Victorian Period Religion Summary By: Danielle Barker
The Victorian Era was a Christian country. During this time, being involved with the church was the basis of how everyone lived their lives. People looked at the Bible as the literal truth and it set the foundation of ethical behavior. New active groups of Christians made the Church of England more welcoming to the people. They wanted to invest more money into the churches and this spurred an abundance of new churches to be built or repaired over time. More churches were built during this time than since the Middle Ages.
As religion was a big part of the history and the majority of people were Christian, it often ran into many people believing in different things and created a lot of disagreements. England was a god fearing group of people, but during the Victorian period, Christianity suffered from constantly being questioned. With the advancements of science and technology, this time period spent a lot of time trying to determine religion and science. Some felt the need to prove God’s existence. Whereas, most people who studied the word of God, believed that His Work in nature was presumed to be the same truth. William Paley’s Natural Theology, which argued that natural objects showed signs of design and therefor showed existence of a designing God. Many educated individuals would study scripture as historical texts. So when Charles Darwin suggested the scientific Theory of Evolution by natural selection, it caused many well educated people to find the literal truth of the Bible, difficult to accept. His book, Origin of the Speices, contradicted what the Christian Bible said when saying that God created the world. Charles Darwin’s book was criticized for challenging the established religious beliefs. However, some scholars like Alfred Tennyson, stuck to their belief by, “believing where we cannot prove.”