The Death of Christian Britain

— Postscript —
Scotland’s rising from 67 per cent in 1938 to its all-time peak of 128 per cent
in 1955. This was staggering church growth, of a kind unique in both the
Church of England and the Church of Scotland in the late modern era, and
not seen in any significant church since the short periods of religious revival
affected Methodism in the nineteenth century (when some branches
achieved unrepeated figures ranging between 3.4 and 13.6 per cent per
annum during the revivals of 1859, 1876 and 1882). 77 After 1918, growth
rates in virtually all British Protestant churches were routinely of the order
of 1.0 to 2.0 per cent per annum, mostly minus figures. Therefore, what happened
during 1945–56 was really remarkable. Even if there had been a fall
in indicators of religiosity in the late 1930s and during wartime, and even if
not all of the levels of religiosity of that decade were to be repeated, the
growth in religiosity come the peace was nonetheless strikingly large and
sudden. Fed by a powerful revival of the Sunday School movements in those
denominations, what the Church of England and the Church of Scotland
achieved between 1945 and 1957 was not only unprecedented in British
established churches, but was of a scale unseen since Victorian revival. 78
Coming from an opposite viewpoint to those critics, Matthew Grimley
takes an even wider definition of moral austerity than I did. In his view,
even if I described Britain of the period 1945–63 accurately as ‘the nation’s
last Puritan age’, I was at fault in limiting this to sexual morality. Grimley
writes that ‘[Brown] misses the important point that it was also a period in
which there remained a residual, if a greatly attenuated, sense of Puritanism
as a continuing tradition in national culture, a sense that was lost thereafter’.
He makes an interesting case for there being something larger at work. He
identifies a change in English national identity appearing before the 1960s,
in what he calls the ‘decline of the language of national providence in the
1950s’, marked in part when the notion of Britain as a Protestant country
became unacceptable through ‘immigration of a substantial non-Christian
religious population’. 79 The problem here is twofold. Firstly, his conception
of ‘Britain’ transmogrifies into ‘England’ at various points, making it a little
difficult to pin down what territory, and identity, he is actually referring to.
Secondly, his argument misidentifies the periodisation of immigrations. The
immigrants of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were overwhelmingly Christian,
dominated by the movement of peoples from the Caribbean. Asian migration
of non-Christian peoples only became comparable in numerical terms
in the late 1960s and 1970s. In all, from 1953 to 1961, 240,650 came from
the West Indies, but only 69,800 from India and 42,250 from Pakistan
(including East Pakistan, which in 1971 became Bangladesh). 80 Yet, despite
those caveats, Grimley makes a convincing case for something changing in
the British/English character in the 1950s, though I think his case is stronger
amongst English intellectuals than the population at large for whom the real
change came in the next decade.
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