Few Scottish cities were changed more completely by religion than Glasgow. In 1560 the archbishop’s own city went over to the Reformed faith with surprisingly little violence, and the Scottish Reformation in Glasgow explains how. The last Catholic archbishop, James Beaton, fled to France taking the cathedral’s records and treasures with him, and never returned. Unusually for Scotland, the cathedral itself came through the upheaval largely intact, a story told in the cathedral and the Reformation, while the influence of John Knox was felt in every parish.
The struggle over how the Kirk should be governed dominated the century that followed. In late 1638 the General Assembly met in Glasgow Cathedral and, defying the king’s commissioner, deposed the bishops and abolished episcopacy. That meeting launched the Covenanting movement, whose decades of resistance, persecution and martyrdom are traced in the Covenanters and Glasgow.
Industrial Glasgow brought new faiths and new divisions. Thomas Chalmers, minister of the Tron and then of St John’s, pioneered parish relief in the city’s poorest districts and went on to lead the Disruption of 1843, when over a third of the ministers of the Church of Scotland walked out to form the Free Church. Irish migration rebuilt Catholic Glasgow: St Andrew’s Cathedral on Clyde Street was designed by James Gillespie Graham in 1814, and the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland was restored in 1878. The bitterness between communities that followed, felt in workplaces, on the streets and on the terraces, is examined honestly in religious conflict in Glasgow.
Today the city is home to Scotland’s first purpose-built mosque, the Central Mosque of 1984, alongside long-established Jewish, Sikh, Hindu and Buddhist communities. The articles below follow the religious history of Glasgow from the medieval church to the city of many faiths.
Every article in this chapter: