Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society

Traditions

Rebecca Styler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138572805
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351272261
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This four-volume historical resource provides new opportunities for investigating the relationship between religion, literature and society in Britain and its imperial territories by making accessible a diverse selection of harder-to-find primary sources. These include religious fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, sermons, travel writing, religious ephemera, unpublished notebooks and pamphlet literature. Spanning the long nineteenth century (c.1789–1914), the resource departs from older models of 'the Victorian crisis of faith' in order to open up new ways of conceptualising religion. This first volume looks at 'Traditions', offering an overview of the different religious traditions and denominations present in Britain during this period.

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I: TRADITIONS

This volume sketches a broad picture of the main varieties of religious opinion and practice within Britain during the nineteenth century. ‘Tradition’ is here understood to mean a collective body of thought and practice which refers to the authority of the past, is transmitted across at least several generations, and which has a public manifestation in the form of institutions and/or a recognised body of literature. The category is applied to different faiths, denominations and movements both within and transcending these structures. The volume seeks to bring to light new aspects of well known religious traditions, and new voices from within them, but also to broaden the range of what has typically been included in surveys of religion in this era: firstly, by including examples from different national contexts within the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland; secondly, by including faith traditions beyond Christianity and Judaism which had an organised presence in Britain by the end of the century; and thirdly, by extending the idea of ‘tradition’ to include interpretive schools of thought defined by categories of social and cultural experience rather than purely by theological, ritual or institutional concerns. It is intended that the sources selected, all (with one exception) written by enthusiastic ‘insiders’, will convey the coherence and experiential validity of each tradition for those who practised it.

The elements used by the 1851 Religious Census to distinguish one sub-group of dissent from another are useful tools to begin with for distinguishing one tradition from another – distinctiveness of doctrine, ritual and organisational structure.¹ However, these criteria imply an understanding of religion as defined ‘from above’, by the theological and institutional concerns of ecclesiastical elites. This approach tends to present faith as ‘socially decontextualised’,² demarcated from social and cultural factors which have in fact been vital in shaping religious experience. Approaches to studying religion ‘from below’ deny that religion can be isolated from ‘secular’ conditions and contexts but is inevitably embedded in them, as the tripartite title of this four-volume series suggests. As Joseph Kitawaga puts it, ‘there is no such thing as a purely religious phenomenon. A religious phenomenon is a human phenomenon and thus is not only religious but also social, cultural, psychological, biological, and so on.’³ Therefore, as well as including traditions defined by scholarly and organisational concerns that were relevant to nineteenth-century believers as well as to many religious historians, categories are also included that emerge from particular social and cultural contexts such as gender, class, geopolitics and aesthetics.⁴ This is most obvious in Part 9, ‘Interpretive Traditions’, where class, gender, poetry and nature are the experiential starting points from which inherited religious texts and tropes are explored and reinterpreted.

The geopolitical dimensions of nineteenth-century religion are recognised by the decision to include perspectives from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. While no claim is made that this volume represents anything like a full picture of faith’s regional variations in all the component nations of the British Isles (each of which boasts its own historiography for this period), elements of this have been included in order to broaden the scope of the study in this respect, and to redress the common tendency to present as British what was essentially an English experience.⁵ This approach allows room for religious traditions that are strongly inflected by geopolitical contexts, not least the colonial dynamics within the British Isles (especially following the Acts of Union in 1706, 1707 and 1801). In Wales and especially Ireland, the most populous religious traditions were increasingly shaped by a consciousness of Anglocentric hegemony, as shown in some of the sources presented here. Inclusion of the four nations complicates some of the familiar narratives of nineteenth-century religion, and ways of organising an account of it, that are most applicable in the English context. The distinction between the established church and nonconformity becomes less straightforward in Scotland where the established Church was not tied to the state in the same way as the Church of England, but the same distinction is much intensified in Wales and Ireland where for much of the century at least the established Church was bound up with colonial authority. The anxiety about working-class alienation from the churches that beset English commentators in the wake of the 1851 census, and was also a concern in Scotland, simply did not apply in Wales or Ireland for most of the century where religion flourished among working-class communities. Hence, some entries in this volume feature nationally specific religious formations (such as Irish Catholicism, Welsh Nonconformity, Scottish Presbyterianism and predominantly English Wesleyan Methodism) while others represent denominations and movements relevant to the whole of the British Isles.

This volume also aims to be more inclusive than has been usual in such surveys in its treatment of faiths beyond Christianity and Judaism which, while not populous, were nonetheless part of the picture of late-nineteenth-century religious life and signalled the beginnings of the religious diversity that developed more substantially in the twentieth century. It has been shown that natives of various faiths from India, the Middle East, Africa and China were living in Britain since at least as far back as the eighteenth century.⁶ An organised Zoroastrian community can be dated from the foundation of the Zoroastrian Association in 1861, while Muslims had localised communities focused on mosques formed in the 1880s and 1890s. It is more debatable to speak of Hinduism as a nineteenth-century tradition in Britain, if this suggests an organised community of faith practitioners, but the movement of Brahmo Hinduism was developed by Indian intellectuals in the context of British-Indian political relations and religious dialogue, in Britain and India – so it is included here. (Buddhism was known and influential among a number of late-century believers both orthodox and otherwise, but was not represented in communities of practice at this point – see Vol. IV, section 4.1. The first Sikh societies and Gurdwara were not established until the early years of the twentieth century.) It is important to recognise that, while these groups may not have been numerous or geographically widespread, focused on London and its environs and a few other major cities, they were not marginal politically speaking: Britain had its first Zoroastrian (Parsi) Member of Parliament in 1892, Dadabhai Naoroji, with another, Mancherjee Bhownaggree, elected in 1895; and the Brahmo Rammohun Roy was for a few years the star of liberal hopes in Britain as the 1832 electoral reforms approached, and was mooted as a potential MP.⁷

This volume forms the foundation of this four-volume series, depicting the established bases of faith on which (as Volumes II–IV develop) were built structures of feeling, missionary endeavour, and from which sceptics dissented. But this should not imply that this volume represents static bodies of unquestioned thought, based on a simplistic binary of tradition versus innovation. Revision and development are intrinsic to religious traditions whose members are, as Simon Marsden argues, ‘always involved in the active rereading and reinterpretation of [their] own sacred texts, language and theological concepts’.⁸ Although a tradition by definition grants authority to the past (whether located in scripture, rite or clerical office) this does not exclude the possibility of reconfiguring inherited ideas and forms in the light of changing cultural contexts which generate newly felt personal and political needs and new bodies of knowledge. As is now widely accepted in nineteenth-century religious studies, the once popular simplistic linear narrative of the ‘loss of faith’ has been replaced by a more nuanced appreciation of the varied ways in which faith responded to modernity, often to reconfigure inherited belief in the light of new contexts and understandings.⁹ Many of the sources featured in this volume register a desire to reanimate habitual forms, to push the tradition in a fresh direction, and to reinterpret its central topoi. Yet it is rare for these authors to wear innovation as a badge of virtue. More commonly they present their revisions as a return to lost origins, regaining a lost purity or fulfilling the spirit of their tradition more fully than recent aberrations. Even the more obviously progressive or liberalising movements typically claim to be recovering an original flexibility or balance that has been obscured by an anomalous phase of dogmatism. Volume IV addresses religious innovations that depart more radically from inherited religious traditions.

* * *

Given that Christianity was the religion of the majority, its various formations fill half the topics in this volume, which are organised into sections based on denominational categories, movements and national contexts. ‘Evangelical Religion’ (1) is taken as the starting point, to reflect the importance of this movement to defining the ethos of nineteenth-century religion, above all in its Protestant forms. In the first half of the century, Evangelicalism characterised orthodoxy and most forms of dissent although its ethos spread well beyond these. Proponents of non-Evangelical forms of faith (Christian and otherwise) often explained themselves in terms that responded to Evangelicalism’s priorities, above all its revivalist tone and its purist scripturalism. These features are represented here in entries on ‘ “Vital” religion’ and ‘The authority of the Bible’.

There follows a group of entries focused on what might be broadly described as established churches and/or national churches, which as noted above are not straightforward categories given the complexities of religious structures and demographics within the British Isles. ‘Anglican Developments’ (2) demonstrates two substantial responses within the Church of England to revived Evangelicalism, in the High and Broad Church movements, both of which can be connected to much longer-standing ritualist and latitudinarian traditions, and which had parallel developments within the Church of Scotland. The section ‘Roman Catholicism’ (3) shows an older faith resurgent, represented here in English and Irish formations since the difference in national contexts for this tradition can hardly be overestimated. ‘Roman Catholicism in Britain’ shows a newly tolerated minority faith following legal emancipation in 1829, while in Ireland it was the faith of the majority emerging from an era of suppression under the Protestant Ascendancy. As the entry ‘Roman Catholicism in Ireland’ demonstrates, Irish Catholicism often interwove religious with socio-political concerns and found little fellowship with its English counterpart. The section ‘Scottish Presbyterianism’ (4) represents the prevalent form of Christianity in Scotland in both its established and free forms coming to terms with the new contexts of modernity while trying to hold fast to original principles of spiritual purity and independence.

Given the number of nonconformist Christian denominations recorded in the 1851 Religious Census, ‘dissent’ can only be represented in its most significant forms. The census names as native Protestant communities in England and Wales the Presbyterians, Independents (Congregationalists), Baptists, Quakers, Unitarians, Moravians and Methodists. Methodism boasted numerous breakaway groups, from the Bible Christians (populous in south-west England) to groups like the Stephenites who had just one congregation (see entry 9.1, ‘Radical Christianity’).¹⁰ Many of these denominations had branches across Scotland and at least the Ulster counties of Ireland, while nations within the United Kingdom also had their own distinctive forms of nonconformity. The section called ‘Forms of Dissent’ (5) contains entries on ‘Wesleyan Methodism’, the prevalent form of Methodism in England, followed by an entry on ‘Welsh Nonconformity’ which demonstrates the distinctive tradition of Welsh Calvinist Methodism and the status of nonconformity more broadly as (for many) the true faith of Wales. The other dissenting groups included are ‘Unitarianism’ and ‘Quakers’ which while not large denominations were significant in the cultural consciousness due to their distinctiveness from Evangelical norms and their disproportionate presence in public life. The largest denominations not explicitly featured here – Independents (Congregationalists) and Baptists – are given voice through the authors featured in ‘Evangelical Religion’. The section entitled ‘New Nonconformist Movements’ (6) features the ‘Brethren’ and ‘The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ as traditions emerging within the nineteenth century with strong international connections. (For another significant new denomination, the Salvation Army, see Vol. II, part 2.4.)

Moving beyond Christianity, this volume features Judaism (Part 7) as a longstanding tradition in Britain, but which diversified into various forms in the nineteenth century. While native British Jewish communities were constantly added to by immigration, the larger scale migration from Eastern Europe towards the end of the century presented new challenges to how Judaism defined itself, and who was in charge of that defining. ‘Orthodox Judaism’ is represented by clerical and lay voices seeking to consolidate and deepen faith, including through female visionary power. ‘Reform Judaism’ in Britain was a uniquely biblicist variant, more traditional in most ways than its European and North American counterparts. Lily Montagu’s negotiation of contrasting modes of spirituality, in the wake of late-century diversification of the Jewish community, can retrospectively be recognised as the beginning of Liberal Judaism in Britain – the only tradition in this volume in which female leadership was utterly foundational.

The broadly titled section ‘Religious Traditions from Asia’ (8) includes faith traditions predominant in the Middle East and in India which were brought to Britain through the channels of trade and empire by migrants (both settled and transient) and converts. These entries on ‘Hinduism’, ‘Zoroastrianism’ and ‘Islam’ are each represented by a voice from one native to the faith who spent time in Britain and participated in cross-cultural dialogue within the context of British-Indian colonial dynamics. The writers representing ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Zoroastrianism’ demonstrate a reformist drive to revise popular belief and practice to better suit modern values and a transnational context, while the speaker for ‘Islam’ is particularly conscious of his faith’s potential appeal to those disillusioned with Christianity. All speak with a dual audience in mind, consolidating or reinterpreting their tradition for its ‘insiders’, but with a keen sense of responsibility for shaping outsiders’ perceptions. Whether implicitly or explicitly these accounts offer resistance to pejorative orientalist assumptions regarding the inevitable inferiority of the spiritual and ethical ideals of foreign religions.

The section ‘Interpretive Traditions’ (Part 9) demonstrates some of the key ways in which faith was redefined according to impulses that originated in social or cultural experience, some of which can be connected to longer transhistorical faith traditions. Two relate to categories of socio-political experience: ‘Radical Christianity’ and ‘Feminist Religion’ remind us of the limited place given to the perspectives of the working poor, and of women, in clerically led formulations of theology and practice. These entries effectively present ‘contextual’ theologies whereby praxis drives the reinterpretation of a tradition’s texts and symbols. These political theologies are resonant with the modern-day schools of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editor’s acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements
• General Introduction: Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society
• Introduction to Volume I: Traditions
• Part 1 Evangelical Religion
• Part 2 Anglican Developments
• Part 3 Roman Catholicism
• Part 4 Scottish Presbyterianism
• Part 5 Forms of Dissent
• Part 6 New Nonconformist Movements
• Part 7 Judaism
• Part 8 Religious Traditions from Asia
• Part 9 Interpretive Traditions