The Death of Christian Britain

— Postscript —
Despite the reaction of some critics, I do not believe cultural historians
should become more like ecclesiastical historians. For decades, many of the
latter missed the vitality of faith beyond church walls in the past – its diversity,
its folk qualities, its variation into forms that many clergy abhorred
or, at best, ignored as unfashionable, uncouth and ‘pagan’. Discourse
analysis, coupled with personal testimony, is one vital means for penetrating
the extra-ecclesiastical dimensions of popular religion, getting into
the minds, the bedrooms and the wardrobes of people as they conjured
themselves as Christian men and women.
WAS THE DEATH LATE? VISIONS OF THE
INDUSTRIAL WORLD
The majority of The Death of Christian Britain is about the world of modernity
from 1800 to about 1950. It is about characterising this period as one
of continuities in the culture of Christian Britain – its faith, discourses and
protocols of behaviour. Attacking the notion that industrialisation and
urbanisation secularised the British people was quite an acceptable and welcomed
argument for many religious historians, who felt it to have long been
an error of church and social history. But for others, this was an argument
that was wrong in principle or degree – ‘too dedicated to revolutionist
historiography’ 58 or ignoring the evidence of more gradual decline in the
observance of religion.
The principle at stake here is that of gradualism in secularisation – the
supposed long-term nature of secularisation and its centrality to long-term
modernisation. Traditional secularisation theory is founded on gradualism,
inevitability and the grinding down of Christianity and religious sensibility
in general in the modernising world of Enlightenment thought, industrial
work and urban living. Its greatest current sociological exponent is Steve
Bruce, who maintains an unrelenting adherence to sociological orthodoxy
even as some recent advocates (like Peter Berger) defect, 59 whilst Hugh
McLeod, though far from being in favour of secularisation theory, writes that
the ‘gradual decline of Christendom is one of the central themes in the history
of western Europe and North America during the last three centuries’. 60
There were great changes to the way in which religion found social significance
between 1800 and 1960 (including during 1870–1930 declining churchgoing
but a rising relative importance attached to church membership,
baptism of children and the pan-class culture of respectability). Yet this was
far from constituting secularisation, but rather a religious readjustment to
keep Christian culture dominant; for as long as the hegemony of discursive
Christianity remained, the secular society remained a long way off. Evidence
for the sustained importance of this culture comes in various forms. My
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