The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
nowhere unless he or she looks to some extent at how individuals are
moulded by cultural forces within the society in which they live and breathe.
This is not to deny that individuals participated in this process, as Williams
says, but culture is not something that cloaks the individual alone.
WAS THE DEATH ILL-CONCEIVED?
CULTURAL CHANGE, SOCIOLOGICAL
CHANGE, THEOLOGICAL CHANGE
In 2000, Hugh McLeod wrote that ‘historians of many different kinds are
agreed that secularisation is the central “story” of Western Europe’s modern
religious history, but they offer quite different, and sometimes incompatible,
versions of how it actually happened.’ He wrote a masterly study
of European secularisation between the ‘crazy’ and ‘holy and terrible year’
of 1848 and ‘the even crazier, more terrible and completely unholy year’ of
1914. He explained that most historians of the last thirty years of the twentieth
century, aware of the severe decline of churches since the 1960s, were
tempted to look to the late Victorian and Edwardian period mainly in order
to trace the origins of this later decline. 31 For my part, constantly tracing
‘origins’ seemed to ignore the obvious: that religious decline was a massive
event of the 1960s which, in many regards (such as in the scale of gender
change and youth revolt, and their impact upon organised Christianity), was
in no way presaged in the nineteenth century.
This book constituted shifting my own focus – perhaps obsession – on
nineteenth-century urbanisation and ecclesiastical adaptation to the twentieth
century. It is a move of which many specialist religious historians have
approved. Jeremy Morris has noted the power of ‘predetermined conclusions
as to church decline in the Victorian period which dominated the literature
in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, which implicitly or explicitly linked a
decline in religion to the modernisation thesis of sociology’. 32 The first historian
to really lay out the emptiness of the theory was Jeff Cox in 1982,
and his work then and since to expose the ‘master’ narrative of secularisation
in historians’ thinking has been an important element in the work of
all of us who are concerned to expose theory and extend and validate the
importance of evidence. 33 But this has since been taken up by some religious
sociologists, such as Grace Davie and the American Peter Berger in his recent
disavowal of secularisation theory of which he had previously been a worldleading
proponent. 34
My book raised larger questions about the dominance of secularisation
theory, its origins in the very definition of religiosity at the start of the nineteenth
century, and thus the built-in nature of the self-proof that theory leads
to. David Nash is one who felt that my book contributed towards an undermining
of the ‘broad and homogenizing process’ of secularisation as envis-
206