The Death of Christian Britain

— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —
and their journeys into atheism. Many from poor backgrounds, notably
women, recall with anger the religious-moral regimes of their communities
which condemned their parents unjustly for various moral lapses (from
drinking or socialism to giving birth out of wedlock or ‘unnatural’ sexual
appetite, even within marriage). But those that did so are revealing the
inescapable power of religious discourses within periods of their lives.
Men made life-journeys dominated by the pursuit of ‘useful knowledge’
and awakening to the personal freedom, the personal democratisation of
the intellect, which learning brought. David Vincent has noted the common
sequential progression from childhood helplessness (because, for instance,
of drunken fathers) to moral improvement through education and then
marriage to a ‘good woman’. 28 Sunday was the great day for ‘improvement’;
it was the one day of freedom from work, and Sunday school
and chapel provided an important venue and motivation for the life odyssey
to start. Chance events, disaster and salvation – all were common ingredients
in the autobiography lifted from the evangelical narrative structure.
So too was the system of bipolarities: of drink and sobriety, rough and
respectable.
Even in the early nineteenth century, religious cynics abounded. One
such was Alexander Somerville, the son of a border shepherd, yet he gave
vivid accounts of attending church assemblies as ‘intellectual treats’. 29 But
with autobiographies published from the 1850s onwards, lives were increasingly
constructed within the evangelical narrative structure that had come
into play in their childhood. Christian Watt, a woman born in the 1840s
into a poor fishing family on the Moray Firth coast, wrote her memoir for
a doctor in the mental asylum she entered late in life. She lost her father
and many brothers to the sea, worked as a fisherwoman selling fish from
a creel she carried on her back through the countryside, and worked for
spells as a domestic servant in London and the United States. She recalled
how she lost her virginity in the 1850s to her betrothed in her parents’ bed
whilst they were away; she was spied on by a female neighbour from behind
a curtain, and when a child was born out of wedlock, and she faced church
discipline for fornication, she underwent conversion. Her account contains
all the sought-after ingredients of the evangelical narrative: suitable
husband, financial security, love. It also contains chance events by the score,
but throughout there is the longing journey which is answered by salvation,
the return of doubt, and a second conversion experience. Always a
rebel against the burden of ‘official’ and community Christian morality,
she nonetheless found supreme joy in her rebirth which then reinforced
her rejection of that enforced Christianity. 30
For some autobiographers, the starting point was the irreligion and
immorality of parents, usually fathers. Henry Hetherington’s father gave
up being a master tailor around 1800 to rent a public house where ‘his love
of company’ and ‘his unconquerable propensity for drink, effectually
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