The Death of Christian Britain

— Introduction —
effect of this work in Britain has been to push back the timing of religious
decline from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to make the early decline of
popular religiosity appear more gradualist, nuanced and regionalised. 21
However, the revisionism of scholars who are ‘optimistic’ about religiosity
in urban society leaves two major problems. The first of these is
empirical – the evidence already introduced briefly of sustained church
growth and high religiosity among the British people in the 1940s and
1950s. The second problem is more fundamental. Whilst revision to the
theory of secularisation has transformed understanding of the social history
of religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through new
methods 22 and model-building, 23 and has done much to destroy the validity
and utility of the theory, 24 the way revisionism has gone about this task
has been almost as flawed as secularisation theory itself. Scholars (including
the present author) have been trying for years to qualify or disparage secularisation
theory on its own terms – using the same methods and the same
conceptualisation of the issue. But this has meant studying the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries in something close to obsessive detail, and
has resulted in showing that secularisation took place more slowly, marginally
later, and less completely than the theory originally suggested. But it
has left the theory still in place, if not intact. This is a critical failing. By
merely rescheduling the timing and gradient of secularisation, revisionism
has left unmodified the core notion of religious decline as a prolonged,
unilinear and inevitable consequence of modernity. By relying upon
improved social-science investigation of religiosity to revise secularisation
theory, revisionism has mistaken what the problem is.
The problem is social science itself and its definition of religion. The
social-scientific study of religion has been one of the great projects of
Enlightenment modernity. From the late eighteenth century to the present,
religion has been defined, measured and ‘understood’ through ‘empirical’
evidence spawned by the supposed ‘neutrality’ of social science. Social
science has privileged a ‘rationalist’ approach to religion which assigns
importance to ‘formal religion’ and which denigrates or ignores ‘folk religion’,
‘superstition’ and acts of personal faith not endorsed by the churches.
It privileges numbers, counting religion by measures of members or
worshippers, and ignores the unquantifiable in argument and methodology.
It makes religion an institutional ‘thing’ of society, in the form of the
churches, religious organisations, the act of going to church, the act of
stating a belief in God and so on. In doing so, social science dichotomises
people: into churchgoers and non-churchgoers, into believers and unbelievers,
those who pray and those who don’t, into ‘the religious’ and ‘the
non-religious’. It is reductionist to bipolarities.
This chapter, of course, has already been guilty of this charge. In order
to introduce discussion of religious decline, statistics have been cited in
11