The Death of Christian Britain

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Chapter Ten Postscript: the mortality of Christian Britain reconsidered INTRODUCTION ‘The Church is one generation away from extinction’, said Dr George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, on budget day 1999, describing Britain as having ‘something of an allergy to religion’. 1 Despite many informed commentators having issued dire warnings about the demise of churches or Christianity in this country, the appearance of The Death of Christian Britain in December 2000 led a few Christians to want to shoot the herald – or at least they sent me Biblical texts and warnings that I was destined for hell, to be flung by the angels into the lake of fire. 2 A few Christian historians and sociologists, too, have been hostile. One accused me of ‘enormous condescension’ in having ‘written rather pityingly about 1960s’ Christians, depicting them as vainly swimming against the tide of historical inevitability – not saving but drowning’, 3 whilst another accused me of being ‘maybe a little gleeful’ with the end of Christianity as a sense of self (and accusing me of using the word ‘religiosity’ as a ‘somewhat pejorative’ anti-Christian word). 4 But other Christian responses have been more positive, including several ministers and priests who wrote to me, and some British denominations and divinity colleges called on me to conduct seminars. Meanwhile, online discussion about the book has been vigorous at times, and some Christians have become strongly engaged with its ideas. 5 A few considered me under-committed; Stephen Logan criticised my failure to describe secularisation as ‘good or bad’, lambasting me for failing to celebrate the demise of Christianity. 6 There may well be valid criticisms of this book – some under-researched issues, and some statements deserving better nuance with wider evidence. I will consider some of its shortcomings in this chapter. But though as a non- Christian, but not secularist, historian I claim not to be ‘neutral’, yet I am not seeking to take ‘sides’ (whatever those may be perceived to be) concerning faith, conversions and the place of religion in the present and past affairs of British public life. One reviewer took me in this book to be ‘celebrating’ and applauding the demise of Christian Britain. 7 I certainly do not celebrate Christian congregations in contraction, parish churches in crisis 199
— The Death of Christian Britain — because of shortage of ministers, and church buildings up for sale. I am saddened by the pain experienced by communities (including my own) and the loss to the cultural fabric of the nation resulting from church closures. But I do celebrate the death of Christian Britain, if ‘Christian Britain’ is as I have defined it in this book: not as Christianity (and certainly not as the churches), but rather the dominance of a Christian culture within British society. 8 This book is about a popular culture that arose in the shadow of the Enlightenment and bifurcated between ‘respectable’ and ‘rough’; the former dominated morally by providing distinctive gender definitions of piety (replacing an early-modern culture with very different definitions) which lasted from around 1800 to around 1960. Largely uncontested discourses of submission to Christian moral codes demanded that people perform protocols of behaviour (which I then went on to describe in their heavily gendered forms in Chapters 3 and 4). The culture was a hegemony maintained by acculturation, not by state enforcement. It might have been much flouted and ignored, but those who did so were branded deviants, miscreants and ‘heathens’, not just (or even mainly) by church clergy but by their families and communities. This was discursive power. The death of that was what my book was about – about locating its timing, its characteristics and circumstances. I believe that I lived through that ‘death’ in the 1960s. And yes, I celebrated it both then and, increasingly, since as the magnitude of what happened in the cultural revolution of that decade becomes better appreciated. It freed me and British popular culture as a whole from the relentless misery of an inescapable Christian discourse which governed virtually all aspects of self-identity and expression, community-regulated leisure and domestic life (and to an extent economic life too). It was a culture that had, in its last decades between 1945 and 1960, been backed by the state: through harshly enforced censorship of books and theatres, Sunday closing in many places, of cinemas, public houses, theatres and even children’s playparks, the banning of most forms of gambling, the harsh criminalisation of homosexual relations, and many other things besides. By the 1950s organised Christianity had become characterised by the support of a harsh and vindictive state apparatus that oppressed many pleasures without reason, and hurt the lives of many young people – especially women and gays. And it was the first of these who, in the view laid out in this book, took the lead role in and from the 1960s in overturning that regime, taking on the churches and wider cultural and civil institutions. The female discourse of domesticity was ideologically affirmed primarily by Christianity, but conveniently exploited by the law, commerce and many institutions (not least male trade unions). That discourse was also, in the argument of this book, the bulwark to Christian piety in this country: piety and femininity were mutually enslaved discourses. If domesticity died as a dominant discourse, so too did the churches as popular institutions. I believed at both a personal and 200
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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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— 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
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— The Statistics of ‘Christian
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— Sources — ---- , About My Fat
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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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