The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— Postscript —<br />
secularisation: ‘Pluralisation <strong>of</strong> denominations started in the countryside and<br />
then spread to cities, not vice versa.’ 47<br />
If some sociologists (like Peter Berger and Grace Davie) no longer equate<br />
secularisation with modernisation, they still seem more reluctant than historians<br />
to admit that religious pluralism can be an agent <strong>of</strong> religious growth. 48<br />
Yet a few sociologists are shifting their ground. David Herbert in his broad<br />
sociological review <strong>of</strong> rethinking religion in the modern world agreed that<br />
‘to assess the social significance <strong>of</strong> religion, secularisation theorists measure<br />
the wrong things’. 49 He went on:<br />
Although one may expect a general correlation between church attendance<br />
and the social influence <strong>of</strong> religion, a far better indication is<br />
given by looking at the way religion influences people’s lives and a<br />
good way to do this is to look at the texts and artefacts <strong>of</strong> popular<br />
culture and oral history.<br />
<strong>The</strong> same methodology is implied in Davie’s use <strong>of</strong> Hervieu-Léger’s concept<br />
<strong>of</strong> a ‘chain <strong>of</strong> memory’ that transmits <strong>Christian</strong> culture between generations<br />
and seems to be close to the inter-generational personal testimony I<br />
exploited in Chapter 8. However, the critical issue that I posed in this book<br />
is recognising when this chain broke down. Many scholars recognise this<br />
breach <strong>of</strong> the continuity in <strong>Christian</strong> culture – especially between mother<br />
and daughter – wrought by the 1960s. 50 But Davie has made an entire<br />
hypothesis out <strong>of</strong> the memory surviving that breach <strong>of</strong> the chain, an issue<br />
to which I will return in the last section.<br />
Where I sense that this book has generated more interest for its methodology<br />
is in the idea <strong>of</strong> ‘discursive <strong>Christian</strong>ity’. For liberal <strong>Christian</strong> commentators,<br />
what I describe in the decay <strong>of</strong> discursive <strong>Christian</strong>ity ‘is the<br />
death <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong>ity as a meta-narrative’. 51 David Herbert remarks that this<br />
is an important and more fruitful way to measure the social significance <strong>of</strong><br />
religion, and notes quite rightly the role <strong>of</strong> education in maintaining discourse<br />
(in Foucauldian terms, in circulating it and hybridising it for survival<br />
and sustained relevance). This is quite right, and Herbert points to parallel<br />
work on Egypt and how ‘discursive Islam’ survived Islamic de-politicisation<br />
in the 1960s. 52 But not all are happy with how well the concept <strong>of</strong> discursive<br />
<strong>Christian</strong>ity is deployed in this book. Jeremy Morris thinks the way<br />
I use it ‘homogenizes’ sources which have subtle differences and show<br />
changes in character over the period, and presents ‘discursive <strong>Christian</strong>ity’<br />
as ‘semi-detached’ from the social and political mainstream. <strong>The</strong>re is an<br />
unavoidable conundrum here. He is right that I present a view <strong>of</strong> a core discursive<br />
<strong>Christian</strong>ity over the period from 1800 to 1960, differentiated only<br />
by gender and largely not by time period or locality. But this is deliberate<br />
and unavoidable, since, in line with much feminist historiography (which<br />
stresses continuity in discourse on gendered roles over centuries) and discourse<br />
theory (which considers discourse as dominant and hegemonic across<br />
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