III – Religion

1) The people of the Book

Religion played a very important part in people’s lives in the 19th century and its influence was all-
pervasive. Prosecutions for blasphemy were quite common; national days of fasting (=jeûn) and humiliation
(=confessing sins) were proclaimed in 1853 (cholera epidemic), 1854 (Crimea) and in 1857 (Indian Mutiny).
Theatres and places of entertainment were closed on Sundays. Queen Victoria went to church
regularly and refused to speak to anyone who had been connected with a divorce case. Parliament daily
opened business with prayers and only in 1886 did an atheist (Bradlaugh) refuse to take the customary
oath that involved the Bible. Atheists and agnostics were in a minority or did not express their views for
fear of being ostracised.

Clergymen and clerics sat on all kinds of committees and were called upon to add religious
seriousness to prize-giving ceremonies and cattle-shows!
Religion was an important factor in the spread of education too as the idea was to spread literacy so that
religious works could be read. Children were to be taught the duties of a Christian and were supposed to do
their duty in the station in life Divine Providence had allotted to them. Ex: many Jubilee Schools were built
after the Jubilee of George III in 1810 and the monarch’s wish that all of the children in his dominions
should be able to read and write (McCord).
Many charities were founded in order to provide an environment in which the poor and the sick
could perform religious duties. Providing an environment in which devoutness could flourish was the
reason why the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), the National Society for Promoting Religious
Education in Accordance with the Principles of the Church of England (1811) and the Lord’s Day Observance
Society (1831) were founded.

A driving force behind such initiatives was the Evangelical tradition which emphasized the ideas of
personal conversion and “practical Christianity” (doing good). Evangelicalism lays the emphasis on reading
the Bible, on faith, on urging people to become Christians rather than on ceremonies. Evangelicals were
called so because they encouraged people to live according to the Gospels. They wanted to spread the
Gospels. Many Evangelicals were active missionaries (the Church Missionary Society) and included people
like William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury. Wilberforce campaigned for the abolition of slavery (secured
in 1833) and Shaftesbury was “the father of all nineteenth-century factory legislation” (D.Thomson).
Other famous Evangelicals were Hannah More (1745-1833) who founded schools for the poor and
Robert Raikes (1755-1811) who founded Sunday Schools for the education of working children. The
Evangelical movement permeated the whole spectrum of religious activity in GB and was responsible for
the spread of charity.

The main religious groups were:

- The Anglican Church represented about 47% of churchgoers, did well in rural areas but had lost the cities
and the working classes.
- The Non-Conformist chapels had as many worshippers as the Anglican Church and half of them were
Methodists; about 25% were Congregationalists; 20% were Baptists. The Baptists were strongest in Wales
(36% of the church-going population), Cornwall and Bedfordshire. The Methodists were predominantly
working-class.
Between 1815 and 1830 the Methodist sects made remarkable progress and during the years 1807-
12 the Primitive Methodists broke away from the Wesleyan Methodist Connection. The Primitive
Methodists were successful in their attempt at penetrating areas such northern mining villages and rural
areas and were called the “ranters” because of their emotional style of worship . The founders of Primitive
Methodism were Hugh Bourne, a carpenter, and William Clowes, a potter.
- The Quakers were more middle-class.
- The Catholics seem to have been predominantly proletarian and were concentrated in London and in
Lancashire (Liverpool). In 1829 they were finally granted civil rights on the same terms as Non-Conformists
and in 1850 the Catholic hierarchy was restored. Their numbers kept growing during the Victorian period
(Irish immigration too).

2) The relative decline of Anglicanism

A religious census taken on Sunday, March 30 th 1851 showed that about 54% of the population of
England and Wales of 10 years of age and over went to church that Sunday. By modern standards these
figures are impressive. At the time they were felt to be “humiliating” (Geoffrey Best) as they implied that
more than 40 % of the population had not bothered to attend a religious service on that day.
So it seems that fewer and fewer people were going to church: religious observance was declining,
but most people still held religious beliefs and used the Church for traditional rites of passage (christenings,
weddings, burials).

The 1851 religious census also revealed that the Established Church produced 3.8 M attendances
on census Sunday while other sects collectively saw 3.5 M attendances. So it seems that the Anglican
Church could no longer claim to represent the national at large.
In most of the large industrial centres, in Wales and in Yorkshire, Anglicans were in a minority. It
was also clear that attendance was lower among the poorer elements in society, a fact which bothered the
champions of religion.
By the 1850s the Anglican Church had realised that it had lost the masses and that they had to
Christianise them again. The Roman Catholic church launched a campaign to reclaim lapsed Roman
Catholics and the other churches followed suit. The Anglican Church began to use strategies and techniques
pioneered by the Non-Conformist chapels like “revivalism”, street-preaching or lay private enterprise. New
City Missions were founded and were quite successful. Music halls and theatres were used as places of
worship to attract the poor to more ordinary venues.

Religion remained a major influence in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s in spite of the dissemination of
new ideas which conflicted with religious belief. The science of geology had been developing and had been
casting doubt on the biblical story of the Creation. In 1830-33, Charles Lyell had published his Principles of
Geology which argued for a long development of the earth. Herbert Spencer had insisted on the gradual
evolution of animal species.
In 1859: Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Natural Selection. This book started a
controversy which coincided with another debate over the interpretation of long-accepted texts. A group
of liberal clerics published Essays and Reviews (1860), a book which argued against the literal
interpretation of the Bible, and gradually the ideas of evolution and of critical Biblical scholarship were
integrated into Anglican thinking after stormy debates in the 1860s.
In the late nineteenth century, the rise of socialism and of the labour movement (in the 1880s and
1890s) somewhat weakened the hold of religion on society.