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 />
Yorkshire) and many others. Both rural and urban settings provide corrective<br />
pictures to popular mythology <strong>of</strong> idyllic country village and unpleasant<br />
city slum: the first was far from an harmonious society, and the second<br />
was characterised by neighbourliness in the midst <strong>of</strong> hardship. <strong>The</strong> effect<br />
is the same: they draw pictures <strong>of</strong> a lost world to be fondly remembered<br />
by the elderly reader or hankered after by the young. A few display considerable<br />
antagonism towards evangelical morality and its effect upon the lives<br />
<strong>of</strong> their parents, especially upon mothers, and in so doing convey the stifling<br />
community pressure to conform to religious moral codes as late as the<br />
1940s. 57 <strong>The</strong>y are moral tales <strong>of</strong> community, but they were rarely moral<br />
tales about the ‘self’. Generally speaking, the autobiographers reveal themselves<br />
as lifelong churchgoers and <strong>Christian</strong>s, but their volumes are rarely<br />
composed as ‘religious lives’ in the form <strong>of</strong> their Victorian and Edwardian<br />
predecessors. While they poke gentle and affectionate fun at the moral<br />
world <strong>of</strong> their youth, they still in general subscribe to it. It is a world they<br />
regret for its passing, something they and their publishers realise will attract<br />
book buyers who can invest in that nostalgia. In this way the autobiography<br />
reveals discourse change perhaps more potently than oral testimony:<br />
the journey from the construction <strong>of</strong> moral lives to the nostalgic reconstruction<br />
<strong>of</strong> moral communities. <strong>The</strong> autobiography <strong>of</strong> the nineteenth<br />
century was a construction <strong>of</strong> the moral journey <strong>of</strong> the individual to salvation<br />
– be it <strong>Christian</strong>, atheistic or socialist. <strong>The</strong> autobiography <strong>of</strong> the<br />
twentieth century was a moral museum <strong>of</strong> community in which the writer<br />
was participant observer rather than moral hero. Autobiography was no<br />
longer about progression but about loss. Religion – as narrative structure,<br />
the cement <strong>of</strong> community, and as motif – was central to that loss.<br />
This leaves this work with an empirical problem. If people became inarticulate<br />
about their post-1950s religiosity, finding it easier, as Charles<br />
Taylor proposes <strong>of</strong> ‘modern’ humankind in general, to not believe than to<br />
believe, 58 how does the historian show this? Silences are now well-known<br />
territory to the historian <strong>of</strong> both the early-modern and modern periods,<br />
where failure to mention or discuss major events or issues is in itself a potent<br />
research finding. 59 <strong>The</strong> thing about the sixties is that religion was much<br />
discussed, notably the Honest to God debate from 1962 and the supposed<br />
‘death’ <strong>of</strong> God, to which the elderly responded in considerable numbers. 60<br />
Public debate on television and newspapers was widespread on not just the<br />
decline <strong>of</strong> religion but also on moral change. <strong>The</strong> problem is that autobiographies<br />
and oral testimony <strong>of</strong> the sixties’ generation are relatively few<br />
and elite, seem wholly antagonistic to conventional religion, and interested<br />
only in experimental religiosity such as eastern mysticism. 61 This is not a<br />
product <strong>of</strong> either insufficient evidence or because the likely interviewees<br />
are too young to be ‘interested’ in reflecting on religion. It is a product <strong>of</strong><br />
inarticulacy in conventional <strong>Christian</strong>ity, a new ‘silence <strong>of</strong> history’, marking<br />
the birth <strong>of</strong> <strong>Britain</strong>’s dechristianised generations in the 1960s.<br />
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