Ralph Brown is severe in his disparagement of my book The age of atonement, and in particular of its central argument, viz. my categorisation of ‘Evangelical social attitudes’, which he dismisses as ‘inadequate’.Footnote 1 It seems, however, that he has not understood my argument, particularly as it relates to ‘Claphamite’ (or ‘postmillennialist’ or ‘moderate’)Footnote 2 Evangelicals, and his summary of it is a travesty. The key passage in Brown's critique is the following:
Hilton argues that postmillennialist ‘Claphamite’ Evangelicals like Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), who had assimilated Malthusian political economy, advocated individual voluntary effort to overcome poverty. Premillennialist ‘Recordites’, preoccupied with the notion of national sins and divine retribution, were essentially paternalist in outlook, stressing the need for government intervention to effect moral and social reform. Hilton's contention that these differing conceptions of providential theology formed the mainsprings of two distinct and contrasting Evangelical political stances ignores the fact that ‘Claphamites’ often also looked for special divine intervention as a retribution for national sins.Footnote 3
Brown supports his contention that ‘Claphamites’ frequently ‘looked for special divine intervention’ by pointing first to Chalmers's fear of ‘desolating judgements’ [sic], and secondly to the Christian Observer's interpretation of the 1831 cholera epidemic as a ‘national visitation’, God's purpose being to punish ‘hedonism, commercial fraud, Sabbath desecration and the continuing slave trade’.Footnote 4 The Christian Observer was clearly an organ of postmillennialist ‘Claphamite’ evangelicals, while Chalmers was just as clearly an ally, and so, because I ‘ignore these facts’, Brown concludes that ‘the situation was actually much more complex than Hilton's account suggests and Hilton's categorisation of Evangelical social attitudes is inadequate’.
And so it would be if I had indeed ignored these facts in my account of ‘Claphamite’ Evangelicalism, but on the contrary I discussed them at great length. So why does Brown think I ignored them? It is clear that he has read the following sentence of my book, and inwardly digested it:
Another important point of issue between moderate and extreme evangelicals was the question of whether providence operates ‘generally’ and predictably through natural and immutable laws of cause and effect, or ‘specially’ by ad hoc and ad hominem interventions in terrestrial affairs.
Unfortunately, Brown has failed to digest the sentence which immediately follows that one:
Of course the distinction was not a rigid one, and many of those who thought of providence as working neutrally through physical or secondary laws also reserved a place for ‘special’ interventions from time to time, especially in judgments on whole nations, and in the vital matter of securing individual conversions.Footnote 5
So much for Brown's claim that I ignored the way in which ‘Claphamites’ often ‘looked for special divine intervention as a retribution for national sins’! Yet if it were merely a matter of his having failed to spot a single sentence I could understand. What baffles me is that substantial sections of my book were devoted to explaining, with reference to specific events, why ‘Claphamites’ like Chalmers sometimes appealed to ‘special providence’ and sometimes to ‘general providence’. So far from my analysis ‘ignoring’ their appeals to particular providence, it actually revelled in them. My comment that ‘Claphamite’ or postmillennial Evangelicals ‘also reserved a place for “special” interventions from time to time, especially in judgments on whole nations’ was supported by the following footnote: ‘For example, The Christian Observer 31 (1831), 383–4, considered that cholera came from “Him by whom nations and empires rise and fall”’. Yet this is exactly the example – the same journal, the same year, the same topic, the same argument – which Brown cites against me as evidence that I fail to appreciate how ‘Claphamites’ sometimes appealed to explanations based on special providence. The Age of atonement is littered with similar examples, not least with respect to the likelihood of divine chastisement as punishment for the British slave trade.
To repeat: it is clearly stated in the Age of atonement that ‘Claphamite’ Evangelicals acknowledged the occasional operation of special providence. Assuming that Brown will now accept this point, I anticipate that he might respond by arguing that, if ‘Claphamite’ Evangelicals believed in the operations of general providence most of the time, but reserved a space for special interventions occasionally, then my categorisation of Evangelicals into postmillennialist moderates and premillenarian extremists loses its utility as a predictor of social attitudes. In other words, if postmillennialists were free to swing either way, Evangelicalism must defy the type of schema that I have imposed upon it. I imagine this is what Brown is getting at when he writes (p. 689), ‘Yet, as Boyd Hilton acknowledges, “moderate” Evangelicals like Chalmers also saw the [Irish] famine as a divine punishment’. Brown's use of the word ‘acknowledges’ suggests an admission on my part that Chalmers's response to the famine, which I analyse at considerable length, in some way contradicted my overall thesis. In fact, the opposite is the case: I regard Chalmers's response to the famine as one of my most decisive clinchers.Footnote 6 Chalmers believed that general providence operated nearly all of the time, wherefore he was a high priest of laissez-faire or non-interventionist social policies, but he took an opposite or interventionist line in response to the famine, because that was a rare (but by no means solitary) example of special providence, being sudden, calamitous and geographically specific.
The point that Brown has missed about my central argument, and what (I submit) gives it the rigour that Brown thinks is missing, is that although ‘Claphamite’ Evangelicals occasionally detected the hand of a special providence, premillenarian (sometimes called ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’) EvangelicalsFootnote 7wholly rejected the idea of general providence. Like the Hutchinsonians of the 1750s, like many ultra High Churchmen of their own times, early nineteenth-century premillenarian Evangelicals rejected the very idea of a Newtonian ‘law-bound’ universe, and also the secularising ideologies arising from it, such as utilitarianism, political economy and the more mechanical versions of natural theology. In other words, it was not that postmillenarian Evangelicals could not believe in special providence, rather that premillenarian Evangelicals could not believe in general providence.
‘Claphamite’ Evangelicals were attracted to laissez-faire social and economic policies because they had a sense of an underlying natural law, but premillenarian Evangelicals had no such sense. They worshipped ‘Christ the King’, not ‘God the watchmaker’.Footnote 8 This perspective should help to explain why, as I argued in the Age of atonement, ‘Claphamite’ Evangelicals reserved a place for ‘special’ interventions from time to time, especially in judgements on whole nations, and in the vital matter of securing individual conversions'. Judgements on whole nations – for example battles won and lost, earthquakes, famines, floods, pestilences, demented rulers – had little obvious connection to the everyday social lives of ordinary folk. God might well decide that a ‘people’ (or nation) had become ungodly and deserving of chastisement, but such retributions were administered collectively, not individually.
The situation was otherwise with regard to individual citizens. The latter might communicate with God in prayer, or through the instrumentality of priests and sacraments, but they also came face to face with providence – that is, with general providence – in their daily avocations of buying, getting, selling, making, begging and surviving. Nineteenth-century man was tested, tempted and judged within an economy of redemption, and the dispensations of providence almost invariably (but note the limitation) served as guide and tutor. That is why, when God did occasionally give his divine mechanics a tweak, it was usually with some non-economic purpose in mind, and more often than not to bring sinners round to see the light of the Lord (i.e. to secure individual conversions). Having made the general point, it is worth adding that, although they were scornful of applying special providence to quotidian life in the abstract, many ‘Claphamite’ or postmillennial Evangelicals were more credulous when it came to interpreting their own lives. Their own narrow delivery from some near catastrophe, like their own tragic bereavements, were often accorded a providential significance denied to the experiences of others. No doubt it is universally the case that many ultra-rational and resolutely un-superstitious folk make an exception when it comes to interpreting their own life experiences.
Turning from this central misunderstanding to a less important point, it is irritating to be told by Brown (p. 687) that ‘even Henry Drummond, who … is one of Hilton's main illustrative examples of the “Recordite” [i.e. premillenarian] view, … actually supported the repeal of the corn laws in 1846’. The message which any uninitiated reader would take from Brown's comment is that, if Drummond was a believer in special providences, then according to my theory he ought not to have believed in a free corn trade, given that free trade (according to me) was the policy adopted by those who (unlike Drummond) believed in the mechanical operations of natural laws, at least for about 99 per cent of the time.Footnote 9 Now Brown would have had a fair point here if only he had not ignored the passage in which I discussed Drummond's views on the corn laws, not only in 1846 but also in 1826. He would then have appreciated that Drummond (a notable eccentric incidentally) did not support corn law repeal for the same reasons that ‘Claphamites’ such as Chalmers did, nor for the secular and optimistic reasons espoused by the Cobdenites. As I pointed out at length, Drummond welcomed repeal because it presaged ‘the destruction of all those things which God has instituted in a Christian monarchy as certainly as those things have been overthrown in France’: viz. the abolition of private and family property rights, tithes, support for Churches and support for widows and orphans. ‘It is now to be shown how by all these ways Britain becomes the head of that system which God has denounced by His prophets under the name of Tyre.’ Drummond could hardly wait for these stirring events to take place, not because he thought that ‘private and family property rights, tithes, support for churches, and support for widows and orphans’ were bad things – as a high Tory he cherished them to pieces – but because he thought that their abolition would encompass such a catastrophe as would herald the immediate second coming of Christ, an event which the sixty-year-old Drummond was anxious should take place before he died.Footnote 10 In other words, his support for corn law repeal was a highly distinctive one, and it is utterly disingenuous of Brown to cite him as someone whose views run counter to my argument.
I have always acknowledged that there were some in the first half of the nineteenth century whose views ran counter to my argument, since there are always bound to be exceptions to any general rule of behaviour. However, I do not see the need to concede on any of the examples that Brown has cited. It simply will not do to say that Sumner's Malthusian views were held within a ‘paternalist framework’, as evidenced by his belief in the ‘duty of the wealthy to ameliorate social evils’ (p. 687), since, as I argued in the Age of atonement (pp. 86–8), the term ‘paternalism’ is of no utility unless a distinction is made between material and moral help to the poor. Furthermore, I have never argued that ‘Claphamite’ Evangelicals were opposed to all private philanthropy. They were opposed to ‘guaranteed’ philanthropy and they were opposed to ‘indiscriminate’ philanthropy, but judiciously administered personal giving created what Chalmers called ‘loving gratulation’ between rich and poor, and so helped to heal the wounds of society. In chapter iii of the Age of atonement I discussed at great length how such evangelicals drew the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable giving, and I acknowledged the complexities involved in doing so. It seems to me that Brown caricatures my views by not taking account of its subtleties.
According to Brown, ‘Hilton underestimates the importance attached to the concept of a covenanted nation and national religion’ (p. 687). It is true that those matters hardly figure in the Age of atonement, but why should they have done since, unlike Brown, I was not writing the history of Evangelicalism? What I was attempting to do is signalled pretty clearly in my subtitle: The influence of Evangelicalism on social and economic thought. The ideas of the ‘Claphamite’ Evangelicals could hardly be called hegemonic, since they were challenged on all sides and not just by premillenarians, but they had a disproportionate influence with public-policy makers and their officials, and with newspaper editors and pundits generally. It was because they wielded this indirect power that I felt justified in calling the first half of the nineteenth century the ‘age’ of atonement. I emphasise that this was my purpose, because it seems from the following passage that Brown has not appreciated the fact:
Hilton has drawn a chronological distinction … arguing that the more strident form of Evangelicalism was rapidly fading from prominence by the later nineteenth century, being superseded by milder, more incarnationalist views. Other authors have placed a greater emphasis upon evidence of a hardening of conviction among many Evangelicals during this same period, which has been described as the development of ‘proto-fundamentalism’… Boyd Hilton's argument that Evangelical adventism moved from Irvingite pessimism towards a moderate and incarnationalist optimism during the later nineteenth century … needs to be challenged… Most evangelicals were still very much concerned to emphasise the harshness of divine judgment.Footnote 11
Now it is certainly true that I see the ‘more strident form of Evangelicalism … being superseded by milder, more incarnationalist views’ in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. It is also true that I see Irvingism and other adventist forms of early nineteenth-century Evangelicalism as having much in common with later incarnationalism.Footnote 12 Finally it is true that the Age of atonement made reference to mid-century believers such as Fenton Hort who sought to make accommodation with the new incarnationalism despite having an Evangelical background. But my claim in the Age of atonement was not that Evangelicalism itself was moving in that direction. I make it perfectly clear, many times over, that theologians such as Maurice, Jowett and Llewellyn Davies offered ‘a Broad Church reassessment’ which ‘roused predictable fury in evangelical circles’. Elsewhere I wrote that Jowett's Epistles of St Paul ‘predictably … called forth a vigorous evangelical restatement’ of the doctrine of expiatory atonement from Henry Melvill, while it roused Hugh Stowell, Charles Baring, Frederick Meyrick, Thomas Nolan, Edward Goulburn and others to ‘anguished fury’.Footnote 13 I fail to see how Brown can take my description of an ‘evangelical reaction’ against incarnationalismFootnote 14 to mean that Evangelicals made a ‘movement towards a moderate and incarnationalist optimism’. Almost certainly the majority of Evangelicals went on believing what they had always believed, but their children did not, and anyway – this was my main point – they no longer composed the intelligentsia or influenced policy-makers. In that sense the ‘age of atonement’ was over.
My book undoubtedly presents a schematic interpretation of the relationship between religious ideas and social policy, and its homological lumps are fair game for conscientious ‘splitters’. ‘Splitters’ are historians who, whatever has been said, will always argue that ‘things were actually more complex’. ‘Splitting’ has its place, but it has to be based on a proper comprehension of the lumps it is seeking to zap.
