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² The careers of many of the early nineteenth-century radical orators demonstrate a telling intersection of religious heterodoxy and radical political views: see for example Taylor, Robert and Carlile, Richard, in E. Royle, Victorian infidels: the origins of the British secularist movement, 1791–1866 (Manchester, 1974), pp. 38–43Google Scholar. But there were certainly others whose political radicalism sat quite easily beside Christian orthodoxy: cf. Lyon, E. Groth, Politicians in the pulpit: Christian radicalism in Britain from the fall of the Bastille to the disintegration of Chartism (Aldershot, 1999)Google Scholar; see also some of the case studies in Larsen, T., Crisis of doubt: honest faith in nineteenth-century England (Oxford, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ The OED gives the first usage of the word ‘secularization’ in the sociological sense in 1863, in an essay by E. A. Bond in the Fine Arts Quarterly on the history of art; Lecky, W. H., two years later, used it in his History of the rise and influence of the spirit of rationalism (2 vols., London, 1865)Google Scholar, i, in the phrase ‘that general secularisation of the European intellect’. Religiously motivated sociological surveys would include most famously Mearns, A. S., The bitter cry of outcast London (London, 1883)Google Scholar, and its successor volume, ‘Light and shade’: pictures of London life (London, 1885); Booth, W., In darkest England and the way out (London, 1890)Google Scholar; and the Religious influences volumes of Booth, C., Life and labour of the people in London (9 vols., London, 1892–7)Google Scholar.

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⁵ Cf. Symondson, A., ed., The Victorian crisis of faith (London, 1970)Google Scholar; Jay, E., Faith and doubt in Victorian Britain (London, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Helmstadter, R. J. and Lightmann, B., eds., Victorian faith in crisis: essays on continuity and change in nineteenth-century religious belief (London, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, for a corrective, Larsen, Crisis of doubt.

⁶ Wickham, E. R., Church and people in an industrial city (London: 1957), p. 14Google Scholar; idem, Encounter with modern society (London, 1964), p. 35Google Scholar.

⁷ Cf. Inglis, K. S., Churches and the working classes in Victorian England (London, 1963), pp. 326–7Google Scholar.

⁸ Wickham, Church and people, p. 151.

⁹ See the summary presented in Chadwick, Owen, The Victorian church, i (London, 1966), pp. 363–6Google Scholar; also Coleman, B. I., The Church of England in the mid-nineteenth century: a social geography (London, 1980)Google Scholar.

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¹¹ The ‘classic’ account came to be regarded as Wilson, B. R., Religion in secular society: a sociological comment (London, 1966)Google Scholar, but even the theologians had caught the mood: Cox, H., The secular city: secularization and urbanization in theological perspective (London, 1966)Google Scholar, and Altizer, T., ed., Towards a new Christianity: readings in the death of God (New York, NY, 1967)Google Scholar, though see Cox's own admission that he was wrong in idem, Fire from heaven: the rise of Pentecostal spirituality and the reshaping of religion in the twenty-first century (London, 1996), pp. xv–xviiGoogle Scholar.

¹² Currie, R., Gilbert, A. D., and Horsley, L., Churches and churchgoers: patterns of church growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar.

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¹⁴ Thompson, E. P., The making of the English working class (London, 1963), p. 411Google Scholar.

¹⁵ E.g. Joyce, P., Work, society and politics: the culture of the factory in later Victorian England (London, 1980)Google Scholar; Laqueur, T. W., Religion and respectability: Sunday Schools and working-class culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven, CT, 1976)Google Scholar.

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¹⁹ Ibid., p. 56.

²⁰ Cox, J., The English churches in a secular society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar.

²¹ McLeod, D. H., ‘New perspectives on Victorian working-class religion: the oral evidence’, Oral History, 14 (1986), pp. 31–49Google Scholar; Williams, S. C., Religious belief and popular culture in Southwark, c. 1880–1939 (Oxford, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²⁶ See particularly ch. 3, ‘The salvation economy’, in Brown, The death of Christian Britain.

²⁷ Brown, ‘Did urbanization secularize Britain?’, was one of the first contemporary historians to speak of the ‘massive institutional revival’ of the churches in Victorian Britain: p. 8.

²⁸ A generation of British students was schooled in the ‘crisis’ perspective by the immensely readable Chadwick, W. O., The secularization of the European mind in the nineteenth century (Cambridge, 1975)Google Scholar; but see, for example, Atkin, N. and Tallett, F., Priests, prelates and people: a history of European Catholicism since 1750 (Oxford, 2003), esp. pp. 110–20Google Scholar, for a brief account of the post-Napoleonic religious revival in France.

²⁹ The most impressive evidence undoubtedly remains the national church membership series, and rites of passage figures, recorded exhaustively in Currie, Gilbert, and Horsley, Churches and churchgoers.

³⁰ Walford, R. A., The growth of ‘New London’ in suburban Middlesex (1918–1945) and the response of the Church of England (Lewiston, NY, and Lampeter, 2007)Google Scholar; see, for example, the table on electoral rolls at pp. 425–6.

³¹ McLeod, Hugh, The religious crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yates, Nigel, Love now, pay later? Sex and religion in the fifties and sixties (London, 2010)Google Scholar.

³² See for example Bruce, S., God is dead: secularization in the West (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar, but also Secularization: In defence of an unfashionable theory (Oxford, 2011).

³³ Green, S. J. D., The passing of Protestant England: secularisation and social change, c. 1920–1960 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 4–12Google Scholar. Notwithstanding this – or perhaps because of it – Green's analysis of the complexity of religious belief and practice, and of the impossibility of bracketing off religious history from other aspects of historical understanding, is an immensely sophisticated and rich contribution to the scholarship. Much of what follows here is anticipated in Green's study, which, however, was read after my first draft was written.

³⁴ McLeod, D. H. and Ustorf, W., The decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; but also see Larsen, T., ‘Dechristendomization as an alternative to secularization: theology, history, and sociology in conversation’, Pro Ecclesia, 15 (2006), pp. 320–37Google Scholar.

³⁵ An early critique of the use of the returns was Pickering, ‘The 1851 religious census’. Publication of the detailed returns is enabling useful county by county comparisons. There are too many editions to list here, but a valuable if somewhat uneven coupling is, for example, Watts, M., ed., Religion in Victorian Nottinghamshire: the religious census of 1851 (Nottingham, 1988)Google Scholar, and Tranter, M., ed., The Derbyshire returns to the 1851 religious census (Chesterfield: Derbyshire Record Society, xxiii, 1995)Google Scholar.

³⁶ See McLeod, ‘New perspectives’, and Williams, Religious belief, drawing on the archive of oral material at Essex University. Stephen Parker, in a short study of church life in Birmingham during the Second World War, nevertheless used some fresh oral material, and this suggests that there is more to be made of oral evidence for the post-1945 situation: Parker, S. E., Faith on the home front: aspects of church life and popular religion in Birmingham, 1939–1945 (Bern, 2005)Google Scholar.

³⁷ Probably most historians would lay the emphasis on Marx rather than Feuerbach, but the first move in this strategy of interpretation was really made by Feuerbach. Amongst various works on Feuerbach, the one I have found most useful is Harvey, V. A., Feuerbach and the interpretation of history (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar.

³⁸ The theological and philosophical fragility of such views was exposed forcefully in Milbank, J., Theology and social theory: beyond secular reason (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar, and also, more recently, inter alia, in Taylor, C., A secular age (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2007)Google Scholar.

³⁹ Ward, W. R., The Protestant evangelical awakening (Cambridge, 1992); and also Faith and faction (London,1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chs. 5 and 10; see also J. D. Walsh, ‘The origins of the evangelical revival’, in G. V. Bennett and J. D. Walsh, eds., Essays in modern English church history (London, 1966), and especially pp. 148–53.

⁴⁰ This is a point tellingly made by Dominic Erdozain, in a study of the transformation of the language of sin deployed by evangelical preachers in the course of the nineteenth century, as they seemingly ‘secularized’ sin into a series of social abuses such as the vice of drink: idem, ‘The secularisation of sin in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 62 (2011), pp. 59–88. His argument parallels mine, but is by no means identical.

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⁴² Wilberforce, W., A practical view of the prevailing religious system (9th edn, London, 1797), p. iiGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ The original quotation came from a long letter to an unnamed clerical correspondent, dated 19 Aug. 1785, ‘On the church’, quoted and edited by Robert Southey in his Life of Wesley (London, 1820; 1889 edn, London), p. 516Google Scholar; Max Weber quoted it in turn from Southey in The Protestant ethic and the spirit of Capitalism (English trans., London, 1930; London, 1976 edn), p. 174Google Scholar, whence it has appeared in numerous anthologies and websites.

⁴⁴ Cf. Milbank, Theology and social theory, p. 139: ‘Secular reason claims that there is a “social” vantage point from which it can locate and survey “religious” phenomena. But it has turned out that assumptions about the nature of religion themselves help to define the perspective of this social vantage.’

⁴⁵ See Finney, C., Lectures on revivals of religion (London, 1835)Google Scholar; also McLoughlin, W. G., Modern revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York, NY, 1959)Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Cf. Harding, S. F., The book of Jerry Falwell: fundamentalist language and politics (Princeton, NJ, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Bruce, S., ‘Secularisation, church and popular religion’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 62 (2011), pp. 543–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ Brown, The death of Christian Britain, pp. 30–4.

⁴⁹ Jenkins, Tim, Religion in English everyday life (New York, NY, 1999)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Laudable, though now somewhat dated, attempts at this include Obelkevich, J., Religion and rural society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar, and Urdank, A. M., Religion and society in a Cotswold Vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780–1865 (Berkeley, CA, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Parry, J. P., Democracy and religion: Gladstone and the Liberal party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Biagini, E., Liberty, retrenchment and reform: popular liberalism in the age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar; Matthew, H. C. G., Gladstone, 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar, and idem, Gladstone, 1875–1898 (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar; Bebbington, D., The mind of Gladstone: religion, Homer, and politics (Oxford, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. From a quite different stable, but equally alert to the central importance of religion in British modern history is Cowling, M., Religion and public doctrine in modern England (3 vols., Cambridge, 1980–2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is of course also impossible not to mention the influence of Jonathan Clark's work, covering largely an earlier period but with significant implications for the nineteenth century: English society, 1660–1832: religion, ideology and politics during the Ancien Regime (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2000). A brief general account of Victorian political thought which, influenced partly by some of these studies, does place religion at the centre is Jones, H. S., Victorian political thought (Basingstoke, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁵² A fascinating fusion of literary criticism, theology, and legal history which certainly points the way to further studies is Schramm, J.-M., Testimony and advocacy in Victorian law, literature and theology (Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar. The relationship of religion and municipal culture was central to Morris, J. N., Religion and urban change: Croydon, 1840–1914 (Woodbridge, 1992)Google Scholar, even if it remained somewhat too indebted to an older interpretation of secularization; influential behind the reading of municipal culture offered there was Cannadine, D., ‘The transformation of civic ritual in modern Britain: the Colchester oyster feast’, Past and Present, 94 (1982), pp. 107–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ Garnett, J., Grimley, M., Harris, A., Whyte, W., and Williams, S., eds., Redefining Christian Britain: post-1945 perspectives (London, 2006)Google Scholar; Katznelson, I. and Jones, G. Stedman, eds., Religion and the political imagination (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁴ B. Martin, ‘Dark materials? Philip Pullman and children's literature’, in Garnett et al., eds., Redefining Christian Britain, p. 187.

⁵⁵ Buckley, At the origins of modern atheism.

⁵⁶ Young, B. W., Religion and enlightenment in eighteenth-century England: theological debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lash, N., The beginning and the end of ‘religion.’ (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵⁸ Such simplistic categories ironically make it more, rather than less, difficult to understand in their own terms how ‘popular’ believers see themselves. This is exactly the point made, for example, by Elizabeth Brusco in her description of the way in which Colombian evangelicals do not see themselves as religious, but as people following a particular way of life; their use of ‘religion’ is almost always pejorative, and refers to the practices followed by Catholics: Brusco, E., The reformation of machismo: evangelical conversion and gender in Colombia (Austin, TX, 1995), pp. 19–20Google Scholar. The distinction implied here between ‘religion’ and ‘faith’ echoes the polemic of Karl Barth against ‘religion’: for an introduction, see Gorringe, T., Karl Barth: against hegemony (Oxford, 1999), pp. 41–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar, or J. A. Di Noia, OP, ‘Religion and the religions’, in Webster, J., ed., The Cambridge companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 243–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ Williams, Religious belief, p. 13.

⁶⁰ See his assertion that ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’. Cultural analysis was therefore about ‘sorting out the structures of signification’: Geertz, C., The interpretation of cultures (New York, NY, 1973), pp. 5, 9Google Scholar. Geertz's assertion that the symbolic system of a society provides a densely textured map or model of its underlying relationships placed religious ritual as one amongst a range of cultural artefacts that included language, art and literature.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 125. The whole of the essay from which this quotation is taken is vital as a source for Geertz's understanding of religion: ‘Religion as a cultural system’, pp. 87–125.

⁶² Asad, T., Genealogies of religion: discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD, 1993), p. 30Google Scholar.

⁶³ Ibid., pp. 33–5. As Asad argues, ironically Geertz's very approach to religion as social symbol was itself a product of the religious history of the West, which had come to see religion as essentially a matter of symbolic meanings connected to general social order, and with generic functions of its own which could not be identified or confused with ‘any of its particular historical and cultural forms’: ibid., p. 42.

⁶⁴ Cf. Joel Robbins's discussion of the rapid rise of Charismatic Christianity amongst the Urapmin people of Papua New Guinea, in Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a Papua New Guinea society (Berkeley, CA, 2004), and Webb Keane's exploration of the relationship of Calvinism, conversion, and sociality amongst the island of Sumba in Indonesia, in Christian moderns: freedom and fetish in the mission encounter (Berkeley, CA, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Baldwin, J. F., ‘The varieties of liturgical experience’, Studia Liturgica, 32 (2002), pp. 1–14Google Scholar. The works to which he refers are an essay by Hoffman, , ‘How ritual means: ritual circumcision in rabbinic culture and today’, Studia Liturgica, 23 (1993), pp. 78–97Google Scholar, and Doty's, W. G.Mythography (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1986)Google Scholar.

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⁶⁷ The abiding difficulty of James's position in specifying the content of religious experience is underlined in Lash, N., Easter in ordinary: reflections on human experience and the knowledge of God (London, 1988), pp. 71–83Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Entry for 16 Apr. 1870, Easter Eve, in W. Plomer, ed., Kilvert's diary, 1870–1879 (London, 1944), p. 26.

⁶⁹ Entry for 2 Dec. 1866, in M. Smith and S. Taylor, Evangelicalism in the Church of England (Woodbridge, 2004), p. 209.

⁷⁰ Williams, Religious belief, p. 131.

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⁷² John Betjeman, letter of 25 Mar. 1939 to Roy Harrod: Wilson, A. N., Betjeman (London, 2006), pp. 131–2Google Scholar.

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⁷⁴ See for example, Toon, P., Evangelical theology, 1833–1856: a response to Tractarianism (London, 1979)Google Scholar; Nockles, P., The Oxford Movement in context: Anglican high churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Turner, F., John Henry Newman: the challenge to evangelical religion (New Haven, CT, 2002)Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ Colley, L., Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992)Google Scholar. Something of the fruitfulness of this recent area of enquiry can be gleaned from the broad time-frame surveyed by historians such as Wolffe, J., God and greater Britain: religion and national life in Britain, 1843–1945 (London, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Claydon, Tony and McBride, I., eds., Protestantism and national identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650 – c. 1850 (Cambridge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Pope, R., ed., Religion and national identity: Wales and Scotland, c. 1700–2000 (Cardiff, 2001)Google Scholar.

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