The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
not Christian: they have been de-Christianised, and even as a conversion
narrative can no longer be claimed as a province of Christendom.
Since 2000, narratives of religious decline have become matters of intensified
interest across different disciplines and different countries. Sociologists,
philosophers and anthropologists have been chewing on the nature of ‘the
secular’ with renewed vigour. 40 The most ambitious has been Charles Taylor
in A Secular Age 41 in which, though he affirms with many caveats the secularisation
thesis, he envisages the secular age as not an absence of religion but
a multiplication of options from within an ever-growing range of spiritualities
and religions. Key here for him is a growing search for authenticity in the
western individual’s search for self-expression – one sourced from, but by no
means confined by, the aspirations of the sixties in an ‘expressive revolution’
that has deeply alienated late twentieth-century generations from the
churches (which, Taylor rightly observes, find it hard to talk to the millennium
generation). 42 In a different approach, Talal Asad in Formations of the
Secular focusses particularly on the link between religion and the state, and
looks at ‘the secular’ as a product of secularism framed by the colonial issue
of a Europe encountering Islam, and by the secular condition as a perfection
of the European Enlightenment. 43 Other sociologists, notably Steve Bruce,
sustain pretty traditional social-scientific approaches to the inevitable process
of religious decline. But sociologists and historians to an extent are talking
past each other over secularisation. Historians find difficulty in engaging
with quite such sweeping concepts and ideas that are, in their view, at best
loosely pinned down empirically, and which often have a poor recognition
of the importance of dates and the causes of historical change associated
with them. This is why the recent rise of international historical interest in
the twentieth century, and especially the 1960s, has been so valuable, bringing
together the parallels in experience over religion and secularisation
between countries like Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Germany, the
Netherlands and Sweden. 44 Behind each of these, to greater or lesser extents,
has been a critique of secularisation as an adjunct to modernisation in the
period 1750–1950 and a rise of interest in approaches to the 1950–2000 period
ranging from the merely statistising to the postmodern and gendered. What
Michael Gauvreau says of Canada can extend more broadly: ‘The central difficulty
with the “modernisation as secularisation” pillar that undergirds the
structure of Canadian social history is that it has largely lost any concrete
point of reference in actual historical contexts or events.’ 45 Underlying it all
has been the presumption that the journey from rural to urban society, from
agricultural to industrial, has also been, step for step, the journey from a faithcentred,
Christian culture to an unbelieving, secularising one. This is now
severely disrupted as a pattern of thought amongst historians of secularisation,
with cultural historians in Britain having shifted considerably towards
denouncing the inevitability of the secularisation theory. 46 The rise of multifaith
societies is equally no longer seen as the necessary accompaniment to
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