The Death of Christian Britain

— Notes to pages 11–17 —
urbanization in the nineteenth century: an interpretative model’, in McLeod
(ed.), European Religion.
21 The field sadly lacks a sophisticated comparative literature, other than in the
work of Hugh McLeod: see H. McLeod, Piety and Poverty: Working-class
Religion in Berlin, London and New York 1870–1914 , New York, Holmes &
Meier, 1996; and H. McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe
1789–1989, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997.
22 McLeod, Class and Religion; H. McLeod, ‘New perspectives in Victorian
working-class religion: the oral evidence’, Oral History Journal, 1986, vol. 14;
Brown, ‘Did urbanisation secularise Britain?’; and C.G. Brown and J.D.
Stephenson, ‘Sprouting wings? Women and religion in Scotland c. 1890–c. 1950’,
in E. Breitenbach and E. Gordon (eds), Out of Bounds: Women in Scotland in
the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University
Press, 1992.
23 For a model of staggered working-class secularisation in metropolitan cities,
see McLeod, Piety and Poverty. For a model of religious growth in British
cities, see Brown, ‘The mechanism of religious growth’.
24 C.G. Brown, ‘Essor religieux et sécularisation’, in H. McLeod, S. Mews and
C. D’Haussy (eds), Histoire Religieuse de la Grande-Bretagne, Paris, Editions
du Cerf, 1997, pp. 315–37.
25 A phrase popularised by Wilson, Religion in Secular Society, p. 14.
26 M. Spufford, ‘Can we count the “godly” and the “conformable” in the seventeenth
century?’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 36 (1985).
2 THE PROBLEM WITH ‘RELIGIOUS DECLINE’
1 The classic formulation of this grand narrative is Peter Laslett’s The World We
Have Lost, London, Methuen, 1965, a book founded on a discourse on the
pre-industrial ‘otherness’ of religiosity which his readers are invited to share.
It includes the following hostages to hundreds of doctoral fortunes: ‘All our
ancestors were literal Christian believers, all of the time.’ (p. 71); ‘It has been
shown only very recently how it came about that the mass of the English
people lost their Christian belief, and how religion came to be a middle-class
matter.’ (p. 72).
2 The classic formulation of this second, post-industrial revolution part of the
grand narrative is Alan Gilbert’s The Making of Post-Christian Britain: A
History of the Secularization of Modern Society, London and New York,
Longman, 1980. Though more cautious than Laslett, Gilbert felt empowered
by the intellectual bravado of 1970s’ sociology to vacuum up swathes of history
in his own empirically contestable statements: ‘Organized religion, everywhere
in the British Isles, has failed to cope with the decline of the territorial community
and the emergence of pluralistic, partial communities.’ (p. 84).
3 J. Walsh, ‘Methodism and the mob in the eighteenth century’, Studies in Church
History, 1972, vol. 8, p. 218; C.G. Brown, ‘Protest in the pews: interpreting
Presbyterianism and society in fracture during the Scottish economic revolution’,
in T.M. Devine (ed.), Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society 1700–1850,
Edinburgh, John Donald, 1990.
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