The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
WAS THE DEATH PREMATURE? THE 1960S IN
RELIGIOUS HISTORY
Before The Death of Christian Britain appeared, a number of historians had
identified the importance of the 1960s to secularisation in different parts of
the world. In 1997, David Hilliard broached the subject in an article on
Australia, whilst Peter van Rooden did the same for the Netherlands. 81 Since
2000, the identification of the caesura in Christian culture in 1960s’ Britain
has led to a number of key scholars recognising important aspects of that
trauma, and making broader estimations of the applicability of that timing to
other nations. Amongst many studies, I would point to Patrick Pasture, writing
from a Belgian base, who is in no doubt about the 1960s’ impact: ‘What
really happened is mainly a fundamental break with history.’ 82 In Canada,
Stuart Macdonald has identified in a statistical study that, though some
churches did not follow a British-like pattern, three of the large Protestant
denominations did, involving a sudden and dramatic move from growth to a
permanent religious decline, whilst work by Michael Gauvreau is absorbing
the new attention to the 1960s and to the European experience more generally
as a framework for understanding Canadian trajectories of religious
transformation. 83 Wim Damberg has shown for German Catholicism that
there was a surge of church attendance in the late 1940s, after which a moderate
decline set in during the 1950s to accelerate in the early 1960s and, again,
during 1968–74. 84 This type of pattern of change in the 1960s is now appearing
more commonly from international historical studies.
The question of the suddenness of change to religious culture in Britain
has also been emerging as of increasing interest to historians. 85 The most significant
study of all, that by Hugh McLeod, is an excellent international
examination of the religious crisis of the ‘long sixties’ from 1958 to 1974.
Surveying England, western and northern Europe, North America and
Australasia, he concludes: ‘In the religious history of the West these years
may come to be seen as marking a rupture as profound as that brought about
by the Reformation.’ 86 Arguably, McLeod’s book marks the coming of age
of the sixties as the main focus for the historian’s interest in secularisation,
and I will return to some of his arguments shortly. Elsewhere, interest in the
1960s as a trauma in the cultural life of Britain has generated new synoptic
studies, such as Michael Donnelly’s, which locates the debates and much of
the key evidence. 87 More detailed studies are drawing out the interaction of
religion with cultural change, including Mark Roodhouse who has shown
that the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960 was not just a key event eroding the
institutional structures of cultural traditionalism, but that it induced an acrimonious
public debate that split Anglican moral theory and undermined the
Church of England’s wider moral authority in English society – arguably
leading to a hastening of the process of secularisation. 88
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