The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— <strong>The</strong> <strong>Death</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> <strong>Britain</strong> —<br />
femininity, rather than a spoken knowledge <strong>of</strong> their bodies and the ‘facts<br />
<strong>of</strong> life’. <strong>The</strong> site <strong>of</strong> their femininity had been religion and church which<br />
provided a sexually ‘sheltered life’. By speaking its very name, such<br />
testimony marks its end.<br />
<strong>The</strong> elderly <strong>of</strong> the 1970s and 1980s displayed the intergenerational change<br />
in another way. Even if they were in transit away from the evangelical life<br />
narrative, they were still subscribers to its discourses. When the generation<br />
born in the first half <strong>of</strong> the century discusses why religion has been important<br />
in their lives, they characteristically give broken replies in which they<br />
resort to relating their own religious activity to that <strong>of</strong> their parents: ‘I had<br />
always been used with – well, my father was an organist for a start’, and<br />
‘Religion was well, my Dad was – <strong>The</strong>y were very religious. I mean, it was<br />
a sort <strong>of</strong> routine we had been brought up to.’ 54 When discussing their loss<br />
<strong>of</strong> religiosity, on the other hand, they tend to refer to their own children<br />
and cultural change. Paula Queen born in 1912 in Edinburgh said in the<br />
1980s:<br />
I don’t know when it [religion] ceased to be quite as important.<br />
I’ll tell you what I think is wrong nowadays. You see so much about<br />
science on these [television] programmes that – I remember when<br />
my son was taking medicine, not one <strong>of</strong> these students believed in<br />
anything. He did join Greyfriars Church initially but when he got<br />
further on and so steeped in science they would make you believe<br />
that you’re just a chemical equation and that when you died it was<br />
just the chemical equation ceased working and that was it, you know.<br />
It used to depress me when I used to hear it because they could<br />
knock down every argument you had. And I’d say ‘but the Bible’,<br />
and my son would say the Bible was written by a man – a man writes<br />
a book, he doesn’t always stick to fact. And so what could you say<br />
to that because I suppose it was written by a man and then I started<br />
to listen to programmes on there, scientific programmes, and I really<br />
– am torn in two. I can’t decide now whether – I don’t believe there’s<br />
a hell, I think you make your own hell on earth . . . I can’t believe<br />
that there’s a heaven where there’s angels fluttering about and all that.<br />
I can’t believe that nowadays, but I’d like to think there’s another<br />
life . . . 55<br />
Here is an elderly woman reflectively rationalising her position within discourse<br />
change. This is an attempt to justify <strong>Christian</strong> religiosity both before<br />
and after discourse change – an attempt made on the assumption <strong>of</strong> that<br />
change. This is a form <strong>of</strong> justification which would not, for the most part,<br />
have occurred in their younger years. <strong>The</strong>re is a sense <strong>of</strong> not just confusion<br />
over ‘what to believe’, but grief – discursive bereavement – at the loss.<br />
Instructively, the phenomena observable in late twentieth-century<br />
testimony <strong>of</strong> younger people – reticence about talking about religion, the<br />
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