The Death of Christian Britain

— Postscript —
But some Christian scholars are less convinced of the 1960s as cultural
revolution and consider that I had made ‘overblown claims’ for that decade
of a ‘semi-apocalyptic’ nature, and have devoted considerable space in a book,
Redefining Christian Britain, in an attempt to overturn my argument and evidence.
89 Unfortunately, they made some errors. Some contributors tended to
think this book was about the decline of Christianity in the 1960s when it
was actually about the collapse of dominant Christian culture. The editors
confused ‘diffusive’ with ‘discursive’ Christianity, and they tried to disagree
with what they falsely suggested I had stated about the contraceptive pill in
the 1960s – when I never mentioned the pill anywhere in the book. One of
the contributors, William Whyte, made an exaggerated critique of the importance
of Jackie magazine in my arguments about the sixties, when discussion
of it filled up only nine sentences, and charged me with signifying that ‘this
was a generation of women that replaced Jesus with Jackie’ (which is not what
I said nor meant). He further attributed me with arguing that ‘religion
had been feminized’ when I did not; I spoke variously of ‘piety’, ‘religiosity’
and ‘Sundays’ as being feminised, which are very different things. Another
contributor, Holger Nehring seemed to imply that I suggested CND was the
product of ‘an a-religious generation of young protesters’, when I have
explicitly located both it and the anti-apartheid movement in the context
of religious protest. 90 Overall, the editors and some of the contributors of
Redefining Christian Britain seemed to be suggesting that in various ways I
sought to ‘write Christians out’ of the important movements, literature and
legacies of the 1960s. In one regard, they did this unfairly; the editors disputed
my implication of the decline of Christian folk belief and practice by
representing evidence cited by another scholar, used by him to illustrate the
manner of ‘the death of Christian Britain thesis’, as evidence of that scholar’s
dispute with the thesis. 91 In any event, the evidence for a sudden and dramatic
disappearance of much Christian folk belief and practices in the 1960s and
1970s is pretty convincing. Hugh McLeod is quite clear that folk Christian
practices such as ‘churching’, which Sarah Williams fascinatingly found
recalled by elderly oral history respondents in the 1990s, was strong in the
early 1950s but declining rapidly in the 1960s, and seemed, from the oral
testimony he reviewed, to have all but disappeared by the mid-1970s. 92
It is indeed McLeod who provides the most detailed and nuanced evidence
for the depth, geographical breadth, severity and consequences of de-
Christianisation in Europe in the 1960s. He feels 1963 is less significant in
the downturn in religious statistics (as I suggested on page 1) than 1967 and
in overall secularisation by his favoured year, 1968. 93 McLeod identifies
strongly with ‘68ers’, especially the Christian contribution to the moral
debates over Vietnam and apartheid. But two things are missing: firstly, the
statistics of church decline show no distinctive change in 1968, whilst they
do in 1963, and, secondly, in Britain ‘les évènements’ of 1968 were largely
a damp squib: governments rocked in the USA, Prague, Paris and other
European nations; Britain gawked but did not tremble.
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