The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
Society has gradually risen in intelligence and general good feeling.
The Bible has become an honoured book. Christianity has secured
public sentiment in its favour. The house of God was never attended
as it is at present . . . Never was there so much true piety among all
classes, the rich as well as the poor. 72
In its first edition in 1886, the British Weekly (subtitled A Journal of Social
and Christian Progress) wrote: ‘To His appearing, and to the work He
planned and did, we trace all that marks the superiority of the new world
to the old, and all that is pregnant with growth and improvement yet to
come.’ The extension of the franchise, ‘the hour of the emancipation of the
people’, it linked to moral revolution: ‘the movements for temperance and
chastity are not temporary crazes, but great uprisings’. 73 This was a
profoundly Whig view of the upward progress of man, based on the evangelisation
of the world. It was a message of equality and of progress:
‘Salvation is offered to you: it is offered to all without distinction; it is for
the poor as well as the rich; the beggar as well as the king; for men of all
climes, and all complexions, and all ages.’ 74 For the true evangelical, the
work of mission as much as of family life was upward preparation for the
second coming. For all the moral and ecclesiastical panic created (and
intended) by the discourse on unholy cities, the evangelical’s ultimate view
was that the salvation industry was working, and that Britain was becoming
ever better prepared to be in a state of collective grace to receive the millennium
of Christ’s kingdom.
The salvation industry was a vast and inescapable facet of nineteenthand
early twentieth-century Britain. Its perfection (and indeed innovation)
of multi-media propagandisation propelled its ideas into the public domain
to transcend political, regional, ideological, gender, social and class boundaries.
Most importantly, it also transcended denominational boundaries.
Whilst Methodist, dissenting and presbyterian churches were undoubtedly
the leading edge of evangelical endeavour, the apparatus of discursive
Christianity developed also in the Anglican and Catholic churches. Though
the divide between church and chapel, high and low church, and between
Catholic and Protestant, were important facets of the religious landscape
in nineteenth-century Britain, the historian must not exaggerate this and
overlook the Christian common ground. 75 This was nowhere more observable
than in the post-1850 development of Catholic devotion and mission
in Britain on a parallel basis to Protestantism, incorporating voluntary
organisations promoting devotion and moral coda in equal measure, and a
responsiveness to revivalist impulses (including from Moody and Sankey). 76
For the Protestant evangelical, to be in the ‘State of Grace’ was the goal.
All humankind was to be encouraged that it was their goal too, and it was
this that gave rise to the greatest evangelisation effort the world has ever
seen. It was a levelling doctrine:
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