ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how religiosity was expressed and how organized religion shaped public life. The Anglican Church dominated the religious landscape. Descriptions by middle-class observers of declining working-class urban religiosity need to be seen not as objective descriptions but as symptoms of middle-class anxiety, anxiety intensified by the Victorian belief that cities were inherently immoral spaces. Britain became a religiously pluralistic though still predominantly Christian country, one in which the Church of England competed with other Protestant churches and with the Roman Catholic Church for believers and participants. Concentrated in the clothing industry, immigrants tended to be politically radical, active in trade unions, and more religiously observant than English Jews. Theosophy was a blend of spiritualism, eastern religions, and scientific rhetoric that appealed to those who found western Christianity lacking. In the later Victorian period, Britain also had a very small but high-profile group of nonbelievers or atheists, those who actively rejected religion and denied the existence of God.
