The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
had abandoned Christian belief after reading widely in science and theology.
This, she wrote, shattered her:
At first my whole motive in life seemed gone, and I felt that the
morals which hung upon that motive must go too. For a long time
I was absolutely miserable. I have recovered. I never pray now. I only
feel and think and act. But I am sure all who know me would say
that my character is superior now to what it was then, because it is
richer, more sympathetic. I may also say that I do not find resisting
temptation any more difficult, relying on my own strength, than I
used to do when I prayed for help. 43
Eschewing ‘male’ reason, these women had been forced to engage with religious
doubt within the evangelical discourse on female piety. Even then,
they could not shed it; the implications were too great. A man might gain
respect for professing ‘unfaith’ with intellectual vigour, but for a woman
to maintain her ‘character’ outside the profession, or the semblance, of
Christian belief was a difficult and often heroic enterprise. If a woman shed
her religion, she could shed her reason for being.
Few women before the mid-twentieth century could even attempt to
throw off these shackles of their moral identity. Those who did were, as
in these cases reported in the columns of the upper-class Daily Telegraph,
overwhelmingly aristocratic, upper-middle-class, or bohemian and artistic.
But for the ‘ordinary’ woman to contemplate revolt against evangelical
discourse was, as with ‘Amoebe’, to endanger being a woman: ‘My whole
motive in life seemed gone, and I felt that the morals which hung upon
that motive must go too.’ Clinging to or acquiring the status of being ‘a
Christian’ was a sine qua non for most women between 1800 and 1950. In
the nineteenth century, this could mean a conversion experience; Mrs
Sydney Watson left a Bible class meeting determined to get a share of God’s
love and resolved ‘more earnestly than ever to be good’. 44 After 1900, it
tended to be a social rather than salvationist goal; Margaret Penn and Alice
Foley from north-west England were almost driven to despair in the early
twentieth century by their desire for acceptance in church and Sunday
school. 45 But throughout the period, few women could ignore the discursive
power of religion to their womanhood. Winifred Foley’s father was a
miner with little interest in religion who felt that ‘organised religion was
the opium dealt out to the masses by the cynical few, to obtain for themselves
their own heaven on this earth’. Husbands only went occasionally
to church in her village, being able to disengage themselves intellectually,
politically and discursively from religion. But Winifred’s mother, like most
women in the village, went to church regularly, though the poorer wives
only went once a week because they couldn’t afford good clothes. 46
Being a practising Christian was for a woman a richly feminised experience.
Young women and girls aspired to and emerged into womanhood
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