Faith in Diversity: The Flowering of Divergent Agendas in Recent Writing in the Social History of Religion in Late Modern Scotland

Abstract

The writing of religious history has changed enormously in Scotland in the last fifty years. Early pioneers of a social history approach to the interaction of religion and society, such as L. J. Saunders in Scottish Democracy 1815–1840: the social and intellectual background (London, 1950), and the work of Stewart Mechie in his collection of essays The Church and Scottish Social development 1780–1870 (London, 1960), joined an early flowering of empirical sociology of religion under John Highet, such as his The Churches in Scotland To-day (Glasgow, 1950). By the early 1970s, the field was being strongly influenced by trends from England and Wales. On the one hand, within ecclesiastical history there was a development of social-history approaches to church and cities, most ably developed by Hugh McLeod, whose Church and Class in the Late Victorian City (London, 1974) established a new benchmark in the field. McLeod is now the doyen of the social history of religion in western Christendom, having over three decades produced an unmatched body of comparative work in monographs and articles (including his Piety and Poverty: Working-class Religion in Berlin, London and New York 1870–1914