The Death of Christian Britain

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— 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 33
— The Death of Christian Britain — discourse collapsed in my lifetime, its ubiquitous circulation and widespread subjectification spent. There is a dissonance between the traditional theory of secularisation and my personal experience of secularisation, and this book is its product. 34
Page 2 and 3: The Death of Christian Britain PRA
Page 4 and 5: ‘For anyone who is genuinely inte
Page 6 and 7: The Death of Christian Britain Und
Page 8 and 9: Contents List of illustrations ix
Page 10 and 11: illustrations FIGURES 7.1 Church o
Page 12 and 13: — Acknowledgements — University
Page 14: note on oral history The oral-hist
Page 18 and 19: Chapter one Introduction This book
Page 20 and 21: — Introduction — no new credo,
Page 22 and 23: — Introduction — in 1997 even p
Page 24 and 25: — Introduction — 365 in 1981 an
Page 26 and 27: — Introduction — Historians hav
Page 28 and 29: — Introduction — effect of this
Page 30 and 31: — Introduction — or a family, o
Page 32 and 33: — Introduction — in ways no lon
Page 34 and 35: — The Problem with ‘Religious D
Page 52 and 53: Chapter three The Salvation Economy
Page 54 and 55: — The Salvation Economy — It wa
Page 56 and 57: — The Salvation Economy — evang
Page 58 and 59: — The Salvation Economy — with
Page 60 and 61: — The Salvation Economy — and P
Page 62 and 63: — The Salvation Economy — centr
Page 64 and 65: — The Salvation Economy — famil
Page 66 and 67: — The Salvation Economy — Indee
Page 68 and 69: — The Salvation Economy — and t
Page 70 and 71: — The Salvation Economy — with
Page 72 and 73: — The Salvation Economy — broug
Page 74 and 75: — The Salvation Economy — Every
Page 76 and 77: — Women in Discourse and Narrativ
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— Women in Discourse and Narrativ
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Page 104 and 105:
Page 106 and 107:
— Men in Discourse and Narrative
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Chapter six Personal Testimony and
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— Personal Testimony and Religion
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Chapter seven ‘Unimpeachable Witn
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— The Statistics of ‘Christian
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Percentage — The Statistics of
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100 90 80 70 60 50 40 Percentage Sc
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— The 1960s and Secularisation
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140 120 100 80 60 Percentage 40 20
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Chapter nine The End of a Long Stor
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— The End of a Long Story — the
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— The End of a Long Story — Can
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Chapter Ten Postscript: the mortali
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— Postscript — intellectual lev
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— Postscript — Each can overdo
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— Postscript — But Williams the
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— Postscript — aged by sociolog
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— Postscript — secularisation:
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— Postscript — Despite the reac
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— Postscript — very much restri
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— Postscript — Scotland’s ris
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— Postscript — But some Christi
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— Postscript — filed Protestant
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— Postscript — maturing of femi
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— Postscript — the oral contrac
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— Postscript — grammar school f
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— Postscript — Church confirmat
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— Postscript — and the churches
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— Postscript — an older concept
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— Postscript — Christianity has
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— Notes to pages 7-10 — 15 Stat
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— Notes to pages 17-21 — 4 E.J.
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— Notes to pages 26-28 — aglow
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— Notes to pages 35-41 — 3 THE
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— Notes to pages 48-54 — 41 Quo
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— Notes to pages 59-64 — 7 B.L.
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— Notes to pages 71-79 — D. Ski
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— Notes to pages 86-90 — 126 Ib
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— Notes to pages 96-100 — 47 R.
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— Notes to pages 104-112 — 98 C
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— Notes to pages 118-128 — 10 Q
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— Notes to pages 133-139 — 75 S
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— Notes to pages 144-149 — betw
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— Notes to pages 154-157 — vol.
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— Notes to pages 164-173 — 62 C
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— Notes to pages 176-185 — 32 M
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— Notes to pages 194-201 — 2 On
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— Notes to pages 205-209 — 29 S
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— Notes to pages 213-216 — 70 R
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— Notes to pages 220-224 — 104
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— Notes to pages 228-232 — 135
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— Sources — ---- , About My Fat
Page 297 and 298:
— Sources — Reports to the Gene
Page 299 and 300:
— Sources — Wilson, J.H., A Bri
Page 301 and 302:
— Sources — ---- , ‘Popular c
Page 303 and 304:
— Sources — Cressy, D., Birth,
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— Sources — ---- , ‘Seculariz
Page 307 and 308:
— Sources — Layton-Henry, Z., T
Page 309 and 310:
— Sources — Norman, E.R., Churc
Page 311 and 312:
— Sources — ---- , Reconstructi
Page 313 and 314:
— Sources — Chadwick, R.E., ‘
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Campbeltown 20-1 Camporesi, Piero 1
Page 317 and 318:
Girl Guides 131 Girl’s Own Paper
Page 319 and 320:
Plymouth Brethren see Brethren poet
Page 321:
women: and evangelicalism 42; and f
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