The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
creating a society with a sharpened awareness that the economic bonds
which tied people to parish, land and landowner were dissolving.
Agricultural improvement hastened that process, as landowners enclosed
common fields and reorganised farming society as a hierarchy of rentiers,
tenant farmers and farm workers. With new wealth and changing social
sensibilities, the rich made country homes a place of retreat, not of permanent
residence, and the lord’s pew in the parish church was more often
than not vacant at Sunday worship. The ecclesiastical bonding of plebs and
lords in country and village was dissolving. This was a process hastened
for many by the formation of textile villages in the eighteenth century
where the rule of the landowner rarely held, and where, in many cases,
distance from the parish church necessitated millowners or villagers to erect
a church – usually not of the establishment but of dissent of one variety
or another. Textile, mining and fishing villages became hotbeds of
Methodism and dissent, and panic-stricken parish clergy started to equate
the rise of dissent with the decline of religion. So the idea of religious
decline was born in Britain within the notion of breaking social bonds, the
decline of what E.P. Thompson called the ‘paternalism–deference equilibrium’.
8 But if rural society begat the idea, it was quickly re-conceived within
a new context – the industrial town.
THE MYTH OF THE UNHOLY CITY
From the outset of urban expansion and early industrialism in the late
eighteenth century, British culture was developing doubts about the spiritual
efficacy of the town. Literature, so important to the shaping of middleclass
culture, 9 was dominated by texts – notably poetry – which located
virtue and sensibility in pastoral scenes. Even before cities troubled the
evangelical palate, change to rural society was anticipating urban concerns.
The Scots poet Robert Fergusson (1750–74) eulogised the disappearing
countryside of paternalism, and regretted the capitalistic improvements of
the agricultural revolution, 10 whilst one character of novelist Tobias Smollett
(1721–71), Matthew Bramble, expressed the fears of urban growth in
Bath – that most ‘genteel’ and unthreatening of towns – where ‘the mob is
a monster . . . a mass of ignorance, presumption, malice, and brutality’. 11
More influential and immensely popular amongst the English middle classes
was the poet William Cowper (1731–1800), a converted evangelical who in
the 1780s regarded ‘London, opulent, enlarged, and still/Increasing London’
as the pre-eminent source of vice and irreligion:
Of holy writ, she has presumed to annul
And abrogate, as roundly as she may,
The total ordonance and will of God;
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