‘In the olden days, everyone believed in God’

No, they didn’t

I just heard one of those asides in a conversation about modern spirituality, that went, ‘Of course in the olden days everyone believed in God, and went to church.’

There’s an analogue between the unchurched, who think they know what Christianity is, and what I guess I’ll call the ahistorical, who think they know what things were like before us. That myth, about old-timey people being religiously credulous (because they were backward), and us not being like that (because we’re enlightened), is common. It’s like thinking people in the olden days were small, and we’re big, because the human organism has somehow advanced. That second myth, whose origins are in Victorian starvation, is easy to dispel, given the access we have to medieval skeletons; in the fourteenth century, when people were eating enough, they were our size, and in the nineteenth, when many of them weren’t eating enough (and we know from Rowntree’s poverty mapping that they weren’t), they were smaller than they should have been.

As for people going to church all the time, and uniformly believing in God (which is not the same), it’s not true. Granted, there are upswings and downswings in formal religious affiliations, and in the short horizon of popular memory it can certainly look this way. But over human history it just isn’t true.

Some spot-checks will show this.

In the 20 years after World War I, for example, professed affiliation with Christian denominations collapsed. It had been whittled away already, partly by interest in alternatives like spiritism. The ghastly lethality of the war drove an enormous surge in non-traditional religiosity, that persisted, despite a counter-surge in Christian revivalism, all through the 1920’s.

The later Victorians were interested in spiritism too, on a big scale. They couched it as a scientific field of study. They formed and funded ambitious investigatory societies, subscribed to by luminaries like Conan Doyle, Crookes, and Balfour. This was on the back of a general falling-away from traditional forms of faith that was already well underway. Scholarship is abundant just on the great and documentable crisis of English faith in the 1870’s.

A century before, to spot-check another generation, there’s the famous deism, and general agnosticism, that we associate with the Englightenment. Thinking of inherited religion as irrational was pervasive. Guess how many people came forward for the sacrament at St. Paul’s, London, on Easter Sunday in 1800. Answer: 7.

And so on, backward in time. Why did Edgar revivify the life of the English church in the 950’s? Because Christianity had been moribund for generations. His historian and propagandist, Aethelwold, tells us so, and the historical record supports this. Many churches and altars – so much for myths about the middle ages – had indeed been abandoned since the generation of Bede.

Edgar’s sponsorship of the Benedictine monastic foundations had much to do with his need for a civil service as he united the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The Victorian public were well served by the parish system, too, operated through the established (read: state-supported) Anglican clerical institutions. So, yes, sometimes a lot of people went to church. Did all of them? No, never. Did all of them also ‘believe in God’ (whatever that means)? No, and they say so in their literary records.

Here’s a point to consider, and I myself am just old enough to remember first-hand evidence of this:  Our elders early in the 20^th century did not talk as much as we do about ghosts, or angels, or aliens (that proxy for the paranormal). They did not espouse Reiki, or crystal healing, or spirit guides like we do either. They’d think this was foolishness (and my elders used that word).

By comparison, our generation is the hyper-credulous one, sometimes to the point of superstition.

P.S.: If you count new, non-denominational, forms of Christianity (granted, the traditional denominations are having problems), it’s actually the case that we go to church MORE than they sometimes did, not less.