The Death of Christian Britain

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Chapter nine The End of a Long Story At the start of the third millennium, we in Britain are in the midst of secularisation. This is not a novel statement, but this book has sought to show that what is taking place is not merely the continuing decline of organised Christianity, but the death of the culture which formerly conferred Christian identity upon the British people as a whole. Whereas previously, men and women were able to draw upon a Christian-centred culture to find guidance about how they should behave, and how they should think about their lives, from the 1960s a suspicion of creeds arose that quickly took the form of a rejection of Christian tradition and all formulaic constructions of the individual. For some scholars what is being described here is the condition of post-modernity – the obliteration of agreement on core realities and metanarratives by which the present and the past are understood. If a core reality survives for Britons, it is certainly no longer Christian. To make this case, this book has had to show the poverty of existing social-science theory governing the understanding of religious decline. Traditionally in Britain, secularisation has been understood in terms of dichotomies between city and countryside, and between proletarian and bourgeois. These dichotomies were drawn from the evangelical– Enlightenment bipolarities by which so much of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury British society was understood. Social science inherited from evangelicalism the ways of perceiving religion and society, and it has thereby constricted the study of the subject within those early nineteenth-century parameters. The metanarrative resulting from this meeting of evangelicalism and Enlightenment failed to explain what happened to religiosity, when it happened or why it happened. Even to this day, many social scientists (especially some sociologists of religion) tend to be disinterested in these questions, including the crucial one of ‘when’. 1 Without an interest in the timing of secularisation, there can be no serious identification of causes. Scholars who have moved significantly away from social-scientific (and indeed scientific) method have already charted part of the route to a new understanding of the end of the Christian religion. The ‘philosophical 193
— The Death of Christian Britain — anthropology’ of Charles Taylor is important in this regard. 2 Taylor argues that in the mediaeval and early-modern worlds, religious beliefs ‘sank into the background’. He writes: ‘In our public and private life of prayer, penance, devotion, religious discipline, we lean on God’s existence, use it as the pivot of our action, even when we aren’t formulating our belief, as I use the stairs or banister in the course of my focal action’. Taylor proposes that one of the fundamental changes wrought by modernism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the movement of Christian faith from the background to the foreground of the individual’s identity; ‘theology comes indexed to a personal vision, or refracted through a particular sensibility’. However, he says, this place of religion in personal life was fundamentally and permanently changed in the twentieth century: Virtually nothing in the domain of mythology, metaphysics, or theology stands in this fashion as publicly available background today. But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing in any of those domains that poets may not want to reach out to in order to say what they want to say, nor moral sources they descry there that they want to open for us. What it does mean is their opening [of] these domains, in default of being a move against a firm background, is an articulation of personal vision. It is one that we might come to partake in as well, as a personal vision; but it can never become again an invoking of public references, short of an almost unimaginable return – some might say ‘regression’ – to a new age of faith. 3 Though Taylor’s language is different, and at the risk of being mistaken and committing a disservice, there seems to me in his crafting of religious change a notion of pre-modernity, modernity and post-modernity, following similar contours to those outlined in this book. The last change Taylor ascribes to ‘modernism’, a timing which he locates in literature and the arts to the turn of the nineteenth–twentieth centuries, and the causes to the ‘internalizing move of modern humanism, which recognises no more constitutive goods external to us’. The articulation of good – the very speaking of it – becomes less, he says, since as humanists we are fearful of formulaic responses, historical sham, and a ‘moral assurance . . . which actually insulates us from the energy of true moral sources’. We also fall silent about ‘the narrative construction of our lives’ – in other words, we no longer articulate our lives as moral stories. As a moral philosopher, he says that whilst ‘[t]here are good reasons to keep silent’, he urges us not to be, and to abjure modern (post-modern?) relativism about the absence of absolute good and ‘hypergoods’. 4 What Taylor may seem to be describing is post-modernity, but he calls it modernity. Indeed, what divides analysis within the academy is the virtue of postmodernism as a theory and method of analysis, and post-modernity as an historical period. The cynics of post-modernity rely on the belief that in 194
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The Death of Christian Britain PRA
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‘For anyone who is genuinely inte
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The Death of Christian Britain Und
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Contents List of illustrations ix
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illustrations FIGURES 7.1 Church o
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— Acknowledgements — University
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note on oral history The oral-hist
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Chapter one Introduction This book
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— Introduction — no new credo,
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— Introduction — in 1997 even p
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— Introduction — 365 in 1981 an
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— Introduction — Historians hav
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— Introduction — effect of this
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— Introduction — or a family, o
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— Introduction — in ways no lon
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— The Problem with ‘Religious D
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Chapter three The Salvation Economy
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— The Salvation Economy — It wa
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— The Salvation Economy — evang
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— The Salvation Economy — with
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— The Salvation Economy — and P
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— The Salvation Economy — centr
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— The Salvation Economy — famil
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— The Salvation Economy — Indee
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— The Salvation Economy — and t
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— The Salvation Economy — with
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— The Salvation Economy — broug
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— The Salvation Economy — Every
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— Women in Discourse and Narrativ
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— Men in Discourse and Narrative
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Chapter six Personal Testimony and
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— Personal Testimony and Religion
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Page 160 and 161: — Personal Testimony and Religion
Page 162 and 163: Chapter seven ‘Unimpeachable Witn
Page 164 and 165: — The Statistics of ‘Christian
Page 182 and 183: Percentage — The Statistics of
Page 184 and 185: 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 Percentage Sc
Page 188 and 189: — The 1960s and Secularisation
Page 206 and 207: 140 120 100 80 60 Percentage 40 20
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Page 216 and 217: Chapter Ten Postscript: the mortali
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Page 238 and 239: — Postscript — maturing of femi
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Page 244 and 245: — Postscript — Church confirmat
Page 246 and 247: — Postscript — and the churches
Page 248 and 249: — Postscript — an older concept
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— Notes to pages 48-54 — 41 Quo
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— Notes to pages 59-64 — 7 B.L.
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— Notes to pages 71-79 — D. Ski
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— Notes to pages 86-90 — 126 Ib
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— Notes to pages 133-139 — 75 S
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— Notes to pages 144-149 — betw
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— Notes to pages 154-157 — vol.
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— Sources — ---- , About My Fat
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— Sources — Reports to the Gene
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— Sources — Wilson, J.H., A Bri
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— Sources — Cressy, D., Birth,
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— Sources — ---- , ‘Seculariz
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— Sources — ---- , Reconstructi
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— Sources — Chadwick, R.E., ‘
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Campbeltown 20-1 Camporesi, Piero 1
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Girl Guides 131 Girl’s Own Paper
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Plymouth Brethren see Brethren poet
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women: and evangelicalism 42; and f
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