The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
inevitable religious decline of the conventional secularisation story, but a
remarkably sudden and culturally violent event.
In the 1960s, the institutional structures of cultural traditionalism started
to crumble in Britain: the ending of the worst excesses of moral censorship
(notably after the 1960 trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the ending
in 1968 of the Lord Chamberlain’s control over British theatre); the legalisation
of abortion (1967) and homosexuality (1967), and the granting of
easier divorce (1969); the emergence of the women’s liberation movement,
especially from 1968; the flourishing of youth culture centred on popular
music (especially after the emergence of the Beatles in late 1962) and incorporating
a range of cultural pursuits and identities (ranging from the
widespread use of drugs to the fashion revolution); 32 and the appearance
of student rebellion (notably between 1968 and the early 1970s). 33
However, some modern cultural theorists go much further to argue
that the 1960s was a key decade in ending ‘the Enlightenment project’
and modernity. In its place, the era of postmodernity started to mature. 34
Structural ‘realities’ of social class eroded, and there was a repudiation
of self-evident ‘truths’ (concerning the role of women, the veracity of
Christianity, and the structure of social and moral authority), a new
scepticism about the science-derived nature of ‘progress’, and the disappearance
of an agreed ‘reality’. Science, social science and Christianity
were equally victims in the making in the 1960s. They started to be
undermined by the ‘linguistic turn’ – the deconstruction of the role of
language, signification and discourse which had constructed the Enlightenment
narrative of history, rationality and progress. As Lyotard wrote:
‘The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers,
its great voyages, its great goal.’ 35 Just as environmentalism and the
anti-nuclear movement started to challenge science in the sixties, so poststructuralism
and feminism would come within a decade or so to challenge
social science.
But the immediate victim was Christianity, challenged most influentially
by second-wave feminism and the recrafting of femininity. In 1959,
Boyfriend magazine for teenage girls began publication and was an instant
hit, starting with a circulation of 418,000. Its format was new, but its
message was old. It used a well-known pop song and its singer to inspire
a story which delivered a traditional moral discourse on the nature of female
virtue. The magazine was short-lived, winding-up in 1965 when its sales
had plummeted to 199,000. It was cleared off the shelves by Jackie, which
started in 1964 when Beatlemania was at its height. Its initial circulation
was 350,000 and reached 605,947 by 1976. Jackie also took pop songs as
the inspiration for its comic-strip stories – ‘Meet me at the corner’, ‘Come
fly with me’ and ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ – but discarded traditional
moral language. Stories now focused on the words ‘you’, ‘love’ and
‘happiness’. Rooted in swinging London, Jackie persisted in asserting the
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