The Death of Christian Britain

— The Problem with ‘Religious Decline’ —
or local power of the state church: the exertion of influence in poor relief,
education, moral control and so on. As established churches, the Church
of England and the Church of Scotland exerted their power most effectively
over the people directly, with the parish church the focus of
considerable formal control over parishioners’ lives. The rise of Methodism
and Protestant dissenting churches in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries challenged that power and threatened the status of the vicar or
minister. 3 Religious apathy or indifference also threatened that power, but
only if the numbers of people got out of hand. Secularism, the concerted
attachment to religious unbelief, was a similar threat. But of the three, established
churchmen feared dissenters the most because they vastly
outnumbered secularists and because they gave the indifferent the excuse
not to submit to parish authority.
If established churchmen had immediate cause to shout loudly about
religious decline, their message had a resonance with others. The ‘establishment’
– the political and social elites – were frequently heard joining
in the clamour. Landowners relied on a combination of economic power
(over tenants, tradesmen and the families reliant on them) and social power,
and the latter depended significantly on the symbolic role of the parish
church. The parish church and the manor house were the twin seats of
local power, and the vicar and the lord or laird were the joint holders of
that power. The parish churches were heavily dependent on the landowners
for construction and maintenance, and the clergyman was usually selected
by a member of the landowning classes (or by the Crown, which meant
the same), and the minister relied for income derived from English tithes
or Scottish teinds upon the produce of the land. 4 Church and land were
tied together, whilst in towns municipality and church were also closely,
though more complexly, bound. This made Sunday service immensely
symbolic of local power. The English lord sat in his front-row boxed pew
(and his Scottish equivalent in the ‘laird’s loft’ at the back or side of the
church), the clergyman was in his pulpit, and the parishioners sat in ranked
pews allocated, rented or bought according to social and economic status. 5
To attend church was to participate in a parade of power, to submit symbolically
to God and to Mammon. The two were not at odds, but in cahoots.
Any threat to the one was a threat to the other, and for this reason the
landed elites had immediate cause to wish their people in obedience to the
church as they would have them in obedience to themselves. 6
This system started to crumble in the eighteenth century. The disintegration
was a slow process, and extended in some places until the middle
decades of the nineteenth century. In a few places, such as the Highlands,
Hebrides and Northern Isles, the eighteenth century actually witnessed the
rise of the parish state as these inaccessible areas were brought within the
national church and the national economy. 7 But elsewhere, Britain was
being changed by new wealth, by increasing trading and manufacturing,
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