Britain

Britain in the wider sense is the frame for material that crosses the island's internal borders. Roman Britain left altars and temples to a mixture of imported and local gods, and the fusions recorded on them, Sulis Minerva at the hot spring at Bath above all, are among the clearest evidence anywhere for how Roman religion absorbed a provincial cult rather than replacing it. What came after the legions is much thinner. The Anglo-Saxon settlement brought a Germanic pantheon known mostly from place names, the days of the week and a handful of hostile Christian references, and the Norse settlement of the north and the isles brought a related one.

Both peoples brought runes, and the inscriptions they cut are the earliest writing in the island's vernaculars. English runic inscriptions run from small personal objects to the standing cross at Ruthwell, and reading them is a discipline of its own, because the alphabet was extended for English sounds and most of the texts are very short.

The Reformation crossed the internal borders and produced a different result on each side of them, which is why the atlas keeps England, Scotland and Ireland as separate entries and uses this one for what genuinely spans them: the print culture that carried reformed argument in a shared language, the Bible translations that circulated across the whole island, and the dissenting movements, Quakers, Baptists and Methodists among them, that organised without regard to the border and then exported themselves.

The largest religious fact about Britain is not a domestic one. From the eighteenth century the island's churches built an apparatus for sending people abroad: the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Baptist Missionary Society, the London Missionary Society and the Church Missionary Society among many others, funded by subscription and staffed increasingly by tradesmen and their wives rather than by clergy alone.

The relation between that effort and the empire was never simple, and Andrew Porter's study of it argues against reading missionaries straightforwardly as agents of expansion. Missionary societies were often at odds with colonial administrations and with settler interests, campaigned against slavery and sometimes against the taking of land, and worked in places the empire did not govern. They also travelled on the empire's ships, relied on its protection, and carried assumptions about civilisation that were not separable from it.

What is not in doubt is the result. The largest Anglican provinces are now in Africa, the churches planted by British societies in India, the Pacific and the Caribbean passed into local hands long ago, and the theological arguments that most divide the Anglican Communion today run between those provinces and the church that sent the missions. Attendance in Britain has fallen while the communion it seeded has grown, which reverses the direction of authority and is one of the more consequential religious shifts of the last century.