The Death of Christian Britain

— The 1960s and Secularisation —
Such transitions in intergenerational oral testimony are commonplace.
One Edwardian woman from Enfield was reported by her children as being
fairly religious, continuing to attend weekly church events into old age in
the 1920s. Her daughter reported in a shorter fashion on her religiosity,
but recalled in some detail going to Sunday school weekly in the 1920s and
early 1930s. By contrast, her granddaughter reported that religion meant
‘nothing at all’ in her youth in the 1950s, though she did attend church for
a year and continued to attend church dances, the Guides and to wear
Sunday best. The fourth generation, the great-granddaughter brought up
in the 1970s and 1980s, never went to Sunday school, church, Guides or
any church-based activity. No religious or quasi-religious discourse, motif
or activity whatever can be discerned in her testimony. Repeated questioning
on religion, drawn from the same questionnaire as put to her mother
and grandmother, drew blank or disinterested responses; her only comment
was: ‘I was never religious.’ 51 The stunting had become reversed; it was the
interviewee, not the interviewer, who had no discussable concept of her
religiosity. The 1960s generation had become inarticulate about religion –
even more so than the older interviewer.
From early in the twentieth century, there is plenty of evidence from
autobiography and oral testimony of men disavowing churchgoing, and
even rejecting Christianity. 52 But for women, this type of personal journey
away from religion was extremely difficult and comparatively rare before
the 1950s. It was difficult because a woman could not just ‘drop’ religion
as a man could; her respectability as a woman, wife and mother, whether
she liked it or not, was founded on religion whether she went to church
or not. For a woman, religion filled the same place occupied by ignorance
about sex. Hetty Beck, born in 1879 into an upper-working-class Church
of England family, recalled:
[T]here was certain things that were not revealed to us in our days –
fact – well, youngsters talk about them when they’re five years old
these days [1960s], but – oh no – things were kept very private, in
many ways. But you learnt more when you got older and you got
out into the world and mixed with other people, whatever you did
really at home – which, perhaps it was best; perhaps it wasn’t – I feel
– I’m not too sure about it. Now if you look a – er – well of course,
life at that time, when we were growing up, life was – you lived a
sheltered life. You went to church and Sunday – you went to Sunday
school and you’d go to church in the evening . . . 53
This disturbed broken answer is typical of elderly female interviewees in
the late twentieth century who were seeking ways to verbalise the changes
in their personal world since childhood. But with these women, it was
still an articulate engagement with conceptions of religiosity – with the
evangelical narrative structure and its discourses – which defined their
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