Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (review)

The Victorian crisis of faith has long dominated discussion of religion in nineteenth-century England, so much that it is viewed almost as a rite of passage to modernity. With such volumes as Susan Budd's Varieties of Unbelief (1977) and A. N. Wilson's God's Funeral (1999) looming large on bookshelves, a casual reader—and indeed many scholars—might be forgiven for concluding that the Victorian age brought the demise or at least the serious decline of Christianity. Timothy Larsen would like to argue otherwise. In this provocative volume, Larsen proposes to study not the crisis of faith but rather the Victorian "crisis of doubt," by which he means the trend—and he takes pains to establish it as a trend—for Victorian unbelievers to find their way back to Christianity or at least some semblance of orthodox religious belief after flirtations (and even long-standing marriages) with secularism. He bases his argument on seven case studies of prominent Secularist leaders and "heroes of Freethought" who (229), returning to Christianity in the prime of life, devoted their remaining years to Christian preaching and public activism. The examples of William Hone, Frederic Rowland Young, Thomas Cooper, John Henry Gordon, Joseph Barker, John Bagnall Bebbington, and George Sexton help Larsen put the Victorian crisis of faith in proper perspective: "Many more Victorians were reading about, talking about, and perhaps worrying about the crisis of faith than were actually experiencing it themselves" (11).

Larsen devotes seven of his ten chapters to individual faith biographies. These case studies were not hard to find; his reconverts left ample paper trails documenting their struggles with both skepticism and Christian belief. Private letters and published treatises, supplemented by articles in the religious and secularist press, provide clues to the timing, reasons for, and results of these reconversions. Motivations for reconversion varied widely. Larsen stresses the intellectual nature of many reconversions rather than the emotional or social dimensions. Fears of damnation or pressure from family and friends did not appear to draw these men back. For many, Larsen emphasizes, Christianity was simply "more intellectually convincing than unbelief" (17). For Bebbington, a prominent leader of the freethinking movement and editor of the Propagandist journal, it was popular skepticism's lack of culture and intellectual depth that eventually led him back to Christianity.

Larsen also probes the affective side of reconversion, as in the biography of Barker, a powerful personality with an active mind, who established a reputation in 1841 as a "fearless inquirer after truth" when he left his preaching position in the Methodist New Connexion in a protest over baptism (143). After a career in the United States as a freethinking lecturer and radical abolitionist who openly declared that "all religion was immoral" (155), Barker gradually found his way back to orthodox Christianity in the 1860s. His decision, Larsen argues, grew from the conviction that "instincts, feelings, sensibilities, and affections were germane when weighing the truthfulness of a proposition . . . that his moral instincts . . . were truer guides than seemingly irrefutable cold logic" (167).

But sometimes the clues are murky, making it difficult to establish with certainty what someone actually believed and why. Suppression of information was a significant challenge. As Larsen observes, not only have present-day historians ignored these reconversion stories, but Victorian Secularist leaders also exerted concerted efforts to "downplay, discredit, or simply ignore" their significance (231). Furthermore, reconversion stories, much like conversion stories, rely on hyperbole for effect and require careful cross-referencing with other evidence. To his credit, Larsen is honest when doubts linger about what can be claimed with confidence. Nineteenth-century religious skepticism, like religious faith, was fluid, and at a given moment these men might lean one direction or another without leaving a clear trail of evidence. Larsen responds with painstaking research. He carefully demonstrates, for example, that the "waggish radical" Hone (17), who gained notoriety in the 1810s for...