The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
Describing Christian ‘new birth’ as ‘the salvation economy’, Bradwell
was reflecting a common parallel drawn in nineteenth-century industrial
Britain between the capitalist economy and evangelical renewal. Two
‘economies’ existed back-to-back to each other, like the two sides of a coin.
An ‘economy’ was not merely an abstract entity of production, distribution
and exchange, but was the divine government of the world, a moral
entity in which the individual was placed by receiving God’s grace.
Conversion represented consanguineous values to capitalism: self-help, selfreliance,
taking responsibility. Similarly, the ‘Christian economy’ was not
merely to be conceived of as the church and attendance upon its rituals,
but as the enveloping of life within an evangelical framework. Evangelicalism’s
scheme of salvation, as Boyd Hilton has said, had as its centrepiece
‘an “economy of redemption” in which souls were bought in the cheapest
market and sold in the dearest’. 2 The scheme was a ‘rational’ one, elevating
the economy of business and commerce into ‘an arena of great spiritual
trial and suspense’. 3 Evangelical theologians of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century admitted a scientific conception of causation in which
God’s works had mechanically harmonious consequences, most observable
in William Wilberforce’s mathematical chart of his state of salvation. 4
This economy was not measurable merely by counting churchgoers or
Sunday scholars, rates of church membership growth or numbers of religious
marriages. It has to be gauged by the discursive environment within
which such high rates of church affiliation and worship occurred.
Evangelicalism held up discursive mirrors against which the individual
negotiated his/her self. While the next two chapters examine the discursive
strength of evangelical culture, the present chapter focuses upon the ‘salvation
economy’ – the machinery of ideas and agencies by which the
discursivity of evangelical piety dominated public culture.
Conversionist evangelicalism broke the mental chains of the ancien
régime in Britain. If pre-industrial religiosity stressed individual faith within
the context of obedience to church and state, modern evangelicalism laid
stress on faith in the context of the individual as a ‘free moral agent’. Faith
was disjoined from the state by reconceiving religion outwith the ecclesiastical
monopoly of the established churches. John Wesley started to
explore the ambiguities and contradictions in the faith–state relationship in
the mid-eighteenth century, 5 but it was in the two decades between 1790
and 1810 that the full theological and personal implications of modern evangelicalism
emerged into popular religiosity and popular culture. The key
was the Enlightenment, for, as several scholars have shown, evangelicalism
became intrinsically shackled to it, deriving rationality for religious experience.
6 The result was that a person’s religious experience attained a new
validity which called that individual to evangelical action. Instead of
implying obedience to church discipline and ecclesiastical courts, the
religious test became one for the individual to impose upon his/her self.
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