The Death of Christian Britain

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Chapter six Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 MEMORY, DISCOURSE AND IDENTITY This chapter explores how personal testimony relating to the period 1800 to 1950 was reflexive to the power of evangelical discourses on piety. Oral testimony, autobiographies, and letters to newspapers or public figures, have been extensively used by historians to provide illustration of personal social experience. 1 But in addition, as Penny Summerfield has said, ‘personal narratives draw on the generalized subject available in discourse to construct the particular personal subject. It is thus necessary to encompass within oral history analysis and interpretation, not only the voice that speaks for itself, but also the voices that speak to it, the discursive formulations from which understandings are selected and within which accounts are made.’ 2 This chapter deploys this formula, but also expands upon it. The subjectification of discourse is customarily taken solely at the level of reflexivity to discourse. 3 Here, three separate techniques are used in relation to the material examined in the last two chapters. Personal testimony (autobiography, oral evidence and letters to newspapers) is analysed to explore, first, reflexive evidence of discourses on piety, second, evidence of the evangelical narrative structure being used in intertextual exchange by the individual to construct her or his life, and third, for evidence of religious activities, organisations and motifs – the ‘salvation economy’ – in their lives. In Chapter 8, we return to these techniques to explore the revitalisation of religious discourse, evangelical narrative structure and the ‘salvation economy’ in the 1950s, and then its breakdown from the 1960s. In exploring individuals’ reflexivity to discourse change, it is obvious that the discourses of times remembered may be very different from the time within which the memory is being recalled and testified. Fundamental to this book is the argument that the evangelical narrative structure and the discourses within it had a powerful continuity between the late eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, but that both structure and discourses then radically changed in the 1950s and 1960s. Accepting this proposition for the moment, it is obvious that oral-history testimony given 115
— The Death of Christian Britain — after the 1960s, whilst referring to an earlier period, will have been greatly affected by that change in the moral climate. This was nowhere more apparent than in attitudes to religion in people’s lives. The liberalisation of religious values, and loss of the ‘religious life’ which the vast bulk of oral interviewees experienced in their childhood and young adulthood of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, became radically ‘reremembered’. This becomes evident in oral testimony in the form of laughter, self-derision, grief or even bitterness at recollections of the religious regimes they had followed without question as youngsters. This is not a mere product of aging; this is a product of moral turn. The effect of this moral turn in oral testimony on religion is evident in another way. The interviewer is younger and, in many cases, someone trained either implicitly or explicitly in social-scientific inquiry. In many oral-history collections, the interviewers are often both personally ‘less religious’ than their interviewees, and less experienced in their own lives of the moral framework of the evangelical narrative. Most disconcerting, both questionnaire-writers and interviewers in follow-up questions are deploying different, modern and stunted discourses on the religiosity of fifty, seventy or a hundred years ago. There are other discourses, the mythical discourses of received historical wisdom gleaned from social-history books and university classes, which have unrefined and ‘unlived’ notions of Victorian and Edwardian religiosity. For instance, oral history questions in the 1960s and early 1970s focused heavily on the social (or class) divisions between church and chapel (Church of England and dissent) in England and Wales, and elicited suitable remembrances within this left-wing, Marxist-derived structural approach to society which so dominated British social history and sociology at that time. This then rendered the history of religion as an adjunct to class struggle, adding oral testimony to documentary evidence of religion’s power to divide society along class fractures. As we move into the later 1980s and 1990s, oral interviewees were less drawn to put their memories within this divide. Questioning in oral research in the 1990s changed with the impact of new ideas from post-structuralism. Unfortunately available oral testimony on religion has not yet drawn on the new emerging tradition – in feminist scholarship especially – of the necessity of engaging with the mutual reflexivity of subjectivities between interviewees and interviewers. In this the subjectivity of the interviewer (drawing on its own moral framework of constituent discourses) is inevitably transformed in response to that of the interviewee, and vice versa. 4 The oral history material used in this book was mostly produced between 1968 and 1988 without the benefit of these modern methods. This presents apparent problems. The oral interview of necessity imposes the interviewer as a mediator between the interviewee and the ultimate testimony: the interviewer poses questions, setting the agenda and, most importantly, providing the vocabulary and conceptual frameworks within 116
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The Death of Christian Britain PRA
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‘For anyone who is genuinely inte
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The Death of Christian Britain Und
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Contents List of illustrations ix
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illustrations FIGURES 7.1 Church o
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— Acknowledgements — University
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note on oral history The oral-hist
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Chapter one Introduction This book
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— Introduction — no new credo,
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— Introduction — in 1997 even p
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— Introduction — 365 in 1981 an
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— Introduction — Historians hav
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— Introduction — effect of this
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— Introduction — or a family, o
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— Introduction — in ways no lon
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— The Problem with ‘Religious D
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Chapter three The Salvation Economy
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— The Salvation Economy — It wa
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— The Salvation Economy — evang
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— The Salvation Economy — with
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— The Salvation Economy — and P
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— The Salvation Economy — centr
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— The Salvation Economy — famil
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— The Salvation Economy — Indee
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— The Salvation Economy — and t
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— The Salvation Economy — with
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— The Salvation Economy — broug
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— The Salvation Economy — Every
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— Women in Discourse and Narrativ
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Page 82 and 83: — Women in Discourse and Narrativ
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Page 134 and 135: — Personal Testimony and Religion
Page 162 and 163: Chapter seven ‘Unimpeachable Witn
Page 164 and 165: — The Statistics of ‘Christian
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Percentage — The Statistics of
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100 90 80 70 60 50 40 Percentage Sc
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— The Statistics of ‘Christian
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— The 1960s and Secularisation
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140 120 100 80 60 Percentage 40 20
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Chapter nine The End of a Long Stor
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— The End of a Long Story — the
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— The End of a Long Story — Can
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Chapter Ten Postscript: the mortali
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— Postscript — intellectual lev
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— Postscript — Each can overdo
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— Postscript — But Williams the
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— Postscript — aged by sociolog
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— Postscript — secularisation:
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— Postscript — Despite the reac
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— Postscript — very much restri
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— Postscript — Scotland’s ris
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— Postscript — But some Christi
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— Postscript — filed Protestant
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— Postscript — maturing of femi
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— Postscript — the oral contrac
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— Postscript — grammar school f
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— Postscript — Church confirmat
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— Postscript — and the churches
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— Postscript — an older concept
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— Postscript — Christianity has
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— Notes to pages 7-10 — 15 Stat
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— Notes to pages 17-21 — 4 E.J.
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— Notes to pages 26-28 — aglow
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— Notes to pages 35-41 — 3 THE
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— Notes to pages 48-54 — 41 Quo
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— Notes to pages 59-64 — 7 B.L.
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— Notes to pages 71-79 — D. Ski
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— Notes to pages 86-90 — 126 Ib
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— Notes to pages 96-100 — 47 R.
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— Notes to pages 104-112 — 98 C
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— Notes to pages 118-128 — 10 Q
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— Notes to pages 133-139 — 75 S
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— Notes to pages 144-149 — betw
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— Notes to pages 154-157 — vol.
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— Notes to pages 164-173 — 62 C
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— Notes to pages 176-185 — 32 M
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— Notes to pages 194-201 — 2 On
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— Notes to pages 205-209 — 29 S
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— Notes to pages 213-216 — 70 R
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— Notes to pages 220-224 — 104
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— Notes to pages 228-232 — 135
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— Sources — ---- , About My Fat
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— Sources — Reports to the Gene
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— Sources — Wilson, J.H., A Bri
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— Sources — ---- , ‘Popular c
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— Sources — Cressy, D., Birth,
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— Sources — ---- , ‘Seculariz
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— Sources — Layton-Henry, Z., T
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— Sources — Norman, E.R., Churc
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— Sources — ---- , Reconstructi
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— Sources — Chadwick, R.E., ‘
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Campbeltown 20-1 Camporesi, Piero 1
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Girl Guides 131 Girl’s Own Paper
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Plymouth Brethren see Brethren poet
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women: and evangelicalism 42; and f
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