Truth and Hypocrisy in Victorian England

The Lord Christ Vs Bentham and Darwin

There are few things more distasteful than the pseudo-Christianity which predominated amongst the Victorian elites.  Many practised the appearance of faith, whilst privately despising it.  This was not always the case: the Great Awakening took hold amongst the gentry and elites and many were truly converted.  They devoted themselves to working for the poor and the downtrodden.  

Anthony Ashley-Cooper was the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury.  He remains a wonderful exemplar of an aristocrat committed to Christ.  He spent his adult life seeking to bring the Christian faith to the most needy.  He was a staunch campaigner against slavery.  He started an organization called Ragged Schools.  According to historian, A.N. Wilson

Ashley's entire motive for establishing Ragged Schools, rescuing women and children from their servitude in mines and factories, was based on the premise that God Himself had chosen to come to Earth as a poor person of no reputation, thereby not merely redeeming the human race from sin, but teaching it that every child born into the world is made in God's image and likeness, every child has dignity and worth, and rights.  Remove the truth of Christianity and, for a Christian of Ashley's generation, you have destroyed the very reason for believing in virtue itself.  The Benthamite jungle has triumphed.  [A. N. Wilson, The Victorians (London: Arrow/Random House, 2002),    p.167f]

But so many of the English aristocracy regarded themselves as "smarter than the average bear."  Unbelief was the preserve of sophisticated, educated, and superior people.

Victorian Clergy

The Perfect Occupation, or Not

Historian A. N. Wilson tells us what his dream job would have been, had he lived in the Victorian period.  Wilson is an historian of Marxist stripe.  He is not a Believer.  Nevertheless he writes:

It is difficult to conceive of any more agreeable way of life than that of the Victorian country parson.  If I had to choose my ideal span of life, I should choose to have been born in the 1830's, the son of a parson with the genetic inheritance of strong teeth. (Improvements in dentistry are surely among the few unambiguous benefits brought to the human race by the twentieth century.)

I should avoid a public school education through being 'delicate', and arrive at Balliol with a good knowledge of Greek to be taught by Benjamin Jowett. . . . After a short spell-say, five years-teaching undergraduates at the Varsity, one of them would introduce me to his pretty, bookish sister, and we should be married.  I should resign my fellowship and be presented with a college living, preferably a medieval church, a large draughty Georgian rectory and glebe enough to provide the family with 'subsistence'.  By now it would be, let us say, the 1860's, and I should remain here for the next forty years, a faithful friend to generations of villagers to whom I would act as teacher, amateur doctor and social worker, as well as priest.

Letter from the UK

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton - review

A banal and impudent argument for the uses of religion

Terry Eagleton
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 12 January 2012 10.00 GMT

The novels of Graham Greene are full of reluctant Christians, men and women who would like to be rid of God but find themselves stuck with him like some lethal addiction. There are, however, reluctant atheists as well, people who long to dunk themselves in the baptismal font but can't quite bring themselves to believe. . . .


Such reluctant non-belief goes back a long way. Machiavelli thought religious ideas, however vacuous, were a useful way of terrorising the mob. Voltaire rejected the God of Christianity, but was anxious not to infect his servants with his own scepticism. Atheism was fine for the elite, but might breed dissent among the masses. . . .  There was one God for the rich and another for the poor. Edward Gibbon, one of the most notorious sceptics of all time, held that the religious doctrines he despised could still be socially useful. So does the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas today.

Diderot, a doyen of the French Enlightenment, wrote that the Christian gospel might have been a less gloomy affair if Jesus had fondled the breasts of the bridesmaids at Cana and caressed the buttocks of St John.