The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
concern with sexual regulation. It was, she says, related to the churches’
anxiety to regulate women’s bodies ‘to retain social power in a situation
where such power is under increasing retreat’. 123
And it was young women who made the choice to enter into pre-marital
sexual encounters on a massive scale in the 1960s. The change in sexual
activity was much more marked for women than for men. In 1964, a survey
showed that the level of sexual activity amongst teenage girls was very low:
5 per cent of 16-year-olds, 10 per cent of 17-year-olds, and 17 per cent of
18-year-olds claimed to have had pre-marital sex. But by 1974/5, a similar
survey found the figures had risen to 21, 37 and 47 per cent respectively.
By comparison, the change in teenage male pre-marital sexual activity was
much lower: rises from 14 to 32 per cent of 16-year-olds, 26 to 50 per cent
of 17-year-olds, and 34 to 65 per cent of 18-year-olds. 124 So, whilst male
sexual activity had about doubled in each age group between 1964 and
1974/5, female sexual activity had tripled or (in the case of 16- and 17year-olds)
quadrupled. This marks yet again how the sexual revolution was
overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the sixties, not the fifties, and how it
was much more a female than a male revolution. Moreover, the same 1964
data were analysed to show that those with the greatest level of sexual
activity were the least likely to be churchgoers; sexual activity was a good
predictor of churchgoing. 125 This is clear evidence of the salience of sex to
secularisation in Christian Britain in the 1960s.
Leaving sexual activity aside, there have been high levels of scepticism
amongst many established church historians and sociologists as to the significance
of women’s defection from the churches in the Christian crisis of
the 1960s. Some base this scepticism on a wider denial of either the suddenness
or the severity of the sexual revolution, the women’s liberation movement
and the impacts these had on religious belief. One group of Christian
scholars wrote in response to the present book that, in the 1960s, ‘ideas about
identity, about gender and about sexuality, and – by implication – about
belief, slowly mutated’, a mutation ‘which only gradually challenged conventions
of gender’. 126 The women’s revolution of that decade, widely
described in feminist and other historiography, is thereby reduced to a slow
process of some indeterminate duration.
But the revolt of women in the pews was real. Patrick Pasture finds the
case convincing on the abandonment of female piety in the 1960s as women
started to go their own way, and thinks it applies across much of western
Europe. 127 Historians of Catholicism in Europe speak of the cultural rift
between Catholicism and the liberal–pluralist societies of Europe culminating
in the rift of Vatican II in the 1960s and the complex changes in religious
practice that resulted. 128 But Hugh McLeod has expressed particular doubt
as to this hypothesis, and casts doubt on there being any evidence on this
matter. 129 In truth, he himself contributes quite a bit of the evidence in his
own work. In his recent book on the 1960s, he publishes a table on Anglican
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