Victorian Reverts
Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England
by Timothy Larsen
Oxford University Press, 2006
(317 pages, $110.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Harold K. Bush
The Victorian era in England featured growing religious doubts, increased secularization, and the large-scale abandonment of faith by the majority of the educated cultural elites. Attacks on Christianity came on several fronts: the widespread impact of Darwinian theories of evolution; the popularization of the German higher criticism of the Bible; the growing interest in theories of the unconscious and human psychology; rapid advances in astronomical knowledge; and the meteoric rise of interest in comparative religions.
This standard scholarly account has become so entrenched that it is rarely even questioned. Timothy Larsen challenges this common story, and does so brilliantly in Crisis of Doubt.
Doubting Crisis
“The nineteenth-century crisis of faith is a motif that has become vastly overblown,” he declares in the first line of the book. Larsen, a professor of theology at Wheaton College, begins his argument by documenting some of the ways in which the institutional teaching of the Victorian Age has fostered this motif and by illustrating the powerful “tendency in Victorian studies to separate religion from any positive connection with thought.”
He then tells his story from opposite assumptions, showing that, in fact, numerous Victorian intellectuals went through long periods of serious doubt, only to be drawn back to belief. A great many ended up reconnecting with their former faith—due, mainly, to its logical content.
Honest doubt was not the only model for the thinking Victorian, says Larsen: “There was also a crisis of doubt” itself. Thus does Larsen accomplish here revisionist history at its very best: one that illuminates the errors of a common paradigm, and turns that paradigm on its head, to argue the opposite viewpoint.
In the body of the book, he documents the “crisis of doubt” that seven prominent secularist leaders (and a number of others only briefly sketched) faced as their skepticism began to dissipate and they were drawn back to faith. These men were widely known and influential in Victorian Britain, but are now almost forgotten except by specialists.
For example, William Hone was one of the most famous freethinkers of his era, whose satires were so popular that they drew the wrath of the Anglican Church. He later realized the error of his atheistic ways and formally reconverted to an Evangelical brand of faith.
Larsen is careful to show that Hone’s conversion was intellectually motivated and highly reasonable, and not merely emotional. A number of compelling factors drew him back to belief: disillusionment with the lives of freethinkers; experiences of the paranormal; a fresh appreciation of the Bible; the character and teachings of Jesus; and the philosophical inadequacy of materialism.
Harold K. Bush teaches English at Saint Louis University. His newest book, Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age, will appear in the fall of 2006.
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