Book Notes: Christianity and Social Service in Britain by Frank Prochaska

Frank Prochaska's "Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain: The Disinherited Spirit" is a well-researched and pretty readable account of the church's once dominating role in social care and its path to being almost completely eclipsed by the state.

The most intriguing parts of the book are those which deal with the details of some of the most important movements in Christian education, home visiting ministries, mothers organisations, and nursing. The detailed account of Mrs Ranyard and her missionary Bible-nurses, who later became just "Ranyard Nurses" and who became state health visitors is a nice little summary of wider movements in secularisation. Similar studies in other fields are also helpful. One aspect I was under-aware of was the number of such organisations that existed throughout the inter-war years but who were finally killed-off by WWII, by migration, call-ups and through the massive bomb damage city-centre mission halls and care-facilities sustained in the blitz.

Less convincing are some of Prochaska's sweeping generalisations, which he uses to bridge between his detailed ground-level research and his over-all conclusions. In one sentence he dismisses Calvinism as a dour creed disinterested in social care. Such a stereotype might suit his purposes but Prochaska seems unaware that just such unresearched assumptions have been shown to be an entirely inaccurate portrayal of this aspect of Victorian city life by Shaw (also Oxford University Press), 2002. Likewise his attempt (p76) to see Thomas Chalmers as a social theorist moving the churches towards a more secular vision of social provision is hardly persuasive to anyone who has ever read Chalmers. The author states up-front that he is not a Christian - and at times this gives the book a sense of dispassionate objectivity, but on other occasions he allows his anti-Christian views to colour his judgement too much. In this regard the opening and closing chapters are perhaps the weakest.

A major omission of the book is any analysis of the movements within the churches which sapped their interest in social questions from the 1890s onwards, especially within evangelicalism which had been in the forefront of such work for over a century; these included dispensationalism, Keswick 'holiness' movements, and the burgeoning Pentecostalism. These factors merit discussion alongside the church's numerical decline and the growth of the state which are well covered.

Nevertheless this is a fascinating study into a neglected aspect of the history of the church in this country.