The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
(and self-reverential) metanarrative, whose phalanx of adherents – clergymen,
Marxists, sociologists, social historians, liberal politicians and others
– form a unanimity of rational minds telling an irrefutable ‘normative’
story, thereby establishing a myth which becomes seemingly normal,
unquestionable, eternal. Secularisation is the rationalising accompaniment
of modernisation, the great Enlightenment project which has been making
the modern world one in which the mind is liberalised, the people urbanised
and urbane, literate and educated, devoid of irrationality, and scientific
in their understanding of this new world of machines. Secularisation is a
salute to reason, the intellect and to progress. In this it is both threat and
promise. Welcomed by Marx and Engels, 82 abhorred by Thomas Chalmers
and other clergy, it nonetheless united these adherents in legitimation of
the Enlightenment narrative which they inhabit as the heroes of knowledge.
The Enlightenment hierarchy of knowledge and power reduces religion to
a ‘rational’ object to be ‘rationally’ understood, ‘rationally’ promoted or
‘rationally’ undermined. Secularisation is a revelatory experience, revealing
reason in a ‘modern’ society.
Secularisation theory as a field of discourse had an enormous influence
in British society between 1800 and 1950. The next four chapters analyse
the enormity of its influence through media (Chapter 3), which promoted
gendered discourses on how to be ‘religious’ (and conversely how to fall
into irreligion) in industrial and urban society (Chapters 4 and 5). The
discourses promulgated ‘tests’ of religiosity which were broadcast within
the society, suffusing the written, legal and governmental world of the
day and defining the moral dialectics of popular culture – of ‘rough’ and
‘respectable’. Those tests divided the nation’s economic and recreational
habits; the useful and the useless, the rational and the irrational, the religious
and the heathen. Popular culture became conceived as a polarity, a binary
on/off, religious/non-religious. These were the tests of religiosity which
were both personal and social, confronting the individual in a jarring,
intrusive way. The Victorian home missionary and district visitor knocked
on the door and asked about the ‘religious condition’ of those inside.
The answers were written down in notebooks: ‘they have found Christ’,
‘man a drunk’, ‘wife struggling’, ‘man a specious fellow’, ‘children in
danger’. The entries in the notebook were counted, the numbers from the
notebook added together, the district totals added to the city totals, the
city totals added to the national totals, the religiosity of the nation totted
up to produce a percentage figure. City Missions counted doors knocked
on, doors opened, the numbers inside who were clean or dirty, drunk or
sober, in sickness or in health, those willing to pray or sing a psalm, and
those not. Tract distributors counted the numbers of tracts handed out at
street preaching stalls, public hangings, in public houses and at army
garrisons. Congregational penny banks counted the numbers of transactions,
and the amounts saved and withdrawn. Preachers wrote diaries
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