The Death of Christian Britain

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