This chapter is concerned with the recent tribulations of Scotland's distinctive contribution to conservative religion: the Free Church and the Free Presbyterian Church. It also considers a subtle change in outsiders’ attitudes to religion-taken-seriously. The decline of Christianity in Scotland is not just a matter of fewer people going to church. As religion has become less popular it has also become less well-known and this has allowed popular perceptions of Christianity to become distorted. As the final section will illustrate, this has the strange consequence that those who take their Christianity seriously are now routinely accused of being ‘unChristian’.

As explained in Chapter 1, the mergers that saw the Kirk regain its status as the home of most Protestants left behind dissident remnants. Although nationally small, the Free Church (FC) and Free Presbyterian Church (FPC) were deeply rooted in the highlands and islands. From the 1930s to the 1960s these two small bodies had actually performed relatively better than the Church of Scotland; not because they were better at recruiting adults but because they had larger families and hence more chance of keeping enough children in the faith to replace the members who passed on.

At the end of the twentieth century both the FC and FPC split. Although both schisms had particular and local causes, both illustrate two perennial features of Scots religious culture: the factionalism inherent in conservative Protestantism and the necessity to choose between separation from, or compromise with, secular society.