The Origins of the British Secularist Movement 1791-1866
Edward Royle
Victorian Britain was a Christian country. That is, its laws and institutions, supported by the courts and public opinion, aided by a variety of Churches and sects, upheld and declared the Christian religion. The whole tone of Victorian middle-class life was religious, and the Churches enjoyed a great period of prosperity and success. But contemporaries were well aware that the foundations of religion in society were precarious: intellectual doubt threatened the very basis of biblical Christianity on the one hand, and mass infidelity among the lower orders disturbed and challenged pious consciences on the other.
The growth of industrial society in the nineteenth century, with its increasingly urban, class-conscious and secular outlook, was the background to the development of an all-out radical attack on the political and religious establishment of the country. The origins of this establishment can be traced to the Restoration, when the political and religious clock had been put back in an effort on the part of the governing class to suppress the memory and achievements of the Commonwealth period. Church and State had then been wedded in a marriage of mutual convenience in which orthodox Christianity was regarded as the very basis of the law and the constitution. Gradually during the course of the nineteenth century this constitution came under attack and was eroded: dissenters and Roman Catholics were admitted into the political fold, the franchise was extended to the first of the new classes to find its identity-the middle class-and by the 1850s even Quakers and Jews were allowed civil rights.
The turn of those lower down the social scale was to come next. In pre-industrial society attacks on orthodox Christianity were not uncommon, but they were usually made in the name of orthodox Christianity. Irreligion in its true sense of an attack on the established religion became common only with the development of industrial society, and was usually associated amongst the lower orders with the general radical attack on the Church-State constitution…
Victorian Infidels (PDF 361 pages)
