The nineteenth century gave us the idea of “culture” as the broadest framework in which the forms of life of a society, whether a tribe or a national state, can be located. From cooking to clothing, from poetry to dance, to marriage, to religion, these and every other aspect of a society's customs, practices, and beliefs are part of something we have come to call its “culture.” This is an idea that began in embryo in Giambattista Vico's Nuova Scienza (1725) and came fully into the light of day in Germany and France decades later in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Hegel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the brothers Grimm, and others. The primacy of culture is an idea that has in the last two hundred years evolved into the social sciences as we know them today and, most brightly, in the discipline of anthropology. It found one of its strongest voices in England in the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century. Arnold's was one of the first English voices to put the matter of “culture” on the intellectual agenda of his time.

To say that culture encompassed a whole series of pursuits such as football matches, cheese-making, and brass bands was one thing, but it was quite another when Arnold wrote that religion and the spiritual life of a people were also part of culture. Objections to this characterization of religion as merely a part of a people's culture were quick in coming. The counterclaim that culture derived ultimately from religion and that the spiritual truths of a people gave birth to any serious notion of culture was put forward in the nineteenth century by those who were seen to be defending an old idea. Progressive opinion already accommodated to the scientific cast of mind and to secularism applauded Arnold's bold claim. All the momentum of persuasion was on the side of the arguments of the secularists and the quick growth of anthropology, sociology, and political economy in the later years of the nineteenth century anchored the proposition in the academy. There were objecting voices of course – John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and any number of bishops of the Church of England – but the force was with “culture,” not religion, as the nineteenth century ended. For all intents and purposes, the argument was over.