One of the most pervasive images in the English art and literature of the Second World War was the country church. The rural chapel at Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire (home of a Caroline Anglican community) provided the resolution to T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, first published in 1942:

In Michael Powell's and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944), the towers of Canterbury Cathedral standing amid a blitzed city provided a recurrent motif. The film's culmination—and the plot's resolution—occurred in and around the cathedral, with the protagonists experiencing a series of miraculous interventions, followed by the closing scene of a platoon of soldiers singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” before departing to France. Salisbury Cathedral was the subject of one of Frank Newbould's “Your Britain—Fight for It Now” posters, as well as featuring in Lawrence Whistler's stained-glass window depicting a fighter airplane at Moreton in Dorset.Footnote 2 This depiction of churches was not just “deep England” bucolicism. Urban scenes were also portrayed, notably in John Piper's pictures of damaged churches in Coventry, Bath, Bristol, and London. Most famously, Herbert Mason's photograph “The Miracle of St. Paul’s,” showing the cathedral intact amid the Blitz on 29 December 1940, became an icon of national resistance and providential deliverance.Footnote 3 So pervasive was the image of the church in the Blitz that it risked becoming a cliché, as director Humphrey Jennings learned when some on the Left, including George Orwell, criticized him for his overuse of images of churches in his 1941 documentary film The Heart of Britain.Footnote 4

The deployment of images of churches in wartime was not casual or accidental; they worked as a symbol of national character that was intelligible to churchgoers and nonchurchgoers alike. But this symbolism worked in wartime only because the link between national character and religion had already been firmly established before the war. John Piper had depicted Anglican churches and Nonconformist chapels during the 1930s (and, from 1938, had described them in the Shell Guides with John Betjeman). In paintings like “The Resurrection, Cookham” (1924–27), Stanley Spencer had placed the events of Christ's life around the churchyard of his Berkshire village.Footnote 5 Winchester Cathedral had provided the setting for the denouement of A. G. MacDonell's novel England, Their England (1933) in much the same way that Canterbury was to do in A Canterbury Tale.Footnote 6 Guides to English churches and cathedrals had been produced in the 1930s for the newly mobile day-tripping public.Footnote 7 Above all, the connection between Englishness and Protestant religion had repeatedly been asserted in the voluminous popular literature on national character that was produced between the wars. Sources like books exploring national character and poetry, sermons, political speeches, and film suggest that an imaginative identification between Englishness and a tolerant, undemonstrative form of Protestantism remained strong in the first half of the twentieth century.

In spite of the renewed attention paid to the role of religion in the formation of national identity in other periods and countries, discussion of the religious dimension has been strikingly absent from recent writing on Englishness.Footnote 8 There have, it is true, been several studies of the relationship between Britishness and Protestantism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but few writers have explored the relationship between religion and English identity.Footnote 9 Equally important, historians of religion have ignored the role played by religion in twentieth-century national identity. This is partly because national identity does not easily fit into the secularization thesis, the classic statements of which tended to emphasize the primacy of sociogeographical and economic factors.Footnote 10 Historians of religion have also tended to be happier dealing with the quantifiable—church attendance figures—rather than the more slippery and unquantifiable question of the broader cultural influence of religion.Footnote 11 A few social historians, notably Callum Brown and Sarah Williams, have recently begun to consider this influence by looking at how religion continued to suffuse language, private morality, and domestic ritual, a phenomenon termed “discursive Christianity.”Footnote 12 In her work on working-class Southwark, for example, Sarah Williams has demonstrated how identification with a local church was an important part of local identity. But revisionist historians of religion have largely followed their predecessors in focusing on particular localities; as Susan Thorne has pointed out, this preoccupation with history from below, and with the local, has led to a neglect of national, international, and imperial identities.Footnote 13 Although some scholars have examined the relationship between religion and national public ritual, British historians have been slow to draw on sociological categories such as “conventional religion” or “civil religion,” the American writer Robert Bellah's idea of a form of loose popular religion that unites and legitimates a nation.Footnote 14

Nevertheless, the association between Protestantism and national character does have important implications for the debate about twentieth-century religious decline. In fact, close study of the quantitative data suggests that the era of the two world wars was not a period of unilinear decline. The period 1918–45 was one of overall numerical decline for the Protestant churches, but this masks some important distinctions between decades and denominations. All the main Protestant denominations in fact enjoyed growth for much of the 1920s, and the Free Churches briefly reversed the decline from which they had been suffering since 1906–9. Congregationalist membership rose from 288,784 in 1916 to 290,934 in 1927, the highest figure since 1908. The Baptists similarly climbed from 255,469 members in 1919 to 259,527 in 1926, their highest figure since 1911. The Wesleyan Methodists reached their highest membership since 1906 prior to their reunion with the other Methodist churches in 1932.Footnote 15 Anglican communion figures similarly rose from 2,097,000 in 1917 to a peak of 2,390,978 in 1927. Although all the Protestant denominations went into decline around 1930, the Nonconformists declined much faster than the Church of England. By 1939, the Congregationalists had declined to 259,876, the Baptists to 241,915, and the Methodists to 738,061 (from a combined total at reunion in 1933 of 761,101.) All three main Free Churches continued to decline throughout the Second World War. By contrast, the Church of England declined far more slowly and still had 2,245,102 Easter Day communicants in 1939. Its electoral rolls remained fairly constant at around 3.5 million members from the inception of the rolls in 1923 to 1939.Footnote 16 One explanation for this disparity is that Nonconformists were increasingly slipping into Anglican conformity. Although he concedes that it is very hard to prove this, Jeffrey Cox has raised the possibility that “in the quiet of the suburbs … the Church of England has been the great beneficiary of the crisis within Nonconformity.”Footnote 17 While Nonconformity continued to decline after disruption of the Second World War, Anglicanism rallied and was close to its 1939 communicant figure in 1960. Declinist grand narratives have tended to obscure both the modest recovery of Nonconformity in the 1920s and the resilience of Anglicanism until 1960.

But church membership figures do not tell the whole story of Christian influence. To borrow an analogy from recent discussion of superpower politics, the churches enjoyed both “hard power”—their membership base—and “soft power,” their broader cultural, political, and ethical influence. A proper estimate of the national strength of Christianity between 1918 and 1945 needs to include the “soft power” as well as the “hard power,” and the former remained formidable. National culture remained dominated by Christian points of reference in this period, some of them new ones like religious broadcasting on the BBC and the ceremonies of remembrance for the dead of the Great War. A pervasive sense remained that national culture and identity were inexorably tied up with Protestantism. Ross McKibbin has pointed to “the strength of a kind of historic Protestantism in the English people's perception of themselves” between the wars, while Michael Saler has demonstrated how a Ruskinian belief in a “Protestant” national style continued to pervade art and design, producing a distinctive English variant of modernism and even influencing the look of the London Underground.Footnote 18

Not only Christians but indeed people of most religions were keen to emphasize their national credentials in the interwar period. Some members of the Jewish community were reluctant to support Zionism, lest they be thought un-English, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews sought to counter Mosley's Fascists in the 1930s by stressing the Jewish contribution to national life.Footnote 19 In a similar way, some Muslim intellectuals like Abdullah Yusef Ali affirmed their loyalty to the British Empire against pan-Islamists and appealed to converts by stressing the compatibility of Islam with English ways of life.Footnote 20 Most conspicuously, the English Catholic hierarchy were at pains to demonstrate their Englishness, dissociating themselves from Irish nationalism and pledging vocal support for the government in the General Strike.Footnote 21 With the help of apologists like G. K. Chesterton, the hierarchy also sought to create its own narrative of Englishness through the recognition of English martyrs such as Thomas More, canonized in 1935.Footnote 22 In his writings after his conversion in 1930, Evelyn Waugh emphasized a similar continuity with pre-Reformation England, the recusant country house chapel fulfilling the symbolic role that the parish church played for Protestant artists and writers.Footnote 23 These non-Protestant or non-Christian versions of Englishness, however, did not find much support or resonance outside their own communities, and they were almost completely excluded from the literature of national character. For this reason, they are not considered here, although they have suffered from the general neglect of religion in recent historiography and there remains a great deal more to be said about them. In popular writing about Englishness, it was almost always the Church of England and the Nonconformist churches that were depicted as representative and formative of national character.

The idea of “national character” originated with Liberal writers like J. S. Mill and H. T. Buckle in the mid-nineteenth century. It offered a more democratic account of national development than earlier Whig histories and stressed the agency of the English people in creating their nation. Peter Mandler has summarized national character as “the idea of a cultural, psychological, or biological essence that all individuals in a given nation share in common, and that directs, somewhat abstractly, all manifestations of national life.”Footnote 24 The discourse of national character had competed with, and often been eclipsed by, a more aggressive imperial patriotism in the 1890s and 1900s. But after the First World War it seemed to fit a national mood that, as Alison Light and others have pointed out, was increasingly inward looking and domestically focused.Footnote 25 Having originally been a Liberal discourse, national character was appropriated by writers of all parties in the interwar period. The virtues it celebrated were gentle ones—tolerance, modesty, eccentricity, and individualism.

The huge popularity of the idea of national character in the 1920s and 1930s came about because it fulfilled a number of needs. It had a didactic role, offering a way of educating a new democratic electorate in their civic duties. It also had a polemical role, offering a communitarian critique of class sectionalism. It coincided with (though was distinct from) an explosion of travel literature describing the English landscape, which was itself a consequence partly of the rise of motoring and partly of anxieties about its impact on the countryside.Footnote 26 Interwar writers on national character included Conservatives, Liberals, and some socialists, though almost all of them were united in their concern at the impact of class politics on the national community. They were mostly novelists, journalists, or academics, with the odd clergyman or politician. Many were from Free Church backgrounds (and almost all the rest were Anglicans), but by no means were all of them religiously observant. A large number of Scots wrote books attempting to explore the quirks of the English, a fact that was itself an indication of the growing sense of cultural separateness between England and Scotland.Footnote 27 English writers were often guilty of rhetorical slippage, eliding the categories of English and British, though not all were as flagrantly inexact as Sir Stephen Tallents, who listed St. Andrews and Princes Street in Edinburgh among his favorite English places in his book The Projection of England.Footnote 28 In addition to Scots, there were also a number of European anatomists of national character.Footnote 29 With a few exceptions, most writers on national character were male.Footnote 30 National character writing operated at different levels and in different genres, from the homespun popular histories of Arthur Mee, to the political speeches of Stanley Baldwin, to academic treatises like Ernest Barker's National Character and the Factors in Its Formation (1927), but it was generally aimed at a middlebrow audience. The idea of national character thus emanated from a narrow social base, but it found a wider audience in the sitting rooms of suburbia through popular histories, radio talks, and the middlebrow press.

Common to virtually all writers on national character was a belief that the English were a people rather than a race. The English were racially mixed and could not be distinguished from other European peoples. There was, it was true, still a racial element in national character, but most commentators agreed that it was less important than environmental or cultural factors. Several writers suggested that the success of the English was a result of their racial diversity, arguing that the immigration of groups such as the Huguenots and the Flemish had “enriched our national stock,” though usually omitting Jewish immigrants from that list.Footnote 31 In rejecting race as a key determinant of national character, most writers sought to emphasize the shaping power of cultural factors, including religion. The most thorough articulation of this came from Ernest Barker, in National Character and the Factors in Its Formation. Barker argued that it was not the racial, environmental, or demographic substructure of a nation that determined national character (though these could contribute to it) but rather its “spiritual superstructure,” which was the product of language, law, education, and religion.Footnote 32 A similar argument was used by another academic, W. Macneile Dixon, professor of English at Glasgow, who wrote in The Englishman in 1931 that a nation was “built on a foundation more secure than race, geography, or language, upon a rich heritage of memories. … In a nation a spiritual basis is at work. It has a soul.”Footnote 33 Like Barker, Dixon accorded a key role to religion in the shaping of this spiritual basis of national character.

The type of religion invoked by writers on national character was popular rather than institutional. Religion was something that lay deep in the English people but that could not be controlled by outsiders or ecclesiastical hierarchies. W. R. Inge, dean of St. Paul's and author of England, stressed that “it is quite in accordance with the anti-professional prejudices of the English people that our most influential religious teachers have been laymen.”Footnote 34 Insofar as the clergy featured in this discourse, it was not prelates but rather unassuming parish clergy such as George Herbert, who was commended by Arthur Bryant for refusing preferment.Footnote 35 More often, the hero was the individual layman—Bunyan, Cromwell, or the generic figure of the Puritan. In line with the wider English spirit, English piety was presented as inward looking and restrained. Inge stressed the “inwardness and individualism of English piety,” while H. W. Nevinson referred to religion as something “underlying” in the national character but that was not much discussed in public.Footnote 36 The implication of this emphasis on individual religion was that even though the English may not always be religiously observant, they were still innately religious. A related theme was that English religion was often unarticulated or submerged, and the image of mist or twilight was often used to evoke it.Footnote 37 As we shall see, this linking of the English weather and religion was later revived in Second World War propaganda.

Two particular elements in English piety were usually presented as microcosms of, and influences on, national character. These were Anglican moderation and Nonconformist voluntaryism.Footnote 38 The assertion that national character was shaped by Anglicanism and Nonconformity was not a new one, but it was made easier by circumstances at the end of the First World War. The demise of political Nonconformity, which had begun before the war and was greatly accelerated by it, meant that rivalry between Anglicans and Nonconformists abated, and they could more happily enfold each others’ traditions into a common narrative.Footnote 39 A sense of a common English Protestantism emerged that did not erase denominational distinctions but, rather, was superimposed upon them. But unlike the common Protestantism of the early to mid-nineteenth century, this one was not, by and large, defined by anti-Catholicism. The secession of the Irish Free State in 1922 meant that Catholicism had diminished as a political threat, and Protestantism was no longer defined in opposition to a Catholic “Other.”Footnote 40 An aggressive anti-Catholicism survived in areas with a large Catholic population, notably Lancashire, but even here sectarianism was in decline by the 1930s.Footnote 41 There was nothing in England to compare with the racialized anti-Catholicism that was propounded by some prominent Church of Scotland ministers in the 1920s.Footnote 42 Writers on national character still criticized Catholicism, not as a source of heresy or idolatry, but because it stood outside the mainstream of national culture. Inge was representative of the tone of many when he said that “it is impossible to converse long with a Catholic without being conscious of an unsurmountable [sic] barrier; and if we consider what that barrier is, we find that we cannot confidently appeal to those instincts and moral traditions that are the common heritage of all English people.”Footnote 43 Roman Catholics were excluded from the idea of national character, but it was not defined in opposition to them. As we shall see, aspects of the old anti-Catholic rhetoric were transposed to new external threats such as Communism and Nazism.

Another difference with earlier versions of common Protestantism was that this one emphasized Englishness more than Britishness. Here again, long-term changes had been brought to fruition by the First World War. By 1922, the Anglican established church only survived in one of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom. Irish, and then Welsh, disestablishment had ended Anglicanism's awkward double life as both an English and a British church. During the agitation for disestablishment, Welsh Anglicans had sought to identify themselves with Welsh language and culture, and the final enactment of Welsh disestablishment in 1919 merely accentuated this trend.Footnote 44 The reunion of the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church in 1929 left only a vestigial form of establishment north of the border and underlined Scottish singularity. As the Welsh and Scottish churches began to assert their own distinctive cultural traditions, so it became less complicated for Anglicans to assert the Englishness of the Church of England.

At the same time, English Nonconformists no longer felt so bound to invoke a pan-British identity in order to support their oppressed brethren in other parts of the United Kingdom and could instead emphasize their Englishness. As Jonathan Parry has shown, Nonconformists in the 1870s had already espoused a form of Englishness, but it had been a consciously oppositional one. This sense of separateness abated from the 1880s onward.Footnote 45 By the Edwardian period, Nonconformists were keen to portray themselves as part of the national mainstream, an assertion given conspicuous expression by the positioning of the new Methodist Central Hall, which opened in 1912, opposite Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster.Footnote 46 The decision of prominent Free Churchmen, such as the secretary of the Baptist Union, J. H. Shakespeare, and Robertson Nicoll, editor of the British Weekly, to support the First World War further encouraged this identification of Nonconformity with the nation, and at the end of the war it received royal recognition when George V attended the Free Church National Thanksgiving Service in the Royal Albert Hall in November 1918. The Great War reduced the Nonconformist sense of political separateness in other ways, too; the implosion of the Liberal Party deprived Nonconformists of their key organ of tribal identity, while the granting of Welsh disestablishment seemed to satisfy what little appetite remained for English disestablishment.

This led to a rapprochement between Anglicans and Nonconformists. The appointment of the leading Anglican laywoman Maude Royden as a preacher at the Congregationalist City Temple in 1917 was a sign of this, as was the attempt the same year by J. H. Shakespeare and the Wesleyan John Scott Lidgett to open negotiations about the reunion of the Free Churches with the Church of England.Footnote 47 Though these negotiations failed, it is significant that the sticking points were episcopacy and the sacraments but not disestablishment. The recession of disestablishment as a cause was borne out by the Prayer Book controversy in 1927–28, when Free Churchmen were notably reluctant to support disestablishment, and some even went so far as to argue that an established church was an important part of national life.Footnote 48 By 1934, the former chancellor Philip Snowden, himself a Wesleyan, could note that “the present generation has never heard of the disestablishment of the Church of England.”Footnote 49 Anglicans and Free Church leaders in the 1920s collaborated on industrial policy through the Conference on Politics, Economics, and Citizenship in 1924.

Addressing an audience of Conservative Nonconformists that same year, Stanley Baldwin remarked that “the old controversies which divided the nation and separated the Nonconformists are passed away.”Footnote 50 This was an overstatement—some Nonconformists defiantly wished to remain separate. A number of separatist evangelical groups eschewed identification either with the nation or with older dissenting traditions. Calvinist sects, such as the different varieties of Brethren, consolidated their support in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 51 Others (Anglicans and Nonconformists alike) were attracted to Frank Buchman's Oxford Group, which was not world renouncing but offered a form of intense personal spirituality that ignored existing denominational traditions and emphasized international, rather than national, community.Footnote 52 Within the Church of England, Anglo-Catholics rejected both formal reunion and closer ties with the Free Churches. When Bishop David of Liverpool, a leading supporter of reunion, invited a prominent Unitarian to preach in his cathedral in 1933, he was prosecuted for heresy by the leading Anglo-Catholic Lord Hugh Cecil. The bishops of the Northern Province agreed that David should not have invited a Unitarian to take part in a service, because Unitarians did not believe in the Trinity. There were limits, then, to the willingness of Nonconformists and Anglicans to accommodate one another.

These objections notwithstanding, the new sense of amity between Anglicans and Nonconformists meant that it was no longer contentious to present Anglicanism as emblematic of English national character. An appendix to the Archbishops’ Report on Church and State, published in 1916, noted that “‘the Church’ has more chance to-day of coming to be regarded as representative of the great majority of the nation than it has had since the rise of the Wesleyan movement in the eighteenth century, or perhaps since the rise of the Puritan movement in the seventeenth century.”Footnote 53 Nonconformists were becoming more inclined to regard the Church of England as representative of Christianity in the nation. Writing in 1927, Inge likewise suggested that the decline of Nonconformity would mean that “the Anglican Church may have another opportunity of leading and representing the religion of the English people.”Footnote 54 This thought did not occur just to Anglicans. The agnostic G. M. Trevelyan observed privately in 1937 that “the Church of England has become a kind of reflection of the national religion, and was for that reason incoherent and even archaic, but it covered much ground, and won the allegiance of many types of mind.”Footnote 55 The elision of Englishness and Anglicanism was affectionately satirized by two other best-selling historians, W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, in their 1930 spoof textbook, 1066 and All That. A recurrent joke throughout the book was that the English were naturally Anglican. After the Anglo-Saxon invasion, “the country was now almost entirely inhabited by Saxons, and was therefore renamed England, and thus (naturally) soon became C of E. This was a Good Thing.” Pope Gregory the Great's “non Angli, sed Angeli” was translated as “not Angels, but Anglicans.”Footnote 56 According to 1066 and All That, it was the pope who had seceded from the Church of England at the Reformation, while the Marian persecutions were “a Bad Thing, since England is bound to be C of E, so all the executions were wasted.”Footnote 57 The assertion that England was “bound to be C of E” was of course partly a satire on Whig historians, but the authors were also satirizing a more general tendency among contemporary writers to regard Anglicanism as a sort of religious “default setting” for the English.

But in arguing that Anglicanism was typical of the national character, commentators were keen to enfold the Nonconformist tradition into their narrative. Whereas Matthew Arnold had presented Nonconformity as opposed to national culture, it was now argued that that culture had been enriched by Nonconformity. Stanley Baldwin told an audience in 1927 that the “dualism of the Church and Chapel taken together” had been “one of the most potent influences in the life of our country.”Footnote 58 This argument was given a more detailed expression the same year by Ernest Barker in National Character and the Factors in Its Formation, which described Nonconformity as “the most peculiar and yet most effective of all the elements in English character.”Footnote 59 In his contribution to his brother Hugh Kingsmill's collection on The English Genius in 1937, Brian Lunn was able to claim that “the dissenting Churches have contributed their distinctive colours to the social fabric of England in which they are now firmly interwoven, and English Nonconformity has a character as peculiarly national as the British Constitution, or the public school system or the Anglican Church itself.”Footnote 60 There were personal reasons why these three writers sought to stress the complementarity of the two traditions in national life: Barker was a Congregationalist who had converted to Anglicanism, Baldwin was an Anglican whose forebears had been prominent Methodists, and Lunn's father, Sir Henry Lunn, had been simultaneously both a Methodist minister and an Anglican layman. But many of their readers would have shared this mixed religious background, and even those who did not were prepared to affirm the virtues of one another's religious traditions.

One way to affirm the common religious heritage was to emphasize symbols that straddled the Anglican and Nonconformist traditions. These common symbols could be books like the English Bible (and to an extent the Prayer Book and hymnody), individuals like John Wesley, or traditions like Puritanism. The Bible was a particularly popular common reference point for writers on national character because of its wider influence on English language and literature. An editorial in The Times in 1938 said that the English Bible had “contributed, as no other force has done in a like degree, to what is best in the national character,” while Stanley Baldwin told a Canadian audience in 1939 that “you cannot begin to understand the Englishman until you try to realise the impression left on him generation after generation by the English Bible.”Footnote 61 Writers were not unaware of the paradox of presenting the Bible as English, but they argued that the English had been particularly favored in their translations of scripture. “By some strange dispensation it fell to us as our spiritual portion, and divides us from the rest,” wrote Dixon. “It rooted itself in England as a native tree, like one of her own oaks.”Footnote 62 The Bible was a potent symbol of Englishness because it was tied up with a sense of place (learned by many in Sunday school), which transposed biblical narratives to the English countryside. In a Second World War broadcast on “The Spirit of England,” Clemence Dane (a pseudonym for the actress Winifred Ashton) wrote that “Wycliffe somehow writes as if Palestine were England. The Sea of Galilee might be Windermere, and the River Jordan becomes uncommonly like our own River Thames.”Footnote 63 The same conflation of the Thames Valley and the Holy Land was evident in the paintings of Stanley Spencer.Footnote 64

The translation of the Bible that was normally singled out as quintessentially English was the Authorized Version, because this was common property for Nonconformists and Anglicans alike. For Dixon, it was “so national, so representative, so English, a mirror of the country's character and genius,” not least because it had been written by a committee, thus demonstrating the national attribute of compromise.Footnote 65 The Prayer Book was also believed to have shaped national character, a fact that helps to explain why its revision became such an intense subject of parliamentary conflict in 1927–28. Many Nonconformists felt that they had a stake in it because of its influence on national character. Some nonbelievers also emphasized the importance of the Authorized Version and Prayer Book in shaping Englishness—Ralph Vaughan Williams was one such, George Orwell another. Though often contemptuous of the clergy, Orwell bemoaned the decline of knowledge of the Bible and famously perplexed his executors by insisting on being buried according to the rites of the Church of England.Footnote 66 Orwell's official biographer, Bernard Crick, has pointed out how central to his Englishness was his “ironic attachment to the liturgy, the humane political compromises and the traditions of the Church of England.”Footnote 67

Even more prominent than the Bible in accounts of the shaping of national character was the Puritan tradition. The German commentator Wilhelm Dibelius wrote in his 1922 study England that “Puritanism dominates the English soul.”Footnote 68 For the Congregationalist Nathaniel Micklem it was “one of the greatest influences upon the English people.”Footnote 69The Times was still referring to Puritanism as “one of the most formative influences on the national character” in 1950.Footnote 70 Like the Authorized Version, Puritanism was a shared point of reference (and reverence) for Anglicans and Nonconformists alike. This was a departure from the Victorian period, when the word had been appropriated by militant dissent. While some Victorians like J. R. Green had argued that Puritanism was a central element in the national character, for many others—including Matthew Arnold—it carried negative connotations of sectionalism because it was monopolized by Nonconformists.Footnote 71 But the decline of political Nonconformity meant that Puritanism's controversial charge was defused, and it could now be reincorporated into the national story. As Timothy Lang has pointed out, “now that sectarian discord no longer divided English society, now that the disruptive forces released by the Reformation seemed reconciled, the Stuart past could be interpreted as an example of organic unity.”Footnote 72 This argument was given poetic expression in T. S. Eliot's image in “Little Gidding” of King Charles I and the regicides being “folded in a single party” by the passage of time, and his conclusion that “we cannot revive old factions … or follow an antique drum.”Footnote 73

What was it about Puritanism that was deemed to have shaped the national character? As Raphael Samuel pointed out in his study of the nineteenth-century use of the term, “Puritan” was—right up to the 1960s—a term of approbation that did not usually denote sexual prudishness but, rather, the more positive attributes of independence, adherence to conscience, tolerance, high seriousness, and hard work.Footnote 74 It also had connotations of manly vigor and was often, though not exclusively, applied to males.Footnote 75 Inge called it a “virile and stern element in the national character.”Footnote 76 The solitude and individualism of the Puritan were also presented as an abiding element in English character.Footnote 77 But Puritanism was not abstracted from its religious context; almost all writers on national character emphasized its role as a living tradition in national public life.

The celebration of the Puritan tradition in national character writing in the 1920s and 1930s was given urgency by an elegiac sense that its glories were passing.Footnote 78 Many agnostics and atheists shared this sense. Arnold Bennett, who had been brought up a Wesleyan Methodist, expressed it in an article on the “Passing of the Puritans” (1926), in which he described his pride, despite his rejection of its theology, at having grown up in the Puritan tradition.Footnote 79 In his article “Hymns in a Man's Life” (1928), D. H. Lawrence expressed a similar pride at having been brought up as a Congregationalist (and thus a descendent of Cromwell's Independents) and described Nonconformist hymns as providing “the clue to the ordinary Englishman.”Footnote 80 Although Q. D. Leavis was a Jewish atheist, she felt the importance of the literary traditions of her husband's Puritan ancestors, lamenting “the break-up of the Puritan tradition” in Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) and warning that “if for the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress are substituted the News of the World and the Sunday Express, it will be evident that popular taste is likely to be in some danger.”Footnote 81 Along with fears for the literary heritage of Nonconformity went fears for its material heritage, too. Nonconformist chapels were well represented alongside Anglican churches in Recording Britain, the government and Pilgrim Trust project set up at the behest of Kenneth Clark in 1938 to produce watercolors of English buildings that might be threatened with bombing.Footnote 82

Writers on Englishness invoked shared religious traditions as a way of inspiring a sense of community against a number of secular challenges in the 1920s and 1930s. The first major challenge was the accommodation to democracy after 1918, and here it was the tradition of Civil War Independency, the forerunner of Congregationalism, that was most often invoked. Some Victorian authors such as J. R. Green and T. H. Green had emphasized the democratic traditions of Independency, but it was the publication of the Putney Debates by C. H. Firth in 1891 that really invited parallels with modern debates about universal suffrage.Footnote 83 After the franchise extension of 1918, the Putney Debates became an irresistible point of comparison for writers on civics like A. D. Lindsay, Master of Balliol, and Lindsay's point was picked up by one of his readers, Stanley Baldwin, who told the Nonconformist Brotherhood Movement in 1930 that “in the Protestant doctrine of the individual soul, on the one hand, and in the assembling together of the brethren in the church congregation, on the other, you have the seed-bed of modern democracy.”Footnote 84 Baldwin, of course, had an ulterior electoral motive in sedulously flattering Nonconformist audiences during the later 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 85 But the Puritan roots of democracy were widely acknowledged. Even a critic of Puritanism like the Anglo-Catholic socialist R. H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), was careful to extol “the enormous contribution of Puritanism to political freedom and social progress” and conceded that “it is probable that democracy owes more to Nonconformity than to any other single movement.”Footnote 86

What was particularly attractive about citing Puritanism as an antecedent of modern democracy was that it represented a form of democracy that had grown up outside the state. As Julia Stapleton has pointed out, much interwar patriotic writing was actually quite antistatist, emphasizing the English genius for voluntary action.Footnote 87 By describing as typically English the counterculture of Nonconformity, forged in battles with the state, writers on national character could make a point about the heterogeneity and tolerance of national life, comparing it with the state-imposed nationhood of other European countries. For the same reason, the Puritan Pilgrim Father was sometimes used as a symbol of the empire. Interwar writers on Englishness generally said very little about the British Empire, but this did not denote anti-imperialism; as Susan Thorne has pointed out for the Edwardian period, most middle-class commentators (Nonconformists included) shared an attachment to the idea of empire that was consistent with, and withstood, their disapproval of specific imperial policy.Footnote 88 But writers on national character were keen to emphasize empire as a form of temporary trusteeship (an idea given impetus by Britain's assumption of new mandates at the end of the Great War). They also sought to fit the empire into their discourse of the national genius for improvisation, voluntary association, and political liberty. “No deep-laid schemes of founding an empire were ever made in this country,” said Inge. “The flag has usually followed trade, not trade the flag.”Footnote 89 One way of making this point was to use the figures of the Elizabethan seafarer or Captain Cook to explain the ad hoc, freelance nature of English imperialism.Footnote 90 But another way was to use the Puritan Pilgrim Father as a symbol, to make the point that one of the driving forces of empire had been, not state expansion, but the cause of religious liberty. Footnote 91 If proof were needed that the empire had been driven by the quest for liberty rather than by expansionism, it could be seen in the development of the United States, which had assumed its own nationhood when ready, as other parts of the empire were now doing. This may have been a disingenuous and inaccurate description of empire, but it was a way of fitting recent imperial developments into the broader discourse of national character.

Another political challenge that could be met by invoking shared religious traditions was class consciousness. Particularly after the 1926 General Strike, public moralists attempted to celebrate national characteristics that transcended class and argued that the national temper was averse to violent appeals to class interest. Both Anglicanism and Puritanism could play a role in this rhetoric. A number of writers used the Anglican via media as a symbol of middle-of-the-road English virtues of compromise.Footnote 92 In England, published in the year of the General Strike, W. R. Inge asserted that “the spirit of compromise has guided the Church of England at all times. It has aimed at being the nation on its spiritual side, and has not thought it necessary to be more logical or consistent than the nation as a whole.” Inge also stressed that the Church of England was typical in being “anti-revolutionary.”Footnote 93 Writing the following year, Ernest Barker argued that Anglicanism had fostered “the passion of national unity.”Footnote 94 Closely related to this idea of moderation was the argument that the low temperature of Anglicanism—its reticence and aversion to enthusiasm—was one of the reasons why the alien plant of Communism would never take root in England. Anglican reticence was portrayed as a strength, not a weakness—part of the wider restraint that was so typical of the national character.Footnote 95

Another reason why Communism would not take root, it was argued, was an ingrained Protestant resistance to foreign authority. H. W. Nevinson, a Labour-supporting agnostic, argued in his book Rough Islanders that “the English hostility to all foreign authority, whether spiritual or political, subsists below the tolerant surface.” Communism was failing in England for the same reasons that Catholicism had failed, because the English mind was “deeply attached to the guidance of practical experience or tradition, and bearing no resemblance to the theoretic and widely discursive mind of Russians.”Footnote 96 This stress on practicality was a common topos in writing on Englishness, and, as Julia Stapleton has shown, it could also be seen in historical writing and education policy.Footnote 97 Several authors found evidence of the practicality of the English in their religion. Arthur Bryant pointed out that “the English have nearly always been suspicious of what they regard as `highfalutin' preaching and religious theory.”Footnote 98 In a speech at Wesley's Chapel in 1928, Baldwin (one of whose great-grandfathers had been ordained by Wesley) argued that Wesley's “supreme legacy … was his conception of a practical religion for the ordinary man and woman.” It was this practicality that made Wesley “typically English; the best native qualities of the Englishman were in him, and were raised to such an extraordinary pitch that they became genius.”Footnote 99

By presenting Wesley as a typically English hero, Baldwin was partly soliciting Wesleyan votes, but he was also pursuing his aim of appealing to the moderate instincts of ordinary trade unionists to separate them from the “alien” ideology of their leaders. In another speech in 1927, he pointed out that the Wesley brothers had “arrested social cleavage by uniting all grades of society in the bonds of a common religious ideal,” while the Wesleyan tradition had “been responsible for the production of the best types of labour and co-operative leaders during the last half-century.”Footnote 100 Baldwin's assertion that Methodism had averted revolution may have come—directly or indirectly—from Élie Halévy, the first volume of whose History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century had appeared in English in 1924. Arthur Bryant used the same argument, as did Ernest Barker, who was a friend of Halévy.Footnote 101

From the mid-1930s, the rhetorical armory of national character began to be trained on Nazi Germany. Ernest Barker argued in a series of lectures given in Germany in 1936 that “English Nonconformity, with its doctrine of the limited state and its aspiration towards … religious liberty” had been “a salt ingredient of English life, which maintained its peculiar savour and produced some of its most vital characteristics.”Footnote 102 By implication, Germany's lack of such an antistatist tradition was one of the reasons why it had fallen prey to dictatorship. In an epilogue to these lectures, written after his return to England, Barker sought to defend Cromwell against the accusation, made by (among others) the American scholar W. C. Abbott, that the Lord Protector had been a forerunner of Hitler. (Anger at the same accusation had caused Isaac Foot, the Wesleyan Liberal MP, to set up the Cromwell Association in 1935.) Barker depicted Cromwell as tolerant, moderate, and judicious, like a “homely English policeman.”Footnote 103 The difference between Cromwell's doctrine of “the people of God in England” and Hitler's idea of Volk was that Cromwell did not believe in race, and his national community was “decided not by blood but by faith.”Footnote 104 Barker's argument was taken up by the Czech Jewish historian Hans Kohn in a famous article on “The Genesis and Character of English Nationalism” (1940), which argued that English nationalism, dating back to the Puritan revolution, was distinctive because “it has always been and still is closer than any other nationalism to the religious matrix from which it arose, and is imbued with the spirit of liberty asserted in a struggle against ecclesiastical and civil authority.”Footnote 105

The demands of wartime propaganda (and the fact that many of their works originated as BBC talks broadcast across the United Kingdom) forced many writers to write about “Britain” rather than “England,” but their focus remained overwhelmingly Anglocentric, and their points of reference—Anglican moderation, Puritanism, the English Bible—remained the same.Footnote 106 The Puritan tradition was especially frequently invoked, though this was not solely because of religious resonances. Milton's words “methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation, rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks” were frequently quoted.Footnote 107 Socialist writers sought to equate the British army with the New Model Army, as a citizen army in which democracy and debate were encouraged. Parallels with the English Revolution were also encouraged by the coincidence of the tercentenary of the events that started it.Footnote 108 Nevertheless, religious themes were never far away, even for Marxists like Christopher Hill, who was himself highly conscious of belonging to the Puritan tradition.Footnote 109 The filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, who went to live in a Welsh mining community to make his film The Silent Village in 1942, told his wife that he had found both “Christian and communist principles” there, commenting that “from these people one can really understand Cromwell's New Model Army.”Footnote 110 Writing in 1941, the Marxist and future Labour minister John Strachey expressed exasperation at the residual strength of Puritanism, which had been “the essential faith of the English people” for three hundred years. He conceded that “it is true that it is turning out that there is more in that faith that is still sound and valid than some of us had realised,” but he complained that “many aspects of it are obsolete, and incompetent to meet the needs and problems of today.”Footnote 111

The readiness of socialist writers to invoke popular religious traditions during the Second World War was a reflection of a new receptiveness to patriotism on the Left. As Miles Taylor has pointed out, the Left had been slow to come to terms with the phenomenon of popular patriotism in the 1930s, but by the outbreak of war some socialist writers developed a patriotism emphasizing the heterogeneity of English life and its freedom from state direction.Footnote 112 It is not surprising that they drew on some of the symbols that had been used to make the same point in national character writing since the 1920s. Orwell was one such, arguing in “The Lion and the Unicorn” that “all the culture that is most truly native centres around things which even if they are communal are not official.” His emphasis on English pastimes that were either solitary or voluntary helps explain his inclusion (later purloined by John Major) of “old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the Autumn mornings” in his list of “characteristic fragments of the English scene.”Footnote 113 The early morning communion service was traditionally the most private and undemonstrative part of the Anglican liturgy, and, by enveloping his old maids in mist, Orwell borrowed what we have seen was a stock metaphor for English religiosity. J. B. Priestley also used mist in one of his controversial radio Postscripts in 1942. “Through the fading mists there emerge the simple, kindly, humorous brave faces of the ordinary British folk—a good people, deeply religious at heart, not only when they’re kneeling in our little grey country churches but also when they’re toiling at their machines or sweating under loads in the threatened dockyards.”Footnote 114 Priestley was echoing another staple of prewar national character writing—the argument that religion was something that went on quietly and undemonstratively and often outside church.

The argument that the religious traditions of the English explained the reluctance to follow foreign forms of authority continued to be expressed after the end of the Second World War. In her essay on “The Rural Englishman” in Ernest Barker's edited collection The Character of England in 1947, Vita Sackville-West described a countryman who was “not a passionately religious man” but who had a stubborn resistance to religious authoritarianism. “He respects his parson, but would not allow his conscience to be ruled,” she said. “He cannot endure dictation, even from the lips of a Man of God. And when it comes to any question of Rome, that is foreign interference, that is wholly abominable, that is a thing we won’t stand, a thing which covers intimidation under a cloud of incense, a thing which makes appeal to the worst instincts of emotion, luring with beauty rather than with austerity, luscious rather than bleak, entirely opposed to the iconoclastic ironsides of Oliver Cromwell.”Footnote 115 We have seen how this idea of an ingrained Puritan resistance to foreign dogma had been used to explain English resistance to Communism in the 1920s. With the beginning of the Cold War, this theme resurfaced. In the celebrated collection of essays denouncing Communism, The God That Failed (1950), the Labour politician and agnostic Dick Crossman, whose mother was of Quaker stock, ascribed the failure of Marxism to take root in Britain to Nonconformity. The appeal of Communism, he argued, was similar to that of Catholicism—unquestioning obedience. This went against the political culture of Protestant countries, because “the Protestant is, at least in origin, a conscientious objector against spiritual subjection to any hierarchy.” What had stopped Englishmen like him from accepting Communism was, Crossman said, “sheer Nonconformist cussedness. … No Pope for me, whether spiritual or secular.”Footnote 116

For many authors, the existence of the Puritan and the Anglican traditions was proof of the unique felicity of English institutions. Writing in the Festival of Britain souvenir brochure in 1951, Herbert Butterfield noted smugly that “perhaps the greatest of misfortunes of Germany lies in the fact that no phenomenon quite like English Nonconformity existed in the German states in modern times.”Footnote 117 This was part of a wider tendency, Whig in origin, but also shared by Conservative-leaning historians, to assert that English or British institutions were the best in the world. As Reba Soffer has pointed out, the national past was still seen by most interwar historians as “inherently more orderly, more aesthetically harmonious than other national or comparative histories.”Footnote 118 But from the argument that England was especially fortunate, it was but a small step to arguing that this was a sign of divine favor. A number of authors made this step; as Christopher Parker has pointed out, providentialist interpretations of national history were “close to the surface” throughout the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote 119 The remainder of this article explores the survival of a low-key providentialism in national character writing and in political rhetoric.

There was something tentative—almost embarrassed—about the assertion that divine providence was protecting the English. Some commentators on Englishness made a joke of it. E. M. Delafield, the French-born comic novelist, wrote in 1938 that “most Englishmen, if forced into analysing their own creeds—which heaven forbid—are convinced that God is an Englishman—probably educated at Eton.”Footnote 120 Instead of invoking a God of battles, interwar authors presented a rather more homely deity. In a radio talk in 1933, Arthur Bryant said that the English “regard Providence as a kind of friendly neighbour who in the last resort will never let them down.”Footnote 121 One reason for this rather low-key version of providence was the legacy of the Great War, which had led some to reject a belief in providence. The Conservative minister David Eccles recalled in the 1960s how his mother had lost her faith as a result of her son's death. “God's providence and my eldest brother's death on the Somme were irreconcilable, and it was God who had to be abandoned,” Eccles recalled.Footnote 122 In his study of The English in 1929, H. W. Nevinson noted that the war had “appeared to destroy the former belief in an overruling Providence that numbered the hairs of every head.”Footnote 123 The war did not destroy a belief in a divine providence that rewarded just nations; British victory in 1918 could still be adduced as proof of that. But bellicose assertions of divine favor were unfashionable. Germany's conduct in the war also carried a terrible warning of the dangers of a deluded belief that God worked through the state.

Interwar authors thus argued that God worked, not through the state, but through those voluntary English institutions that restrained its power. The proof of divine favor was not the power of the state but rather its weakness and the corresponding strength of localism and voluntary action. Describing English local government in 1935, Sir John Neale said that “particularly in these times of dictatorship abroad, we may thank God that we are not as other men are.”Footnote 124 The same argument could be applied to the British Empire. William Temple, bishop of Manchester, argued in 1926 that it was “fashioned in the providence of God for the fulfilment of his purpose,” but this purpose was in fact to relinquish power, “to educate the less politically developed peoples to an even further participation in their own government, until they are able to take a complete charge of it.”Footnote 125 Stanley Baldwin used a similar argument in an Empire Day speech in May 1929, calling the British Empire “less … a human achievement … than an instrument of Divine Providence for the promotion of the progress of mankind,” but asserting that its success lay in the way that it had devolved power to its constituent parts and describing the Simon Commission, currently deliberating the future of India, as acting “under providence.”Footnote 126

The survival of a low-key, pluralistic, idea of providence between the wars meant that, when the Second World War came, a more assertive form of providentialism could come back to the fore. The popular historian Arthur Mee wrote an instant book on the crisis of June 1940 proclaiming that, “guided by the hand of God and sustained by our own right Arm, we came through the shadows of defeat into the sunlight of a nobler dawn” and that “Providence, which overrules us all, has guarded us in wondrous ways.”Footnote 127 The deliverance of Dunkirk also led Herbert Butterfield to develop a more explicit doctrine of providence, and in The Englishman and his History, he argued that the English had a particular national genius for working with divine providence.Footnote 128 Paul Addison has suggested that Churchill's belief in providence, as displayed in his wartime speeches, was in fact close to the religion of the bulk of the populace and provided him with a crucial point of contact with the general public in 1940.Footnote 129 Certainly Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher thought that Churchill had tapped into a national vein, remarking after the statesman's death that he “had a very real religion, but it was a religion of the Englishman. He had a real belief in providence, but it was God as the god with a special care for the values of the British people.”Footnote 130

The outcome of the Second World War at least initially confirmed this providentialism. When Fisher was enthroned as archbishop of Canterbury in the last days of the war in April 1945, his enthronement sermon showed that belief in providence could be as strong as ever. “Church and nation have grown up together, and we see God's providence at work in both,” proclaimed Fisher, and he spoke of “that tried and tested unity in our people which in these last years has brought us by God's providence through great perils and great sacrifices to the verge of a great deliverance.” Fisher also paid tribute to the role played by the Free Churches in “the shaping of our national character.”Footnote 131 Nonconformists, too, continued to invoke providence. In a lecture on “Liberty and the Liberal Heritage” in 1948, Isaac Foot discerned “the hand of Providence” in the fact that England could claim Milton, Burke, and Wordsworth as its upholders of liberty.Footnote 132

But belief in providence seems to have gone into decline soon after these self-satisfied effusions. It is significant that the last National Day of Prayer in Britain was held in 1947. The tone of the day, coming as it did at a time of the loss of India and the American loan crisis, was rather subdued and uncertain. W. R. Matthews, dean of St. Paul’s, tried to cheer up the king and the congregation. “We must resist the temptation to become disheartened and careless and to despair amid our difficulties,” he exhorted them. “God has a place for our nation and commonwealth in bringing peace, order and justice into human life.”Footnote 133 But the assertion that God had a place for the nation now seemed rather forlorn and threadbare. Significantly, when the government was lobbied to hold another National Day of Prayer at the time of the 1956 Suez crisis, there was no official enthusiasm for it.Footnote 134 Providentialist ideas could not easily be fitted into new narratives of national and imperial decline. Of course it was possible to argue that Britain had lost its empire because of divine disfavor, as Butterfield sometimes argued in the 1950s. It was also possible to argue, as Baldwin and Temple had begun to do in the 1920s, that Britain's peaceful divestment of parts of its empire was a new sort of providential destiny. But neither argument seemed to carry much conviction.

The decline of the language of divine providence in the 1950s was accompanied by a decline in the language of national character. As Chris Waters has shown, national character writing limped on into the 1950s, but New Commonwealth immigration posed a challenge to some of its more glib generalizations.Footnote 135 One of these was that England was a Protestant (or even a Christian) country; always a questionable generalization, it became an unacceptable one after the incorporation through immigration of a substantial non-Christian religious population. More generally, the very idea that there could be a single national character increasingly seemed both inaccurate and potentially repressive. Although new versions of Englishness continued to be articulated in the late 1950s and 1960s—for example, through the revival of English folk music, or the iconography of Swinging London—they were no longer expressed in the language of national character. Aspects of the old association between Englishness and religious diversity and tolerance later resurfaced in multicultural discourse, but multiculturalism fundamentally rejected the idea of a single national character.Footnote 136

The question of whether the decline of the idea of national character had an adverse affect on the fortunes of English Christianity is outside the chronological scope of this article, but historians seeking to explain the sudden decline in religious observance from 1960 onward might do well to look, not just at the rejection of Christian codes of personal morality, but also at the collapse of belief in national character that accompanied it. The loss of an imaginative identification with a national religious past was just one of many rejections of tradition that happened in the 1960s, but it was an important one. One small indication of this was the changing fortunes of the word “Puritan,” which instead of carrying positive connotations of religious and political liberty, came from the 1960s to be primarily associated with the infringement of personal liberty in sexual relations. During the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, the literary critic Richard Hoggart praised Lawrence's novel as “virtuous and puritanical,” but this laudatory use of the term would have been impossible a few years later, as the term became irretrievably tarred with connotations of repression.Footnote 137 Historians have failed to spot this semantic shift; when Callum Brown describes the period 1945–63 as “the nation's last Puritan age,” he is talking about sexual morality, but he misses the important point that it was also a period in which there remained a residual, if greatly attenuated, sense of Puritanism as a continuing tradition in national culture, a sense that was lost thereafter.Footnote 138

Religion remained central to the articulation of the idea of national character in the first half of the twentieth century. When commentators referred to the English as a Christian people, they were referring not to their propensity (or otherwise) for churchgoing but to a belief that Christianity (and specifically Protestantism) had shaped the distinctive political, legal, and associational culture of the nation. The frequency with which they did this suggests that the idea still resonated with a public that still saw itself as Christian. Alongside loosely Christian codes of respectability and sexual morality, the sense of belonging to a Protestant nation was an important component of the “discursive Christianity” that Callum Brown has identified as dominating British culture until the 1960s. This shared idea of national culture afforded religion a degree of protection and prominence that helped to mitigate and delay the effects of institutional decline.