The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
The myth of the unholy city is now two centuries old, kept alive by
historians and sociologists quoting the ‘evidence’ of its originators: Thomas
Chalmers, Horace Mann, and every statistic and clerical exclamation of irreligious
slums. The story told by academics in the second half of the
twentieth century has been the same story as that told by clergymen in the
1810s and 1820s. The present becomes blurred with the industrial past in
a way which leaves understanding of contemporary religious decline entangled
with understanding of past religious decline. Secularisation theory
removes any need to ask why religion is declining now – at the start of
the third millennium – because it all started so long ago in the milltowns
of industrial Lancashire and Lanarkshire. Our secularisation in the 2000s
is the same secularisation of the 1920s or the 1880s or the 1810s – declining
churches, alienated working classes, residual religiosity amongst the
respectable middle classes. The textbooks and research papers are empty of
reasons, only seeking to decipher what has been happening. Secularisation
theory demands no new reasons for the halving of church affiliation in
the last forty years, and sociologists and contemporary historians will not
offer you anything fundamentally new. 75 Our modernisation is the same
modernisation as of old – increasing technology, urban anomie and privatisation
of the individual, decreasing shared values, communality and
community. The world we have lost, the pre-industrial world, was the last
truly religious age. The world we have today is the same as that found by
Thomas Chalmers in the slums of central Glasgow in 1815.
ENVISIONING RELIGION
This book argues that the world of 2000 is not the world of 1815. Even
the world of 1950 is not the same as now. What has happened to popular
religiosity since 1950 has been very different to what happened in the
previous century and a half. It is in my lifetime that the people have
forsaken formal Christian religion, and the churches have entered seemingly
terminal decline. It matters that we understand why.
Secularisation theory is now a narrative in crisis. 76 It is in crisis partly
because it professes to be a ‘scientific’ or ‘social-scientific’ account of the
decline of religion, gauged by ‘objective measures’ which it itself has set.
It defines ‘the rules of its own game’, and they must be challenged. At the
heart of the game are its rules about what religion is. These rules were
drawn up in the nineteenth century by society itself, the rules which defined
what it was to be ‘religious’ and what it was to be ‘irreligious’. Those rules
were not ‘neutral’; they were loaded, ‘social-scientific’ definitions. They
were rules developed by men (sometimes women) who counted themselves
part of the birth of social science itself. Men like Thomas Chalmers developed
a social science in the conscious wake of those Enlightenment thinkers
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