The Death of Christian Britain

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— 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 197
— The Death of Christian Britain — churches, for despite their dramatic decline, they will continue to exist in some skeletal form with increasing commitment from decreasing numbers of adherents. 9 Nor is it the death of belief in God, for though that too has declined, it may well remain as a root belief of people. But the culture of Christianity has gone in the Britain of the new millennium. Britain is showing the world how religion as we have known it can die. 198
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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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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
Page 210 and 211: Chapter nine The End of a Long Stor
Page 212 and 213: — The End of a Long Story — the
Page 216 and 217: Chapter Ten Postscript: the mortali
Page 218 and 219: — Postscript — intellectual lev
Page 220 and 221: — Postscript — Each can overdo
Page 222 and 223: — Postscript — But Williams the
Page 224 and 225: — Postscript — aged by sociolog
Page 226 and 227: — Postscript — secularisation:
Page 228 and 229: — Postscript — Despite the reac
Page 230 and 231: — Postscript — very much restri
Page 232 and 233: — Postscript — Scotland’s ris
Page 234 and 235: — Postscript — But some Christi
Page 236 and 237: — Postscript — filed Protestant
Page 238 and 239: — Postscript — maturing of femi
Page 240 and 241: — Postscript — the oral contrac
Page 242 and 243: — Postscript — grammar school f
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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Page 257 and 258: — Notes to pages 26-28 — aglow
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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 96-100 — 47 R.
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— Notes to pages 104-112 — 98 C
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— Notes to pages 118-128 — 10 Q
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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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— Notes to pages 164-173 — 62 C
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— Notes to pages 176-185 — 32 M
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— Notes to pages 194-201 — 2 On
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— Notes to pages 205-209 — 29 S
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— Notes to pages 228-232 — 135
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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 — ---- , ‘Popular c
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— Sources — Cressy, D., Birth,
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— Sources — ---- , ‘Seculariz
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— Sources — Layton-Henry, Z., T
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— Sources — Norman, E.R., Churc
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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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