The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —<br />
which informants are invited to respond. This is literally a process <strong>of</strong><br />
‘putting words into the mouth’ <strong>of</strong> the interviewee, a process which can<br />
simplify or alter the vocabulary <strong>of</strong> the interviewee. This is a particularly<br />
acute issue in relation to religion where questions posed by the generation<br />
<strong>of</strong> social-science researchers <strong>of</strong> the 1960s and after tend to be simplified in<br />
their conception <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong>ity. Religion is reduced to church, Sunday<br />
school, ‘being religious’, posing issues <strong>of</strong> belief and life rhythms which<br />
interviewees did not naturally look upon from the ‘distance’ <strong>of</strong> those words<br />
and concepts. Interviewees had lived these issues, not analysed them in<br />
social-science terms. <strong>The</strong>y had tended, especially during youth, to look<br />
upon these as intimate issues related to sometimes complex <strong>Christian</strong><br />
doctrines in which they had been extensively schooled. Oral interviewing<br />
can be reductionist in relation to religion: it can stunt the detail <strong>of</strong> religious<br />
discourses because the interviewee may alter answers knowing that<br />
the interviewer (and the question-setter) will either not understand them<br />
or will be uninterested in them. However, this should not be looked upon<br />
merely as a problem. It is also an opportunity, for it is a product <strong>of</strong> the<br />
testimony, observable in the disjunctions between interviewers’ questions<br />
and interviewees’ answers. <strong>The</strong> result is that the interview is a confrontation<br />
between two modes <strong>of</strong> understanding religiosity that informs us<br />
about both and about their relationship – the chronological cultural<br />
transformation represented by the ‘religious distance’ between their respective<br />
historical ages. 5 <strong>The</strong>re are, if you like, two interviewees in an<br />
interview. <strong>The</strong> one holding the microphone is telling us as much about<br />
discursive domains as the interviewee. 6 One aim is to combine the evidence<br />
in this chapter with that in Chapter 8 to exploit this process through<br />
re-examining oral testimony <strong>of</strong> the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in respect <strong>of</strong><br />
change to discourse and narrative structure.<br />
Autobiography may be exploited for the same end, but it requires slightly<br />
different handling. Autobiography is widely acknowledged as a most<br />
revealing historical source for the social historian. It provides a platform<br />
where the people themselves can write the agenda <strong>of</strong> their lives, revealing<br />
the concerns which they themselves felt. In this process, the conceptions<br />
<strong>of</strong> ‘the self’ and the life that has been lived reveal a reflexivity to the discursive<br />
world in which the work was written and in which it was read. <strong>The</strong><br />
reflexivity operates in part through both publishers’ and readers’ expectations<br />
(the operation <strong>of</strong> commercial factors). 7 But another characteristic is<br />
intertextuality with other genres (such as biography and fiction). 8 <strong>The</strong> way<br />
in which the autobiography has introduced religiosity has undergone<br />
dramatic change in the last two hundred years, reflecting changes in<br />
discourse (and remembrance <strong>of</strong> it), in how the ‘self’ has been composed<br />
from discourse, and in the structuring <strong>of</strong> the life narrative and religiosity’s<br />
place within it. <strong>The</strong> added advantage <strong>of</strong> autobiography over oral testimony<br />
is that it can reveal discourse change further into the past (towards the start<br />
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