The Death of Christian Britain

— Postscript —
secularisation: ‘Pluralisation of denominations started in the countryside and
then spread to cities, not vice versa.’ 47
If some sociologists (like Peter Berger and Grace Davie) no longer equate
secularisation with modernisation, they still seem more reluctant than historians
to admit that religious pluralism can be an agent of religious growth. 48
Yet a few sociologists are shifting their ground. David Herbert in his broad
sociological review of rethinking religion in the modern world agreed that
‘to assess the social significance of religion, secularisation theorists measure
the wrong things’. 49 He went on:
Although one may expect a general correlation between church attendance
and the social influence of religion, a far better indication is
given by looking at the way religion influences people’s lives and a
good way to do this is to look at the texts and artefacts of popular
culture and oral history.
The same methodology is implied in Davie’s use of Hervieu-Léger’s concept
of a ‘chain of memory’ that transmits Christian culture between generations
and seems to be close to the inter-generational personal testimony I
exploited in Chapter 8. However, the critical issue that I posed in this book
is recognising when this chain broke down. Many scholars recognise this
breach of the continuity in Christian culture – especially between mother
and daughter – wrought by the 1960s. 50 But Davie has made an entire
hypothesis out of the memory surviving that breach of the chain, an issue
to which I will return in the last section.
Where I sense that this book has generated more interest for its methodology
is in the idea of ‘discursive Christianity’. For liberal Christian commentators,
what I describe in the decay of discursive Christianity ‘is the
death of Christianity as a meta-narrative’. 51 David Herbert remarks that this
is an important and more fruitful way to measure the social significance of
religion, and notes quite rightly the role of education in maintaining discourse
(in Foucauldian terms, in circulating it and hybridising it for survival
and sustained relevance). This is quite right, and Herbert points to parallel
work on Egypt and how ‘discursive Islam’ survived Islamic de-politicisation
in the 1960s. 52 But not all are happy with how well the concept of discursive
Christianity is deployed in this book. Jeremy Morris thinks the way
I use it ‘homogenizes’ sources which have subtle differences and show
changes in character over the period, and presents ‘discursive Christianity’
as ‘semi-detached’ from the social and political mainstream. There is an
unavoidable conundrum here. He is right that I present a view of a core discursive
Christianity over the period from 1800 to 1960, differentiated only
by gender and largely not by time period or locality. But this is deliberate
and unavoidable, since, in line with much feminist historiography (which
stresses continuity in discourse on gendered roles over centuries) and discourse
theory (which considers discourse as dominant and hegemonic across
209