The Death of Christian Britain

— Postscript —
aged by sociologists. 35 He deprecated the sense of inevitability and longevity
built into the process, and the way in which it has caused (and continues to
cause) historians studying every stage of modern history to be ‘[b]rowbeaten
into thinking that religion must be, by definition, in recession’. 36 Historical
inquiry has been compromised, the sting plucked from it by a sociological
inevitability and a disinterest in timing and causes. In one sense, the historian
has been reclaiming the story of religion from sociology.
Indeed, Nash points to the uses of an older-fashioned historical method
to be exploited in chasing out the historical flaws in the history of secularisation.
Nash is happy with the advent of a postmodern method, and a focus
on lived lives and the narratives that shape and provide self-understanding,
but is less happy with the remaining sense of my describing what he calls
‘an irremovable moment that has passed’; I may have changed the history
of the process, he says, but the inevitable endpoint remains in The Death of
Christian Britain (the title as well as the text). To better this, he thinks my
argument does not go far enough. He calls for an end to endpoints in secularisation
studies – to study where religion and religious narratives have
survived the ‘death of Christian Britain’ in, he argues, ‘slimming culture in
the West’ and in therapy and new age culture, in drug and substance-abuse
rehabilitation regimes, supported by celebrities who search for ‘therapybased
salvation’. 37 Nash is one of a number who point to the residue of
Christian narratives of redemption and conversion in post-sixties Britain,
indicating, it is proposed, something less than the secularised culture I imagined
in this book. 38 I am happy to think about ways of removing endpoints,
inevitabilities and the ineluctable from the historical narrative. But the death
of a dominant discourse is still that – a death. It might survive as one competing
narrative in a multicultural society of many faiths and lots of nofaiths
(however we label these). But that does not negate the passing of the
time when a Christian discourse was hegemonic. And are post-1960s secularised
narratives of Christian conversions – including ‘therapy-based salvation’
– evidence enough to suggest a survival of Christian narrative? These
are residues, not salient Christian narratives that continue to engineer British
society and morality; they have been rendered de-Christianised – in some
parts atheist, in most parts religiously indifferent. A conversion narrative is
merely a structure, not in itself a discourse. Just because Christmas is the
structure of a pagan festival does not signify that Britain today worships
paganism. The study of changing discourses within rituals and narrative
structures has long been a productive area of historical inquiry, and I have
gone further recently in exploring the gendered nature of the evangelical
conversion narrative and the period when it held indomitable sway. 39 But
there is little sensible religious comparison to be drawn between, on the one
hand, the evangelical Christian conversion and, on the other, a conversion
narrative in an atheistic novel, in holistic alternative therapy or (as I will
come on to) in feminism. If narratives do not serve Christianity, they are
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