The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
culture. I did not say, as Herbert suggests I did, that ‘modern individuals
can no longer articulate coherent moral stories about themselves, largely as
a result of the decline of the social influence of religious narratives’. 156 On
the contrary, I contend that the loss of Christian moral narratives from the
1960s was very much propelled by vigorous promulgation of new narratives
which, with amazing suddenness, swept liberal culture: postcolonial narratives,
feminism, gay liberation, the green movement and narratives of
sexual freedom. Morality was not lost, it was recrafted with spirit and determination
into forms that define common culture and values for most Britons
in the present day. These were moral narratives, however much some conservative
and traditional Christians may wish to denigrate them as amoral
ones. This process is not at an end. It continues today, for instance, in relation
to the issue of euthanasia, where conservatives in the churches are
recoiling from popular pressure for the law to be changed to enable the citizen
to be supported by others if he or she decides to end his or her life.
Now, many philosophers have no doubt contributed towards the intellectualising
of this position; but it must be clearly understood that popular
adoption of this lies at the root of this new position, and that it was not
something handed down from above. This is the people’s decision – a truly
democratic discourse that has emerged with amazing unanimity amongst the
British unchurched since around 1990 and, though there may be many who
will deny it fervently, also amongst some laity and clergy of the Christian
churches who have participated in or approved of assisted suicide.
This brings me full circle to a restatement of the need for the production
of a cultural history of secularisation. David Nash is right that historians of
religion (which has to include the important role of non-religious historians
of the subject) have to place religion centre stage of cultural history of
the present as of the near past, and not allow it to be ignored by succumbing
to the anachronistic sacred–profane dichotomy which, over many
decades, has marginalised religion within our discipline. But in doing this,
the cultural historian is looking to the power of the people as agents of
change, and should not allow the moral judgments of Christian scholars nor
the undue privileging of intellectuals (Christian or otherwise) in the narrative
of the process. British secularisation did not involve the leadership of
the state (as in France), nor the collapse of denominational ‘pillars’ (as in
Belgium, the Netherlands and to an extent West Germany). It has been
above all a product of people’s choices, made largely free from intellectuals
or a supposed descent into immorality and crime. The death of Christian
British culture, or the rupture in Christianity as McLeod puts it, was a real
and – I would argue – a cataclysmic event of the 1960s. Sweeping as it may
seem, the conclusion of the first edition of this book still stands. I wrote at
the end of Chapter 9 that the churches will not die, but would continue to
exist in some skeletal form (which is what seems to be suggested by most
British Christian sociologists). What I did write is that ‘the culture of
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