The Death of Christian Britain

— The Problem with ‘Religious Decline’ —
where they counted and named those who were ‘struggling’, ‘anxious’ and
those who ‘found liberty’. Churches counted members, communicants, the
baptised, the Sunday scholars, the tracts distributed, the numbers at mission
services. Sunday school superintendents counted enrollees, attenders, those
who could read the New Testament, and those who qualified by good
attendance for the summer outing. It seems irrefutable that more statistics
were counted on religion than on any other single subject in Victorian and
Edwardian Britain.
This mass of ‘evidence’ gave secularisation theory its discursive power
in the age of Enlightenment ‘rationality’. As one of the cornerstones
of social science, secularisation theory is a social construction which is
inherently disabled from allowing that religion is a discursive power
because, to do so, it would have to admit that it also is an adjunct to that
discursive power. Secularisation theory judges the people of the past (and
of the present) by social-scientific measures derived from nineteenthcentury
discourses on what it meant to be religious (such as to be teetotal,
thrifty, churchgoing, respectable, ‘saved’ or a believer in God) and what it
meant to be irreligious (drunk, spendthrift, unchurched, ‘rough’, unconverted
or a non-believer). These discourses were, and are, laced with a
medley of prejudices about poverty and prosperity, social class and
ethnicity, religious bigotry, and the nature of belief or unbelief. ‘Religious
decline’ is at its root a moral judgement, whether brandished by Christians,
atheists, social scientists or philosophers. Early psychologists of religion
like William James infused their spurious ‘empirical Science of Religion’
with explicit evangelical precepts and moral judgement on religious
worth. 83 Even the recent ‘philosophical anthropology’ of Charles Taylor,
whilst legitimately seeking to reject ‘the ambition to model the study of
man on the natural sciences’ (notably behaviourism), extends discursive
secularisation theory from social science to linguistics. He identifies the
rising study of language in the twentieth century as evidence of a ‘a largely
inarticulate sense of ourselves’ which is affecting the ‘reflexive awareness
of the standards one is living by (or failing to live by)’ through which
‘moral agency’ creates ‘a fully competent human agent’. 84 This is perpetuating
secularisation theory as discourse by translating it from the terms of
the social scientist to that of the linguistic philosopher – an ironic translation
given the role of the ‘linguistic turn’ in challenging social science.
Christian secularisation theory is thus very powerful. It is deeply
ingrained as discourse in ways of conceiving history, progress and the
human condition. To break its power does not mean new research need,
or should, claim a better ‘neutrality’. On the contrary, this book acknowledges
the presence of the ‘personal’ in research, and the methodological
virtue of this to academic scholarship. 85 The ‘reading’ here is not ‘neutral’
but in itself highly subjectified, the product of personal experience of the
discourse change explored in Chapter 8. The power of traditional religious
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