The Death of Christian Britain

— The Salvation Economy —
with the tendency of the age’ who were promoting ‘the practice of sobriety
in connection with a sound moral state of feeling’.
The puritanisation of society reached its key moment in the early 1830s
with the advent of the temperance movement. Dunlop was a pioneer,
starting work as so many others did in the Sunday school movement, and
then seeing Britain’s first North American-influenced temperance societies
in Maryhill in Glasgow and in his native Greenock. He was finally
persuaded of the temperance ideal on a European tour in 1830, and then
started campaigning nationwide, producing pamphlets and undertaking
lecture tours. This produced significant, immediate and permanent changes
in the definition of piety. Equally, the identification of drinking as a moral
and religious evil to be countered by pledge-taking heightened the maleness
of impiety. It amended the nature of religiosity, including the piety
of the existing Christian community: ‘The irreligion of the religious must
be subdued,’ wrote one correspondent in the Baptist New Connexion
journal in 1834, ‘their affinity to the world destroyed, and their lust for
vanity and sensuality be crucified. The manners and habits of the professing
community are decidedly intemperate.’ 17 It was a considerable struggle to
convince each denomination. By 1834, it was reported that in the cities of
Leicester, Nottingham and Loughborough only two dissenting clergy
had become members of temperance societies. 18 With the rise of teetotalism
in 1836, the evangelical moral agenda became closely linked with selfimprovement
ideology in working-class communities, notably in the
Chartist movement from 1837. The whole of society was being reassessed
by a new moral barometer in which the alcohol test was supreme.
The salvation revolution coincided in the 1790s and 1800s with the industrial
revolution and its accompanying rapid urbanisation. These created new
‘social problems’: the breakdown of traditional social relationships; 19
working men in expanding or new trades with an increasingly machismo
culture which redefined gender roles and fomented domestic violence; 20
uneducated child workers working long hours six days a week but roaming
the streets and fields on Sundays; and prostitution, drunkenness and the
expanding cultural dissipation of traditional forms of popular culture
(including unregulated folk sports, brutal sports, fairs and gambling). 21
Three things followed immediately: first, there was heightened sensitivity
amongst the social elites – the landed classes, patricians and middle classes
– to the adverse social consequences of industrial and town growth. The
‘rough culture’ of the predominantly urban new working classes became a
‘problem’ which required solutions. Evangelicalism provided a ‘moral
package’ of admirable social values and agencies suited to the regulation of
lower orders who were now out of the reach of traditional forms of institutional
control. 22 Second, evangelicalism became immediately popular
amongst the new working classes. This was most obviously seen in the
development of churches in new textile, metallurgical and mining villages
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