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