The Death of Christian Britain

Chapter two
The Problem with
‘Religious Decline’
THE WORLD WE HAVE LOST
‘Religious decline’ is an emotive, loaded term. It is the product of a long
tradition which runs deep into the conceptual framework of social science
and into the modern Christian church’s construction of its ‘mission’.
Religious decline in Britain is intellectually located in the distance
between two ‘worlds’: the pre-industrial and the industrial. Pre-industrial
society was the world we have lost – a world of innocence, humble
spirituality, economic simplicity and social harmony. 1 Industrialisation and
the growth of large cities started the rapid decline of the churches, religious
belief and religious morality. Piety and machines were disconnected and
opposing. By contrast, the world we have found was and remains a world
of technology, competitiveness, and social dislocation, with piety a transient
signifier of class identity. 2
This secularisation narrative did not originate in the twentieth-century
academy but in the late eighteenth-century world of changing power relations.
To proclaim ‘faith in danger’ has been the perpetual task of churches
in all historical ages to defend against backsliding, but it was only transformed
into a perpetual thesis of ‘religion in decline’ in the special
circumstances of agricultural improvement and industrial revolution. The
thesis of decline has since been proclaimed by various interested parties.
The first and by far the biggest group has been churchmen – parsons, ministers,
priests and preachers – who have maintained an incessant clamour on
the issue since the late eighteenth century. Within this group, the precise
message has varied very significantly. Clergy of the established or state
churches – the Church of England and the Church of Scotland – have had
at the forefront of their minds the danger to their churches posed by the
rise of alternative or dissenting churches. Pessimism about faith has for this
group been closely related to a fear of loss of power. At national level
within England and Wales, the Church of England has enjoyed privileged
positions in the House of Lords and in the influencing of policy on a wide
range of issues. Many of those issues have been to do with the devolved
16