Labour and the Free Churches, 1918-1939: Radicalism, Righteousness and Religion
Ebook
Did the Labour Party, in Morgan Phillips' famous phrase, owe 'more to Methodism than Marx'? Were the founding fathers of the party nurtured in the chapels of Nonconformity and shaped by their emphases on liberty, conscience and the value of every human being in the eyes of God? How did the Free Churches, traditionally allied to the Liberal Party, react to the growing importance of the Labour Party between the wars? This book addresses these questions at a range of levels: including organisation; rhetoric; policies and ideals; and electoral politics. It is shown that the distinctive religious setting in which Labour emerged indeed helps to explain the differences between it and more Marxist counterparts on the Continent, and that this setting continued to influence Labour approaches towards welfare, nationalisation and industrial relations between the wars. In the process Labour also adopted some of the righteousness of tone of the Free Churches.
This setting was, however, changing. Dropping their traditional suspicion of the State, Nonconformists instead increasingly invested it with religious values, helping to turn it through its growing welfare functions into the provider of practical Christianity. This nationalisation of religion continues to shape British attitudes to the welfare state as well as imposing narrowly utilitarian and material tests of relevance upon the churches and other social institutions. The elevation of the State was not, however, intended as an end in itself. What mattered were the social and individual outcomes. Socialism, for those Free Churchmen and women who helped to shape Labour in the early twentieth century, was about improving society as much as systems.
An original analysis of Nonconformity's contribution to the rise of the Labour Party during the interwar years.
A significant contribution to the history of the Labour Party, Free Churches and inter-war Britain
Explores the contemporary relevance of the ethical socialism of the early 20th century
Offers a major case study of the relationship between religion and politics
1. Introduction
2. Theological and Political Changes amongst the Free Church Leadership
3. The Nonconformist Conscience
4. Changes in Chapel Society
5. The Politics of Pewmanship
6. Free Churchmen and Women in the Labour Party
7. The Nonconformist Conscience and the Labour Party
8. The Free Churches and Class Consciousness
9. The Kingdom, the State and Socialism
10. Conclusions
Appendices on Nonconformist Candidatures in General Elections 1918-35
Bibliography
Index
This is a really important book. The relationship between the Labour party and the free churches is widely recognised, but very little understood. Peter Catterall has done a first-class job in combining an acute understanding of the Labour movement, and a deep knowledge of the nonconformist churches, to produce the first serious history of the relationship between the two. Based firmly on meticulous research in the relevant political and religious archives, Catterall constructs an analysis that comfortably outstrips anything that has gone before. This is a book that was urgently needed, and it will be the primary point of reference in its field for some time to come.
The Labour party was founded in a church hall and it used to be said that the labour movement owed more to Methodism than to Marxism. But now that we live in a post-industrial society and the 'Nonconformist Conscience' has all but gone, Labour finds itself with a serious identity crisis. Peter Catterall's brilliant new history takes us back to explain the Christian power-within that shaped the party that built the world's first social democracy.
- Title: Labour and the Free Churches, 1918-1939: Radicalism, Righteousness and Religion
- Author: Peter Catterall
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2016
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781441125996, 9781350067264, 1350067261, 144112599X
- Resource ID: LLS:9781441125996
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-09T09:19:22Z
Peter Catterall is Reader in History at the University of Westminster, UK. In addition, he teaches on democracy and public policy for the Hansard Society. He is also chair of the George Lansbury Memorial Trust. He has published widely on 20th-century British history and his most recent work is Labour and the Politics of Alcohol: The Decline of a Cause (2014).