Rethinking Secular Time in Victorian England

Front matter

Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700-2000

Series Editor David Nash Department of History Oxford Brookes University Oxford, UK

This series reflects the awakened and expanding profile of the history of religion within the academy in recent years. It intends publishing exciting new and high quality work on the history of religion and belief since 1700 and will encourage the production of interdisciplinary proposals and the use of innovative methodologies. The series will also welcome book proposals on the history of Atheism, Secularism, Humanism and unbelief/ secularity and to encourage research agendas in this area alongside those in religious belief. The series will be happy to reflect the work of new scholars entering the field as well as the work of established scholars. The series welcomes proposals covering subjects in Britain, Europe, the United States and Oceania.

Contents

Temporalities

Challenging Secularization

First Challenge: The Material Turn Second Challenge: The Temporal Turn Confusing Times

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Secularities, Technologies, and Modern Temporalities

In 1904, Edward Cowell patented and published a pocket-size fold-out chart of ‘all the important cities of the world’, and suggested it would be particularly valuable to travellers, news editors, and bankers. On its centre page, 160 cities appeared as dots within a grid of vertical lines indicating global time zones. Readers could slip a loose ruler-like paper strip showing 24 hours into holes on either side of the page to be slid across the chart, enabling them to find the time in any of the cities, provided they knew the time in their own location. Cowell instructed his readers to

[set] the time (on the time strip) to your own local time (not Standard Time but to you own meridian). The correct time will then appear in all other cities. This chart also shows the DAY and DATE around the world; that is, it shows at a single glance what portion of the world is occupied by TOMORROW or YESTERDAY (that is, the day succeeding or preceding).!

The cities were marked in an empty white space, their relative location determined solely by calculation of longitude and latitude, abstracted from actual topological variations. The little device represented the world as a blank surface on which travellers, news, and money could be imagined

1 Edward Cowell, Time Chart of the World: Instant Time in 160 Important Cities (London and Liverpool: George Philip & Son, Ltd in London; Philip, Son & Nephew in Liverpool, 1904).

© The Author(s) 2022 1 S. Fisher-Hoyrem, Rethinking Secular Time in Victorian England,

Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700-2000, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09285-5_1 as circulating without friction so that their temporal location could be determined and predicted ‘at a single glance’, as the author put it (Image 1.1).

This was not all Cowell’s idea, of course. Something along these lines had been envisioned by the Canadian delegate to the International Geographical Congress in Venice in 1881, Sanford Fleming, who argued for adopting a ‘system of cosmopolitan time-reckoning’, which he thought

=i When NOON is at Lt WEST LONGITUDE z one Day and Date prevails c

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»»>————->- Direction of rotation. THE DAY (for the Earth) starts at the 180th,

Image 1.1 Edward Cowell, Time Chart of the World: Instant Time in 160 Important Cities (London and Liverpool: George Philip & Son, Ltd in London; Philip, Son & Nephew in Liverpool, 1904). Bodleian Library, 22013 e. 6, whole chart

INDON iver the World. |E EAST LONGITUDE

Meridian and travels West. Direction of the SUN'S Path. <—————#«

Image 1.1 (continued)

would enable ‘absolute certainty about time’.? And Fleming’s proposal was only one of several expressions during the latter half of the nineteenth century of a growing European and North American concern with temporal coordination and standardization. Expanding networks of suboceanic telegraph cables forced attention to the notion of global simultaneity, as testified by the many international conventions debating the possible

?Sandford Fleming, The Adoption of a Prime Meridian to Be Common to All Nations. The Establishment of Standard Meridians for the Regulation of Time. (London: Waterlow & Sons Limited, 1881).

location of a common time meridian. To the Victorians, partly motivated by national pride (Britain was responsible for most of the 90,000 miles of submarine cables laid by 1880), the ‘annihilation of space and time’ effected by the expanding technological networks seemed for the first time to make conceivable in practical terms the century-old idea of a British global federacy.* Commenting on the successful telegraphic connection between England and America, and pre-echoing the late-twentieth-century idea of a ‘global village’, the Times declared that ‘the world [was] fast becoming a vast city’.* In 1884, the International Meridian Conference decided on the Greenwich Meridian as ‘official’, and during the early 1900s nations increasingly adopted the new standard time on domestic levels. The temporal standardization that made possible Cowell’s little time chart would become one of the great Victorian achievements.

But Cowell’s chart does more than exemplify a general fin-de-stecle concern with time and standardization. It makes explicit a fundamental idea that underpins the argument of this book, namely that there is a necessary conceptual connection between a particular kind of mobile entities such as travellers, news, and money, and the conception of time that makes it conceivable to predict their movement. The chart presents the entities as moving between spatial locations yet measures their flight not in spatial but in temporal terms. If the entities were to deteriorate or be interrupted along route, such temporal measurement would be impossible. On the one side of the conceptual coin, then, there are entities able to move without deterioration, and on the other, a time that is independent of their movement. Conceptually speaking, these two belong together.

This is the basic premise for what I am trying to do in this book. In the chapters that follow, I will describe three Victorian technological networks whose operation centred on moving specific entities in ways that made them impervious to change, and which therefore, I will argue, carried a particular concept of time. The Victorian railway network sought to move travellers without causing them psychological or physical harm. The networks related to daily news production and distribution moved information in the form of ‘news’ through long chains of translation without interruption. Networks connecting local banks to the Bank of England circulated paper notes meticulously made to embody the immutability of

3Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 630-91. 4*The Success of the Transatlantic Cable Etc’, The Times, 30 July 1866, 8.

the abstract gold standard on which depended both the notes’ value and the state of the national economy. These networks functioned as intended if they were able to mobilize human skills and technologies to impart to the entities the joint properties of immutability and mobility, and maintain these properties throughout the entities’ passage. If this operation was successful, the entities’ movement could be traced and predicted using (for instance) time charts such as Cowell’s. And because entities moving without change have a conceptual connection to a time independent of their movement, we can say that to the degree these networked operations were successful, the networks mediated this kind of time.

Mediated is a key word here. It is not so much that Victorians explicitly discussed or believed propositions about the nature of time (though, of course, discussions of this topic are not exactly difficult to find in the sources). It is rather that the networks included collective practices and behaviours that only made sense on certain unspoken conditions. We could think of it as conditions of possibility, or ideas implicitly underpinning certain practices. Cowell’s chart was part of an extensive network which functioned on the condition that time was in a certain way—uniform and abstract, everywhere the same. The chart also served to install and maintain this particular time conception in the minds and embodied habits of people using it. In this way, the networks described in this book carried unarticulated ideas that gradually came to be taken for granted. This taken-for-granted-ness required active construction and maintenance. Travelling by train, engaging with current events through newspapers, or using cash—these were practices whose apparent simplicity belied the extent of work needed to make them appear so obvious and natural. In other words, the book is concerned with a level at once more material and more ‘subconscious’ than is perhaps common in most history books. What is at stake is not conscious ideas or experiences, but unarticulated assumptions and concepts embedded in material networks and their associated practices, together with the extensive work needed to achieve this embedding.

CHALLENGING SECULARIZATION

Analysing and describing how certain networks of technologies and practices mediated this kind of time, the book aims to offer a new approach to the history of secularization. As a pragmatic point of departure, I have chosen the revised secularization narrative presented in philosopher

Charles Taylor’s 2007 book A Secular Age—or at least some of its core tenets."

Drawing on the work of Marcel Gauchet and Benedict Anderson, Taylor offers an analysis of modernization and secularization in terms of underlying assumptions about the nature of time.° In A Secular Age, as in his earlier works Sources of the Self (1989) and Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), Taylor digs below notions of articulated ideas and seeks to excavate the very basic sense in which people imagine and perform their everyday ‘life-worlds’.” He is interested in the ‘pre-theoretical’ assumptions that are always-already implicit in the embodied and habitual practices of human collectives.’ Though the 800-page book is about secularization, Taylor is less interested in belief or unbelief per se than their ‘shared conditions’ in modernity, that is, how belief and unbelief both take on new meanings on a common and constantly changing background. As he puts it, because ‘all beliefs are held within a context or framework of the taken-for-granted, which usually remains tacit, and may even be as yet unacknowledged by the agent, because never formulated’, and because this tacit background changes over time, ‘belief in God isn’t quite the same thing in 1500 and 2000’.? For Taylor, then, to speak of modern secularity is to speak of ‘the new conditions in which belief and unbelief uneasily coexist, and often struggle with each other in contemporary society’.!°

Taylor’s secularization thesis is sophisticated and comprehensive, and has been celebrated, discussed, and critiqued in several fora. For the purposes of this book, two specific elements of it are of particular importance, both of which historians of secularization have largely neglected—even those who have to some extent engaged Taylor’s work: firstly, his mentioned attention to the level of unarticulated assumptions implicit in

>Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA.; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007).

®Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1983).

7Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (London: Duke University Press, 2004).

è Ruth Abbey, Charles Taylor (Tedington: Acumen, 2000), 178-93.

° Abbey, 13.

collective embodied practices; and secondly, his explicit association of secularity with a specific kind of time embedded on this level. In combination, these two core tenets of his thesis offer to the historiography of British secularization a subtle challenge whose potential radicality historians in the field have yet to fully appreciate.

Historians of British secularization have typically focused their analyses on the level of beliefs, discourses, and identity formation, and assumed that the category of secularity is conceptually and necessarily tethered to ‘religion’. Whether construing secularization as a decline in conscious affirmation of Christian doctrine due to the impact of the natural sciences, historical criticism, or the erosion of any transcendent ground of morality,'! or deploying case studies to counter such sweeping claims of an ‘unsettlement of faith’,'? historians’ focus has generally remained on religious/ nonreligious beliefs and their cultural or social dissemination and influence. Intellectual historians have shown that religious ideas continued to have a strong influence throughout the nineteenth century, not only in the morally charged Victorian domestic sphere but also in political and economic thought.'* Alongside the emergence of self-consciously ‘secular’ outlooks such as utilitarianism and ‘secularism’ (a term coined by George

1 Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, The Gifford Lectures in the University of Edinburgh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

2 Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City, ed. J.F.C. Harrison and Stephen Yeo, Croom Helm Social History Series (London: Croom Helm, 1974); Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Mark Smith, Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth, 1740-1865, ed. Sir John Elliott et al., Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); David Nash, ‘Reconnecting Religion with Cultural and Social History: Secularization’s Failure as a Master Narrative’, Cultural and Social History 1, no. 3 (2004): 302-25; David Nash, ‘Reassessing the “Crisis of Faith” in the Victorian Age: Eclecticism and the Spirit of Moral Inquiry’, Journal of Victorian Culture 16, no. 1 (2011): 65-82.

Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1795-1865, New ed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Frank M. Turner, ‘The Religious and Secular in Victorian Britain’, in Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3-37; Frank Prochaska, Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain: The Disinherited Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Recently, historian Dominic Erdozain has sought to restate the centrality of doctrinal discussions in histories of secularization. Dominic Erdozain, The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx, | edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Jacob Holyoake in the 1850s),!* others have pointed to religious revivals and intense pastoral-promotional work across the spectrum of Christian denominations, not least the great profusion of domestic missions in cities like London and Manchester.!* While there certainly occurred something one could call a Victorian ‘crisis of faith’, where some widely publicized authors dismissed the particular Christian traditions in which they had grown up, the period equally saw a high number of (re)conversions to various religious orthodoxies among the same generation.'®

Around the turn of the millennium, inspired by the 1990s’ historiographical debates over ‘postmodernism’, some historians shifted to a register of ‘discourses’ providing a repertoire of moral and gendered norms and narratives from which people receive and construct their identities. "7 Prominent among these approaches was that of Callum Brown, whose 2001 book The Death of Christian Britain’? claims the latter was only fully secularized as late as the 1960s, when the force of certain narrative

14 George Jacob Holyoake, The Trial of Theism (London: F. Farrah, 1858); For accounts of British secularism, see David Nash, Secularism, Art and Freedom, New edition (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 1994); Michael Rectenwald, Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016).

15 Prochaska, Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain; Douglas A. Reid, ‘Playing and Praying’, in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: 1840-1950, ed. Martin J. Daunton and Peter Clark, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 745-810; David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s, New edition (London: Routledge, 1988); David Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England, Croom Helm Social History Series (London: Croom Helm, 1979); Kathleen Heasman, Evangelicals in Action: An Appraisal of Their Social Work in the Victorian Era (London: Geoffrey Bles Ltd, 1962).

16 Timothy Larsen, Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Nash, ‘Reassessing the “Crisis of Faith” in the Victorian Age: Eclecticism and the Spirit of Moral Inquiry’.

17 Sarah Williams’ 1999 study of the poorer working classes in Southwark argued that ‘religiosity’ is more a question of inner identity formation than external participation in church services, while Simon J.D. Green emphasized how that same term ‘religiosity’ (or non-) might denote a property belonging to specific modes of social organization. Simon J.D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); S.C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800-2000, ed. Hugh McLeod, Christianity and Society in the Modern World (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).

structures characteristic of Christian Evangelicalism (which until then had dominated popular discourse) went into abrupt and rapid decline. I shall not repeat his entire argument here, only note that for all his interest in religion’s collective and ‘discursive’ forms, Brown remains committed to an understanding of religion as primarily to do with belief. What makes religion such a difficult phenomenon to study, he writes, is that it ‘is founded upon faith—on belief—that is, by its very definition, without proof of its validity’. It is therefore only ‘the social and cultural significance of religion that we study’.'®

In the wake of the emerging social scientific field of nonreligion and secularity studies in the 2010s,” Brown and other historians have increasingly returned to statistics, surveys, and interviews in order to account for the multiple varieties of atheistic, agnostic, free-thinking, sceptical, or otherwise nonreligious identities that have existed throughout history despite the image often perpetuated of ‘enchanted’ premodern pasts.?! The hope is to restore a sense of historical agency and identity to groups who have more often than not been ignored or neglected by mainstream historical accounts largely focused on religion and its complex development. ”?

Typically, the implicit understanding of ‘religion’ in these historiographies has been as a kind of universal and primordial human instinct (of which Christianity is sometimes assumed to be at once merely one expression among many and a prototype) whose essence nonetheless remains elusive to the rational scientist.” Hence, people can leave ‘religion’ yet

Callum G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. Keith Robbins, Religion, Politics and Society in Britain (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2006), 8-9.

0 Jesse M. Smith and Ryan T. Cragun, ‘Mapping Religion’s Other: A Review of the Study of Nonreligion and Secularity’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 58, no. 2 (2019): 319-35, https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12597.

2 David S. Nash, ‘Believing in Secularisation—Stories of Decline, Potential, and Resurgence’, Journal of Religious History 41, no. 4 (2017): 505-31, https://doi. org/10.1111/1467-9809.12449; Callum G. Brown, Becoming Atheist: Humanism and the Secular West (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017); Clive D. Field, Secularization in the Long 1960s: Numerating Religion in Britain (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

22 David Nash, ‘Secularist History: Past Perspectives and Future Prospects’, Secularism and Nonreligion 8, no. 0 (23 January 2019): 1, https://doi.org/10.5334/snr.113.

23 Catherine Bell, ‘Paradigms Behind (and Before) the Modern Concept of Religion’, History and Theory 45, no. 4 (2006): 27-46.

still be ‘religious’, for instance. A few examples must suffice here. Historian Mark Smith discusses popular belief in witches and use of charms as expressions of ‘another religious world [than Christianity]’, which he calls ‘popular superstition’ and ‘traditional religion’.** Similarly, Simon Green states that after the mid-nineteenth century the British people ‘retained their religion [...] but their religion ceased to be meaningfully Christian’.2° Callum Brown discusses the appearance of what he considers ‘quasi-religions’ in twentieth-century Britain,” but what makes them merely ‘quasi’ is apparently their general lack of what (at least in this part of the world) has been considered traditional Christian features such as a set of creedal propositions or institutionalized forms of worship. Despite a certain widening of the concept of ‘religion’ and moving it to a level of discourse or identity formation, current histories of secularization have maintained this rather vague understanding of what ‘religion’ really means.

Throughout these shifts, historians of British secularization have tended to cast the secular as the negation of religion—whether they conceive the latter in terms of beliefs, discourses, or identities. Unfortunately this ignores discussions that have been going on for decades in the neighbouring halls of Religious Studies, where scholars have long been questioning whether such a distinction between religion and its ‘other’ can be meaningfully made. As anthropologist Talal Asad and many others have demonstrated, ‘there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.” Others have argued that to assume religion has an autonomous essence distinguishable from science, politics, or rationality is to presuppose the division in contemporary liberal societies between ‘faith’ and

4Smith, Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth, 1740-1865, 263.

Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870-1920, 389.

% Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, 24.

27 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 24.

1 INTRODUCTION: SECULARITIES, TECHNOLOGIES, AND MODERN... ll

‘politics’, a division representing a distinctly Western and modern paradigm with a murky colonial legacy.’

Most historians of British secularization carry on as if these discussions never occurred. Dominic Erdozain—despite having written critically about the multiple definitions of ‘religion’ circulating in the historiography—emphasizes theological and doctrinal commitments and the ‘core beliefs’ that, for him, define the essence of what it means to be ‘religious’.”° ‘Secularization’, he asserts, denotes ‘the moment when [religion] called on no resource beyond its own earthbound velocity [...] a shift [that] occurred within religious organizations, rather than outside them’. For Callum Brown, when ‘a formerly religious people’ makes a ‘sudden plunge into a truly secular condition’, it simply means they no longer perform religion in amy of its forms.*' Of course, some have contested the suddenness of this assumedly modern plunge, but for the present purposes the important point is that secularity still tends to denote a negative absence while the term ‘religion’ does most of the conceptual work.** Secularity is only available as something occurring either within ‘religion’ (most often implicitly understood as Christianity in some form) or in opposition to a

?8See Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Derek R. Peterson and Darren R. Walhof, eds., The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Timothy Fitzgerald, ed., Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations (London and Oakville CT: Equinox, 2007); Daniel Dubuisson, The Invention of Religions (Bristol: Equinox Publishing, 2019).

2 Erdozain himself has critiques the multiple definitions of ‘religion’ circulating in the historiography. See Dominic Erdozain, ‘““Cause Is Not Quite What It Used to Be”: The Return of Secularization’, English Historical Review 127, no. 525 (2012): 377-400.

3° Dominic Erdozain, ‘The Secularisation of Sin in the Nineteenth Century’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 62, no. 1 (January 2011): 59-88.

31 Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800-2000, 1.

32 With this understanding of what constitutes ‘religion’, it is perhaps no surprise that The Strange Death of Christian Britain tends to equate religion as such with Evangelical Christianity, ignoring the presence of any Roman Catholics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, except for passing remarks that they were very similar to Evangelicals. See Jeremy Morris, “The Strange Death of Christian Britain: Another Look at the Secularisation Debate’, The Historical Journal 46, no. 4 (2003): 963-76.

generic and ill-defined ‘religiosity’. Very rarely is secularity admitted any independent conceptual footing.

This tendency is evident in the field as a whole to this day, even as some historians seek to challenge it with ‘postsecular’ conceptual frameworks.*? As Jeremy Morris has pointed out, the field remains characterized by a separation between the specifically ‘religious’ and the specifically ‘nonreligious’, in structural as well as theoretical terms: histories of the social aspects of religion are written with little regard for a/theological issues as such, while ecclesiastical or denominational histories are written within scholarly conclaves made up of sympathizers**—a pattern I want to suggest is currently repeating itself in the emerging historiography of various ‘secularisms’.

To illustrate: in 2006, a year before Taylor published A Secular Age, a group of scholars employed his diagnosis of the late twentieth century as an ‘age of authenticity’ in a book titled Redefining Christian Britain—an obvious reference to Brown’s declared death of the same.” Arguing that ‘traditional’ church practices had not so much been rejected as consciously reconfigured to meet the modern criteria of ‘authentic’ performance, they provided a series of case studies highlighting how even after the 1960s religious belief has remained ‘a critical part of British identity’.*° More recently, Sam Brewitt-Taylor has argued that the moral parameters of the assumed secular revolution of the ’Sixties’ in Britain were initially articulated by Christian radical clergymen.*” From this perspective, it is as if the secularity associated with the 1960s’ radicalism and plurality of worldviews had been provided by Christianity all along and that all critique had always really been integral to the Christian tradition itself. On the other hand, historians less inclined to celebrate the flexibility of religious doctrines have sought to take Taylor and his interlocutors to task for their not always

33 Sam Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism in the Church of England and the Invention of the British Sixties, 1957-1970: The Hope of a World Transformed, Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

34 Morris, ‘The Strange Death of Christian Britain: Another Look at the Secularisation Debate’.

35 Jane Garnett et al., eds., Redefining Christian Britain: Post 1945 Perspectives (London: SCM Press, 2006), 12, 21-34; Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1992).

36 Garnett et al., Redefining Christian Britain, 6.

37 Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism in the Church of England and the Invention of the British Sixties, 1957-1970.

very subtle religious apologetics, arguing with Brown that ‘[t]he constant calibration from religion, usually Christianity, and, as in Taylor’s case, Catholicism, warps the possibility of envisioning secularity in anything like its potentials’.** Brown goes so far as to suggest that only historians who themselves identify as atheist could ever hope to get right the actual histories of atheistic and secular identities.*? In his 2016 book Nineteenth- Century British Secularism, in a strange reversal of the religious apologetic approach described above, Michael Rectenwald referred to Taylor’s notion of a shared ‘background’ on which belief and unbelief coexist, arguing that this background—which for Taylor and his sympathizers has its roots in Christian theology and pietistic practice—was on the contrary first articulated as a conceptual possibility by none other than nineteenth-century self-identifying ‘secularists’ .*°

First CHALLENGE: THE MATERIAL TURN

The structural and conceptual dichotomy between religion and secularity and the related concern with changes in people’s (non- )beliefs constitute two intertwined threads running through the entire historiography of British secularization. The central elements of Taylor’s thesis challenge both tendencies. First, as we have already mentioned, Taylor’ is concerned with a ‘deeper’ level than beliefs or identity markers. His analysis bypasses the question of belief versus unbelief because it addresses assumptions that remain unarticulated and implicit in embodied practices shared by large collectives. Even if the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of articulated ‘-isms’ and worldview identities, these nonetheless emerged and operated on a common background of shared, unspoken conditions. The question is not what people were able to express about themselves or others, or what identity markers were available to them in dominant discourses. At stake is not thoughts or words, but actions and things, not identities or narratives, but implicit conditions for practice and the technologies that mediate these conditions.

38 Callum G. Brown, ‘The Necessity of Atheism: Making Sense of Secularisation’, Journal of Religious History41, no. 4 (2017): 439-56, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9809.12448.

? Brown.

40Rectenwald, Nineteenth-Century British Secularism; See also Michael Rectenwald, ‘Mid- Nineteenth-Century British Secularism and Its Contemporary Post-Secular Implications’, in Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age, ed. Rochelle Almeida, George Levine, and Michael Rectenwald (Boston: De Gruyter, 2015), 43-64.

A key concept for Taylor here is what he calls social imaginaries,"! which he describes as a wide array of ways in which [people] imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go [and ought to go] on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations.”