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