The Death of Christian Britain

Chapter eight
The 1960s and
Secularisation
RETURN TO PIETY: 1945–58
The late 1940s and 1950s witnessed the greatest church growth that Britain
had experienced since the mid-nineteenth century. Historians and sociologists
have never come to terms with the growth of institutional religion in
Britain between 1945 and 1958. Some scholars miss its scale or even its
existence because the statistical data have not been scrutinised closely. Most,
however, have ignored it because it does not fit their theoretical presumption
that secularisation was under way long before, and that Britain was
by then a ‘secular society’. 1 However, what happened in these years is
demonstrative both of the power of discursive Christianity, and of the
nature, timing and duration of British secularisation that followed.
The period between the end of World War II and the late 1950s is
commonly referred to by many historians as ‘the age of austerity’. Despite
the rise of the welfare state and comprehensive town planning, and despite
full employment and significant growth in standards of living for most
social groups, rationing on foodstuffs, furniture and most basic commodities
continued until the mid-1950s. It was an age of economic retrenchment
in Britain’s old basic industries, marked by widespread nationalisation and
concern with the fiscal health of a nation that had borrowed heavily during
and at the end of the war. The mood of the country seemed dour, unexciting
and intensely conservative. Even the rhetoric of the bold, new welfare
state was resonant with Victorian religious philanthropy in its talk of
educating the working-class girl and preventing juvenile delinquency. 2
This was nowhere more marked than in the discursive construction of
femininity. The end of the war had been marked by the state’s promotion
of ‘pro-natalism’, of women’s place being in the home where the nation
needed an invigorated birth rate to overcome labour shortage. During the
war, women had been drafted into a wide variety of industries and agriculture
to fill the gaps left by men on active service. But as Penny
Summerfield has shown, the way this was implemented did not undermine
domestic ideology, and it ‘did little to alter but rather reinforced the unequal
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