Land, Faith and the Crofting Community

This book probes the deep-rooted links between the land, the people and the religious culture of the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the nineteenth century. The responses of the clergy to the social crisis which enveloped the region have often been characterised as a mixture of indifference, deference or fatalistic passivity. Seeking to lay bare the existing myths by a wide-ranging analysis of all the denominational, theological and social factors at play, this study boldly overturns the received scholarly and popular interpretations. Here, in the first comprehensive study of this important subject, we see more clearly the centrality of religion in the experiences of Highlanders during the upheavals of the clearances and the crofters' war.