The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
splinter clubs from the original. Congregations were linked in denominations
– the Wesleyan Methodists, the General Baptists, the Congregationalists,
the United Secession Church – which formed assemblies or
synods to act as regional and national (and indeed international) parliaments,
exercising control over congregational behaviour and organising the
bigger schemes of evangelisation and church growth. So the member of one
club could enjoy reciprocal rights of membership wherever he or she might
go in the country, finding a welcome for Sunday worship and like-minded
people with whom to socialise and make contacts.
The congregational clubs of Victorian Britain recreated the nature of
organised Christianity as an expanding, evangelising territory. Almost every
club had territorial dimensions, a ‘parish’ defined by its denomination, but
it overlapped with parishes or clubs of other denominations, and in any
event usually had only notional significance. Members of the club might
come from long distances, and new members were rarely rejected because
they lived outwith the parish. The congregational club differed from the
parish state of the pre-industrial period in creating an abstract territoriality,
a claim on social space. In one particular, though, there was an important
literal territoriality: the home-mission district. By the 1840s and 1850s,
urban dissenting congregations drew up parts of cities, often quite small
ones of a few streets, inhabited by what were deemed alienated workingclass
families which became targeted for intensive evangelisation on a
permanent basis. Here the agencies of the congregation were deployed in
integrated work: Sunday schools, millgirl prayer meetings, young men’s
societies, bible classes, medical missions, gospel temperance societies and
tract distributors. The home-mission district was a defining function of
the congregation. It gave the members a sense of religious and social
‘otherness’, a group of people in more straitened financial conditions who
required Christian charity of a ‘useful’ and ‘improving’ kind. This work
was not the giving of dole, but the offering of means to social and moral
rescue: the Christian gospel, the temperance gospel, the thrift gospel
and so on. The congregation deployed these ‘agencies’ as different but integrated
means for social reform.
This work made the church, and especially the dissenting church of the
nineteenth century, a hive of activity. 31 In physical terms, the congregational
church grew from being in 1800 a mere meeting house to being by
1900 a centre with many different halls for various meeting groups, and
usually also with a satellite church or station in the mission district.
Dissenters were ebullient with their success. They did this work themselves,
they donated vast amounts of money, organised committees and collecting
systems, got building loans, and managed themselves into a religious entity.
But they were always aware of the ‘problem’ – the non-churchgoers of the
slums and industrial districts. Indeed, it was this awareness that drove them
in their evangelisation work. The existence of the ‘religious other’ was
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