The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
late 1940s and 1950s had been deposited in the extremely vigorous representation
of the respectable wife, mother and young girl, was washed away
in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. British women secularised the
construction of their identity, and the churches started to lose them. The
exodus started with the young. As Table 8.1(a) shows, in the Church of
England the number of confirmations (usually occurring between the ages
of 12 and 18) was still extremely strong as late as 1960 and then started to
fall steeply and unremittingly. Table 8.1(b) indicates that female confirmations
were always higher than males, but it was in 1961–3 that the
proportion of girls taking this ceremony started to fall steeply, halving in
the period 1961–74. Even though male confirmations were also falling (and
indeed at a faster rate), the critical fact here is that female confirmation was
still extremely high in the 1950s whilst male confirmation was already low
and falling. Male alienation from religion certainly seems to have been more
progressive than female alienation, and men’s membership links with
churches in the twentieth century may have been held in place in large part
as a propriety – in deference to the more resilient religiosity of wives and
mothers. Men were partners to religious respectability; when women no
longer needed to be ‘chaperoned’ to church, and indeed did not want to
go at all, men no longer had ‘to keep up appearances’ in the pews. Victorian
evangelicals were probably right: when women stopped identifying with
church, so did men. The British schoolgirl of the mid-1950s faced playground
taunts for proclaiming atheism; by contrast, the ‘atheist’ schoolgirl
of the mid-1960s was rapidly becoming the norm. 65 Freed from religious
constraints on ‘female respectability’, the secularisation of the form of
marriage and child baptism (domestic occasions orchestrated conventionally
by women) arose from the early 1970s onwards by negotiation between
females of different generations (principally between mother and adult
daughter). The religious alienation of the next generation of children
followed. If this analysis is correct, the keys to understanding secularisation
in Britain are the simultaneous de-pietisation of femininity and the
de-feminisation of piety from the 1960s.
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