The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
history). Affluence on its own is not a sustainable explanation of the timing
and character of religious alienation in Britain when, in America, it led on
in the 1970s to a resurgence of conservative religion.
Nor is social class a sustainable explanation. The religiosity of the
working classes in the past and present has been an ongoing work of revisionism
in which many scholars have participated. 103 But whilst most social
historians of religion are now agreed that the working classes were more
religious than once thought, McLeod continues to assert for the 1960s that
class differences had a greater role to play in religion than did gender. 104
The patterns of the nineteenth century (that I reviewed and itemised on
pages 154–6) continued in the later twentieth century, with evidence that,
though the lower working classes were poor churchgoers, the skilled upper
working class were more numerous and, indeed, invariably dominated most
Christian congregations. 105 Come the 1960s, there was no sudden workingclass
alienation from either the churches or Christian piety different from
any middle-class exodus, and which can account for the timing and severity
of the decline in organised Christianity in that decade. The rise of affluence
and the reforms of Christian intellectuals and ‘pragmatic’ Christians
cannot explain why hundreds of thousands of people stopped going to
church, stopped registering their adherence and membership of churches,
stopped baptising their babies, started a move towards secular forms of
marriage and not getting married at all, and started the slow process – very
slow albeit – that has led to a decline in belief in God in Britain (and in
most European countries). So great was the cultural transformation that it
had all these deep and profound demographic consequences. And at the
heart of those demographic changes, I submit, was the changed decision
making of young women.
WERE WOMEN TO ‘BLAME’? GENDER, SEX
AND DE-CHRISTIANISATION
The history of gender is important, not because it shows ‘the importance
of women’, but because it provides a different chronology to history. It
does not follow the convenient trajectories, pace and periodisations of
conventional history. Thus, key questions in gender history like ‘did women
have a Renaissance, a Reformation or an Enlightenment?’, produce answers
in which traditional events feature, but not necessarily as the customary
turning points. New events and continuities take precedence: the rise of
the female ‘witch’ in early-modern European culture, coupled with the
cementing of masculine conceptions of Christian piety, the feminisation of
European Christianity around 1800, first-wave feminism, second-wave
feminism and the late twentieth-century trend towards sexual emancipation.
Some of these period changes framed this book: 1800 as marking the
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