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