Religion and History in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Abstract The chapter introduces the process by which progressive and developmental ideas of history became authoritative in Protestant intellectual culture: a process affecting Anglicans and nonconformists; liberals and evangelicals; and religious and secular critics. It argues that the religious revivalism of the earlier part of the century tended to express itself in terms of static conceptions of religious tradition. Religious and secular varieties of liberalism, by contrast, began to rely upon more dynamic ideas of the religious past. Religious liberals challenged traditionalists by interpreting religion in developmental terms. Rooting the wider progress of civilization in the different phases of the history of the church, they elevated history into a new kind of natural theology, often with reference to different kinds of German Idealism. Their unbelieving critics, on the other hand, understood progress as the history of secularization. The chapter grounds these debates in the institutions and publishing culture of the Victorian public sphere.