The Death of Christian Britain

— The End of a Long Story —
Canada have seemed difficult to fit in the British model of religious decline.
A supposedly obvious ‘secular’ society of the twentieth century has
sustained high levels of churchgoing and church adherence. Debate on this
has gripped American sociologists of religion for decades without apparent
resolution. Perhaps the answer lies in seeing the same discursive challenge
as Britain experienced emerging in North America in the 1960s, but then
not triumphing. A discursive conflict is still under way in North America.
The Moral Majority and the evangelical fight back has been sustained in
public rhetoric in a way not seen in Europe. North American television
nightly circulates the traditional evangelical narrative of conversionism, with
cable and satellite channels broadcasting religious issues in a way quite
alien to Europe where, broadly, there is no meaningful audience for them.
In the USA and to a lesser extent Canada, a discursive battle rages, and
has raged, since the 1960s. Secular post-hippy culture of environmentalism,
feminism and freedom for sexuality coexists beside a still-vigorous evangelical
rhetoric in which home and family, motherhood and apple pie, are
sustaining the protocols of gendered religious identity. Piety and femininity
are still actively enthralled to each other, holding secularisation in check.
In Foucauldian terms, North America may be experiencing an overlap of
epistemes (of modernity and post-modernity).
And what of the British Christian churches? The scholar of religious
decline is accustomed to studying churches, but the further from 1960 you
look, the less relevant are they to such study. Churchpeople continue to
examine religious decline in terms of what the churches are doing – their
good and bad management – and have an endearingly optimistic faith in
the future. In the midst of religious crisis in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and
1990s, churchpeople continued to predict a corner about to be turned in
church decline. 7 But it did not happen and seems unlikely to happen. British
culture is pioneering new discursive territory. As Foucault demonstrated
in his studies of civilisations from the classical to the modern, religious
discourses have ‘governed’ the self through rites which have constituted a
series of
techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a
certain number of operations on their bodies, on their souls, on their
own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to
transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state
of perfection of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and
so on. 8
This role of discursive Christianity seems to have stopped effecting these
operations on the individual in Britain and much of Europe. The ‘religious
life’ in which individuals imagined themselves, and which gave them the
narrative structure for gendered discourses on religiosity to be located in
their personal testimony, seems to have vanished. This is not the death of
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