The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
where, in the 1780s and 1790s especially, they became hotbeds of fervent
Methodism and Protestant dissent in which groups of men came together
to organise chapel committees, start savings schemes, rent a room for
worship, build a church, and acquire a minister or join a Methodist circuit. 23
Evangelical religion conferred the identity of a self-managed organisation
for the men of the new industrial working classes ‘who had very little to
do with the government of anything else’. 24 Third, as Anna Clark has
cogently argued, evangelical religion imbued women as well as men ‘with
a sense of spiritual equality’. Working people created their own systems of
moral authority in plebeian chapels, and members submitted to them to
regulate moral offences such as fornication, drunkenness, and Sabbathbreaking.
Though this could involve middle-class congregational leaders
disciplining working-class members (especially in churches of the larger
denominations in the larger cities), 25 it also involved congregations composed
of those from the same social background (and indeed occupations)
operating a collective moral code upon each other. As Clark stunningly
reveals, sin and salvation were highly gendered issues for the individual
sinner, with women submitting to the patriarchal authority of male church
leaders but, at the same time, exploiting the system as the only one which
really addressed familial issues and which could enforce redress (marriage
or child support) upon the men who had abused or deserted them or made
them pregnant. 26
Evangelical religion, especially in its more radical form, thus became an
enforcer of domestic ideology for an evolving, though troubled, masculinity
of the artisan chapel-goer, and a community venue for the exploration of
women’s roles, ideals and protests. In short, if the gender division of work
created the separate spheres for men and women of the new working classes
between 1780 and 1850, it was evangelicalism which provided the community
location for the elaboration and affirmation of those separate spheres
as domestic ideology. Faith was being privatised as an individual choice,
but one which had the potential to privilege female piety and institute
anxiety about masculinity.
These developments were widespread phenomena within British
Christianity of the nineteenth century, and by no means limited to
Protestantism. Changes in the English Roman Catholic Church between
1850 and 1914, as Mary Heimann has persuasively demonstrated, had less
to do with Irish, Roman or ultramontane influences than with native
Christian sensibilities. Catholic devotion in Victorian and Edwardian
England, she shows, had a great deal in common with Protestant spirituality,
including the inducement of anxiety, the conversion experience and
moral earnestness, whilst the rise of late-Victorian Marian devotion seemed
to owe more to the emergence of English feminine and domestic piety than
to the French growth of apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. Heimann
concludes: ‘Indeed, some aspects of English piety in the period, Catholic
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