Nineteenth-Century British Secularism

"Michael Rectenwald's Nineteenth-Century British Secularism is an impressively lucid, balanced, and wide-ranging engagement with the implications of recent challenges to both modern secularism and the secularisation thesis for our understanding of Victorian literature and culture. Placing the often-overlooked organised Secularist movement at the centre of the narrative enables Rectenwald to advance us beyond critical cliches about Victorian doubt and a 'crisis of faith' and to do justice to the prescience and complexity of Victorian thinking about the concepts of secularism and secularisation." (Sara Lyons, Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Kent, UK and author of Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater: Victorian Aestheticism, Doubt and Secularisation (2015))

Nineteenth-Century British Secularism offers a new paradigm for understanding secularization in nineteenth century Britain. It argues that George Holyoake's Secularism represents a historic moment of modernity, a herald for understanding secularization and modern secularity.Nineteenth-Century British Secularism offers a new paradigm for understanding secularization in the nineteenth century. It addresses the crisis in the secularization thesis by foregrounding a nineteenth-century development called 'Secularism' – the particular movement and creed founded by George Jacob Holyoake from 1851 to 1852. Nineteenth-Century British Secularism rethinks and reevaluates the significance of Holyoake's Secularism, regarding it as a historic moment of modernity and granting it centrality as both a herald and exemplar for a new understanding of modern secularity. In addition to Secularism proper, the book treats several other moments of secular emergence in the nineteenth century, including Thomas Carlyle's 'natural supernaturalism', Richard Carlile's anti-theist science advocacy, Charles Lyell's uniformity principle in geology, Francis Newman's naturalized religion or 'primitive Christianity', and George Eliot's secularism and post-secularism.