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The Death of Christian Britain

The Death of Christian Britain

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— <strong>The</strong> Problem with ‘Religious Decline’ —<br />

justly argued, can never be reached but by a series <strong>of</strong> aggressive efforts.’ 39<br />

<strong>The</strong> heathen city became an <strong>of</strong>ficial discourse <strong>of</strong> the British state. When in<br />

1854, Horace Mann presented the results <strong>of</strong> the 1851 Census <strong>of</strong> Religious<br />

Worship to parliament, his commentary was wholly reliant on Chalmerian<br />

interpretation. Of ‘the alarming number <strong>of</strong> non-attendants’ at church, Mann<br />

wrote <strong>of</strong> large towns: ‘What Dr. Chalmers calls “the influence <strong>of</strong> locality”,<br />

is powerless here: the area is too extensive and the multitude too vast.’<br />

Whilst the middle classes had become more religiously devotional, he wrote<br />

that ‘in cities and large towns it is observable how absolutely insignificant<br />

a portion <strong>of</strong> the congregations is composed <strong>of</strong> artizans’ – a class so ‘utter<br />

strangers to religious ordinances as the people <strong>of</strong> a heathen country.’ <strong>The</strong><br />

solution, asserted Mann, was the aggressive evangelising system. 40 After<br />

Chalmers, the language <strong>of</strong> class placed religiosity and its absence as the<br />

centre <strong>of</strong> the conception <strong>of</strong> society, its ordering and its problems.<br />

Chalmerian terms like ‘masses <strong>of</strong> ignorance and irreligion’ 41 and ‘heathenism’<br />

became the vocabulary <strong>of</strong> ecclesiastical and civil rhetoric.<br />

Despite a few who expressed more optimistic views <strong>of</strong> urban religion, 42<br />

the discourse on the unholy city was by 1850 established as a cornerstone<br />

<strong>of</strong> British ecclesiastical and social policy, driving forward appeals to church<br />

members for ‘<strong>Christian</strong> liberality’ for church-building, evangelisation and<br />

educational schemes. Social-science methods were deployed in mid-century<br />

to educate and inspire the laity. In the 1840s and 1850s, churches were<br />

infected as much as other branches <strong>of</strong> the nation’s life by the mania for<br />

statistics. Statistics <strong>of</strong> church membership, churchgoing and Sunday school<br />

attendance took pride <strong>of</strong> place beside vast reams <strong>of</strong> statistics on crime, prostitution,<br />

drink and gambling as what were called ‘moral statistics’ <strong>of</strong> the<br />

nation and <strong>of</strong> the larger cities in particular. 43 By the 1850s popular magazines<br />

were routinely publishing data on crime, ‘morals’, church members<br />

and Sunday school scholars side-by-side. In 1853 Chamber’s Journal published<br />

a study <strong>of</strong> the ratio <strong>of</strong> population to the numbers <strong>of</strong> drunk and<br />

disorderly persons picked up in the streets <strong>of</strong> major cities, with London in<br />

1851 achieving a ratio <strong>of</strong> 1:106, whilst the worst recorded places in <strong>Britain</strong><br />

were Edinburgh with 1:60 and Glasgow with 1:22. 44 Statistics were manufactured<br />

by ways now lost which calculated that there were in <strong>Britain</strong> in<br />

1860, 25,000 persons <strong>of</strong> ‘disreputable character’ living in ‘dens from which<br />

no fewer than 134,922 persons <strong>of</strong> both sexes daily proceed on missions <strong>of</strong><br />

vice and immorality’. 45 <strong>The</strong> discourse on the unholy city placed ‘scientific’<br />

evidence in the form <strong>of</strong> statistics at the heart <strong>of</strong> analysis, providing a<br />

powerful objectification <strong>of</strong> ‘the problem’.<br />

Whatever the statistics showed <strong>of</strong> irreligion in provincial cities, London<br />

had a reserved and, indeed, revered place in evangelical thinking. It represented<br />

the ultimate test <strong>of</strong> evangelicalism, for its sheer scale and density<br />

was the antithesis <strong>of</strong> the <strong>Christian</strong> rural parish <strong>of</strong> the pre-industrial age.<br />

It was in the 1880s that London reached its nadir as the city <strong>of</strong> moral<br />

25

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