The Death of Christian Britain

— The Salvation Economy —
evangelist or preacher, and denying the authority and control of ecclesiastical
regulation.
In this, evangelicalism made religion potentially dangerous, and was
resisted strongly by many clergy of the established churches. In the context
of the Revolutionary Wars of the 1790s, evangelical preachers of many
denominations and none became harried by civil and ecclesiastical power,
and their methods – open-air preaching, tract distribution and ‘unregulated’
Sunday schools – became seen as ‘democratical’. Some Establishment clergy
who had initially welcomed evangelicalism either turned on it (sometimes
by becoming informants for the government), or were scared off from it.
In Scotland, the agitation of one former evangelical minister caused all
but one of the Established Church clergy to resign from the Glasgow
Missionary Society in 1798, and instigated the Church of Scotland in 1799
to issue a ‘pastoral admonition’ prohibiting clergy and people from
supporting Sunday schools. 11 Though Scotland in the 1790s represented an
extreme established-church reaction to evangelicalism, such hostility was
evident throughout Britain, and especially in the Anglican attitude to
Methodism. An immediate consequence was the direction of initial evangelical
energies into the patriotic and ‘safe’ foreign mission rather than the
politically dangerous home mission. It was in the mission to foreign lands
where a key characteristic of evangelicalism – the voluntary organisation –
was developed. From the Ladies Auxiliary of the foreign mission organisations
of Britain’s cities in the late 1790s, evangelicalism emerged not
merely as a personal conversion experience but as a ‘doing’ – as an active
work as Sunday school teacher, tract distributor or fund-raiser. And the
activity had one aim: to bring everyone to conversion.
THE SALVATION REVOLUTION
Despite its important doctrinal emphases, it was the route to salvation which
was the distinctive feature of evangelicalism; as Ian Bradley has said,
‘Evangelicalism was never really a theological system so much as a way of
life.’ 12 If salvation was a personal experience, to engineer it on a grand scale
was a social issue. Millions had to be ‘called’, and this required a cultural
environment in which it would be widely received. It required machinery
in the form of propagandisation and outreach agencies to foment a modern
puritan revolution – a call to the individual to self-contemplation and
conversion, to congregational participation, and to evangelical action in
society at large. From 1796 to 1914, Britain was immersed in the greatest
exercise in Christian proselytism this country has ever seen. It focused the
individual on personal salvation and ideals of moral behaviour and manifestations
of outward piety. It reconstructed the local church in its modern
form – not a parish state of regulatory courts, church discipline and
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