--- title: "David Lloyd George (1863–1945)" date: "2026-10-12T10:56:22+01:00" modified: "2026-10-12T10:57:11+01:00" url: "https://heritage.humanists.uk/david-lloyd-george-1863-1945/" post_id: 14603 categories: ["Freedom of Belief", "Politics", "Secularism"] tags: ["Politics", "Secularism"] --- # David Lloyd George (1863–1945) > ‘The only true basis of unity is equality, and national unity presupposes equal justice for all faiths and all creeds.’ > > David Lloyd George, speaking at Kinmel Camp, August 1916 David Lloyd George was a Liberal politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1908 to 1915 and as Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922, leading Britain through the last two years of the First World War. A founder of the modern welfare state, he introduced old age pensions and national insurance, and he championed [the disestablishment of the Church in Wales](https://heritage.humanists.uk/wales/). Raised in the Welsh Nonconformist chapel, Lloyd George lost his religious faith as a boy, and in private could dismiss chapel worship as ‘superstitious rot’. Yet throughout his life he kept up the public persona of a devout Nonconformist, preaching from chapel pulpits and crediting ‘the Almighty’ with victory in war. He is a striking example of a pattern common in his era: private doubt and unbelief held alongside the public religious identity that politics, party, and society still expected. Whether he was a non-religious man performing religiosity or a genuinely divided figure, he was a crucial figure in the history of British secularism: the champion of Welsh disestablishment, and the wartime minister who declared that national unity required equal justice for all faiths and creeds. He was also the first of Britain’s non-religious wartime Prime Ministers. In the Second World War the country was led in turn by Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill, both privately non-religious, with [Clement Attlee](https://heritage.humanists.uk/clement-attlee/) as Churchill’s deputy and then his successor. ### A chapel boy who lost his faith Lloyd George was born in Manchester in 1863 to Welsh parents and brought up in the village of Llanystumdwy, near Criccieth, by his uncle Richard Lloyd, a shoemaker and the unpaid pastor of the Disciples of Christ at Criccieth, a small breakaway Baptist sect that took the New Testament as a literal and sufficient guide to life. He trained as a solicitor and in 1890 was elected Liberal MP for Caernarvon Boroughs, a seat he held for fifty-five years. His faith collapsed early. He later recalled that at the age of eleven ‘he suddenly came face to face with the fact that religion, as he was taught it, was a mockery’, and described the feeling as a sense ‘that there was no one at the other end of the telephone’. Years afterwards he showed Frances Stevenson, his secretary and later his second wife, the exact spot on the road from Llanystumdwy to Criccieth where it had happened, and told her he remembered ‘the exact moment – he was in bed – when the whole structure and fabric of religion fell before him with a crash, nothing remained’. The story was public by 1910, when the journalist Harold Begbie published a sketch of the new Chancellor revealing that at eleven, all that Christianity ‘had to tell him of God and His universe rang suddenly false in his soul’. ‘There was no God for him,’ Begbie wrote; he felt ‘in a boat derelict on a wide sea of eternal night’. At sixteen he found his way out through Thomas Carlyle’s *Sartor Resartus*, and with it a new creed: ‘Religion is service to humanity.’ *The Literary Guide* seized on the story in January 1911, concluding that the Chancellor was ‘neither more nor less than a Positivist’, a follower of [Auguste Comte](https://heritage.humanists.uk/auguste-comte/)’s [religion of humanity](https://heritage.humanists.uk/positivism/). It was not far wrong about his interest. In 1888 he spent a Sunday in London hearing the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon in the morning and the Positivist Frederic Harrison in the afternoon, and his diary shows that he admired Harrison’s addresses, though he thought their truths were better taught by Christianity. ![](https://heritage.humanists.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/10/David_Lloyd_George_c1911.jpg)*Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer, c. 1911. Photo: Reginald Haines. Public domain, via* [*Wikimedia Commons*](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1310527)*.* In private, his scorn for chapel-going could be blunt. On 13 August 1890, a few months after entering Parliament, he answered an angry letter from his wife Margaret, who had rebuked him for going on the Thames to Kew Gardens instead of to a chapel meeting. Had he been at home in Criccieth, he replied, he would have had: > ‘…the pleasure of being cramped up in a suffocating malodorous chapel listening to some superstitious rot.’ > > David Lloyd George, letter to Margaret Lloyd George, 13 August 1890 The historian Chris Wrigley cautions that this may have been temper rather than a considered religious view, though he notes that Lloyd George said similar things on other occasions. Late in life he was franker still about why he stayed in the fold. Explaining to his private secretary A. J. Sylvester in 1936 why he had never followed Asquith into the Church of England, he said that he ‘held no great belief’ in Baptist doctrines, but had been brought up among them and would never have it thought that, ‘once he had made his position, he had let them down by transferring to some other faith’. > ‘In reality, his instincts were more secularist than Nonconformist.’ > > John Grigg, *Lloyd George: The People’s Champion* (1978) His biographers have read this evidence in different ways. John Grigg concluded that Lloyd George had become the champion of Nonconformity ‘with a strict economy of sincerity’, rejecting ‘dogmatic Christianity of every kind’ and having ‘a special dislike for the Nonconformist kind’. The American historian Don Cregier described him as ‘a Deist and perhaps an agnostic, though he remained a chapel-goer and connoisseur of good preaching all his life’. Others, including Wrigley and the historian of religion Ian Machin, argue that what he lost was the fundamentalism of his uncle’s sect rather than all belief, and that he fluctuated between doubt and a liberal faith; Machin called him ‘a broad and speculative Baptist’. His son Richard wrote that his father’s religious beliefs ‘fluctuated, and there were periods in his life when he lost faith’. On any reading, the gap between what he said in private and the language he used in public is plain. ### The pulpit politician Whatever he thought of ‘superstitious rot’ in private, Lloyd George’s political base lay in the Welsh chapels, and he spoke from their pulpits throughout his career. In 1911, in a sermon-lecture at a Welsh chapel in London, he turned on the rationalists directly. > ‘A greater, more serious, and more destructive mistake had never been made than by those people who taught Rationalism thinking it was going to save the world.’ > > David Lloyd George, 1911, as reported in *The Literary Guide*, August 1911 He went on to warn that destroying the Christian churches would turn the country into ‘a burnt-up wilderness’. *The Literary Guide* replied that the Chancellor’s own social reforms were rationalist or they were nothing, and that to denounce rationalism in 1911 was ‘to denounce science, philosophy, statesmanship, and even the Christian Churches themselves’. It reminded him of Judge Jeffreys’s Bloody Assizes and the fires of Smithfield, both carried out in a thoroughly Christian country. On one cause, rationalists and Nonconformists stood together: ending the privileges of the Church of England in Wales. Lloyd George had campaigned for Welsh disestablishment since the 1890s, and in 1912 [F. J. Gould](https://heritage.humanists.uk/frederick-james-gould/) argued its case in *The Literary Guide* on the principle that spiritual and temporal power should be separated. The Welsh Church Act passed in 1914 and came into force in 1920, while Lloyd George was Prime Minister. It was the first disestablishment of an Anglican church in Great Britain, and the start of the long secularisation of Welsh public life. ### War and the Almighty The First World War brought Lloyd George’s most generous words on freedom of belief. Speaking to Welsh recruits at Kinmel Camp in August 1916 as Secretary of State for War, he declared that the many creeds and opinions in the new army must be recognised and provided for, because national unity required ‘equal justice for all faiths and all creeds’. The directors of the [Rationalist Press Association](https://heritage.humanists.uk/rationalist-press-association/) wrote to congratulate him, and asked him to secure recruits’ legal right to affirm rather than swear, to record their beliefs correctly, and to exempt freethinkers from compulsory church parades. No reply came. ![](https://heritage.humanists.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/10/David_Lloyd_George-786x1024.jpg)*Lloyd George as Prime Minister, 1919. Photo: Harris & Ewing, Library of Congress. Public domain, via* [*Wikimedia Commons*](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74474)*.* After the war he was readier to credit God with victory. Replying in 1921 to a message of sympathy from the Calvinistic Methodists of Anglesey, he wrote that ‘nothing less than the guidance of the Almighty could have led our country successfully through the perilous straits of the recent war’. In *The Literary Guide*, [Adam Gowans Whyte](https://heritage.humanists.uk/adam-gowans-whyte/) found this hard to square with the muddle, slaughter and shell shortages that the Prime Minister knew better than anyone, and with the awkward fact that secular France had shared in the victory while devout Germany and Russia had not. > ‘The alleged guidance of God was general, never specific; and in its general form it is … indistinguishable from complete indifference.’ > > Adam Gowans Whyte, ‘Mr. Lloyd George and the Almighty’, *The Literary Guide*, August 1921 Whyte suspected that the Prime Minister was simply saying ‘the traditionally correct thing’. There was some evidence that he was. Years later the [RPA President](https://heritage.humanists.uk/presidents-of-the-rationalist-association/) Charles Beadnell noted that Lloyd George, like Queen Victoria, had been averse to holding National Days of Prayer. ### The Sermon on the Mount Out of office, Lloyd George kept preaching. In 1926 he told a Welsh congregation at the East Castle Street Baptist Church in London that the Sermon on the Mount held the answer to the social problems of the day. Gould answered him in *The Literary Guide* with ‘Mr. Lloyd George’s Religion’, pointing out that the Sermon’s advice to ‘resist not evil’ and ‘take no thought, saying What shall we eat?’ sat oddly with the man who had run the munitions effort and introduced rationing. Gould had no quarrel with the Gospels as a document of their age, he wrote; his objection was to treating them as a programme for 1926, when economics, science and organisation were what the world needed. ### Legacy Lloyd George’s divided religious life was a product of his time and place. His political base lay in the Welsh chapels, and in the Britain of his day a public profession of Christianity was still close to a requirement for high office; open unbelief was a cause for scandal, as [Charles Bradlaugh](https://heritage.humanists.uk/charles-bradlaugh/)’s long fight to take his seat in Parliament had shown. The rationalists who criticised him understood this well. Whyte suspected that he was simply saying ‘the traditionally correct thing’, and the *Guide* had noticed as early as 1911 that the creed he had found as a teenager, ‘service to humanity’, was not Christianity at all. Within two years of his fall, Britain had its first openly humanist Prime Minister: [Ramsay MacDonald](https://heritage.humanists.uk/james-ramsay-macdonald-1866-1937/), a former chair of the [Union of Ethical Societies](https://heritage.humanists.uk/the-union-of-ethical-societies/) (today’s Humanists UK), who became Labour’s first Prime Minister in 1924 and was the first to make a [secular affirmation](https://heritage.humanists.uk/charles-bradlaughs-struggle-to-enter-parliament/) rather than swear a religious oath on taking his seat in Parliament. Lloyd George was created Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor in January 1945 and died at Llanystumdwy that March, weeks before the end of the second war in which Britain had been led by a non-religious Prime Minister. To the rationalists of his day he was both a frustration and, at his best, an ally. The evidence points one of two ways. Either Lloyd George was a non-religious man performing religiosity for the chapel vote, as his own words in private and the biographies by John Grigg and Don Cregier suggest; or, at the very least, he was a divided figure, sceptical in private and devout in public, with a mixed relationship with the freethought movement of his day. On either reading, he was one of the most important figures in the history of British secularism and secular liberal reform, leading the fight to disestablish the Church in Wales, and laying foundations for a welfare state so that citizens could be supported by the state rather than through a patchwork of religious charity. In doing so, he opened up space for greater religious toleration and, ultimately, helped to carve out the largely secular political culture of later twentieth-century Britain, underpinned by his belief, as he told recruits at Kinmel Camp in 1916, that ‘national unity presupposes equal justice for all faiths and all creeds’. In 2024 Humanists UK included him, the earliest of the Prime Ministers it listed, in its [history of non-religious Prime Ministers](https://humanists.uk/2024/07/05/non-religious-prime-ministers-a-history/), alongside [Ramsay MacDonald](https://heritage.humanists.uk/james-ramsay-macdonald-1866-1937/) and [Clement Attlee](https://heritage.humanists.uk/clement-attlee/). --- ### Sources - *The Literary Guide*: January 1911 (‘Along the Wayside’, on Harold Begbie’s sketch); August 1911 (‘Lloyd George on Rationalism’); March 1912 (F. J. Gould, ‘Disestablishment’); November 1916 (‘Religion in the Army’); August 1921 (Adam Gowans Whyte, ‘Mr. Lloyd George and the Almighty’); August 1926 (F. J. Gould, ‘Mr. Lloyd George’s Religion’). - *Rationalist Annual*, 1945 (C. M. Beadnell, ‘Relativity, God, and the Universe’). - Kenneth O. Morgan (ed.), *Lloyd George Family Letters, 1885–1936* (1973), p. 35. - Earl Lloyd George, *Lloyd George* (1960), pp. 20–1. - A. J. P. Taylor (ed.), *Lloyd George: A Diary by Frances Stevenson* (1971), p. 79; Frances Lloyd George, *The Years That Are Past* (1967), p. 19. - Colin Cross (ed.), *Life with Lloyd George: The Diary of A. J. Sylvester* (1975), pp. 143–4. - William George, *My Brother and I* (1958), p. 78. - John Grigg, *Lloyd George: The People’s Champion* (1978), pp. 29, 32. - G. I. T. Machin, ‘Lloyd George and Nonconformity’, in Judith Loades (ed.), *The Life and Times of David Lloyd George* (1991), p. 36. - Chris Wrigley, ‘The Nonconformist Mind of David Lloyd George’, *Journal of Liberal History* 96 (Autumn 2017). - Ian Machin, ‘David Lloyd George, Nonconformity and Radicalism, c.1890–1906’, *Journal of Liberal History* 77 (Winter 2012–13). - Don M. Cregier, *Bounder from Wales: Lloyd George’s Career before the First World War* (1976). - Humanists UK, [‘Non-religious Prime Ministers: a history’](https://humanists.uk/2024/07/05/non-religious-prime-ministers-a-history/) (5 July 2024). The *New Humanist* archive is available via [Exact Editions](https://shop.exacteditions.com/new-humanist). Subscribe at [newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe](https://newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe). See also ---------- - [ James Ramsay MacDonald ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/james-ramsay-macdonald-1866-1937/) - [ Clement Attlee ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/clement-attlee/) - [ Positivism ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/positivism/) - [ Frederick James Gould ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/frederick-james-gould/) - [ Wales ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/wales/)