The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
alienated condition of the working classes, and moreover to describe them,
without inverted commas, as the masses, the ignorant, the unchurched, the
lapsed and the pagan. 61 This was especially true of church historians who
were then widely cited in general social histories by academics who, by the
1990s, should have known better. 62
Some social historians of the later 1960s and 1970s arrived at a compromise
position. They acknowledged the popularity of Methodism and new
dissent amongst the common people between the 1770s and 1830s, but, at
a time of widespread secularist cynicism amongst social historians, a functionalist
gloss was liberally applied to working-class religiosity. Some on
the left regarded it as ‘the chiliasm of despair’ of the working class emerging
within exploitative industrial capitalism and being subjected to evangelicalism
as a bourgeois social control which turned the worker into ‘his own
slave driver’. 63 A more widely accepted anti-Marxist version interpreted
religion during these years as ‘the midwife of class’, the gateway through
which the working classes passed into secularism or religious indifference
– ‘the ultimate spiritual state of the majority in the great towns of the
industrial age’. 64 This view of working-class religiosity as a temporary
phenomenon of 1770–1830 became so highly regarded that it has had a
strong influence on subsequent research. Some Marxist historians associated
the emergence of a new middle class in the 1830s and 1840s with the
exclusion en bloc of the working classes from the churches, 65 whilst others
associated a schism in the 1830s and 1840s between upper and lower
working classes (between the ‘labour aristocracy’ and the lumpen proletariat)
with a schism between the churched minority and unchurched
majority of working people. 66 Meanwhile, specialist social historians of
religion were pushing back the critical period of decline to the years
between 1870 and 1914, and were adopting short-period case studies of
London (or parts of it) and individual towns. 67 The only historian to move
significantly away from the local study was Alan Gilbert, whose work
on national church statistics formed the basis for three critical volumes of
the 1970s. 68 These books deployed statistics to ostensibly prove the theory
of secularisation – the inevitable decline of religion in industrial society.
In these ways, scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s tempered secularisation
theory’s most excessive claims, but tended to affirm the theory itself
by qualifying it rather than refuting it. Secularisation theory was being
judged on its own terms. This remained the case even with the most ‘optimist’
revisionism of the 1980s and 1990s. The theory has been condemned
for its unfalsifiability in claiming religious decline as an irreversible progress
of history. Its social-scientific narrative was rejected by quantitative and
qualitative rebuttal of its account of religion’s nineteenth-century collapse
(especially amongst the working classes); and the reputed relationship
between urbanism and religious decline was assailed by new techniques. 69
The rise of experiential historiography, of ‘history from the bottom up’,
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