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