(United Kingdom) (includes bibliography)

History Today, April, 1997, by Mark Bevir

Onward Christian Socialists? Mark Bevir takes a timely look at a little-known phenomenon that was part of turn-of-the century radicalism in Britain.

The conference held in Bradford in 1893 to form the Independent Labour Party (ILP) met in a disused chapel being run as a Labour Institute by the Bradford Labour Church. The conference was accompanied, moreover, by a Labour Church service attended by some 5,000 people.

The Labour Church movement that played such a vital role in the history of British socialism was inspired by John Trevor. Trevor resigned as a Unitarian minister to found the first Labour Church in Manchester: the first service took place there in October 1891. A string band opened the proceedings, after which Trevor led prayers, the congregation listened to a reading of a poem by James Russell Lowell, and Harold Rylett, a Unitarian minister, read the lesson, before the choir sang ‘England Arise’, a socialist hymn written by Edward Carpenter. Trevor gave a sermon emphasising the religious nature of the Labour movement. Before long Labour Churches had sprung up in most of the large cities in Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, including, of course, Bradford.

Although British socialism owes a debt to Marxism and Fabianism, its leading characteristics derive from an ethical socialism exemplified by the Labour Churches. Historians have often portrayed these as products of the impact of secularisation and a class-based politics on the Nonconformist tradition. They have done so within the context of a historiography according to which history takes us, more or less inevitably, from traditional, religious societies characterised by primitive rebellions embodying an ethical socialism, to modern secular societies characterised by class conflicts embodying a mature socialism. Recent events, however, seem to have undermined this interpretation. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of New Labour suggest we need to look again at the Labour Churches. We should recognise they express a set of religious beliefs of continuing relevance for modern politics.

Although Labour Churches attracted people who had been raised as Catholics, Anglicans and even secularists, the majority had Nonconformist backgrounds -- a factor reflected in the religious beliefs and experiences upon which the movement was based. Secularists rarely experienced a crisis of faith, and although Anglicans often did so, the Church of England provided other outlets for people who turned to ethical socialism, notably the Christian Social Union. Besides, Nonconformists came from a tradition within which independent churches had a well-established place.

Labour Churches thrived, therefore, in the industrial centres of Nonconformity. In the first four months of 1894, four new churches sprang up in South Lancashire alone. Somewhat over half of the fifty or so branches that lasted for more than a year were in either Lancashire or the West Riding of Yorkshire. In addition, there were several in South Wales and Scotland, a small group around Birmingham, a slightly larger group in the Potteries, and others dotted all over the country. Herbert Casson even formed an American branch of the movement. The most important Labour Church remained that in Manchester, where, in 1893 and 1894, three services were held on Sundays, all usually before a full house.

Trevor grew up as a Calvinist before discovering Ralph Waldo Emerson and training to become a Unitarian minister. He decided to form a Labour Church after a member of his congregation said he had stopped going to chapel because he felt unable to breathe freely there. The Bradford Church was formed in 1892 in opposition to local Nonconformist ministers after they sat on the platform at a meeting held in support of a Liberal opponent of the socialist candidate, Ben Tillett. Often, however, members of the Labour Church retained Nonconformist allegiances. P.H. Wicksteed, a writer and University Extension Lecturer whose areas of expertise included Dante and political economy, was, after Trevor, the most important figure in the early days of the movement, and he remained a practicing Unitarian minister. The Bolton Church was formed when a local church affiliated to the movement ‘in so far as their constitution as a congregational church would allow’.

Of those attracted to the movement from other backgrounds, Fred Brocklehurst, the General Secretary of the Labour Church Union, was an Anglican who had considered taking Holy Orders before turning to socialism. Paul Campbell, who formed the London Church, was an Anglican who edited the Christian Socialist and played an active role in the Settlement Movement which encouraged well-meaning young men to live in deprived areas and work towards their spiritual improvement. Walter Morse, who became Secretary of the Labour Church Union in 1896, had been an Anglican until he joined the Leeds Church, and R.A. Beckett, an editor of the movement’s magazine, was the son of an Anglican clergyman. People even joined the Labour Church from non-Christian backgrounds: the Keighley Church was formed by Swedenborgians; and, of course, Keir Hardie was raised by free-thinking parents, though he later turned to evangelicalism. Even Hypatia Bradlaugh-Bonner, the daughter of Charles Bradlaugh, the great secularist leader, appeared before the Bolton Church to give a talk with the ironic title, ‘The Queen’s Reign of Peace’.

All these people joined the Labour Church not because they were on the road to secularism, but because of sincere and stable religious beliefs. Moreover, their beliefs are characteristic not only of leaders of the Labour Churches, but also of other ethical socialists, including Edward Carpenter, Katherine St John Conway, J. Bruce Glasier, Margaret McMillan and Philip Snowden, all of whom were active in the Labour Church, writing for its newspapers and speaking from its pulpits.

To understand the beliefs on which the movement was founded we need to relate them to the Victorian crisis of faith which arose as a result of the challenge posed to biblical literalism by Darwinism, historical criticism of the Bible, and moral doubts. The ethical socialists tried to reconcile faith with evolutionary theory and historical criticism by adopting an immanentist theology. They argued that God dwells in the world, revealing himself through an evolutionary process, not as a transcendent figure who intervenes in our world spontaneously. Thus, they argued that Darwinism merely captures the way God works through natural means, and the historical critics merely show the Bible represents a part of the historical unfolding of God’s will as opposed to a one-off revelation.

Immanentist doctrines flourished among Nonconformists, Anglicans, and even occultists. Among Christians, immanentism led also to a new interest in Christ the man. D.B. Foster of the Leeds Church, for example, was raised as a Wesleyan, becoming a local preacher at the tender age of seventeen, before experiencing severe doubts about the compatibility of his faith with modern science and about the morality of doctrines such as the atonement. Faced with these doubts, he followed ‘the revelation of life’ he found in Jesus until he saw he must ‘trust to the great creative forces’. Eventually he decided that ‘the ever-growing public life around me was a far truer interpretation of the spirit of Jesus than the narrow self-saving ideas common in the churches’.

William Jupp grew up in a Calvinist household and became a Congregationalist minister until doubt led him to Wordsworth and Emerson who inspired him to establish the Croydon Church. More generally, Percy Redfern, a secularist until he turned to the Labour Church, the co-operative movement, and Tolstoyism, spoke for many when he complained that secularism offered only a ‘negative’ liberation when what people need is ‘truth now, a whole truth, a truth they can live by’. For the members of the Labour Church, this truth was that God was present in the spontaneous life of this world; he was not a transcendent being who had conveyed his law through a dogmatic revelation.

An immanentist faith sustained a socialist political viewpoint in two key ways. First, it undermined the evangelical distinction between sacred and secular -- because the divine was present in this world, our life on earth became a religious matter -- and thereby encouraged people to look for God’s kingdom here on earth. Second, it suggested that everyone had the divine in them -- we all belong to one universal brotherhood by virtue of embodying one divine spirit -- and thereby encouraged a sense of solidarity. Ethical socialists typically defined socialism in terms of an inner spirituality and a sense of brotherhood, more than a set of economic relationships or institutional arrangements. This, moreover, is why they insisted on the importance of an inner change as a prerequisite for the realisation of socialism. One must first create socialists precisely because the sense of brotherhood is itself the central feature of socialism. D.B. Foster, like many others. publicly confessed his inner conversion to socialism. He explained that having recognised ‘the way to that Kingdom of God on earth for which I have prayed and worked so long’, ‘... the men whom I employed became my comrades in life, whose needs constituted their right to wages rather than their ability to make profit for me’. Before long, he gave up his draper’s shop so as to repudiate the detested role of employer for that of relative poverty and involvement in an anarchist workshop. John Trevor described ‘the teaching that a man can be made better merely by being more comfortable’ as ‘the grand heresy of socialism’.

What distinguished the Labour Church from other expressions of Victorian immanentism was, of course, the belief that the instrument for the realisation of God s kingdom was not a Christian organisation but the Labour movement. Trevor described Jesus ideas as an ‘anachronism fatal to any complete development’. He believed Christianity had become a life-denying religion, so one had to reassert the joy of life. The Labour movement expressed such joy: it stood for a ‘living and loving fellowship with Man, with Nature, and with God’. A rejection of dogma, and a belief that the whole of the Labour movement embodied the divine spirit, could lead to predictable difficulties. Mr Gutteridge of the Nottingham Church complained of being ‘puzzled by the multiplicity of the ideas of their speakers’ since ‘on one Sunday, they would have an orthodox speaker, and perhaps on the next an aggressive secularist’. Most people, however, like Gutteridge himself, would have recognised an orthodox view within the movement, and that orthodoxy, supposedly embodied by the Labour movement, was an immanentist faith combined with an ideal of universal brotherhood.

The Labour Churches proved extremely popular, albeit for a comparatively short time. Over a thousand Labour Church Hymn Books were sold in just one day at the movement’s second annual meeting in Birmingham. Although more than a hundred individual Labour Churches were formed, most of these lasted only a month or two, so the number of active branches probably reached a peak of just over fifty in around 1895. The Labour Church attracted members of both sexes, from most social classes, and from a variety of ages, although, as one would expect in a socialist movement of that time, the dominant group was young lower middle-class and upper working-class males. The most notable thing about the members was a shared set of religious experiences. Judging by the evidence we have from members about their religious life, they were raised in traditional structures of faith, experienced profound doubts, and finally came to faith again through the romantics, or by a personal experience of ‘oneness’ with their fellows, or via new religious groups such as the theosophists or the spiritualists.

Most Labour Churches attracted congregations of between 300 and 500 people. Dundee averaged 400, although they had to turn people away when Keir Hardie addressed their inaugural meeting. Halifax generally pulled-in some 500. Oldham’s average attendance was 300, of whom 100 were regulars. And Plymouth always filled a hall capable of accommodating about 250 people. When the Birmingham Church attracted a congregation of a mere 120 one Sunday late in 1893, its members were disappointed, saying the turnout was ‘not very good’. There were, however, a good many smaller Labour Churches: Wolverhampton generally had an attendance of about 100 at its monthly meeting, and Barnsley rarely attracted more than forty people. A famous speaker could be relied upon to boost attendances, but many churches reported ‘a difficulty in getting speakers, especially on the moral and religious side of the work’.

Although Trevor wanted the content of services to reflect local traditions and requirements, he said his ideal service would consist of the following: (1) Hymn (2) Reading (3) Prayer (4) Solo or Music by the Choir (5) Notices and Collection (6) Hymn (7) Address (8) Hymn (9) Benediction. In practice, however, few churches bothered with anything more than hymns, readings, addresses and short prayers. The Labour Church Hymn Book contained few traditional hymns, being composed largely of socialist songs by activists such as Edward Carpenter and William Morris, and poems by romantics such as Emerson and Charles Kingsley. Readings in the churches typically came from the works of the same writers, with the Bible being virtually ignored. Although Labour Churches often relied on local activists to give the addresses, the most popular speakers were those who also proved so successful for the Independent Labour Party. Sam Hobson, a Quaker from Ireland, who was active in the Cardiff Church and a member of the Council of the Labour Church Union, recalled Philip Snowden being the most popular; Keir Hardie attracted larger crowds but spoke less often, and Katherine Conway and Enid Stacy had more select audiences.

The main activities of the Labour Churches, apart from their regular services, were educational and philanthropic ones. With respect to education, they tried both to learn for themselves the theoretical principles of socialism and to bring others, particularly workers, to an inner conversion to it. Most churches either organised a Sunday School or took over one established by the socialists of the Clarion Clubs. The London Church, under the guidance of Paul Campbell and Margaret McMillan, was especially active in educational outreach work. After McMillan moved to Yorkshire, she lectured at the Leeds Church, in 1896 on the French Revolution and in 1897 on Modern Economists -- Smith, Ricardo, Jevons, Mill, Marx, and, of course, Ruskin. The churches drew extensively on the resources provided by the Fabian Society to educate themselves in socialism, with the movement’s newspapers constantly urging members to participate in Fabian correspondence classes. The philanthropic activities of the churches varied considerably. The Hanley Church led a campaign against local lead-poisoning. D.B. Foster worked tirelessly to publicise and improve the condition of the slums of Leeds, a task he continued after being elected as a local councillor. The Manchester Church ran both a Shelter for the Homeless and a Cinderella Club for underprivileged children in the Deansgate area. Indeed, many of the movement’s Sunday Schools were tied to Cinderella Clubs, which raised money to provide treats for inner city children. The Manchester Club organised an annual picnic in the city park, a Christmas feast in the schoolroom, and various expeditions to the countryside.

The main role of the Labour Churches, therefore, was to provide a cultural basis for political activity undertaken elsewhere. As Edwin Halford of the Bradford Church explained, ‘the Churches were formed for education, and for the stimulation of action on the part of Socialists’, so ‘political action’ was ‘outside their sphere of work’. The cultural activities of the churches, moreover, often of life than any overtly religious theme. Few even bothered with those rites of passage traditionally performed by other churches: although the Leeds Church devised a ceremony resembling baptism, and even acquired a marriage licence, such activities were very rare. Quite apart from anything else, many Labour Churches feared the person who performed the rites of passage would acquire a priestly status of which they strongly disapproved. The belief that God was present equally within everyone led them to a strongly democratic and anti-clerical position.

A democratic ethos also underlay the organisational structure of the Labour Church. The individual branches were based on a concept of brotherhood or fellowship rather than priesthood. The typical church had no priest, no pulpit, and no Bible. It was just a congregation of believers held together by a chairman with no special status. To ensure the churches represented a spontaneous eruption of life, not the dead weight of theology, John Trevor did his utmost to keep central organisation to a minimum. There were no rituals or organised forms of worship. In January 1892, Trevor started to publish a monthly magazine called The Labour Prophet, which provided the main centralising force within the movement. Although a full-time General Secretary was appointed. the post did not last long as the local churches could not afford to pay a suitable salary. In 1893, twenty or so local branches formed a Labour Church Union which arranged annual conferences. The Union, however, had no formal constitution and little power.

The decline of the Labour Church reflected the problems it had reconciling the claims of religious purity and political effectiveness. Its immanentist theology taught that the divine was working through the Labour movement, but any attempt to theorise this process was likely to lead to a theological tradition that would inhibit the natural expression of life. The theological basis of the Labour Church effectively precluded its adopting a properly critical stance towards Labour. Indeed, Trevor insisted the Labour Church did not exist to bring religion to the Labour movement, but only to proclaim the religious nature of that movement. We should not be surprised, therefore, to find the Labour Church torn between an absorption in the political movement, which would undermine its religious identity, and a repudiation of the political movement, which would appear to be contrary to its own teachings.

The tension between these two positions underlay Trevor’s constant battle to defend the religious content of services. Whereas he wanted to ensure the Labour Church retained a religious identity, others, notably Fred Brocklehurst, wanted to reduce its mission to the Labour programme, even arguing that neither religious faith, nor want of religious faith "should debar any man from joining our ranks." Such differences led to practical struggles over the form services should take and the wording of official pronouncements. In 1895, Trevor introduced a formal benediction at the end of services in Manchester and recommended others to do likewise, but few did, and, prior to this, many clearly disliked his use of the word God. Whereas Trevor thought the word conveyed the idea of a Supreme Power better than any other, many, like Brocklehurst, thought it irrelevant. Initially the motto of The Labour Prophet announced "God is our King," but after four issues it changed to ‘Let Labour be the basis of civil society’, a phrase taken from Mazzini. By 1894 Brocklehurst and his allies were carrying the fight to the movement’s statement of principles. Although the Labour Church Union voted to retain the word God by the narrowest of majorities, an official journal of the movement could still say ‘Labour Church folk do not bother much about God’.

The problem was that the more the Labour Church turned its back on religious forms and practices, the less it retained a distinctive identity to sustain itself. The conflict between religious purity and a political commitment to Labour issues led not only to quarrels but also to a sense of purposelessness. Some of those who wanted to retain a religious feel to the movement now began to argue socialists had to avoid all political activity if they were to retain their spiritual integrity. ‘At last’, Percy Redfern recalled, ‘I began to think that it was in the nature of a struggle for political power to produce just that "bankruptcy" of the socialist ideal’. A Clarion investigation into the causes of the decline of the movement highlighted above all else the fact that so many people found ‘practically no difference between a Labour Church meeting and an ILP meeting’.

The Labour Prophet continued until 1898, when it was replaced by a smaller, quarterly Labour Church Record, which itself folded in 1902. Even Trevor’s energies began to flag after the death of his wife and younger son in 1894, and in 1900, after the failure of his proposal for a system of discipleship, he withdrew from the movement to study the sex question and promote free-love. When Allan Clarke, of the Bolton Church, took over Trevor’s editorial duties, he immediately began a campaign to highlight the ‘spiritual’ side of the movement, even proposing changing its name to ‘Goodwill Church’ on the grounds that ‘"Labour" shuts out so many people’. Although a few Labour Churches were formed after the relative success of the Labour Party in the 1906 General Election, in reality the movement had ceased to be an effective force as early as 1900, and almost no Labour Churches survived beyond the First World War. The broader tradition of ethical socialism of which the Labour Church was a part has continued, however, to appeal to many of Labour’s leading politicians.

FOR FURTHER READING:

P. D’a. Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival 1877-1914 (Princeton University Press, 1968); K. Inglis, ‘The Labour Church Movement’, International Review of Social History 3 (1950); H. Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party, 1880-1900 (Oxford University Press, 1966); S. Pierson, ‘John Trevor and the Labour Church Movement in England, 1891-1900’, Church History 29 (1960); F. Reid, ‘Socialist Sunday Schools in Britain, 1892-1939’, International Review of Social History 2 (1966); J. Trevor, My Quest for God (Labour Prophet, 1897); C. Bryant, Possible Dreams: A Personal History of the British Christian Socialists (Hodder & Stoughton, 1996).

Mark Bevir is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Newcastle.

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