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 />
with the tendency <strong>of</strong> the age’ who were promoting ‘the practice <strong>of</strong> sobriety<br />
in connection with a sound moral state <strong>of</strong> feeling’.<br />
<strong>The</strong> puritanisation <strong>of</strong> society reached its key moment in the early 1830s<br />
with the advent <strong>of</strong> the temperance movement. Dunlop was a pioneer,<br />
starting work as so many others did in the Sunday school movement, and<br />
then seeing <strong>Britain</strong>’s first North American-influenced temperance societies<br />
in Maryhill in Glasgow and in his native Greenock. He was finally<br />
persuaded <strong>of</strong> the temperance ideal on a European tour in 1830, and then<br />
started campaigning nationwide, producing pamphlets and undertaking<br />
lecture tours. This produced significant, immediate and permanent changes<br />
in the definition <strong>of</strong> piety. Equally, the identification <strong>of</strong> drinking as a moral<br />
and religious evil to be countered by pledge-taking heightened the maleness<br />
<strong>of</strong> impiety. It amended the nature <strong>of</strong> religiosity, including the piety<br />
<strong>of</strong> the existing <strong>Christian</strong> community: ‘<strong>The</strong> irreligion <strong>of</strong> the religious must<br />
be subdued,’ wrote one correspondent in the Baptist New Connexion<br />
journal in 1834, ‘their affinity to the world destroyed, and their lust for<br />
vanity and sensuality be crucified. <strong>The</strong> manners and habits <strong>of</strong> the pr<strong>of</strong>essing<br />
community are decidedly intemperate.’ 17 It was a considerable struggle to<br />
convince each denomination. By 1834, it was reported that in the cities <strong>of</strong><br />
Leicester, Nottingham and Loughborough only two dissenting clergy<br />
had become members <strong>of</strong> temperance societies. 18 With the rise <strong>of</strong> teetotalism<br />
in 1836, the evangelical moral agenda became closely linked with selfimprovement<br />
ideology in working-class communities, notably in the<br />
Chartist movement from 1837. <strong>The</strong> whole <strong>of</strong> society was being reassessed<br />
by a new moral barometer in which the alcohol test was supreme.<br />
<strong>The</strong> salvation revolution coincided in the 1790s and 1800s with the industrial<br />
revolution and its accompanying rapid urbanisation. <strong>The</strong>se created new<br />
‘social problems’: the breakdown <strong>of</strong> traditional social relationships; 19<br />
working men in expanding or new trades with an increasingly machismo<br />
culture which redefined gender roles and fomented domestic violence; 20<br />
uneducated child workers working long hours six days a week but roaming<br />
the streets and fields on Sundays; and prostitution, drunkenness and the<br />
expanding cultural dissipation <strong>of</strong> traditional forms <strong>of</strong> popular culture<br />
(including unregulated folk sports, brutal sports, fairs and gambling). 21<br />
Three things followed immediately: first, there was heightened sensitivity<br />
amongst the social elites – the landed classes, patricians and middle classes<br />
– to the adverse social consequences <strong>of</strong> industrial and town growth. <strong>The</strong><br />
‘rough culture’ <strong>of</strong> the predominantly urban new working classes became a<br />
‘problem’ which required solutions. Evangelicalism provided a ‘moral<br />
package’ <strong>of</strong> admirable social values and agencies suited to the regulation <strong>of</strong><br />
lower orders who were now out <strong>of</strong> the reach <strong>of</strong> traditional forms <strong>of</strong> institutional<br />
control. 22 Second, evangelicalism became immediately popular<br />
amongst the new working classes. This was most obviously seen in the<br />
development <strong>of</strong> churches in new textile, metallurgical and mining villages<br />
41