The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
description of ‘the last great puritan age’ echoes the work of Olaf Blaschke
on Germany who, working at the same time as me, argued in 2002 that the
‘second confessional age’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
should be regarded as a period of immense Christian strength, only collapsing
in the 1960s. 61 On a smaller scale, Dorothy Entwistle has shown in a number
of studies of working-class Lancashire based on oral history how the
church and church rituals remained absolutely central to identities and experiences,
not least for children but for adults too, into the 1920s and 1930s; the
churches and chapels, she concludes, had an ‘enduring attraction’. 62
Whilst many church historians agree with this book’s contention on the
strength of Christian culture in the industrial society from the 1800s to the
1950s, many have queried aspects of my characterisation of it – notably of
evangelicalism. Mary Clare Martin has criticised me and earlier historians
of childhood and the family for contending ‘that fear of retribution and pressure
to repent were frequent and disturbing features of children’s lives
between 1740 and 1870, particularly in the early nineteenth century’. She
argues from some first-hand recollections of individuals in Walthamstow
and Leyton, then two Essex villages, that there was little evidence of children
being taught about hell and those that were did not record it ‘as harmful’.
‘Fear’, she says, was used as a sense of awe and reverence rather than
terror. 63 From her limited evidence Martin may well be right, and I have no
doubt that parents, teachers and others mediated the discursive power of
death-bed culture for children. But that part of my study was not dealing
with experience; it was dealing with discourse, and there is no doubt (which
she did not challenge) that the literature written and published for children
by evangelicals, and published in magazines such as those of the Primitive
Methodists, and which I quoted from in this book, was designed to induce
terror in children by talking of hell, eternal damnation and the dangers of a
child dying without repentance (see page 65). This character of evangelical
literature for children in the early nineteenth century is hard to deny, and,
though it declined from the later nineteenth century, it retained a presence
in some evangelical rhetoric (against which many parents even today still
protect their children).
The closing years of the puritan age attract special attention. Simon Green
does not approve of this book’s description of the 1950s; it may have been
‘bold social analysis’, he says, but ‘It is also wholly inadequate social history.’
Calling me a ‘child of the 1960s’, he insinuates that my description of
the post-war era as ‘the age of austerity’ was somehow new and outlandish
when, in fact, this title has been much used of the late 1940s and early
1950s. 64 There is rising agreement amongst economic historians that the
years 1950 to 1973 were ‘the golden years’ of British economic growth, and
many writers like Sandbrook and Jarvis show that the British people
(beyond the ‘educated classes, widely understood’, as Green quaintly puts
it) experienced a rapid rise in prosperity. 65 But the rise in consumption was
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