The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
phenomenon. 143 By contrast, Pentecostalism is becoming better understood
– a movement which in Britain is predominantly black, and strongly reliant
on immigrants from West Africa and the Afro-Caribbean community; this
fits with David Martin’s recent description of world Pentecostalism as ‘the
religious mobilization of the culturally despised, outside any sponsorship
whatever, whether of their own local intelligentsias, or of the clerical secular
intelligentsias of the West’. 144 But it is probably too dismissive to say that, as
a cultural revolution, Pentecostalism has no political implications. It is inherently
conservative and is drawn inexorably to share a political influence with
other religious conservatives in British Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Each
of these developments was outwith the purview of this book and, though I
have written about some of them elsewhere, religions in the context of a secularising
society await the gaze of the cultural historian. 145
If the cultural historian is cautious about researching the present, others
are bolder. An increasing number of Christian sociologists and historians
place emphasis on Christianity in Europe (including Britain) undergoing
‘mutation’ into new forms, rather than decline. Most Christian commentators
accepted the truth of the decline of the churches in Britain, but defended
this in different ways as ‘not secularisation’. 146 One group of Christian scholars
has stated of Britain that ‘the closure of churches should not be seen as
synonymous with decline’. 147 This may be a difficult proposition for the evidence-based
historian to agree with; the last forty years have seemed incontrovertibly
decades when closing churches went hand-in-hand with loss of
members, declining Christian rites, the overturning of Christian influence in
the state, and the loss of a culture of Christianity in British communities. This
is not to deny that new forms of Christian worship have been emerging for
some time: the house church movement and mega-churches are two examples.
But arguments are becoming more conceptually elaborate. Sociologist
Grace Davie has argued that European religion is mutating, and in this the
churches remain important in specific roles (such as education and philanthropy,
retaining what she sees as a vital ‘memory’ for Christianity in Europe).
So, the collapse of the churches is thus positive, not negative; even the
collapse of state churches is, she says, not due to ‘religious causes’ but is ‘part
of the renegotiation of European society as a whole’. 148 In this argument,
Christian institutions are stronger than their weakness or disappearance
would suggest, and, though active Christian numbers go down, they have a
disproportionate impact in charitable and ethical endeavour. Though she
notes that this mutation is ‘very unlikely’ to result in a significant increase in
churchgoing in modern Europe, Davie claims that unchurched Europeans
‘remain grateful to rather than resentful of their churches’ for these ‘vicariously’
performed tasks – which include rites like funerals and national celebrations
– which ‘carry’ the continent’s Christian memory. From this, Davie
follows a number of other Christians in proposing that the very definition of
religion is widening (to include individual and social health and, to resurrect
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