The Death of Christian Britain

— Notes to pages 185–193 —
56 W. Foley, A Child in the Forest, London, Futura, 1977; L. Beckwith, The Hills
is Lonely, The Sea for Breakfast, London, Arrow, 1972, several others about
the Highlands, and her About My Father’s Business, London, Arrow, 1973
about Cheshire; F. Thompson, Larkrise to Candleford, orig. 1945, Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1973.
57 V. Massey, One Child’s War, London, BBC, 1983; E. Hall, Canary Girls and
Stockpots, Luton, 1977; M. Hobbs, Born to Struggle, London, 1973.
58 C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 491–2; and advance publicity sheet
for Charles Taylor’s Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, April–
May 1999.
59 L. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin
Working Class, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987; R. Hutton, ‘The
English Reformation and the evidence of folklore’, Past and Present, 1995,
no. 148, p. 114.
60 R. Towler, The Need for Certainty: A Sociological Study of Conventional
Religion, London, RKP, 1984.
61 See for instance J. Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the English
Underground 1961–1971, London, Pimlico, 1998.
62 S. Bruce, ‘Religion in Britain at the close of the 20th century: a challenge to the
silver lining perspective’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 1996, vol. 11, 269–71.
63 (A. Robertson), Lifestyle Survey, Edinburgh, Church of Scotland, 1987.
64 See for instance H. McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe
1789–1989, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, 134–43; P.A. Welsby, A
History of the Church of England 1945–1980, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1984, pp. 97–106; D. Hilliard, ‘The religious crisis of the 1960s: the experience
of the Australian churches’, Journal of Religious History, 1997, vol. 21; I.
Machin, ‘British churches and moral change in the 1960s’, in W.M. Jacob and
N. Yates (eds), Religion and Society in Northern Europe since the Reformation,
Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1993; S. Gilley and W.J. Sheils (eds), A History of
Religion in Britain, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, esp. pp. 467–521.
65 In Falkirk in the 1960s only 40 per cent of non-churchgoing teenagers expressed
a belief in God compared to 75 per cent for churchgoers; boys were even more
secularised, with bizarre scores of 37 per cent for churchgoers and 47 per cent
for non-churchgoers. P.L. Sissons, The Social Significance of Church Membership
in the Burgh of Falkirk, Edinburgh, Church of Scotland, 1973, p. 325.
9 THE END OF A LONG STORY
1 The most recent and jarring example of this failure is Steve Bruce, who writes:
‘Social historians of religion disagree about the precise shape of the curve [of
religious growth and decline] and the placing of the peak, but, whatever objection
they may raise to this or that measure, they are agreed that there are now
far fewer church members and church-goers than there were in 1950, 1900,
1850, or 1800.’ S. Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to
Cults, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 31.
267