The religion of Englishness: Puritanism, Providentialism, and "national character," 1918-1945

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 46, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 884-906

  Grimley, Matthew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 56449088775     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/520264     Document Type: Article

References (182)

1. T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," in Four Quartets (1944; repr., London, 1959), 46
2. For other examples of the use of cathedrals in wartime propaganda, see Paul B. Rich, Prospero's Return: Historical Essays on Race, Culture, and Society (London, 1994), 38-39
3. For a discussion of this photograph, see Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, and Andrew Saint, eds., St. Paul's; The Cathedral Church of London, 604-2004 (London, 2004), 100, 334, 461
4. George Orwell, film review of Eyes of the Navy, The Heart of Britain, and Unholy War (1941), in Orwell's England, ed. Peter Davidson (London, 2001), 248-51
5. Fiona MacCarthy, Stanley Spencer: An English Vision (New Haven, CT, 1997)
6. Archibald G. Macdonell, England, Their England (1931; repr., London, 1983), 206-7
7. See, e.g., Harry Batsford and Charles Fry, The Cathedrals of England (London, 1934)
8. For theoretical approaches to religion and national identity, see Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997)
9. Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford, 2003)
10. William R. Hutchison and Hartmut Lehmann, Many Are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism (Minneapolis, 1994)
11. Conor Cruise O'Brien, God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, MA, 1999)
12. C. A. Bayley, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914 (Oxford, 2004), chap. 9
13. For recent studies of English identity that hardly mention religion, see Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford, 2002)
14. Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003)
15. Marcus Collins, "The Fall of the English Gentleman: The National Character in Decline, c. 1918-1970" Historical Research 75, no. 187 (2002): 90-111
16. See Linda Colley, Britons; Forging a Nation, 1707-1837 (London, 1992)
17. Hugh McLeod, "Protestantism and British National Identity, 1815-1945," in Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. Peter Van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 44-70
18. John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843-1945 (London, 1994)
19. Keith Robbins, History, Religion, and Identity in Modern Britain (London, 1993)
20. Peter Mandler ("Against Englislmess: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850-1940," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., no. 7 [1997]: 155) has argued against using the term "Englishness," rightly pointing out that, as a contemporary usage, it was generally restricted to artistic style. However, in common with most historians, I have used the term more generally in this article
21. A notable exception that does relate national identity to secularization is David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford, 1978)
22. Bernice Martin, "Beyond Measurement: The Non-quantifiable Religious Dimension in Social Life," in Public Faith? The State of Religious Belief and Practice in Britain, ed. Paul Avis (London, 2003), 1-18
23. Galium Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London, 2001), 12
24. Sarah C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c. 1880-1939 (Oxford, 1999), chap. 6
25. Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA, 1994), 3
26. For religion and national ritual, see Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day, 1919-1946 (Oxford, 1994)
27. Wolffe, God and Greater Britain
28. For conventional religion, see Robert Towler, The Need for Certainty: A Sociological Study of Conventional Religion (London, 1984)
29. For civil religion, see Robert Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-traditional World, ed. Robert Bellah (New York, 1970), 168-89
30. Gerald Parsons, Civil Religion in Perspective (Basingstoke, 2002)
31. Andrew Shanks, Civil Society, Civil Religion (Oxford, 2002)
32. Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), 143-44
33. Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870-1930 (Oxford, 1982), 253
34. Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (Oxford, 1998), 278
35. Michael Saler, The Avant-Garde in Inter-war England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (New York, 1999), 20-23
36. Todd M. Endelmail, The Jews of Britain, 1656-2000 (Berkeley, CA, 2002), chap. 5
37. Humayun Ansari, The Infidel Within: Muslims in Britain since 1800 (London, 2004), chaps. 4-5
38. Kester Aspden, Tortress Church: The English Roman Catholic Bishops and Politics, 1903-1963 (Leominster, 2002), 76-102, 162-173
39. G. K. Chesterton, "Thomas More," in The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity from St. Bede to Newman, ed. Maisie Ward (London, 1933), 209-17
40. Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920-1990 (London, 1991), 131-40
41. Julia Stapleton, "The England of G. K. Chesterton," Chesterton Review 32, nos. 3-4 (2006): 339-55
42. Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion (London, 1935)
43. Brideshead Revisited (London, 1945)
44. Men at Arms (London, 1952)
45. Peter Mandler, "The Consciousness of Modernity? Liberalism and the English National Character, 1870-1940," in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War Two, ed. Martin Daunton and Bernhard Reiger (Oxford, 2001), 120
46. and also The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, CT, 2006)
47. Raphael Samuel, "Introduction: Exciting to be English," in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols., ed. Raphael Samuel (London, 1987), l:xxiv-xxv
48. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London, 1991), 8
49. Paul Rich, "A Question of Life and Death to England: Patriotism and the British Intellectuals, c. 1886-1945," New Community 15, no. 4 (1989): 498
50. See, e.g., Stuart P. B. Mais, This Unknown Island (London, 1932)
51. Henry V. Morton, In Search of England (London, 1927)
52. Douglas Goldring, Pot-Luck in England (London, 1936)
53. William Macneile Dixon, The Englishman (London, 1931)
54. MacDonell, England, Their England
55. Ivor Brown, The Heart of England (London, 1935)
56. Denis W. Brogan, The English People (London, 1943)
57. Sir Stephen Tallents, The Projection of England (London, 1932), 15
58. George Santayana, Soliloquies in England (London, 1920)
59. Wilhelm Dibelius, England (Stuttgart, 1922)
60. Odette Keun, I Discover the English (London, 1934)
61. Gustaaf J. Renier, The English: Are They Human? (Leipzig, 1932)
62. Pierre Maillaud, The English Way (Oxford, 1945)
63. Rose Macaulay, Life among the English (London, 1942)
64. Clémence Dane [Winifred Ashton], "Our Bible," in The English Spirit, ed. Anthony Weymouth (London, 1942), 74-79
65. William Ralph Inge, England (London, 1926), 28
66. Ernest Barker, National Character and the Factors in Its Formation (London, 1927), 39
67. Arthur Bryant, The National Character (London, 1934), 6-7
68. For an account that did approvingly cite the Jewish contribution to England's racial diversity, see Henry W. Nevinson, Rough Islanders; or, The Natives of England (London, 1930), 15
69. Barker, National Character, 7
70. Dixon, Englishman, 30-31
71. Inge, England, 76-77
72. Bryant, National Character, 60
73. For Bryant's ideas on national character, see Julia Stapleton, Sir Arthur Bryant and National History in Twentieth-Century Britain (Lanham, MD, 2005)
74. Nevinson, Rough Islanders, 184, 189
75. Brown, Heart of England, 94
76. see also Ernest Barker, "An Attempt at Perspective," in The Character of England, ed. Ernest Barker (Oxford, 1947), 570
77. Stephen Koss, Nonconformity and Modern British Politics (London, 1935), chap. 6
78. Simon J. D. Green, "Survival and Autonomy: On the Strange Fortunes and Peculiar Legacy of Ecclesiastical Establishment in the Modern British State, c. 1920 to the Present Day," in The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain, ed. S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting (Cambridge, 1994), 305-9
79. Philip Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism: A History of Liverpool, 1868-1939 (Liverpool, 1971), chaps. 16-18
80. Galium Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh, 1994), 191-96
81. Stewart J. Brown, "Outside the Covenant: The Scottish Presbyterian Churches and Irish Immigration," and Richard Finlay, "Nationalism, Race, Religion and the Irish Question in Interwar Scotland," Innes Review 42, no. 1 (1991): 19-15, 46-67
82. D. Ambrose Jones, A History of the Church in Wales (Camarthen, 1926)
83. Kenneth O. Morgan, Freedom or Sacrilege? A History of the Campaign for Welsh Disestablishment (Penarth, 1965), 13-14
84. Keith Robbins, "Religion and Identity in Modern Britain," in Religion and National Identity, ed. Stuart Mews, Studies in Church History 18 (Oxford, 1982), 476
85. Jonathan P. Parry, "Nonconformity, Clericalism and 'Englishness': The United Kingdom," in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge, 2003), 152-80
86. For other examples of architectural assertions of national influence by Nonconformists, see Clyde Binfield, "English Free Churchmen and a National Style," in Mews, Religion and National Identity, 519-33
87. Alan Turberfield, John Scott Lidgett: Archbishop of British Methodism (Peterborough, 2003), pts. 5-6
88. John Newton, "Protestant Nonconformists and Ecumenism," in Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century, ed. Alan P. F. Sell and Anthony R. Cross (Carlisle, 2003), 362
89. Matthew Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars (Oxford, 2004), 161-62
90. Philip Snowden, Autobiography, 2 vols. (London, 1934), 1:41-42
91. The Times, 9 April 1924, 19
92. Roger Shuff, Searching for the True Church: Brethren and Evangelicals in Mid-Twentieth Century England (Carlisle, 2005), chaps. 2-3
93. Ian M. Randall, Evangelical Experiences: A Study in the Spirituality of English Evangelicals, 1918-1939 (Carlisle, 1999), chap. 9
94. David Bebbington, "The Oxford Group Movement between the Wars," Voluntary Religion, ed. W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood, Studies in Church History 23 (Oxford, 1986), 495-507
95. For the popularity of the Oxford Group among 1930s Conservative politicians, see Philip Williamson, "Christian Conservatives and the Totalitarian Challenge, 1933-1940,"' English Historical Review 115, no. 462 (2000): 619-23
96. Church of England, Report of the Archbishops' Committee on Church and State (London, 1916), 249
97. Inge, The Church in the World (London, 1927), 23
98. Journal of Bishop Hensley Henson, 20 April 1937, Hensley Henson papers, Dean and Chapter Library, Durham Cathedral. See also David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London, 1992), 35-38
99. Walter C. Sellar and Robert J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London, 1930), 6
100. Stanley Baldwin, speech on "Cornwall," 23 June 1927, in Stanley Baldwin, Our Inheritance (London, 1928), 57
101. Brian Lunn, "Dissent," in The English Genius, ed. Hugh Kingsmill (London, 1938), 193
102. The Times, 18 June 1938, 15
103. Stanley Baldwin, An Interpreter of England (London, 1939), 19-20
104. Dane, "Our Bible," 77
105. For other examples of artists imagining biblical scenes in the English landscape, see Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, 1799-1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford, 2005), 35-45
106. Orwell, "The English People" (1947)
107. and "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" (1941), 208, 273
108. Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London, 1981), 143
109. Dibelius, England, 399
110. Nathaniel Micklem, May God Defend the Right! (London, 1939), 58-59
111. The Times, 9 May 1950, 5
112. John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, 2 vols. (1874; repr., London, 1960), 2:566
113. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869; repr., Cambridge, 1993.)
114. Timothy Lang, The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage (Cambridge, 1995), 226
115. Eliot, "Little Gidding," 46
116. and see also Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London, 1948), chap. 4
117. Raphael Samuel, "The Discovery of Puritanism, 1820-1914: A Preliminary Sketch," in Revival and Religion since 1700: Essays for John Walsh, ed. Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew (London, 1993), 201-47
118. Though women could sometimes be described as Puritan; see, e.g., Dugald Macfadyean, A Modern Puritan (London, 1912)
119. For a wide-ranging discussion of contemporary perceptions of the decline of Puritanism in the interwar period, see Simon J. D. Green, "The Strange Death of Puritan England, 1914-1945," in Yet More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain, ed. Wm. Roger Louis (London, 2005), 185-209
120. Arnold Bennett, Things That Have Interested Me, 3rd ser. (London, 1926), 238-39
121. D. H. Lawrence, "Hymns in a Man's Life" (1928), in The Works of D. H. Lawrence: Later Essays and Articles, ed. James Boulton (Cambridge, 2004), 133-34
122. Queenie D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932; repr., London, 2000), 100, 104, 117
123. Pilgrim Trust, Recording Britain, ed. Arnold Palmer, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1946)
124. see also David Mellor, "Recording Britain: A History and Outline," in Recording Britain: A Pictorial Doomsday of Pre-war Britain, ed. David Mellor, Gill Saunders, and Patrick Wright (London, 1990), 9-34
125. Green, Short History, 2:438
126. T. H. Green, "Four Lectures on the English Revolution," in The Works of T. H. Green, 3 vols., ed. Richard L. Nettleship (London, 1888), 3:289-96
127. Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil War and the Passions of Posterity (London, 2001), 317-18
128. Stanley Baldwin, "The Authentic Note of Democracy," John Clifford Lecture to the Brotherhood Movement, 14 July 1930, in his This Torch of Freedom (London, 1935), 38
129. Philip Williamson, "The Doctrinal Politics of Stanley Baldwin," in Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling, ed. Michael Bentley (Cambridge, 1993), 205-6
130. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926; repr., London, 1990), 269
131. Julia Stapleton, "Political Thought and National Identity, 1850-1950," in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750-1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge, 2000), 245-69
132. Thorne, Congregational Missions, chap. 6
133. See, e.g., Alfred Noyes, "The Sea," in Kingsmill, English Genius, 159-71
134. See, e.g., Nevinson, Rough Islanders, 190
135. Maillaud, English Way, 202-3
136. Reba Soffer, "The Long Nineteenth Century of Conservative Thought," in Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia and Identity in Modern British Culture, ed. George K. Behlmer and Fred M. Leventhal (Stanford, CA, 2000), 149
137. Julia Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics: The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker (Cambridge, 1994), 116-19
138. Stanley Baldwin, lecture to 150th anniversary meeting of Wesley's Chapel, 1 November 1928, in his This Torch of Freedom, 95-97
139. For Baldwin's rhetorical invocation of his joint Anglican and Free Church background, see Philip Williamson, "Doctrinal Politics of Stanley Baldwin," 198-298
140. and Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999), 285-88
141. Baldwin, "Cornwall," 57
142. Ernest Barker, "Élie Halévy," English Historical Review 53, no. 109 (1938): 79-87
143. See also Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics, 96n, 126-27
144. Ernest Barker, Oliver Cromwell and the English People (Cambridge, 1937), 46
145. Barker was later unfairly accused by Hugh Trevor-Roper of praising Hitler in front of a German audience by comparing him to Cromwell, an accusation that he vehemently denied; see Richard Davenport Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (London, 2006), 17
146. Hans Kohn, "The Genesis and Character of English Nationalism," Journal of the History of Ideas 1, no. 2 (1940): 92-94
147. See, e.g., Ernest Barker, Britain and the British People (Oxford, 1942)
148. See, e.g., Alan P. Herbert, England Speaks: A Symposium (New York, 1941), 25
149. See, e.g., Christopher Hill, ed., The English Revolution, 1640: Three Essays (London, 1941)
150. Pene Corfield, '"We are All One in the Eyes of the Lord': Christopher Hill and the Historical Meanings of Radical Religion," History Workshop Journal 58, no. 1 (2004): 110-24
151. Humphrey Jennings to Cecily Jennings, 10 September 1942, in The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, ed. Kevin Jackson (London, 1993), 62
152. John Strachey, A Faith to Fight For (London, 1941), 138-39
153. Miles Taylor, "Patriotism, History and the Left in Twentieth-Century Britain," Historical Journal 33, no. 4 (1990): 971-87
154. Orwell, "The Lion and the Unicorn," in Davidson, Orwell's England, 252, 254
155. J. B. Priestley, Postscripts (London, 1940), 22
156. Vita Sackville-West, "Outdoor Life," in Barker, Character of England, 416-17
157. Richard H. S. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (London, 1950), 12-13
158. Herbert Butterfield, "Christianity and Western Ideas," in Festival of Britain, The Church and the Festival: Souvenir Programme (London, 1951), 10
159. Reha Soffer, "The Conservative Historical Imagination in the Twentieth Century," Albion 28, no. 1 (1996): 2
160. Christopher Parker, The English Historical Tradition since 1850 (Edinburgh, 1990), 107
161. E. M. Delafield [Edmée de la Pasture], preface to Pont [Graham Laidler], The British Character Studied and Revealed (London, 1938), 9
162. David Eccles, Half-Way to Faith (London, 1960), 18-19
163. Henry W. Nevinson, The English (London, 1929), 67-68
164. John E. Neale, Essays in Elizabethan History (London, 1958), 203
165. William Temple, "Christianity and the Empire," The Pilgrim 6, no. 4 (1926): 447-57
166. Stanley Baldwin, Empire Day speech, Hyde Park, 24 May 1929 in his This Torch of Freedom, 26-28
167. For Baldwin's own private and public invocations of providence, see Williamson, Stanley Baldwin, 278-81 and 292-93
168. Arthur Mee, Nineteen Forty: Our Finest Hour (London, 1941), preface and 79
169. See also Gavin White, "The Fall of France," in The Church and War, ed. W. Sheils, Studies in Church History 12 (Oxford, 1983), 431-42
170. and Keith Robbins, "Britain, 1940 and 'Christian Civilization,'" in History, Society and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick, ed. Derek Beales and Geoffrey F. A. Best (Cambridge 1985), 279-99
171. Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and His History (Cambridge, 1944), 11
172. Paul Addison, "The Religion of Winston Churchill," in Bentley, Public and Private Doctrine, 249
173. See also John Ramsden, "Providence and St. Paul's," The Tablet, 29 January 2005, 4-5
174. Edward Carpenter, Cantuar: The Archbishops in Their Office (London, 1971), 489
175. Geoffrey Fisher, "Church and Nation," in The Church and the Nation, ed. Charles Smyth (London, 1962), 14
176. Isaac Foot, Liberty and the Liberal Heritage (London, 1948), 21
177. The Times, 7 July 1947, 8
178. Philip Williamson, "National Days of Prayer: The Churches, the State and Public Worship in Britain, 1899-1956" (unpublished manuscript, Durham University). I am grateful to Williamson for permission to cite this article
179. Chris Waters, "'Dark Strangers' in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947-1963," Journal of British Studies 36, no. 2 (1997): 207-38
180. Julia Stapleton, "Citizenship versus Patriotism in Twentieth-Century Britain," Historical Journal 48, no. 1 (2005): 174-75
181. The Times, 29 October 1960, 10
182. Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 9