Revival as Cultural Spotlight: the Strange Case of Rugby Football and the Welsh Revival of 1904–5

Abstract

Historians of religion should be used to seeing phenomena such as revivals ‘reduced’ to some other social or cultural phenomenon. Fifty years ago, Perry Miller was exasperated by attempts to explain the American Great Awakening in terms of ‘debtors against creditors’, ‘the common man against the gentry’ or any other such social relations. The Great Awakening, he insisted, was its own event and one that both illuminated and moulded the society that witnessed it. The Welsh Revival of 1904–5 was not as far-reaching in its consequences but it shares a stubborn irreducibility with other great revivals and, as I will argue, it provides vital perspectives on non-religious phenomena. The bold suggestion here is that, rather than looking to social phenomena to explain revival, we use the coruscating clarity of revival to explore ‘secular’ social phenomena – in this case, the powerful threads of sporting affiliation that had been insinuating themselves in the cultural pattern since the 1870s.