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294 Peter Catterall As Nonconformity Gently Waned, the Labour Party 294 book reviews Peter Catterall Labour and the Free Churches, 1918–1939. Radicalism, Righteousness and Religion. Bloomsbury, London/New York 2016, xiv + 322 pp. isbn 9781441115898. £63; us$85.40. As nonconformity gently waned, the Labour Party waxed. This meticulously researched, perceptive, and subtle study charts the mingling of those two jour- neys between 1918 and 1939. The distinctiveness of the relationship between British religion and socialism has fascinated historians since Halévy’s con- troversial suggestion that evangelical religion (and particularly Methodism) staved off a French style revolution. Indeed, Catterall’s starting point is the oft-quoted comment of Morgan Phillips, the general secretary of the Labour Party 1944–1961, that socialism in Britain owed more to Methodism than Marx, and that therein lay its distinctiveness from its European anti-clerical cousins. Harold Wilson, a Congregationalist by upbringing, suggested that the allit- eration bred inaccuracy and ‘nonconformity’ would be better, but the point remains. As Catterall makes clear, during the interwar years, various brands of Methodism provided far more Labour mps and activists than the other Free Churches. Catterall uses “four prisms” to gain data about the relationship between the Free Churches and Labour—the attitude of Free Church leaderships to the party, local patterns of commitment and voting behaviour, the person- nel of the Labour movement, and ideas and ideals of both. Undergirding this is research into the denominational allegiance of mps, tuc General Council members, National Executive Committee members and the Labour councillors of Bolton, Liverpool, Bradford, and Norfolk.The mixed nature of the sources for all but mps means that the edges will always be fuzzy, but his instinct is to be inclusive—upbringing and ethos are as determinative as adult commitment. Even after losing his faith Fenner Brockway, the son of Congregational mission- aries, retained a deep reverence for Christian ideals (p. 131). That methodology leads to the suggestion that the Free Church presence in the Labour party, although gently diminishing, “remained substantial” (p. 148) by the end of the interwar years. The key contribution the Free Churches made to the develop- ment of the Labour movement was people, from the Wesleyan local preacher Arthur Henderson who was such a critical shaper of the Party as its General Sec- retary as well some time Foreign Secretary to the Congregationalist Margaret Bondfield, the first woman to serve in the cabinet who found her inspiration in the Old Testament’s attitude to the poor to Peter Lee, the miners’ leader and Primitive Methodist lay preacher who led the dominant Labour group on Durham County Council, and many others. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/18712428-09702014 book reviews 295 They brought with them a chapel culture that was in flux—from the old cer- tainties of evangelical salvation to a collectivist modernism, from a world of social apartheid into a new national acceptance, from single-minded Liberal- ism to a fragmented political allegiance on a spectrum which during the inter- war years included Baldwin’s National Government as well as Labour. So, in Hope Congregational Church in Wigan in the 1920s the congregation included the Liberal mp, the Tory leader of the opposition on the town council, and the first woman Labour councillor in the town. The Free Churches were seeking a new language for new social realities, whether through sacramentalism, with its stress on the common meal and community, or the aftermath of the Edwardian new theology which (Catterall perceptively notes) could be read as an attempt to build a bridge between theology and socialism, or the abandonment of laissez-faire liberalism for the more tentative yet subtle appreciation of politics and economics epitomised by copec1 (on which Catterall is a little hard). Those new social realities—mass unemployment, movement of capital on a new scale, industrial relations, the growth of the state in response to fiscal income—sounded the death knell for the nonconformist conscience, which had been ailing at least since the 1902 Education Act. Its strident attacks on ‘unrighteousness,’ which had purchase in a world of late Victorian laissez-faire individualism and the pursuit of freedom, now cut little ice. As the Congregationalist and Labour mp Somerville Hastings put it, “… civil and religious liberties can never be complete without economic liberty as well” (p. 45). The battles for those great nonconformist causes— immorality, drink, gambling, and the Sabbath—were tired skirmishes by 1939. Free Church Labour mps championed the issues, but the party handled its pol- itics differently—it steered away from ‘causes,’ balancing the needs of all its members from the churches to the ciu (Club and Institute Union) to avoid being captured by any interest group. The voting pattern on the Wales (Tem- perance Bill) of February 1924 showed clearly that whilst the all Free Church Liberal mps voted in favour, their Labour equivalents were sharply divided (p. 157). All that was left of the nonconformist conscience was a “righteousness of tone” (p. 153) which those with ears to hear heard transferred to the political platform. That was part of chapel culture’s broader rhetorical contribution to Labour in the interwar years. The sermon on the mount and Christ’s exhorta- 1 Christian Conference on Politics, Economics, and Citizenship, est. 1924. Church History and Religious Culture 97 (2017) 267–302.
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