ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to be helpful to religious organisations, and to all voluntary organisations which aspire to some active, critical dialogue with society rather than to comfortable co-existence in its interstices. The main elements towards an answer which this book arrives at are as follows: religion and the consequences of what religious organisations chose, or were constrained, to be; religion and absolute and relative deprivation for most people; religion and changing patterns of local middle-class and working-class presence; religion and changing modes of capitalist organisation, in production, distribution and leisure; and religion and the altering presence of the State and centre in relation to the life of a locality. ‘Religion’ is never coterminous with religious organisations; but c. 1890 in Reading, religion was dominated by continuous organisations such as churches and chapels.
