The Death of Christian Britain

Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000

Callum G. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134029990
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Death of Christian Britain examines how the nation's dominant religious culture has been destroyed. Callum Brown challenges the generally held view that secularization was a long and gradual process dating from the industrial revolution. Instead, he argues that it has been a catastrophic and abrupt cultural revolution starting in the 1960s. Using the latest techniques of gender analysis, and by listening to people's voices rather than purely counting heads, the book offers new formulations of religion and secularization.

In this expanded second edition, Brown responds to commentary on his ideas, reviews the latest research, and provides new evidence to back his claims.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

This book is about the death of Christian Britain¹ — the demise of the nation's core religious and moral identity. As historical changes go, this has been no lingering and drawn-out affair. It took several centuries (in what historians used to call the Dark Ages) to convert Britain to Christianity, but it has taken less than forty years for the country to forsake it. For a thousand years, Christianity penetrated deeply into the lives of the people, enduring Reformation, Enlightenment and industrial revolution by adapting to each new social and cultural context that arose. Then, really quite suddenly in 1963, something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people, sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significance. In unprecedented numbers, the British people since the 1960s have stopped going to church, have allowed their church membership to lapse, have stopped marrying in church and have neglected to baptise their children. Meanwhile, their children, the two generations who grew to maturity in the last thirty years of the twentieth century, stopped going to Sunday school, stopped entering confirmation or communicant classes, and rarely, if ever, stepped inside a church to worship in their entire lives. The cycle of inter-generational renewal of Christian affiliation, a cycle which had for so many centuries tied the people however closely or loosely to the churches and to Christian moral benchmarks, was permanently disrupted in the “swinging sixties”. Since then, a formerly religious people have entirely forsaken organised Christianity in a sudden plunge into a truly secular condition.

This book sets out on an ambitious and probably controversial journey to understand what happened. It is not merely a chronicle of what befell the churches or the faith of the British people; nor is it a foray into conventional social history to seek social causes of declining popular religiosity; nor is it a sociology of modern British religion, or what's left of it. The story being told here is not to be found in books on “the church in crisis”, religious history or sociology of religion. What is attempted is rather different. The aim is to look at how the British people in the past — in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries — absorbed Christianity into their lives and then, from the 1960s, stopped doing so. The techniques deployed in this book are new, drawn from modern cultural theory, and they provide a fresh and different interpretation of what makes a society Christian in the first place and what happens when it dechristianises. The techniques allow us to revise the narrative of religious decline, or what is commonly called secularisation, and to appreciate anew its causes, nature and timing. What emerges is a story not merely of church decline, but of the end of Christianity as a means by which men and women, as individuals, construct their identities and their sense of “self”. This breach in British history, starting in the 1960s, is something more fundamental than just “failing churches”. What is explored and analysed is a short and sharp cultural revolution of the late twentieth century which makes the Britons of the year 2000 fundamentally different in character from those of 1950 or 1900 or 1800, or from peoples in many other countries.

There is no pleasure in proclaiming the death of Christian Britain. Some people will be able to catalogue tremendous losses — of faith, of succour in worship, of social activity in church organisations, of a sense of spirituality. There is the loss of old certainties, that fixed moral core which Britons as a whole used to recognise even when they deviated from it. Christianity was, to borrow a metaphor of one scholar, like a banister upon which a person leaned when climbing or descending stairs.² It was a fixture in our lives, conservative by instinct and little changing in nature, by which individuals knew and trusted others by their respectability in family behaviour and conformity to the Christian Sunday. On the other hand, many people will be able to identify gains from the decentring of rigid moral codes — such as increased sexual freedom and freedom for diverse sexualities, greater gender equality, and a new tolerance of religious and ethnic difference. One could say, not altogether flippantly, that the decline of Christian certainty in British society since the 1950s has meant that respectability has been supplanted by respect — in which moral criticism of difference has been replaced by toleration and greater freedom to live our lives in the way we choose.

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Britain in the year 2000 is the recent growth of ethnic diversity, largely through immigration, and the rise of a multi-faith society in which Christianity has been joined by Islam, Hinduism and the Sikh religion, amongst others. However, what has been noticeable to all observers is that the strength of attachment to other religions in Britain has not, in the main, suffered the collapse that has afflicted the bulk of the Christian churches. In the black and Asian communities of Britain, non-Christian religions are in general thriving. Moreover, one of the few sections in our society where Christian churches are thriving is in the predominantly black communities. Yet, it must be emphasised that the haemorrhage of British Christianity has not come about as a result of competition from or conversion to other churches. No new religion, no new credo, not even a state-sponsored secularism, has been there to displace it.

It is not especially novel to proclaim that the Christian churches are in decline in Britain. But what is new is the idea of the death of Christian Britain. To propose that this is possible, let alone happening or happened, will be disturbing to many people. Christians may find it controversial, especially church leaders and clergy who, despite watching the inexorable decline of members year-on-year for the last four decades, still in the main hold to an optimistic outlook for their religion. Some clergy, especially of the liberal mainstream Christian denominations, locate the future of their religion within a “multi-faith” vision of society in which ecumenism and church union introduce a new acknowledgement of the validity of religious experience and belief derived from other religious traditions. Many church-people may find the claim excessive, especially since the UK Christian Handbook suggests that in 1995 as many as 65 per cent of Britons were “Christian”.³ More widely, the death of Christian Britain will be controversial to others because the “death” of a religion has hitherto been unimagined — except when a secular socialist state, state repression, religious “reformation”, or military-supported religious imperialism has threatened a faith, none of which apply to Britain in the new millennium. It will also be controversial to a large group of scholars in the social sciences and humanities (including sociology, church history and social history) for whom the decline of religion is not something new but something very, very old. For most scholars, Christian religion in Britain, Europe and North America has been in almost constant decay for at least a century, and for some sociologists and historians for even longer — for between two hundred and five hundred years. They have imagined religious decline as one of the characteristics of the modern world, caused by the advance of reason through the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, and through the social and economic dislocation of the industrial revolution. What scholars have imagined is religious decline as a long-term process that has left today's Britons with a residual Christian belief but no churchgoing habit. In all of these cases, Christian decay in Britain has been perceived as a decline without an imagined end. This book imagines the end.

The first and most obvious manifestation is the Christian churches in crisis. In the year 2000 less than 8 per cent of people attend Sunday worship in any week, less than a quarter are members of any church, and fewer than a tenth of children attend a Sunday school. Fewer than half of couples get married in church, and about a third of couples cohabit without marriage. In England only a fifth of babies get baptised in the Church of England, and in Scotland one estimate is that about a fifth are baptised in either the Church of Scotland or the Roman Catholic Church. By some calculations, as few as 3 per cent of people regularly attend church in some counties of England, and in most the non-churchgoers represent over 90 per cent of the population. If church participation is falling, all the figures for Christian affiliation are at their lowest point in recorded history. Christian church membership accounts for less than 12 per cent of the people and is falling. There is now a severe crisis of Christian associational activity: religious voluntary organisations, which formerly mushroomed around congregations and independent missions, account for a minuscule fraction of recreational activities. Most critical is the emerging evidence of the decay of Christian belief. Though 74 per cent of people express a belief in the existence of some kind of God or “higher power”, 50 per cent or fewer subscribe to the existence of sin, the soul, heaven, hell or life after death — while the numbers having specific faith in Jesus Christ as the risen Lord are considered so statistically insignificant that opinion pollsters do not even ask the question.⁴ Whilst some non-Christian religions are growing in Britain as they are elsewhere — notably Islam and comparatively small “new religions” like Mormonism — growing religions are not filling the spiritual vacuum being deserted by Christianity.⁵

So weak are the demographics of church connection that the government is now contemplating disestablishing the Church of England (the last state church in the countries of the UK), whilst the Church of Scotland is contemplating destroying its historic status as the National Kirk by a union with three other denominations.⁶ Church authorities every week deal with the disposal of church buildings by selling them off as carpet showrooms or for conversion into “des. res.” flats, while older cathedrals and minsters survive by transformation into heritage sites for historical-religious tourism rather than religious worship.⁷ In such ways, Christianity is becoming Britain's past, not its present. The Christian churches have not only fallen in size but also in moral standing. They were once a safe and unmoveable fixture at the heart of national standards, but now confidence in the probity of church leaders is almost weekly challenged by scandal. In the last five years, at least one Catholic bishop and a seemingly endless line of priests have admitted to having sex with women, a significant minority of priests and nuns stand accused of child abuse, Protestant ministers and elders (of both sexes) are accused of extra-marital relations, gay priests are starting to “come out”, and even accusations of financial impropriety have been levelled at some clergy.⁸ To be sure, these are small minorities in each of these categories, but such public scandals are destabilising the moral certainty formerly vested in Christian churches.

Also under threat are the Christian churches as fixtures in the landscape of British institutions. Ecclesiastical statisticians are now routinely predicting the disappearance of churches. Major denominations, ranging from the Roman Catholic Church to the Church of Scotland, are short of recruits to be priests and ministers.⁹ Britain's leading church statistician, Peter Brierley, has warned that declining popular support will cause some denominations to disappear during this century. The Church of Scotland in 1997 even put a date on its own demise through membership loss — in the year 2033.¹⁰ As never before, church leaders are being forced to think the unthinkable as every statistic, and every balance sheet of income and expenditure, forces them not just to close church buildings, but to think about where this inexorable “down-sizing” is leading. Crumbs of comfort have come in the last decade from evidence that the British people still recognise the existence of God even if they do not attend church. As Grace Davie, a leading religious sociologist has put it, the people are “believing without belonging”. However, even she acknowledges that “the content of belief is drifting further and further from the Christian norm”.¹¹

The situation was not always like this, and it is surprising how recent that was. Between 1945 and 1958 there were surges of British church membership, Sunday school enrolment, Church of England Easter Day communicants, baptisms and religious solemnisation of marriage, accompanied by immense popularity for evangelical “revivalist” crusades (the most well-known being those of the American Southern Baptist preacher, Dr Billy Graham). Accompanying these was a vigorous reassertion of “traditional” values: the role of women as wives and mothers, moral panic over deviancy and “delinquency”, and an economic and cultural austerity which applauded “respectability”, thrift and sexual restraint. Not since the late Victorian period had there been such powerful evidence of a professing Christian people in Britain. Nor was Britain unique. In the United States between 1942 and 1960, popular religiosity and institutional church strength not only continued to grow, but earlier denominationalism gave way to a vigorous and inclusive religious culture which — as in Britain — nurtured conservatism and traditional values, whilst church membership per capita grew faster than at any time since the recording of statistics began in 1890.¹² In Australia, the period 1955 to 1963 has been described as a “modest religious boom” which affected every denomination across all the measurable indices of religious life, characterised by the same crusading evangelism and social conservatism as in Britain and the United States.¹³ In most regions of West Germany between 1952 and 1967 there was a modest rise in church-going amongst the Protestant population, whilst in France, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands in the 1950s a resilient religious observance underpinned confessionalist politics.¹⁴ National experiences varied greatly, and there were exceptions (notably in Scandinavia), but there is clear evidence that in the mid-twentieth century there was a significant resilience to Christianity in Britain and much of the Western world.

On a surface level, the 1950s appeared to be the beginning of our modern and contemporary condition. Britons then were appreciating the beginnings of the new technology which presaged our world of 2000: nuclear power (which went on stream in 1957), television (which spread quickly to most homes after the broadcast of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953), and labour-saving kitchen appliances (like refrigerators and modern electric cookers). The welfare state was under full construction, cities were being modernised by comprehensive town planning (slum-clearance and the building of peripheral housing estates and new towns), and there was a start being made to the expansion of higher education. But to perceive a modern “feel” to the 1950s is merely to probe skin-deep. It is a measurement made overwhelmingly in terms of things, not in terms of what the British people felt, did or thought. In its cultural climate, the 1950s was in fact a deeply old-fashioned era, so old that it has often been described as the last Victorian decade. Nearly 2 million people came to hear Billy Graham preach in London in a short religious crusade in 1954, and a further 1.2 million came in Glasgow in 1955, with 100,000 worshippers packing Hampden Park football stadium for a single religious service. Nothing like it had been seen before in British Protestantism, and nothing like it has been seen again. The mental world which produced this in the 1950s was not just a world of a tiny minority, held together by the sub-culture of a closeted and defensive Christian community. The mental world which drew in those worshippers was a national culture, widely broadcast through books, magazines and radio, and deeply ingrained in the rhetoric with which people conversed about each other and about themselves. It was a world profoundly conservative in morals and outlook, and fastidious in its adherence to respectability and moral standards. Many people may have been hypocritical, but that world made them very aware of their hypocrisy.

A vast chasm separates us from the mid-twentieth century condition. Religious statistics show how far away that world of the 1950s was from ours in the year 2000, and how much closer it was to the world of 1900. Take the types of marriage — religious or civil — which couples undertook. In 1900, 85 per cent of marriages in England and Wales (and 94 per cent in Scotland) were religiously solemnised. By 1957, 72 per cent of marriages in England and Wales (and 83 per cent in Scotland) were still by religious rites. But in the 1960s, decline was rapid. In England and Wales, religious marriage fell from 70 per cent in 1962 to 60 per cent in 1970, and continued to decline to 39 per cent in 1997. In Scotland, the fall over the same period was from 80 per cent in 1962, to 71 per cent in 1970, and then to 55 per cent in 1997. The position has been even worse for Christianity than these figures suggest, because an increasing proportion of religious nuptials has been by non-Christian rites. These statistics might appear bad for the state of religious marriage, but in the year 2000 they actually constitute the highest indicator of religiosity there is. All the other measures of Christian activity and adherence are markedly worse in both absolute terms and in terms of rate of decline. Take the proportion of infants baptised in the nation's largest Christian church, the Church of England. Out of every 1,000 live births, 609 baptisms were performed in the Church in 1900; by 1927 the proportion had actually risen to 668, the highest ever, and even by 1956 the figure was 602. But then it fell dramatically — to 466 in 1970, 365 in 1981 and 228 in 1997. Or take the level of church membership in the population at large. Between the 1840s (when data become available) and the year 2000, the best estimates indicate that the peak year of church adherence per head of population came in 1904 for England and Wales and 1905 for Scotland. After some decline over the next forty ...