The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— Postscript —<br />
very much restricted to the late 1950s, from 1957 onwards. With stop–go<br />
policies, it was difficult for British working people to make a substantive<br />
growth in consumption, and to acquire new homes, and the improvement<br />
<strong>of</strong> working-class life was held in check not from want <strong>of</strong> employment, but<br />
from want <strong>of</strong> affordable good housing, domestic space and household goods<br />
to buy. <strong>The</strong> rise in consumption figures for workers came late. <strong>The</strong>re were<br />
2 million private taxed cars on British roads in 1950 (with ownership<br />
restricted to 14 per cent <strong>of</strong> households) and this rose to over 3 million (at<br />
28 per cent by 1960), much <strong>of</strong> it in the boom years <strong>of</strong> 1957–61 – with a<br />
tripling between 1950 and 1966 accounted for in large measure by the sixties<br />
boom, not by the 1950s. Television licences rose from 3 million in 1953<br />
to 4 million in 1955, but it took the next five years for them to rise to 10<br />
million, whilst washing machine ownership also rose sharply after 1955. 66<br />
In this way, the ‘age <strong>of</strong> austerity’, as a consumer phenomenon, is strongly<br />
identified with the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the age <strong>of</strong> plenty is later<br />
and mostly in the 1960s.<br />
But the 1950s were not merely ‘austere’ in consumption terms. As I made<br />
plain in Chapter 8, austerity was also experienced as religious revival for<br />
some (especially the young and females) and in the way austerity was experienced<br />
as expectation <strong>of</strong> moral behaviour and deportment. Reactions to this<br />
have varied, from those who regard my description as too extreme to those<br />
who regard it as not extreme enough. On the one side, Green denied what<br />
he considered the ‘emerging pr<strong>of</strong>essional consensus’ <strong>of</strong> historians that the<br />
1950s were marked by religious revival, arguing that church membership fell<br />
and that the true character <strong>of</strong> the decade was <strong>of</strong> sustained religious decline. 67<br />
McLeod also downgrades the ‘revival’ image, rehabilitating the 1950s as a<br />
decade <strong>of</strong> gradual liberal intellectual growth, increasing commitment amongst<br />
<strong>Christian</strong>s and limited revival amongst teenagers and young adults; he argues<br />
that ‘it would be hard to justify’ my claim that the later 1940s and 1950s<br />
witnessed the greatest growth in church members that <strong>Britain</strong> had experienced<br />
since the mid-nineteenth century. 68 Though historians now agree<br />
that there was some church growth in the 1950s, Green says it was ‘little<br />
more than a minor redistribution amongst the practising religious towards<br />
the Establishment’ 69 in England. In this way, the growth is seen by McLeod<br />
and Green to be small-scale and marginal, making little impression on the<br />
long-term trend <strong>of</strong> decline.<br />
I dispute this, and I do so with greater vigour now than I did at the time<br />
<strong>of</strong> writing the first edition. Let me first look to the situation in the churches<br />
with the least evidence <strong>of</strong> revival – the Free Churches (which were called<br />
Nonconformist or dissenting churches in the nineteenth century). <strong>The</strong>re was<br />
a general stability to the membership <strong>of</strong> many dissenting churches from the<br />
end <strong>of</strong> the war until 1956–7. <strong>The</strong> Methodist Church reached a plateau <strong>of</strong><br />
membership at around 742,000 to 746,000 between 1946 and 1956, and only<br />
from 1957 is there a discernible fall. 70 In the Baptist and Congregationalist<br />
213