The Death of Christian Britain

— Postscript —
filed Protestant avant-garde’ – the playwrights and the Christian theologians.
99 He tends to emphasise the liberal changes to Christianity in the sixties,
and seeks to marginalise conservative change. This he does particularly
in relation to Mary Whitehouse because, he says, she ‘represented the conservative
end of the spectrum of Christian opinion at the time, and was far
from representative’. 100 This surely underplays the impact of a woman who
had a public profile greater than any liberal Christian leader of the decade,
dominating television, newspapers and magazines of the time. As an icon of
the conservative Christian laity, she was taken by secular liberals and the
young to be leading the churches into their obsession with sexual promiscuity,
and to be the personification of the forces against which sixties’ rebellion
was fighting. McLeod’s international account of religious change in the
long 1960s is unlikely to be bettered, but it can be nuanced differently from
his emphasis on liberal and what he calls ‘pragmatic’ Christian responsiveness
in favour of the conservative Christian retrenchment that left a legacy
after the 1970s in the ‘family values’ political action in the Conservative
Party and in the Charismatic Renewal of the so-called ‘Thatcher generation’
of born-again Christians. 101
Would any of what happened to Christianity in the 1960s have taken
place without youth culture and women’s liberation? Would Christian
liberal reformers in the House of Lords, in the Free Churches and elsewhere
really have accomplished anything as sweeping and revolutionary as the
massive decline in the Christian churches that ensued? In 2006, the senior
padre in the British armed forces wrote that his department was ‘struggling
for coherence’:
Britain’s rapid secularisation since the 1960s, combined with encroaching
professionalism and fiscal accountability, has left chaplains lacking
sure legitimacy within a culture that no longer deems Christian discourse
normative . . . Civil society has largely embraced secular liberalism,
marginalising religion in the public space. 102
It is this cultural collapse of Christendom that in the end needs explaining
from the 1960s.
To do this, many historians reach instinctively for the narratives of prosperity,
poverty and breakdown of communities with which the history of
secularisation has been customarily written in Britain. Sheridan Gilley
argued that The Death of Christian Britain should have considered the
wider breakdown of stable communities, the Blitz, decline of heavy industry
and so on in relation to secularisation. My reason for disagreement is that
these are the items in the traditional narrative of religious social history,
and I tried to show in the book (as Gilley explains) that this narrative is
the product of secularisation theory and is essentially useless for explaining
the timing or causes of secularisation (just as gender historians have shown
that this narrative of events does not explain fundamental change in gender
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