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Dynamics of Local Religious Change

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Dynamics of Local Religious Change Movements and Regions 41 Chapter 2 Movements and Regions: Dynamics of Local Religious Change Whatever the cross-currents of historical interpretation, the High Church revival in the Church of England was at least an unquestioned fact by the early twentieth century. Its prominence could be measured externally in terms of changing ritual and liturgical practice, with a growing frequency of commun- ion services, an increasingly elaborate liturgical style, and a rising confidence in asserting doctrinal positions and emphases on controverted points that would have shocked many Anglicans two or three generations before. Its in stitutional base, after the failure of the strategy of containing Ritualism through legislative and penal means, was secure by the 1890s and 1900s. The founding of theological colleges such as those at Chichester (1839), Wells (1840), Salisbury (1861) and St Stephen’s House, Oxford (1876) provided a theo- logical and vocational grounding in High Church principles. National asso- ciations such as the English Church Union (founded in 1859 as the Church of England Protection Society), the Society of the Holy Cross (or SSC, from the Latin Societas Sanctae Crucis, founded 1855 for clergy), and the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament (first formed 1857, but refounded 1862, as a society dedicated to eucharistic devotion) could draw together Anglo-Catholic opin- ion, and represent its interests. Although its more extreme adherents, with their enthusiasm for devo tional practices going beyond the canonical or authorised norms of Anglicanism, continued to be a headache for bishops, nevertheless there was growing acceptance by the church hierarchy of the dis- tinct theological position advocated by Anglo-Catholics. Some have even argued that this growing acceptance represented a ‘respect- able’ or increasingly ‘middle class’ trend that was tantamount to a betrayal of its roots.1 By the time of the British Weekly London church census of 1886–7, for example, the building of distinctly Ritualist or Anglo-Catholic churches in the London suburbs had easily begun to outpace the congregations built up by several decades of intensive slum ministry in East London – contrast St Augustine’s, Kilburn (consecrated in 1880), with its morning congregation of 866, with Charles Lowder’s St Peter’s, London Docks (consecrated in 1866; Lowder, by then, was dead, and his former curate Lincoln Wainwright was in 1 Cf. J. S. Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism, pp. 263–4. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004326804_003 42 Chapter 2 charge), with its morning congregation of 226.2 But there is actually little evi- dence that middle-class adhesion to High Churchmanship was a late-nineteenth century phenomenon: churches completed or consecrated in the last quarter of the century could take a long time, even up to twenty years, to reach that point, from the conception of a mission district through to the acquisition of land, the building of a mission hall, and the raising of funds. Moreover, subur- ban strength compared with inner-city weakness was hardly a feature unique to Anglo-Catholicism, at least in modern British religious history, and the very existence of the comparison points to the importance of scrutinizing closely the various regional and local factors that contributed to the changing fortunes of the movement. The nature and scope of the revival cannot adequately be assessed from congregational numbers alone – no more than it can by concen- trating exclusively on personalities and opinions. The local dynamics of change – the multiple interactions between people at local level which facilitated or impeded church life – constitute an essential dimension in any attempt to understand a religious movement. In this chapter, I shall explore these dynamics through a number of telling examples, drawn from various regions. I aim to demonstrate how the study of Anglican High Churchmanship in this period is part of the wider social history of religion in Britain, in order to outline the complex processes by which Anglican ecclesial culture was transformed in the nineteenth and early twenti- eth centuries. Initial reflections on the theme of growth qualify the more outlandish assumptions often made about the impact of the Oxford Movement in particular, emphasizing its location within a broader movement of church renewal. As one social historian of religion acknowledged, the growth of the Church of England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries repre- sented ‘the one prolonged period after the Restoration in which [it] succeeded in improving its quantitative position within English society’.3 In that con- text, it is clear that the High Church revival took place within, rather than over and against, the broader recovery of the Church of England in the period. A second section considers the more troublesome question of the relationship of Tractarianism and Ritualism within the revival, and essentially argues for their treatment as a single phenomenon. The third and fourth sections turn to a more detailed exploration of local patterns of change, focusing particularly on urban areas, taking into account particularly the work of the late Nigel Yates, 2 The Religious Census of London, Reprinted from the British Weekly, pp. 22 & 32. 3 A. D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change 1740–1914, p. 29..
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