The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— Postscript —<br />
filed Protestant avant-garde’ – the playwrights and the <strong>Christian</strong> theologians.<br />
99 He tends to emphasise the liberal changes to <strong>Christian</strong>ity in the sixties,<br />
and seeks to marginalise conservative change. This he does particularly<br />
in relation to Mary Whitehouse because, he says, she ‘represented the conservative<br />
end <strong>of</strong> the spectrum <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> opinion at the time, and was far<br />
from representative’. 100 This surely underplays the impact <strong>of</strong> a woman who<br />
had a public pr<strong>of</strong>ile greater than any liberal <strong>Christian</strong> leader <strong>of</strong> the decade,<br />
dominating television, newspapers and magazines <strong>of</strong> the time. As an icon <strong>of</strong><br />
the conservative <strong>Christian</strong> laity, she was taken by secular liberals and the<br />
young to be leading the churches into their obsession with sexual promiscuity,<br />
and to be the personification <strong>of</strong> the forces against which sixties’ rebellion<br />
was fighting. McLeod’s international account <strong>of</strong> religious change in the<br />
long 1960s is unlikely to be bettered, but it can be nuanced differently from<br />
his emphasis on liberal and what he calls ‘pragmatic’ <strong>Christian</strong> responsiveness<br />
in favour <strong>of</strong> the conservative <strong>Christian</strong> retrenchment that left a legacy<br />
after the 1970s in the ‘family values’ political action in the Conservative<br />
Party and in the Charismatic Renewal <strong>of</strong> the so-called ‘Thatcher generation’<br />
<strong>of</strong> born-again <strong>Christian</strong>s. 101<br />
Would any <strong>of</strong> what happened to <strong>Christian</strong>ity in the 1960s have taken<br />
place without youth culture and women’s liberation? Would <strong>Christian</strong><br />
liberal reformers in the House <strong>of</strong> Lords, in the Free Churches and elsewhere<br />
really have accomplished anything as sweeping and revolutionary as the<br />
massive decline in the <strong>Christian</strong> churches that ensued? In 2006, the senior<br />
padre in the British armed forces wrote that his department was ‘struggling<br />
for coherence’:<br />
<strong>Britain</strong>’s rapid secularisation since the 1960s, combined with encroaching<br />
pr<strong>of</strong>essionalism and fiscal accountability, has left chaplains lacking<br />
sure legitimacy within a culture that no longer deems <strong>Christian</strong> discourse<br />
normative . . . Civil society has largely embraced secular liberalism,<br />
marginalising religion in the public space. 102<br />
It is this cultural collapse <strong>of</strong> Christendom that in the end needs explaining<br />
from the 1960s.<br />
To do this, many historians reach instinctively for the narratives <strong>of</strong> prosperity,<br />
poverty and breakdown <strong>of</strong> communities with which the history <strong>of</strong><br />
secularisation has been customarily written in <strong>Britain</strong>. Sheridan Gilley<br />
argued that <strong>The</strong> <strong>Death</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> <strong>Britain</strong> should have considered the<br />
wider breakdown <strong>of</strong> stable communities, the Blitz, decline <strong>of</strong> heavy industry<br />
and so on in relation to secularisation. My reason for disagreement is that<br />
these are the items in the traditional narrative <strong>of</strong> religious social history,<br />
and I tried to show in the book (as Gilley explains) that this narrative is<br />
the product <strong>of</strong> secularisation theory and is essentially useless for explaining<br />
the timing or causes <strong>of</strong> secularisation (just as gender historians have shown<br />
that this narrative <strong>of</strong> events does not explain fundamental change in gender<br />
219