The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
nightmare, Jack the Ripper and ‘Darkest England’. The tone was set in
1880 by James Thomson’s narrative poem The City of Dreadful Night in
which an unearthly preacher in an anti-sermon informs the ‘spectral
wanderers of unholy Night’ that ‘There is no God; no Fiend with names
divine’. 46 The 1880s was the decade of moral panics, promoted in part by
the anonymous pamphlet of the Congregationalist minister the Revd
Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, and in part by the
revelations of Stead’s articles in the Pall Mall Gazette about, and subsequent
prosecution for, obtaining a young girl for immoral purposes. 47 When
in 1886 the British Weekly was founded as the main religious newspaper
of the British evangelical community, its prime concern was the irreligious
nature of London. A pre-launch census of London churchgoing gripped
the attention of church leaders (especially the clergy) as its results appeared
over several months, showing that 12.6 per cent of the population attended
morning services of Protestant parish churches and 13 per cent at evening
services. 48 Two years later, William Booth’s In Darkest England and the
Way Out 49 not only intensified evangelical sensitivity to London but
provided an enduring image of London as an impenetrable continent of
social danger. Charles Booth’s and Seebohm Rowntree’s studies of poverty
provided further grist to the mill of the mythology of cities in secularising
danger, causing one Liberal politician to conclude that ‘present belief in
religion . . . is slowly but steadily fading from the modern city race.’ 50
Pessimism propelled the evangelising cause. For the Scot Henry
Drummond, the city was ‘the antipodes of Heaven’ and a problem for
mankind and for the Christian: ‘To make Cities – that is what we are here
for. To make good Cities – that is for the present hour the main work of
Christianity. For the City is strategic . . . He who makes the City makes
the world.’ 51 Clergy drew on a variety of ideologies and social movements
to reconstruct the city: civic gospels in industrial cities like Birmingham
and Glasgow between the 1850s and 1870s, 52 municipal socialism in the
1890s, 53 and the garden-city movement in the 1900s. ‘Let us notice’, wrote
one clergyman in 1910, ‘how the Garden City ideal possesses some of the
features which belong to the ideal city of God described in the end of the
Apocalypse.’ 54 But the emergence of these ideals was dependent on the city
remaining a perpetual social and religious problem. Objectified by statistics
and surveys, and by botanical-style expeditions into the slums to collect
specimens of the irreligious and depraved, idealism depended on the
embedded idea of the urban crisis of religion.
The myth of the unholy city remained largely untarnished at the heart
of British ecclesiastical thinking throughout the twentieth century. But it
only started to seriously invade the academy of historians after 1950. E.R.
Wickham established a very firm principle at the start of his pioneering
study of the history of urban religion in Sheffield:
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