The Death of Christian Britain

— The 1960s and Secularisation —
THE DEMISE OF CHRISTIAN RELIGION
The statistics of British secularisation show by all indicators that the greatest
gradient of decline of formal Christian religiosity occurred after 1958.
Moreover, for the majority of the indicators, the greatest absolute and
proportionate losses of the British people to organised religion occurred
after that date.
We saw in Chapter 7 that Christian church connection grew per head
of population down to the first decade of the twentieth century, and
between 1905 and 1950 entered a period of fluctuation, exacerbated by two
world wars, which left many indicators in the mid-1950s higher than in
much of the nineteenth century and only marginally lower than at their
highest point. Only churchgoing had declined, but this amounted mostly
to a thinning of the people’s religious worship, not to a massive polarisation
between churchgoers and non-churchgoers. Sunday school enrolment
and religious marriage showed remarkable strength until the 1930s. Baptism
into the Church of England actually grew down to 1927, so that it was at
a higher rate throughout the inter-war years than it had been in the
Edwardian period. Though most of these indicators showed a downturn
in the 1930s, especially in the late 1930s, most of the indicators were still
strong by the 1940s.
What was happening was this. Adult church activity was declining but
adult church association remained strong and, in the case of baptism,
showed periods of growth. Sunday school enrolment, though declining,
was doing so at a far slower rate than adult churchgoing. Adults were
continuing the late Victorian trend of investing less in activity and more
in passive association: through membership, attendance to religious rites of
passage, and in ensuring that their children attended Sunday school. With
discursive Christianity still strong in the inter-war period, family subscription
to religiosity was becoming increasingly concentrated in the family
and the community. The family subscribed to the discourses of Christian
behaviour less by going to church and more by passive and surrogate association:
the family rituals of marriage and baptism, and the attendance of
children at Sunday school.
In the light of this, what happened in the 1950s becomes all the more
remarkable; the two trends are reversed. Church of England baptism rates
and the rate of solemnisation of marriage actually started to fall in the early
1950s, whilst church membership and Sunday school enrolment grew very
significantly. In England, Easter day communicants grew 20.1 per cent as
a proportion of population between 1947 and 1956; in Scotland, total religious
affiliation to all churches grew 7.6 per cent as a proportion of total
population, and Sunday school enrolment by 31.3 per cent as a proportion
of 5–14 year olds. One consequence was a revival of religious marriage;
after declining between the late 1930s and the early 1950s, it then grew
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