No Presbyterians, No Machines

... was the slogan of a group of Luddite campaigners in the North of England during the industrial revolution. I mentioned it to my mother, and she said it sounded like the perfect world. I think (given that she's a Presbyterian minister's wife) that she was joking. But the slogan is evidence, once again, of how intertwined religious and social change are in British history. Why were Presbyterians and machines associated? Because if you were a dissenter from the Church of England, you were barred from almost every means of advancing yourself except through business and industry. In addition, because dissenters were not allowed to attend Cambridge or Oxford, they got a much more practical and thorough education through their own academies, which were more open to new science and technology. In particular, the Scots (who were mainly Presbyterians) had a far superior education system to the English. So many of the inventors, businessmen and industrialists at the forefront of industrialisation were dissenters.
It is because of this kind of connection that I am going to spend much of my first few weeks of tutoring explaining basic elements of Christian doctrine and church structure to my students. That, and the fact that I'm on much safer ground there than trying to explain how the spinning jenny worked!