The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
homes. One informant recalled in dramatic terms how for hours, one day
in November, she led her sister with her baby round London in thick fog
trying to find a church that was open for the sister’s churching. 87 Churching
had been a formal Church of England service until 1645, and although
restored in 1660, it seems to have withered in elite circles and amongst
Nonconformists. But oral-history evidence from Lancashire, Dudley
and from London demonstrates both how widespread the practice was
until the first half of the twentieth century, and how its survival rested
with plebeian women themselves who enforced a discourse that, without
it, bad luck would befall both the ‘unclean’ woman and the household
that admitted her. 88 Melodrama also features in the long story told by
Mary Manson in Shetland of how her mother travelled on foot with a sick
female cousin across two barren islands and made a perilous sea-crossing
to find a wisewoman for a remedy. The woman locked them in a dark
box-bed whilst she prepared a potion and sent them away to administer it
with considerable ritual. 89 A variety of studies have demonstrated, using
oral and documentary evidence, that complex religious observances based
on amulets and rituals, many kept secret and furtively observed, existed in
Britain until the middle of the twentieth century. This constituted a highly
gendered religious world, mostly rooted in Christian belief. Williams
concludes that ‘apparently incompatible narratives of religious belief’
coexisted for women, drawing upon both church and folk customs of some
considerable longevity. 90
Women had to negotiate complex and competing Christian protocols.
To borrow an observation from Stanley and Wise, the gender ‘role’ ascribed
by religious identity to women was not fixed and immutable, not ‘gender
socialised in someone’ but was ‘situationally variable’, meaning that the
‘self’ was and is ‘relationally and interactionally composed, its construction
being historically, culturally and contextually specific’. 91 The moral and
religious ‘self’ was a negotiation between sometimes contradictory protocols
of discourse, as they interacted with economic and family circumstances.
To be both pious and feminine was very difficult.
MEN’S NARRATIVES
The structure of male narratives reveals important facets of masculinity as
a social construction. Significant numbers of male interviewees recall pressure
from parents to become a parson, minister or priest. The testimony
of Thomas Brennan, born in 1896, revolves around two central episodes in
his life – the choice in his youth of becoming a Catholic priest, and his
years of war service in the armed forces. Raised in Liverpool of fairly devout
Catholic parents, he was trained as an altar boy, and looked on the clergy
‘as real fatherly figures – very kindly, oh yes, yes’, and his parents hoped
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