Religious Lives: Sermons and Secularization

This paper will challenge the suggestion that the lives of Britons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were becoming more secular, using the evidence of sermons and the growth of a sermon culture. The period 1689-1901 was undoubtedly a ‘golden age’ of sermons in which sermons played a more central role in the lives of people than before or since. It has been estimated that about 250 million individual sermon ‘events’ occurred in this period, and about 85,000 individual sermons were printed. Many of the latter were reprinted and collected together in multivolume works. Sermons were enormously popular – and talented preachers were widely celebrated. Guides to churches often indicated the places where as sermon could be heard, much as modern guides suggest the best clubs and bars. Much of the experience of Puritan, evangelical lives were generated and fuelled by sermons. Moreover, sermons undoubtedly helped to endorse the identity of minority religious denominations, hence Protestant dissenters’ sermons far out-strip their percentage of the population which they constituted. In this respect, sermons contributed to the stories that dissenters told one another about their identity.

The material culture of the age was also dominated by sermons: churches were built as places for preaching and the print and publishing industry relied heavily on sermon sales. In short the evidence is plentiful that sermons, long overlooked as a source for historians and historical theologians, played a dominate role in religious lives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All this raises the question of the degree to which we can describe this period as one in which secularization was occurring or in which secularization has any meaning for the lives of men and women who might eschew church attendance but who would buy sermons in large numbers.