The Death of Christian Britain

— Postscript —
But Williams then goes on to a more powerful and insightful point of
criticism. She is a scholar who presaged my work in this book with her own
excellent research which suggested the need to reconsider the centrality of
social class to analysing religious formation and secularisation. 27 So in that
sense she backs the task of shifting social class to one side – not dispensing
with it, but re-evaluating it in the light of bigger and more connected discourses.
But, she says,
there is a sense in which Brown is in danger of simply replacing one
meta-narrative based on themes of modernisation and class with one
based on the imposition of a powerful official discourse on the society
as whole. ‘Social class’ has then merely been replaced by ‘discursive
power’ as the key to religiosity. What is missing in this approach is
the diversity and complexity of popular definitions of religiosity. 28
She is surely right when she then went on to say that people were not passive
receivers of discourse, but participated actively ‘in shaping their own
culture in matters of religion’ as they did in all other matters. This is an
interesting reference to wider debates in cultural history about the manner
in which discourse works – one that involves an (unavoidable?) tension
between the way discourses limit humans’ choices within their own cultures,
versus the agency of the individual man or woman to negotiate between,
around or past those discourses. 29 But postmodernists get an unfair press on
this. In a book on historical theory, I wrote: ‘People’s minds, conscious or
unconscious, are not passive vessels for containing discourses. Rather, the
individual constructs their own identity by drawing on the discursive construction
of the self available in society at large’. 30 In this regard, in The
Death of Christian Britain, I did not deny agency to the individual. One
example of negotiation of discourse comes in the exceptionally candid oral
interview of Ronald Walker (see pages 118–21), whilst other hints at the torture
of such negotiation come in the testimony of Paula Queen (see page
184) and her grief at the death of discourse. The agency of the individual is
not denied by postmodern method, and certainly not in the way that Marxist
approaches of previous decades tended to see social class as an unavoidable
economic determinant of religious affiliation and practice. But there is
always a tension between the individual and culture. At the end of the day,
if discourse analysis is an important tool for the social scientist and historian
(and much of my profession agree that it is), then we have to look at
how discourse is something cultural – i.e. something exchanged between
individuals in mutually recognisable forms – thereby detracting from the
role of the individual in constantly creating individual cultures. Culture is
not the individual; by definition culture transcends the individual.
Otherwise, there would be no social exchange and, in this case, no common
beliefs of Christians within and between churches. The historian will get
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