Towards Indifference

Abstract

Perhaps the most famous comment on nineteenth-century working-class religion was that made by Horace Mann in his report on the religious census of 1851 in England and Wales [clviii]. Noting that ‘a sadly formidable proportion of the English people are habitual neglecters of the public ordinances of religion’, he took it as obvious that most of the absentees were drawn from the working class. After stating that ‘in cities and large towns, it is observable how absolutely insignificant a portion of the congregations is composed of artisans’, he went on to discuss the reasons for this conspicuous absence from public worship:

There is a sect, originated recently, adherents to a system called ‘Secularism’ …. This is the creed which probably with most exactness indicates the faith which, virtually, though not professedly, is entertained by the masses of our working population; by the skilled and unskilled labourer alike — by hosts of minor shopkeepers and Sunday traders — and by miserable denizens of courts and crowded alleys. They are unconscious Secularists — engrossed by the demands, the trials, or the pleasures of the passing hour, and ignorant or careless of the future. These are never, or but seldom seen in our religious congregations; and the melancholy fact is thus impressed upon our notice that the classes which are most in need of the restraints and consolations of religion are the classes which are most without them.