The Death of Christian Britain

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