The Death of Christian Britain

— Postscript —
grammar school for girls in Stockport, quickly fell into the sexually adventurous
atmosphere of the town – including the homosexual culture surrounding
King’s College. But, when she and her boyfriend moved to London
in 1954, it was quite impossible to gain lodgings together: ‘no landlady would
rent a flat, no hotel would let a room to a couple which hadn’t evidence of
marriage’. 120 Even in metropolitan, avant garde London, which was to be the
forefront of sexual liberation in the 1960s, it was quite impossible to share
lodgings with a man whilst unmarried in 1954 and 1955, and this was also the
case in Glasgow. 121 The repressive moral environment of the 1950s was
inescapable, except, it seems, in Oxbridge. For the majority, churchgoing and
pre-marital sex were two opposing life choices. This seems to be supported
by the result of correlating the illegitimacy rate against Anglican Easter Day
communicants 1947–73 (the data from Figure 10.1), which produces a figure
of –0.8081, suggesting a strong inverse link between these two variables.
Thus, there is every reason to believe that sexual activity and churchgoing
had a causative connection; the moral and ethical climate in which churchgoers
moved before the 1960s tended to make them more likely to not have
sexual intercourse until marriage or, at the least, until a pregnancy might run
to term after a wedding date.
But things were changing after 1960. In Figure 10.1, there is a very marked
increase in illegitimacy from 1960 to 1968 (at the very same time that Easter
Day communicants start to decline as a proportion of population). Hera
Cook rightly takes this as indicative of rising pre-marital sexual intercourse.
By 1968, the rate of 8.5 per cent was the highest figure for the whole century,
with the exception of one year, 1945. The level of sexual activity was
now into new territory. Then in 1969 the surge halts – with a figure of 8.4
per cent at which it stays until 1972, when the figures start to rise again. The
cause of this was the removal in 1968 of the BMA’s restriction upon British
doctors prescribing the pill to unmarried women. The flattening of the line
in this graph is the product of the arrival of the pill. In short, the sexual revolution
in relation to pre-marital sex was well underway by 1968, before the
pill. The pill did not start, did not instigate, the surge in pre-marital sex. It
was already happening.
What was going on had a profound impact on organised Christianity.
By 1968, the newspapers and the television screens of Britain were full of
commentary from conservative Christians, clergy and laity alike, about the
rise of permissiveness. The ‘promiscuous girl’ was at the forefront of discussion
– including in the Church Times, where the leader pages contained
almost weekly items on churchmen criticising sexual behaviour. 122
The control of female sexual activity must be the subject of a different
paper, but I adhere to Linda Woodhead’s statements in this regard. She has
written that it is only in the modern period that sex has ‘assumed such
central and universal prominence in a Christian agenda’, a reaction against
permissiveness, the privatisation of Christianity, and the historical Christian
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