Arnold's publicist activity did not end in 1869 although it became more straightforward as he took on the role of a modern critic of religion. This work got underway in his thinking about the Irish Church, where he newly addressed the restrictions that afflicted the Nonconformists. As his religious criticism went on to read the Bible as poetry, it elaborated his thinking about language and literature. The relativist understanding of language in this religious criticism conformed to his early claim, that ‘everywhere there is connexion… no single event, no single literature, is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literatures’ (I: 20-1).

The seriousness of his religious texts seems related to the deaths of two of Arnold's six children in 1868, and the chastening effects of criticisms of Culture and Anarchy that suggested that he had broken with good sense. When he returned to social and political criticism in the late 1870s he rarely used the term ‘culture’, which his writing had imbued with offensive, elitist associations. The elevation of his brother- in-law, W. E. Forster, to Minister of Education in1868 meant that he was unlikely to be promoted and it underscored his marginality.

Yet Arnold's books on Saint Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the Bible (1875) and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877) brought him a new order of celebrity as readers reacted strongly to their insistence on Christianity's importance as a moral force despite the collapse of its religious truth. In 1877 he received invitations to stand for the Oxford Poetry Professorship again, and to become Rector of St. Andrews University, both of which he declined. He was, however, soon implicated in the spread of culture through the commodification of literature and new educational ventures. The demand for his criticism rested considerably on his reputation as a poet, and this was heightened by the publication of a selection of his poetry in 1878.