The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
and going on to challenge, oppressive religious backgrounds. 133 In England,
there is also testimony to the religious background of the women’s liberation
movement. Some feminists had difficult experiences of religion in their
youth, including Sheila Rowbotham (who was sent by her Methodist-hating
father to a Methodist boarding school in North Yorkshire) and Lorna
Sage (who at 16 years of age was destined for a Church of England home
for unmarried mothers). 134 Other feminist autobiographies speak of the
guilt Christianity induced in their youth in the 1950s. 135 Issues with their
Christian upbringing in the 1940s and 1950s were an important backdrop
to many of those who became feminists in the 1960s and 1970s.
All of this leaves issues to do with men and masculinity. Though a few
reviewers felt that this book concentrated too much on femininity and too
little on masculinity, parallels outside of Europe have been found for the
account of how in Victorian discourse men were expected to submit to female
religiosity. 136 But the outcomes of gender interactions in the churches may
be complex. In Canada, the Catholic Church lost ground in Quebec after
1965, according to Gauvreau, because of a feminist current within Quebec
Catholicism to which conservative forces within the church responded by
insisting after 1945 on radically different gender roles and destinies, fostering
‘a profound sense of cultural rupture and opposition between men
and women’. 137 Certainly, the old truism that Christianity was a ‘Ladies’
Religion’ (see page 93) still has resonance in the twenty-first century; one
commentator in an Anglican evangelical journal observed that ‘men often
remain programmed not to habitually attend church’. 138 But since the 1960s,
the loss of the pious femininity in Christian discourse in Britain has left something
of a vacuum, being filled from the late 1980s by a greater appearance of
masculinity expressed as militancy – something happening not just in
Christianity. 139 The outcome of this is unclear, but the greater expression of
male religiosity has become something of a trend.
IS DEATH THE ONLY STORY? RELIGION IN
MUTATION
There is a growing trend amongst European Christian scholars to deny that
secularisation is happening. They generally admit that churchgoing, church
membership and most rites of passage (with the exception of Christian
funerals) have been declining greatly for forty years. But they have started
to become very creative in explaining this as anything but secularisation.
Could there be other stories than ‘the death of Christian Britain’, and do
they conflict with it?
This book did not consider in any substantive way other ‘religious narratives’
of the 1960s and after. It did not reflect in any depth, for example, on
the rise of new age spirituality and its impact upon traditional Christianity
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