“In Ten Years There Is an Increase of 450 Priests of Antichrist”: Quantification, Anti-Catholicism, and theBulwark

Abstract

The Scottish Reformation Society's The Bulwark (1851–present) was the Victorian era's most influential anti-Catholic periodical, a reputation based on its self-proclaimed devotion to “facts.” Attempting to counter a unified Catholic Church in a period of pronounced intra-Protestant conflict, the Bulwark sought to root religious controversy in the increasingly popular phenomenon of statistical inquiry. The Bulwark’s obsession with collating and interpreting religion-based numbers was unique not for its existence, but for its sheer extent. It thus exemplifies how “official” statistical documents, methods, and conclusions were translated into the concerns of popular religious culture. In particular, the Bulwark’s ongoing surveys of Catholicism's “progress,” intended to frighten Protestants into action, weaponized statistical discourses that were used in more measured fashion elsewhere. To that end, the Bulwark argued that only Protestants had the right mindset to put religious statistics into a proper explanatory framework, whereas Catholics manipulated their own data for dishonest rhetorical purposes that the Bulwark disclaimed. The Bulwark’s statistical turn, which bypassed the sectarianism of its theological articles, positioned it as a voice uniting the interests of all Protestant readers against Parliament's dangerously tolerant brand of liberalism.

The Scottish Presbyterian Defence of British Protestantism: The Scottish Reformation Society and the “Papal Aggression”, 1850–52

“…In the journal's first year of publication, it claimed to have circulated 30 thousand copies and was published simultaneously in Edinburgh, London, and Dublin. 32 Begg himself achieved infamy as the driving force behind Scotland's "anti-popery" movement. A Free Church of Scotland minister at Newington, Edinburgh, Begg was a charismatic yet divisive figure even within his own church.…”