Welsh Journals

SOME WORKING-CLASS ATTITUDES TOWARDS ORGANIZED RELIGION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY WALES W. R. LAMBERT Delegacy of Local Examinations, Oxford The religious historiography of nineteenth-century Britain has hitherto concerned itself primarily with exchanges of letters between church leaders, with denominational histories, and with analysing the attitudes of religious leaders to problems of poverty. Too rarely is religion studied in action at the community level; too rarely is the religious organization seen as a small 'society' with internal strains and recurring organizational problems. Sectarianism, schism, revivalism and secul- arism preoccupy sociologists of religion but are only beginning to interest historians of religious institutions in nineteenth-century Britain. As Dr. Pelling has noticed, it is particularly disappointing how little we yet know about the relationship between organized religion and the nineteenth-century working class. The difficulty has been that historians both of church and of chapel have concentrated on the story of the foundation and early growth of their respective denominational institutions, and on explaining their subsequent development, from the point of view of the loyal believer. Doctrinal changes and disagreements are usually well treated, but comparatively little attention has been paid to the compo- sition of the lay membership and its occupational and class characteristics, the degree and intensity of its religious commitment, and its numerical relationship to the total population of the country. Wearmouth's work on Methodism and the British working class consists largely in listing those trade union leaders who received a Methodist upbringing, without making any systematic attempt to distin- guish the reasons for the extent and limits of Methodist influence, or the local and occupational pattern of the various sects concerned. More recently, however, more valuable attempts have been made to emphasise the importance of working- class religious commitment in Britain in the nineteenth century, notably by Inglis, Currie, Pelling, Kent, Mole, Thomis and Soloway in England, and by E. T. Davies and Professor Ieuan Jones for Wales. 2 It is a commonplace of course that in its religious adherence nineteenth-century Wales was predominantly nonconformist with, broadly speaking, Calvinistic Meth- odism holding sway in north Wales and Independency and the Baptists predomin- ating in south Wales. The strength of nonconformity was revealed statistically in 1851: two in every three of the people who had attended religious services on census Sunday were nonconformists; over half of the population of Wales attended a place of worship compared with only a third in England. 4 Of the working population which attended, 22 per cent are said to have attended the services of the Established Church and 78 per cent are said to have attended nonconformist chapels. By 1866 it was claimed with justice that 'in Wales, nonconformity is speaking broadly the national creed and the national practice'. However, the disabilities of nonconformity disqualified many people from becoming effective members of the social order long after the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Little wonder that a Merthyr nonconformist could write in 1885 that 'the history of Nonconformity is that of one long continuous fight of right