The Death of Christian Britain

— Postscript —
Church confirmations per 1,000 of population over twelve years amongst men
and women. This shows two important things. Firstly, it indicates that the
growth in church members in the Church of England between 1948 and 1960
was fuelled by young women. In those years, female confirmations rose from
33.6 to 40.9 per 1,000 population (a rise of 28 per cent); by contrast, male confirmations
were static at 27.3 and 27.6, showing no meaningful growth whatsoever.
This therefore buttresses considerably the case for young women’s
responsiveness in the 1950s to the last and ferocious blast of the traditional
discourse on femininity and piety. Secondly, though from 1960 to 1974
female confirmations fell marginally slower than men’s (a drop of 52 per cent
compared with 56 per cent), the male figures showed a continuous decline
since at least 1934 (of 61 per cent) whilst female decline only started in
1960–62. 130 A haemorrhage of male recruitment had thus been established
for three decades prior to the 1960s, whilst women’s recruitment actually
grew over that period. This was creating an ever-increasing imbalance
towards a ‘woman’s church’ in the Anglican communion in England. Thus,
when decline started, it was the change in female recruitment that was the
significant change, not that in male recruitment (as there had been no change).
This is shown by correlating confirmations against Church of England Easter
Day communicants during 1950–70, which produces a higher figure for
women’s confirmations (0.9436) than for men’s (0.8929). 131 In short, figures
for new female recruits correlate better than male recruits with the rise and
then the fall of Anglican Church membership in the 1950s and 1960s. This
tends to suggest very strongly that the wider collapse of church recruitment,
churchgoing and church membership in the early 1960s was triggered by the
sudden appearance in 1960–62 of female defection from church recruitment,
not men’s thirty-year-long continued decline.
By the early 1970s, feminism was clearly an important factor in the continued
changes to women’s lives and identities in Britain. Some women
became alienated from organised Christianity as a result of their involvement
in the women’s movement, but the far greater impact was to put
many women off from joining churches. Gerald Parsons has commented
that conversion ‘does not appear to be a particularly convincing way of
describing the decline of the core religious culture of Britain’, whilst Hugh
McLeod has gone further to state from his review of oral history archives
that ‘there is no evidence that involvement in the women’s movement had
been the cause of their rejection of Christianity’. 132 But this evidence is growing.
In Scotland, women attracted to feminism in 1968–75 often experienced
something akin to the character of a conversion experience, and many
came from strong religious backgrounds (Christian and Jewish particularly,
including some former nuns) which they were leaving behind. Women’s
consciousness raising groups, the foundational organisation of feminism in
the early 1970s, were based on the idea of ‘bearing your testimony’, which
was brought to the movement by some who were intentionally rejecting,
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