The Death of Christian Britain

Chapter five
Heathens: Men in
Discourse and Narrative
1800–1950
THE PROBLEM OF MALE RELIGIOSITY
As femininity and piety became conjoined in discourse after 1800, the
spectre arose of masculinity as the antithesis of religiosity. From the
sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, a wife’s femininity was perceived as
a threat to piety and household, and a husband established his moral status
by controlling her. From 1800 to 1950, by contrast, it was a husband’s
susceptibility to masculine temptations that was perceived as a threat to
piety and household, and the wife established a family’s respectability by
curbing him. 1 Exemplars of piety changed sex, from being overwhelmingly
male to being overwhelmingly female, and the route to family harmony no
longer lay in the taming of the Elizabethan shrew but in the bridling of
the Victorian rake, drunkard, gambler and abuser. 2
For men as for women, the discourse change around 1800 was dramatic.
As domestic ideology and separate spheres caused gender roles within the
home to become increasingly segregated, men were expected to submit to
the pious domain of the feminine hearth and home. Though the reality
of the Victorian man’s attitude to piety and domesticity was far from
universally hostile (certainly in the middle-class world), 3 this submission
was depicted as a sacrifice of innate masculinity. If women’s piety became
depicted as intrinsically contented, and remained remarkably stable in this
condition during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men’s piety
was perceived as in constant inner turbulence and its depiction subject to
increasing discursive instability. As a result, there was extensive experimentation
in the construction of moral masculinity: in the rise of muscular
Christianity from the 1840s and 1850s, and its role in sport; in the advance
of militarism as exemplified in the Volunteers after 1860 and militarised
youth movements (like the Boys’ Brigade) from the 1880s; and in the
attempts of some religious organisations like the Salvation Army to utilise
a curbing of manhood as an evangelising strategy. 4 This chapter argues that
these were not changes to masculinity as such, but rather ‘sub-discursive’
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