Faith and Fallacy: English and German Perspectives in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The agony of faith that failed is one of the familiar echoes of Victorian England, as familiar as the conservative rant against the corrosive scepticism of ‘German’ professors who would have been better at the bottom of the ‘German Ocean’. A crisis of faith, however, is less easy to detect, define, and date, and the hunt for it is much obfuscated by characteristic perceptions of both the mid-nineteenth and the late-twentieth centuries. The Religious Census of 1851 seemed more shocking to contemporaries than it does to us because of two assumptions which they shared neither with previous nor with later generations, that there should be a parson in every parish and that everyone free and able to darken the doors of a place of worship should do so weekly. And our own day has blinkers of its own. Is the present religious situation in western Europe an adequate hermeneutic for the whole story? Or is the problem of believing as encountered in Victorian England a chapter in a complicated web of many plots, in which belief finds new social roles as well as losing old ones, not least because of a radical redistribution of Christian belief and practice in the world as a whole. Is there one story, that of secularisation, or are there several?KeywordsNineteenth CenturyEighteenth CenturyReligious PracticeHistorical CriticismProtestant ChurchThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.