The Death of Christian Britain

— The Problem with ‘Religious Decline’ —
of houses and families, it as an extent of field which puts at a distance
all hope of a deep or universal impression . . . 29
By 1817, Chalmers was developing a thorough fear of the large city. He
told his congregation: ‘I am surely not out of place, when, on looking at
the mighty mass of a city population, I state my apprehension, that if something
be not done to bring this enormous physical strength under the
control of Christian and humanized principle, the day may yet become,
when it may lift against the authorities of the land, its brawny vigour, and
discharge upon them all the turbulence of its rude and volcanic energy.’ 30
Four years later, Chalmers had advanced both his system and his ideas,
publishing The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns as a twovolume
social-scientific study of urban religion and morality which linked
him to the ideas of Malthus and Ricardo. Deploying statistics of religiosity
collected from his parish and Glasgow as a whole, he demonstrated just
how far irreligion had taken a hold in working-class industrial towns. ‘The
atmosphere of towns, may at length become so pestilential, as to wither up
the energies of our church.’ 31 ‘Profligacy,’ he maintained, ‘obtains in every
crowded and concentrated mass of human beings.’ People and clergy are
separated, as are social classes.
In a provincial capital, the great mass of the population are retained
in kindly and immediate dependence on the wealthy residenters of
the place . . . [which] brings the two extreme orders of society in to
that sort of relationship, which is highly favourable to the general
blandness and tranquillity of the whole population. In a manufacturing
town, on the other hand, the poor and the wealthy stand more
disjoined from each other. It is true, they often meet, but they meet
more on an arena of contest, than on a field where the patronage and
custom of the one party are met by the gratitude and good will of
the other.
Chalmers thus saw the nature of economic relationships as differing
between commercial and industrial towns. When the working classes were
industrial and not service providers for the wealthy, there was no economic
bond between them. Manufacturers, he said, were worthy people, but ‘their
intercourse with the labouring classes is greatly more an intercourse of
collision, and greatly less an intercourse of kindliness, than there is that of
the higher orders in such towns as Bath, or Oxford, or Edinburgh’. As a
consequence, ‘there is a mighty unfilled space interposed between the high
and the low of every manufacturing city’. The solution to this void was
‘to multiply the agents of Christianity amongst us, whose delight it may
be to go forth among the people’. 32 However, when in the 1820s Chalmers
moved to Edinburgh as professor of divinity, he quickly discovered that
he had been too sanguine about the state of religion and moral degradation
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