![]()
Part I
Religion, social welfare and social policy in the UK
![]()
ONE
Conceptualising the relationship between religion and social policy I: historical perspectives
Summary
- The earliest historical records show that between the 11th and 16th centuries, churches played the primary role in collecting money to spend on the poor and for caring for the poor. As of the 17th century, and with the introduction of the Poor Law of 1601, more organised institutional control at local government level began to take shape as poverty began to be seen as a social problem in need of organisation and redress. In the early 20th century, religious philanthropy reached its apogee with the proliferation of Christian social activism and social care work. But as the demands of industrialisation and pauperisation increased, the church found itself shrinking in resources and membership. By the end of the Second World War, Archbishop William Temple led the way in arguing that the British state was a Christian state and responsibility for social welfare was handed over to a secular administration that would be better able to respond to the needs of the British population.
- Some of the most significant political leaders and social reformers of Britain, from William Gladstone to William Beveridge to Tony Blair, have been driven or in part inspired by their religious faith. Key milestones in British social policy history such as mass education and ragged schools (which were specifically for children from poor backgrounds), the University Settlement movement and the Charity Organisation Society have grappled with the place of religion in public life. Christianity has thus played a central role in the shaping of British national identity. Today, it may be said that church and state have come full circle in Britain, and once again the church is being called on to fill the gaps in welfare provision.
- The changing religious and ethnic profile of the UK since the 1950s has increased the diversity of religious welfare provision, with a growing number of non-Christian faith groups engaging with government in public service provision, although the Jewish population has had a much older history in Britain.
Introduction
In order for us to understand the relationship between religion and social policy in the British context, it is useful to adopt two complementary approaches, one historical and one theoretical. The first of these is the subject of this chapter; the second is taken up in the next. These two perspectives fulfil two important purposes: on the one hand, our view of the welfare state is stretched to the period before the Second World War which is often missing in contemporary social policy scholarship since it is post 1945, which is generally depicted as the watershed moment of the classic Beveridgean welfare state (Page and Silburn, 1999; Fraser, 2009). This allows us to see that social welfare is a much broader and older endeavour than the modern welfare state, with religious values, identities and political mobilisation supplying much of the moral and material resources shaping its pathway.
Most importantly, the historical overview presented in this chapter shows that religious welfare in Britain has much wider connotations than charity or volunteerism; instead, it is firmly concerned with the societal, nation-building and civilisational enterprises that have preoccupied leaders of the British nation-state since early medieval times, including and up to Beveridge in the 1940s. These manifest themselves in issues of social order, ethics of the good life and the basic constitution of human identity. This historical overview also equips us with useful conceptual baggage for studying the relationship between religion and social policy. Thus, concepts such as the mixed economy of welfare, the role of social and political institutions and the influence of moral philosophical thinking in shaping the welfare state become evident. As a result, the historical and theoretical discussions that cut across this chapter and the next are closely intertwined, and this is due in part to the poor development of the theoretical literature on religion in social policy scholarship, and its more advanced status in other subjects such as the history of the welfare state and historical sociology.
We come therefore to the contribution of this chapter. The aim is to provide a basic scene-setting discussion that brings out the key historical phases and currents that have shaped the development of the British welfare state. It begins with an account of the role of the church in caring for the poor in the Middle Ages (Midwinter, 1994), and how this role progressed through to the 16th-century Reformation with the establishment of two national churches (the Church of England and Presbyterian Church of Scotland) (and the persistence of smaller church denominations) in Britain, which had a reformed Protestant character akin to North America, but different from the largely Catholic and Lutheran traditions which took hold in the rest of Europe (Kahl, 2005).
As the role of the church in British social welfare intertwined with growing state involvement from the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century through to the 19th century, this chapter shows how Christian understandings of welfare have helped form the foundations of social policy in Britain. However, questions remain, as Pacione (1990) notes, over the extent to which, as an established church, the Church of England has been too close to the monarchy, the government and the middle classes to be able to mobilise the working classes sufficiently. These are more fundamental questions about the nature of churchâstate relations in the UK that the chapter explores since they have direct implications for understanding the British welfare regime structure. The chapter thus develops the historical account systematically up to the end of the Second World War, when the Church of England effectively gave up its right to administer social welfare provision by actively endorsing the establishment of a secular state apparatus to meet the social needs of the time. Simultaneously, new minority religions would soon begin to grow, etching out a new religious profile for the UK.
The chapter is divided into three sections that look at the historical profile of religious welfare from early Christian provision in the 11th century (the shortest of the three sections due to the lack of sufficient historical records), through to the 16th-century Reformation and 19th-century Victorian philanthropy to the final emergence of the modern welfare state after the Second World War (1945).
Historical overview of religion and social welfare provision in Britain
This historical overview is broken down into two large historical periods: the first spanning medieval England until the period of the Reformation, roughly the 11th to 15th centuries, when religiously based social welfare provision was the norm; the second period looks at the 16th century, a watershed moment that began with the Reformation, leading to the 18th-century Enlightenment up until the first half of the 20th century, as changes began to take root in the fusion of religious welfare provision with state and secular voluntary action leading to the near-total marginalisation of the church after the Second World War. The focus of the historical overview is Britain, and England in particular. It is clear from the outset that most of this historical overview will have a Christian focus since non-Christian religions have only come to the fore in the social welfare landscape of Britain in the last 20 years, and in some respects, the reporting of the empirical research in this book constitutes a continuation of the historiography of welfare provision by minority ethnic religions in the UK.
Medieval period (11th to 15th centuries): church dominance in welfare
The medieval period is characterised by the parallel predominance of two systems of social organisations, that of feudalism, where a landed warrior class offered work opportunities and patronage to the peasant population and the church, which in the English case had the archbishops of Canterbury at its apex and a network of bishoprics, monastic orders and village-based parishes (Midwinter, 1994). Issues such as the alleviation of poverty and sickness were not formally recognised or treated in the administrative structures of feudal life, notwithstanding the existence of contracts between feudal landlords and their peasant labourers, whereby shelter and work were offered to the latter in exchange for their labour and service to the former. Thus, peasant families first and foremost had to fend for themselves by living off the land that they worked on. The rule of self-help was supplemented by the supportive role of the church in matters of assistance to the poor and vulnerable.
During this period, the church was a well-resourced institution, owning land and estates and collecting dues from the laity. Churches often acted as conduits for gifts and endowments aimed at the poor with much of this activity taking place at parish level, although in some cases revenues were kept by the church leaders. The church thus acted as both the source of inspiration for social welfare and the mechanism for the actual delivery of assistance (Midwinter, 1994). Christian notions of being âGodâs debtorâ through good works done to help the disadvantaged animated social welfare provision at the time (Midwinter, 1994, p 14). So the idea that by helping those less fortunate, one would gain Godâs favour in the afterlife is deeply associated with religious welfare practice, and this has survived down the ages to give expression to various forms of religious social welfare practice today. This idea of an âafterlife insuranceâ (Midwinter, 1994, p 15) also meant that the impact of the social assistance offered was perhaps not thought to be of great importance. This is an issue that would also need to be looked at in contemporary studies of religious welfare.
At the height of the medieval period, the church monasteries played the lead role in helping the poor by distributing food, money, clothes and alms at the monastery gates or even delivering these to poor peopleâs homes (Whelan, 1996). Eventually, these services became institutionalised in the shape of the establishment of almshouses which were the first such examples of non-cash or kind domiciliary service to the poor. Although widespread, almsgiving was not a very well organised activity and arguably increased the plight of the poor and their dependency as opposed to bringing about more long-term improvements to their lot â anyone who presented themselves as poor at the monastery gates would receive poor relief as no independent inspection of their circumstances was made (Whelan, 1996). It certainly did not overturn the feudal system. With time, the development of merchant and craft guilds saw the emergence of more secular forms of welfare provision aimed at helping the widows and orphans of guild members (Midwinter, 1994).
Midwinter (1994) further explains that in terms of illness and the treatment of the sick, the church took two contradictory stances: on the one hand, it saw disease as a form of âdivine retributionâ (Midwinter, 1994, p 17) and was inclined not to intervene; and in other instances, the church was actively involved in charitable service whereby the almshouses sometimes specialised in helping lepers, the blind or people with disabilities. Nursing and hospital orders were a commonplace church activity, as were the travelling Franciscan or âgreyâ friars who offered help to the infirm. Almshouses formed the precursors to the workhouses and hospitals, the two earliest of which were St Bartholomewâs and St Thomasâ, established in London in 1123 and 1200 (Midwinter, 1994). Significantly, these institutions were located in towns and offered care to the poor, sick, aged, disabled and orphans.
In matters of education, dealing with lawlessness and crime, the role of the churches was also important. It began to make large-scale contributions by the 14th century when over 300 schools were in operation under the control of monasteries, cathedrals, hospitals or charities. Modern-day institutions such as Winchester School (1382) and Eton (1440) were established in this way, although even then, their primary purpose was to serve the children of the nobility. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge later followed with firm identities as ecclesiastical colleges. The role of the church as âopinion formerâ and social authority continued to prevail even when new forms of secular apprenticeship, urban trades and the law training Inns of Court evolved (Midwinter, 1994, p 19). In terms of keeping the social order, since church establishments were also large landholders, they had jurisdiction over the rural communities, thereby instilling very firmly in them a culture of crime as sin. Eventually, this gave way to the more secular role of the local constable (predecessor to the modern-day policeman/woman) and legal structures of local government.
The 16th-century Reformation to 19th-century Victorian era: merging of state and church in welfare
Under Henry VIII, England was transformed into a Protestant country and church property was confiscated by the state. This period, from the 1500s onwards, became known as the Reformation. It saw the spread of Calvinism and Lutheranism across Northern Europe as more secular forms of political rule began to take root, thus requiring new forms of public social welfare to replace the old system of poor relief that was under the charge of the medieval Catholic Church. In England, this brought about the passage of the Act for the relief of the Poor of 1597, to be known posthumously as the Poor Law 1601 (Whelan, 1996).
The overseers of the Poor Law remained the local churchwardens, although no clerical responsibility or involvement in dealing with the poor was written into the Act itself. Christian motivation for social action continued to flourish in voluntary form as well, especially in the area of education. The principle of the joint stock company took root during the 17th century and was the basis of the establishment of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in 1699 by Reverend Thomas Bray. SPCK fostered the establishment of charity schools for poor people (Whelan, 1996). By 1729, 1,419 schools had been established in England, teaching 22,503 children. This initiative formally established the idea of education within Christian social thinking in England and was the precursor to the Sunday schools and ragged school movement (Whelan, 1996).
Cunningham (1998) and Innes (1996) note that, by the mid-18th century, there was no real distinction between state and non-state action in the social welfare realm. The terms âcharityâ, âphilanthropyâ and âwelfareâ denoted areas of social intervention as opposed to specific ways of addressing social problems. Cunningham (1998) discredits âhistoriographicalâ attempts to assign charity to religious roots and philanthropy to secular ones, arguing that the English Poor Law was itself sometimes referred to as âlegal charityâ (Cunningham, 1998, p 2), and in the Catholic countries of Europe, voluntary funding also provided the main resources for poverty relief. Innes (1998) also notes that community volunteers supported state action as a matter of extending public relief. Thus,
What bound together state and voluntary bodies was that they were both concerned with formulating and implementing policies towards the poor ⌠across Europe, we can discern a âmixed economyâ of welfare in which state, church and voluntary organization were often inextricably mixed. The English Poor Law, the most obvious example of state regulation and tax funding, depended on volunteers for its operation. (Cunningham, 1998, p 2)
According to Innes (1998), therefore, the Reformation was crucial in setting European countries on specific social policy trajectories. It produced a geosocial demarcation of European welfare provision into a largely Protestant North and a Catholic South. The main characteristics of the emerging Protestant/Catholic divide in welfare provision were that in the former case, welfare was mainly coordinated by the state, through local, municipal or parochial bodies, whereas in the latter case, especially after the counter-Reformation, the church continued to dominate welfare provision through religious orders and confraternities (Innes, 1998, p 21). These differences remained a matter of degree; indeed, the same types of services were such as âlodging houses ⌠residential and non-residential workhouses ⌠home nursing-care ⌠regular or occasional pension or dole schemes ⌠and grants for special needs such as marriageâ (Innes, 1998, p 23). According to Innes (1998), the practice of institutional care for the âimpotentâ poor (the young, old, sick, homeless and vulnerable) was also begun by the church and later developed into poorhouses or âhospitalsâ in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Christian understandings of morality and social order underpinned many of the key changes taking place at this time in relation to social welfare in Britain. An emphasis on individualisation and moralisation of the relationship between donor and recipients saw more religious groups taking to the fore of social welfare such as the nuns in early 19th-century Ireland. Many leading 18th-century philanthropic organisations, such as the Philanthropic Organisation of England, were led by progressive social reformers who, even though Christian, did not necessarily attribute to their organisations a Christian mission. Rather, t...
