The “Great Church Crisis,” Public Life, and National Identity in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain

Abstract

This dissertation explores the social, cultural, and political effects of the “Great Church Crisis,” a conflict between the Protestant and Anglo-Catholic (or Ritualist) parties within the Church of England occurring between 1898 and 1906. Through a series of case studies, including an examination of the role of religious controversy in fin-de-siècle Parliamentary politics, it shows that religious belief and practice were more important in turn-of-the-century Britain than has been appreciated. The argument that the onset of secularization in Britain as defined by both a decline in religious attendance and personal belief can be pushed back until at least the 1920s or 1930s is not new. Yet, the insight that religious belief and practice remained a constituent part of late-Victorian and Edwardian national identity and public life has thus far failed to penetrate political, social, and cultural histories of the period. This dissertation uses the Great Church Crisis to explore the interaction between religious belief and political and social behavior, not with the intent of reducing religion to an expression of political and social stimuli, but with the goal of illuminating the ways politics, culture, and social thought functioned as bearers of religious concerns. The intense anti-Catholicism unleashed by the Church Crisis triggered debate about British national identity, Erastianism, and the nature of the church-state relationship. Since the Reformation, Erastians – supporters of full state control of the church – and proponents of a more independent church had argued over how to define the proper relationship between the national church and state. This dissertation demonstrates that the Church Crisis represents a crucial period in the history of church-state relations because the eventual Anglo-Catholic victory ended Parliamentary attempts to control the church’s theology and practice and, therefore, sounded the death knell of political Erastianism. In short, tensions between Protestant and Catholics reached a high water mark during the years of the Great Church Crisis. These tensions catalyzed both a temporary revival of Erastianism and its ultimate descent into irrelevance.