The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
represent a people on the move spatially and socially. Evangelicalism in the
eighteenth century ‘came out of the closet’ as an expansive force, a partner
to economic individualism, and the spiritual manifestation of a new
economic order.
Evangelicalism’s link with the Enlightenment was very important. For
one thing, it made religion a ‘rational’ matter of study – not merely
Bible studies and theology, but conversionism itself. The Enlightenment
made the conversion and the religious revival objects for study. Instances
of revival became studied; cases were recorded, written down, the age, sex
and occupation of the converted registered, the economic, social and even
meteorological circumstances of the revival recorded. Preachers and clergy
started writing diaries which detailed the religious experiences of their
flocks. These were like laboratory reports recording times, dates and
observable physical symptoms. They were written up into learned articles
and books which amounted to a pathology of the conversion experience. 8
This made the study of religion a social science with clergy and preachers
themselves the social scientists. It was now a measurable phenomenon, with
numbers of ‘the saved’ of immense interest. The Methodists were the first
to produce, from 1767, reliable annual statistics of members in each of the
constituent countries of the British Isles. 9 Other denominations were much
slower – between 80 and 120 years slower – in reaching the same standard,
but other forms of religious statistics started to become collected with
increasing mania from the 1790s: parish membership data, numbers of
people without church seats, numbers of pews per head of population,
numbers of Sunday school attenders, and so on. Numbers started to
represent a new power for the churches, especially for the dissenters and
for the evangelicals who promoted voluntary organisations committed to
evangelisation at home and abroad. 10 Evangelicalism exerted its power by
broadcasting rising statistics of ‘the saved’ which, in a context of rapid
population growth, was almost inevitable. But in the simple statistical
methods of the time, evangelicalism entered almost a century of continuous
euphoria with rising numbers.
The power being exerted by evangelical numbers was a discursive power.
Religious statistics divided people: into church members and non-church
members, churchgoers and non-churchgoers, those with a church pew
and those without. This challenged established religion. Its condoning of
personal conversion challenged the established definition of religiosity
as conformity, as submission to authority. It was, to use a modern word,
‘democratic’. It was a leveller, tearing the formal expression of religiosity
from the serried ranks of churchgoers in the landlord’s parish church,
and ceding it to the personal experience of high and low wherever they
might feel it. It moved religion out of the control of civil–ecclesiastical
power. It deregulated religion, in the economic-speak of the late twentieth
century, ‘privatising’ it, opening up the saving of souls to any passing
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