The Death of Christian Britain

— The 1960s and Secularisation —
driver, a Catholic lorry driver. Very very simple life, a firm faith and a
place to go in my lorry, in my nice lorry. I realised I was more complex
than that and I slightly envied that life. I envied the innocence.’ 27 But the
majority of young people were outside ‘beatnik’ culture in the 1950s. For
most children, it was a decade of submission to family values and duty, of
boys being good and girls being nice. Personal testimony shows many
unchanged features of childhood between the 1900s and 1950s; one oral
historian, Elizabeth Roberts, comments: ‘They were to do as their parents
told them; they were to be honest and respectable; they were not to bring
shame on their families by getting into any kind of trouble.’ 28 The fifties’
Sunday was only marginally more liberal than its Edwardian predecessor:
going (or being sent) to Sunday school whether or not your parents went
to church, Sunday-best clothes, restricted Sunday games, and with the
parkies tying up the swings in the public park. The church, Sunday school
and family were memorials to their parents’ history which the young
endured in that decade. Both change and continuity seemed retrospective.
There was the world of the past, still present in Victorian values, in adults’
memories of depression, in a war memorialised in bomb-sites, war movies
and a father’s silence on his war. The past also seemed present in what was
new: the welfare state, prefabs and council-housing estates mending the
past in its own image. The family home was at the peak of its sanctification;
more homes were demolished and more new ones built than ever
before, predominantly one- or two-storey ‘cottage’ style with front and
back gardens. 29 Where change intruded, it remained institutionally and
discursively boundaried. Even dances and popular music could be churchmediated.
By the fifties, introduction to dances and popular music was
often in the church hall: Jenny Kennedy, born 1945, went to coffee bars
during the week, the church dance on Saturday night, and only went to
Sunday school because her mother stepped in when there was no one to
teach the infants. 30 The 1950s were about perfecting Victorian values and
finally distributing their fruits. The decade was, as Carolyn Steedman has
put it, ‘a point between two worlds’ where the child was ‘a repository for
other people’s history’. 31
THE SIXTIES’ DISCOURSE REVOLUTION
Secularisation could not happen until discursive Christianity lost its power.
From 1800 until 1950, the British Christian churches had no state sanction
to force people to be adherents or believers as had been the case before
1800. It had been the ‘salvation economy’ which had wielded a power over
the individual to make the choice to absorb and adapt gendered religious
identities to himself and herself. It was only when that discursive power
waned that secularisation could take place. The result was not the long,
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