The Death of Christian Britain

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