The Post-war Generation And The Establishment Of Religion

Jackson W Carroll, Wade Clark Roof, David A Roozen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429975578
• Subtopic: Religious Institutions & Organizations
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first book to offer a comparative analysis of the impact of the post-war ?Baby Boom? generation on Christianity around the world. Taking a cross-cultural approach, the contributors examine ten advanced countries, including England, France, Germany, Australia, and the United States, and explore the ways baby boomers have helped reshape and redefine ?establishment religions? ? that is, the dominant, primarily Christian institutions. Their conclusions are broad and far-reaching, shedding light on the fate of religion in other countries now modernizing and those countries moving through the modern to the postmodern. Sociologists, historians, and scholars of religion will profit from the insights put forth here on religion in a postmodern context.

1
The Post-War Generation and Establishment Religion in England

Eileen Barker

The General Context

This portrayal of the English post-war generation with respect to establishment religion is to be located within the context of a society which has had an established church for more than four centuries, and which now entertains what might be termed a gentle, secularizing pluralism. Over half the 48 million or so people living in England have a loose affiliation with the Church of England, but around 5 million are associated with both the Nonconformist and Catholic churches; also, there are now well over a million Muslims, and several hundreds of thousands who belong to the Jewish, Hindu and Sikh traditions. It is possible to list over a thousand other religious institutions in England, some of which may have several thousands of members, while others will have no more than a score or so.

The gentleness of Eiiglish pluralism may sometimes express itself in indifference or apathy; but the adjective has been chosen to evoke a relative absence of embattled positions. England has enjoyed, on the one hand, a relative absence of virulent antagonisms (there is little of the anticlericalism that has been evident in some, mainly Catholic, parts of Europe) and, on the other hand, a relative absence of frenetic enthusiasms (as are evident in segments of the United States).

The secularization manifested in twentieth-century England is not unlike the secularization that was anticipated by Weber and Durkheim, and which has been variously described in neo-classic form by Wilson (1966b), Dobbelaere (1981), Westley (1983) and many others. It is a secularization that is intrinsically tied to social variables such as industrialization, modernity, urbanization, rationalization, bureaucratization, and societalization and to both structural and functional differentiation. It is a "process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance" (Wilson 1966b:14). It is, concurrently, a process by which religion has become increasingly a leisure pursuit, privatized and/or individualized in, to some extent, the apparently opposing, but basically compatible, processes that are described by Luckmann (1967; 1977) and Berger (1969) and, indeed, somewhat more provocatively, by Wilson:

In this private sphere, religion often continues, and even acquires new forms of expression, many of them much less related to other aspects of culture than were the religions of the past. . . . religion remains an alternative culture, observed as unthreatening to the modern system, in much the same way that entertainment is seen as unthreatening. It offers another world to explore as an escape from the rigors of technological order and the ennui that is the incidental by-product of an increasingly programmed world

(Wilson 1985:20).

The pluralism is contained, rather than actively restrained or encouraged, by an established church which, in some ways, has gradually become marginalized from an historically evolved, but ever-more shifting establishment. It is not a pluralism of fierce competition, nor yet is it one of utter laissez faire. It is not a pluralism devoid of tension, nor yet is it one fundamentally undermined by tension. While it is a pluralism in which the dice may be historically or economically loaded, it is, nonetheless, a genuine pluralism in that it is one in which the question "who's going to win?" is not a pressing question for English society, despite the fact that it may be such for some of the society's constituents.

It is a pluralism that tallies well with the familiar metaphor of the supermarket. It is one in which geographical, occupational, and social mobility have contributed to the erosion of the ties of family and tradition. It is a pluralism that is fed by the media and the educational system, both of which, while embracing homogenizing tendencies towards a monolithic culture, also encourage seekership, the questioning, even ridiculing, of authority, and an emphasis upon the primacy of individual freedom and choice. It is a pluralism that extends, beyond a multitude of religious, spiritual, political and/or ideological choices, to a possibly more fundamental pluralism of identity.

But, while there are undoubted differences and divisions within and between the different generations of English society, there is no great fragmentation, and, except, perhaps, among the immigrant Muslim populations, there is little in the culture or the structure of contemporary England that resembles the pillarization of social life such as one would find in Holland, and, to some extent, in Northern Ireland. English Anglicans may go to Catholic convent schools, Methodists and Muslims to Church of England schools, but the vast majority of children born in postwar England have attended state schools.

There lingers, furthermore, a still-recognizable sacred canopy of British society that transcends denominational labels. While the establishment embraces Nonconformity and the Catholic church, Britons do not generally articulate their common identity as "One Nation under God"—although such rhetoric is sometimes drawn upon. Rather, the Church of England is understood as part of something else—an unarticulated jumble of 1066 and 1215, of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, of Waterloo and Dunkirk, of Celtic mysteries and vague memories of a colonial past. In a delicate tension with the pluralism, there lurks a shared culture, a shared history that defines as a single and a separate entity the island Kingdom, which is both small enough and large enough to have a dozen national Dailies. While internationalism spreads and pluralism proliferates (and the post-war generation has done much to promote such changes), establishment religions take their place as partial upholders of a wider British sacred identity that may be symbolically affirmed and celebrated at Royal Weddings, in a Falklands War¹, through Elgar at a last night of the Proms,² or in the solemn aftermath of a Hillsborough disaster.³

The Demographic Context

Given that the concept "baby boomers" is sometimes used interchangeably with "post-war generation", a brief demographic account of the crude birth-rate in the United Kingdom should be given. The generation referred to as the "baby boomers" were born in Britain not so much during a peak in the birth-rate as between two peaks (one of 20.7 per thousand of population in 1947 and another of 18.8 in 1964) which fall either side of a trough of about 15.6 in 1953. Since then, the rate has continued a long-term fall, reaching 13.4 by the late 1980s (Central Office of Information 1967:9; Economist 1990:20; and Sillitoe 1971:20). The rates have been consistently slightly lower for England and Wales, slightly higher for Scotland and considerably higher for Northern Ireland (Central Statistical Office 1972:25).

Limitations of the Data

While the main thrust of this paper concerns England, some of the data to which I shall be referring apply to Britain (including Scotland and Wales), or the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland) as a whole. No systematic study of the religious attitudes, beliefs and practices of the post-war generation in Britain has been conducted, although there are several sources providing partial information. Unfortunately, the sources tend to use different years of birth for dividing age cohorts, so precise comparisons over time are difficult, and sometimes it is not possible to separate out the whole of the post-war generation (presuming this to consist of those born between 1945 and 1965) from earlier or later generations. A further limitation in the data is due to the fact that the only occasion on which the decennial population census of the U.K. inquired about religious beliefs was in 1851.

Continuing Decline or Revitalization?

The so-called "secularization debate" seems to have been taking on a new life in England in the past few years. There has been a certain amount of speculation that the post-war generation might be returning to established religion, or at least becoming more religious in some ill-defined form. A recent television series stated that:

New evidence suggests that our religious belief, ritual and experiences are as persistent and widespread as ever and ready for a comeback.⁴

The new evidence does not, however, appear to be all that evident! Indeed, the only evidence would seem to be that some commentators have come to recognize that religion among the young is not as dead as it has sometimes been thought to be—which is doubtless true. But the fact that there are enthusiastic Pentecostalists, charismatics and evangelicals, and that there is a healthy interest in the New Age, is hardly proof that church-going or even religiosity is about to undergo a spectacular revival.

The optimism that an increase in church attendance could be around the corner is hinted at even by Peter Brierley, who, in his work for the Evangelical Alliance, the Bible Society and Marc Europe, has possibly done more than anyone to keep track of U.K. church-going figures. Prima facie, Brierley's figures (see Tables 1.2-1.4 below) would seem to point in a contrary direction, yet he writes that:

Some research has shown that these ["baby boomers"] return to churches after years away because they want to give their children a religious education and value system

(Brierley 1991a:88).

What Brierley does not point out in the text, however, is that this research was conducted in the United States—and, to confuse matters somewhat further, a few pages later he quotes the same researcher as saying that he (George Barna) believes that baby boomers "will be the first generation in the twentieth century to break the pattern in which people increasingly embrace the church as they age" (Brierley 1991a:95).

Roof (1990:17) tells us that of the two-thirds of American baby boomers who had dropped out of religious institutions for at least two years (at an average age of 19), about a third have returned (at an average age of 28, often when they have school-age children). Recently there has been some evidence that very slightly (but hardly significantly) more Americans aged between 30 and 49 are increasing their frequency of church attendance (34 percent) than are decreasing it (33 percent) (Princeton Religion Research Center 1991:3), and several of those who are increasing their attendance are quite likely to give "for our children" (18 percent) or "worship as a family" as their reason (PRRC 1991:2).

But that is America. If a similar pattern ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Post-War Generation and Establishment Religion in England
• 2 Baby Boomers Downunder: The Case of Australia
• 3 Fifty Years of Religious Change in the United States
• 4 Tradition and Change in the Nordic Countries
• 5 The Post-War Generations and Institutional Religion in Germany
• 6 The Case of the Netherlands
• 7 The Case of French Catholicism
• 8 The Surviving Dominant Catholic Church in Belgium: A Consequence of Its Popular Religious Practices?
• 9 From Institutional Catholicism to "Christian Inspiration": Another Look at Belgium
• 10 Religion and the Post-War Generation in Italy
• 11 The Orthodox Church and the Post-War Religious Situation in Greece
• 12 Conclusion: The Post-War Generation - Carriers of a New Spirituality
• About the Editors and Contributors
• References
• About the Book