How the Oxford Movement Saved Christmas

A world filled with great social and technological change, religious uncertainty, and a desire for ritual and deeper faith in the midst of a disenchanted, overstimulating society: All of these seem like issues of the twenty-first century. But they are also tensions that affected Victorian Britain, leading to the rise of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s. These young and devout intellectuals expressed dismay at the apathy of the Anglican establishment and its lukewarm response to the upheaval of an increasingly anxious and secular world. They eventually exerted significant influence, transforming the religious landscape in Britain, revitalizing old rituals and practices, and even renewing interest in celebrating lapsed Christmas festivities.

In medieval times, large feasts and other jovial Christmas celebrations were the norm, as demonstrated in poems like the fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Merriment existed alongside reverent religious devotion to the miracle of Christ’s birth: The two were not considered oppositional. Christmas carols such as “In Dulci Jubilo” and “Good King Wenceslas” symbolized this connection between communal joviality and religious spirit. But the more radical manifestations of the Reformation in Britain strained this connection. Puritanical factions claimed many Christmas traditions were pagan blasphemy. This anti-Christmas sentiment reached a fever pitch after Oliver Cromwell took power in 1653 during the English Civil War and his Commonwealth government banned the celebration of Christmas. This ban lasted only as long as the Cromwell regime, and Christmas officially returned with the restoration of the Stuart kings in 1660. But celebrations remained relatively muted.

The Oxford Movement played a significant role in restoring Christmas to a central place in nineteenth-century British religious life. As Bishop Geoffrey Rowell wrote, this was largely due to the movement’s focus on “the revival and enrichment of the Prayer Book forms of service, and a proper observance of the seasons and festivals of the church calendar.” The thinkers of the Oxford Movement, such as John Keble, Edward Pusey, and, perhaps most famously, John Henry Newman, were interested in revitalizing forgotten rites and rituals in Britain. Though they took great inspiration from the distant past of Christianity and reverently studied the early Church Fathers, they were not antiquarians who lived in a bubble apart from the concerns of their age. Quite the opposite: They vividly addressed the question of how Christianity and specifically the Anglican church should respond to the lukewarm beliefs and religious apathy they saw as characteristic of the nineteenth century.

These thinkers were also called Tractarians for their role in writing the Tracts for the Times. From 1833 to 1841, a dozen writers including Newman, Pusey, and Keble published a total of ninety tracts. The most famous of these was the final one, Tract 90, in which Newman declares the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglicanism to be compatible with the teachings of Catholicism, leading to significant controversy, and finally to Newman and other members leaving Anglicanism for Roman Catholicism. Even though reviving many of the pre-Reformation rituals in Anglicanism served to move some sectors of Anglicanism closer to Catholicism, crossing the Tiber was not the aim of these tracts. Pusey and many of the other leading figures in the Oxford Movement remained Anglicans. Rather, the main focus of the Tracts for the Times was to awaken religious life in Britain from its complacency. 

The Tracts were not just intellectual exercises; they raised awareness of this complacency among the public, similar to the function of the Federalist Papers in early America. They compiled the perspectives of a variety of intellectual leaders who wrote with erudition and pugnacity, attempting to convince the public that significant institutional change was necessary. They saw the current state of the Anglican church as too willing to compromise with the secular world, and too unwilling to view its own traditions as relevant and living. For the Tractarians, church rituals were not anachronisms or embarrassments but keys to strengthen belief. Lytton Strachey argued that Christians must remember “the presence of the supernatural in daily life,” and wryly noted that taking the Christian religion seriously “had not been done in England for centuries.” 

Unlike the Puritans they opposed, the Tractarians did not think zeal and devotion alone could heal the malaise that dampened religion in Britain. Instead, the Tractarians viewed the elaborate forms and rites of medieval Christianity, eschewed by their Puritan brethren as obstacles to true worship, as integral components of England’s lost zeal. As Newman wrote in 1834, Anglicanism succumbed to this malaise through “the neglect of the daily service, the desecration of festivals, the Eucharist scantily administered.” Those who seek to restore religious rites today are in many ways ideological descendants of Newman—a worthwhile lineage, considering how successfully the Tractarians shaped religious life in Britain. As Rowell wrote, the Tractarian movement succeeded in changing many facets of Anglican worship, even among those who did not entirely agree with the movement, to the extent that by the 1870s, “Christmas decorations in churches and special Christmas observances were no longer” merely characteristic of the Tractarians. These observances included the widespread implementation of musical services on Christmas, and they also included special Christmas charity events, providing additional food and aid to the poor. Revitalizing the observation of Christmas helped to mark it for the Victorians as a time deserving of particular reverence and celebration. 

The elegant decorations and services of many churches at Christmas today is a cause for delight, but it also serves as an inspiration. Much of what characterizes modern Christmas celebration throughout the Anglophone world was lost centuries ago but then revitalized, in part because of the thinkers of the Oxford Movement. Ritual is always ready to come back and take its rightful place, even in the adrift modern world.

Joshua Fagan is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington specializing in nineteenth-century British literature.