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 />
landowner power, but the congregation as a private club and a parliament<br />
<strong>of</strong> believers. And it spawned the ‘associational ideal’ by which true believers<br />
could express their conversion in the assurance shown through commitment<br />
to evangelising work in voluntary organisations. 13<br />
From 1800 <strong>Britain</strong> was puritanised by evangelicalism. Through the influence<br />
<strong>of</strong> secularisation theory and the Marxist-derived agenda <strong>of</strong> class<br />
politics, this process has been most commonly understood by historians as<br />
a predominantly middle-class class development. 14 Certainly the middle<br />
classes <strong>of</strong> non-metropolitan <strong>Britain</strong> experienced savage change to their<br />
lifestyle with the rise <strong>of</strong> evangelical culture. <strong>The</strong> temperance pioneer John<br />
Dunlop recalled lodging as a student at Glasgow University in 1801 with<br />
the Revd Stevenson Macgill, a pioneer ‘modern’ evangelical in the Church<br />
<strong>of</strong> Scotland: ‘In vain D[r] MacGill reprobated excess; in vain he & his<br />
brothers Thomas and Francis exhibited specimens in themselves <strong>of</strong> almost<br />
continental temperance.’ Dunlop remembered that the social and business<br />
life <strong>of</strong> the patrician middle classes, clergy and students was infused with<br />
drinking to excess, hunting parties, and attendance ‘at an infinity <strong>of</strong> voluptuous<br />
parties’ thrown by parishioners for their minister. ‘Purity <strong>of</strong> thought<br />
& morals were at a low ebb . . . Everyone <strong>of</strong> a serious cast in the middle<br />
class (male or female) was insulted & spoken against.’ However, by the<br />
following decade the struggle to puritanise was starting to win over<br />
Glasgow society, especially with the arrival <strong>of</strong> Thomas Chalmers. By 1860,<br />
Dunlop recalled, Glasgow had been ‘advanced & improved in science, literature,<br />
morals and piety’. 15<br />
Evangelicals like Dunlop were by the 1830s active in developing new<br />
elements <strong>of</strong> piety. One essential ingredient in this process was rewriting<br />
the history <strong>of</strong> the recent past – writing a ‘moral history’ <strong>of</strong> <strong>Britain</strong>. Some<br />
saw this as resurrecting the puritan divines <strong>of</strong> the seventeenth century and<br />
the early evangelicals <strong>of</strong> the eighteenth century (such as Jonathan Edwards),<br />
but more urgent was rewriting the moral history <strong>of</strong> the most recent past.<br />
Evangelicals were conscious that every age was distinguished by different<br />
moral tones, by what the Chamber’s Journal in 1836 called ‘tendencies’.<br />
This was evident in literature where in the 1790s and 1800s ‘poets and versifiers’<br />
had been dedicated ‘to the production <strong>of</strong> pieces directly calculated to<br />
injure the morals <strong>of</strong> the people’:<br />
Take up the works <strong>of</strong> these authors, and see how many songs they<br />
have written descriptive <strong>of</strong> the delights <strong>of</strong> an indulgence in intoxicating<br />
liquors, or commemorative <strong>of</strong> the wild enjoyments <strong>of</strong> a drunken<br />
brawl.... According to their definition <strong>of</strong> moral qualities, no one is<br />
to be considered honest, good-hearted, generous, cheerful, or merry,<br />
unless he can take his glass freely; that is, unless he be a drunkard. 16<br />
‘Fortunately,’ the Journal claimed, ‘the race <strong>of</strong> drunken poets is now pretty<br />
nearly extinct’, replaced with a ‘new order <strong>of</strong> men . . . in correspondence<br />
40