English Christianity and the Australian Colonies, 1788–1860

Abstract

In the England of 1840, as Professor Chadwick observes, the idea of mission pertained to the lapsed at home as well as the heathen overseas. This article, in discussing connexions between the English Churches and the Australian colonies, deals with a third meaning: colonial mission. The seventeenth-century association of religion and colonisation is well known. The bearing of religion (heathen missions excepted) on the imperialism of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and the response of English Christianity to settlement colonies in this period, have occasioned less discussion. Most familiar are the points where religion was drawn into imperial policy, as in British North America after the Revolution. Promotion of the Church of England was part of an overhaul of imperial administration in New South Wales as well. But in the new century this method of achieving political and social stability ran into difficulties at home. In Australia it was ineffective and little more popular than in the Canadas. By 1830 religion was ceasing to be an instrument of imperial policy. The new bearers of British Christianity overseas, the evangelical missionary societies, had been founded with the heathen in view and generally avoided other engagements. The missionary fervour of the post-Napoleonic period thus coincided with indifference to the religious needs of emigrants and colonists. A response came in the 1830s in the form of colonial missionary societies and a quickening of the older Church societies. Though never a match for the home and heathen enterprises of Victorian Christianity, the colonial missions had roots in the nation's past. They expressed the various aspirations of the home Churches and were part of the phenomenon of empire.