Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe

Religion in Urban Everyday Life: Shaping Modernity in Łódź and Manchester, 1820-1914

religion in urban everyday Life Shaping Modernity in Łódź and Manchester, 1820–1914 anDreas Kossert religion Versus urbanization/Modernization? the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were regarded in many Western countries as a time of religious crisis. the crisis was generally believed to be most acute in cities, especially among the working class. this article focuses on religion and its impact on everyday life in two major european industrial cities—Manchester in the West, and Łódź in Central europe.1 as gigantic centers of textile production, Łódź and Manchester, known as the “promised Land” and “Cottonopolis,” respectively, became mythical cities in their own regions. When it came to new methods of manufacturing, both cities stood at the forefront of technical revolution, especially in the cotton industry. in the span of a few decades in the nineteenth century, Łódź and Manchester attracted hundreds of thousands of new inhabitants seeking to create a new life out of the dramatic changes of the industrial revolution. Migrants of each social stratum focused their desires, professional and private, on making that myth a reality. as migration centers, Łódź and Manchester created and amalgamated ethnic and religious diversity. yet with this flood of newcomers, neither city could provide social continuity to established groups and institutions. during the nineteenth century, all public institutions had to be newly established, and both cities witnessed the emergence of new social strata. Manchester and Łódź thus functioned as spaces of modernization, with rapid innovation in the organization of and communication among social and ethnic groups, institutions , and individuals. steady migration caused the constant threat of ethnic and religious tensions to become virulent, which, in highly i4 Berglund_book.indb 35 2010.03.29. 19:29 36 andreas Kossert industrialized textile centers, could erupt in the form of a labor movement . during the nineteenth century, cities grew at a rate unprecedented in world history, and the population of second-tier cities like Łódź and Manchester proliferated. since the beginning of this social revolution, there have been two opposing views about its meaning for religious traditions . By the 1830s and 1840s, many voices proclaimed that cities were strongholds of irreligion. Most famous, perhaps, was Friedrich engels’ 1844 study of the english working class, in which he claimed that religion had effectively died out.2 While the comments of engels and others about the absence of religion dealt only with the working class, some observers saw the city in its entirety as a religious desert. one of engels’ contemporaries, a London clergyman, claimed in a sermon of 1844 that “the life of cities is essentially a worldly life,” whereas “the country with its pure serenity—oh, how unlike the hot thick breath of the towns—of itself inspires some feelings of religion.”3 other evidence of the time, however, indicates that religion in industrial cities was not swept away by secularization but rather was an integral part of modern urban society. one Manchester businessman, for instance, bitterly complained about the noise his workers made on a sunday evening, not in a pub, curiously, but in a chapel. “in the tavern there is no loud shouting or singing on sunday evenings, but in the preaching-home the noise is so great that until late at night the neighbors cannot sleep.”4 some people, instead of finding the worship service a nuisance or oddity, saw cities as dynamic centers of religious activism. to a scottish evangelical in the 1830s, Glasgow was the “Gospel City,” leading the nation in its religiously inspired reform movements and its evangelistic enterprises.5 of course, most of these commentators were deeply involved in the religious controversies of their time, and their commitments strongly colored their judgments. For instance, nonconformists’ enthusiasm for urbanization was influenced by their view that cities were a powerful counterweight to the religious traditionalism of the countryside. the same differences of interpretation can be found among modern historians and sociologists writing the religious history of the nineteenth century. the question of the causes and extent of secularization in Western societies has been hotly debated. the classical approach to the question, which goes back to Max Weber, views secularization as a i4 Berglund_book.indb 36 2010.03.29. 19:29 37 Religion in Urban Everyday Life universal process.6 exponents of modernization theory generally argue that religion was in severe decline in the cities of nineteenth and early twentieth century europe and that its strength lay in backward...