 37, 42, 108, 141, 142, 143, 147, 156, 160, 166, 175, 181, 211, 249, 266 Taylor, O. J., 263 Taylor, Stephen, 30, 250; see also Parry, J. P. television and the churches, 290 Temple, William (Archbishop of Canterbury), 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 102, 123, 134, 135, 136, 153, 176, 177, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 247 Tesco stores, 178 That Was the Week That Was (TW3), 281 Thatcher, Margaret, 140, 192 Theology, 182, 201, 259, 285, 286, 288, 292, 297 Thomas, Donald, 141, 143, 175, 176, 177 Thomas, Hugh, 249, 280 Thomas, J. H., 144, 178 Thomas, Keith, 88, 130 Thomas, Terence, 9, 12, 18 Thomas, William, 307 Thompson, David M., 145, 292, 293; see also Briggs, J. H. Y. and Turner, John Munsey Thompson, E. P., 102 Thompson, F. M. L., 3

331 Thompson, Kenneth, 12, 18, 19, 20, 51 Thompson, R. C., 259; see also Bishop of Llandaff Thompson, R. H. T., 259 Thompson, Raymond, 108 Thompson, Thea, 144 Thorpe, Andrew, 44 Thorpe, D. R., 142 Times, The, 162, 170, 172, 182, 219, 220, 235, 254, 267, 278 Tinker, Joseph, 50 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 112 Towler, Robert, 295 Townsend, Charles, 37, 306 Townsend, Group Captain, 264 Toye, Richard, 58 Toynbee, Arnold, 96, 176 Tractarianism, 126 trades unions, 100 Traviskis, H. K. (Reverend), 233 Tressell, Robert, 66 Trevelyan, G. M., 6, 97, 155, 175 Trevelyan, G. O., 148 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 266 Tribe, David, 297 Trinder, Tommy, 276 Trinity, the, 85 Turner, Bryan S., 3 Turner, Frank M., 154, 310 Turner, John, 248 Turner, John Munsey, 42; see also Briggs, J. H. Y. and Thompson, David M. Tyacke, Nicholas, 303 Underwood, A. C., 70 Unitarianism, 43 United Methodist Church, 65 urbanisation and religious decline, 16 Vansittart, Peter, 54, 146, 182, 192, 266 Vatican Council, 36 Vaughan, W. E., 36, 37 Veblen, Thorsten, 123 Victoria, Queen, 110, 308, 309 Victorians, the, 11 Christianity of, 86 English as, 306–7 puritanism of, 131 Vidler, A. R., 199, 292, 295; see also Earle, Nick; Corbishley, T.; and Knight, Margaret Vincent, John, 41 Voegelin, Eric, 15 Vrijhof, Peter Hendrik, 9; see also Waardenburg, Jacques

332

Index

Waardenburg, Jacques, 9; see also Vrijhof, Peter Hendrik Wagner, Donald D., 61 Wakefield Divisional Association of Church Schools, 213 Wallace-Hadrill, J. M., 242 Waller, P. J., 39 Wallis, Roy, 4, 16, 19, 20, 30, 33, 208; see also Bruce, Steve Walsh, John D., 148; see also Bennett, G. V. Wand, J. W. C., 235, 240, 265 Ward, Keith, 18, 309, 316 Ward, Thomas Humphrey, 307 Ward, W. R., 148, 306 Ward-Perkins, Bryan, 242 Warwick, Christopher, 264 Waugh, Evelyn, 106 Weatherhead, Leslie, 268, 269 Webb, Josephine, 5, 63, 64, 90, 315; see also Halsey, A. H. Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 111, 153 Weber, Max, 16, 122, 130 Wedgwood, Josiah, 141 welfare state and churches, 53–4, 226–7, 287–8 Welldon, J. E. C. (Dean of Durham), 162, 314 Wells, H. G., 105 Wells, John, 274, 275 Wesleyan Conference, 107 Wesleyan Methodist Church, 60 Whelan, C. T., 5, 32; see also Goldthorpe, J. H. White, Hayden, 15 White, J. F., 252 White, R. J., 266 Whitehorn, Katharine, 250 Whitehorn, R. D., 215 Whiting, R. C., 231; see also Green, S. J. D. Whyte, J. H., 4 Whyte, William, 305, 316; see also Garnett, Jane; Grimley, Matthew; Harris, Alana; and Williams, Sarah Wichard, Sabine, 40 Wickham, Chris, 242 Wickham, E. R. (Bishop of Middleton), 260, 268, 284, 287, 288 Wigley, John, 143, 144, 158, 161, 163, 165 Wilkinson-Browne, A. R. (Canon), 218, 235 Williams, A. T. P. (Reverend), 147, 193, 244, 309 Williams, Bernard, 249 Williams, Chris., 57; see also Tanner, Duncan and Hopkins, Deian

Williams, Harry, 292 Williams, Sarah, 305, 316; see also Garnett, Jane; Grimley, Matthew; Harris, Alana; and Whyte, William Williams, Susan, 87, 141 Williamson, Philip, 43, 58, 98, 139, 145, 168 Willink, Henry, 238 Willoughby, David, 142 Wills, Paul, 249; see also Burton, Alan and O’Sullivan, Tim Willsden, George, 257 Wilson, A. N., 95 Wilson, Bryan R., 3, 15, 16, 17, 20, 24, 26, 30, 76, 121, 205, 245, 246, 247, 276–9, 280, 285–7, 288, 300, 314, 316 Wilson, Clyde, 164 Wilson, George B., 174 Wilson, Harold, 45, 47, 50, 57, 59, 249, 281 Wilson, J. Dover, 145 Wilson, Robert, 309 Wilson, Woodrow, 307 Winant, John G., 224, 231 Winnington-Ingram, A. F. (Bishop of London), 287 Winsley, Gerald, 260 Winter, J. M., 157 Winthrop, Delba, 112; see also Mansfield, Harvey Wolfe, Kenneth M., 81, 82, 256 Wolfenden Report, 178, 250 Wolfenden, John Frederick (Baron), 178, 266 Wolffe, John, 4, 7, 50, 145, 153, 155, 306 women decline of religion and, 79–80, 301–2 position in society of, 117–18 Womersley, David, 242 Wood, D., 163 Wood, E. S. (Bishop of Croydon), 163 Wood, Edward (Earl Halifax), 176 Wood, Gordon S., 307 Wood, John, 303 Woodard, A. R., 238 Woodhead, Linda, 4, 316; see also Davie, Grace; Davie, Paul; Heelas, Paul; and Smith, John Woodward, Alfred (Canon), 229 Wooldridge, Adrian, 103, 212, 223, 231, 316; see also Mickelthwait, John Wooley, Matthew, 44 Wootton, Barbara, 183, 184, 204

Index World War I continental Sunday and, 158–9 religious decline and, 61–2 religious revival and, 60–1 World War II and religion, 199–200 Worsley, Peter, 314 Wright, A. D., 306

333 Wright, D. S., 295, 296 Wright, Esmond, 171 Yanagawa, Keichi, 17 Yeo, Stephen, 45, 310 York, 73, 74, 79, 80, 156, 171, 174, 180–208 Young, G. M., 155, 307 Young, Michael, 192; see also Prager, Theodor

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