The Death of Christian Britain

— The Salvation Economy —
central to their perception of their own success, and for this reason religious
‘decline’ was the perennial fear of the evangelical. In a practical sense,
the fear of the ‘lapsed’ multitude was the primary propaganda used by
evangelicals amongst themselves to cajole each other into giving money and
time to the cause.
In a sermon entitled ‘The Contemplation of Heathen Idolatry an
Excitement to Missionary Zeal’, the Congregationalist Revd Ralph Wardlaw
told the London Missionary Society in 1818:
The reproach of many centuries has of late been rolling away. An
unprecedented impulse of benevolent zeal has been given to the whole
Christian world. All is life, and energy and action. By Bible Societies,
and Missionary Societies, and Tract and School Societies, efforts are
now making, the most extensive, the most prosperous, and the most
promising, for enlightening and evangelizing the entire population of
the globe. 32
The great invention of evangelicalism was the voluntary organisation. It
turned the elite organisation of eighteenth-century charity into the backbone
of urban-industrial society, providing spiritual, educational, recreational,
evangelising and moralising opportunities for the whole population.
From the first true product of the evangelical movement, Robert Raikes’
Sunday school in Gloucester in 1780, literally hundreds of types of organisation
were spawned within the evangelical community. These were the
‘agencies’ of mission, using differing techniques and evolving agendas to
impart elements of the overall evangelical message. The voluntary organisation
took over the regulation of the people’s habits from the
established-church parish-state of the early modern period.
It started with the Sunday school in 1780, progressed by 1800 to the
tract distribution society, and from 1826 emerged as the mission-district
visiting system – the ‘aggressive system’ popularised by Thomas Chalmers,
spread by the City Mission movement from the mid-1820s, and taken up
almost universally by the 1850s amongst British Protestant churches. There
were three core agencies of discourse dissemination: Sunday school, tract
and visitation. But to them were added other specific agencies: the Penny
Bank movement from the 1840s; the myriad of organisations for older
youths which developed from the 1840s (the YMCA, the YWCA, bible
classes, Christian Endeavour, millgirl meetings); and organisations for adults
(mothers’ meetings, and missions to specific occupational groups). 33 The
density of these organisations within urban society increased as the nineteenth
century progressed. They became a mania of the committed
evangelical, designed to provide a wall-to-wall bombardment of citizens. It
was in the 1810s that the integration of evangelical agencies started, initially
in the experimental scheme at the Tron parish of the Church of Scotland
in Glasgow where Thomas Chalmers attracted to his side many who were
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