The Secular Messianism of Robert Elsmere : Race, Jewishness, and the “New Reformation”

Abstract

Abstract: This essay explores Robert Elsmere (1888) by Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs. Humphry Ward) in the context of twenty-first-century challenges to the secularization thesis. It claims that Ward’s vision of a messianic “New Reformation,” and her conception of a modern, progressive form of faith, are entangled with regressive nineteenth-century ideas about race. It argues that in its articulation of Protestant liberal theology, which is grounded in the German Higher Criticism, the novel not only endorses a racialized, anti-Judaic supersessionism that is enacted in both plot and character-structure, but also embraces a Teutonic supremacy that anticipates aspects of contemporary Christian nationalism.