The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
older men and care-worn women, crowded the after meetings, and
there were many decisions for Christ.
One night there was a fierce storm and a shipwreck on the shore. Peggy
assisted the survivors, and Guy was washed up, near death. Peggy heard that
he had been preaching to the sailors on the boat as it made its way from
India, and as he recovered Peggy heard his story. Guy’s wife had died after
a year of hateful marriage: ‘He had hardened his heart, and lived a life of
forgetting God until a year before. Then slowly the hard heart was broken,
and at length Guy was surely led from infidelity to Christ. God at last
claimed him for his own.’ Coming round on the beach, Guy was repentant:
‘I know I am not worthy, Peggy,’ he said, ‘but I love you. Can you
after all the past, trust yourself to me?’
And so, instead of spending my life alone, henceforth the two of
us will go together, the glad work of telling the Gospel story will not
be ended – rather – rather, since two are better than one, the best
work lies before.
The structure of this story depends on a series of binary oppositions,
culminating in the conversion of the ‘villain’ to God and to woman:
A. Godly young woman falls in love with ungodly man
B. Wickedness of ungodly young man destroys plans of godly young
woman
C. Godly young woman works hard and unselfishly
D. Ungodly man pays price for his ungodliness
E. Ungodly man is converted
F. Chance event
G. Man and woman make godly union
This scheme of narrative episodes was the template of the evangelical narrative,
usually composed of around eight segments. The narrative episodes
each contained, with the exception of the chance event, an opposition
between two things: ‘godliness’ and ‘ungodliness’, man and woman, and so
on, the number two becoming, in its repetitive usage, what narratologists
refer to as a ‘pattern number’ of storytelling to which the reader becomes
accustomed. 75 If the pattern number remains a constant, the order of moves
between narrative segments could vary between stories. Moves could be
varied first, as with Eco’s analysis of Bond novels, by changing their order
(by moving the chance event to a different narrative spot, for instance) or
the nature of the agency for converting the ungodly man. Second, this
narrative with an ‘ideal’ outcome could be inverted into a ‘tragic’ outcome;
instead of happy temporal results from Christian rebirth, there could be
an unhappy or even horrific end, despite rebirth in woman, because of the
power of evil and of Satan within ungodly man.
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