The Death of Christian Britain

— The Problem with ‘Religious Decline’ —
who were developing classical economics: Adam Smith, David Ricardo and
Thomas Malthus. To bend religion to economistic principles, they had to
draw up the laws, the rules, by which religion could be defined like any
economy: what it was to be religiously ‘rich’ and what it was to be religiously
‘poor’. 77 Supposedly ‘objective’ tests of religiosity were developed,
tests which, with remarkable little change, have survived within the
Christian community until the end of the twentieth century. They were
tests which, from time to time, were challenged by radical Christians, but
they retained a hold on not just the ecclesiastical mind but the ‘common’
mind as well: society accepted these ‘objective’ tests of religiosity. It
constructed its vision of popular culture upon those tests. If you understand
the origins and non-universal nature of those tests, you undermine
the foundations of secularisation theory. 78
In the previous section, the evolution of secularisation theory was
summarised. Foucault’s description of how a field of academic knowledge
operates may be usefully applied to this. The ‘knowledge’ of secularisation
theory, its very ‘evidence’ of statistics and contemporary reports on religiosity,
is located within a group of related discourses – what Foucault calls
the ‘discursive practice’ of an academic subject – with the rules of that
discursive practice determining the collection, editing and deployment of
evidence such as quantitative data. Conversely, as he states, the discursive
practice ‘may be defined by the knowledge that it forms’ – a phenomenon
especially characteristic of Enlightenment positivism. 79 Certain relations (or
linkages) are established between discourses ‘interior’ to the subject (such
as on the unholy city, the ‘religious’ middle classes, and the ‘irreligious’
working classes) and ‘exterior’ objects (such as the cities and different
social classes themselves, their habits and behaviour) which must be
named, classified, analysed and explained. 80 Secularisation theory first
emerged as a ‘field of discourse’ between the 1790s and the 1820s when a
set of relations or conditions came into being which linked discoursers
(principally clergy), techniques of observation (statistical and other systems
of recording religiosity) and sites of discourse (Sunday schools, home
missions and religious publications), and simultaneously permitted the
clergy a discursive power in a ‘space of exteriority’ beyond their own
domain (in sites such as town halls, official censuses, parliament, press and
academe). 81 By this dispersal, a field of discourse like secularisation theory
is distinguished and given power across a wide range of disciplines (church
history, social history, sociology, town planning), across ideologies
(Marxism, conservatism, liberalism), and across institutions (churches, charities,
voluntary organisations, municipal authorities, the labour movement
and central government).
As Lyotard contended in the 1970s, the ‘metanarratives’ of scientific and,
one might add, social-scientific disciplines are in crisis because they are
self-legitimating. In his terms, secularisation theory is a self-referential
31