The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— <strong>The</strong> <strong>Death</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> <strong>Britain</strong> —<br />
concern with sexual regulation. It was, she says, related to the churches’<br />
anxiety to regulate women’s bodies ‘to retain social power in a situation<br />
where such power is under increasing retreat’. 123<br />
And it was young women who made the choice to enter into pre-marital<br />
sexual encounters on a massive scale in the 1960s. <strong>The</strong> change in sexual<br />
activity was much more marked for women than for men. In 1964, a survey<br />
showed that the level <strong>of</strong> sexual activity amongst teenage girls was very low:<br />
5 per cent <strong>of</strong> 16-year-olds, 10 per cent <strong>of</strong> 17-year-olds, and 17 per cent <strong>of</strong><br />
18-year-olds claimed to have had pre-marital sex. But by 1974/5, a similar<br />
survey found the figures had risen to 21, 37 and 47 per cent respectively.<br />
By comparison, the change in teenage male pre-marital sexual activity was<br />
much lower: rises from 14 to 32 per cent <strong>of</strong> 16-year-olds, 26 to 50 per cent<br />
<strong>of</strong> 17-year-olds, and 34 to 65 per cent <strong>of</strong> 18-year-olds. 124 So, whilst male<br />
sexual activity had about doubled in each age group between 1964 and<br />
1974/5, female sexual activity had tripled or (in the case <strong>of</strong> 16- and 17year-olds)<br />
quadrupled. This marks yet again how the sexual revolution was<br />
overwhelmingly a phenomenon <strong>of</strong> the sixties, not the fifties, and how it<br />
was much more a female than a male revolution. Moreover, the same 1964<br />
data were analysed to show that those with the greatest level <strong>of</strong> sexual<br />
activity were the least likely to be churchgoers; sexual activity was a good<br />
predictor <strong>of</strong> churchgoing. 125 This is clear evidence <strong>of</strong> the salience <strong>of</strong> sex to<br />
secularisation in <strong>Christian</strong> <strong>Britain</strong> in the 1960s.<br />
Leaving sexual activity aside, there have been high levels <strong>of</strong> scepticism<br />
amongst many established church historians and sociologists as to the significance<br />
<strong>of</strong> women’s defection from the churches in the <strong>Christian</strong> crisis <strong>of</strong><br />
the 1960s. Some base this scepticism on a wider denial <strong>of</strong> either the suddenness<br />
or the severity <strong>of</strong> the sexual revolution, the women’s liberation movement<br />
and the impacts these had on religious belief. One group <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong><br />
scholars wrote in response to the present book that, in the 1960s, ‘ideas about<br />
identity, about gender and about sexuality, and – by implication – about<br />
belief, slowly mutated’, a mutation ‘which only gradually challenged conventions<br />
<strong>of</strong> gender’. 126 <strong>The</strong> women’s revolution <strong>of</strong> that decade, widely<br />
described in feminist and other historiography, is thereby reduced to a slow<br />
process <strong>of</strong> some indeterminate duration.<br />
But the revolt <strong>of</strong> women in the pews was real. Patrick Pasture finds the<br />
case convincing on the abandonment <strong>of</strong> female piety in the 1960s as women<br />
started to go their own way, and thinks it applies across much <strong>of</strong> western<br />
Europe. 127 Historians <strong>of</strong> Catholicism in Europe speak <strong>of</strong> the cultural rift<br />
between Catholicism and the liberal–pluralist societies <strong>of</strong> Europe culminating<br />
in the rift <strong>of</strong> Vatican II in the 1960s and the complex changes in religious<br />
practice that resulted. 128 But Hugh McLeod has expressed particular doubt<br />
as to this hypothesis, and casts doubt on there being any evidence on this<br />
matter. 129 In truth, he himself contributes quite a bit <strong>of</strong> the evidence in his<br />
own work. In his recent book on the 1960s, he publishes a table on Anglican<br />
226