The clergyman bows to me!
It may be that they are now dying out, but there used to be a sizeable social group in England who described themselves as ‘churchpeople’. Not, nota bene, as ‘Christians’ or ‘believers’; they never used to ask if you believed in God or even if you were religious, but only whether you ‘went to church’. Nor did they ever mention God themselves, if they could help it. This may have been due to the historical Anglican suspicion of ‘enthusiasm’ in religion, or merely the natural English reticence and embarrassment about anything emotionally serious. Or perhaps it was a faithful representation of their true allegiance, which was not to a deity or a doctrine or even a morality, but to a social ritual. After all, they always wanted their family members to ‘come to church’ too, even if they knew full well that said members did not believe a word of the religion; that may make us wonder whether the principals believed any of it themselves. It was like having their family members with them when posing for a formal portrait; they proclaim that they are bona fide members of society, and behold, here are my status symbols, my proof of reproductive success. And if they had not in fact succeeded in reproducing, being ‘churchpeople’ fast-tracked them with the adoption agencies, which used to be run entirely by other churchpeople.
A passage in Wilkie Collins’ ‘The Woman in White’ admirably demonstrates the function of the church in an English community of the mid-19th century. Mrs. Catherick had been branded (wrongly, as it happens) as an adulteress, and had then worked for years at regaining her reputation. ‘“I stand high enough in this town, to be out of your reach”, she now tells an interlocutor. “The clergyman bows to me. Aha! you didn’t bargain for that, when you came here. Go to the church, and inquire about me – you will find Mrs. Catherick has her sitting, like the rest of them, and pays the rent on the day it’s due. Go to the town-hall. There’s a petition lying there, a petition of the respectable inhabitants against allowing a Circus to come and perform here and corrupt our morals: yes! OUR morals. I signed that petition, this morning. Go to the bookseller’s shop. The clergyman’s Wednesday evening lectures on Justification by Faith are publishing there by subscription – I’m down on the list. The doctor’s wife only put a shilling in the plate at our last charity sermon – I put half a crown. Mr. Churchwarden Soward held the plate, and bowed to me. Ten years ago he told Pilgrim, the chemist, that I ought to be whipped out of town, at the cart’s tail. Is your mother alive? Has she got a better Bible on her table than I have got on mine? … Ah! there is the clergyman coming along the square. Look, Mr. what’s-your-name – look, if you please!” She started up, with the activity of a younger woman; went to the window; waited until the clergyman passed; and bowed to him solemnly. The clergyman ceremoniously raised his hat, and walked on.’ The petition, the paid pew, the lectures, the collection and the greeting by the clergyman: all serve the same purpose, of defining who is In and who is Out.
It was not altogether different in my youth, although such very local publishing was dead, and no one paid for a particular seat in church. The priest was, perhaps, half-way through his transmogrification from an arbiter of respectability to a social worker. But the churchgoers still sat for hours afterward, discussing not the sermon but who had been there and who not, and wearing what hat. Absentees lost brownie points, which meant that the discussers could now move up. The main object of churchgoing was the same as attendance at the cocktail party, except without the coke in the bathrooms or the quickies in the upstairs bedrooms – namely to see and be seen. It was a weekly recalibration of who was where in the status hierarchy. This was, of course, for the middle-class; the underclass achieved the same result with the weekly punch-up.
The Anglican churchwoman who dusts the pews so as to proclaim her place in the hierarchy, and arranges the flowers so as to grind the faces of her rivals into the flagstones, is thus the last descendant of the priestess raising a bloody knife above the altar of human sacrifice.
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