Excerpt from The Religion in the Labour Movement: International Conference on Labour and Religion Held in Browning Hall, Walworth, London, September 1-5, 1919
The ascendancy of Labour in the life of to-day is obvious. Announced a generation ago, disbelieved, then derided, now dreaded, it is everywhere tangibly present. It holds in its hands the levers of the subtle mechanism which supplies our food, our shelter, and every means of communication. The world, always dependent upon Labour, was not aware of the fact. Now it is aware: and Labour is aware.
Side by side with this newborn ascendancy, there stands an ancient and august Interest which claims now, as ever, to dominate not Labour alone, but every other phase and function of the life of man, because relating him to that which is greater than the world and vaster than the universe. And the question asserts itself: How do these powers stand to each other to-day? What is the mutual relation of Labour and Religion?
Too often the relation is conceived in a very external way. As was once the case with direction in the State and in industry, so religion is supposed to be imposed or urged upon the working classes by their social "betters." And working men who have long attained their majority and renounced tutelage in things political and economic, strangely retain the old attitude in matters of faith and worship. Religion is to them a sort of product manufactured in church and chapel and college, and supplied to them from these centres, and they receive it or reject it as a thing supplied from without. On the Continent religion has been too largely the bulwark of the upper and official classes, a convenient department of state for the buttressing of the established order. In this country, thanks to the variety and vitality of the Free Churches, the official grip has been much slackened. But even in this country, whatever be the numbers of the working class in attendance on this or that denomination, organised religion has been to a very great extent under middle and upper class direction. English religion has been painfully bourgeois. It has rarely or never been frankly proletarian.
Now, when Labour is every day becoming more self-conscious, we cannot expect it to continue in religious vassalage to the classes whose yoke in other spheres it is resolutely breaking. Nor can the intelligent working man overlook one very terrible fact. For well nigh a hundred years, since the first Reform Bill, the church and chapel-goingg people have had absolute political and industrial control of the people of Great Britain; and at the close of their ascendancy what do we find? Nearly one-third of the people insufficiently fed, insufficiently clad and insufficiently housed, slums blotting our cities and villages, and at the same time unprecedented aggregations of wealth. The planting of a few missions, more or less imperfectly equipped, in the back streets of our great cities, or the establishment of a few remedial agencies here or there, cannot for a moment outweigh the damning fact.
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