The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— <strong>The</strong> <strong>Death</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> <strong>Britain</strong> —<br />
the narrative is studied in terms <strong>of</strong> a series <strong>of</strong> oppositions which are, in<br />
Eco’s words, ‘immediate and universal’. <strong>The</strong> oppositions can be permutated,<br />
the interactions varied from story to story, but they form an invariant<br />
structure <strong>of</strong> oppositions which breed a familiarity in the reader. In the<br />
Bond novels, the oppositions are between Bond and the villain or the<br />
woman, between the ideologies <strong>of</strong> democracy and totalitarianism or communism,<br />
and a large number <strong>of</strong> relations between value-types such as<br />
perversion–innocence, loyalty–disloyalty, chance–planning. <strong>The</strong>se bipolarities<br />
form in succession the narrative’s progress from its start point <strong>of</strong><br />
‘danger’ to its conclusion <strong>of</strong> ‘victory’ (Bond over villain, Bond with the<br />
woman, the free world over communism/totalitarianism). <strong>The</strong>se oppositions<br />
in succession form the sequential structure <strong>of</strong> the story, what Eco<br />
calls a succession <strong>of</strong> ‘play situations’ in which each move gives rise to a<br />
countermove, propelling the story forward. 72 Eco identifies within the<br />
story a series <strong>of</strong> oppositions which correspond closely to Foucault’s notions<br />
<strong>of</strong> discourse in which ideal and anti-ideal exist in necessary conjunction.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se oppositional discourses emerge within the story in succession,<br />
forming its episodes or narrative structure.<br />
Eco’s methodology is highly relevant to the evangelical narrative. Indeed,<br />
it is entirely possible to read the evangelical narrative structure as a common<br />
thread linking popular religious and secular fiction <strong>of</strong> the nineteenth and<br />
twentieth centuries. Though it may have earlier origins (and was most<br />
certainly popularised in Pilgrim’s Progress), it only became thoroughly<br />
regular and repetitive in the nineteenth century and – most importantly –<br />
assumed a dominant discursive role in popular culture. Whilst Frye may<br />
be right in identifying the Bible as ‘the Great Code’ for narrative romance,<br />
religious literature <strong>of</strong> the nineteenth century familiarised English-speaking<br />
people (and very probably others) to the specifically ‘evangelical code’.<br />
It was this code that established the appetite for the literary boom <strong>of</strong> the<br />
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which almost universally used<br />
that code, providing Britons with the primary format in which they learned,<br />
explored and negotiated their own individual life destinies. <strong>The</strong> published<br />
story was no mere invitation to self-conception; it was an injunction to do<br />
so. <strong>The</strong> life-story, including the obituary, was a guide to behaviour: ‘What<br />
a hint is this’, said one magazine in 1848 at the end <strong>of</strong> a story, ‘to pious<br />
young women, whose husbands are not religious!’ 73 Within the lifestory<br />
were located the issues <strong>of</strong> life destiny which each person was<br />
compelled to negotiate, placing piety within personal narrative. Stories were<br />
consequently vital to the conception <strong>of</strong> religiosity in <strong>Britain</strong> in the nineteenth<br />
and twentieth centuries.<br />
<strong>The</strong> stories contained vital variations in how religiosity was conceived.<br />
<strong>The</strong> vital, primary variation was that between women and men. Just as<br />
discourses on male and female piety varied, so the evangelical narrative in<br />
which they were located varied. Both the female discourse and the female<br />
72