The Death of Christian Britain

— Postscript —
intellectual level that the death of Christian culture as the dominant
discourse of British life took place in the 1960s. This book sought to explore
and explain it.
COMPETENCES AND METHODOLOGIES
Over the last forty years, religion has disappeared from much history
writing because the ‘secular’ nature of Britain has been taken as axiomatic. 9
Like other social historians of religion, I am one who has sought to reinstate
it in the consciousness of the history discipline. Events and recent developments
have changed matters somewhat: the attacks of 9/11 in New York
and of 7/7 in London, amongst others, and the rise during the 1990s and
2000s of a new assertive quality to conservative Christianity and its pressure
groups on issues like abortion, homosexuality and blasphemy. This
new appearance of what has been called ‘resurgent’ religion in the public
sphere is not because British religion is ‘growing’; church attendances,
membership, baptisms, marriages and virtually all other indicators of religious
rites have continued to slide in the period 2000–2008 as they have
since the 1960s. In that regard, nothing has changed in the social reality of
secularisation in Britain. But a perception of resurgence of religion in Britain
has been brought on by emerging issues of religion in politics and moral
campaigning, increased by the way in which Tony Blair ‘came out’ on television
as a committed Christian in the closing months of his premiership
in 2006 and then, on demitting office the following year, converted to
Roman Catholicism. 10
The disappearance of religion from British historiography of the late
modern period has occurred side-by-side with declining interest in social
class as the category of analysis in British social history. For what was a
brief period, social class dominated the heyday of the social history of religion
from the late 1950s to the 1970s, giving way in the 1980s and 1990s
to a slow slide in interest in both. Whilst there had been slowly growing
attention from the late 1980s to gender in religious history (not least in
Hugh McLeod’s work), there was as yet no noticeable interest in using
gender as a category of analysis in relation to the general social history of
secularisation. 11 Amongst social historians of religion, including the present
author, social class was sustained as the only category of analysis worth
considering, often passing muster as ‘urbanisation’ or some such surrogate
category.
The analytical backbone to The Death of Christian Britain arose in 1996
when I turned to postmodernism and gender (when introduced by my new
partner to women’s history and discourse analysis, and when inspired by
an article by Sarah Williams that rejected the primacy of social class and
called for a ‘linguistic turn’ in the study of religion in Victorian Britain 12 ).
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