I

Historians like a good story just as much as anyone else, and no more beguiling story has been told of the history of Christianity in Britain since the beginning of the nineteenth century than that of its inexorable decline. Convinced or appalled by the anti-religious rhetoric of some of the philosophes, and by the French Revolution's destruction of much of the life and organization of the Catholic Church in Western Europe, radicals, atheists, and church people alike began to associate their experience of the age through which they were passing with the decline of Christian faith. There was nothing intrinsically new about anti-Christian thought in itself, which could be traced at least as far back as the Renaissance, if not further, to say nothing of its classical roots.Footnote ¹ But this association of unbelief with the tribulations of an age acquired an altogether more pervasive edge. A subtle exchange occurred in the process. What began primarily as an argument about the political alliances forged in the heat of resistance to the French Revolutionary regime and its reform of the church became transformed, in the British context, into an argument about social alliances, and in particular a conflict between the ‘old’ world of stability and hierarchy and the seeming ‘new’ world of industrial capitalism, with its socially disintegrative work disciplines. Radicals who construed their struggle against the established churches of Britain as a common cause with French Republicans were tempted to identify their version of Christianity, deism, or even (in extremis) secularism, with an emergent ‘modernity’ (no one of course used that word at the time) typified by the new industrial conurbations, however much some of them also criticized many of the practices of industrial and commercial entrepreneurs themselves.Footnote ² But those who opposed secularism and radical religion were caught in the same apparent choice between the old and the new: the conviction eventually took hold that the place of religion in the new world of commercial and industrial advantage was tenuous at best.

In retrospect, it is easy to see why this view should have been so persuasive. It provided a ready explanation for the shortfall that church leaders were to feel constantly in the course of the nineteenth century between their aspirations and their achievements, since the suspicion that the age was against them was never far from their minds. As it later came to be packaged as ‘secularization theory’, it raised questions about the nature of religious belief, and about the strategies that churches adopted in order to extend and consolidate their pastoral provision, which in turn were to help generate many of the early forays into applied sociological research.Footnote ³ In turn, later in the century, it came to provide one of the abiding, fundamental categories of the rising theoretical discipline of social theory. By this means, it came to dominate the minds of Western intellectuals to such an extent that it became almost part of the intellectual ‘common sense’ of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Callum Brown has put it,

This review surveys the current state of the discussion of secularization in modern Britain, and aims to show the persistence in the historiography of arguments derived ultimately from Christian categories but which have been transposed into (and thus concealed by) observations which masquerade as neutral sociological description. Whilst not seeking to deny the evidence of institutional shrinkage, it goes on to suggest a different focus for future work than that commonly adopted by historians by opening up a distinction rarely observed by historians in the field, namely that between arguments about religious decline per se, and arguments about the nature of religious experience. Historians have been wary of examining the latter, presumably fearing the evidential difficulties of analysing supposedly internal states of mind. As a consequence, however, they have tended to assume that the nature of religious experience as an analytical category is self-evident and in need of no further investigation. As I shall suggest, a more pluralistic or sophisticated understanding of religion raises profound challenges to a tradition of interpretation which has mostly been content to assume that the enormous diversity of religious experience in modern British history can be subsumed under a single historical problematic.

II

The religious historiography of modern Britain has been dominated by the one overarching question: has the story of Christianity in and through the long period of industrialization and urbanization in Britain, up to the present day, been one of inexorable, continuing decline? The answer, until recently, was mostly cast in the affirmative. It was relatively easy for social historians to fit much of the statistical, institutional, and biographical evidence for popular belief into a framework that presupposed that very ‘warfare’ of science and religion, and the ‘crisis of faith’, that they encountered in the writings of many of the more prominent thinkers of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵ Many historians consequently almost took for granted the intrinsic hostility of industrialization, technological development, and social change to organized Christianity, and armed with that conviction, it was possible to fight their way through the vast and complex mass of available evidence available to the simple conclusion that the churches struggled fruitlessly against the growing religious indifference of the new urban ‘masses and classes’.

Despite the welter of local commentary presupposing falling rates of churchgoing throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians generally date the modern discussion of secularization to E. R. Wickham's Church and people in an industrial city (1957), a study of Sheffield. This is perhaps because of the succinct, pithy way in which Wickham expressed his conclusions, and his readiness to deploy the language of social science. He famously argued that ‘[f]rom the emergence of the industrial towns in the eighteenth century, the working class … have been outside the churches’; or, as he put it forcefully elsewhere, it was not that the churches had lost the working class, but that ‘they have never had them’.Footnote ⁶ His position was taken up approvingly in K. S. Inglis's Churches and the working classes in Victorian England (1963), and was widely accepted in the 1960s and 1970s as a decisive intervention.Footnote ⁷ Yet his combination of historical analysis and mission strategy should have given pause for thought. For all the care he brought to his study of the Sheffield material, Wickham was not a professional historian, but a committed Anglican priest who had helped to found modern industrial mission. His eye was on the present, with its closing churches and shrinking congregations. Building on the perceptions of nineteenth-century clergy – themselves influenced by the secularizing narratives generated by evangelical and revivalist soteriology – he drew out contemporary commentary and statistics on Sheffield's church growth to delineate a widening gulf between the churches and the working people of Sheffield. He could quote the Anglican clergyman Samuel Earnshaw's verdict in 1861 that ‘the Christian religion has almost entirely lost its hold upon the artisans of this country’, and others like it, alongside the 1851 statistics.Footnote ⁸ Church building and church attendance were central to Wickham's case. But these were official (or church-generated) indices which inevitably highlighted shortfall; neither index could register adequately the social reach of the churches, nor touch the pervasive nature of popular Christianity. As a result, Wickham's conclusions had a strangely predictable shape, for all the welter of evidence: they pointed to the need for more engagement, and for better religious provision, conclusions which would have been perfectly familiar to his Victorian forebears. Nevertheless, his work became an important element of the orthodoxy about religious decline which now established itself widely in British social history, not least because his identification of social class as the central category in analysing British religious history struck a chord with social historians increasingly preoccupied with class analysis.

The decisive piece of evidence for this position was the only official census of church attendance in Britain, conducted in 1851 and published in summary form in 1854, which claimed that only 58 per cent of the 12·5 million people who were able to attend church on the Census Sunday (i.e. after omitting the sick and elderly, some servants, and others who clearly could not attend) actually did so.Footnote ⁹ Under the rule that prevents access to the detailed census returns in Britain for 100 years, historians could not look closely at the local evidence for this claim until the late 1950s, but when they did so, what they found seemed to confirm it.Footnote ¹⁰ Certainly, the availability of the returns stimulated a new wave of social history of religion in Britain, which thrived on the excitement generated by the growing influence of social theory and sociology on history to apply the term ‘secularization’ to the long-term narrative of religious change in Britain. By the late 1960s, the dominant theoretical model in British religious history had become a concept of secularization which, as we shall see, ultimately was derived from the religious pathology of Victorian church people, though shaped in and through the work of Marx, Tönnies, and Weber.Footnote ¹¹ This was so, despite the fact that even the 1851 census itself registered what is likely to have been a remarkably high level of national church attendance across Britain, given all the assumptions commonly made about the godlessness of the new industrial cities.

Even when they disagreed about the precise contours of religious change in Britain, historians could at least agree that secularization represented the central principle around which their work revolved. For the next twenty years or so, the essential shape of this account was fleshed out in a series of highly influential monographs, and given added force, it seemed, by the statistics of church membership collected by Alan Gilbert, Robert Currie, and Lee Horsley, all of whom were also to make significant contributions of their own to the debate.Footnote ¹² Hugh McLeod's study of church life in London, Class and religion in the late Victorian city (London, 1974), was perhaps the most sophisticated and rich of its kind, but it retained social class as its main analytical category, and remained wedded to an interpretative framework of decline. Alan Gilbert's equally sophisticated synthesis was notable as an account which already demonstrated some awareness of evidence which ran against the grain of the secularization thesis, but which could only accommodate that evidence within an argument which assumed the truth of an underlying trend of secularization: ‘the effectiveness of the Victorian Church as a social institution … reflected a process more of metamorphosis than of revival’.Footnote ¹³

The centrality of the category of social class in what amounted to a new sub-discipline, namely the social history of religion, proved attractive in other ways, too. It seemed to fit closely, for example, arguments which instrumentalized religion in class conflict by presenting it as an agent of social manipulation and control. By this means, the rise of class consciousness – especially of a distinctive working-class consciousness – itself became part of the story of secularization, as the ‘rising’ working class were, as agents of modernity, to throw off the shackles of religion in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the most eloquent – indeed infamous – presentation of this view, E. P. Thompson's description of Methodism as the ‘chiliasm of despair’, rapidly came under forceful attack, nevertheless the basic presumption has lingered on.Footnote ¹⁴ Later attempts to nuance such arguments nevertheless assumed the same basic move.Footnote ¹⁵ Perhaps the sharpest expression was Jennifer Hart's evisceration of Victorian sermons in the interest of presenting a thoroughly distilled and systematized concept of social control.Footnote ¹⁶ The difficulty for historians wishing to challenge such a simplification of course was that the social effects and intentions of religious professionals could not be denied: few Anglican clergy in the nineteenth century, for example, believed in anything other than the preservation of the existing social order. But it is quite another matter to assume that power relations themselves constitute the central feature of an analysis of religion. The conviction persists, however. Two recent books on the Anglican clergy by Robert Lee, for example, deploy an account of religion that is captivated by the concepts of hierarchy and social control.Footnote ¹⁷ His study of rural Norfolk is constructed on the ‘presumptive view that the clergyman stood in an authoritarian relationship to his parishioners’.Footnote ¹⁸ Again and again, he reads religion as a cipher for ‘more complex’ realities, seeing revivalism, for example, against the background of social, economic, and political convulsions.Footnote ¹⁹ A twofold movement is at work in arguments such as this: first, religion is conceived as a symbol or expression of something else; and second, it is extrapolated and bundled up as a cluster of symbols which become, paradoxically, isolated from their context in devotional practice and belief. Consequently, it is robbed of its internal sophistication and diversity.

Arguments presuming religion to be primarily an instrument of social control thus parallelled and strengthened the case for secularization. In a sense, the common factor was the emphasis on social class, or class consciousness, as the key variable. Yet the paradigm of working-class consciousness in particular was influenced by the supposition that religion essentially was tangential, or even marginal, to authentic work-class experience. Religious decline, consequently, was assumed to be an integral aspect of the emergence of a mass, democratic society.

III

However resilient it may have proved to be, nevertheless the flaws in the secularization argument could not be concealed, and in the last thirty years, a growing tide of revisionism has seriously challenged it. Beginning with the publication of Jeffrey Cox's study of Lambeth in 1982, increasingly historians have doubted both the adequacy of the statistical evidence once marshalled in favour of secularization, and the various explanations offered for it.Footnote ²⁰ Cox questioned the inevitability of secularization, and showed the vitality of late Victorian religion. Work by Hugh McLeod, and later Sarah Williams, on oral evidence showed how religion remained a pervasive and important aspect of working-class culture, even in the early twentieth century.Footnote ²¹ An early article by Callum Brown, drawing much on the 1851 figures, broke the absolute link between urbanization and church decline.Footnote ²² Detailed study of the 1851 census by Keith Snell and Paul S. Ell has confirmed this.Footnote ²³ Mark Smith, in a provocative study of Oldham and its hinterland, assembled persuasive evidence of an increase in churchgoing throughout the period of rapid industrialization.Footnote ²⁴ Clearly, the rise of new forms of leisure, the rise of organized labour, the rise of the factory system, the rise of concepts of social class and class consciousness – all the various ‘rises’ that had been used to explain the apparent decline of churchgoing in industrial society – now had to be discounted. As this wave of revisionism rolled forward, the chronology of church decline had to be reassessed. Hugh McLeod put its beginning in the 1880s and 1890s; Jeffrey Cox and Simon Green, supported to some extent by Sarah Williams, pushed it forwards to the 1930s; then Callum Brown, in his path-breaking The death of Christian Britain (2001) went further still, reckoning that there was no significant decline in Britain's religious life until the 1960s.Footnote ²⁵ This claim depended upon a radical shift in the understanding of ‘Christian Britain’. Brown mined a variety of data – including evangelical tracts – to extract a linguistic code (or ‘discourse’, in his terminology) which could then be read in terms of gender relations. The content of this discourse he labelled the ‘salvation economy’, and without question he made much of telling, significant insights the data yielded into ways in which men and women understood their worlds in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote ²⁶ By this means, the variations of official indices of church practice before the 1960s were effectively sidelined.

Leaving Brown's controversial arguments to one side for the moment, there is now something like an emergent consensus, at least amongst social historians of religion. Contrary to the view that dominated British religious history for many years, church attendance (and other forms of practice) actually increased throughout most of the nineteenth century, so that historians are now prepared to talk about the institutional revival of the churches.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, something like the same observation, by extension, can be applied to the experience of Christianity across Europe in the nineteenth century, a period when so often historians have been tempted to emphasize religious crisis and decline, but which in fact, post-1815, was an extraordinary period of religious revival.Footnote ²⁸ Secularization on any significant scale did not happen until quite recently, and cannot be linked directly to industrialization, or urbanization, or the rise of class consciousness. There is, however, evidence that measurable religious practice (church attendance, rites of passage) probably failed to keep pace with population growth from the end of the nineteenth century, and peaked in absolute terms in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ²⁹ Even between the wars, then, Britain remained a strikingly religious and churchgoing society. This is borne out by Rex Walford's telling study of church building in the new north London suburbs after 1918, which presented evidence both of large congregations and of a deep penetration of suburban society by the churches, something particularly illustrated by the scale of the new electoral rolls for the parochial church councils created under the Enabling Act of 1919.Footnote ³⁰

There is no doubt that religious practice began to contract sharply in the 1960s, so that Callum Brown, dispensing with the conventional arguments on secularization, paradoxically has retained the term in relation to the last fifty years of British history. Nevertheless, even Brown's work has displaced secularization from its once widely accepted central role in the narrative of religious history in Britain. His more recent Religion and society in twentieth-century Britain (London, 2006) subtly modified the account of religious change he had offered previously to include more personal evidence of the complexity of religious belief, through personal testimony. Increasingly, the attention of historians has been drawn to the decade in which social historians themselves took to the thesis with such enthusiasm – the 1960s. This was the decade of the ‘permissive’ revolution in culture and society, and its impact on the life of the churches had never been studied adequately before. Brown's lead has now been followed by Hugh McLeod in a wide-ranging study which claims that the period may one day come to be seen as ‘marking a rupture as profound as that brought about by the Reformation’, and by Nigel Yates who has shown nevertheless the persistence of religious themes even through much of the new culture and art of the period.Footnote ³¹

It may yet prove premature to talk of an ‘emergent consensus’. Most historians writing in this field would now agree about the Victorian revival of institutional religion, and would be sceptical of attempts to produce all-encompassing explanations of Christianity's eventual contraction in modern Britain. Yet they would not all agree about the dispensability of the term ‘secularization’. Brown retains it, as I have pointed out; it remains embedded in the literature on modern Britain produced by social and political historians; and it is also central to the work of a number of sociologists, including Steve Bruce, whose strong rebuttal of revisionism increasingly sees him foraging in the fields of the historians.Footnote ³² Green, in his most recent book, has replaced the notion of a decline in Christianity with a distinct and different (if overlapping) notion of a decline in Protestant identity – well aware, nevertheless, that even this hypothesized and contracted argument may well still stand against the grain of much recent historiography.Footnote ³³ This is comparable to another recent updating of the secularization argument, which has focused on the disappearance of ‘Christendom’ as the overarching hegemony of the values sponsored by the Christian churches: Christianity survives in modern Britain, the argument implies, but has been displaced from its once unchallenged authority.Footnote ³⁴ There are, then, continuing disagreements over methodology. Can historians say anything adequate about religion beyond referring to measurable data? Should changing indices of religious practice be taken as a direct reflection of changing ‘inner’ religious states of mind? Should religious practice be interpreted in terms of particular social functions, and particular social interests? These and other questions remain unanswered.

What is clear, however, is that the argument over ‘secularization’ in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has largely ceased to be an argument about the nature and interpretation of evidence of religious practice, and is now becoming – much more interestingly – one about the interpretation of ‘religion’ itself. It is most unlikely that there will be significant new evidence brought to the fore in the years to come. The 1851 material has been practically ‘done to death’. The returns have been well worked over now, and published for many English and Welsh counties.Footnote ³⁵ The available oral material has now mostly been studied.Footnote ³⁶ Diaries, letters, and other personal testimony are, by their very nature, unlikely to have a major impact on the study of national trends.

New interpretations of what is fast becoming familiar material undoubtedly will arise, and the voracious capacity of online search engines may facilitate more creative syntheses of different kinds of evidence, not least the vast amount of newspaper and periodical material now available online. But I doubt that this will get us very far, unless it helps us to think more creatively about the historical interpretation of religious belief. What is very striking even in contemporary writing on this subject is the persistence of a ‘Feuerbachian residue’.Footnote ³⁷ Echoing the basic move made in Feuerbach's Essence of religion, historians seem to have assumed that the core elements of British religion can be construed in such a way as to reflect central aspects of power relations in society, and that the sophistication of their account of religion will be determined solely by the corresponding sophistication of their understanding of social relations. Religion, on this view, is only to be understood in terms of something else, in terms of that which it is not.Footnote ³⁸

IV

This opens up the possibility that the study of the genealogy of arguments about secularization, and their relationship to religious history, may yet have much to yield. Far from being a product of the objective study of society, the conviction that the new world coming into being was intrinsically hostile to religion was also theologically convenient for the churches, indeed in a sense it was the product of new currents of devotion. Thus a closer and longer-term examination of the sources of secularization theory than the conventional ‘history of ideas’ narrative that draws on the modern ‘masters of suspicion’ such as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber may have much to tell us about the reasons why it has remained such a compelling argument. The transformation of Protestant piety in the West in the course of the eighteenth century – a devotional movement variously called by historians Pietism, the Evangelical Revival or the Great Awakening – depended upon the development of an account of contemporary religion as well as contemporary society which presumed the thinning out, or secularizing, of the context in which the new forms of religious association had to be asserted. The theological roots of secularization theory as yet lack full investigation, but there are many clues in the late Reg Ward's dense and rich study of the origins of the Revival.Footnote ³⁹ That secularization is also a theological hypothesis is precisely why accounts of its history cannot afford to ignore the history of theology.Footnote ⁴⁰ The theological rationale for ‘revival’ was, naturally, the moribund state of existing religious institutions, which could be attributed to the pervasive effects of concupiscence and sin. Revival was predicated on the perception of loss, corruption, failure, and spiritual emptiness, and the association of this spiritual desolation with contemporary features of society became all the more powerful when wedded to anxieties about the consequences of social and political change. This arguably stood in contrast to the religious rivalries of the seventeenth century, in which puritan criticism of the Church of England, and of the ‘Laudian’ tradition, could be presented essentially as a political threat, an aggressive companion of monarchical absolutism. The social pathology of evangelicalism thus came to generate narratives of secularization which were to become enormously influential in the nineteenth century. William Wilberforce's A practical view of the prevailing religious system (1797) gave the game away in its full title, which went on to read ‘of professed Christians in the higher and middle classes in this country, contrasted with real Christianity’.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, Wilberforce's justification, as a politician, for commenting on the state of his fellow citizen's Christianity opened up precisely the horizon, not only of personal sin, but of social apostasy: ‘he might also allege … not only that Religion is the business of every one, but that its advancement or decline in any country is so intimately connected with the temporal interests of society, as to render it the peculiar concern of a political man’.Footnote ⁴² John Wesley famously pointed out – and was quoted triumphantly by Weber as a result – the intricate relationship of revivalism, prosperity and indifference:

Wesley's pessimism about the prospects of Methodism thus encompassed not only the old or existing world of religious belief, but the new world of commercial opportunity. And yet, on the surface, there was little actually new in this argument. It would not be pressing the argument too far to suggest that Christianity almost necessarily generates narratives of secularization – or at least of religious decline – which arise in the course of attempts to explain why renewed religious commitment is required in a context in which the Gospel has already been proclaimed long before. It is the systematization of this insight into a doctrine which came to be detached from its theological origins, and articulated as a ‘truth’ of social science, which is at issue in debate over secularization theory today.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the nineteenth century, the rationale for revival – the overcoming of the ‘decline’ later labelled ‘secularization’ – came to be articulated in and through new disciplines of social organization, which in turn created categories of evidence convenient for illustrating and demonstrating the narrative. The systematic manipulation of emotion practised by the great revivalists of the period – men such as Charles Finney or Dwight Moody – and backed up by careful organization of supporters was predicated on this very secularizing pathology, for it depended upon renewal of an existing but faded faith. Waves of revival notoriously intersected cyclically with periods of falling away.Footnote ⁴⁵ The narrative of revival and decline proved to be infinitely adaptable, for it applied as much to individuals as to churches or social groups, and it has remained an extraordinarily powerful item in the armoury of the revivalist preacher.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet other forms of organization and technology also proved their worth. Meetings, professional preachers, song-books, the railways, and metalled roads, all had their part to play in the organization of the thoroughly ‘modern’ science of religious revival. But so did the marshalling of new kinds of evidence – statistics of converts and members, for example, and surveys of social and moral conditions.

By the twentieth century, the story of decline had thus garnered a great deal of evidence to support it. The systematic collection of social data – a product largely of the scientific aspirations of social scientists in the nineteenth century – enabled the identification of inconvenient or undesirable trends, just as much as convenient or desirable ones. To measure churchgoing, to take the simplest example, was naturally also to enable the measurement of non-churchgoing. Arguments about church building needs and rates of church building (or ‘church extension’, in the contemporary jargon) were to be conducted against the background of a conviction that provision was always falling short of identified need. Need could be calculated, because population could be counted. Since most forms of Christianity in Britain were strongly influenced by the new currents of piety and their preoccupation with evangelism, it was perhaps inevitable that churches would be tempted again and again to measure their aspirations against their achievements, and to find the latter falling short.

Yet all this is not to deny that there were definite shifts in observable phenomena such as church attendance. Secularization theory may seem a sociological doctrine whose proponents are remarkably reluctant to investigate the philosophical character of its arguments. But it would be foolish in the extreme to suppose that exposing the intellectual genealogy of arguments about secularization in itself evaporates the evidence they are used to explain. The institutional shrinking of the historic, mainstream churches in Britain in the twentieth century is, for the most part, established beyond doubt. That in turn, as Steve Bruce has recently argued, cannot but have had an impact on popular religion, the religion which some historians have assumed clung on in popular culture long after the tide of churchgoing began to recede.Footnote ⁴⁷ The question at issue here is not, however, the existence of observable trends, but rather the production of a general interpretation which is presumed to explain most or all of the data. The account which has dominated the historiography of British religion has presumed a process which social historians, believers, and historians alike have packaged as ‘secularization’. It is this that is now in contention, rather than the indices concerning Christian practice and belief which have been deployed as evidence for the process. There is, therefore, a historical trend which needs investigation, and accordingly there remains a need to test contrasting historical explanations.

If accounts such as those I have cited are misleading, what could stand in their place? The implications of this critique could be taken in two different ways. The more radical direction, I would suggest, is that ‘secularization’ is a broken concept, inapplicable to the British experience in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, and unhelpful even in attending to the contraction of mainstream Christianity in the last half-century. It is a product of the marriage of theoretical arguments which sought to displace or replace Christianity – Feuerbach's essentialism, Marx's compensation theory, Tönnies's transition from traditional community to modern society, Weber's notion of disenchantment, and so on – to the narratives of decline and revival generated by Christians themselves. As Brown himself has recognized, the conventional notion of secularization is an ideological construct whose time has passed.Footnote ⁴⁸ In its place what is required is a much more sophisticated and contextualized methodology for the study of religion, which takes religion seriously in the sense of recognizing the sophistication, complexity, and generative power of the values, practices, and ideas of the people of the past. It is a methodology that could stand comparison with the work of contemporary ethnographers of religion, such as Tim Jenkins's book Religion in English everyday life (1999), in which a series of cross-sections through aspects of religious practice in modern Britain allows the reader to see something of the inner complexity of religious practice and belief.Footnote ⁴⁹ Not all readers will agree with Jenkins's assault on secularization theory, but his attention to religious life as lived opens up ways of seeing particular religious practices which resist simplistic reduction. It is a methodology that could also involve the triangulation of concepts of religion according to an array of different forms of evidence covering liturgical practice, doctrinal difference, institutional development, and personal testimony.

There is no question but that historians are constrained by the nature of the evidence at hand, however, and a historical ethnography of the kind I am sketching here is likely to remain peculiarly elusive.Footnote ⁵⁰ A less radical direction would be the reconfiguration of British religious history with the teleological assumptions built into secularization theory taken out. In this view, a refreshingly different reading of the history of British religion might come into view. It could be one which would register variations in religious practice over time, but seek to include these into a broader account of the development of British religion than is conventionally assumed. Theological disagreements would be seen to matter, for they must certainly take their place in the complex of reasons why British religion has changed over time, in other words why there is a history of British religion. Dispensing with the concept of secularization would also force us to concentrate more attention on the particular adaptive and evangelistic strategies of churches and religious groups. Above all, it would dispose at last of the notion that modern Britain is inherently unreligious by virtue of being ‘modern’, and allow the construction of a new narrative in which religion could be seen once more to have been central to the British experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Political historians of the nineteenth century have already begun to show the way, inspired in part by Colin Matthew's comprehensive reassessment of the career of Gladstone.Footnote ⁵¹ But that is just one strand. Others might include much closer attention to regional variations in religious belief and practice in Britain, closer study of the role that religion played in the emergence of municipal culture, and consideration of the interaction of law and religion in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵² Dispensing with the straitjacket of secularization could prove to be remarkably liberating. Again, signs of where this could lead are present in the recent book Redefining Christian Britain (2006), an indirect riposte to Callum Brown which sets out the diverse ways in which modern British culture and social life remain indebted to Christian ideas and institutions, and also in the ambitious collection of essays, Religion and the political imagination (2010).Footnote ⁵³ The case studies in both books suggest at the very least how hollow and misleading the secularization paradigm can be, at the same time as salvaging (especially in the latter volume) elements of its deployment which remain of enduring importance. Writing of Philip Pullman's His dark materials trilogy, for example, with an eye on children's literature more broadly, the sociologist Bernice Martin asserts ‘Like Blake and most antinomians and many secular moderns Pullman judges religious authority with peculiar harshness precisely because he is employing criteria of judgement derived from Christianity itself, however much they have been repackaged as “secular”.’Footnote ⁵⁴ That in itself – given what I have argued above about Christianity's presentation of itself as a response to a narrative of failure – is hardly surprising.

But central to the kind of methodological reconfiguration of which I am speaking would be a re-examination of the nature of ‘religion’ itself. There is already a useful literature to hand here, which draws on philosophical and theological history to show how the concept of ‘religion’ is weighted with assumptions which carry an intrinsic predisposition towards its own marginalization. Michael Buckley's magisterial study of the origins of modern atheism, for example, demonstrated how the denial of religious belief became possible in Western thought precisely at the point at which a distinctive shift occurred in the ontological description offered by Christian theology, such that the things of another world could be analysed and criticized or denied as if in some sense continuous with, or defined by, the observable world.Footnote ⁵⁵ Brian Young's study of Enlightenment religion showed the emergence of an understanding of religion amenable to comparative study, a point underlined from the direction of critical theology by Nicholas Lash.Footnote ⁵⁶ Here, and in other studies, the pertinent observation is that, before the emergence of comparative religion, there was no obvious sense in which the term ‘religion’ was assumed to describe a basic human experience shared between people of different faiths and constitutively different from, say, ‘politics’ or ‘art’ or ‘leisure’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the interest of intellectual clarity – but not of conceptual sophistication – ‘religion’ came to be defined in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a human activity, a subject of appropriate analysis irrespective of the truth claims of particular forms of religious faith.

Since historians study human activity, or rather the evidence for human activity, there is probably nothing to be gained from dispensing altogether with the term ‘religion’. But noting the genealogy of the term can help to understand what is lost if its reference is assumed to be self-evident and one-dimensional. Something of that loss is encountered, for example, in the common tendency amongst historians to recast religious experience and church life into the simple polarization of ‘elite religion’ and ‘popular religion’, obliging them to choose one or other as their main focus.Footnote ⁵⁸ Social historians of religion have thus tended to set their work over against that of conventional ecclesiastical history since, by focusing on church leaders, institutions, and doctrine, that has merely continued the ancient preoccupation of historians with the upper echelons of society; by contrast, their own work has proclaimed its attention to the ideas and values of the common people. Even some of the most creative forays into the field have found it difficult to escape this polarity altogether. Sarah Williams's influential study of popular religion in Southwark is sensitive to the observation that ‘official and unofficial religion’ were not ‘monolithic and immutable entities’, but interrelated and overlapping, and yet much of her discussion of the religious experience of the poor of Southwark falls into line behind the assumption that ‘popular religion’ was markedly different from the religion of religious professionals.Footnote ⁵⁹ Clergy appear here as eccentric interlopers, remote from the people they served. The religion of the people is read as something qualitatively different from the religion of the churches, erasing the infinite number of mediations and negotiations by which the life of any complex institution such as a church is sustained in practice.

If there is much to be learnt about the poverty of binary forms of analysis from anatomizing the construction of secularization theory, there is also much to be learnt about the complexity of religious experience. Inevitably, the secularization model has focused attention on the reasons why people did not go to church (though that in itself is an immensely complex issue, one all too often oversimplified in the literature). But why did people go to church? Historians have tended to assume either that they did so simply because they believed in what the churches were teaching them, or because (see the discussion above) religion covertly served some other social function. More refined attempts in the twentieth century to describe the nature of popular piety – such as those pioneered by Weber or Otto – resorted to some such polarity as ‘this worldly/other worldly’, but this is virtually useless for the close analysis of historical patterns of religious behaviour and belief. Much work remains to be done in explicating the contours of religious behaviour in the past.

There is a useful parallel here, however, in the ethnographic and anthropological study of liturgy. The work of social anthropologists on ritual does provide a useful counterbalance for historians, since it may evoke subtler, multi-dimensional notions of religious expression, though perhaps only at the cost of a different kind of polarity, namely that of ‘text’ (ritual) and context. Here, the rite is certainly read as a social symbol for a really existent social order. A more nuanced position on ritual than that of earlier theorists emerged in the ‘symbolic anthropology’ of Clifford Geertz, with his assertion that ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’.Footnote ⁶⁰ But when Geertz described the anthropological study of religion as a ‘two-stage operation’, he located the ‘meaning’ of religious symbol outside itself, since this study involved ‘first, an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which make up the religion proper, and, second, the relating of these systems to social-structural and psychological processes’.Footnote ⁶¹ As the Muslim ethnologist Talal Asad pointed out, this division of symbol and society implies two separate levels of analysis, namely cultural symbols, on the one hand, and social and psychological realities, on the other.Footnote ⁶² Geertz had failed to spot that religious symbols not only produce moods and motivations (in Geertz's terminology), but also project disciplines, and that disciplines in turn can coerce specific reactions.Footnote ⁶³

The ethnography of religion has moved on substantially since the Geertz–Asad discussion. A clutch of American ethnographers have begun to explore the ways in which those who profess particular religious convictions creatively improvise accounts of their world in ways which deploy, test, and stretch categories derived from their faith.Footnote ⁶⁴ Remaining nevertheless with the question of the interpretation of ritual, recently liturgists have begun to be more interested in the way in which ritual does not necessarily carry one meaning only, but promotes and stimulates a variety of different levels of meaning. J. F. Baldwin, for example, has used pioneering discussions by Laurence A. Hoffman advancing a fourfold typology of ritual, and by William Doty on the multiplicity of ritual's effects, to propose that the study of liturgy is not well served by the assumption of single meaning, for, as he says, ‘we draw the distinction between essential and non-essential aspects of the rite to our peril, since much of the rite that theologians and historians may think important may have little significance to the participants’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Conversely, rituals which theologians and historians consider unimportant, or ‘fading’, or residual, may continue to matter much to their participants. Consideration of liturgy in this light raises the possibility that, in any one act of worship, many different things are going on, resisting the ‘pigeonholing’ of worship into one overarching explanatory theory.

The observation is capable of extension. It suggests that what historians need to evolve is something like a typology of professed piety that can be read differentially in the light of theology, liturgy, and social and economic change, amongst other factors. Just as Friedrich Schleiermacher used the concept of religious experience, in The Christian faith, to contain, not the world of subjective religious experiences, but rather the collective experience that the content of Christian faith itself created, so historians perhaps need to take the notion of Christian experience and subject it to examination with a typology that might cover something of the range of experiences of individual believers in the modern era.Footnote ⁶⁶ The difficulty that a historical individual's motivation remains largely hidden from view is almost insurmountable; but evidence does point to something, even if what it points to, and how it does so, is elusive. What follows is not an exhaustive categorization – since all of these categories are descriptive ‘takes’, not decisive, self-evident identities – but simply a sketch of various possible religious responses, drawing on personal testimony or third-person description:

There are doubtless others. Merely listing responses such as this simply acts as a pointer to the complexity of the discussion. It also tends to individualistic accounts, unless corrected by an acknowledgement that many different traditions of belief, motivation and practice may be present and active in the lives of particular people. No one person is likely ever to have represented just one or other of these responses. The same could surely be said of any particular religious experience or practice. If there is a debt of sorts here to William James's Varieties of religious experience, it is certainly not in claiming that the historical study of piety can yield an identifiable religious ‘core’ of experience, but rather simply in the complexity suggested in the title – there are, or can be presumed to have been, varieties of religious experience in the past, which will have criss-crossed and mutually interwoven not only in the history of particular communities, but in the history of individuals themselves, and which will have been, in an equally complex way, informed by and influencing the politics, culture, and social outlook of the people concerned.Footnote ⁶⁷ What I have here called ‘liturgical piety’ would appear to sit closely alongside ‘customary piety’, for example, and the latter certainly alongside ‘sociable piety’. And so one could go on.

Nothing more than the briefest of hints can be given here. Such an analysis might help us to re-read the history of British religion in a way that restores depth and complexity to our understanding of it. Take, for example, one of the many vignettes of village religion that litter the pages of Francis Kilvert's Diary. After visiting a dying man, Pritchard, at Cefn Y Blaen at Easter 1870, for example, he wrote the following:

Noting how varied popular religious experience might have been enables us to see how many layers are present just in this one short account – liturgical piety, to an extent, possibly customary piety, but also sacramental piety. The ecclesiastical historian would remark the evidence of Easter communion, the social historian perhaps the voluntary claim implicit in the phrase ‘merely because he liked to receive’, and the eagerness of the family to get Pritchard to make his will. But consider too the following extract from the undergraduate diary of Francis Chavasse (later bishop of Liverpool), just four years earlier:

Again, many dimensions of religious experience can be discerned here, including (obviously) sacramental piety, but also personalist piety (‘Never before did I feel him so near’) and mystical piety (‘Oh who can tell the rapture of that blessed time’). Each of these dimensions could be the subject of historical investigation, for each could manifestly be encountered in other lives and other contexts. But these two clerical accounts of communion, the one intensely personal and interior, the other descriptive of a pastoral encounter, share a common context in the mid-nineteenth Anglican concern to reinvigorate eucharistic worship, even though Kilvert, a moderate high Anglican, and Chavasse, an evangelical, had quite different doctrinal positions. They are moments then in the changing history of Anglican eucharistic piety, to take one thread only, and comparison and contextualization begin to open up a sobering complexity in the conventional story of Victorian piety. From a very different end of the social spectrum, consider again the personalist dimensions of this account provided by Sarah Williams from an interview given by a Barbara Luke (describing Sunday School) in the early twentieth century:

Here again the differences between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ religious experience begin to blur, for what we hear is an account, not of what Barbara Luke herself claimed to know, but of what she was taught, and there is surely an echo there of one person's experience of the very different emotional register, reflected in language, in Sunday School as opposed to adult worship in church.

At the risk of overdoing the point, another pair of accounts provides a useful and striking comparison. Mystical and experiential piety is surely present here in Cosmo Gordon Lang's description of a decisive spiritual encounter in Cuddesdon parish church in 1889:

But it is a very different kind of religious motivation that one finds in the high church John Betjeman's testimony to a non-believing friend fifty years later:

It would be dangerous, of course, to set these two accounts beside each other simply as a contrast, for no one could accuse Lang of being indifferent to doctrine, and likewise no one could accuse Betjeman of being unconcerned with mystical experience. Though separated by time and social circle, they are both recognisably the voices of high churchmen, but with many different registers present at once.

Most of the accounts cited above come, naturally, from the highly educated. But there is no intrinsic reason to believe that the spiritual world of the poor was any less complex, or any less intersected by Christian doctrine, than was that of the rich and educated. Kilvert's experiences – even refracted through the eyes of a man self-consciously crafting a literary text – open up enormous possibilities for the interpretation of religious belief, not only of his own class, but of that of the people he observed and met. Betjeman himself, after all, in the extract above, throws out the suggestion that any particular person's religious motivation is irredeemably complex: it is surely the historian's responsibility at the very least to acknowledge that complexity, and to seek to respect it in the process of investigating and reconstructing the world of the past. Though I have offered nothing more than the sketchiest of indications here as to how this could actually be done in real historical study, the implication nevertheless is that religion in the modern world is not adequately described as a sort of quiddity, the nature of which can only be described after we have subtracted tangible human realities such as economic activity, social relationships, and political and community identities. With such a caution in view, the simplistic trajectories of classic secularization theory are left far behind.

V

In the compass of a work of this length, inevitably it has not been possible to do much more than to survey the literature on religious ‘decline’ in modern Britain, noting some of its weaknesses, and suggesting alternate strategies. In particular, I have sought to show that, far from being a critical solvent applied to Christianity by forces or people acting from outside it, secularization theory in part derives its authority from Christianity's own pathology of decay and renewal. I have also sought to demonstrate how some of the more attenuated conceptions of religious belief which linger on in the work of secularization apologists, and perhaps social historians more generally, could be amplified and enriched by greater attention to the complexity of religious experience. But I would not want to exaggerate the deleterious effect of the preoccupation with decline on religious history, real though it has been. It is not that the secularization thesis has evacuated other religious and historical perspectives altogether, including those of traditional ecclesiastical history. There have been significant disagreements between historians over subsidiary issues in modern British Christianity, and these continue. Was evangelical religion in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an impediment to working-class radicalism, or a midwife to it? Notoriously, social historians following the lead of Elie Halévy, such as Edward Thompson, have tended to the former view, whereas a number of scholars, such as Robert Wearmouth, Bernard Semmel, and John Walsh, have dissented from the contradistinction this seemed to imply between class consciousness and religious belief, and suggested a much more positive relationship.Footnote ⁷³ Age-old theological divisions between and within churches continue to provoke historians to reassess or reassert the significance of specific movements or leaders, with the Oxford Movement in particular still attracting rival, contrasting interpretations.Footnote ⁷⁴ Another debate has run – and still runs – over the relationship of religion and national identity in Britain. Stirred up by Linda Colley's contention that Protestantism was central to the evolution of British national identity in the eighteenth century, historians have been picking over the bones of the ensuing controversy ever since.Footnote ⁷⁵ Yet another, less intense discussion has centred on the adaptive strategies of churches in the modern period, as they sought to ‘modernize’ their ministries, liturgies, missionary, and educational methods and bureaucracies to cope with the challenges of rapid social change.Footnote ⁷⁶

In these and other areas of enquiry, religious historians in Britain continue to produce much original work. But the sheer prominence of the controversy over secularization, or church decline, has perhaps ensured – paradoxically – that ecclesiastical history in Britain has never been drawn into the rich, constructive synthesis of social and demographic analysis with institutional history of the kind that has typified French religious history in the wake of Gabriel le Bras and his ‘religious sociology’. Consequently, the modern history of British religion remains a peculiarly fragmented subject. British ecclesiastical historians have mostly stood aloof from social theory and social analysis, content to practise their craft in the grooves long laid down by confessional and denominational identities – a context which, given the pluralism of British religious history even from the late eighteenth century, is admittedly itself extraordinarily complex. Alongside and yet distinct from ecclesiastical history has sprung up what is almost a new discipline, the social history of religion, in which even the most prominent writers – such as Alan Gilbert and Hugh McLeod, and more recently Sarah Williams and Callum Brown – have shown scant interest in the theology and practice of the traditional denominations as such. No account of modern British religious history can ever be satisfactory, however, if historians remain content with this degree of separation.