The Death of Christian Britain

— 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
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