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The Reform and Extension of Established Churches in the United Kingdom 37 The Reform and Extension of Established Churches in the United Kingdom, 1780-1870 Stewart J. Brown During the latter phase of the Napoleonic Wars, the United Kingdom began directing unprecedented amounts of public money towards improving and extending its established churches. Despite the massive costs of the war, the parliamentary state invested heavily in building new churches, repairing and enlarging existing churches, providing church-based schools, building residence houses for the clergy, and increasing the incomes of poorly paid clergy. Combined with grants of money, the state also enacted measures of church reform, strengthening the powers of bishops, requiring higher standards of pastoral care from the clergy, and improving the incomes and conditions of curates. This movement to reform and extend the established churches was in part a response to the social unrest resulting from early industrialisation and the new democratic movements inspired by the American and French Revolutions. There was a real concern that labouring people, many of them experiencing dire poverty in the rapidly growing industrial districts, were becoming dangerously disaffected from the social and political order. Some were rejecting Christian beliefs altogether; many more were joining dissenting religious bodies that, it was feared, had no loyalty to the monarchical state, proclaimed ‘democratic’ ideas regarding the equality of all people before God, and dreamed of an approaching millennium that would include the levelling of social ranks. For the Tory governments of Spencer Perceval (1809-1812) and Lord Liverpool (1812-1827), and their supporters among Britain’s governing classes, the best antidote to the spread of such revolutionary ideas was to extend a state-sanctioned Protestant Christianity among the lower social orders. Such a Christianity would promote the virtues of passive obedience and non-resistance to the powers that be, and quiet resignation in the face of worldly adversity and injustice. It would teach the common people to direct their aspirations, not to revolution and a new social order in this world, but to a personal reward in Christ’s heavenly kingdom. It would promote loyalty and service Stewart J. Brown 38 to the state, as the expression of God’s order and purpose on earth. And so, beginning about 1808, the parliamentary state provided major grants of public money to the established churches; indeed never in its history did the parliamentary state invest so heavily in the established churches as it did between 1808 and 1824. Some also began to believe that the extension of the established churches could be a means of consolidating the United Kingdom politically. The United Kingdom was a recent creation. It had been formed with the Act of Union of 1801, which had united the exclusively Protestant parliaments of the overwhelmingly Protestant Great Britain and the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Ireland. The Union had been enacted following a revolutionary uprising in Ireland in 1798, a bloody struggle that had begun as a French-inspired republican rising but that had quickly degenerated into a sectarian civil war, which had cost over 30,000 lives and added to the legacy of hatred between Ireland’s Protestants and Catholics. The prime minister, William Pitt, had intended to secure a measure of Catholic emancipation immediately following the Act of Union, but emancipation had been thwarted, largely by the opposition of King George III, and as a result the Irish Catholic population remained largely alienated from the Union state. Of a total population of about 15,846,000 making up the United Kingdom in 1801, approximately 5,216,000 - or nearly a third - were Irish, and of these, about three-quarters were Roman Catholic. Could a state, in which about a quarter of the population were disaffected, have much chance of achieving stability? For some among Britain’s governing classes, the only real hope for securing the Union on a permanent basis was for a large proportion of the Irish Catholic population to convert to Protestantism. And, they believed, the best way to achieve these conversions was through a well-resourced, efficient and effective established Protestant Church in Ireland. Some extended this ideal of enhanced political unity through religious uniformity to the whole of the United Kingdom. They envisaged the different nationalities of the United Kingdom - England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland - all organised under the authority of the established churches into close-knit parish communities of less than 1,000 inhabitants. In these communities, people would come together for Sunday worship within the parish church, educate their...

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