The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
the liberalisation of British society: to legalisation of abortion in 1967
(which it did not wholly oppose), to decriminalisation of homosexuality in
1968 (a ‘distasteful’ group of people who were ‘sick, and who are in need
of a physician, even although as yet no complete cure has been found’),
and the liberalisation of divorce (which it approved subject to the promotion
of ‘Engaged Couples’ courses). By 1970 it was quite optimistic,
admiring young people’s principled opposition to the Biafran and Vietnam
wars, and finding virtue even in sexual permissiveness: ‘If the sanctions of
commandment and convention are gone, people are set free to respond to
goodness for its own sake, under no compulsion, constrained and sustained
by the love of Christ and not by the fear of a lost respectability.’ The
Committee considered whether marriage might be on the way out, and felt
this was not without historical precedent. ‘The spirit of the age with its
new found freedoms, and its healthy intolerance of humbug and hypocrisy,
challenges Christians to re-think the implications of Christian morality –
not a bad thing to have to do.’ But then, in a single sentence of its report
in 1970, the Committee grasped the central issue: ‘It is the promiscuous
girl who is the real problem here.’ In this utterly sexist statement, the
Committee actually understood the central issue – that the ‘moral turn’
in female sexuality destroyed the entire house of cards. Boys had always
been boys, but female permissiveness meant that a generation of young
women were turning their back on the discourse of pious femininity. With
this realisation, the Committee could not cope, and by 1972 it voiced total
exasperation with ‘the turbulent continent of morality’ and the unfolding
‘promiscuous age’. 47
Many Christian congregations in Britain tried to compromise with the
new age of youth in the late 1960s, developing new forms of religious
worship using guitars and penny whistles, modern dress and a ‘happyclappy’
atmosphere in an attempt to mimic the forms of youth culture.
Churches continued to try to absorb rock bands and the new-fangled discotheques
within their premises. In Edinburgh, large numbers of fourteen- to
seventeen-year-olds (including the author) were members of a considerable
‘church-hall’ circuit of rock dances and discos, but this had largely collapsed
by 1970 as it was shut down by congregations unable to countenance the
increasing loudness of the music, the arrival of soft drugs, the visits of the
police and, above all, the brazen nature of teenagers’ casual sexual liaisons.
A hundred and ninety years after Sunday schools first opened, the salvation
industry was shutting its doors to an entire generation of youngsters who
no longer subscribed to religious discourses of moral identity. Secularisation
was now well under way.
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