Abstract
Evangelicalism has been credited with the invention of the voluntary society; by the end of the nineteenth century, as Pat Thane notes, it was the largest single inspiration of charitable effort. Evangelicalism was a pervasive cross-denominational movement that proclaimed the responsibility of the church to apply the message of the gospel to social problems. Its defining characteristic as a force for voluntary intervention was its emphasis on social ethics and welfare and from the 1830s it inspired a middle-class crusade to infuse social and cultural life with Christian principles, prompting churches and socio-religious organizations to become providers and organizers of leisure. Puritan religion was suspicious of leisure as a source of sin and non-conformist denominations in particular imposed strict limits upon recreation. In the face of the new social problems of urbanization, religious attitudes to leisure changed. The extent to which they did so was varied; leisure remained a potential cause of sin and thus required moral regulation, but might also serve as the basis of a Christian social life.