Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2. Theological and Political Changes amongst the Free Church Leadership 3. The Nonconformist Conscience 4. Changes in Chapel Society 5. The Politics of Pewmanship 6. Free Churchmen and Women in the Labour Party 7. The Nonconformist Conscience and the Labour Party 8. The Free Churches and Class Consciousness 9. The Kingdom, the State and Socialism 10. Conclusions Appendices on Nonconformist Candidatures in General Elections 1918-35 Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

An original analysis of Nonconformity's contribution to the rise of the Labour Party during the interwar years.

About the Author

Peter Catterall is Reader in History at the University of Westminster, UK. In addition, he teaches on democracy and public policy for the Hansard Society. He is also chair of the George Lansbury Memorial Trust. He has published widely on 20th-century British history and his most recent work is Labour and the Politics of Alcohol: The Decline of a Cause (2014).

Reviews

This is a really important book. The relationship between the Labour party and the free churches is widely recognised, but very little understood. Peter Catterall has done a first-class job in combining an acute understanding of the Labour movement, and a deep knowledge of the nonconformist churches, to produce the first serious history of the relationship between the two. Based firmly on meticulous research in the relevant political and religious archives, Catterall constructs an analysis that comfortably outstrips anything that has gone before. This is a book that was urgently needed, and it will be the primary point of reference in its field for some time to come.
*Andrew Thorpe, University of Exeter, UK*

The Labour party was founded in a church hall and it used to be said that the labour movement owed more to Methodism than to Marxism. But now that we live in a post-industrial society and the ‘Nonconformist Conscience’ has all but gone, Labour finds itself with a serious identity crisis. Peter Catterall’s brilliant new history takes us back to explain the Christian power-within that shaped the party that built the world’s first social democracy.
*Robert Colls, De Montfort University, UK*