The forgotten history of the Labour Church

May the strength and joy of God’s presence be with all who love their brethren in sincerity, Amen.

This piece is about a now-forgotten experiment in modern religiosity – the Labour Church. It consisted of an attempt, against the backdrop of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, to merge Labour politics with spirituality. This endeavour might be described as exceptionally based.

Religious observance in Britain has historically varied along class and political lines. In the aftermath of the industrial revolution, one might say as a generalisation that working-class Britons were not especially interested in organised religion – although there were many exceptions to this. There was something of an overlap between progressive politics and Protestant Nonconformism. By contrast, the Church of England was ‘the Tory Party at prayer’.

The Labour Church was an unusual example of an explicitly left-wing Christian denomination. It was not unprecedented in this regard, however. There were Chartist Churches in the 1830s and 40s. There was even a Communist Church in the 1840s.

Foundation and early success

The Labour Church was founded by Rev. John Trevor, who established the first congregation in Manchester in 1891. Trevor was a Unitarian minister who broke away from his denomination when a member of his flock told him that he had stopped going to chapel because he didn’t feel that he could breathe freely there. Trevor was assisted by another Unitarian minister, Rev. Philip Wicksteed (who remained affiliated to Unitarianism).

Wicksteed described a service held in Manchester in 1892, at which he read a lesson from Dante’s Inferno. He was impressed by the dedication of the attendees:

I was struck at once with the purposeful air with which the six or seven hundred members of my congregation gathered. They were of all classes, but the great bulk I took to be working men. We had, I think, the most genuine and spontaneous religious service on which I ever engaged. As a matter of fact, the hymns, prayers, solo songs, pieces of music, lesson and address had all been arranged beforehand…. There were none of the traditions, customs, or habits of worship… but there was the reality of worship there. The hymns were sung with the utmost heartiness, the solo singers and musicians were felt as a part of the congregation, not as performers. At the close of the prayer a chorus of disimprisoned coughs testified to the earnest participation of the congregation in the devotions of the place, and the lesson and address were greeted with frank and spontaneous applause that did the heart good. My ‘lesson’ was the first canto of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’…. [T]he strained attention of my hearers released itself in prolonged and repeated applause that showed how every word had gone home.

The movement experienced some early success. It spread quickly through Lancashire and West Yorkshire. A Labour Church Union was formed in 1893, although this organisation encompassed only part of the movement. Over 1,000 Labour Church hymn books were sold in a single day at the Union’s second annual meeting in 1894. At the founding conference of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford in 1893, a Labour Church service was held which attracted 5,000 people.

In all, over 100 individual Labour Church branches were founded, although many did not last long. The number of active congregations reached a peak of just over 50 around 1895. A typical congregation consisted of 300-500 people.

The movement produced a monthly periodical, the Labour Prophet (1892-98), which was superseded a few years later by a quarterly, the Labour Church Record (1899-1901).

What did Labour Church members believe?

The Labour Church movement has been seen as falling within established traditions of Victorian thought: immanentist theology (based) and ethical socialism (also based). But it consciously avoided formulating doctrines. It may be seen as an anti-theological enterprise: there was even disagreement about whether or not to refer to ‘God’.

John Trevor set out the following basic principles when he founded the movement, but not all branches or members necessarily agreed with all of them, and they came to be amended over time:

The Labour Church is based upon the following Principles:

1. That the Labour Movement is a Religious Movement [this is based].

2. That the Religion of the Labour Movement is not a Class Religion, but unites members of all classes in working for the Abolition of Commercial Slavery.

3. That the Religion of the Labour Movement is not Sectarian or Dogmatic, but Free Religion, leaving each man free to develop his own relations with the Power that brought him into being.

4. That the Emancipation of Labour Can only be realised so far as men learn both the Economic and Moral Laws of God, and heartily endeavour to obey them.

5. That the development of Personal Character and the Improvement of Social Conditions are both essential to man’s emancipation from moral and social bondage.

In practice, there were a number of quite different shades of opinion within the Labour Church movement. Many adherents were simply working-class Nonconformists. But the movement also embraced people who were coming from other perspectives: Anglicans, Roman Catholics and indeed secularists. A Mr Gutteridge of the Nottingham branch of the church noted that “one Sunday, they would have an orthodox speaker, and… the next an aggressive secularist”.

The secularists perhaps grew in strength over time, but we should not see the Labour Church in general as being a pathway to secularism. For the most part, its members seem to have been genuine religious believers.

Religion and politics

The Labour Church movement was plainly not just a religious enterprise. It had educational and charitable arms – and, most obviously and significantly, it was linked with Labour politics. In some areas, the congregations evolved into purely political gatherings. Indeed, it has been suggested that some Labour Church branches were founded in order to circumvent a legal ban on political meetings on Sundays.

There was a significant relationship with the Independent Labour Party (ILP). When the legendary Labour luminary Keir Hardie addressed the second annual meeting of the Labour Church Union, it was reported that his speech was “largely devoted to I.L.P. politics”.

Sunday meetings were sometimes addressed by councillors and MPs, including Hardie. Hardie told one gathering:

The Christianity of the schools has had its day. Thank God it is passing away. Christianity today lies buried, bound up in the cerements of a dead and lifeless theology. It awaits decent burial; and we in the Labour movement have come to resuscitate the Christianity of Christ, to go back to the time when the poor should have the Gospel preached to them, and the Gospel should be good news of joy and happiness in this life, of God’s Kingdom on earth as a preparation for that which is to come in the world beyond the grave.

The movement supported various progressive causes, including women’s suffrage and an end to the Boer Wars. In its approach to left-wing politics, it seems to have tended towards reformist rather than revolutionary ideas, which only goes to make it even more based.

Nevertheless, the beliefs that circulated in the Labour Church were open to criticism from more theory-heavy forms of leftism. The progressive ethos of the movement was animated by a Christian belief in the brotherhood of humankind – admirable, perhaps, but arguably lacking the cogency of a hard-edged economic analysis of capitalism.

How did the Labour Church worship?

The prototypical Labour Church service was said to consist of:

(1) Hymn (2) Reading (3) Prayer (4) Solo or Music by the Choir (5) Notices and Collection (6) Hymn (7) Address (8) Hymn (9) Benediction.

This seems to have been a theoretical ideal, though, more than a practical reality. A fixed liturgy, with its conservative and hierarchical associations, did not fit well with the ethos of the movement. Some churches did not even like saying prayers. As the movement became increasingly secular, there was also pressure to delete theological references from hymns.

It seems to have been normal to say the Lord’s Prayer together early in the service. Beyond that, the presider had wide discretion as to what prayers should be said, or if prayers should be said at all. As the Edwardian period wore on, even the Lord’s Prayer was too much for some congregations.

Here is an early meeting which John Trevor presided over at Chorlton Town Hall in Manchester:

The first item on the programme was an overture rendered by an orchestra of violins, after which a short prayer was offered. Then a popular music hall vocalist sang “The Song that Reached my Heart;” next one of Mr Russell Lowell’s poems was read, also a chap[t]er from the Old Testament, and then the audience joined in the singing of a hymn. All this prepared the way for the address, the subject of which was “The Programme of the Labour Church.” The address was delivered by Rev John Trevor. “This new Church,” he said, “was in sympathy with all movements that were taking up the cause of labour and social regeneration. Labour was rising, it was discontented, and was determined that it would no longer submit to the conditions imposed upon it. The Labour Church desired to make progress without resorting to the old and desperate methods of physical force. It proposed to bring religion into the struggle. It would try to show how to get a religious and godly life (without the help of churches that were opposed to them), and yet help them to secure the freedom for which they longed. It would try to bring religion of a simple, manly, straightforward character into the labour movement, but not a religion that would bind them down to old creeds. They desired freedom, not only in society, but in religion also, so that a man might be able stand face to face before God, and that he might able to believe in God as his own nature prompted him, without any man being able to say, on the strength of anything written in any book, that that belief was false and untrue.” There was a large attendance and the address was listened to with evident interest.

Labour Churches did not generally offer rites of passage. There were no standard rituals for the dedication of children, marriages and funerals, save for one funeral liturgy that was adopted as late as 1907. Nor does practice seem to have been standard as to how regularly such ceremonies were performed. As regards marriages, only the Leeds chapel was known to have been registered to conduct weddings.

The end of the movement

In the early years of the twentieth century, John Trevor focussed his attentions elsewhere due to poverty and ill health. He diverted his energies away from the Labour Church and into chicken farming and advocating free love.

By 1902, there were only 20 Labour Church branches, although new ones were still being formed as late as 1906, in the wake of the Labour Party’s encouraging performance in that year’s general election. The movement essentially did not survive the Edwardian period, although some Labour Church traditions were apparently still being practised in the 1950s.

Different explanations for the demise of the Labour Church have been proposed. It has been argued, for example, that the movement increasingly struggled to compete with the mainstream churches and chapels because the latter developed more of a social conscience and peeled off members accordingly.

I would suggest that the reason for the Labour Church’s failure was straightforward. There was no real niche for it to fill. It was attempting to enter a market that was already saturated. Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain was not short of either left-wing political organisations or Christian churches. Moreover, demand for the latter was falling and the churches were entering their long decline (which continues to this day). A body which combined two things that were already freely available elsewhere was never going to prosper, particularly since it never came up with a distinctive, unified message of its own.

A. J. Waldergrave, who was a Secretary of the Labour Church Union, said: “I’m glad, on the whole, that the Labour Church did not flourish and become another established sect.” Maybe. But the movement deserves to be better-known today. It was pretty based.