[6] Religion in the city: evangelicalism in Belfast 1800–60

The greatest challenge to evangelical ardour throughout the British Isles was posed by the new industrial centres which rendered existing religious structures inadequate and irrelevant. The real test for churches and voluntary religious organizations in the nineteenth century, therefore, was how well they could adapt to the realities of urban living and, more particularly, how much support they could attract from a predominantly youthful and mobile working class. A plethora of local studies has indicated that church extension programmes in the 1830s and 1840s were too late and too limited to enable religious institutions to make any real impact on the lives of working people in terms of formal observance. It has also been recognized, however, that to conclude-as did many Victorians-that the urban working classes were steeped in irreligion, atheism or scepticism, is too simplistic. For a minority of working-class men and women regular church attendance reflected a desire for an orderly, ‘respectable’ lifestyle. Many others accepted the churches’ services at important stages of the lifecycle-for baptisms, marriages and funeral services-as a matter of culture and tradition and used the churches’ social facilities without feeling any need to attend more overtly ‘religious’ activities. Recent studies also suggest that while the doctrinal, dogmatic, church-based conventions of orthodox Christianity were largely rejected by the urban masses, religious ideas, symbols and values permeated popular culture at a less official level. The relationship between religion and the culture of a community is thus richer and more complex than statistical analysis alone can reveal. While sectarian competition is particularly characteristic of Ulster’s major town, a study of its religious development in the first half of the nineteenth century sho ws that working-class attitudes to evangelical attempts to transform their lives are much the same in Belfast as in London, Manchester or Glasgow.1