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‘A Victory for God’: The Scottish Presbyterian Churches and the General Strike of 1926

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

Stewart J. Brown
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Extract

During the final months of the First World War, the General Assemblies of the two major Presbyterian Churches in Scotland - the established Church of Scotland and the voluntary United Free Church - committed themselves to work for the thorough re- construction of Scottish society. Church leaders promised to work for a new Christian commonwealth, ending the social divisions and class hatred that had plagued pre-war Scottish industrial society. Bound together through the shared sacrifice of the war, the Scottish people would be brought back to the social teachings of Christianity and strive together to realise the Kingdom of God. The Churches would end their deference to the laws of nineteenth-century political economy, with their emphasis on individualism, self-interest and competition, and embrace new impera- tives of collective responsibility and co-operation. Along with the healing of social divisions, church leaders also pledged to end the ecclesiastical divisions in Scottish Presbyterianism. The final months of the war brought a revival of the pre-war movement to unite the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church into a single National Church, and Scottish ecclesiastical leaders held forth to a weary nation the vision of a united National Church leading a covenanted Christian commonwealth in pursuit of social justice and harmony.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , October 1991 , pp. 596 - 617
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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