The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
as a place to baptise their children, as an institution to send their children
for Sunday school and church recruitment, and as a place for affiliation.
The next generation, which came to adulthood in the 1970s, exhibited even
more marked disaffiliation from church connection of any sort, and their
children were raised in a domestic routine largely free from the intrusions
of organised religion. The broken, abrupt, dismissive and disinterested
responses of young oral interviewees of the 1980s become explicable. They
just had no discursive, associational or institutional link with Christianity.
If churchgoing, church recreation, church membership and religious rites
of passage started declining in sequence between the 1880s and 1960s, their
accelerated fall from the 1960s is probably starting a fifth phenomenon: the
decline of Christian belief. Steve Bruce has recently suggested that from
the 1960s faith itself – in God, in the afterlife, in the supernatural – has
been in decline. 62 Certainly, some social-survey data seems to show not
only decline in personal piety (private and daily prayer for instance), but
also a fall in the proportion of people who claim to believe in the basic
supernatural tenets of Christianity (such as belief in the existence of God,
and the existence of heaven and hell). 63 For the generations growing up
since the 1960s, new ethical concerns have emerged to dominate their moral
culture – environmentalism, gender and racial equality, nuclear weapons
and power, vegetarianism, the well-being of body and mind – issues with
which Christianity and the Bible in particular are perceived as being wholly
unconcerned and unconnected. At the same time, the social implications of
conventional religious culture – respectability, sobriety, observance of social
convention, observance of the Sabbath – have been rejected en bloc. Even
where a moral goal appears to have survived (as with sobriety, especially
in relation to driving), this has been remoralised in discourse in a form
completely divorced from religiosity and Christian ethics.
The result has been that the generation that grew up in the sixties was
more dissimilar to the generation of its parents than in any previous century.
The moral metamorphosis directly affected the churches’ domain: the
decline of church marriage, the rise of divorce and remarriage, the rise of
cohabitation in place of marriage (notably from the late 1970s), decreasing
stigmatisation of illegitimacy, homosexuality and sexual licence, the growing
recourse to birth control and abortion, and the irresistible social pressures
for government liberalisation of restrictions on drinking, Sunday closing
and recreation. The range of the changes in demography, personal relationships,
political debate and moral concerns was so enormous that it did
not so much challenge the Christian churches as bypass them. Of course,
the new cultural environment affected the churches deeply, and transformed
them fundamentally. Ecclesiastical change has been enormous: Vatican II
and its aftermath, the Honest to God debate, the impact of protest against
the Vietnam and Biafran wars, ecumenical discourse, feminism, the rise
of environmentalism, and awareness of social and ‘North–South’ issues
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