On the Limits of Social History: Nineteenth-Century Evangelicalism

On the Limits of Social History: Nineteenth-Century EvangelicalismEvangelicals in the Church of England, 1734-1984 by Kenneth Hylson-Smith; The Age ofAtonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865 byBoyd Hilton; Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780-1865by Albion M. UrdankReview by: Jeffrey CoxJournal of British Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Apr., 1992), pp. 198-203Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on BritishStudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/175767 .

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during the puritan backlash of the seventeenth century, the over- whelming picture to be drawn from this book is the inventive new means found by Protestant Englishmen to enjoy themselves, using as a convenient excuse great national occasions.

Amidst the array of tables, graphs, statistics, means, medians, averages, histograms, simulations, back projections, and so forth, what emerges from these studies is further evidence to aid us in refining the picture of life in everyday early modern England that has been gradually building up since the 1960s. Were Tawney still alive today he would doubtless be both surprised and gratified to find just how much we now know about this period. In 1912 he was emphatic, using the phrase "we cannot say"; later he modified his views; today, none of us can be quite sure how much we will one day be able to say about the "hopes, fears and aspirations of the men who tilled the fields." As a result of the work disseminated through these books we certainly now know a great deal more than we did about marriage patterns, the problems of survival, the movement of people around the country, and the propensity of every locality to find events that could legitimately and regularly be celebrated in time-honored and boisterous fashion.

J. V. BECKETT University of Nottingham

On the Limits of Social History: Nineteenth-Century Evangelicalism

Evangelicals in the Church of England, 1734-1984. By KENNETH HYLSON-SMITH. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, Ltd., 1988. Pp. ix+411. $49.95.

The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865. By BOYD HILTON. New York: Clarendon Press, 1988. Pp. xiii+407. $69.00.

Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780-1865. By ALBION M. URDANK. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni- versity of California Press, 1990. Pp. xviii +448. $47.50.

For decades historians have complained about our lack of knowl- edge of nineteenth-century evangelicalism. Kenneth Hylson-Smith's history of evangelicals in one denomination, the Church of England, brings together part of the story in a coherent chronicle of events, including an interesting account of the vigorous revival of Anglican evangelicalism since the Second World War.

















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Boyd Hilton's fascinating, ambitious book does much more to lighten our darkness about the broader significance of evangelicalism. He chooses theological labels to redefine the spirit of two ages in British history, the age of atonement from 1780 to 1850 and the age of incarnation from 1850 to 1880.

Between 1780 and 1840, he argues, a moderate, rational evangelicalism emerged that shaped thought, not only about religion, but also about politics, society, science, and especially economics. Its exem- plars were William Wilberforce and Thomas Chalmers; its economic and theological sources Malthus and, to some extent, Joseph Butler. The key to recognizing moderate evangelical influence, which Hilton finds in the most unlikely places, is an emphasis on moral retribution in both society and nature, a concept that he links to the evangelical doctrine of substitutionary or forensic atonement. Evangelical pessimism about human nature entailed a pessimism about the possibilities for economic growth, which explains why moderate evangelicals op- posed both the corn laws and the old poor law for reasons different from those of Whigs and radicals.

There is a certain amount of confusion in his argument about the relationship between moderate evangelical ideas and other ideas. Sometimes the stress is on influence, other times on linkage, other times on parallels. He recognizes that the moderate evangelical point of view was only one among several ways of looking at the world, including Owenite socialism, Coleridgean romanticism, and a progres- sive cosmopolitan Whig tradition of moderate utilitarianism and economic optimism, looking to Adam Smith in economics and William Paley in theology. More important for his analysis was a contrasting evangelical tradition, premillenarian and pentecostal, exemplified by the Record newspaper and Lord Shaftesbury. Worshiping an inter- ventionist and unpredictable God, Shaftesbury and other premillenari- ans looked more favorably on state intervention in society. With less faith in God's rationality and providential design for society, the ex- treme evangelicals were willing to advocate without fear of impiety government intervention in the form of factory acts, poor laws, and corn laws.

Hilton casts a very wide net for moderate evangelicals, including among their number some tractarians, broad churchmen like Thomas Arnold (a "latent evangelical"), Jane Austen, and even Lord Byron, whose rebuttals of Calvinism Hilton treats as desperate efforts to es- cape his own inner convictions. But the charm and persuasiveness of Hilton's writing come from his willingness to link aspects of thought that are usually considered separately and to identify new parallels in the thought of apparently disparate individuals. Moderate evangelicalism, premillenarian evangelicalism, and Paleyian theological utilitarianism are linked politically to Liberal Toryism, High Toryism, and Whiggery, but that is just the beginning. He establishes links between









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economic risk taking and natural theology, phrenology and natural disasters, incarnationalist theology and the first law of thermodynam- ics, the millennium and the financial collapse of 1825-26, Unitarian theology and the marginal theory of value.

These unexpected connections are often worked out in character sketches turning on what he calls "psycho-epistemological" concerns, a method of argument that allows him to explain theologically why Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, and Charles Grant fell asleep during Robert Owen's explanation of his new moral world. Hilton's classifi- cation scheme provides a new and sophisticated framework for dealing with arguments about the influence of utilitarianism and evangelicalism, conflict between free trade and protectionism, and the relative importance of paternalism and individualism.

Although his argument does not depend on it, he succeeds in measuring the direct influence of moderate evangelicals on policy. He establishes the wide authority of the economic writings of Thomas Chalmers, who supported free trade because he believed it would re- tard economic growth, just as God intended it to. Hilton finds clear evidence of evangelical influence on the Liberal Tory decisions to re- turn to the Gold Standard in 1819 and abolish the Combination Laws in 1824-25. In both cases, the motive was the same: the Gold Standard would provide a healthy moral retribution for atheistic speculation and visionary risk taking; strikes and unions would teach both masters and laborers valuable lessons about the limits of human endeavor.

Although Hilton asserts that he is not a theorist, his narrative turns on what he calls a paradigm shift in the mid-nineteenth century from the age of atonement to the age of incarnation. The new stress on the incarnation in late nineteenth-century English theology is well known, but Hilton turns it into a metaphor for the emergence of a kinder, gentler Britain in the 1850s. Most striking is his treatment of the adoption of limited liability in 1855 and 1856. The timing of this legislation and the strange parliamentary alliances it engendered have never been satisfactorily explained, but economic historians are unlikely to be well prepared to evaluate Hilton's explanation. He links limited liability to changing attitudes to risk in the natural order, a new theological emphasis on the incarnation at the expense of the substitutionary theory of the atonement, and a corresponding decline of belief in Hell.

Too much probably has been made of the decline of belief in Hell in the nineteenth century, but some downplaying of the doctrine is clearly evident in theological discussion. In his account of "limiting the liability of sin," Hilton argues that with the abolition of Hell (decline having become outright abolition) the wealthy developed a new temporal concern for the poor. Chalmers regarded the poor laws as impious, viewed some forms of organized charity as a threat to society,











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and was capable of finding evidence in the New Testament of Christ holding back food from the hungry. In Chalmers's Age of Atonement, "the poor had a sporting chance of being whisked to paradise, the well-to-do faced the prospect of a fiery workhouse beneath the earth, an afterlife of perpetual less eligibility" (p. 276). By abolishing Hell after 1850, however, "the middle and upper classes were making their futures more secure, but at the same time they were also removing a justification for their own material advantages." Having done this, the way was open for ameliorating the risks imposed on the poor by the poor law and the market. Hilton ends with a new explanation of Glad- stone's appeal, arguing that Gladstone turned his own early nineteenth-century retributive, providentialist, and moralistic views to political advantage by combining them with mid-nineteenth-century optimism.

Hilton shuns historical materialism. Although he gets our attention by attaching unexpected theological labels to his ages, he is no religious determinist, either. The relationship between ideas and events is left unexplained, as Hilton carefully avoids the most obvious explanation for his midcentury paradigm shift, some kind of change in the economic or material conditions of British society. He also ignores the enormous scholarly investment in the social history of religion of the last few decades.

Albion Urdank's book on religion and the economy in a Glouces- tershire village may well explain why. Urdank is utterly uncritical of historical materialism. In his familiar story of modernization, industri- alization is the historical actor that causes all major changes, although leaving many lesser changes to be explained. For those secondary changes, his rhetorical method is the constant reference to various sociological or historical theories, models, patterns, hypotheses, and observations, all treated as "models" to be "tested," as if the book were a laboratory.

Furthermore, Urdank is so thoroughly deferential to authority that his laboratory "test" is almost always positive, confirming the wisdom of the theorist or historian. In repeated appeals to authority, he claims that, if other scholars use the gemeinschaft/gesellschaft distinction, the tradition/modernity distinction, the church/sect/denomination distinction, the Durkheimian concept of anomie, or the sociological theory of secularization, then they must be useful in discussing Nails- worth in Gloucestershire.

His first chapter contains sweeping generalizations about social mobility and the role of education explained by deferential references to the views of Lawrence Stone, Roy Porter, Samuel Beer, Anthony Giddens, and Neil Smelser. Urdank's analysis of wills reveals a class structure that is taken to confirm the views of Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Elie Halevy. He concludes by suggesting that the Nailsworth














working class was less communitarian and more receptive to capitalist values than E. P. Thompson argues. It is a relief to see an authority questioned rather than cited as evidence.

This method is all the more frustrating because of the many valuable things in the book. From Lewis Namier to E. P. Thompson to Jonathan Clark, historians have cited the influence of eighteenth- and very early nineteenth-century Dissent without knowing very much about what things were like in Dissenting chapels. Urdank provides an interesting description of the emergence and history of Dissent in Nailsworth, especially in the authoritarian world of a small Friends Meeting. His depiction of Baptist and Congregationalist collaboration with the landowning .elite, and Whig Anglican landowning tolerance and even encouragement of Nonconformity, qualifies a number of as- sumptions about the slumbering radicalism of Dissent, which was sound asleep in Nailsworth as far as any political or social radicalism was concerned.

But even the worthwhile arguments tend to run aground on Ur- dank's speculative and deferential rhetoric. He establishes that the pattern of variation in the birthrate was different for Dissenters and Anglicans. The Dissenting birthrate was more sensitive to change in industrial output, the Anglican rate to changes in agricultural output. But his conclusions about the causes and significance of these differ- ences consist of psychohistorical speculation about a greater or lesser sense of community in different churches. For instance, during a trade depression, Baptists displayed an increase in both the conversion rate of new members and the birthrate among established members. He connects the simultaneous growth of Baptist conversions and births during trade depressions to anomie among outsiders and a stronger sense of community among insiders, leading to conversion in one case and greater physical reproduction in the other.

It is interesting to speculate on alternative possible explanations. Perhaps anomic unemployed Baptist weavers consoled themselves with greater frequency of sexual intercourse. Perhaps Gloucestershire weavers who were doing well during the trade depression attributed their exceptional prosperity to Providence and joined the chapel out of gratitude to God. Perhaps trade depression caused Gloucestershire weavers to drown their sorrows in alcohol, with a corresponding increase in guilt, producing a sense of sin that led to conversion. The list could go on, but Urdank has found a convenient answer in the ideas of Emile Durkheim.

His closing chapter on Shortwood Baptist Church, a central insti- tution in his community, represents social science history at its least persuasive. The Shortwood Baptist Church suffered a decline in its growth rate after 1850, comparable to the national decline in the real Nonconformist growth rate. Instead of examining the local pattern of decline skeptically, Urdank allows speculation to run riot.














The suicide in 1854 of a Minchinhampton Baptist weaver is explained as a consequence of a widespread mood of psychological depression, a "chiliasm of despair," despite the fact that the man had suffered paralysis in his legs. Urdank inevitably summons the sociological theory of secularization because it has been put to good use by many other scholars. Middle-aged Baptists were "more preoccupied by the cares of this world . . . and, for this reason, were the most secularized of all Shortwood's membership" (p. 291). Shortwood Bap- tists who lived far from the chapel attended more regularly than those who lived near it, a reflection, he argues, of a clear secularizing trend, since the modern system of factory discipline encouraged those "living a short distance from chapel to rest on Sundays rather than attend religious services" (p. 293). In the end, however, the concept of secularization tells us little of interest about Shortwood Baptist Chapel.

Hilton has ignored social history altogether and written a persuasive and thought-provoking book. Urdank's book demonstrates that social historians who wish to be persuasive must pay more attention to the quality and rigor of their arguments and devise new ways to tell the story of religious change in the modern world.

JEFFREY COX

University of Iowa



JEFFREY COX

University of Iowa



JEFFREY COX

University of Iowa




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On the Limits of Social History: Nineteenth-Century Evangelicalism