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