Tarquin O’Flaherty continues his series by looking at the relationship between church state and power

An extraordinary thing happened in England in the wake of the Enclosures; the common people began to believe in miracles.  They began to believe that in a very short time, all inequity would be swept away, to be quickly replaced by some sort of grand Utopian perfection.  Up to a point, some of this belief was justified.  Robert Owen’s New Lanark experiments had clearly shown that factories could be managed profitably without exploiting the workforce.  Societies, guilds and groups representing the workers had begun to form and to exercise some form of influence over employers.  There was constant agitation, with great support from the employer class for the right to vote.  The peasantry seriously came to believe that this force was now unstoppable and that it was only a matter of time before employers became aware of this too.  And now, with the Reform Bill of 1832 granting the vote to the new middle class, the stage was set and the door open for the expected Utopia to sweep in.

This was all very Biblical, an unstoppable steamrolling force which was about to change the world forever.  The peasant ear was attuned precisely to this idea, having been educated for a century in the idea of God, the Second Coming and the notion of the meek inheriting the earth.  How could they fail?  Robert Owen himself had said the millenium is upon us.  All we’ve got to do is wait.  The overworked, the exploited, the downtrodden desperately needed to believe in something.  Effectively abandoned by both the Church of England, which saw itself as an a private club for the privileged upper-class, and equally by William Cobbett’s ‘…nasty, canting, dirty, lousy Methodists…’ who thought that fighting to overthrow an established system was ‘…infidel and irreligious…’ the working classes looked elsewhere for deliverance from hardship.

Robert Owen, a good and honourable man, nevertheless upset a lot of important people with his radical views.  Observing his own workforce and how well they reacted to being treated in a civilized manner, he came to the conclusion that the vast percentage of ‘bad’ people were only bad because they had been treated badly.  Treat them well and the better side of their nature is encouraged.  This was diametrically opposed to the commonly held view amongst people with money that the lower orders were there to be distrusted, exploited, used and discarded.

Owen’s belief was formed through observation.  He believed that a man’s character is formed for him by the hardship he is forced to endure.  If economic conditions deny him the means to feed his family, then even the very best of men might steal.  The Church on the other hand believed that man’s character is formed by him and nothing will change that.  Owen’s view, despite the evidence to support it, was seen by the Nonconformist Church as denying the idea of original sin and therefore profoundly un-Christian.