This paper focuses on the commencement of a new research project looking at the religion of British emigrants going to British settler colonies in the nineteenth century.

It examines the place of religion in the historiography of British emigration, in contrast to the importance of religion in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It goes on to outline some of the issues, questions, and difficulties in a project that seeks to detail how Christianity did, or did not, matter to British emigrants of all social strata in nineteenth-century Britain.

Finally, it will make some preliminary remarks about coherences and contrasts between the religion of the emigrants and that of their religious professionals, the clergy.