God and Politics: Religions and Political Culture in Britain, c. 1789 – 1914

Standard renderings of nineteenth-century Britain recognise the inherence of religion in ‘Victorian values’, and caricatures of the age – starting famously with Lytton Strachey’s – fasten onto the piety and prudery of its manners and morals. But the dialogue particularly between its political and religious historians has been limited. Much deeper into the century than is typically appreciated, religion and politics – though often separate analytical categories for the historian – were for many coterminous: the repeal of the Test Acts and Catholic emancipation were central to the passing of an ancien régime, but successive issues such as Irish Church reform, the Ecclesiastical Commission, the Maynooth grant, Jewish relief, the universities, church rates, disestablishment, burials, education, Bradlaugh, and, much more widely, religiously framed attitudes to wealth and poverty and therefore the rise of welfare, were the pith and marrow of political debate. Throughout the nineteenth century, the language of politics was freighted with commonplace, dog-whistle associations between church, state, property, and hierarchy – a Burkean ‘wisdom of ancestors’  – on the one side; and dissent, emancipation, pluralism, and progress – the ‘march of intellect’  – on the other. Late into the nineteenth century, Disraelian and Salisburyite Conservatism articulated constant appeals to the former, and Gladstonian Liberalism to the latter. And the British empire, of course, projected religious agendas and discourses across the globe, on a spectrum from the altruistic to the genocidal. 

The paper proposes to explore British political culture in the long nineteenth century via six themes: [1] the role of dissent and orthodox religion respectively in fortifying radicalism and loyalism in the French revolutionary epoch; [2] the neglected ecclesiastical dimensions of the age of reform; [3&4] the endurance of denominationalism as a determinant of political identity and of electoral alignment in late-Victorian party; [5] Protestant and British national identity, and the role of religion as driver of and vindication for British imperialism; and [6] the ways in which religion determined attitudes to poverty and wealth, and the relationship between a declining confessional politics and the reconfiguration of party in the early twentieth century.