In his influential book, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life, the Yale historian, Frank M. Turner, quotes this passage from Newman's Essay on the development of Christian doctrine in order to critique academic trends in the twentieth century. Turner's view that a suspicious dislike of religion has shaped the research agendas of twentieth-century Anglo-American historians is persuasive. For him, the academy has promoted a skewed narrative of Victorian Britain that legitimizes present-day personal and institutional values. The myth of nineteenth-century ‘progress’ from a religious to a secular orientation is, he argues, rooted in the very principles endorsed by the twentieth-century university as its philosophical raison d'être: ‘liberalism, secularism, rational science … and other progressive, non-religious outlooks’. New approaches derived from social history invite reassessment of the importance of religion throughout the history of the period. In particular, they draw attention to the interpenetration of religious and secular viewpoints and activities, and the important ‘role of ideas that are not wholly of the critical, rationalist, scientific, progressive mode’.