The Death of Christian Britain

— The End of a Long Story —
the year 2000 it is still modernism that is acting upon us as the agent of
secularisation in an unbroken line stretching back to the late eighteenth or
early nineteenth centuries. It is still the Enlightenment paradigm that they
promulgate, that rationality was hostile to popular religion and the ‘religious
self’. To the supporters of post-modernity, this is fundamentally
wrong. It is a failure to understand the nature of the evangelical age and
the duration of its legacy. Instead of rationality and religion clashing in the
Enlightenment, it is the story of the Enlightenment’s boost to Christian
religion, already well told, that needs to be more widely accepted. 5
Meanwhile, there are still too many scholars who misread the secularising
impact of industrialisation and urbanisation, despite all the revisionist
research of the 1980s and 1990s. The cumulative effect is that scholars from
a wide variety of backgrounds falsely conflate our secularisation with what
they think was the secularisation of the nineteenth century. They have failed
to perceive the robustness of popular religiosity during industrialisation
and urban growth between the 1750s and the 1950s.
This failure is caused by a focus on ‘structures’ (such as churches and
social classes) to the neglect of ‘the personal’ in piety. The ‘personal’ is
intrinsically wrapped up with language, discourses on personal moral
worth, the narrative structures within which these are located, and the
timing of change to these. Around 1800, with the fading of coercive religion
(or what Charles Taylor calls ‘background’ religion, and ‘the great
chain of being’), religiosity became overwhelmingly discursive, dependent
on bringing an evangelical narrative of the life story to the foreground of
personal identity. These discourses were fundamentally gendered as,
perhaps, they had always been, but where before 1800 Christian piety had
been located in masculinity, after 1800 it became located in femininity.
Paeans of praise were heaped on women’s innate piety whilst brickbats
were hurled at men’s susceptibility to temptation. Enforcement of ‘hypergoods’
(again drawing on Taylor) was transferred from external agencies
(the state churches) to the internal of the individual. Identity became
something incredibly personal, a matter for deep personal enforcement,
negotiation or neglect. In this ‘system’, women were the key, for it was
their religiosity that mattered. It was their influence on children and men,
their profession of purity and virtue, their attachment to domesticity and
all the virtues located with that, which sustained discursive Christianity in
the age of modernity.
This age lasted a century and half, from about 1800 to about 1960.
Though these things are never instantaneous, the age of discursive
Christianity then quite quickly collapsed. It did so, fundamentally, when
women cancelled their mass subscription to the discursive domain of
Christianity. Simultaneously, the nature of femininity changed fundamentally,
shedding its veneer of piety and respectability, and becoming
disjoined from the romance which provided women’s personal narrative
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