So much for received notions

[flemmings]

Reading The Agency and wondering-- well, not how authentic it might be, but how far it strays from authenticity. Then Aaronovitch provides a corrective: 'the shocking conclusion of the 1851 church survey in Britain' revealed that 'less than half the population had attended church at all and of those that did less than 20% went to an Anglican Church.'

Maybe there was a religious resurgence in late Victorian times? Because I distinctly remember the scandal that would ensue if EM Forster's Maurice stopped taking Communion at *his* Anglican church. Like, yanno, everyone was watching who did and who didn't? which sounds so small town Anglo and Anne of Green Gables-y I can't stand it.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

There was indeed a giant religious resurgence in late Victorian times-- at about the same time and having about the same components as the U.S. Third Great Awakening, a movement notable for establishing Christian Socialism and the idea of the socially useful gospel. Anglo-Catholicism also experienced a major resurgence, the Oxford Movement, leading up to, for instance, the existence of Cardinal Newman.

However, this doesn't actually change the statistics that much in some ways, because church-going, and especially High Anglican church-going, was always much more established among the upper classes. The major universities had compulsory religious education and you had to be at least a lay cleric to attend-- until the early twentieth century, I think, though I don't have the cite for when exactly this stopped. During the beginning of industrialization, for instance, factory workers were theoretically supposed to be allowed to go to church, but a lot of them very sensibly did other things with their few free daylight hours.

But yeah, the Oxford Movement did make a very small town out of the English intelligentsia; it's not just who's taking Communion, it's who's going to turn Catholic, who's going to move closer and closer to Rome. Which was a thing that could split families. I recommend Penelope Fitzgerald's wonderful memoir of her father and uncles, The Knox Brothers, in which one became an atheist, one an Anglican priest, and one a Catholic priest-- it's a funny, sweet book which nonetheless points out that their father never again spoke to either the atheist or the Catholic.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

(googles Third Great Awakening, which I'd never heard of)

Interesting. Though I do wonder whether there was a tendency towards umm pseudo-social mobility in middle-late Victorian society helping the trend? If the Colonel's family and the Squire's go to church, and the lower middle class merchant of the 1840s is, by the 1870s, wealthy enough to want to be considered equally respectable, naturally his family goes to church too.