The Death of Christian Britain

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