Religion and the Secular in Victorian Prose: In Dialogue with William R. McKelvy

Abstract

In his essay “Children of the Sixties,” William R. McKelvy chal-lenges those theories of secularization that “link the advent of mo-dernity to forms of religious decline” and find clear evidence of this “re-ligious decline” in Victorian England. According to McKelvy, these sec-ularization narratives not only misrepresent the role of religion through-out Victoria’s long reign, they also mislead contemporary, “post-secular” scholars of Victorian studies. This is especially the case when scholars trace the roots of secularization theory “as a primary explanatory model for the nineteenth century and its signal cultural products” back to the Victorian period itself. By contrast, McKelvy notes that current historical scholarship finds clear evidence for “the vigor and vitality of religion throughout Victorian and Edwardian times” and dates “the birth of to-day’s dominant secularity” to the 1960s, the same decade in which Peter Berger, Bryan Wilson, and others produced broadly influential sociologi-cal theories of secularization.