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