The Death of Christian Britain

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