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