The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
Q: Did religion mean more or less to you after childhood?
A: About the same.
Q: What does that mean?
A: Well, not important nor unimportant. A fairly medium course if
you like. Occasional attender at church as a child. 49
Among interviewees born after the late 1930s, answers on religious matters
are strongly characterised by these short answers. This can be interpreted
in a number of ways. On the one hand they exude an air of indifference
about religion; the testimony suggests it is a topic the interviewees of that
generation devoted little time to in their daily lives or even in their more
thoughtful moments. On the other hand, it might be interpreted as a way
of rejecting the interviewer’s intrusiveness: the short answers might be
saying ‘this a private matter, it’s none of your business’. A third possible
factor is the interviewer’s (or questionnaire-setter’s) ‘stunted’ conception
of religion which fails to provide a question to which the interviewee feels
able to respond. There is, however, a fourth issue: the absence of either a
narrative structure or a set of terms with which the interviewees are able
to answer. They are of a generation that has not sustained a training in
how to express their religiosity. They may even have a sense of religiosity
or spirituality, but they are not familiar – like their parents and their grandparents
– in having to express this. Critically, a very common element is
the general absence of the motifs of moral bipolarities (drinking and teetotalism,
strict Sundays and banning of games, gambling and not gambling,
strict discipline and naughtiness), as well as an absence of the narrative
progression which contained these contrasts. There is indeed a reticence
about describing their lives with the same openness as their parents.
Constructing a life narrative is less important to them, but equally they do
not conceive of it as being capable of being rendered in such a format. In
other words, the ‘stunting’ of the concept of religion is mutual between
interviewee and interviewer.
This last issue surfaces in a new way in the final generation when the
discursive change is virtually complete. Maureen Lowrie born in 1967, was
the granddaughter and daughter respectively of Kevin and Laurence, and
at the time of being interviewed in the late 1980s she was a student. She
had attended Sunday school but stopped at the age of ten: ‘that was my
decision’. Religion meant little to her until she decided to get confirmed,
but ‘Now that’s died off; I seem to have lost that faith, you know.’ She
became bitter with the Anglican vicar when her best friend’s father was
sacked as headmaster of the local Church of England school: ‘standing on
a Sunday morning shaking his hand seemed the height of hypocrisy to me.
So, Sundays is kept for my work and also for my parents.’ 50 What emerges
is the interviewee’s stunted conception of religiosity as ‘going to church’
and not as a wider personal religious identity.
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