The Death of Christian Britain

— 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
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