The Death of Christian Britain

— Personal Testimony and Religion 1800–1950 —
to be readily and expectantly drawn upon in personal testimony. But the
way in which the testimony reflected that discursive power was significantly
gendered.
WOMEN’S NARRATIVES
In the autumn of 1904, the Daily Telegraph published a massive readers’
correspondence instigated by one letter which asked of Christian Britain:
‘do we believe?’ A collection of 242 letters from the correspondence
received was published in book form the following year, in which
239 writers were divided into those professing Christian ‘faith’ (130),
those professing ‘unfaith’ (57) and those professing ‘doubt’ (52). 39 The
correspondence was dominated by men of the ‘establishment’, the upper
echelons of Edwardian society, mostly from London and the Home
Counties, with strong representations from Anglican clergy, lawyers,
and doctors, with the odd mayor, rear admiral and banker thrown in.
Irrespective of their attitude to religion, they represented the issue of
‘believing’ as an overwhelmingly intellectual issue, debating the nature
of Christian religion in terms of doctrine, science, comparative religions
and logic. This was an exercise in intellectual machismo – powerful men
applying ‘reason’ to religion, whether for or against, and signified by
many of the 127 anonymous letter-writers adopting self-consciously Latinised
monikers: Oxoniensis, Homo, Cantabrigiensis, Etonensis Credens,
Credenti Nihil Difficile.
Only seven of the 239 correspondents were identifiably women. Their
manner of writing was very different. With them the issue of morality
dominated, the prime concern being the impact of unbelief upon women’s
moral stature. ‘Gambler’s Wife’ contributed a letter-length autobiography
of the ‘cruelty, wrong, and oppression of men’ wrought on her and her
children by her husband, a rich landed heir, who had spent his fortune and
impoverished and abandoned his family. She had struggled to bring her
children up in respectability before God and society, but had failed in the
face of ‘the leaders of society, who have not the manliness to defend
the right’: ‘My life has been a living death, and I long for the end.’ 40 At
the other extreme from this was another letter, signed ‘A Very Happy
Woman’, who confessed herself ‘incompetent’ to discuss belief ‘either theologically
or scientifically’, but offered her personal conviction of an
‘undefined religion’ based on ‘life, love and peace’. 41 Many male correspondents
asserted that ‘women worshippers who attend services believe
. . . but the immense majority of men do not’. 42 In response, a woman from
London, signing herself in mock intellectual submission as ‘Amoebe’, spoke
of ‘the large number of thoughtful women who do not believe’ because of
the expectation that women must be religious in order to be moral. She
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