The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —<br />
and their journeys into atheism. Many from poor backgrounds, notably<br />
women, recall with anger the religious-moral regimes <strong>of</strong> their communities<br />
which condemned their parents unjustly for various moral lapses (from<br />
drinking or socialism to giving birth out <strong>of</strong> wedlock or ‘unnatural’ sexual<br />
appetite, even within marriage). But those that did so are revealing the<br />
inescapable power <strong>of</strong> religious discourses within periods <strong>of</strong> their lives.<br />
Men made life-journeys dominated by the pursuit <strong>of</strong> ‘useful knowledge’<br />
and awakening to the personal freedom, the personal democratisation <strong>of</strong><br />
the intellect, which learning brought. David Vincent has noted the common<br />
sequential progression from childhood helplessness (because, for instance,<br />
<strong>of</strong> drunken fathers) to moral improvement through education and then<br />
marriage to a ‘good woman’. 28 Sunday was the great day for ‘improvement’;<br />
it was the one day <strong>of</strong> freedom from work, and Sunday school<br />
and chapel provided an important venue and motivation for the life odyssey<br />
to start. Chance events, disaster and salvation – all were common ingredients<br />
in the autobiography lifted from the evangelical narrative structure.<br />
So too was the system <strong>of</strong> bipolarities: <strong>of</strong> drink and sobriety, rough and<br />
respectable.<br />
Even in the early nineteenth century, religious cynics abounded. One<br />
such was Alexander Somerville, the son <strong>of</strong> a border shepherd, yet he gave<br />
vivid accounts <strong>of</strong> attending church assemblies as ‘intellectual treats’. 29 But<br />
with autobiographies published from the 1850s onwards, lives were increasingly<br />
constructed within the evangelical narrative structure that had come<br />
into play in their childhood. <strong>Christian</strong> Watt, a woman born in the 1840s<br />
into a poor fishing family on the Moray Firth coast, wrote her memoir for<br />
a doctor in the mental asylum she entered late in life. She lost her father<br />
and many brothers to the sea, worked as a fisherwoman selling fish from<br />
a creel she carried on her back through the countryside, and worked for<br />
spells as a domestic servant in London and the United States. She recalled<br />
how she lost her virginity in the 1850s to her betrothed in her parents’ bed<br />
whilst they were away; she was spied on by a female neighbour from behind<br />
a curtain, and when a child was born out <strong>of</strong> wedlock, and she faced church<br />
discipline for fornication, she underwent conversion. Her account contains<br />
all the sought-after ingredients <strong>of</strong> the evangelical narrative: suitable<br />
husband, financial security, love. It also contains chance events by the score,<br />
but throughout there is the longing journey which is answered by salvation,<br />
the return <strong>of</strong> doubt, and a second conversion experience. Always a<br />
rebel against the burden <strong>of</strong> ‘<strong>of</strong>ficial’ and community <strong>Christian</strong> morality,<br />
she nonetheless found supreme joy in her rebirth which then reinforced<br />
her rejection <strong>of</strong> that enforced <strong>Christian</strong>ity. 30<br />
For some autobiographers, the starting point was the irreligion and<br />
immorality <strong>of</strong> parents, usually fathers. Henry Hetherington’s father gave<br />
up being a master tailor around 1800 to rent a public house where ‘his love<br />
<strong>of</strong> company’ and ‘his unconquerable propensity for drink, effectually<br />
125