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