In recent weeks, I have described how workers in the British Industrial Revolution (1750-1850) were wrenched out of their slow, agriculturally paced existence into an unpleasant, time-dominated factory life. Eventually, they accepted that pressured life.
I offered two forces that encouraged them to accept it. Now I have a third.
One was the discovery of things to buy. Basically, there wasn’t much reason to work hard if you didn’t have things you wanted to buy, so why work? It was not until attractive products (“gadgets”) turned up in local shops that people were willing to put in many hours. The second theory was that workers gradually recognized that if they were forced to work longer hours they would earn more money. (The two motivations mingled but are still different and at least the first is controversial.)
The third force was religion. Specifically, the Protestant religion. And more narrowly, Methodism.
We’re all familiar with Max Weber’s argument that Protestantism changed European behavior with its rigorous Calvinist doctrine of predestination. That is, God had chosen only some as the “elect,” who would be going to heaven. No one on Earth could know whether or not he or she was “elect” (except perhaps Calvin)[1]. This had consequences. If you were deeply disciplined and found the “calling” God had for you, and if you did not flaunt the wealth that derived from your discipline, you were probably going to be saved.
Despite some similarities, Methodism didn’t have that rigid idea of the elect. In fact, it was initially a movement within the complacent and traditional eighteenth-century Anglican Church. What the Methodist chapels offered was an exhilarating emotional experience. A person could embrace Jesus and wash away one’s sins (“in the blood of the lamb”) and then adopt a disciplined approach to life, with an active concern for others and periodic return to the excitement of salvation. This movement appealed to the masses more than to those already middle-class.
Historians have argued about the social impact of Methodist chapels. In 1906, Élie Halévy, a French historian who studied the English character, said that the docility that Methodism induced prevented the British masses from fomenting a revolution like the French revolution. British historian E. P. Thompson agreed that Methodism produced docile workers (especially since employers provided Sunday Schools that supported moral habits), but he thought the numbers were too small to prevent a French-style revolution. [2]
What Methodism did, in his view, was twofold. It shifted the underclasses’ attention to spiritual matters (“The Transforming Power of the Cross” is the title of one of his chapters). And it helped, over the long term, develop a solidity among those classes. Thompson saw Methodism not so much as the “politically regressive or ‘stabilising’ force” (Thompson’s quotation marks) that Halévy did but as “indirectly responsible for a growth in the self-confidence and capacity for organization of working people.”[3] Eventually, that would lead to class consciousness and to forming a class that would assert its rights.
For my goal of understanding workers and how they changed, Methodism may have made them more content with their lot. And therefore, better workers.
[1] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge [1930] 1992), 65.
[2] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House [1963]1964).
[3] Thompson, 42.
It appears to me that this author has applied Marxist theory to a
movement that she does not at all understand. Wesley wasn’t in the least concerned about “workers”; that’s certainly a Marxist construct. Rather, he was concerned about brothers and sisters in Christ, about people as people, not “the people.”
The concern of the Wesleyan movement was, and to the extent that it is still faithful, is to “spread Scriptural holiness across the land.” That’s probably a paraphrase of exactly what John Wesley said, but it’s close enough. His concerns were only incidentally economic. He, and those with him, wanted people, all people, to be able to live in harmony with God’s will. That would mean, among other things, obeying the Ten Commandments. If not stealing or coveting or chasing after your neighbor’s ass made you a “more docile worker” that certainly would have been an unintended consequence. Simply put, gainful employment was to make possible a family structure wherein God could be honored.
I think we are talking about man’s natural inclination to seek relief from dissatisfaction and to commune more closely with his Creator. Jefferson called it “the pursuit of happiness,” which to 18th Century man, daily facing existential threats, meant much more than acquiring the latest and greatest bobbles but did include the prosperity to actually improve one’s and one’s progeny’s security.
On into the 1960s I used to hear that Catholics would hopelessly overpopulate the predominantly Catholic countries. (I’ll get to the relevance to your blog in short order.) Even as a kid I was an empiricist and noticed that our many Catholic families didn’t seem to have more kids than Protestants. (Jews seemed to have fewer than Christians.) I was not a statistician or good at math and I’m not now, but I can read simple population data and see that Catholic countries have near ZPG rates. Now, to your post.
I would like to know what empirical research says about the influence of religious doctrine on everyday behavior. Two sources: maybe historical records; almost certainly modern behavioral psychology and economics.
My English grandparents, bedrock Anglicans, came to America and had 10 children. Their working class siblings in England in the mid to late 19th C became Baptists and Salvation Army.
At the risk of abandoning important qualifiers but for brevity, the question is how much of the motivation for joining new religions is protest against existing order and how much is the appeal of doctrine?
I meant to finish my post by saying we have to answer that question before we can credibly evaluate hypotheses about the role of doctrine in the work place.
You ask a great question, but can’t it be both protest and appeal? Push and pull? Humans seem to have a great attraction to religious or spiritual experience, and circumstances determine how that experience is expressed. Martin Luther was offended by indulgences, but much more went into his break with the Church than that. Protestantism broke down traditional hierarchies and thus very quickly anyone could become a preacher or start his own sect. Calvinism is perhaps the most difficult to explain because (at least according to Weber) it replaced the asceticism of the monk in his cell with asceticism “in the world.” I’ll have to think more about whether answering this question is necessary. If there is correlation between sect and behavior, there may well be causation, and that may be where theories come in.