The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
Three related observations struck me: that religious decline in Britain only
became really serious in the 1960s (a ‘fact’ known but largely sidestepped
by academics), that any change in religious fortunes in that decade could
not be explained by changes in social class (as broadly there were none of
sufficient magnitude) but might be explained by changes in gender (which
were profound), and that the way to demonstrate such a thing could not
be through the traditional social-science route of church-led social history,
but through a larger linguistic turn into a postmodern-inspired approach
of discourse analysis and personal-testimony study. 13 With the addition of
statistical analysis, none of these three main research methods was in itself
original or novel, but their combined use in religious history was newer.
Novelty has induced some censure. A fair criticism of the discourse
analysis is that I paid too little attention to Roman Catholicism, Anglo-
Catholicism and non-evangelicalism generally, being ‘overly syncretic’,
identifying similarities amongst British Christians but minimising their differences.
14 This criticism has come from a number of Catholic and Catholicsensitive
reviewers, including Sheridan Gilley, who noted that ‘Catholics are
treated simply as a species of conversionist Protestants’. 15 In my defence
I focussed upon Protestantism, and evangelicalism in particular, because I
argued that it was this brand of Christianity that set the pace in ideological,
public policy and cultural terms in the nineteenth century, with evangelicals
– through their energy, ideas and emphasis on action – having an impact in
Britain far in excess of their numbers or civil status. 16 By 1900, evangelicals
had attracted an intellectual support (from other church traditions especially),
in parallel to popular gendered discourses on piety, which was so
strong that the Christian culture they had nurtured proved resilient and
seemingly impervious to moral refutation for a further half century; modern
Christianity became dominated by these gendered discourses. Moreover,
I was influenced, firstly, by Mary Heimann’s well-received Catholic Devotion
in Victorian England (1995) that emphasised the parallels rather than
the contrasts between Catholic and Protestant (and which I suspected could
be taken further), and, secondly, by the experience recounted by oral respondents
and autobiographers between the 1880s and 1940s (some quoted in
the book) that showed they attended services of both Catholic and Protestant
churches with regularity and ‘without discrimination’ (the words of one
woman from Glasgow). This was something perhaps lost in the 1950s and
1960s. I believe strongly that ‘official’ church history over-emphasises ecclesiastical
separation between laity over the past two hundred years. Following
the lead of Patrick Joyce in his shift from emphasising class difference in
Victorian popular culture to empathising the shared vision of ‘the common
people’, and acknowledging also Patrick Pasture’s similar observations on
Christianity from a Belgian context, 17 the people’s history suggests a strong
common Christian experience from 1800 to 1950. Ecclesiastical history has
a tendency to divide the people in this period, cultural history to unite them.
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