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Money Matters: The Neglect of Finance in the Historiography of Modern Christianity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Sarah Flew
Sarah Flew*
Affiliation:
The Open University
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Extract

The subject of religion and finance is seriously neglected within the historiography of the church during the modern period. This essay explores the pioneering ‘Financing of American Religion’ project and suggests possible fruitful avenues of research into the financing of British religion. By way of a case study, it analyses the size of the religious voluntary sector as a whole and then, within that, the individual finances of a range of Anglican voluntary organizations, all home missionary organizations within the diocese of London. Historians of religion have shown a certain reluctance to grapple with the columns of figures and minutiae of detail contained in cash books, general ledgers and annual reports. This essay serves as a brief taster of the wealth of material contained in such sources.

Type
Part II: Changing Perspectives on Church History
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 49: The Church on its Past , 2013 , pp. 430 - 443
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

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References

1 Howe, Daniel Walker, ‘Afterword’ to Noll, M. A., ed., God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790–1860 (Oxford, 2002), 295.Google Scholar

2 Chaves, Mark, ‘The Financing of American Religion Initiative Evaluation: Final Report’ (unpublished report, Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, November 1997), 1.Google Scholar

3 Ibid. 6–10.

4 Ibid. 13.

5 Noll, , God and Mammon, 7.Google Scholar

6 Ibid. 10.

7 Wilks, Michael, ‘Thesaurus Ecclesiae’, in Sheils, W. J. and Wood, D., eds, The Church and Wealth, SCH 24 (Oxford, 1987), xv-xlv, at xv.Google Scholar

8 Jeremy, D. J., Capitalists and Christians (Oxford, 1990), 419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 See two papers which do discuss the financial efficiency of pew rents: S. J. D. Green, ‘The Death of Pew Rents, the Rise of Bazaars, and the End of the Traditional Political Economy of Voluntary Religious Organisations: The Case of the West Riding of Yorkshire, c.1870–1914’, Northern History 27 (1991), 198–235; Brown, Callum G., ‘The Costs of Pew-renting: Church Management, Church-going and Social Class in Nineteenth-Century Glasgow’, JEH 38 (1987), 347–61.Google Scholar

10 Yeo, Stephen, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Morris, J. N., Religion and Urban Change: Croydon 1840–1914 (Woodbridge, 1992).Google Scholar

11 Owen, D. E., English Philanthropy: 1660–1960 (Cambridge, 1965), 3.Google Scholar

12 Hall, Peter Dobkin, ‘The History of Religious Philanthropy in America’, in Wuthnow, R. and Hodgkinson, V. A., eds, Faith and Philanthropy in America: Exploring the Role of Religion in America’s Voluntary Sector (San Francisco, CA, 1990), 38–62, at 38.Google Scholar

13 Rare examples of this approach include Garnett, Jane, ‘Gold and the Gospel: Systematic Beneficence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England’, in Shells, and Wood, , eds, The Church and Wealth, 347–58 Google Scholar; Green, S. J. D., Religion in the Age of Decline (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Owen, , English Philanthropy, 477.Google Scholar

15 There were 118 entries in 1874 and 120 in 1914.

16 The entry for 1874 is listed under its initial name of the East End Juvenile Mission.

17 Four of the societies, as listed in the directories, were the British and Foreign Sailors’ Society (established 1833), the Mission to Seamen (established 1856), the Presbyterian Missions (established 1847) and the Church Extension Association (established 1864). The fifth was the Salvation Army (established 1865 as the Christian Mission).

18 Christian Mission Magazine, July 1876, 172.

19 Davidson, R. T., The Life of Archibald Campbell Tait, 2 vols (London, 1891), 1: 261–2.Google Scholar

20 The printed annual reports of the LDHM can be found at the British Library and Lambeth Palace Library. The information has been supplement by details from the LDHM general ledgers (London Metropolitan Archive, DL/A/H/020/MS31994).

21 The printed annual reports of the BLF can be found at the British Library, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, Lambeth Palace Library and the National Archives (CRES 40/103). Figures are extrapolated from BLF Annual Report subscription lists. The number of donors and subscribers in 1873 was 2, 135; that for 1878 was 812.

22 The Origin of the Bishop of London’s Fund … and its Work for 50 Years (London, 1913), 5–6.Google Scholar

23 Ibid. 9.

24 The Official Yearbook of the Church of England (London, 1883), 175 Google Scholar; Blackmore, Henrietta, ed., The Beginning of Women’s Ministry: The Revival of the Deaconess in the Nineteenth-Century Church of England, Church of England Record Society 13 (Woodbridge, 2007).Google Scholar

25 A virtually complete but uncatalogued run of LDDI printed annual reports is held in the London archive of the Community of St Andrew (formerly the LDDI).

26 A full statistical analysis of the subscription lists will be found in my Open University doctoral thesis, provisionally entided ‘Philanthropy and Secularisation: The Funding of Anglican Voluntary Religious Organisations in London, 1860–1914’.

27 Chaves, ‘Financing of American Religion’, 15–16.

28 Hoge, Dean R. et al., ‘Giving in Five Denominations’, in Chaves, Mark and Miller, Sharon L., eds, Financing American Religion (Walnut Creek, CA, 1999), 3–10 Google Scholar. For more information on the importance of teaching the doctrine of Christian stewardship in relation to levels of giving, see Flew, ‘Philanthropy and Secularisation’.

29 Chaves, , ‘Financing of American Religion’, 19–29.Google Scholar