TY - JOUR
AU - Ledger-Lomas, Michael
AB - Run by the Rev. Augustus Cant, the Rev. Nasal Whine and Soapy Bareface, Esq., the Society for the Distribution of Moral Pocket Handkerchiefs propagated evangelical Protestantism by selling cheap goods embroidered with improving words to the poor. If it never existed, being invented by a high church satirist in 1860 (p. 169), then the argument of Joseph Stubenrauch’s book is that it may as well have done. The idea that evangelicals created an ‘age of atonement’ in early nineteenth-century Britain is a familiar one, but they also believed themselves to be leading an ‘age of ingenuity’. Historians of industrialization and social change long ago established the intensification of commercial exchanges and the exponential proliferation of consumer goods from the later eighteenth century onwards, but the impact of these changes on religion remains unclear. The prevailing assumption is that it was negative: ‘material modernity’ has been implicated in ‘soft secularization’ (p. 21), weakening piety by diverting the gaze of ordinary Britons from heaven to their well-stocked parlours. Stubenrauch argues that as practitioners of an innovative and exceptionally demanding form of Protestant religiosity, evangelicals were neither apprehensive nor complacent about commerce or consumption. Instead, they ‘bent material modernity’ (p. 17) to spread their conversionist gospel. He argues that in placing evangelicals in industrializing society, previous historians have not understood their religious experience from the inside out. Once one does so, apparent tensions or even binaries in their thought – between matter and spirit, money and the gospel – vanish. Bruce Hindmarsh and Phyllis Mack have already established that evangelical piety’s emphasis on sinful weakness and insistence on self-surrender could generate innovative forms of selfhood and agency, but Stubenrauch goes a step further in arguing that this spiritual creativity had social and economic applications, equipping evangelicals to prosper in a world of goods. This presentation of evangelicalism as an earthly creed convincingly dissents from Deborah Cohen’s argument1 that evangelicals became happy consumers only once their theological spines had softened. Presenting evangelicalism as preoccupied with individual salvation in another world, Cohen suggested that it thrived in spartan surroundings. The growing enthusiasm with which ordinary Britons consumed goods from the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in decorating their homes, thus marked the end of its pretensions to dominate British society. Nice wallpaper was the writing on the wall for the age of atonement, which gave way to an age of incarnation in which the humanity of Jesus was taken as a vote of confidence in the material world. Cohen’s reading of theology leaned on Boyd Hilton’s hugely influential vision of the rise and fall of evangelicalism as a governing creed. Central to his interpretation was the suggestion that, while early nineteenth-century evangelicals pioneered Christian understandings of markets, their atonement theology had made them deeply pessimistic about them. Their Christian political economy ruled out sustainable economic growth, which would collapse when speculative bubbles popped or population growth gobbled up increases in the standard of living. God had instituted economic laws to discipline a fallen world that was at best a theatre for salvation, while atonement theology’s account of how Christ’s death had saved an impotent humanity was phrased in the language of debt and contract. Stubenrauch’s challenge to this picture is at a basic level empirical. Evangelical material culture was not threadbare but thick and complex, and was so in advance of a putative age of incarnation. From the later eighteenth century, evangelicals agreed with their sentimental and polite contemporaries that things communicated values. Many of their favourite things now look either severe or trite: plaques bearing the motto ‘Prepare to Meet Thy God’ or samplers woven by female prisoners with such scriptural injunctions as ‘Thou God seest me’. Yet Stubenrauch argues that such goods were powerful (because pithy and ubiquitous) encapsulations of their theology: ‘a moral technology for initiating and remembering the conversion experience’ (p. 189). In particular, evangelical authors were skilled in using texts and images to play on feelings and thus to bring an evangelical affective community into being. What explains this plethora of evangelical things? Stubenrauch argues that slow-burning shifts in soteriology were largely responsible. Jonathan Edwards introduced into mid-eighteenth-century transatlantic evangelicalism the suggestion that God’s grace in effecting an individual’s salvation could be diffused through earthly ‘means’. The thought was taken up not only by Arminian Wesleyans but by the increasing numbers of moderate Calvinists, who interpreted ‘means’ as expanding modes of mobility, production and exchange, such as canals, roads, salespeople and cities, all of which could and should be exploited to effect conversions. Evangelicals thus emerge as joyously uninhibited in their interactions with a commercial economy. To take one instance, some historians have argued Britain’s modernized road network required passengers to treat one another with stiff reserve. Evangelicals though roamed around it with ease, buttonholing strangers and handing them tracts. Hackney coachmen emerged as one favourite, because captive, audience for their hectoring productions. Likewise, Stubenrauch argues that urbanization did not dismay them. Toryish evangelicals, such as the Church of Scotland minister Thomas Chalmers, certainly regarded cities as wild spaces to be tamed. But for liberal dissenters such as the Rev. Robert Vaughan, author of The Age of Great Cities (1843), they were reserves of intellectual and cultural energy to be tapped. Tract distributors stalked those cities alongside the flâneurs and dandies. Where others saw anonymous faces in the crowd, they picked out lost souls ready to consume redemptive words. Eschatology joined soteriology in pushing evangelicals towards a market economy. Stubenrauch maintains that post-millennialism was the mainstream position among evangelicals until mid-century, but contends that its conviction that Christ’s return to earth must wait for an earthly millennium to run its course made for a dynamic rather than a static view of the world. The millennium was no distant prospect; it was coming into being every day through the expansion of manufactures and trade. Evangelicals published rapturous accounts of the 1851 Great Exhibition, garlanding it with a citation from Psalm 24: ‘The Earth is the Lord’s, and all that therein is’ (p. 211) and hailing its creator Prince Albert as Isaiah’s prince of peace (p. 239). The theological genealogy which Stubenrauch thus reconstructs for evangelical materiality enables him to take a fresh look at such organizations as the Religious Tract Society (RTS). Historians have sometimes emphasized that the RTS had misgivings about market mechanisms that might have sullied the purity of its mission, such as sweat-shop manufacture, paid hawkers or the use of sensational stories and images. Yet Stubenrauch highlights the speed and brio with which it adopted commercial methods. His post-millennialist were happy warriors, who saw nothing wrong with hawking the gospel or, for that matter, with profit. Callum Brown long ago taught historians that evangelicals created a ‘salvation economy’ in nineteenth-century Britain; Stubenrauch adds that it ran off the market economy’s animal spirits. Stubenrauch renders the boosterism of his evangelicals with empathetic flair. Yet perhaps he is sometimes taken captive by their attitudes in the act of sketching them. For all his elegant revisions of Cohen and Hilton, his analysis fails to question an assumption that runs throughout their work and that of many other historians, namely that for good or ill evangelicals enjoyed ‘cultural dominance over the early Victorian period’ (p. 2). Was that ever really true? It tends to make evangelicalism a synecdoche for Protestantism, conveying the misleading impression that they were the only Christians who aspired to or succeeded in mastering material modernity. Yet a broader angled enquiry might find plenty of Whiggish eulogies to material abundance from church people who shared an understanding that this was a providential blessing on British society, but not their tightly coiled understanding of how material ‘means’ effected conversion. While Stubenrauch has done a superb job of sketching how evangelicals envisioned the salvation economy, it remains unclear how far visions became reality. Those tracts pressed on coach men were envisaged as ‘arrows’, ‘diminutive pill[s]’ or even ‘grenades’ (p. 147), which just had to be lobbed at their targets to have an effect. Yet the ‘idealized tract distributor’ (p. 150) sketched by the RTS in its literature was just that – idealized – and we tend to hear only from his or her satisfied customers. It is just as uncertain whether the evangelical cultures of consumption sketched by Stubenrauch were widespread enough to shape society as a whole. Were there enough ‘Prepare to Meet Thy God’ plaques in a sufficient range of households for their message to cut through? Or were these porcelain commandments lost in the much larger inventory of goods produced by worldly-minded manufacturers? The suspicion that evangelicals were creative enough in adapting to material modernity, but stopped short of being its architects, is confirmed by Stubenrauch’s conclusion, which notes that their ‘age of ingenuity’ (p. 253) folded surprisingly quickly in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. That reflected a backlash against ‘means’ by the growing number of evangelicals more interested in the premillennial advent of Christ or the cultivation of personal holiness than in a business-like pursuit of the millennium. If that seems plausible, then the speed of their victory hints both that premillennialism and pessimism about material modernity had never been confined to an ‘extreme’ pocket but had been central to evangelicalism all along, particularly in the established churches. Given the preponderance of Congregationalists and Baptists among his evangelical innovators, it might be that Dissent was more important in shaping an age of religious ingenuity than evangelicalism as such. Perhaps the evangelicals who had always suspected they could not sell the gospel like any other commodity were not too far wrong. After all, when the imaginary Society for the Distribution of Moral Pocket Handkerchiefs published their accounts, they had expenses of £640, but only sales of 3s 4½d. Note 1. Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (London: Yale University Press, 2006) © 2017 Michael Ledger-Lomas
TI - Household Godliness: Evangelicals and Goods Revisited
JF - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.1080/13555502.2017.1303273
DA - 2017-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/household-godliness-evangelicals-and-goods-revisited-vw10kTvrX1
SP - 274
EP - 277
VL - 22
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -