Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c. 1880-1939

Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c. 1880-1939. By S. C. Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. xi + 206 pp. $70.00 (cloth).

This short book (the actual text is just 176 pages) represents a significant advance in our understanding of popular religion in modern urban Britain. Hitherto, with the honourable exception of Hugh McLeod, church historians have been so concerned with the vicissitudes of the institutional churches that they have ignored or misconstrued the wealth of evidence available to them about the attitudes and beliefs of those of the labouring classes who did not attend church. The sheer concentration of arguments about church advance and church decline in the modern period on the evidence presented by statistics of churchgoing has naturally reinforced the institutional bias of most practitioners of church history. Even when historians did not take at face value the anxieties of Victorian church men and women about the "heathenism" of the great cities of Britain, nevertheless their attention was drawn to the countervailing evidence of working-class church attendance.

Sarah Williams's book at one level has little to say directly about the conventional shape of modern British religious history, since it simply bypasses these controversies about churchgoing. From the beginning, she is clear that her study is not of the Church as such, but of the people of South London and their expression of their religious ideas (p. v). She is sharply critical of modern church historians for their presumption that the history of Christianity is chiefly-or even entirely-the history of the mainstream churches. Her evidence is drawn partly from written sources, both published and unpublished, and partly from oral testimony, which she mines with immense creativity and subtlety. Her conclusion is that working-class culture in South London in this period was remarkably religious, contrary to the assumptions of social historians and church historians alike. However, the shape and character of popular religious belief were often in strong contrast to the official religion of the churches, their ministers and their most active laity. Using the concept of "inward spiritual graces," drawn from one of her sources, and influenced by the theory of symbolic interactionism developed by sociologists such as Herbert Blumer, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, her reconstruction of the interior religiosity of the urban working class is a tour de force of historical interpretation.

This reconstruction is not one-dimensional. She identifies a number of central strands in popular belief, which interweaved through popular ethics and metaphysics in complex ways. Thus, for example, in the chapter "Occasional and Conditional Conformity," she demonstrates the way in which clergy often continued to possess in popular eyes something of a sacral quality, just as particular churches also came to be seen, or owned, by neighbourhoods, as "our church," a place in which "to meet with God" (p. 97). And yet, in another chapter, she contrasts the ideal of the "true believer," accepted by many working people and possibly appropriated from official views, with the criticisms often made of the behaviour and attitudes of churchgoers: true believers did not necessarily go to church.

If Williams's reconstruction of popular religious belief appears to leave the controversies about trends in churchgoing untouched, in another sense clearly church historians are going to find her conclusions extremely uncomfortable. If she is correct in her description of the richness of the interior religious world of the urban working class-and that is a big "if," given the philosophical difficulties of reconstructing the interior mental world of people no longer alive-then the problem of non-attendance is actually thrown into even sharper relief. Just why, one might ask, did it prove so problematic for churches to find so few points of contact with working-class belief? Why did their product not appeal on its own terms? Why did they not see through their failure to recognize genuine belief when they encountered it? After all, the nineteenth century was littered with earnest attempts to evangelize the rapidly-growing cities of Britain-one might cite in passing the Salvation Army, mission churches and chapels, the Church Army, educational initiatives, the unquestioned popularity of the Sunday Schools, open-air preaching, and so on. Furthermore, there is a puzzling aspect to the chronology Williams sketches out here. She claims that the evidence for popular belief suggests a lessening of hostility to the Church in South London towards the end of the nineteenth century (hence the rise of the notion of "our church," and so on), and yet this is precisely the period in which there is a general consensus amongst historians that church attendance, if not declining absolutely, was nevertheless declining relative to population growth, before entering absolute decline early in the twentieth century. Thus, it would appear that the diffusive, popular religion Williams has outlined not only was not a background for any increase in church attendance, but if anything was a basis for its decline. If that is so, it is a remarkable phenomenon which itself calls for explanation.