Arnold's Distinction

After reading an excerpt from Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, I became fascinated by the level of insight and reasoning the author has placed on the importance of discerning a unique and perhaps more profound way of defining the word "culture". After becoming frustrated with Emerson and quite frankly struggling through Shelley, Arnold's insightful discourse on the definition of culture came as a breath of fresh air to me. I was especially fascinated by the way in which Arnold related culture to religion through similar objectives. This curiosity led me to wonder about Arnold's personal religious background as way of understanding more about how he links culture to religion. I found from further reading that Matthew Arnold, although not rejecting religion altogether, did in fact reject Christianity to become agnostic and believed the bible to be completely metaphorical. Arnold also rejected the idea of the supernatural, focusing more on how religion, and more particularly Christianity, had a positive or negative moral affect on society. This information was incredibly helpful to me in understanding the way in which Arnold speaks of religion within Culture and Anarchy. In one section of his writing, Arnold even warns against spirituality, stating: "Faith, in machinery is, I said, our besetting danger; often in machinery most absurdly disproportioned to the end which this machinery, if it is to do any at all, is to serve; but always in machinery, as if it had a value of itself" (Culture and Anarchy, 829). Arnold rejects all cases of faith or the supernatural and is concerned more with the community instead of the self, reinforcing religious ideas which focus on he betterment of society and culture instead of the individual. I thought this to be an interesting understanding of the relationship between religion and culture.
Just a few links I found:
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/index.html
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/bio.html
Quotes by Matthew Arnold-You Can Listen!