The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
between 1952 and 1957 from 69 to 72 per cent of all marriages in England
and Wales and from 82 to 83 per cent of marriages in Scotland. The way
in which this growth was achieved is best seen from Figure 8.1 which shows
the recruitment success during the twentieth century of Britain’s two major
churches, the Church of England and the Church of Scotland. The number
confirmed in the Church of England (usually between the ages of 12 and
16) is measured for each year as a percentage of the number baptised fourteen
years previously, and the number becoming new communicants ‘by
profession’ in the Church of Scotland (usually between the ages of 16 and
20) is measured as a percentage of those baptised eighteen years before.
The graph shows increasing recruitment success between 1945 and 1956,
notably in the Church of Scotland. All British churches benefited to greater
or lesser degrees from growth in this period. In short, from 1945 to 1956
British organised Christianity experienced the most rapid rates of growth
since statistics started to be collected in the nineteenth century.
From 1956 all indices of religiosity in Britain start to decline, and from
1963 most enter free fall. As Figure 8.1 shows, this fall was very rapid in
the 1960s, and after levelling off at haemorrhaging rates of between 22 and
28 per cent during the 1970s and 1980s, fell again in the 1990s to a catastrophic
rate of recruiting baptised persons into full membership of only
17 per cent in the Church of Scotland and 20 per cent in the Church of
England. All the figures in this and the preceding chapters show the scale
of declension: an unremitting decline in membership, communicants,
baptisms and religious marriage which, at the start of the third millennium,
shows no sign of bottoming out. The Sunday school in particular is close
to disappearing as a significant institution. In Scotland, presbyterian Sunday
school enrolments represented 39 per cent of Scottish children in 1956, but
then fell to 19 per cent in 1973; from an all-time peak of 325,200 children
in Church of Scotland Sunday schools in 1956, the numbers had reached
only 60,936 in 1994. In England and Wales, the collapse of Sunday schools
led to interruptions in the publishing of statistics by the Church of England
in 1961, the Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church in Wales in
1967, and by the Congregationalist Church in 1968 – an interruption
which signalled the decay of the ‘statistical discourse’ which the churches
had developed in the nineteenth century. The ‘saved’ could no longer be
counted.
All of the indicators show that the period between 1956 and 1973
witnessed unprecedented rapidity in the fall of Christian religiosity amongst
the British people. In most cases, at least half of the overall decline in each
indicator recorded during the century was concentrated into those years.
That in itself makes the ‘long sixties’ highly significant in the history of
British secularisation. What heightens the significance is the fact that so
many indices of religiosity fell simultaneously. Across the board, the British
people started to reject the role of religion in their lives – in their marriage,
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