Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain

Callum G. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317873495
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

During the twentieth century, Britain turned from one of the most deeply religious nations of the world into one of the most secularised nations. This book provides a comprehensive account of religion in British society and culture between 1900 and 2000. It traces how Christian Puritanism and respectability framed the people amidst world wars, economic depressions, and social protest, and how until the 1950s religious revivals fostered mass enthusiasm. It then examines the sudden and dramatic changes seen in the 1960's and the appearance of religious militancy in the 1980s and 1990s.

With a focus on the themes of faith cultures, secularisation, religious militancy and the spiritual revolution of the New Age, this book uses people's own experiences and the stories of the churches to display the diversity and richness of British religion.

Suitable for undergraduate students studying modern British history, church history and sociology of religion.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The secularising century

In 1900, most people presumed that Britain was a Christian nation. It appeared to be leading the world economically, morally and religiously, exporting Christianity through the Empire and church missionaries to those regarded as the ‘heathen peoples’ of Africa and Asia. In 2000, most people presumed that Britain was secular and had lost its Christian faith, practice and culture. Newspapers carried headlines of ‘The Church in crisis’, ‘Elderly lose faith in religion’ and ‘Empty pews’, backed up by opinion polls and social-science investigations.¹ But, at each end of the twentieth century, there were some commentators who found evidence for opposing propositions. In 1904, the Daily Telegraph newspaper asked, ‘Do we believe?’ In response, only 54 per cent of readers professed Christian ‘faith’, whilst a census in the same year by the Daily News showed that only 19 per cent of Londoners went to church, striking some commentators as evidence of a religious crisis at the heart of Empire.² By contrast, at the start of the twenty-first century, the Sunday Telegraph carried an optimistic banner headline, ‘Revealed: Britain still believes in God’, over a story that 62 per cent of people believed in the Almighty. One hundred years apart, the Telegraph newspapers were posing counter-intuitive propositions that seemed, from most evidence, to have got it the wrong way round: they should have been optimistic for Christian religion in 1900 and pessimistic in 2000.

This confusion illustrates how studying the history of religion in twentieth-century Britain can be especially difficult. In this book, we shall see how the nature of religion itself was constantly being questioned, and seemed to be changing, during those one hundred years. For one thing, this gave rise to a changing approach to religious certainty. In 1900, there was almost universal certainty in British government and the major institutions (including the churches) that Christianity was the only legitimate religion, that it was obviously superior to every other religion, and that without it social morality and civil order would collapse. By 2000, that universal certainty was gone (including from most churches). In its place had emerged two different dimensions on religion. The first dimension was that religious views were by then highly diverse, ranging across many traditions (like Islam, Judaism and the new age), and that together they underpinned the multi-cultural and multi-racial society of modern Britain. The second dimension was that, for most people in Britain in 2000, religion had diminished as an element in everyday identity and culture; religion occupied a smaller part of people’s thoughts and behaviour than it did in 1900. Taken together, these two dimensions meant that religion no longer united the nation in the way it once had. And yet religion still mattered by 2000 – even for those for whom religion was personally unimportant, and who professed no beliefs. The rise of religious conflict in the 1990s and early 2000s was one factor, touching the lives or consciousness of most Britons. The world remained scarred by religious conflict between countries (between India and Pakistan, Israel and the Palestinians, and between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia), by religious conflict within countries (in places like Sudan and Thailand) and by religiously-motivated international terrorism (notably by Islamic fundamentalist groups in very many countries, including in Britain). Conflict seemed to reaffirm awareness of religion around 2000.

It is a bit of a puzzle for a very secular people like the British in the twenty-first century to find religion so far up their political agenda. The weight of evidence, that we shall explore in this book, suggests that Britain at the start of the twentieth century was a strongly religious society, and that at the end of the century it was a weakly religious society. In between, the strength, significance and character of British religion changed more profoundly than in any other period of recorded history. The twentieth century was the first century in which weekly churchgoers fell below 10 per cent of the British population. It was the first century in which Christianity lost its dominance of public culture, private morality and the media of the day. It was the first century in which non-Christian religions became numerous, challenging the dominance that Christianity had held for a millennium, making Britain ‘a multi-faith society’. It was the first century during which Christian behaviour became unenforceable by the state, with the repeal, liberalisation or effective collapse of traditional Christian-based laws on homosexuality, abortion, divorce, suicide, breach of promise (of marriage), censorship, blasphemy, and Sunday trading and entertainment. It was the century when two out of the three established or state churches of mainland Britain – the Church in Wales and the Church of Scotland – broke their effective dependence upon state patronage and legality, leaving only the Church of England as a somewhat fragile established church. It was the century when dissenting Protestant churches like the Methodists effectively lost much of their strength and place in British religious life. It was the first century in which women gained something like equal recognition, changing from the position in 1900 when they held few ecclesiastical offices in any church, to the position of 2000 when they were fully ordained as pastors in most Christian denominations (though not bishops in the Church of England) and when some churches had become dependent on women recruits. And between 1900 and 2000, the broader change of religious authority in British civil life was staggering. The churches and religious ideas lost influence in government, education and social welfare. The twentieth century was the century of Britain’s greatest religious change.

One way of exploring how the degree of change was understood is to look at the shifting interpretation of the word ‘secularisation’. In 1900, to many churchmen, ‘secularisation’ meant the state’s takeover of church property and functions (specifically land and duties pertaining to the state or established churches of England, Wales and Scotland); these were functions like giving out relief to the poor, maintaining schools, influencing social policy in government and controlling charities. In 1900, ‘secularisation’ meant the policy of ‘disestablishment’, and implied an attack on the religious establishment which, its supporters argued, upheld the moral and religious fabric of the United Kingdom.³ But by 2000, with loss of church property and functions in the state mostly accomplished, the meaning of secularisation had changed. It had come to mean the loss of popular Christian behaviour and faith – the decline of going to church and praying, the decline of marrying in church and baptising children, and the decline of believing in Jesus Christ as the Risen Lord. Religious activities declined as understanding of Christian belief lessened, and religion occupied a smaller and smaller space in people’s lives, thoughts and understanding of their own identity. So, the meaning of secularisation shifted from a transfer of control from the religious to the secular, to a decline in the people’s Christian faith.

It is the change in popular faith with which this book is most concerned. We start with a few statistics. During 1900–2000, there were dramatic falls in levels of churchgoing, church membership, religious marriage, baptism and Sunday-school attendance. Religious marriage fell between 1900 and 1997 from 85 to 39 per cent of all marriages in England and Wales, and from 94 to 55 per cent of all Scottish marriages.⁴ The baptism rate fell in Britain’s largest church, the Church of England, from 61 per cent of all births in 1900 to 19.8 per cent in 2000. This decline was then compounded by the collapse of recruitment of baptised babies into full church membership, which fell in the Church of England from 42 per cent in 1903 to 20 per cent in 1997, and in the Church of Scotland from 75 per cent in 1900 to 17 per cent in 1998.⁵ Churchgoing, long regarded as the central test of a Christian’s commitment, fell also. At the beginning of the century, national church attendance on a given Sunday in England was probably around 25–30 per cent of the population (with London, one of the lowest churchgoing places, showing a rate of between 19 and 26 per cent). In 1998, the national figure was 7.5 per cent, and local figures were often much worse.⁶ The bulk of this collapse had been accomplished by the 1980s. In Aberdeen in the north-east of Scotland, church attendance fell from 26 per cent in 1891 to 9 per cent in 1984.⁷

A small core of committed churchgoers remained in 2000, but those disappearing from worship were often the churches’ outer constituency – those who, in previous generations, had gone once a month or for special Christian festivals like Easter and Christmas. This extended and casual churchgoing constituency had largely disappeared during the century. This was very important because the numbers were large, making up perhaps one-third of the adult population even as late as 1950. But by 2000, the churchgoers were becoming less numerous and more cut off from the rest of the population. What was happening was the creation of a large cultural chasm between those who went to church intensely (usually weekly) and those who did not go at all.

This was reflected in another set of changes. In most homes between 1900 and 2000, there was a disappearance of saying grace before meals and prayers before bedtime; there was a declining observance of the Sabbath by not working or playing sport or games; and there was even a falling-off in the Christian family ritual of Sunday lunch. If truth be told, at the start of the twenty-first century, religion became a minor or even irrelevant ‘thing’ for most Britons. For the average young person, religion became something endured during religious education classes at school, or something confronted at a religious wedding or a funeral. But only a tiny minority of 16–25-year-olds in 2000 were attenders at church or Sunday school during their youth, or had read any holy scripture, and few of this age group attended a place of worship. The evidence shows that even their parents were unlikely to have attended religious rites during the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was the parents and in some cases the grandparents of the British children of 2000 who presided over the decay of Christian practice. Even surrogate symbols of Christian respectability and conformity had gone – the ‘Sunday best’ dress, the special Sunday roast lunch and the family promenade in the park that were commonplace between 1900 and 1960. Even the major religious festivals had declined in religious significance. By 2000, Christmas was marked with negligible religious observance in most households (as distinguished from the secular giving of presents and eating of large meals), whilst Easter, Lent and Whit were little more than names for public holidays. This all reflected the diminishing place of Christian culture in Britain. This had fallen by 2000 to possibly its lowest level ever, shaping few of the cultural forms with which most people came into contact.

Just as people’s lives were secularised during the century, so too were the media that reflected and reinforced popular culture. Religious issues and motifs penetrated deep into the popular media of 1900 – notably in novels, magazines for the family, for women and for children, and in cinema films which developed during the next fifty years. But by 2000, Christian rhetoric was not only displaced from those media, but it had never developed to any significant extent in any of the new media thrown up by technological change: radio, television and the internet. In both its cultural environment and in the ‘religious’ or ‘moral’ conduct of its citizens, Britain had become by the end of the century a society largely shorn of its Christian heritage. Cultural activities during the week and the year became largely empty of religion. Sunday, the ‘Christian day’ set aside in the Bible as a day of rest in respect for God, is now devoid of widespread religious ciphers, with a tiny minority attending church.

Such change marks something more fundamental, possibly elemental, in the human condition. Religion in some form or other – from early ritual, to sophisticated beliefs in redemption and afterlife – is something that has probably been a constant in human history, something that has provided the major archaeological and architectural traces of the British peoples from pre-history to the Christian era of the second millennium. Religious structures – like churches with spires – stood proud of the landscape, whilst religious ritual punctuated the lives of virtually all of our forebears every week and every year. Christian culture interspersed the seasons and the week, in the form of rituals, clothes and ways of marking time. Even for the indifferent, the dissenting and the disbelieving, Christian religion provided a constant point of cultural referral against which to relate themselves. To be a rebel almost invariably meant rebelling against religion – whether by not attending the church building, ignoring church authorities over moral behaviour, or declaring oneself a secularist or atheist. Religion was also ‘political’ and ‘constitutional’, having important bearings on patterns of loyalty and disobedience, fealty or treason, and – come more democratic times – of how people voted. In England and Wales in 1900, to be a Tory or Conservative more often than not implied allegiance to the Church of England, whilst being a Liberal implied allegiance to Protestant Nonconformity. By 2000, such religious– political divisions had largely gone from mainland Britain. Only in Northern Ireland did religious adherence continue to strongly influence voting, with the bulk of Protestants voting for Unionist parties (that supported the maintenance of the Union with the rest of Britain) and the bulk of Roman Catholics for republican parties (that supported Northern Ireland leaving Britain and joining the Irish Republic).

But religion intruded into not only the way people spent their time, how their government operated and how they voted, it governed also how they felt about each other and about themselves. Personal identities were heavily constructed on religious frameworks. Daily consumption of cultural forms was influential in how each person constructed his or her notion of ‘self’, and offered a measure for self-esteem. In 1900, family magazines instructed women and girls how to be ‘homely’, virtuous, feminine and pious, giving them prayers to say and homilies to recite, establishing their femininity and womanly qualities in religious terms. They showed women how the right clothes and hairstyles could combine pious respectability with appearing feminine and cool. Men and boys in 1900 were told how to curb their ‘baser’ masculine instincts in speech and play, and how to achieve religious and moral respectability through avoidance of alcoholic drink, gambling and swearing. Everyday British culture was a moral maze, defined by a Christian core, which constantly berated the irreligious and praised the ‘true Christian’.

Each of these levels contributed to British Christian culture in the early part...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures, tables and analysis panels
• Acknowledgements
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The faith society, 1900–14
• 3. Trench religion, 1914–19
• 4. Christian culture in confusion, 1920–45
• 5. Faith in austerity, 1945–59
• 6. The sixties’ revolution, 1960–73
• 7. The shaping of secular society, 1974–2000
• Guide to further reading
• Index