The quotation in the title comes from the historian Peter Laslett. It is brought up from time to time by historians of religion.

Is it true?

There is a certain core truth to it. If we could travel back in time to just about any period before the industrial revolution, we would be surprised at how religious – and superstitious – people were.

But it is not as simple as that.

In part, the contrast between the past and the present arises because people don’t really talk about this stuff today. Even though most people don’t go to church, surveys show that supernatural beliefs – and even personal spiritual experiences – are widespread. Yet it isn’t good form to talk about this sort of thing unless you are within certain safe spaces. This social norm has the effect of suppressing important evidence of belief. It makes society feel more rational and sceptical than it actually is.

(I suppose I should acknowledge at this point that supernatural beliefs and experiences are not necessarily the same thing as religion. Indeed, one curious thing about organised religion in the modern West is that it has become less interested in providing a framework for supernaturalism in general. If you believe that you have seen a ghost or had a premonition, who do you tell? A medieval peasant might have told the parish priest. Today, you might get less interest and insight from the local vicar than from a random friend in the pub.)

If modern society is more believing – more ‘religious’ in a broad sense – than we might think, the opposite is true of previous periods in history. Society was much less religious than we often assume, particularly if we equate religion with ‘literal belief’.

In any society anywhere, there will probably always be a certain number of people who have no interest in religious matters. There has been academic research into whether religiosity has a genetic component; but in any event we can assume that some combination of nature and nurture will ensure that any given population will contain people whose responses to the supernatural range across the spectrum from the devout to the contemptuous. If this is so, the quotation in the title cannot be true, or even close to true.

It is easiest to demonstrate this by looking at formal religious observance. There is evidence going back at least to the sixteenth century that the poorer classes of society were not enthusiastic churchgoers. Attendance at the local Anglican parish church on Sundays was in theory compulsory for most English people for most of the period from 1552 to 1969. This sounds very strict, but even in the early part of this timeframe the legislation was not rigidly enforced. It was not really directed against ordinary people who were indifferent to religion. If you were a landowner who tried setting up a new sect or rejected the Church of England in favour of the Pope, there was a good chance that you would find yourself in legal trouble. If you were a ploughboy who couldn’t be bothered going to Mattins on Sunday morning, there was a good chance that you wouldn’t. The churchgoing legislation mostly ceased to be enforced after the passage of the Toleration Act 1689, and reports from eighteenth-century parish clergy to their bishops indicated that non-churchgoing was an increasing problem.

Formal observance is only one metric of religiosity, of course. Even when people went to church, they did not necessarily have any very deep commitment to the Christian faith. Religion is to a large extent a social phenomenon. Church was a social club. Mass or Mattins was an opportunity to gossip, flirt and do business. Sunday school, when it was invented, was a source of childcare.

This is why the epic hammering that has been suffered by church membership and attendance in modern times is not due to the triumph of an alternative commitment to secular rationalism. Most people do not explicitly identify as atheists, and very few indeed affiliate with nonreligious movements like Humanists UK and the National Secular Society. The religion-killer is not philosophical scepticism but the growth of competing attractions. It was the rise of modern leisure and consumer culture that took away the churches’ social role. Philip Larkin claimed that he read Voltaire instead of going to church on Sundays; but most people just watch the football or head for B&Q. On other days, they have no reason to think very much at all about gods, spirits, life after death, and so on. If they do think about such things, it is likely that they have a vague sense that there is probably some element of truth to all that. They just don’t tend to talk very much about it.

(The same trends also cut away at secular movements as modernity set in. For example, the rise of a mass leisure society seems to have been a major part of the reason why socialist movements had more difficulty recruiting members in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth. People had more interesting things to do with their time.)

We can be reasonably certain that, even in the ‘ages of faith’, a large proportion of people were not Christians in any sense that would be recognised by modern evangelists; and this was so even if they were churchgoers. Here are a few examples of popular indifference and hostility towards religion, taken from Keith Thomas’ classic book Religion and the Decline of Magic – they come from the Tudor and Stuart periods, before the Enlightenment and modern secularism came along:

• In a Cambridge parish in 1547, according to Bishop Stephen Gardiner, “when the vicar goeth into the pulpit to read that [he] himself hath written, then the multitude of the parish goeth straight out of the church, home to drink”.
• A ploughwright, Matthew Hamont, was burned in Norwich in 1578 for denying the divinity and resurrection of Christ. He thought that the New Testament was “but mere foolishness, a story of men, or rather a mere fable”.
• In 1598, two men in Cheshire said that they would not give any money to reconstruct the parish church, but only to pull it down.
• In 1600, the Bishop of Exeter said that in his diocese it was “a matter very common to dispute whether there be a God or not”.
• In 1608, a butcher in the diocese of Ely set his dog on people as they went to church.
• In 1623, another butcher, this time in Bromsgrove, found himself in trouble with the law when he parodied the formula for Holy Communion. He presented a crooked pin to an acquaintance, saying, “Take thee this in remembrance that Parkins of Wedgebury died for thee and be thankful”.
• In 1635, one Brian Walker of Durham declared: “I do not believe there is either God or Devil; neither will I believe anything but what I see”. He preferred Chaucer to the Bible.
• In 1656, two weavers from Lacock put forward various unorthodox beliefs, including that “if the Scriptures were a-making again, Tom Lampire of Melksham would make as good Scripture as the Bible”. One of them commented that he would sell all religions for a jug of beer.

There is a further complication to the ‘literal believers’ idea. Lots of people in premodern England undoubtedly were religious in a meaningful way. The list of examples above would not have been representative of the entirety of the population, and clerical sources probably exaggerated the extent of disaffection from the church. But what does ‘literal’ mean in this context? Many people may have been religious – genuinely and even credulously so – but they did not necessarily have a firm grasp on orthodox Christian doctrine.

This is another reason why looking at the evidence for formal observance can be misleading. People who rarely went to church may well have embraced, quite sincerely, what has been called ‘diffusive Christianity’. This term was coined by the Bishop of Rochester in 1903. According to the historian Jeffrey Cox (The English Churches in a Secular Society), it consisted of:

…a general belief in God, a conviction that this God was both just and benevolent although remote from everyday concerns, a certain confidence that “good people” would be taken care of in the life to come, and a belief that the Bible was a uniquely worthwhile book and that children in particular should be exposed to its teachings…. [Jesus Christ] was not altogether absent…. People appear to have been willing to say good things about Jesus Christ when they got around to it.

Cox suggested that this may have been “the most that a millennium of indoctrination had achieved in implanting Christian ideas in the popular mind”.

So… many (but by no means all) of our ancestors may have been ‘believers’. But they were not necessarily ‘literal’ believers in the sense of being sticklers for the creeds and the catechism.

An interesting case study here is provided by an 1847 report into education in Wales – this is often known as ‘The Treachery of the Blue Books’ because of the unfairly negative picture of Welsh society that the English commissioners who wrote the report put forward. One of the things that the commissioners thought that they had uncovered was a shocking state of religious ignorance among Welsh children.

The commissioners talked about this in some detail. Some kids didn’t know the number of the Ten Commandments or what they commanded. Some didn’t know who John the Baptist was. Others didn’t know how many many gospels there were or who wrote them. There was confusion between Old Testament and New Testament characters. The commissioners were told that the Old Testament murderer Cain had killed Jesus, and that the Virgin Mary was Jesus’ wife. One child thought that Jesus was born in Hell.

This doesn’t sound like the kind of Christian indoctrination that we might associate with early Victorian Britain – let alone Wales, which had a reputation for being a stronghold of fundamentalist Protestantism. But if we look more closely at what the report says, we find that much of the supposed ignorance was not actually ignorance of religion or even of Christianity, but rather a lack of knowledge of specific information from the Bible – which is not the same thing. What is more, some of the children had clearly taken the information in but had got it confused in their minds, as children do.

We also have to remember that the circumstances under which the commissioners tested the children were artificial and somewhat hostile. If you were a 9-year-old in nineteenth-century Abergavenny and some well-dressed English strangers suddenly appeared in your schoolroom asking questions about John the Baptist, you might be forgiven for not answering at your best. Who are these men? What do they want? Are they trying to make fools of us? If I get an answer wrong, will I be punished?

On the whole, the children actually didn’t do too badly. Here, for example, is a passage dealing with a school in Cardiganshire:

Who were the Apostles? — Dead silence; nobody knew. What were they to do? — Same result. Who appointed them? — Christ. How many were there? — Long pause. First boy. — Two, Sir. Another pause. Another boy. — Twelve, Sir. Who was the Apostle who wrote the greatest number of the Epistles? — Nobody could tell. A penny was here promised to the first who could tell who it was. First boys. — John. Long pause. Who wrote the Epistle to the Romans and Thessalonians? Second boy, — Peter. What did Christ come for?— To save the world. How? — By dying. What must we do to be saved? — Long pause. First girl. — We must die. Second girl. — Be good. What besides? — No one could tell. What did Christ do to instruct his disciples? — None knew. What were the Apostles to do? Pause. A penny offered to any one who would tell. Second girl. — To write. What were they called who were to write the Gospels? Silence. Who did write the Gospels?— Christ, Sir. Where was Jesus Christ born? — In Bethlehem. Where is that? — In Judea. Where is Judea? — In Bethlehem. Is it in Wales ?— No, Sir; in England. Where did Christ die? — In Calvary. Where is that? — In Bethlehem. Where is Bethlehem? — In Europe. Will Christ come again? First boy. — No. Second boy. — Yes. What will he come for? — To burn the world.

The reader is clearly supposed to be shocked at this barbarian ignorance. Imagine thinking that Judea is in England! But if one reads the passage more carefully, taking into account the children’s nervousness, the upshot seems to be that they knew the basics of their religion well enough. Christ died in order to save the world, and he will come again to deliver a fiery judgement. We must be good in order to have life after death. The geographical confusion was forgivable; and knowing that St Paul wrote most of the Epistles is not really a core tenet of the Christian faith.

*

It is no more accurate to say that all our ancestors were literal believers than it is to say that everybody today embraces atheistic rationalism. Quite a lot of people in the ‘ages of faith’ didn’t care about religion, and those who did often had little interest in the particulars of the Bible or orthodox theology. In the same way, belief in the supernatural remains widespread today, even if it is often not channelled into Christian or other formal affiliation or observance. We are dealing here with shades of grey; and within the spectrum of greys, society doesn’t necessarily change all that much.