The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
weaned him from his home’, leading to dissipation, death and the debt of
all the family. 31 The Victorian ‘life’ was invariably a journey away from,
or in fear of, such moral and economic destruction. The male artisan –
respectable, pious and home-loving – was a common self-portrait, but
invariably set as the outcome of a life’s journey through the temptations
of drink and gambling. After an apprenticeship following railway engineering
jobs (and manly temptations) around the train depots of Britain,
Peter Taylor married and settled in Paisley where, because of young children,
many families could not attend church services: ‘so we had one of
our own in each other’s houses, week about. I have carried my first-born
in his cradle upstairs, and Maggie coming up behind with the Bible. Ach,
it was not only grand, it was glorious.’ 32 The act of writing one’s own life
was an affirmation of moral worth. So, too, were diaries. John Sturrock, a
millwright in his mid-twenties, recounted in the 1860s his fastidious teetotalism,
his search for a Christian congregation to suit his tastes, and his
need to record his life in a diary so that ‘I may be able to form an estimate
of how I have spent my leisure time, whether I have been trifling it
away or turning it to any particular advantage’. 33 References to religious
literature (especially Pilgrim’s Progress), and biblical quotations and allusions,
abound in the nineteenth-century working-class autobiography.
Many working-class autobiographers were active in church, Sunday school
or home-missionary activities, and most feature periods of searching for
salvation, periods of waiting for the Lord. They deploy the moral polarities
of drink and sobriety, improvidence and thrift, rough and respectable,
irreligious and pious as the discursive structure of their accounts. 34 Women’s
published autobiographies, though rarer than men’s, were often so intensely
bound-up with religiosity that they were indistinguishable in rhetoric and
narrative structure from evangelical fiction. 35 A minority of autobiographers
experienced religious crises, but even here few lost Christian faith
completely, rebelling more against the churches than against belief and the
narrative of the moral life. 36
The discursive power of religious narrative was noted by early religious
psychologists in the 1890s in studying the evangelical conversion. Using
interviews and questionnaires, psychologists discovered that what they
called the ‘conversion narratives’ of ‘very commonplace persons’ kept true
to ‘a pre-appointed type by instruction, appeal, and example’. They noted
how in the eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards, to whom the modern
evangelical conversion owes much for its narrative, had spoken of conversionist
testimony as in ‘an exact conformity to the scheme already
established in their minds’. 37 The same conversion narratives were apparent
in personal accounts of coming to Christ at the Billy Graham London
crusade of 1954 (which attracted almost two million attenders), and in early
1980s oral-history testimony of the 1949 religious revival on the Isle of
Lewis. 38 The evangelical narrative structure was familiar discursive terrain
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