The Death of Christian Britain

— The Problem with ‘Religious Decline’ —
brought reassessments based on oral and autobiographical sources, showing
how strong were the continuities in popular religious experience between
the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. 70 But even the most active,
and in many ways most innovative, historian in the field, Hugh McLeod,
has continued to perceive secularisation as centrally located in social changes
between the 1880s and 1914. He recently wrote that it was from those
decades that English society became one in which ‘religion has become
to a considerable degree privatised’. From those years, he says, it affects
‘the thinking and behaviour of the individual believer, but no longer to any
great degree shapes the taken-for-granted assumptions of the majority
of the population’, whilst religious institutions cease to dominate ‘nonreligious’
areas of life. 71
There have been hints since the late 1980s of radical change in the way
the subject is conceived and studied. Women’s historians have started to
analyse the discourses of religiosity for women. This was most notably and
ably pioneered in the late modern period by Davidoff and Hall in a book
which made great methodological strides in analysis of religious identity in
the middle classes, but which adhered rather too resolutely to notions of
working-class irreligion. 72 David Hempton, in a perceptive and tantalising
chapter, started to gnaw at the terminology of our subject, and to hesitate
over past dismissals of informal religion. 73 Most tantalising of all, Sarah
Williams argued that historians need to fundamentally reconceive the issue
of working-class religion, moving out from official and formal perceptions
towards informal, folk or ‘superstitious’ religion and rites which constitute
a hitherto ignored world of popular religiosity in late-modern society. 74 It
is Williams’ work, more than any other, that comes closest to redefining
the study of religion in industrial society.
Yet, secularisation theory and the myth of the unholy city remain at the
heart of the social historian’s conception of late modern Britain. Behind
this conception lies an intellectual and methodological continuity stretching
from 1800 to the present, in which the theory was sustained by those who
found it convenient (and in some cases essential) to project an image of
religion in perpetual crisis in urban–industrial society. It is actually
extremely hard to think of one group of people for whom the existence of
a concept of religious growth would have been an intellectual or professional
benefit, and how anybody was significantly disadvantaged by its
absence. Perhaps it was only in a truly religious society like Victorian
Britain, where it mattered whether religion was perceived to be growing
or declining, that such a vast range of interested parties – from clergyman
to Marxist, politician to trade unionist, feminist to temperance reformer –
felt an investment in the concept. If religion had been weak, it would have
been only the clergy who would have cared one way or the other. It was
not until the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, when everybody affirmed secularisation
was happening, that few but the clergy cared.
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