Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Siècle: The Culture of English Religion in a Decadent Age, by Frances Knight

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, historians have tended to follow Callum Brown in locating the ‘death of Christian Britain’ in the 1960s. To advance that argument, Brown emphasised the grip of a post-Victorian ‘discursive Christianity’ anchored in gendered moral codes, and underpinned by the restless energy of spiritual entrepreneurs. While this story has been criticised by Jeremy Morris, Clive Field and others for mashing denominations together into one homogeneous lump, it has nevertheless helped to clear the way for a reappraisal of nineteenth-century religion, which was once assumed to be assailed by doubt, materialism and the march of mind. The main lineaments of that reappraisal are now becoming clear. Some historians, such as W.M. Jacob, emphasise the strength of institutional religion. Others, such as John Wolffe, S.J. Brown, Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas, are more interested in religious politics, thought and culture beyond the pew and the pulpit. Hovering often half-glimpsed behind such research are two linked assumptions. One is that religious institutions were not so much victims of modernity as agents of it, via their provision of education, social work and health care, and that nationalism, the pluralisation of the state and democratisation were not straightforwardly secularising shifts. The other assumption is that religion—including habits that earlier scholars dismissed as ‘superstition’—is not, like the tide, fated to ebb away; rather, it sees beliefs, practices and habits as adapting; infusing into other things; melding into new shapes. The focus of earlier generations of historians on the struggle of ‘honest doubters’ like George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin against institutions presented as always and everywhere rigid, ethically conservative and opposed to change now looks very old-fashioned indeed.