In many respects Victorian Britain was a much more robust, tolerant, and relaxed society than the one we have today. True, there were vast and glaring disparities of wealth; and while the urban workingman householder got the vote in 1867, the same right would not be extended to women until the decade after 1919. Yet Victorian Britain had a pride, a self-confidence, and a sense of destiny which leaves us moderns wringing our hands and apologizing – for its missionary activities, for the British Empire, for its legacy of industrialization, hymn-singing, and even cricket. The Common Law, for example, punished actions, and not peacefully articulated thoughts, prejudices, or opinions (contrary to what interpretation of European Union Law sometimes makes possible today). Declaring yourself an atheist might get your name struck off the vicarage tea-party invitation list, but unless your views came to be associated with republicanism, subversion, or treason, and were proclaimed at rowdy or inflammatory public meetings during times of national crisis, the law would do nothing. It is true that things were rather more fraught during the troubles of the “Hungry Forties” – a time of food shortages, a shamefully neglected famine in Ireland, and labour unrest – but if you did not openly mock or ridicule the Christian faith, the monarchy, and the rule of law, were not seen to be promoting sexual obscenity, and did not declare an approval of French Revolutionary principles, then a philosophical irreligion was not likely to lead to criminal proceedings.
By 1880, the good people of Northampton – including many God-fearing Christians and supporters of our most Christian of prime ministers, William Ewart Gladstone – had enthusiastically voted in the freethinking, secularist, Republican-sympathizing Charles Bradlaugh as their Liberal Party MP. Even after his initial unwillingness to subscribe to a Christian Oath of Allegiance meant he was unable to take his seat, his constituents kept voting him back, until in 1886 the Speaker of the House did allow him to sit, and in 1888 a new Act permitted a secular affirmation.
Indeed, the Bradlaugh affair gives us a remarkable insight into the way that popular opinion and tolerance could lead to peaceful constitutional changes in the more stable and comfortable 1880s, enabling a popular figure, in spite of his “outrageous” views, to be serially elected and confirmed as an MP by Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, Unitarians, and even Anglicans. Because, clearly, they liked him and thought he was a good MP.
A far cry, indeed, from the prevailing secularist myth (still rehearsed by fans of the “Enlightenment”, as I know from personal experience) that modern freedom only became possible when a few inspired and courageous unbelievers dared to seize power from a reactionary Christian elite; for there were certainly not enough radical secular atheists in Northampton in 1880 to return an MP single-handed. But there must have been a lot of Christians who felt that Bradlaugh had won his seat fairly in an open contest, and had a right to sit in it.
It is in this context of remarkable freedom of expression that “modern” atheism and secularism were born in the late Georgian and Victorian era. Their first major advocate, in many respects, was the idealistic Welsh-born self-made industrial millionaire and public philanthropist, Robert Owen.
Moving from Wales to Manchester, then on to Scotland, Owen was in the thick of the first Industrial Revolution, when “Cotton was King” and great fortunes could be made in the textile trade. Most mill-owners treated their workers barbarously, like “white slaves” it was sometimes said; but Owen was a kindly, good-natured, and naturally affable man who also realized that well-treated, well-housed, well-fed, and regularly rested workers were a better investment than angry half-dead ones. He built a new industrial town, New Lanark, in southern Scotland, which possessed, among other amenities, schools, medical care, decent sanitation, and a clean water supply. For Owen was an idealist socialist, freethinker and secularist. And believing that man could be socially engineered into perfectibility once separated from excesses of the bottle and the Bible, he even went on to found a utopian colony, New Harmony, in America in 1825, although, predictably, disharmony set in, and it failed.
But Owen had a fascinating mix of traits that placed him firmly in the tradition of great British eccentrics: he was an amazingly generous philanthropist, an idealist capitalist yet a believer in cooperation rather than competition, an advocate of socialism, a creator of harmonious master–worker trades union relations, a pioneer of the cooperative movement for working people, and a secularist. And honest to his principles, he put his money where his mouth was, and used his own resources to establish, in the late 1830s, a Rational Religion and Rationalist Society, propagated by lectures, meetings, and celebrations aimed primarily at working men. Yet Owen did seem to come to a sort of religious understanding when, in 1854, he became a spiritualist. His boundless zeal for making the world a better place never deserted him, however, continuing right down to his death at the age of eighty-seven in 1858.
Owen’s impact on English secularism and early socialism was enormous, especially as he was one of the few people of his persuasion not to live in an intellectual bubble, but to take a hands-on approach and spend considerable sums of his own earned money in pursuit of his ideals: astonishingly similar to contemporary Christian evangelicals and Christian socialists, in fact.
But it was George Holyoake who really got the British secularist movement off the ground in the 1840s, serving six months in Gloucester gaol for blasphemy in 1842 when, during a radical lecture, he made contemptuous remarks about Christianity. But this period, let us remember, was one of great political unrest: shots had recently been fired at the young Queen Victoria in London, the country was disturbed by widespread rioting, and the economy was in what we would now call “recession”, so that noisily proclaimed allegiances to atheism, secularism, French Republicanism and socialism could get one into trouble. And Holyoake was one of the leading lights in the British secularist and freethinking movement from the early 1840s to the 1890s, as a lecturer, writer, and propagandist.
Holyoake seems to have coined the term “secularism” around 1851, and while it was, and remained, generally associated with a non-religious approach to life, it did not necessarily have to be so. Secularism could, after all, be taken as a purely social creed, meaning that while a person might sincerely believe in God, he or she nonetheless recognized that certain parts of life were theologically neutral. This was probably why Bradlaugh kept winning parliamentary elections in Northampton, as a spectrum of Dissenting Christians no doubt resented what was seen as Anglicanism’s privileged position in national life, and wished to end that privilege. In spite of their own personal atheism, both Holyoake and Bradlaugh were associated, like Owen, with a string of popular social justice and humanitarian causes, including, in Bradlaugh’s case, championing the rights of the ordinary people of India in the Westminster Parliament.
And finally, by way of a coda, let us also be aware of the myth that says British trades unionism and popular working-class social improvement campaigns were products of secular radicals overthrowing Christian control. The true picture is far from simple and clear-cut. Yes, there undoubtedly were radical, secular influences present in British working-class movements, as one sees with Robert Owen and the “Owenites”, and with Holyoake, Bradlaugh, and others: movements drawing on “Rights of Man” and republican ideas. Yet Victorian Britain, let us not forget, was a deeply Christian country, from the archbishops sitting in the House of Lords to the vibrant Dissenting chapel communities of working people that stretched from Cornwall to Scotland, along with the newly founded Salvation Army, and were especially powerful in the industrial towns. One has only to travel across Great Britain today to see these occasionally small but more often imposing chapels, some still in use as places of Christian worship, and others turned into warehouses or theatres. The Welsh valleys and my own native industrial Lancashire in particular were full of them: “Bethesda, 1875”, “Elim, 1880”, along with “Happy Land”, “Reheboth”, “Mount Sion”, “Peniel”, and so on (often named after places where God had revealed himself to mankind in the Old Testament), some dating from the late eighteenth century, but invariably with new re-foundation stones, proudly proclaiming “Rebuilt and extended 1885” or words to that effect.
Indeed, a rapidly growing population after 1840 led not only to waves of chapel-building, but to the building of hundreds of new Anglican churches as well, as Methodists, Baptists, Anglicans, and other denominations competed to win the souls of the expanding working and lower middle classes. And this phenomenon of indigenous local multidenominational Christian revivalism, complete with its penny-a-week insurance “sick clubs”, adult literacy Sunday and other schools, and Mechanics’ Institutes, had far more to do with the growth of working-class self-help movements and trades unions than had the Marxist, German revolutionary, or anarchist movements of the age.
Very important when considering the chapels was the fact that they often – along with the pubs – acted as centres of working-class life, and were built, paid for, and managed by subscriptions from the coal-miners, mill-workers, and working men and women themselves. Wesleyan and Primitive Methodism, Congregationalism, and after 1907 American Pentecostalism in particular made extensive use of lay ministers: ordinary working people who were not only literate but often astonishingly widely read. (I have come across Victorian working-men lay ministers who taught themselves Greek, Latin, and German, not to mention natural science.) Some scrimped and saved to train for the full-time Methodist ministry – always poorly paid – often while doing a full-time day job. My own father had two late-Victorian uncles, one of whom, after finishing his apprenticeship as a mechanic, trained as a full-time Methodist minister and became a noted scholar and bibliophile, while the other, also a working man, became an Anglican lay reader.
And what has all this to do with trades unionism? Well, the skills of oratory and exhortation which enabled a man to spellbind 1,000 people in a large galleried chapel on a Sunday could also be used for addressing a union meeting on a Monday. A powerful working-class minister who could dramatically argue Satan back into hell from the pulpit on Sunday might also be able to beat a mill- or mine-owner into submission when negotiating for better pay and conditions – just as Jesus did with the Pharisees and Sadducees. A far more effective way of improving the people’s lot, indeed, than bloody revolution with its recurrent cycles of political instability!
The great ex-coal-miner labour leader and effective founder of the Labour Party in 1900, James Keir Hardie, had much affinity with this tradition. Cutting his teeth as a lay preacher in the Scottish Evangelical Union, and subsequently becoming a convert to non-Marxist socialism, Hardie seems to have regarded himself as a radical Christian throughout his life, making reference to his saviour in Gethsemane as the horrors of World War I began to unfold in August 1914. As he recorded later in life, “The impetus which drove me first of all into the Labour movement and inspiration which has carried me on in it… has derived more from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth than all the other sources combined.”
So what, you may ask, have socialism, rationalism, secularism, and trades unionism to do with science and religion? A very great deal, I would argue. Many of these ideas claimed a sort of scientific basis: in positivism, in early secular or “rational” sociology, in the view that we were now living in a post-religious era of “science”, and, by the 1860s, in a Marxist model of “dialectical materialism”, where matter, conflict, and progress were the sole engines of social change. It is true that in the British radical tradition of Owen, Holyoake, and Bradlaugh there was a beneficence and a kindly idealism that wanted to make the world a better place, and might almost be considered a sort of “secular” Christianity. And this contrasted sharply with the much more brutal revolutionary and often murderous atheistical schemes more common in Continental Europe, from the French Revolutionaries after 1789 to the German anarchists and Marxists of the 1880s, and on to the horrors of Russia after 1917.
What we see here, therefore, is the emergence, in the nineteenth century, of an attempt to understand and control human beings in a way that often dismissed revealed religion as belonging to a more backward phase of social development. And once again, we find another clear contradiction to the myth that superstition and church dogma reigned supreme in their control of thoughts and actions until the modern atheists stepped in to save the world.