The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— Postscript —<br />
Scotland’s rising from 67 per cent in 1938 to its all-time peak <strong>of</strong> 128 per cent<br />
in 1955. This was staggering church growth, <strong>of</strong> a kind unique in both the<br />
Church <strong>of</strong> England and the Church <strong>of</strong> Scotland in the late modern era, and<br />
not seen in any significant church since the short periods <strong>of</strong> religious revival<br />
affected Methodism in the nineteenth century (when some branches<br />
achieved unrepeated figures ranging between 3.4 and 13.6 per cent per<br />
annum during the revivals <strong>of</strong> 1859, 1876 and 1882). 77 After 1918, growth<br />
rates in virtually all British Protestant churches were routinely <strong>of</strong> the order<br />
<strong>of</strong> 1.0 to 2.0 per cent per annum, mostly minus figures. <strong>The</strong>refore, what happened<br />
during 1945–56 was really remarkable. Even if there had been a fall<br />
in indicators <strong>of</strong> religiosity in the late 1930s and during wartime, and even if<br />
not all <strong>of</strong> the levels <strong>of</strong> religiosity <strong>of</strong> that decade were to be repeated, the<br />
growth in religiosity come the peace was nonetheless strikingly large and<br />
sudden. Fed by a powerful revival <strong>of</strong> the Sunday School movements in those<br />
denominations, what the Church <strong>of</strong> England and the Church <strong>of</strong> Scotland<br />
achieved between 1945 and 1957 was not only unprecedented in British<br />
established churches, but was <strong>of</strong> a scale unseen since Victorian revival. 78<br />
Coming from an opposite viewpoint to those critics, Matthew Grimley<br />
takes an even wider definition <strong>of</strong> moral austerity than I did. In his view,<br />
even if I described <strong>Britain</strong> <strong>of</strong> the period 1945–63 accurately as ‘the nation’s<br />
last Puritan age’, I was at fault in limiting this to sexual morality. Grimley<br />
writes that ‘[Brown] misses the important point that it was also a period in<br />
which there remained a residual, if a greatly attenuated, sense <strong>of</strong> Puritanism<br />
as a continuing tradition in national culture, a sense that was lost thereafter’.<br />
He makes an interesting case for there being something larger at work. He<br />
identifies a change in English national identity appearing before the 1960s,<br />
in what he calls the ‘decline <strong>of</strong> the language <strong>of</strong> national providence in the<br />
1950s’, marked in part when the notion <strong>of</strong> <strong>Britain</strong> as a Protestant country<br />
became unacceptable through ‘immigration <strong>of</strong> a substantial non-<strong>Christian</strong><br />
religious population’. 79 <strong>The</strong> problem here is tw<strong>of</strong>old. Firstly, his conception<br />
<strong>of</strong> ‘<strong>Britain</strong>’ transmogrifies into ‘England’ at various points, making it a little<br />
difficult to pin down what territory, and identity, he is actually referring to.<br />
Secondly, his argument misidentifies the periodisation <strong>of</strong> immigrations. <strong>The</strong><br />
immigrants <strong>of</strong> the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were overwhelmingly <strong>Christian</strong>,<br />
dominated by the movement <strong>of</strong> peoples from the Caribbean. Asian migration<br />
<strong>of</strong> non-<strong>Christian</strong> peoples only became comparable in numerical terms<br />
in the late 1960s and 1970s. In all, from 1953 to 1961, 240,650 came from<br />
the West Indies, but only 69,800 from India and 42,250 from Pakistan<br />
(including East Pakistan, which in 1971 became Bangladesh). 80 Yet, despite<br />
those caveats, Grimley makes a convincing case for something changing in<br />
the British/English character in the 1950s, though I think his case is stronger<br />
amongst English intellectuals than the population at large for whom the real<br />
change came in the next decade.<br />
215