The Death of Christian Britain

— The 1960s and Secularisation —
membership in the 1955–59 period for virtually all British Protestant
churches. Marking the mood, religious revivals spread across Britain, aided
by new technology and new forms. The Billy Graham crusades of 1954–56
were especially noteworthy, producing mass audiences in football stadia,
military barracks and nightly congregations of tens of thousands in large
indoor arenas, with remoter congregations participating in cinemas and
churches by the development of closed-circuit radio and television. Radio
evangelism was also permitted in the early and mid-1950s on BBC radio.
Accompanying all of this was a revival of tract distribution and district
visiting on a scale not witnessed since the late Victorian and Edwardian
periods. 14
The demographics of those most affected by this resurgence of organised
religion are most instructive. The gross numbers attending crusade
events were enormous: 1.9 million people in the 1954 London crusade, and
a further 1.2 million in the 1955 Scottish crusade. Yet, the numbers making
‘decisions for Christ’ or coming forward for spiritual counselling were
minute: only 36,431 (2.1 per cent) in London and 26,457 (2.2 per cent) in
Scotland. The evidence is overwhelming that it was the young – those who
were between 5 and 20 years of age at some point during the period 1945
to 1956 – who participated most fully. And amongst this age group, it was
girls and young women who made up those most deeply affected. Of those
who ‘came forward’ in London in 1954, 65 per cent were women and over
50 per cent were under nineteen years of age; in Scotland the following
year 71 per cent were women, 73 per cent were under the age of thirty
years, and 11 per cent were under twelve years. 15 The events were culturally
extremely important. Children were accompanied by adults, especially
women, many of whom were dressed in their best fur coats and tippets. 16
Accompanying adults may even have discouraged children from going
forward; one boy in his early teens at a packed Billy Graham meeting at
Tynecastle football stadium in Edinburgh was prevented from going
forward when his aunt put a restraining arm in his way, saying: ‘Don’t be
so silly.’ 17 For many attenders these were spectacles in the midst of austerity;
for a small number, especially the young, they induced considerable anxiety.
This was a return to an older evangelical discursive state.
It would be foolish to overstate the direct impact of church growth and
revivalism upon Britons in the fifties. Few were converted and church
membership started its decline in the two years after Billy Graham’s visits.
But the sheer numbers attending were vast, and in this the events both
reflected and reinforced discursive and institutional Christianity. Attendances
at the Greater London crusade in 1954 represented 21.2 per cent
of the resident population, whilst attendances in Glasgow represented 73.7
per cent of the city’s population. 18 Even allowing for significant travelling
from outside areas (especially to Glasgow) and multiple attendances, the
figures show that the events had a powerful resonance to 1950s Britain.
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