The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
society), the fundamental, underlying discourse about male and female roles
stayed the same in modernity. Men’s place was in the world, women’s was
in the home. These gendered discourses varied only at the margins, were
‘hybridised’ by new users and circulators of it, and left very little freedom
to the individual author to vary discourse (largely at the level of textual content,
not the overall meaning). 53 Now, there may be profound reasons to
dispute or modify that argument, and to look to ways in which the protocols
of behaviour commanded by discourses varied by time and place. I can
think of great variations around Britain in the Victorian period in the
expected ways of expressing ‘respectability’, of religious dress (especially for
women) and of Sabbath conduct. But there remained at the heart of these
variations a core discourse on female domesticity, the innate femininity of
the qualities of human piety, and men’s constant susceptibility to the temptations
of drink, gambling and sex. These core discourses were the same in
London, Lincoln or Lerwick, and the same in 1850 as in 1950. 54
Morris and others suggest that my own account of the changing persistence,
and in some cases disappearance, of the evangelical discourse (such as
from boys’ magazines in the inter-war period) indicates secularisation. But
discourse is not measured by rises and falls like barometric pressure (or
churchgoing changing by percentage points). Discourse is about a dominance,
and that dominance is not negated by the shifting patterns of its circulation
– only by its end. The discourse on gendered piety disappeared
from boys’ magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, but was sustained strongly in
girls’ and women’s magazines where it survived into the 1950s. This signified
the increasing discursive burden being imposed on women, with a hardening
in the late 1940s and 1950s evident in the pro-natalism campaign of
government and the final blast of the feminisation of religion which was
inflicted upon the young women of mid-century. 55 The victory of the traditional
discourse on women’s roles in the late 1940s, as Penny Summerfield
chronicles and I tried to trace in relation to religion, is not to be seen from
a post hoc perspective as a trend on the way to secularisation, but as a final
and extremely vigorous, and in its time unrelenting, campaign to keep girls
in the home. And turning closer to analysis of women’s autobiographies for
the 1940s and 1950s, the historian feels the intensity of that discourse. 56
Finally, theological and institutional controversy, Morris further suggests,
must have had an impact on the contours of popular belief, and I left that
out of this book. That is true, but because, as he rightly suggests, I was not
producing a comprehensive survey of belief but focussing on secularisation.
Religious controversy and scandal I have tackled in a recent book – though
it must be said that, whilst the ritual controversy was clearly powerful
around 1900, viewed through the lens of popular culture and personal testimony,
remarkably little of it (beyond Catholic–Protestant antagonisms)
made a lasting impression in the twentieth century. 57
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