The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— Postscript —<br />
Each can overdo its trend, but there is a different, street-level narrative <strong>of</strong><br />
religious history still to be written from the cultural perspective, which<br />
excludes the starting point <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> division and starts instead at that <strong>of</strong><br />
the people’s common culture. Shared cultural experiences are exposed in<br />
detail in Sarah Williams’s work on folk religion in mid-twentieth-century<br />
London and Elizabeth Roberts’s extensive interview work on women’s<br />
churching rituals in Lancashire. <strong>The</strong>re was a common religious life <strong>of</strong> the<br />
<strong>Christian</strong> people that crossed, and even to an extent ignored, church boundaries.<br />
I tried to contribute to this ‘other’ narrative.<br />
<strong>The</strong> fact that discourse analysis hinted at postmodernism attracted its customary<br />
opprobrium, but sometimes it created theoretical confusion as well.<br />
One reviewer assumed that ‘discourse’ meant I was studying what he called<br />
‘the elites as the originators <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> discourse’, and ignoring working<br />
people and their temperance and teetotal movements (which were actually<br />
quite well cited in the book). 18 Another reviewer took me for being opposed<br />
to post-structuralism instead <strong>of</strong> in favour <strong>of</strong> it, 19 whilst a more general complaint<br />
was my ‘highfalutin’ language <strong>of</strong> ‘discourses’ and ‘discursiveness’, even<br />
when it contained valuable argument. 20 Actually, as postmodern method<br />
goes, this book is quite jargon-light (opening me to criticism from the theorysensitive).<br />
Yet, those more understanding <strong>of</strong> the method rightly pointed out<br />
that the challenge to the social-scientific model <strong>of</strong> secularisation does not<br />
come solely from postmodernism, hinting at the possibility (as many have<br />
suggested) that a book with the same overall argument could have been<br />
accomplished by more traditional methods <strong>of</strong> evidence and argument. 21 Of<br />
this I am not sure. Traditional evidence would have pointed to a religious<br />
story framed by the same old periodisations around world wars and revolutions,<br />
historical changes resulting from the same old materialist causes <strong>of</strong><br />
poverty and affluence, and would have crystallised as yet another washed-out<br />
proto- or post-Marxist approach leaving an unsatisfying inconclusiveness to<br />
what caused the 1960s’ death <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> culture. If modern cultural theory is<br />
accepted as having the capability <strong>of</strong> appreciating historical change differently<br />
(and in certain circumstances better), then it is worth trialling in toto.<br />
It was the coupling <strong>of</strong> discourse analysis to the analysis <strong>of</strong> personal testimony<br />
– a technique I learned from Penny Summerfield’s 1998 book<br />
Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives – that I hoped would allow the book<br />
to deliver something rather different in the social history <strong>of</strong> religion (see page<br />
115). Of course, some people are just thoroughly irreconcilable to the scholarly<br />
usage <strong>of</strong> oral testimony – which, one reviewer disdainfully dismissed,<br />
‘adds colour but hardly objectivity’. 22 Amongst academic historians this view<br />
is thankfully receding, and at least two <strong>of</strong> the harshest critics <strong>of</strong> the book’s<br />
thesis are amongst oral history’s most devoted advocates. <strong>The</strong> use <strong>of</strong> personal<br />
testimony (which includes autobiography, court testimonies and the like) is<br />
now better theorised and commands widespread support in the pr<strong>of</strong>ession.<br />
Still, this does not overcome objections that my sample (from existing oral<br />
203