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