The Death of Christian Britain

— Postscript —
very much restricted to the late 1950s, from 1957 onwards. With stop–go
policies, it was difficult for British working people to make a substantive
growth in consumption, and to acquire new homes, and the improvement
of working-class life was held in check not from want of employment, but
from want of affordable good housing, domestic space and household goods
to buy. The rise in consumption figures for workers came late. There were
2 million private taxed cars on British roads in 1950 (with ownership
restricted to 14 per cent of households) and this rose to over 3 million (at
28 per cent by 1960), much of it in the boom years of 1957–61 – with a
tripling between 1950 and 1966 accounted for in large measure by the sixties
boom, not by the 1950s. Television licences rose from 3 million in 1953
to 4 million in 1955, but it took the next five years for them to rise to 10
million, whilst washing machine ownership also rose sharply after 1955. 66
In this way, the ‘age of austerity’, as a consumer phenomenon, is strongly
identified with the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the age of plenty is later
and mostly in the 1960s.
But the 1950s were not merely ‘austere’ in consumption terms. As I made
plain in Chapter 8, austerity was also experienced as religious revival for
some (especially the young and females) and in the way austerity was experienced
as expectation of moral behaviour and deportment. Reactions to this
have varied, from those who regard my description as too extreme to those
who regard it as not extreme enough. On the one side, Green denied what
he considered the ‘emerging professional consensus’ of historians that the
1950s were marked by religious revival, arguing that church membership fell
and that the true character of the decade was of sustained religious decline. 67
McLeod also downgrades the ‘revival’ image, rehabilitating the 1950s as a
decade of gradual liberal intellectual growth, increasing commitment amongst
Christians and limited revival amongst teenagers and young adults; he argues
that ‘it would be hard to justify’ my claim that the later 1940s and 1950s
witnessed the greatest growth in church members that Britain had experienced
since the mid-nineteenth century. 68 Though historians now agree
that there was some church growth in the 1950s, Green says it was ‘little
more than a minor redistribution amongst the practising religious towards
the Establishment’ 69 in England. In this way, the growth is seen by McLeod
and Green to be small-scale and marginal, making little impression on the
long-term trend of decline.
I dispute this, and I do so with greater vigour now than I did at the time
of writing the first edition. Let me first look to the situation in the churches
with the least evidence of revival – the Free Churches (which were called
Nonconformist or dissenting churches in the nineteenth century). There was
a general stability to the membership of many dissenting churches from the
end of the war until 1956–7. The Methodist Church reached a plateau of
membership at around 742,000 to 746,000 between 1946 and 1956, and only
from 1957 is there a discernible fall. 70 In the Baptist and Congregationalist
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