The Sea of Faith

By Don Cupitt

This text began in the 1860s as a phrase from Matthew Arnold's picture of the decline of religion as the retreat of the tide on Dover's beach. The book has had a significant impact, for its account of historical developments and its presentation of Christian non-realism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Jan 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9780334048732

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Dover Beach

Matthew Arnold published ‘Dover Beach’ in 1867, in his last collection of poems. It expressed the sense, common in his time, that the ancient supernatural world of gods and spirits which had surrounded humankind since the first dawn of consciousness was at last inexorably slipping away. The English social and religious order had until quite recently seemed strong enough to be able to resist the encroachment of unbelief by isolating and containing it, but it was becoming apparent that the long rearguard action was being lost. From now on thinking Christians would either be revisionists of some kind, or else be consciously in a dissenting minority.

Arnold himself was a revisionist, for after turning away from poetry he published in the 1870s four books of what would now be called radical theology. But he was not primarily a thinker. In the English manner he was a mixture of poet and shopkeeper, combining an intuitive, imaginative mind with a sharp sense of social reality. What moved him was not philosophical argument, but his sense of the social and cultural changes that had come about with the French Revolution. In Britain intuitive thinking, acute social perceptions and a uniquely long experience of industrialism have ensured that even today events in the heart of the great cities are still seen as peculiarly challenging and significant.

Secularism

On Trinity Sunday 1959 I was ordained by William Greer, then Bishop of Manchester, to the parish of St Philip, Salford. I had chosen to return to Lancashire partly because I wanted to reconnect with my origins after an education in the south-east, and partly because like several of my friends I believed it was necessary to test my understanding of Christianity against the realities of life in an industrial city.

From that point of view, if from no other, Salford was ideal. Old Salford on the west bank of the Irwell and old Manchester facing it on the east bank together make up the oldest large industrial area in the world. Its population had begun to rocket in the late eighteenth century, reaching 100,000 by 1800, and rising again to 500,000 by 1850. The young Friedrich Engels and his Mary knew it intimately, and he drew on it for a good deal of the most horrific material in his early book on The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.

At the time when St Philip’s was built in 1825 the vast population of this area had inevitably largely lost touch with the church. There were two rather genteel town churches of Queen Anne date, St Ann, Manchester, and Sacred Trinity, Salford, full of rented pews, and there was the old Manchester Parish Church (today the Cathedral) where the legendary Joss Brooks held sway as chaplain. A rough, eccentric character, his ministry is chiefly remembered for – and cannot have consisted of much more than – the conducting of astonishingly large and chaotic mass baptisms and weddings.

The government recognized that in the new manufacturing towns a population was developing which was quite without religion, and it voted two large grants of public money for the provision of churches as a thank-offering for the victory at Waterloo. St Philip’s, a formidable pile erected in 1824 by Sir Robert Smirke in the Grecian style then fashionable, is one of the ‘Waterloo churches’. Inside, it is evident that this is a building designed to seat as many people as possible for the money. Upstairs in the gallery, the tightly-packed cheap seating for the poor can still be seen. Downstairs there were originally rented pews for the middle classes, who in those days before commuting still lived along the main streets of the new industrial towns. Their pew-rents, like today’s Stewardship Schemes, helped to finance the church, but it was difficult not to be reminded of Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees for monopolizing the chief seats in the synagogues.

Still, in the early nineteenth century the community did at least attempt to provide seating in church for the new industrial proletariat. Between 1801 and 1851, 2529 new Anglican churches were built up and down the country. If they had all been large like St Philip’s, so that they averaged 750 seats each, then they would have provided just under two million seats.

Unfortunately, even this was nowhere near enough. The population had risen in the same period from 8 to 18 million. As a result, by the mid-century in the great manufacturing towns there were enough seats in church for only about one-third of the population, half of these seats being in parish churches, and the other half being in chapels and Roman Catholic churches.

It is clear then that even if everyone in the great towns had wanted to go to church, there were never enough seats for them all to gather as a community in the traditional village fashion. And did they want to go? It seems not. The Census of 1851 (whose figures include an element of guesswork, but are the best we have) claimed that 42% of the England-and-Wales population had attended church on the day of the count. But Horace Mann, who organized the religious census, was well aware, and pointed out, that the percentage was higher than 42 among the upper and middle classes and among country people, and much lower in the industrial areas. It was lower still in the worst slum parishes – about 10% – and lowest of all among low-paid working men in the prime of life. These men had been cured of their traditional deference, and they no longer accepted either the existing social order or the church that was allied to it. There is a chilling account of their views in a letter written in 1843 by W. F. Hook, the Vicar of Leeds. Hook was no firebrand, but a solid Oxford High Churchman, an historian and a weighty and respected figure.

In the manufacturing districts [the church] is an object of detestation to the working classes. Among this class I have many friends, zealous and enlightened churchmen; and from them, and the persecutions they endure, I know the feeling which exists. The working classes consider themselves to be oppressed people. They think that they can only obtain the right and importance they desire by exhibiting their strength . . .

Hook goes on to say that the workers despise upper-class philanthropists like Lord Shaftesbury. They, the workers, regard themselves as a new Party or class in the State, and

. . . many of them are noble and enthusiastic lovers of their Party. They place Party in the stead of the church; and they consider the church to belong to the Party of their oppressors; hence they hate it, and consider a man of the working-classes who is a churchman to be a traitor to his Party or Order, – he is outlawed in the society in which he moves. Paupers and persons in need may go to church on the principle of living on the enemy; but woe to the young man in health or strength who proclaims himself a churchman.

Thus wrote Hook in 1843, just a few years before the ‘year of revolutions’, 1848, the year of Chartism and the Communist Manifesto. ‘They place Party in the stead of the church’, he says, indicating that a new and secularized social group has appeared. They are secularized because for them the political struggle to advance the cause of the working class in the present world (saeculum, in Latin) has replaced religion as life’s highest imperative. In the next few years a cluster of new ideas entered the English language: secularism (1846), secularist (1851) and secularization in the sense of changing education, morality and practical living so as to make them purely this-worldly in their reference (1863). So far as I can discover, it is only much more recently that we have commonly used secularization in the further sense of the progressive extension of instrumental or utilitarian ways of thinking to more and more areas of life, so that the influence of religion in society and in individual thinking gradually contracts until eventually the sacred vanishes by having been wholly absorbed into the profane. But though the word is new, the reality it stands for was clearly present in the nineteenth century, a period of such rapid change and population-growth that there was plenty of room within it for both massive church expansion and a steady process of secularization to be happening