The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
history archives) was either unrepresentative or, more commonly, that my
‘reading’ of the oral history and autobiographical material was biased or plain
wrong. Hugh McLeod thinks that oral testimony by those born in the midtwentieth
century and later does not show any of the signs of reticence and
‘stunting’ of conceptions of religion that I have suggested. 23 Such difference
of interpretation may arise from consulting different testimonies, or ‘reading’
them in different ways, but I feel that the ‘stunting’ is a demonstrable and
analytically fruitful feature in exploring long-term change in ‘religious’ testimony.
Certainly, the incomprehension I explored between the oral history
interviewer and interviewee struck a chord amongst a number of readers who
felt that often the Christian position was dismissed because of lack of understanding
on the part of the interviewer concerning the nature and content of
Christian concepts and ways of speaking. Two members of the clergy wrote
to me acknowledging the validity of the notion of increasing ‘silence’ on religious
matters in the language and personal narratives of people since the
1950s. 24
From the combination of discourse analysis and analysis of personal testimony
emerged my notion of ‘discursive Christianity’. This seems to have
been hated by general readers as jargon, but welcomed by many scholars
who found it one of the least problematic innovations in the book. 25 But
even those who warmed to the concept may not have appreciated precisely
what is meant by it in the context of modern cultural theory. Sarah Williams
found that I defined discursive Christianity in terms of a particular ideal
type of evangelicalism – what she felt was a monolithic discourse that failed
to look at differences within it. I agree it had that quality. But she was wrong
to assume that I was looking ‘to what extent a particular church-based discourse
was absorbed by the culture at large’. 26 I was not trying to do that
at all. The discourse was not church-authored nor monopolised, but, in common
with all dominant modern discourses, was one refined and hybridised
by hundreds of independent Christian organisations, through thousands of
authors writing in church, independent and secular journals, novels and obituaries.
Indeed, there is hardly an official church source on the subject consulted
in the book; I didn’t use sermons, and I didn’t use church policy
documents. And the reason I did not use those things is that the Christian
discourse of gendered pieties was never formally formulated by the
churches. Whilst some elements (notably male ‘heathens’) were broadcast
by evangelicals in particular, such discourse was not a policy like church
welfare or poor-relief policy. Nor is discourse the same as ideology.
‘Discursive Christianity’ is like neither of these. Discourses, as Foucault and
modern theorists have defined them (and as they have been studied by hundreds
of cultural historians) are to do with injunctions on conduct formed,
circulated and hybridised in culture as a whole – popular culture, religious
culture, political culture, but a cultural formation, not a policy one.
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