Religion as Custom and Political Resistance: An Unorthodox Interpretation of EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class

On Rescuing Religion from Marxian Marginality: Some Prefatory Observations

Religion is often understood in some Western scholarship as an ideology of domination that reifies social reality into an unchangeable given and justifies the status quo. In many historical cases the authority of those in power has been legitimated by religious doctrine, and as such, it has been used to oppress the peasantry and the working class (Bourdieu, 1991), women (French, 1992), and people of color (Kiernan, 1995). Yet, Judeo-Christianity, for example, offers conceptions of equality, goodness, justice, liberation, peace, and solidarity that have animated political challenges to existing inequities and injustices in society (Daim, 1973; Walzer, 1965, 1985; West, 1982). The Civil Rights and Central America Solidarity Movements in the US, Anti-Apartheid in South Africa, Solidarity in Poland, and insurgencies in El Salvador, Bolivia, and Brazil are examples of its disruptive legacy and potential (Borer, 1998; Morris, 1984; Nash, 1996; Nepstad, 1996, 2004; Osa, 1992; Polletta, 2002). As has been noted of Christianity, ‘‘There are two Christs,’ one of the rulers and one of the toilers’ (quoted in Kiernan, 1995).

This turn towards appreciating the oppositional or insurgent potential of religion in politics, revolutionary and otherwise, has often been discounted, if not trivialized, by Marxists. Scholars who do appreciate religion as an oppositional vehicle but who are not Marxists, on the other hand, often judge Marxist theory as inherently incapable of appreciating religion as other than an ideology that reinforces the social and economic interests of a dominant order. Coming to terms with religion otherwise is beyond Marxist theory since this particular mode of theorizing is overburdened by a tendency to dismiss it. There are, of course, many decries against mixing religion and Marxism. Marxism concerns itself with the here and now and material circumstances while religion addresses itself to the other-worldly. Marxism is too narrowly focused on economic and labor interests to be useful otherwise. To these latter material consternations political ones are added. Religion and Marxism define oppression in divergent terms. The personal and social goals of Marxian socialism are distinct from those of Judeo-Christianity. Religion, unlike Marxism, is inherently counter-revolutionary.

Yet, religion has been, in fact, recognized as an ideological source of oppositional, if not resistance, politics by some classical figures from within Marxism itself (Bloch, 1964, 1970, 1972, 1986; Goldmann, 1964; Fromm, 1966; Siebert, 1965). Engels (1966), Kautsky (1953), Gramsci (1975), and Luxemburg (1971), for example, appreciated the millenarian and utopian currents of early Christianity and saw these as sources of political revolutions in antiquity. Even Tucker (1972) – a non-Marxist – finds that Augustinian Christianity and Marxism have in common eschatology (or comprehensive narratives with answers about ultimate existential meanings), historicity, praxis, and redemption. Radical (or materialist) Christians, who have appropriated or been influenced by Marxist thought, have added to this de-mystification effort by demonstrating the oppositional and progressive potential of Judeo-Christianity (Girardi, 1968, 1988; Miranda, 1974, 1980, 1982; Gutiérrez, 1973; Segundo, 1984).

More recently, a number of neo-Marxists have paved the way for a more favorable (though no less critical) evaluation of Judeo-Christianity. They represent the critical theory of religion perspective, a perspective established and developed by Rudolph Siebert (1965, 1979, 1994). Building on the works of Adorno (1973), Benjamin (1969), Habermas (1992, 2002, 1998), and Horkheimer (1970, 1972, 1973, 1978), critical theorists of religion recognize that in the contemporary context of administered societies based on instrumental reason, Judeo-Christianity has incorporated the latter form of reason unto itself and as such exhausted itself as a social force of liberation. ¹ The task of the critical theory of religion, therefore, is to remember, preserve, and reclaim the critical, Messianic, and prophetic content of Judeo-Christianity and channel it ‘into a secular, materialistic theory and praxis of historical struggle for a more [substantively] rational, just, free and solidary future society’ (Ott, 2005: 177). Critical theorists are critically oriented toward traditional religion and the social conditions under which it operates and is constituted (Brittain, 2006: 176). They call attention to the regressive and reactionary motive forces – and the dangers – associated with it. At the regressive level they point to Protestant Christianity’s role in: (1) ‘ideologically legitimating the [historical] development of capitalist society’ (Ott, 2006: 149); (2) reifying rational utility – that is, cost–benefit calculation – as the only valid form of human rationality (Brittain, 2006; Lundskow, 2006); (3) corrupting the human capacity to transcend capitalism (Ott, 2006); and (4) reinforcing the principle of destruction (thanatos) in Western societies (MacKendrick, 2006). At the reactionary level they point to the role of Protestant Christian fundamentalism in the rise of a politics of resentment, the development of authoritarian personalities and absolutist morality, that is, the rise of clerico-fascism (Siebert, 2006), as well as the resurgence of gender essentialism (Wright and Rawls, 2006).

Critical theorists of religion, however, also seek to understand how Judeo-Christianity’s prophetic (theological) content gives ‘voice [and direction] to the cries and longings of suffering humanity’, how it has shaped past and contemporary struggles of human liberation, and the degree to which it can potentially play a role in the critical overcoming of what is (Ott, 2006: 126). As such, critical theorists of religion understand religion as both a source of negative thinking, that is, the great refusal of what is, and as a ‘narrative form of human resistance and hope’ (Ott, 2006: 133). A theology of emancipation – or ‘true’ theology – in this perspective would be a step closer to substantive reason and inform our critical understandings of what is, which at the present contemporary historical juncture of the 21st century remains the class exploitation and cultural domination capitalism continues to impose on humanity as a system driven by instrumental reason (Ott, 2006). A theology of emancipation stands for justice, compassion, and resistance, and can ultimately function as a barrier against as well as a source of critical transcendence of the historical trend of what is. Considered in this light, religion possesses an affective, inspiring, and preservative power against the disintegration of meaning in a world increasingly defined by the impersonal processes of rationalization. This is not to suggest that religion possesses normative intersubjective validity in the modern context – its undifferentiated worldview prevents it from achieving such currency in the context of modernity – but rather that religion can potentially re-enchant, energize, and make subjective experience resistant to rationalization in the context of a threatened lifeworld (MacKendrick, 2006). ‘Religious language’, therefore, ‘can be seen to mediate between impersonal processes of rationalization and … social fragmentation … on the way toward a postconventional identity’ (MacKendrick, 2006: 192).

In another but not unrelated neo-Marxist position which critically advances the resistance and emancipatory potential of religion, Andrew McKinnon – drawing from the work of Adorno (1992), Horkheimer (1995), and Rojo (1988) – challenges us to move beyond the ‘literal and presentist reading’ of religion as the opium of the people (2006: 11). Such a reading overestimates the escapist connotation of the drug and of religion itself and, as such, fails to appreciate the historical nature of this metaphor and Marx’s dialectical position on religion. Opium in the mid-19th century was a commodity used for medical purposes, a source of social conflict (opium wars) and exploitation (of the Asian peasantry), and in Marx’s dialectical exposition a reference for a utopian other. Opium, as such, was not a way to escape reality, but rather a way to contend with the ravages of capitalism; an entryway into understanding the destructive potential of capitalist accumulation; and a way to imagine a world outside capitalist devastation. McKinnon explains: ‘The “traditional” readings of religion as “opium of the people” neglect the context and dialectical movement, in which opium, as a condensed signifier, brings together both expression and protest in one moment’ (2006: 22). Discursively and historically contextualized, and correctly translated, ² Marx’s famous opium metaphor is thus revealing of religion’s dual nature – as both expressive of domination and remonstrative – and its dialectical promise of transcendence (McKinnon, 2006: 21–27). Marx’s original articulation speaks to the latter assertions.

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

To [aufhebung, transcend] religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion. (2009: 72)

As an expression of the destructive potential of capitalism, religion as opium is a call ‘to protest and conflict’ (McKinnon, 2006: 23). As an illusion of what is, religion as opium is also a call to transcend the conditions that produce such an illusion as well as a window into an alternate world (McKinnon, 2006: 24–5). Considered dialectically and historically, Marx’s propositions on religion, therefore, call for the critically-oriented student of religion to pay attention ‘to the oppressive and emancipatory, the ideological and the utopian, within each social moment’ (McKinnon, 2006: 29).

Despite the aforementioned developments that see religion in a more ‘dialectical’ light, it would appear that their import has yet to break through, proving the resilience of a theoretical stereotype against Marxism. In this article I go against this stereotypical current. My intention is not to engage in a discussion about the virtues of substantive reason over instrumental reason; or to examine the role religion plays for the former in overcoming the latter. I leave these tasks to the critical theorists of religion. I do not aim to develop a Marxist sociology of religion at this point either, although the present work may serve as a point of departure for subsequent work on this area. At this stage, I simply turn to one of EP Thompson’s works – his magnus opus, The Making of the English Working Class (MEWC, 1963) – in order to reveal it as one that shows popular religion as more than an instrument of domination. I proceed as such in order to demonstrate: (1) How Marxism may be employed to examine religion’s dual nature as a cultural practice that both constrains and enables opposition to the order of things (i.e. as a practice that functions as a source of both domination and resistance), and (2) how popular religion – primarily in its Methodist sectarian variant – played an oppositional role in the historical process of class formation in England. ³ More to the point, I aim to show how Thompson’s MEWC embodies a sociological framework which is thoroughly Marxist and also sensitive to the role of religion (culture) in the formation of the working class, their consciousness and resistance.

On Methodisms, Religious Sects, and their Role in Working Class Conformity and Resistance in The Making of the English Working Class

Thompson studies the political history of religious custom in MEWC, paying particular attention to the role Methodism and its historical variants play in working class resistance and conformity at a crucial time of its historical development, 1780–1850. His position on the historical role of Methodism is a complex one. On the one hand, he asserts that Orthodox Methodism functioned as a regressive force that prevented revolution in England. This position is consistent with the works of Halévy (1971), Wearmouth (1945), and Perkin (1969), among others. But one can also read his portrayal of Methodism in MEWC, especially his portrayal of sectarian variants, as a historical source of protest and political activism. This latter, more unconventional, position of his historiography is also consistent with the historical works of Hobsbawm (1957, 1959), Wearmouth (1937, 1954, 1959), and Hammond and Hammond (1962, 1968), among others, who make similar observations in their respective works.

Historically, Methodism (founded in the early 1740s) undermined, if not diffused, the political potential of the working class at various stages of its formation. Orthodox Methodism, Thompson notes, ‘inhibited revolution’, was a ‘stabilising or regressive force’, called for the acceptance of suffering, order, and submission, lent itself to a ‘psychic process of counter-revolution’, reinforced ‘the blessedness of poverty’ within a context of rising capitalist exploitation, rural displacement, skill degradation, and economic disparity, and most detrimentally gave rise to fatalism, despite its hysterical and revivalist effects on the masses and its ‘dramatic offer of redemption’ (Thompson, 1966: 381, 47, 358, 380). Yet, Thompson is quick to remind us that the rebellious language of some Methodist sects also made it possible for emergent working classes to resist the transition from a moral economy of provision that reinforced the centrality of human reciprocity to a moral economy of the wage that undermined it. The political activism or rebellious activities of English workers in this period was often expressly driven by the ‘tension between “the kingdom without” and “the kingdom within”’ present in the religious discourse of the time (Thompson, 1966: 50). The Christian-communitarian and millennarial traditions in the Dissent of the Poor also inspired their rebellion against the experiences of economic exploitation and displacement, political oppression, and the cash-nexus the emerging socio-economic order imposed on them. And Thompson similarly reminds us that political reform efforts in the 19th century were suffused by the Christian message of brotherly love: ‘Many early Owenite societies and stores prefaced their rules with the line from Isaiah (XLI, 6): “They helped everyone his neighbour; and everyone said to his brother, be of good courage”’ (1966: 422).

True, the rise and birth of Orthodox Methodism (and the decline of the tradition of Dissent of the Poor) is historically marked by the hold of a theology of sin on society that disabled (or weakened) righteousness, this-worldly liberty, compassion for Christ’s poor, and communitarian justice, as the primary values of a Christian worldview. This shift correspondingly elevated the virtual acceptance of ruling power, other-worldly liberty (predicated on the notion of temporal suffering), and personal salvation as the new religious principles of orientation – not un-coincidentally at a time when the powers of the free-market, the corresponding laws that accompanied it, and an ideological state apparatus were expanding across the Commonwealth – thus revealing the historical role of Methodism as one of the dominant ideologies of the Industrial Revolution (1760–1850). Methodism functioned as an ideology of work-discipline, called for subordination to authority (in particular to the established order), and impressed upon its members the virtues of submissiveness. In doing so it paradoxically legitimated the emergence of a socio-structural arrangement, that is, capitalist civilization, that counted on the undermining of community, common good, and human dignity (these being Christian goals) for the benefit of a few profit-maximizing agents.

Notwithstanding this legacy of domination, Methodist resistance emerged and persisted through the 19th century as a result of cultural and political dynamics peculiar to its own historical unfolding. The Dissenting traditions of 16th- and 17th-century religious sects, for one, were preserved in some form or another in some of the more radical Methodist factions of the 18th and 19th centuries. The ‘Calvinist self-righteousness of the persecuted sect,’ the ‘free-thinking’ of Deism, the ‘communitarian ideals’ of brotherhood and sisterhood from the English Camisards, Moravians, and Quakers, and the ‘liberal principles’ of Socianism were key religious customs that played – often when coupled with the Libertarian tradition of the ‘Freeborn Englishman’ – a central role in the political agitations of the time. Among these, the English Jacobin Movement (1792–96), the 1819 Peterloo demonstrations in Manchester, and the Birmingham Political Union Movement in the early 1830s can be counted as significant events. These and other political and social agitations in the 19th century revolved around demands for economic or electoral reform. Although they did not always deliver desired political results, they shaped the political contention dynamics of the time. Methodism was also a politically self-conscious religion with origins in the Dissent of the Poor and a schism with the Church of England: It originated in contention and it established itself as the religion of the working classes. Its tradition of spiritual egalitarianism often came into conflict with the class hierarchy imposed on their brethren, the poor people. Its focus on evangelical conversion facilitated strong solidarity ties that made it possible for variant sects to weather times of distress and doubt. The Methodist penchant for field preaching and active organizing in both urban and rural areas – anathema to the established Church of England and other elite protestant sects – gave ‘confidence’ to working class communities (Thompson, 1966: 391). As an organized religion that promoted the ordination of laymen to preach and do pastoral work, Methodism produced community-minded leaders and imparted on its followers the capacity for political organization. Such political capacity was subsequently carried over into and embodied in working class activism: ‘Methodism provided not only the forms of the class meeting, the methodical collection of penny subscriptions and the “ticket”, so frequently borrowed by radical and trade union organizations, but also an experience of efficient centralized organization – at district as well as national level – which Dissent had lacked’ (Thompson, 1966: 43–4). ⁷ As an emergent custom Methodism and its sectarian variants also played a role in the historical dynamics that shaped English workers into a working class. Their Bible and Sunday school societies spread literacy across the kingdom, which in turn made it possible for a growing number of the poor and working classes to engage with – commonly in autodidact fashion – both Radical and reactionary publications (Thompson, 1966: 427, 713–20). A growing reading public also meant that those who remained illiterate benefited from political discussions and public readings at taverns, barbershops, and other public sites. As a cultural and social attainment, literacy had a paradoxical impact on working populations. On the one hand, the expansion of literacy meant the rise of Orthodox suspicion against anything rational/ intellectual, in particular politics, and most especially Radical dissent, although their utilitarian orientation toward ‘useful knowledge’ seemingly contradicted this anti-intellectual stand. On the other hand, it created an opportunity for more intellectually minded and free-thinking Methodists to embrace dissent, and, for many, radical politics. ‘The illiterate worker’, Thompson notes

might tramp miles to hear a Radical orator, just as the same man (or another) might tramp to taste a sermon. In times of political ferment the illiterate would get their workmates to read aloud from periodicals; while at Houses of call the news was read, and at political meetings a prodigious time was spent in reading addresses and passing long strings of resolutions. (Thompson, 1966: 712)

Thompson does not argue that Methodism and its sectarian variants generated political radicalism (or socialism) – much of his work demonstrates the opposite – but he does acknowledge that they were generative of social protest and class conflict. Nonconformity in Methodist sectarianism, he also notes, ‘contributed far more directly to the later history of trade unionism and political Radicalism than the orthodox Connexion’ (Thompson, 1966: 397, my italics). ⁸ Such contribution of religious nonconformity or contumaciousness is evident in the way religious language was used in the psalms and the initiation oaths of artisan trade unions (Thompson, 1966: 506–20); in the chosen pseudonyms of strikers (p. 393); in Chartist Hymns (p. 399); in the moral denunciations against orthodox religion by sectarian preachers (pp. 179, 398) and Chartist leaders (p. 399); in the pledges of conspirators (pp. 392, 512); and in the autodidactic Owenism of the 1830s with its brotherly community expectations and admonitions against the profit-motive (pp. 802–6). But this was also the case in the condemning language of Radical pamphleteers against orthodox Methodism such as William Cobbett’s (Thompson, 1966: 388, 395, 749); the righteous exhortations of the Radical Movement in London (470–1); and in the critico-Romantic poetry of William Blake (pp. 15, 52, 57, 119, 374; see also Thompson, 1993).

External and Internal Social Forces Behind Methodist Non-Conformity

Sectarian nonconformity, Thompson shows us, is best appreciated by coming to terms with the internal and external socio-historical forces that shaped it. Internally Methodism opened itself to variant Christian sects, including Dissenting ones. This varied nature and the history of libertarian responses to its authoritarian structure created an open space within it that made the oppositional embodiment of religious practices that undermined its Orthodoxy and fueled the resistance of some of its nonconformist members possible. At various stages of working class formation – starting in the 1790s and through the 1830s – Bible Christians, Independent, Jumper, Magic, Primitive, Quaker, Tent, and Unitarian Methodists broke away from and challenged the calls for compliance and submissiveness that came from Orthodox Methodists. ⁹ As relatively autonomous Methodist sects, they struggled against the incursions of the Industrial Revolution and confronted state-sponsored attacks on their communities. Thompson quotes at length, for example, an Independent Methodist clergyman’s moral condemnation against the state in 1819:

Unequal laws, and partial administration, plant a thorn in every breast, and spread a gloom in every countenance … It may be justly said of such rulers, Their vine is the vine of Sodom, and the fields of Gomorrah; their grapes are grapes of gall, their clusters are bitter; their wine is poison of dragons, and the cruel venoms of asps. But in the kingdom of the Messiah, peace flows as a river … The rod of God’s strength, which comes out of Zion, is not a rod of oppression. (Thompson, 1966: 393)

The Johannas, and Chiliast and Jumper Methodists – known as ranters for their more hysterical and fetishistic ritualism – found justification to their claims of temporal egalitarianism (based on the notion of spiritual equality) and their experiences of injustice in the language of the Old Testament (Thompson, 1966: 386–7). In their sermons and literature, landlords and government agents were identified as the ‘false shepherds of England’ who stood in the way of a New Jerusalem. The official clergy was similarly identified as the ‘Whore of Babylon’, Jezebel adulterers, and enslavers of the Children of Israel (Thompson, 1966: 386). This melodramatic and political language demarcated right from wrong and identified the poor and marginalized as the deserving people. In addition to legitimizing their claims it empowered their religious identities. Thompson notes that ‘derivatives’ of Johanna Southcott ‘passed through one aberration after another, showing themselves capable of sudden flare-ups of messianic vitality until the last years of the 19th century’ (Thompson, 1966: 387). These more hysterical and reactive religious postures survived into the 1830s, although by then they had significantly subsided. Their anomalous occurrence, Thompson notes, came ‘out of the Chiliasm of the poor’ (Thompson, 1966: 799). But there were also Methodist Chartists, Jacobins, Luddites, trade unionists, Unitarians, and weavers – that is, local workers, leaders, and preachers, more worldly (and intellectual) than otherworldly in their orientation – who participated in the politicization of their working class communities. Both religious and the more secular Methodist variants, additionally, had in common communitarian and millennarial currents. The former current was expressed in the language of brotherhood and sisterhood. The latter current gave hope to expectations of deliverance, reinforced notions of justice, compassion, and equality, and animated messianic political agitations. Both currents functioned as effective and powerful motivations, independently and when they came together, through which the working class poor could exercise ‘their historical agency’, however illusory or elusive its ultimate goals for change were (Thompson, 1966: 49–50). One may argue, as Thompson does, that these traditional currents made it possible for workers, especially the working poor, to open themselves to Owenism in the 1830s and subsequently to Chartism in the 1840s (Thompson, 1966: 803).

Externally the specter of the French revolution, its Jacobinical impulse in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the threat of Napoleonic Wars (1800–1815), and Ludditism (1811–1812) conditioned the extent and nature of Methodist influence. The rise of Orthodox Methodism was essentially a class response to the potential threat of political and economic egalitarianism presented by revolutionary developments in continental Europe and in England. But other historical events also shaped the politics associated with its name. While the historical relationship between political events and religion was fluid, Thompson identifies a dynamic that linked these phenomena for the period of 1790 through 1830. He identifies this formative period as being driven by an oscillatory dynamic between spiritual hope, hopelessness, and anguish that came before, during, and after experiencing significant episodes of political conflict in history. This latter relationship reveals an historical role for religion in the politics of rebellion and fatalism. The events, notwithstanding their varied meaning, became occasions through which religious identities assumed form. Generally under a favorable context the ‘active energies of the tradition are most apparent: Christian does battle with Apollyon [the State]’; and under an unfavorable context ‘quietism is in the ascendant, reinforcing the fatalism of the poor: Christian suffers in the Valley of Humiliation’ (Thompson, 1966: 34). The temporal relationships between religious emotion, event, and political radicalism were not always the same. But the historical constant was the intimate, if at times obscure, relationship between them. Accordingly, in the immediate aftermath of the French revolution one found ‘the millennarial hopes of Richard Brothers’; after 1795 and during the period of Napoleonic Wars the poor entered and experienced the Valley of Humiliation and a rise in religious revivalism (based on both spiritual anguish and millennarial expectations) took hold; the period of Luddite activity was followed by subsequent waves of religious revivalism (based on spiritual anguish) and then political radicalism; and during the 1816–17 rebellions that took place in Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and Nottinghamshire the language of political radicalism and religious revivalism (based on communitarian and millennarial expectations) converged in powerful ways in local resistance and demands for change (Thompson, 1966: 389). One pattern for political radicalism appears to have been more consistent than others. During ‘times of hardship or of mounting political excitement all “bent-up hostility” in the mind of the Methodist working man might breakout; and, with the rapidity of revivalist campaigns, Jacobin or Radical ideas might spread “like fire in the whins”’ (Thompson, 1966: 392). Such radical outbreaks clearly did not displace the processes already at work behind the penetration of capitalist relations. But they clearly showed that the English working class did not passively embrace the transformation of the economy that was in place. These and other forms of resistance were in part embodied through the political language – Christian and radical – that was available to them.

Methodist Dissent also found refuge and was transformed in working class communities where fraternal societies, prototypical working class associations, played a central role in the promotion of charity and comradeship, as well as the socioeconomic welfare of its members. In these self-sustaining communities Methodism’s Orthodox hold foundered, as Thompson explains, ‘in practice in a thousand ways under the criticism of impulse and experience: the working class community injected into the chapels its own values of mutual aid, neighbourliness and solidarity’ (Thompson, 1966: 389). In the context of strong working class communities Orthodox Methodism was resisted and transformed from within and without. From within, it encountered other cultural understandings in the minds of workers. Workers used their understanding of social rights (derived from ‘the language of “social man” of the philosophical Enlightenment’ and the language of affirmative rights from the Libertarian tradition of the Freeborn Englishman) that was historically available to them and in turn used these understandings to reinforce their communitarian and millennarial language and to promote their interests on self-governance, political equality, and fair wages (Thompson, 1966: 422). ¹⁰ They also appropriated the dissenting features from the sects (e.g. fellowship, free-thinking, spiritual egalitarianism, and anti-authoritarian impulses) to demand equality in political and economic processes and to resist the ideological conformity Orthodox Methodism called for (Thompson, 1966: 427). From without, Methodism encountered the affirmative experiences of community. As embodied and lived practice, Orthodox Methodism, to ‘varying degrees’, was

softened, humanized, or modified by the needs, values, and patterns of social relationship of the community within which it was placed. The Church, after all, was more than a building, and more than the sermons and instructions of its minister…. In the fluency of life, plain common sense, compassion, the obstinate vitality of older community traditions, all mingle to soften its forbidding outlines. (Thompson, 1966: 379–80)

Additionally, the experience and practice of mutual aid and cooperation made for strong social and political solidarity in these working class communities. This in turn made workers resistant and operated as an ‘ideological barrier’ against (as opposed to being a welcoming mat for) the new experiences the factory-system and cash-nexus imposed on them. In the end, the employment of dissenting cultural features – both secular and religious – the values of community, and social solidarity allowed working people to moderate and adjust (but not eliminate) the growing historical impact of individualism, laissez-faire government, and exclusionary politics on their lives. ‘By the 1840s’, Thompson notes that Orthodox Methodism ‘had lost any following among the poor’, having become by then the ideology of middle class merchants (Thompson, 1966: 427).

On the Significance of Experience: Its Transformational Effect on Popular Religion

For Thompson, working people’s capacity to creatively moderate and adjust to socio-structural conditions in their own cultural terms is what made it possible for them to play an historical part as agents (however restricted) in the formation of their identities as homo-economicus beings who resisted the authority of relations of production during times of crisis and in their community lives, but who also conformed to it. Of course, the history discussed thus far is not by any means ‘a “Methodist contribution” to the working class movement’. Yet, Thompson is sensitive to note that every Methodist

political rebel carried through into his radical or revolutionary activity a profound moral earnestness, a sense of righteousness and of ‘calling’, a ‘Methodist’ capacity for sustained organisational dedication, and (at its best) a high degree of personal responsibility. (Thompson, 1966: 394)

Time and time again the historical record points to ‘this form of “heresy”’ in resistance and rebellious event, especially for members of sectarian offshoots. Indeed, despite its influence as a dominant ideology that justified the exploitative practices of a free-market economy and the oppressive features of industrial work-discipline, working class communities ‘had come to combine their Methodism with their Chartism’ in the late 1830s and the 1840s (Thompson, 1966: 394). ¹¹ This historical development is a testament to the creative use of their cultural heritage (religious and otherwise), their ability to combine many of its elements in strategic ways, and their capacity to use cultural formulations in ways that allowed them to contend with the political demands of the time. Their experience of emergent political-economy conditions drew novel cultural responses from them. Living with these conditions compelled many English workers to use their religious language (often in combination with secular language) to resist the existing and impending detrimental effect such conditions posed to them. Thompson does show us this was especially the case for unorthodox Methodists, those who broke away from the Orthodox Connexion starting late in the 18th century. ‘The Methodist rebel’ – driven by the tension produced by ‘the arguments of secularism and the rhetoric of love’ – was after all ‘marked by a special earnestness and vigour of moral concern’, which did not always coincide with the interests of the Orthodox Church nor the emergent capitalist order (Thompson, 1966: 54).

Instances of resistance were an occasion to defend their claims as Christians and Freeborn Englishmen who deserved better. The following is illustrative of the modifying, if not transformative, effect of experience on religious custom: During the days of Chartism (1838–48) – an extended and intense period of organized political activism that called for electoral and parliamentary reforms (see endnote 11) – workers used the scripture to challenge Methodist orthodoxy and the political-economy order it supported and helped perpetuate through its calls for conformity and industrial ‘discipline’. A working man, Thompson notes, discovered in his reading of the Bible – in an apparent testimonial to the justifiable political activism of this period – ‘that the prophets stood between the oppressor and the oppressed, and denounced the wrongdoer, however rich and powerful’ (Thompson, 1966: 428). Faced with no access to political influence (e.g. no enfranchisement) and living and experiencing a context of economic exploitation and industrial work discipline, this historical character turned to the Bible not to find solace or turn the other cheek in abject fatalism, as often was the custom, but instead to find justification for political resistance against the order of things. The experience of economy by this historical actor prompted her to use and appropriate familiar religious language to scorn and resist through her scorn that which was imposed upon her by the rich and the powerful.

Experience, Thompson explains

walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide. People starve: their survivors think in new ways about the market. People are imprisoned: in prison they mediate in new ways about the law. In the face of such general experiences old conceptual systems may crumble and new problematics insist upon their presence. (1995: 11)

[It] arises spontaneously within social being, but it does not arise without thought; it arises because men and women (and not only philosophers) are rational, and they think about what is happening to themselves and their social world…. We cannot conceive of any form of social being independently of its organizing concepts and expectations, nor could social being reproduce itself for a day without thought. What we mean is that changes take place within social being, which give rise to changed experience: and this experience is determining, in the sense that it exerts pressures upon existent social consciousness [and] proposes new questions. (1995: 10)

‘Experience’ (we have found) has, in the last instance, been generated in ‘material life’, has been structured in class ways, and hence ‘social being’ has determined ‘social consciousness’ … people[, moreover,] do not only experience their experience as ideas, within thought and its own procedures … They also experience their own experience as feeling, and they handle their feelings within their culture as norms, familial and kinship obligations and reciprocities, as values or (through more elaborated forms) within art or religious beliefs … as affective or moral consciousness. (1995: 230–1)

In this theoretical exposition from POT Thompson proposes that experience always mediates the relationship between social being (structured existence) and social consciousness (a presumed awareness of how the world operates). Actors in this scenario are endowed with cultural agency. The social consciousness of an actor, which exercises an influence over the actor’s action, is determined by the conditioning effect of experience, which is ultimately open to interpretation by the actor, depending on what customs are available to her. When the experience of social being makes the customary ways of dealing with it ineffective, actors respond to it creatively, purposefully, and rationally in modified or innovated cultural form in order to overcome the ‘new problematics’ social being introduces. Social consciousness is intelligently and willfully mediated, arrived at, through experience, which ‘proposes new questions’ with which individuals can reflect on the situations impacting them to craft new interpretations and understandings of social being from within and available customary assumptions about it (religious and otherwise) before taking action to resist or accommodate to it in new ways. Most significantly, material life, while it ineluctably conditions experience, is necessarily experienced in subjective terms, and as such ‘handled’ in other than ideational terms. Experienced materiality is necessarily handled in affective and moral terms: As ‘kinship, custom, the invisible and visible rules of social regulation, hegemony and deference, symbolic forms of domination and resistance, religious faith and millenarial impulses, manners, law, institutions and ideologies – all of which, in their sum, comprise the “genetics” of the whole historical process … human experience, which itself (as distinctive class experiences) exerts its pressure on the sum’ (Thompson, 1995: 230).

We may conclude the following in light of Thompson’s position on customs (including religion) and experience. First, Thompson appreciates the role of cultured subjectivity in political mobilization. Customs – notwithstanding their potential as ideological determinants of the status quo – are key agentic factors in the politics of resistance because of how actors potentially use and interpret them in light of their daily or unexpected experiences. Popular religion, Thompson’s historical narrative reveals, possesses a heuristic capacity through which English workers could exercise their agency, if only by way of a politics of resistance that allowed for institutional survival although not revolutionary transformation. Second, lived reality entails and involves context-specific subjectivities and understandings that cannot be made sense of independent of the cultural perspective of participants and how rational actors potentially employ these. Thompson’s historical actors are constituted ‘by the various systems or structures that constitute their historical life space; what they think, feel and do is determined by the fact that they are Methodists, “freeborn Englishmen”, journeymen in a craft undergoing degradation, Londoners, and so on. But the determination is not mechanical’; it always takes place ‘within the constraints imposed and the possibilities opened up by the structures that constitute their subjectivity and their environment’ (Sewell, 1990: 65). If they make history, they are only able to do so through the very customs that constitute and reproduce the systems that condition them as actors. Marx’s aphorism readily comes to mind: People ‘make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx, 1935: 116). The circumstances in Thompson’s case of course refer us to cultural, consciousness, and structural ones. Third, customs condition experience but experience is also an opportunity to condition customs in new and strategic ways. Experience can propose new questions that make possible the generation of new accounts and forms of knowledge from within existing customary understandings and usages. As such, experience can work as an historical catalyst for the critical, moral, and agentic evaluation of structural conditions.

In the historical case outlined by Thompson in MEWC, the dominant ideological meaning of Orthodox Methodism became irrelevant for some workers in the face of (or while experiencing) extremely volatile political and economic conditions. Blind acceptance of authority and temporal suffering, personal salvation, and submissiveness became immaterial standards in their life orientation when confronted with conditions of ontological insecurity that required a collective response as opposed to an individual one. By defining in oppositional terms their religious vocabulary and combining it with secular terms that underscored social and affirmative rights (see endnote 10), English workers were able to collectively resist the conditions that conditioned their experience. Fourth, the social actors that are subject to historical experience are the very site of structural and consciousness contradictions and as such the potential source of resistance or social transformation given their rational and cultured capacity to contend with the socio-structural circumstances impacting them. In Thompson’s historical account the social consciousness (or action) potential of actors was not determined a priori by structured existence or the ideology of the times. Actors developed their consciousness and determined the course of their political actions in the context of historical possibilities and experiences. In the end, ‘the working class [w]as not just made by the Industrial Revolution … but also through … a reworking, in light of new experiences, of inherited cultural traditions’ (Johnson, 1979: 221).