Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T02:38:30.187Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - The growth of voluntary religion

from PART I - CHRISTIANITY AND MODERNITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Sheridan Gilley
Affiliation:
University of Durham
Brian Stanley
Affiliation:
Henry Martyn Centre, Cambridge
Get access

Summary

Charles Haddon Spurgeon epitomised the success of nineteenth-century voluntary religion. From the early 1860s to the beginning of the 1890s the celebrated Baptist preached regularly at his Metropolitan Tabernacle to congregations of around 6,000 people. His vivid, witty and uninhibited approach in the pulpit made him one of the sights of London. By 1865 his sermons had a weekly sale of some 25,000 copies and were syndicated to newspapers throughout the English-speaking world. Although he enjoyed none of the privileges of the established Church of England – and in part because of that circumstance – Spurgeon achieved enormous popularity. The Nonconformists of England whom he championed were at the height of their influence. The descendants of the Puritans, who had left the established church in the seventeenth century and whose ranks had been augmented in the eighteenth by the Methodists, had grown to a position of rough numerical equality with the Church of England. In 1851 whereas some 19.7 per cent of the population attended the Church of England, Nonconformity enjoyed the support of as high a proportion as 18.6 per cent. Dissenters – a term equivalent to ‘Nonconformists’ – had mushroomed over the previous seventy or eighty years. Between 1773 and 1851 the number of Nonconformist congregations had multiplied tenfold, far exceeding the increase in population. Expansion relative to population, at least as measured by membership, continued after 1851 among the Free Churches for another quarter-century. There were parallel surges of church growth outside the state-supported churches in other parts of the British Isles, in the lands settled from Britain during the century and above all in the United States.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adam and Eve: gender in the English Free Church constituency’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44 (1993).
Bebbington, D. W, Evangelicalism in modern Britain: a history from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bebbington, D. W, Victorian Nonconformity (Bangor: Headstart, 1992).Google Scholar
Binfield, Clyde, So down to prayers: studies in English Nonconformity, 1780–1920 (London: Dent, 1977).Google Scholar
Brandenburg, Hans, The meek and the mighty: the emergence of the evangelical movement in Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).Google Scholar
Breward, Ian, A history of the churches in Australasia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Callum G., Religion and society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Cashdollar, CD., A spiritual home: life in British and American Reformed congregations, 1830–1915 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Cox, JeffreyThe English churches in a secular society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).Google Scholar
Davies, Rupert et al. (eds.), The history of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, 4 vols. (London: Epworth Press, 19651988).Google Scholar
Field, C. D., ‘The social structure of English Methodism: eighteenth–twentieth centuries’, British Journal of Sociology 28 (1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilbert, A. D., Religion and society in industrial England: chapel and social change, 1740–1914 (London: Longman, 1976).Google Scholar
Hatch, N. O., The democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Hempton, David and Hill, Myrtle, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster society, 1740–1890 (London: Routledge, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hillis, Peter, ‘Presbyterianism and social class in mid-nineteenth-century Glasgow: a study of nine churches’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 32 (1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hope, Nicholas, German and Scandinavian Protestantism, 1700–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Isichei, Elizabeth, Victorian Quakers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).Google Scholar
Jerrome, Peter, John Sirgood’s way: the story of the Loxwood Dependants (Petworth: Window Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Jones, R. Tudor, Congregationalism in Wales, ed. Pope, Robert (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004).Google ScholarPubMed
Jones, R. Tudor, Faith and the crisis of a nation: Wales, 1890–1914, ed. Pope, Robert (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Larsen, Timothy, Friends of religious equality: Nonconformist politics in mid-Victorian England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999).Google Scholar
Lovegrove, D. W., Established church, sectarian people (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLeod, Hugh, Religion and society in England, 1850–1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLoughlin, W. G., New England Dissent, 1630–1833, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).Google Scholar
Mitchell, W. J., Brief biographical sketches of Bible Christian ministers and laymen, 2 vols. (Jersey: Beresford Press, 1906), vol. i.Google Scholar
Munson, James, The Nonconformists: in search of a lost culture (London: SPCK, 1991).Google Scholar
Noll, M. A., A history of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992).Google Scholar
Oldstone-Moore, Christopher, Hugh Price Hughes: founder of a new Methodism, conscience of a new Nonconformity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Piggin, Stuart, Evangelical Christianity in Australia: Spirit, word and world (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Pike, Douglas, Paradise of Dissent (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1967).Google Scholar
Rawlyk, G. A. (ed.), Aspects of the Canadian evangelical experience (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Ross, Andrew, ‘Student kaleidoscope’, in Wright, D. F. and Badcock, G. D. (eds.), Disruption to diversity: Edinburgh divinity, 1846–1996 (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1996).Google Scholar
Smith, Mark, Religion in industrial society: Oldham and Saddleworth, 1740–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Snell, K. D. M. and Ell, P. S., Rival Jerusalems: the geography of Victorian religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spurgeon, C. H., Lectures to my students (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1954).Google Scholar
Stephenson, A. M. G., Anglicanism and the Lambeth conferences (London: SPCK, 1978).Google Scholar
Stunt, T. C. F., From awakening to secession: radical evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain, 1815–35 (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 2000).Google Scholar
Walker, Pamela J., Pulling the devil’s kingdom down: the Salvation Army in Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, Michael R., The Dissenters, vol. II: The expansion of evangelical Nonconformity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wemyss, Alice, Histoire du réveil, 1790–1849 (Paris: Les Bergers et les Mages, 1977).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×