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