The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
angel in the house’ than the Victorian middle-class woman, and ironically
freer from the greater domestic confinement of the 1950s servantless middle
class. 114 In this way, whilst Mrs Miniver still acted as a cipher for Victorian
domestic ideology, yet she had greater freedoms and more democratic inclinations.
Marriage sustained romance and her sexually attractive qualities;
for her ‘the most important thing about marriage was not a home or
children or a remedy against sin, but simply there being always an eye
to catch’. 115 Nonetheless, Mrs Miniver was not secularised. In the film
especially, churchianity has a central moral and community place in the
social fabric, with Sunday worship in the Anglican parish church displaying
the social hierarchy (of boxed pew for the aristocracy, front seats for
the middle-class Minivers, and rear pews for the servant class), and the
venue for romantic liaison between the Miniver boy and the aristocrat’s
daughter. News of the declaration of war comes – as it did for many of
Britain’s churchgoers on Sunday, 3 September 1939 – in mid-worship.
As Alison Light observes, the novel is ‘a fantastic, fictional resolution of
anxiety’ for the English middle-class woman of the 1930s, 116 but the film
unites this fable of domestic romance with Mrs Miniver’s quiet heroism in
capturing a crashed German pilot. Perhaps unrealistically, Mrs Miniver
in the film has no apparent wartime duties, so her incursion into ‘manly’
bravery is transitory and not a transformation of woman’s role away from
domesticity.
Mrs Miniver’s diary in The Times was matched by Patience Strong’s
‘Quiet Corner’ in the Daily Mirror for expounding the role of home life
as central to personal and spiritual well-being. The fad for domestic
self-satisfaction was even the object of satire in a ‘Contentment Column’
in a Graham Greene-inspired weekly magazine in which the British home
was caricatured as ‘full of sanctity and lethargy’. 117 Though a consciously
class-based depiction of British life, this literature and film of the 1930s
and early 1940s took an evangelical narrative shorn of sin – its threat, let
alone its contemplation – and placed the angel in a house of serenity and
goodness. The central moral coda of the evangelical narrative not only
remained untouched, but was reinvigorated by the loss of ‘sin’ and depiction
of manly temptation. The secular variant of the evangelical story was
shutting its eyes to sin; with the prohibition and anti-gambling campaigns
losing their arguments in the 1930s, the domestic story left the woman
presiding over a house where moderation in drink, wagering and enjoyment
was entirely consonant with domestic bliss.
By the 1930s and 1940s, a rift had developed in the portrayal of women
between the evangelical narrative of traditional religious literature and the
secular narrative of popular literature for girls and women The secular
narrative was showing less and less interest in overt religion, and notably
conversionism which all but disappeared. This may be explained in large
part by the decline of specifically evangelical Protestantism, marked by
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