The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
— Postscript —<br />
But Williams then goes on to a more powerful and insightful point <strong>of</strong><br />
criticism. She is a scholar who presaged my work in this book with her own<br />
excellent research which suggested the need to reconsider the centrality <strong>of</strong><br />
social class to analysing religious formation and secularisation. 27 So in that<br />
sense she backs the task <strong>of</strong> shifting social class to one side – not dispensing<br />
with it, but re-evaluating it in the light <strong>of</strong> bigger and more connected discourses.<br />
But, she says,<br />
there is a sense in which Brown is in danger <strong>of</strong> simply replacing one<br />
meta-narrative based on themes <strong>of</strong> modernisation and class with one<br />
based on the imposition <strong>of</strong> a powerful <strong>of</strong>ficial discourse on the society<br />
as whole. ‘Social class’ has then merely been replaced by ‘discursive<br />
power’ as the key to religiosity. What is missing in this approach is<br />
the diversity and complexity <strong>of</strong> popular definitions <strong>of</strong> religiosity. 28<br />
She is surely right when she then went on to say that people were not passive<br />
receivers <strong>of</strong> discourse, but participated actively ‘in shaping their own<br />
culture in matters <strong>of</strong> religion’ as they did in all other matters. This is an<br />
interesting reference to wider debates in cultural history about the manner<br />
in which discourse works – one that involves an (unavoidable?) tension<br />
between the way discourses limit humans’ choices within their own cultures,<br />
versus the agency <strong>of</strong> the individual man or woman to negotiate between,<br />
around or past those discourses. 29 But postmodernists get an unfair press on<br />
this. In a book on historical theory, I wrote: ‘People’s minds, conscious or<br />
unconscious, are not passive vessels for containing discourses. Rather, the<br />
individual constructs their own identity by drawing on the discursive construction<br />
<strong>of</strong> the self available in society at large’. 30 In this regard, in <strong>The</strong><br />
<strong>Death</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> <strong>Britain</strong>, I did not deny agency to the individual. One<br />
example <strong>of</strong> negotiation <strong>of</strong> discourse comes in the exceptionally candid oral<br />
interview <strong>of</strong> Ronald Walker (see pages 118–21), whilst other hints at the torture<br />
<strong>of</strong> such negotiation come in the testimony <strong>of</strong> Paula Queen (see page<br />
184) and her grief at the death <strong>of</strong> discourse. <strong>The</strong> agency <strong>of</strong> the individual is<br />
not denied by postmodern method, and certainly not in the way that Marxist<br />
approaches <strong>of</strong> previous decades tended to see social class as an unavoidable<br />
economic determinant <strong>of</strong> religious affiliation and practice. But there is<br />
always a tension between the individual and culture. At the end <strong>of</strong> the day,<br />
if discourse analysis is an important tool for the social scientist and historian<br />
(and much <strong>of</strong> my pr<strong>of</strong>ession agree that it is), then we have to look at<br />
how discourse is something cultural – i.e. something exchanged between<br />
individuals in mutually recognisable forms – thereby detracting from the<br />
role <strong>of</strong> the individual in constantly creating individual cultures. Culture is<br />
not the individual; by definition culture transcends the individual.<br />
Otherwise, there would be no social exchange and, in this case, no common<br />
beliefs <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong>s within and between churches. <strong>The</strong> historian will get<br />
205