The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion(Studies in Modern British Religious History)

The book combines intellectual, cultural and social history to address a major area of encounter between Christianity and British culture: the world of leisure. This book traces the rise and fall of the evangelical movement, the powerhouse of Victorian religion, via its preoccupation with pleasure. Victorian evangelicalism demonstrated an ability to excite the affections but also a corresponding suspicion of worldly pleasures. Suspicion developed into hostility, and a movement premised on freedom became coercive and alienating. The crisis of Victorian religion began. It is generally held that the mid-Victorian turn to recreation and sport solved the problem, 'justifying God to the people' through cricket, cycling and football. This book argues otherwise - that the problem of pleasure was inflamed by the ecclesiastical remedy. The problem of overdrawn boundaries between church and world gave way to a new and subtle confusion of gospel and culture. Historians have praised the mood of engagement but the costs were profound. In fact, sport became the perfect vehicle for that humanistic, 'unmystical' morality that defines the secularity of the twentieth century. Secularisation did not wait for the Dionysian rebellions of the 1960s: it emerged - almost a hundred years earlier - in the Victorian transformation of religion into ethics. Central to the process was the problem of pleasure. DOMINIC ERDOZAIN is Lecturer in the History of Christianity, King's College London

Table of Contents:
Introduction 'Born Free and Everywhere in Chains': Evangelicalism and the Problem of Pleasure Romanticism with Boots On: The Virtues of Sport Negotiating the Secular: the Coming of Recreation to the mid-Victorian Religious World 'We Are All Cyclists Now': Applying the Pleasure Principle Sport and the Secularisation of late-Victorian Youth Ministry Contesting the Sacred: the late-Victorian Church and the 'Gospel of Amusement'

Review :
A bold book, written with considerable confidence and élan. Erdozain lays out a compelling and well-structured argument. [He] has provided an important contribution to our understanding of the Evangelical adoption of nonreligious agencies and their central place within the secularization process. A major work of scholarship and a valuable corrective to the errors of historians of Victorian sport. Erdozain's contribution to this [secularization] debate makes a forceful case that future contributors will need to take seriously into account. Deserves attention not only from historians, but also from a wider readership. Essential reading for those with a variety of interests: anyone considering the history of evangelicalism should be engaged, readers with an interest in issues of secularisation will be intrigued, denominational historians of the nineteenth century will find much to ponder, and those whose prime focus is in tracing the history of sport inside and outside the church will find Erdozain's narrative and arguments compelling. This is a scholarly and important book with a big subject which links sport to the wider shores of cultural and religious history. Dominic Erdozain has an important and fascinating story to tell and he tells it with real verve. A devastating critique of why and how Churches became dispensers of 'religious good and services. A major contribution to the ongoing debate about secularisation in Britain. There is much to appreciate here. The long sweep of history, from the 18th century down to the 20th, allows a bold thesis to be worked out in its totality. [...] This is lively, even sparkling, prose.