The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
for femininity and piety. The ‘promiscuous girl’ of 1970, who was morally
indifferent to her sexual activity if not proud of it, marked the end of
evangelical discourse. A generation later in the 1990s, this secular moral
aggression of young women had been translated into ‘girl power’. Women
still make up the majority of churchgoers. But they are overwhelmingly
older women, raised under the old discourses, and who continue to seek
affirmation of their moral and feminine identities in the Christian church.
Men are proportionately under-represented as they always have been, but
then Sunday church service is still an ‘unmanly’ site in discourse. The really
important group that is missing from church is young women and girls.
There is no longer any femininity or moral identity for them to seek or
affirm at the British Christian church. It is their absence that marks the
end of evangelical femininity and piety, and the fusion between the two.
Before 1800, Christian piety had been a ‘he’. From 1800 to 1960, it
had been a ‘she’. After 1960, it became nothing in gendered terms. More
than this, the eradication of gendered piety signalled the decentring of
Christianity – its authority and its cultural significance. Scholars are increasingly
coming to understand the relationship of Christianity to society in
terms of gender, the body and sexuality. The way in which this relationship
was configured changed in different ages, in what Foucault called
different epistemes. But what has been new and unprecedented in the
episteme of post-modernity since the 1960s has been the dissolution of
gendered discursive Christianity. The ungendering of British Christianity
signalled something greater: the ‘absence’ of what Jeremy Carrette has called
‘a transcendent and normative ideal’, 6 resulting in a religious vacuum into
which considerable philosophical and theological energy is being poured
in a search for a new way of corralling the human religious spirit when
there is no centre and no coda. It is precisely because ‘the personal’ changed
so much in the 1960s – and has continued to change in the four decades
since – that the churches are in seemingly terminal decay and British
Christian culture is in its death throes. Charles Taylor is right; it seems
unlikely that there will ever be a return to an age of faith. The evangelical
narrative has decayed; the discourses on gendered religiosity have withered.
The search for personal faith is now in ‘the New Age’ of minor cults,
personal development and consumer choice. The universal world-view
of both Christianity and identity which prevailed until the 1950s seems
impossible to recreate in any form.
The way of viewing religion and religious decline in Britain offered in
this book – if it is correct – should have wider applicability. It may help
to explain the near contemporaneous secularisation of Norway, Sweden,
Australia and perhaps New Zealand, and should help to account for the
rapid secularisation of much of Catholic Europe since the 1970s. Critically,
it may also help to explain the North American anomaly. Throughout
secularisation studies from the 1950s to the 1990s, the United States and
196