The Death of Christian Britain

— The Problem with ‘Religious Decline’ —
fishing, coal mining and whisky distilling drew the parish minister to
comment in 1790: ‘One circumstance in the general character of the lower
class of people, both in town and country, according to the complaint and
experience of their clergy, consists in the little attention paid to every
thing beyond their worldly interest, and a woeful ignorance in matters of
religion; . . . and . . . a more than usual neglect in attending public worship’. 19
When in 1785 the Adelphi cotton-spinning works opened in Perthshire
and the new village of Deanston was spawned around it, a local remarked
five years later that ‘the consequence was very distressing. So many people
collected in one house refined each other in all manner of wickedness. The
duties of the family were neglected, the Sabbath was profaned; the instruction
of youth was forgotten; and a looseness and corruption of manners
spread, like a fatal contagion, every where around.’ 20 Meanwhile, larger
towns further south were objects of considerable anxiety. ‘Sheffield is not
the most irreligious town in the Kingdom’, wrote one of the town’s clergy
in 1817; yet, he went on: ‘Look at the families surrounding your dwellings,
and you perhaps see a solitary instance where a whole household of several
persons are regular attendants.’ 21 In Manchester, J.P. Kay described the
working classes as living ‘precisely like brutes’ seeking to gratify ‘the
appetites of their uncultivated bodies’: ‘Brought up in the darkness of
barbarism, they have no idea, that it is possible for them to attain any
higher condition’. 22
Evangelical criticism of the emerging urban proletariat in the 1790s was
especially strong in Scotland where clergy were most sensitive to the disintegration
of the presbyterian parish-state. 23 But the Revolutionary Wars
with secularist France from 1793 increased awareness of religious neglect
at home: ‘In vain shall we speak of the importance of good morals, while
we are leaders in every species of dissipation, intemperance and debauchery.
In vain shall we speak against French principles and French impiety, while
our whole conduct manifests and promotes a disregard to the doctrines,
laws and institutions of the Gospel.’ 24 The war with a secularist foe had a
cathartic effect on the British religious sense of the irreligious ‘other’, for
in 1795–6 the two great schemes of British evangelicalism emerged in
embryo simultaneously: the mission to the domestic ‘heathen’ of town and
countryside, and the foreign mission to ‘heathen’ lands in the emerging
empire. One minister prioritised action at home rather than overseas: ‘When
we see the tide of infidelity and licentiousness so great and so constantly
increasing in our land, it would indeed be highly preposterous to carry
our zeal to another, and far distant one.’ 25 But the home mission had a
problem; it depended too much on dissenters whose very existence implied
criticism of the parish clergyman and challenge to the already shaky hierarchy
of local power. The established churches did all they could to stall
the home mission: they told government that dissent was ‘democratical’,
‘seditious’ and, in the case of Methodism, ‘the miserable effusions of
21