Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

IDEOLOGY: RELIGIONcommon man. Its hostility to elaborate ritual and learned doctrineencouraged amateur prophecy and preaching. The persistent traditionof millenarianism lent itself to a primitive expression of social rebellion.Finally, its association with emotionally overpowering personal 'conversion'opened the way for a mass religious 'revivalism' of hystericalintensity, in which men and women could find a welcome release fromthe stresses of a society which provided no equivalent outlets for massemotion, and destroyed those which had existed in the past.'Revivalism' did more than anything else to propagate the sects. Thusit was the intensely emotional, irrationalist, personal salvationism ofJohn Wesley (i 703-1791) and his Methodists which provided the impetusfor the renaissance and expansion of Protestant dissent, at anyrate in Britain. For this reason the new sects and trends were initiallya-political or even (like the Wesleyans) strongly conservative, for theyturned away from the evil outside world to personal salvation or tothe life of the self-contained group, which often meant that they rejectedthe possibility of any collective alteration of its secular arrangements.Their 'political 5 energies generally went into moral and religiouscampaigns like those which multiplied foreign missions, anti-slavery andtemperance agitations. The politically active and radical sectarians inthe period of the American and French Revolutions belonged ratherto the older, drier, and more tranquil dissenting and puritan communitieswhich had survived from the seventeenth century, stagnant oreven evolving towards an intellectualist deism under the influence ofeighteenth century rationalism: Presbyterians, Congregationalists,Unitarians, Quakers. The new Methodist type of sectarianism was antirevolutionary,and the immunity of Britain to revolution in our periodhas even—mistakenly—been ascribed to their growing influence.However, the social character of the new sects militated against theirtheological withdrawal from the world. They spread most readilyamong those who stood between the rich and powerful on one side, themasses of the traditional society on the other: i.e. among those who wereabout to rise into the middle class, those about to decline into a newproletariat, and the indiscriminate mass of small and independent menin between. The fundamental political orientation of all these inclinedthem towards a Jacobinical or Jeffersonian radicalism, or at least, amoderate middle class liberalism. 'Nonconformism' in Britain, theprevalent Protestant churches in the USA, therefore tended to taketheir place as political forces on the left; though among the BritishMethodists the Toryism of their founder was overcome only in thecourse of the half-century of secessions and internal crises which endedin 1848.227