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The Church of England and the Church of Scotland (a Presbyterian church) are both established churches, and the sovereign enjoys a special relationship with each. She is under a statutory duty to maintain and preserve the two churches, which are national churches. In Wales and Northern Ireland, there is no established church, and there is no established church in any other member state of the Commonwealth. `Establishment’ is not, however, a very precise term, and the sovereign's relations with the established churches in England and Scotland are very different. Disestablishment of the Church of England is once again a lively political issue as it was for much of the nineteenth century.

Two contradictory Protestant truths. Nature of church establishment in England and Scotland. Its non‐existence in Wales and Northern Ireland. A confused archbishop. Prevalence of religious belief in the United Kingdom since 1851. Religion and social policy: variation in social attitudes between religious and non‐religious people in the United Kingdom. Withdrawal of Prime Minister from appointing bishops 2007: de facto disestablishment? Whether religious representatives have a role in a democratic parliament. Religious pluralism and charitable regulation. The theology of Calvinism from Andrew Melvill to the Percy case. Status of the Church of Scotland Act 1921.

Union of England and Scotland 1707: Darien; succession crisis; trading issues; nature of the treaty. Church establishment in both countries. Union of Great Britain and Ireland 1800–1: United Irishmen 1798; French wars; trading issues; Pitt's plan and George III's veto.

The Church of Scotland was revitalized between 1820 and 1830. Within the Church, there was a new awareness that the number of parish churches was insufficient for the needs of the population. With this comes the mounting theological debate regarding the Westminster Confession of Faith. This begun to create tensions within Scottish Calvinism. In 1829, the Church confronted the new challenge of radical Voluntaryism—the sustained agitation by a group of Scottish Dissenters for the disestablishment of the national Church. Chalmers was deeply distressed by the 1839 Brechin and Stewartson decisions. The dream of nearly a lifetime had been cruelly mocked; the effort and sacrifice of the Church Extension campaign had been rendered meaningless. This chapter relates that after the failure of his campaign, fissures began appearing within Chalmers's Evangelical ascendancy in the Church of Scotland.

In 1839, the rising tension of the controversies regarding both Church Extension and the spiritual independence of the Church, combined with the economic depression and a darkening social environment, contributed to a series of religious revivals within the Church of Scotland. Chalmers, Welsh, and Gordon walked out of the General Assembly. This chapter narrates the culmination of The Disruption of 1834. The Disruption, Chalmers maintained, was not secession. Rather it was a tragic severing of the relationship between the true Church of Scotland and the British State which had broken its pledge to preserve the Church's integrity. For him, it was the Free Church that now represented the national Establishment and Christian commonwealth. To achieve the goal of a national territorial ‘establishment’, based upon the voluntary contributions, Chalmers devised his celebrated Sustentation Fund scheme.

This chapter discusses the three established churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland, and the respective conditions between the years 1801 and 1828. It reveals that the churches were a semi-confessional Protestant State, and were considered the religious authority at that time. Parishes were the fundamental unit of both ecclesiastical and civil government. The churches of England and Ireland were Episcopalian in nature, while Scotland was Presbyterian. The chapter explains how the three churches responded to dissent and the formation of new dissent churches. It also discusses the formation of church parties and the controversies that arose from them.

This chapter presents a lecture covering the Percy case (2005); the question of ‘spiritual independence’; attitudes to Scots law; Free Church attitudes to ‘establishment’ at the time of the Disruption; developments during the nineteenth century; the United Free Church created in 1900; the Free Church case (1904); the position of the Lord President Kinross; the speech of Haldane QC; the opinions on Free Church property; the Churches (Scotland) Act 1905; the moves to unification of the United Free Church and the Church of Scotland; the Church of Scotland Act 1921; the Church of Scotland (Property and Endowments) Act 1925; and a final assessment of the Disruption dispute.

This chapter deals with the continuing hopes and frustrations that the established Churches of Britain faced from 1841 to 1846. Sir Robert Peel, who was appointed Prime Minister, believed that there were real abuses that needed reform within the established Churches. His appointment offered hope to the established Churches that they would be able to gain support from Parliament. However, Peel's appointment was accompanied by other problems, including a severe downturn in the economy that resulted from poor harvests. Because of these, Peel was pressured (to increase church accommodation and Parliament support to the established Churches) by not only the church leaders, but also the parliament. Everything led to the resignation of Peel as Prime Minister, the conversion to free trade, and disruption of the established Church of Scotland.

The Church of Scotland was organized on the presbyterian model, with ecclesiastical law defined and enforced by a hierarchy of Church courts. Two clerical factions developed. Each party represented a distinct interpretation both of the Calvinist orthodoxy of the Westminster Confession of Faith, and of proper ecclesiastical order within the Establishment. Despite his initial lack of enthusiasm, in early February 1811, Chalmers appeared upon the quiet, Moderate-dominated religious scene of northern Fife as an impassioned Evangelical preacher. His preaching began attracting large crowds to Kilmany. His conversion coincided with Scotland's second wave of enthusiasm for overseas mission. This chapter narrates Chalmers poor-relief policies. By May 1816, he had come to realize that the urban environment of the rapidly growing towns and cities of Scotland was radically different from the agrarian community of Kilmany.

During the colonial period British Protestant denominations had established themselves in America. Right up to the Revolution most American Protestants kept close links with their colleagues in Britain, seeking financial and political support from them. Denominations were split by the war, although the established churches of England, outside the American south, and of Scotland tended to favour the British side and many Dissenters adhered to the American cause. Some American denominations were strengthened by the war while others lost ground. Independence brought about significant changes in relations between British and American Protestants. American denominations now generally ran their affairs without much reference to Britain, sometimes obtaining formal recognition of their autonomy. At the same time evangelical revivals were challenging denominations' authority and tending towards their fragmentation or the emergence of wholly new religious movements.

Daniel Defoe did not publish many pamphlets during the years 1708 and 1709. Toward the end of 1709, Defoe devoted a number of issues to concepts of freedom of the press and to a new bill concerning the rights of authors which was going through Parliament. His chief job while in Scotland was defending the Union, particularly against charges in England that the Church of Scotland was persecuting the Episcopalian ministers in Scotland. He regarded these charges as inspired by the Jacobites and launched an attack upon James Greensheils, whom Defoe thought had not been properly ordained and had been thus rightfully prevented from preaching by the Church of Scotland. In some ways the narrative method of The History of the Union, with its glances backward, its dramatic plot, its focus on details and vivid scenes, and its repetitions, bore considerable resemblance to the kind of fiction Defoe would eventually write.

This chapter has highlights the central importance of Nelson to Belfast anti-slavery in the 1840s and early 1850s. Nelson’s emergence as a leading anti-slavery campaigner took place against the backdrop of the Free Church of Scotland receiving money from and engaging in fellowship with the proslavery American churches. In the subsequent ‘Send Back the Money’ controversy, the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society joined the chorus of abolitionist voices calling on the Free Church to break its ties with their proslavery American brethren. Nelson joined with leading American abolitionists such as Henry C. Wright, Frederick Douglass, and William Lloyd Garrison as part of the ‘Send Back the Money’ campaign in Belfast. This bore some positive fruit as the American Old School Presbyterian, Thomas Smyth was excluded from sitting with the Irish General Assembly in 1846. Nelson also defended the radical abolitionist principle of no fellowship with slaveholders at the inaugural meeting of the Evangelical Alliance in London, 1846. This chapter also explains the causes for the eventual demise of the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society, notwithstanding its late revival with the visits of Henry Highland Garnet to Ulster in 1851.

Fundamentalism in Scotland was always confined to a small minority within denominational life, found mainly in the Free Presbyterian Church from 1893 and the remnant of the Free Church which did not unite to form the United Free Church in 1900. A few influential Baptists emerged as fundamentalists in the 1930s and 40s, but they did not garner enough support within the denomination to cause a major division. Confusion between the terms evangelical and fundamentalist led many in the 1950s onwards to accuse evangelicals of being fundamentalist, although the majority of evangelicals within the Church of Scotland denied the label as appropriate to define their position. Scottish churches did not experience any major schism within Presbyterianism or the Free Churches during the twentieth century. The churches maintained a broadly ecumenical evangelical approach to the faith which was demonstrated in the general support that Billy Graham received in his mission to Scotland in the 1950s.

On the eve of its recent tercentenary, histories of the Union could, in most instances, be categorised as belonging to one of two contrasting schools. In the first of these schools, the Union has been portrayed as marking the end of Scotland's independence and in the second, the Union has been viewed as a calculated measure borne out of economic necessity. Religion and concerns over the future of the Presbyterian government of the Church of Scotland have received less scrutiny by historians. In his recent study of the Union, Christopher Whatley has challenged much of the established historiography associated with 1706–1707. Building upon Whatley's seminal study, this chapter examines the demands of the Kirk and how these were addressed in the Scottish Parliament. It assesses the wider significance of the church act: whether this act was essentially political, designed to appease Presbyterian churchmen and weaken popular opposition, or whether there is evidence that Presbyterianism was as significant to the majority of members of Parliament as it was to the Kirk and the Scots people in general.

This concluding chapter recalls some of the important events involving the established Churches in Great Britain and Ireland. It reveals that many had looked up to the established national churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland. However, problems such as the failure of the New Reformation campaign in Ireland and the decline of the parliamentary State to invest additional public money in the established Churches forced church leaders to realize that they should function as a democratic and secular society; not as guardians of the national faith, but as societies of believers.