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New Giants: Church, Welfare and Future

Nick Spencer

Introduction
TThe churches in Britain conceived, gestated, delivered, and then nurtured the welfare state. The welfare state then turned round and killed them. These two statements are wrong on many levels and in many details. They will annoy everyone – believers (‘the churches in Britain are not dead!’) and non-believers (‘what about the many non-Christian contributions to the development of the welfare state?’) – alike. They ignore the single biggest factor in the creation of the British welfare state: warfare. And they invite a whole series of conclusions, such as ‘Christians shouldn’t support the welfare state’, or ‘We need to dismantle the welfare state for Christian revival’, that are palpably untrue, not to mention calculating, self-serving and immoral. But they are nonetheless, in broad, descriptive, historical outline, true. And so, they are offered partly as a provocation, a fresh way of understanding the processes of secularisation, and partly as a suggestion for how to navigate the future of Christianity in Britain.


This essay has four parts to it. The first will take the reader through the historic arguments concerning the relationship between churches and welfare, albeit very briefly. Part two then looks at how these effected the secularisation of the nation. Part three explores where we go from here and, in particular, how the shape of what we include within ‘welfare’ has changed. Finally, part four looks at what particular perspective the churches bring to this new state, and what this means for the future of the church in twenty-first century Britain.


The churches and the formation of the welfare state

In the first half of the nineteenth century, prominent Christians were among the loudest voices against any form of state provision of ‘welfare’ (the term is anachronistic, but we can live with it for the sake for familiarity). Even at that time, however, there were Christian voices making the opposite case and, over the course of the nineteenth century, an improbable combination of High Church Tories, Christian radicals, Methodists, and (Anglo-)Catholics railed against the effects of economic liberalism on the ‘condition of England’. Things finally began to change in the last decades of the century. The longstanding conviction that a Christian society demanded a Christian state came to be understood to mean the kind of state that actively pursued the causes that heretofore had been the remit of the churches. Social welfare was the business of Christian politics and not just Christian charity.

 

There were various strands to this. Perhaps the most prominent was nonconformist. In 1889, the Wesleyan Methodist, Hugh Price Hughes, one of the most influential nonconformists of the late nineteenth century, captured wider opinion when he insisted on the need for a political response to what he called the ‘nine social evils’. ‘A profound instinct has taught the masses of the people that if Christianity is not applicable to politics, Christian is an antiquated delusion’, he wrote in Ethical Christianity. This was part of a slow change in nonconformity in the late nineteenth century in which ever more believers came to view legislation as a legitimate and effective weapon in the battle against sin. The established church was slower to throw its considerable weight behind state-based welfare, but it still moved in that direction. The Settlement Movement, heavily populated with pious young university educated men, encouraged graduates to live alongside the urban poor. The Christian Social Union, although largely apolitical and uninterested in policy responses, helped associate the established church with a systematic analysis of the nation’s social problems. The Revd William Blackley wrote an article for the journal The Nineteenth Century in which he proposed a system of (in its title) ‘National Insurance: A Cheap, Practical and Popular Means of Abolishing Poor Rates’, a momentous step on the road to political reform. (Fifty years later, William Beveridge acknowledged Blackley as ‘a prophet not without honour’). British Catholicism was also aligning towards state intervention. Leo XIII’s important encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) gave papal imprimatur to the idea that the state had responsibility for social safety nets, albeit one tempered by the principle of subsidiarity. The majority of Catholics in mainland Britain were immigrants, with many employed as low and semi-skilled workers, and so legal protection of their rights and security became an important cause, championed both by Catholic politicians and church leaders, not least Cardinal Henry Manning who played a vital role in the London Dock Strike of 1889. Such theological and ecclesiastical commitments cashed out politically, initially in the Labour Church movement of the 1890s, then in the great reforming Liberal administration of 1906, and most significantly through the Labour Party, which developed a sympathy to Christianity often absent in socialist parties on the continent. Keir Hardie, the country’s first Labour MP and leader, was a Christian convert, who wrote in his book From Serfdom to Socialism that although the Mosaic land laws, the ban on usury and Israel’s treatment of debtors ‘cannot perhaps be described as socialistic in the modern sense of the word, they were quite as drastic in their way as are many of the socialistic proposals of our own day’.1 This early Labour link had decayed a little by the 1940s, but most of the politicians who implemented the post-war welfare reforms came from churchgoing family backgrounds, carried the ethics of their upbringing into their political careers, and saw it as their duty to implement those ambitions through political means. To quote Clement Attlee, they believed (and implemented) ‘the ethics of Christianity [rather than] the mumbo jumbo’.This traffic was both ways. A number of prominent ecclesiastics, William Temple supreme among them, were closely associated with the Labour movement and supported the emerging welfare consensus. Temple coined the term welfare state in 1928, advocated a welfare settlement in his wildly popular wartime publication Christianity and Social Order, and chaired several large public meetings in which the Beveridge report was enthusiastically discussed. More broadly, rhetoric around ‘Christian civilisation’ reached a peak in the 1930s and early 1940s. The British were fighting not just to defeat fascism but to protect, preserve, and perpetuate Christian civilisation. Even open atheists got in on the act. ‘We have got to be children of God’, George Orwell wrote in Time and Tide in April 1940, ‘even though the God of the Prayer Book no longer exists’.2 So it was that the churches openly welcomed the newly founded welfare state. They had reservations but, for the most part, most Christians (and indeed most non-Christians) in Britain, saw it as the natural conclusion of a project that, in one sense went back decades, and in another sense millennia. It was entirely right and proper that a nation that claimed the mantle of Christian faith and ethics, now, finally, intentionally, systematically, and comprehensively took responsibility for the welfare of its citizens.


The welfare state and the secularisation of Britain
The classic explanation for secularisation – that societies naturally lose their religion as they become richer, more industrial, more educated, more technologically advanced, and more rational – has come under strain in recent decades. Accordingly, other theories have taken a place alongside this one. One idea that has grown in importance of late relates to the topic of welfare. The social scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart developed an idea which has become known as Existential Security Theory, in which religious belief is essentially a function of security. Societies facing higher levels of risk are likely to be more religious, whereas those with credible social and economic security are less so. A more refined version of this theory has been termed the Governmental or State Thesis, which contends that ‘state welfare spending has a detrimental, albeit unintended, effect on long-term religious participation and overall religiosity.’ The hypothesis here is that the bigger the state, and especially the more extensive its provision of welfare, the smaller need and/or space there is for religious belief, practices, and institutions. Social scientists Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde have tested this thesis empirically by comparing levels of state welfare spending with levels of religious attendance around the world, and while neither factor is perfect, their comparison is strongly indicative. As Gill and Lundsgaarde comment, ‘there is a strong statistical relationship between state social welfare spending and religious participation and religiosity.’3 The sheer size and complexity of secularisation notwithstanding, this theory has both a strong theoretical and empirical claim, and helps explain the remarkably rapid secularisation of later twentieth century Britain. Before the point at which the state started to take direct responsibility for welfare provision, the churches’ charitable work was enormous. To take only one example, by 1910, the Church of England alone counted over 74,000 district visitors in England and Wales.4 It is no accident that nineteenth century Britain did not secularise in the way that twentieth century Britain did, despite experiencing huge industrial, educational, technologically, and economic progress. The reason lies in the fact that however much more ‘developed’ the nation had become, the churches were still active, central and vital to the welfare of community and nation. That changed in the twentieth century. Old habits die hard, and the change was slow at first. By the 1960s, however, traditional charitable giving, volunteering, activities, and institutions were beginning to decline. There seemed little point in paying twice for welfare – through taxation and donation – and it certainly didn’t need to be delivered twice. ‘Charity’ and ‘voluntary work’ were nothing to aspire to in an age of state welfare, and both were sometimes spoken with a sneer, as if to indicate their inferiority to ‘professional’ and ‘statutory’ services. The public presence of churches accordingly changed in two ways in particular. Firstly, when it came to welfare in general, the church’s role became primarily in holding the state to account and ensuring it delivered on its promises. As William Temple wrote during the war, looking forward to a post-war welfare state and the questions that would raise about the role of the church, the church had to point to ‘facts’ pertaining, for example, to poverty, malnutrition or chronic unemployment, with which ‘the Christian conscience cannot be content’. Its job was to draw attention to such ‘evils’ rather than address them itself. After all, how could it possibly hope to compete with the tax-funded, wellfunded, professionalised, and regulated services provided by the state. Secondly, where the church did retain a direct role, it was for the ‘moral hygiene’ of the people, in particular for family and sexual behaviour. The church had never not been interested in these issues, of course. But, historically speaking, its teaching about sexual propriety, marital fidelity, and parental discipline had always taken place alongside enterprises to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Now that the state had the responsibility for the latter, the church was left preaching a gospel of personal morality. The result was not a happy one. The liberal sexual revolution of the 1960s made a mockery of the church’s attempts to maintain traditional moral values and the vastly attenuated role the church now played in housing, feeding, clothing, and healing people made its message of God’s unconditional love somewhat less credible.

The importance of this last point is hard to overstate. Words attain their meaning by drawing on background conditions. The phrase ‘I love you’ achieves its credibility primarily on the basis of the patterns of behaviour in which it is enveloped. The person who says ‘I love you’, and then shows themselves wholly indifferent to your needs, probably doesn’t love you very much. The same goes for the phrase ‘God loves you’. In reality most people first came (and come) into contact with the love of the God through the love of the godly, and if the opportunities to communicate that love are removed across society – worse, if they are removed to leave only sexual-moralising in their place – the message of God’s unconditional love becomes much harder to convey and to believe.


The churches and the new giants
Where does this leave the churches in the future? The first thing to say is, the route here is not and cannot be the route back. Modern states cannot survive without extensive state-based welfare provision. When the Big Society idea was enjoying its alltoo- brief moment in the political sun in 2010-12, and religious figures were called to give evidence before the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee on the subject, they said that, while they appreciated the attention now being paid to church social action, it would be completely irresponsible for the government to reduce its responsibilities and rely on faith groups to fill the gaps left by spending cuts.5 If the churches hadn’t been able to cope with the sheer weight of social need 120 years ago, they were hardly likely to do so today. That recognised, there are two reasons why this take on welfare, church and secularisation is relevant. Neither is especially happy, but that doesn’t mean we can shy away from them.


First is the state of public finances and services. In the words of Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Britain ‘enter[s] the middle years of the 2020s in worse economic straits than at any time I recall’. More specifically, our creaking, burdened public services come at the time of the highest ever peacetime tax take. The reasons for this unhappy combination are complex – low growth, high levels of debt to service, unusually high working age welfare benefits, seemingly endless health care costs, no wriggle room left in defence cuts. Whatever they are, the result is the same.

 

To quote the famous physicist, Ernest Rutherford, ‘We have run out of money. It’s time to start thinking.’ Second is the changing shape of welfare. Some welfare pressures, like health, pensions, and education, remain the same as they were in the 1940s. Some, like the rise in in-work benefits are new but leave little space for the churches to do anything about. Some, however, are new and highly relevant to the church’s mission and message.

Take loneliness for example. According to the ONS, around 6% of adults in Great Britain report feeling lonely often or always, a further 20% saying they feel lonely some of the time, and fully 46% of people with disabilities say the same.6 The problem extends beyond Britain. Indeed, so significant an issue is it that the World Health Organization has launched a three-year Commission on ‘Social Connection’ on the grounds that ‘loneliness and social isolation have serious impacts on our physical and mental health’.7 The issue is on the UK government’s agenda. Starting with its 2018 cross-departmental ‘strategy for tackling loneliness’,8 the government has placed an emphasis on, among other things, ‘empower[ing] local communities to increase volunteering and reduce chronic loneliness’.9 Loneliness was conspicuous by its absence among Beveridge’s Five Giants or in the text of Social Insurance and Allied Services, but it is now a welfare issue. Or take mental health. Loneliness, as the WHO Commission recognises, is a major contributor to mental ill-health but it is hardly the only one. Reported levels of mental ill-health have risen steadily over the last twenty years, in particular among younger people, among whom it has doubled.10 Already a worrying trend, this was supercharged by Covid. According to the BMA, mental health services in England alone received a record 5 million referrals in 2023, up 33% from 2019.11 Perhaps most alarmingly, in the words of one APPG, ‘mental health outcomes have not improved despite substantial investments in services and research’.12 There are various reasons for this and one of them, emphasised by the APPG report, is that ‘the dominant biomedical model of mental health care has led to over-reliance on psychiatric drugs’, prescription of which has increased more sharply even then mental health diagnosis. This had come at the expense of ‘effective social, community and relational approaches’, and of failing ‘to address the underlying social, economic and psychological determinants of mental distress’. As a result, its recommendations are for a radical shift towards ‘more social interventions’, such as social prescribing and community-based mental health hubs.

 

Or, finally, take ‘relationships education’. The APPG report just cited remarked how closely linked ‘toxic relationships, family dysfunction and breakdown, abuse, [and] bullying’ are to mental ill-health. Social media, rather predictably, does not help.13 Schools are being compelled to pick up a lot of the pieces in this area. In the words of one recent BBC report, ‘Schools across the UK are under unprecedented pressure as they struggle to address a range of social issues unrelated to teaching.’14 Those problems and needs are various, and often alarmingly practical and basic. The resulting pressure on teachers, already under strain, is enormous and has led to the need for ever more ‘welfare offices’ and ‘emotional health and wellbeing services’ – whose funding is predicably precarious – to step in and help.


These three issues – loneliness, anxiety or depression, relationships education – are welfare issues today, in a way they were not in the 1940s. Were a modern-day Beveridge to be enumerating five new giants today, they would be among them. Sadly, old giants still stalk the land, not least ‘want’, with around 30% of children living beneath the poverty line.15 The churches do, should and will continue to campaign about such old giants. Indeed, they will continue to do something about them, housing breakfast clubs and food banks across the country. But they are also (rightly) of the opinion that they shouldn’t have to. If the state cannot engineer the end of child hunger in a country as rich as Britain, it is hard to see what legitimacy it has. Few people today, however, think it is the state’s role to end loneliness, anxiety and depression, or to help people relate to one another well. And while this may well be a goal that the state can encourage and facilitate, this is, properly speaking, the role of us – of civil society, of families, communities, and voluntary groups, and of the churches. Indeed, it is a role to which the churches have a particularly powerful message and response.


New welfare and new future

Jesus fed people when they were hungry. He healed them when they were sick or blind or suffering from extreme mental distress. He instructed his disciples to give water to the thirsty and to welcome the stranger. It is not hard to see why those who chose to follow his Way developed practices, groups and ultimately institutions that fed, clothed, housed, healed, and welcomed the needy. It remains so today. But this is not all Jesus did. Put another way, this account of Jesus’ life and ministry is in danger of ignoring the important detail of how – the way – Jesus did these things. Jesus provided food for people, and he ate with people. He taught people, and he asked them questions. He passed judgement on sin and he offered forgiveness for it. He upheld the law and he brought people into society when something – their past, their poverty, their profession, or just the straightforward prejudice of their peers – had led to their exclusion. In short, he drew them into relationship. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this. ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’ Humans need attention, sympathy, time, patience, friendship, and love almost as much as they need food, clothing, and a roof over their head. Yes, they will die if they don’t receive the latter but, a human starved of company, kindness, and compassion will soon see their humanity – their dignity, their personhood – wither and die. Jesus fed, clothed, and healed, and he instructed his followers to do likewise. But the way he did so affirmed their ‘personhood’ (or ‘dignity’ or ‘humanity’). The attention he paid to the excluded, his elevation of followers to friendship, his sharing of bread, his sharing of suffering, ultimately his self-gift for the sake of others restored not only their existence, but their existence as persons. His words, his presence, his love humanised those who had been left out, those whose personhood had been damaged by inattention, neglect and abuse.


Herein lies the ‘welfare church’ of the future, because as the new welfare landscape suggests, we are living in a time in which the relationships that comprise our humanity are under immense strain, often crumbling into dust, and taking our mental health with them. Worse, as if loneliness, anxiety, depression and broken relationship are not bad enough, the advent of AI is liable to make things worse. Just as many today, not least children, take refuge in phones and social media, to the detriment of their long-term good, so an age of AI ‘companionship’ risks setting us ever further adrift from one another. We yearn for one another, not for a screen. The human need to be known, to be heard, to be seen, to be respected, to be loved is evergreen, and while a companion robot or a ‘carebot’ may be better than all-out isolation, it is ultimately a poor substitute. In an age of liberal individualism, of unprecedented movement of people, of demographic rebalancing and an ever-ageing population, of digitally-mediated communication, of ubiquitous and immersive technology, the premium on affirming the humanity of one another in intimate, patient, present, laborious, generous ways will be enormous. The less we do it, the more acutely we feel the need to spend time with, to listen to, to share with, to hold one another. A body of people that tries to follow Christ will go and do likewise. Ultimately, the churches should and will continue to feed, clothe, house and welcome those who need it. Recognising and fostering the personhood of a human being is not an alternative to understanding them as an individual or organism, to meeting their basic material and biological needs. Once upon a time, in the age covered in the first part of this essay, the churches met those material needs but, despite its herculean efforts, the time came when they could no longer do so, and the state took them over. Most of the time they did so, not only with the churches’ blessing but with their active encouragement. The churches are still doing such things, albeit in massively attenuated ways, today. However, the very fact that most churches today also argue, sometimes vociferously, that they shouldn’t have to do that means, by definition, that this is not now their responsibility. The state is responsible for welfare, and it should be.

But the meaning of welfare changes, and there are new giants standing alongside Beveridge’s famous five. Recent decades have shown that, even when practical needs are met (and increasingly, it seems, they are not), there is a yawning need to satisfy the ‘personal’ needs of citizens – their need for company, for companionship, for attention, for character formation, for support, for encouragement, for friendship, for love. And while such needs are not totally foreign to the state – it is not improper for a government to develop a strategy for loneliness – it is also the case that the practical action to meet them is way beyond the capacities of the state. Hence the repeated mantra about ‘empower[ing] local communities’ and ‘increas[ing] volunteering’. In other words, just as the churches recognised and responded the needs that ultimately came to be met through the welfare state in the twentieth century, so it must respond to the new welfare needs of the twenty-first. A religion of communion and community, of habits and practices, of moral and character formation, of sharing and eating, of listening and attention, of repentance and forgiveness, of faith and hope, a religion of love will not only speak but act on these new welfare concerns. Arguably, that is just what the churches (at their best) have done for centuries: affirming and serving the God-rooted and inalienable dignity of all humans, in so doing serving as a conduit of the love that God has for his whole creation. As we enter the second quarter of the century, that dignity and that love are crying out for practical recognition. It is where the future of the churches in Britain lies.

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos, a Think Tank which stimulates the debate about the place of religion in society


Questions for discussion
1. What is the vision of the social good that you can you draw from the New Testament, and how does it translate into a modern, contemporary society like our own?
2. Whose responsibility is that? By which I mean, depending on how you answer (1), is it the government/state? The market? Voluntary groups? Faith groups? Families? Individuals? In which combination?
3. What kind of things do the churches you know do in their community that positively serve that vision?

Notes
1. J.K. Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), p. 37
2. ‘Notes on the Way’, Time and Tide, 30 March and 6 April 1940,
in George Orwell: The Complete Works, Vol. 12, No. 604, ed. Peter
Davidson (London: Secker and Warburg, 1998) pp.121-127
3. Gill, A., & Lundsgaarde, E. (2004). State Welfare Spending and
Religiosity: A Cross-National Analysis. Rationality and Society,
16(4), 399-436. https://doi.org/10.1177/1043463104046694
4. Prochaska, Christianity, p. 65
5. House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee.
The Big Society Seventeenth Report of Session 2010–12
6. Public opinions and social trends, Great Britain - Office for
National Statistics; Disability and loneliness in the United
Kingdom: cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of trends and
transitions - PMC (nih.gov)
7. WHO Commission on Social Connection
8. A connected society: a strategy for tackling loneliness - GOV.UK
(www.gov.uk)
9. Tackling Loneliness annual report March 2023: the fourth year -
GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
10. Tackling Loneliness annual report March 2023: the fourth year -
GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
11. Mental health pressures data analysis (bma.org.uk)
12. Beyond-Pills-APPG-Shifting-the-Balance-Report-2024-1.pdf
(beyondpillsappg.org) Emphases added.
13. Social psychologist - Author - Professor | Jonathan Haidt
14. Toilet training and high anxiety - how schools are changing -
BBC News
15. Child poverty: Statistics, causes and the UK’s policy response -
House of Lords Library (parliament.uk)
Crucible October