Revival, chapel and Nonconformist Wales
Methodist revivals sweep Wales, and by the mid-nineteenth century most Welsh worshippers attend Nonconformist chapels, which shape the language, politics and moral culture of the nation.
- A History of Wales — John Davies, Penguin (2007)
- Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880–1980 — Kenneth O. Morgan, Oxford University Press and University of Wales Press (1981)
- The Span of the Cross: Christian Religion and Society in Wales 1914–2000 — D. Densil Morgan, University of Wales Press (1999)
- Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s — David W. Bebbington, Unwin Hyman (1989)
- Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021 — Office for National Statistics (2022)
From the 1730s preachers such as Howell Harris and Daniel Rowland led an evangelical revival in Wales, and over the next century most Welsh people left the established Anglican Church for Nonconformist chapels: Calvinistic Methodists, Baptists, Independents and Wesleyans. By the religious census of 1851, Nonconformists made up the great majority of those attending worship in Wales.
- A History of Wales — John Davies, Penguin (2007)
- Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s — David W. Bebbington, Unwin Hyman (1989)
The chapels became the centre of community life. Their Sunday schools taught adults and children to read the Welsh Bible, building on Griffith Jones’s circulating schools of the eighteenth century; their hymns, by writers such as William Williams Pantycelyn, became national songs; and they produced a Welsh-language press and a culture of eisteddfodau, choirs and debate. Chapel values, temperance, Sabbath observance and self-improvement, led to the Welsh Sunday Closing Act of 1881, the first law in centuries to treat Wales separately from England.
- A History of Wales — John Davies, Penguin (2007)
- Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880–1980 — Kenneth O. Morgan, Oxford University Press and University of Wales Press (1981)
Politically, Nonconformist Wales resented paying tithes to a church most did not attend, and backed the Liberals, campaigning until the Church in Wales was disestablished in 1920. The last great revival, in 1904–05, led by the young miner Evan Roberts, drew huge crowds. Decline followed, and in the 2021 census more people in Wales said they had no religion than said they were Christian.
- Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880–1980 — Kenneth O. Morgan, Oxford University Press and University of Wales Press (1981)
- The Span of the Cross: Christian Religion and Society in Wales 1914–2000 — D. Densil Morgan, University of Wales Press (1999)
- Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021 — Office for National Statistics (2022)
Why it matters today
Chapel culture made modern Wales: its hymn-singing and choirs, its Sunday schools that taught generations to read Welsh, its radical Liberal and later Labour politics, and its strait-laced respectability. Most chapels are now closed or half-empty, and Wales is one of the least religious parts of the UK, but the habits of mind, from the love of a good sermon-like speech to the communal singing at rugby matches, remain.