The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
religious questions and answers to use issues of religious and moral identities
as constant points of referral throughout the life testimony of
childhood and youth. This happened with Frederick Green, born in 1886
to a father who ‘only ever went to the pub’. Frederick’s Salvationist grandfather
inspired him to an interest in the Salvation Army and to make a
close friendship with an Army missionary. In childhood he accompanied
his mother to the mission every Sunday night, and got Christmas lunches
for the family by touring charity outlets to obtain as many as four free
breakfasts in paper bags. He went to Sunday school and temperancehall
lectures, becoming a life-long teetotaller, and teaching himself prayers:
‘These little things come over you’, he said. 25 When poverty and its causes
were discussed, interviewees tended to raise religion and poverty in either
the same or adjacent passages of testimony. This is evident in the account
of George Hilliard from Lancaster. Born in 1910, his father ran off during
World War I, leaving the very poor family to survive on soup kitchens
and poor-law handouts of coal. His only childhood footwear were clogs
provided by a police charity. Challenged by a priest why he wasn’t at mass,
George explained that going up the street in clogs on a Sunday caused him
to fall over and get filthy, forcing him to stop short of the church door:
‘You were ashamed of clattering in church with clogs, that was what it
was. They wouldn’t take that as an excuse. They didn’t understand the
embarrassment of that. God isn’t listening to your clogs clattering.’ But he
did go to a Wesleyan Mission on Sundays where scholars got a story
book, ‘a thick one with a label inside telling you how many attendances
you’d had out of so many and your name on’, and got to go to Christmas
parties and outings to the country. 26 In such ways, interviewees from the
poorest working-class backgrounds characteristically placed poverty and
religiosity side-by-side in their testimony. In the Preston home of Henrietta
Isleworth (born 1900), her stepmother hung texts and pictures around
the walls: texts in gold letters of ‘God is the Head of this house, the
unseen listener at every meal’ and ‘Thy Word is a lantern unto my feet’,
and fourteen pictures with religious themes hung over the doors: ‘They say
they are unlucky now. How poor she was. ... She sat up all night and
made a shirt for fourpence to buy a loaf.’ 27 Religion acts as the motif of
moral worth, set in relief by the unfairness and suffering of being the victims
of poverty.
Autobiography allows us to follow the same evangelical-narrative routes
as oral testimony and to detect the same moral bipolarities. But being a
longer-established ‘source’, it also illuminates transition in constructions of
religiosity. There is hardly a single autobiography of anyone, from whatever
social background, born between 1800 and 1930 that does not discuss
religion and the moral construction of the individual – whether it’s of themselves,
their parents or others in their communities. Some autobiographers,
notably male socialist autodidacts, record their repulsion from religion
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