The Death of Christian Britain

— The 1960s and Secularisation —
output. Despite a slight rise (to 14, 11 and 20 per cent) in the final three
years of their existence, romance had been displaced by complex and
varied lyrical themes influenced by amongst other things the anti-war movement,
drugs, nihilism, existentialism, nostalgia and eastern mysticism. 42
Conventional morality was not just confronted but in some cases subtly
explored in these later songs, nowhere more so than in the oppositional
discursive ‘voices’ in ‘She’s Leaving Home’, about a girl leaving her parents
and the symbolic shedding of family, convention and unhappiness:
She (We gave her most of our lives)
is leaving (Sacrificed most of our lives)
home (We gave her ev’rthing money could buy).
She’s leaving home after living alone for so many years. 43
Female rebellion – of body, sexuality and above all the decay of religious
marriage – was a transition out of the traditional discursive world.
The Beatles were merely one band circulating discourse change, not
creating it. Pop music – buying it, listening to it, dancing to it and making
it – released the generation of fifties’ and sixties’ children from conventional
forms of popular culture and conventional discourses. Ray Davies
of The Kinks recalled: ‘I went to a church school but the closest I felt to
religion was not when I was singing in the school choir or when I was at
Sunday school, which I always went to, but it was more when I rehearsed
with Dave in the front room.’ 44 Pop music’s impact upon girls, enforced
by magazines like Jackie, was critical. Women had previously been the heart
of family piety, the moral restraint upon men and children. By the mid-
1960s, domestic ideology was assailed on many fronts, putting the cultural
revolution in collision with not just the Christian churches but with
Christianity as a whole. The loss of domestic ideology to youth culture
from c. 1958 meant that piety ‘lost’ its discursive home within femininity.
Its last redoubt, ‘the angel in the house’ to use an historian’s cliché, was
now negotiable and challenged discursive terrain. The distinctive growth in
the 1950s of women’s dual role in home and work was a major contributory
factor, creating a new stress about which model defined a woman’s
‘duty’, upsetting the salience of evangelical protocols, and rendering women
part of the same religious ‘problem’ as men. 45 The reconstruction of female
identity within work, sexual relations and new recreational opportunities
from the late 1960s, put not just feminism but female identity in collision
with the Christian construction of femininity. 46
The discursive death of pious femininity destroyed the evangelical narrative.
This was acutely spotted by the leaders of one denomination – the
Moral Welfare Committee of the general assembly of the Church of
Scotland. Between 1967 and 1972, the Committee effectively abandoned its
traditional promotion of temperance, and offered the Church responses to
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