The Growth of Religious Diversity - Vol 1

Britain from 1945 Volume 1: Traditions

Gerald Parsons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781138467088
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135088958
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: British History

This two-volume set considers the role and significance of religion in post-war Britian, focusing, in particular, upon the closely inter-related themes of the decline of a specifically `Christian Society' and the emergence of a culturally and religiously plural society. Three core questions are examined in depth: to what extent and in what ways has religion remained a significant factor in British culture and society in the period since 1945?, what role does religion play in interpreting and understanding the development of a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society in post-war Britain?, and to what extent has Britain remained (or ceased to be) a `religious society' during this period.
Volume 1: Traditions analyses the history and development of the major religious groups present in Britain in the period since 1945. The major religious traditions examined include the traditional Christian churches, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Afro-Caribbean religious groups, New Religious Movements, and the `implicit' religion of the `silent majority' who remain detached from organised religion but are by no means simply secular.
Volume 2: Controversies explores some of the challenges, tensions and controversies presented by the emergence of an increasingly religiously plural society in Britain since 1945. In particular, it focuses on the impact of religious pluralism on both the Christian churches and other religious traditions, the relationship between communal and national `identities' and religion, women and religion, and the relationship between religion and changing attitudes to personal - and especially sexual - morality.

1

CONTRASTS AND CONTINUITIES: THE TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN CHURCHES IN BRITAIN SINCE 1945

by Gerald Parsons

Inauguration of the Council of Churches of Britain and Ireland in Liverpool, 9 September 1990. From the left: Archbishop Worlock, Bishop Sheppard and John Newton. Photograph by Carlos Reyes-Manzo, Andes Press Agency.

William Temple’s The Church Looks Forward (1944) makes a convenient starting point. There Temple, looking to the post-war situation, advocated as the ideal an integrated society on a coherent Christian pattern. He argued that ‘the Church’ – for him essentially the Church of England – had the right to lay down the principles which should govern the ordering of human society…

(Kent, 1980, p.73)

Whether in the global scale or just within the confines of these islands off the shore of Western Europe, Christians have to live with religious pluralism … Like most of the other countries of the old Christian ‘heartlands’ Britain is now a ‘multi-faith’ society.

(Cracknell, 1990, p.129)

The subject of this essay is the changing nature, position and experience of the traditional Christian churches of Britain between the late 1940s and the early 1990s. As the two quotations above suggest, central to that experience was the transition from a social and cultural context in which it could still make considerable sense to speak of Britain as ‘a Christian society’ to one in which Christianity was simply the largest religious tradition within a thoroughly religiously plural society. This essay will focus on the group of Christian churches – Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Congregational and Roman Catholic – which primarily constituted that tradition in the latter decades of the twentieth century.

This is not to deny that there were also other well-established groups in Britain during this period representative of the Christian tradition, broadly defined. Thus, for example, such diverse groups as the Salvation Army, the Pentecostalists, the Brethren, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Quakers, and the Unitarians were also significant elements in the overall Christian presence. Such groups, however, as well as having to some extent distinctive or unorthodox beliefs or forms of organization, were also numerically considerably smaller than the major denominations noted in the opening paragraph. Thus, in 1970, just over half-way through the period under review, whilst the total membership of the Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Congregational and Roman Catholic churches in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland was calculated as 8,058,697, the total membership of all the other Christian denominations together was only 723,158 – a figure that included not only the groups listed above but also the various Eastern Orthodox churches present in Britain and the rapidly growing community of Black-led churches (Davie, 1990a, p.398). On both grounds therefore – the combination of relatively small size and the tendency to distinctiveness of belief or organization of such groups – the present essay will focus upon the numerically predominant Christian churches of post-war Britain. In so doing it will address what may reasonably be called the ‘mainstream’ of traditional British Christianity.¹

As the title of the essay implies, a study of the post-war history of the major Christian denominations of modern Britain reveals both the emergence of significant contrasts and the maintenance of marked continuities. Indeed, so crucial is this tension between change and continuity that it is appropriate to begin with two very broad characterizations of the churches’ positions in, respectively, the late 1940s and the early 1990s.

In the late 1940s the religious life of Britain was still principally defined by the traditional denominational structures and identities – Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Congregationalist and Roman Catholic – of modern British Christianity. The presence within British society of other religious groups notwithstanding, in the context of the late 1940s discussion of the place and status of ‘religion in Britain’ would still characteristically have assumed that this meant, for all practical purposes, discussion of Christianity as represented by these major denominations. They provided the dominant features of the religious landscape; their presence and influence constituted the overwhelming bulk of the religious life and the religious activity of immediately post-war Britain. Moreover, the status of such ‘traditional’ or ‘mainstream’ Christianity was endorsed implicitly and maintained by the religious aspects of the 1944 Education Act. True, that Act, even as it required that the school day should begin with a collective act of worship and that religious instruction according to an Agreed Syllabus be given regularly to all pupils, did not actually specify what religion was thus to be presented. But in practice the conferences which defined each Agreed Syllabus did not make provision for the representation of faiths other than Christianity, and it is clear that it was assumed tacitly that a generalized form of Christianity – non-denominational, but definitely ‘mainstream’ – was what the Act envisaged. It was also what it produced (Cox and Cairns, 1989, pp.2–4).

It is possible to argue that, because the religious education thus provided was so unspecific and undoctrinal, in the long run it weakened the position of traditional Christianity in British society (Hastings, 1991, p.421), but the assumption of the Act was quite the opposite. As well as recognizing pragmatically that undenominational teaching was necessary if inter-denominational rivalry over the Education Act was to be avoided, the Act also assumed that the presentation of an undenominational Christianity in schools would make sense to children against the background of the more specific teachings provided by the churches. In fact, this assumption was already inaccurate and unrealistic (Cox and Cairns, 1989, pp.3–4), but in the present context it is the general confidence in the validity of the assumption in the mid to late 1940s that is significant.

Religious broadcasting in the immediately post-war period offers another pertinent illustration of the position of mainstream Christianity. In the late 1940s the religious output of the BBC was firmly Christian – and indeed predominantly Anglican, though not exclusively so. It is true that by the close of that decade this religious ‘monopoly’ was beginning to encounter steadily mounting pressure for wider religious representation in BBC broadcasting, but in the late 1940s, unorthodox or non-believing opinion was still strictly limited and controlled in broadcasts. The traditional mainstream Christian position was carefully shown in a consistently good light, opposition to it being held within what were deemed respectable and safe limits (Wolfe, 1984, chs 25, 26).

The social and cultural position of the churches was thus protected. The principal challenges then perceived were the decline in numbers of active church members; the secular assumptions of an intellectual establishment, many (but by no means all) of whose members were selfconsciously and often overtly unbelieving; and, perhaps most significantly, the recognition of widespread indifference or at best benevolent neutrality towards religion and especially towards the specifically doctrinal or theological dimensions of belief. As a Mass Observation survey of a London borough concluded in 1947, whilst actual hostility towards religion was not widespread and ‘an attitude of “goodwill” towards the idea of religion and religious faith’ was apparent, this frequently co-existed with a ‘hostile attitude towards the Church, and a personal religious faith of an exceedingly vague and unorthodox kind’.

To very many religion has come to mean little more than being kind and neighbourly, doing good when opportunity arises. Belief in the Golden Rule, common factor of numerous religious and ethical systems, persists, but without the sanction of faith, or any other sanction than habit and vague memories of childhood teaching.

(Mass Observation, 1947, p. 157)

This was not a new situation. The roots of just such a widespread but diffusive pattern of belief can be traced at least to the later decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century – as the churches themselves had long been aware (Parsons, 1988a). In the late 1940s, however, the churches could confront such challenges in good heart, confident that their traditional denominational structures remained adequate to address the post-war situation. The founding of the British Council of Churches in 1942 had already signalled the beginning of an ecumenical cooperation between the churches which would become increasingly prominent in the post-war period, but in the late 1940s British Christianity remained firmly denominational. Denominational identities were still clearly, even fiercely, defined, especially in the case of Roman Catholicism which fostered a self-consciously separate sub-culture. The various denominations worshipped in distinctive ways. The ethos of the various churches remained distinct and definable, and denominational loyalties strong.

Comparison of this state of affairs with that which pertained in the early 1990s is revealing – of both continuities and contrasts. Denominational structures still remained important. For all the intense ecumenical efforts of the intervening half-century, and despite an immense growth in inter-denominational co-operation, most of the schemes for actual union had failed. And yet, if denominational structures and identities thus survived, for the most part at least they did so in a quite different overall context. By the late 1980s the traditional denominations had become something like partners – some more prominent, some less – in an unofficial ‘ecumenical establishment’. Increasingly, in seeking to speak to society (as opposed to addressing their own members), the churches spoke less as individual denominations and more as a community of traditional Christian churches. Similarly, their worship and their theologies, though still retaining individual emphases, had moved much closer together and now looked more like one another than ever would have been imaginable in 1945.

Indeed, by the late 1980s – and for some time before that – the most important differences within the community of traditional Christian churches in Britain appeared to lie not between denominations but across them. They lay, for example, between those with evangelical, ‘born-again’ and charismatic ‘spirit-filled’ spiritualities and those who remained more conventional and less effusive in their faith and worship. Or again, they lay in the contrast between those whose faith and theology were conservative and whose beliefs were traditional, and those whose faith, theology and beliefs were, in one way or another, liberal, radical or politicized – be it by, for example, a critical and liberal attitude to the Bible and the Christian tradition, by feminism, or by a conviction that radical political action was an essential element of Christian faith. Or, again, there were divisions between those for whom issues of personal, and especially sexual, morality were resolved on strict and traditional lines by an appeal to the biblical text or the traditional teaching of the church, and those for whom such issues were more ambiguous, more open to personal choice, more susceptible to ‘modern’ and ‘permissive’ solutions.

All these issues cut decisively across the traditional denominational divisions of British Christianity. By the early 1990s it was no longer possible, as it would have been forty years earlier, to give even a tolerably clear definition of the nature of each traditional denomination. Whilst each retained important elements of its traditional ethos, each had also moved closer to an ecumenical middle ground and at the same time had tended to become increasingly internally diverse as radical, evangelical, traditionalist, charismatic, feminist, liberal and ecumenical emphases and interest groups competed for attention and influence. Increasingly, charismatics, feminists or theological liberals (or any other sub-group one might choose) might find more in common with fellow charismatics, feminists or liberals in another denomination than with other members of their own denomination who did not share their particular charismatic, feminist or liberal orientation.

And whilst all this went on within the traditional Christian churches, their overall context within British society and culture had also changed. On the one hand there had been a significant decline in numbers of churchgoers, clergy and churches. For example, membership of the major denominations fell from just over 8 million in 1970 to just over 6 million in 1987. The total for other denominations had, meanwhile, risen from some 723,000 to 835,528 (Davie, 1990a, p.398). Moreover, there had also been a decline in the churches’ status within society. They remained significant in national life, and conventional institutional religion remained one of the most popular voluntary activities. But that whole cultural context, in which to discuss ‘religion in Britain’ was essentially to discuss the major Christian denominations, was now quite gone.

By the early 1990s informed discussion of ‘religion in Britain’ would still include the traditional churches, but now as only one element in a much wider variety of religious groups and traditions. Religion in Britain in the early 1990s included well-established Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities; an assortment of New Religious Movements and New Age philosophies and spiritualities; and, within the Christian tradition itself, both new and expanding Black-led churches and local and independent evangelical churches, which stood outside the structures of conventional British Christianity and seemed to possess a marked capacity for growth in notable contrast to the decline evident in most of the traditional denominations. Religion in Britain in the early 1990s was a much more complex and richly diversified phenomenon than it had been in the late 1940s – and even if the Christian churches, taken together, continued to constitute by far the largest single religious tradition in British society, such diversification inevitably transformed their position within the overall pattern and structure of British religious life.

The changed circumstances were reflected in the religious broadcasting of the BBC and attitudes towards religious education. Religious broadcasting by the BBC was no longer exclusively Christian, nor geared to the promotion of an exclusively favourable view of Christianity. Indeed, from as early as 1977, the official objective of BBC religious broadcasting had been redefined as: ‘to seek to reflect the worship, thought and action of the principal religious traditions represented in Britain, recognizing that those traditions are mainly, but not exclusively Christian’ (Annan, 1977, p.319). The position concerning religious education was more ambiguous but no less revealing. The 1988 Education Reform Act sought to clarify and make more specific the clauses of the 1944 Education Act concerning religious education. The 1988 Act required that the religious education provided in state schools should ‘reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian, whilst taking into account the teaching and practices of the other principal religions represented in Great Britain’. It also reiterated the requirement for a daily act of worship and stipulated that this worship should be ‘wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character’ (Cox and Cairns, 1989, pp.27, 33). There are two significant points here. Firstly, unlike the 1944 Act, even as it asserts the priority of Christianity, the 1988 Act explicitly requires recognition of other religious traditions as well. Secondly, despite such recognition, the passing of the Act caused considerable controversy because of the prominence it gave to Christianity. It was, indeed, a far cry from the easy ‘Christian’ assumptions of the 1944 Act.²

Such thumbnail sketches of the position of the traditional Christian churches at the beginning and end of the period under review are, inevitably, impressionistic and incomplete. Nevertheless, they convey something of the tension between change and continuity within the principal British churches during the post-war period and thus also provide a starting point for closer study. It is impossible in a single essay to trace in detail the processes of change and continuity within each of the individual Christian denominations of post-war Britain. Instead, in the present essay we will examine the post-war history and experience of the traditional Christian churches in Britain in three main stages.

Firstly, we will examine the case of the Roman Catholic church in postwar Britain and will suggest that the transformations that occurred in this tradition, though particularly striking and profound, were in fact indicative of much wider patterns of change which affected most of the traditional Christian churches in this period. Secondly, we will examine developments in the other main churches of post-war Britain. Third and finally, we will identify a number of key trends which have affected the traditional churches in general during this period, and in so doing will return to the question of the contrasts between and the continuities within the situations in which the traditional British churches found themselves in the late 1940s and the early 1990s.

1 ‘Into the mainstream’: Roman Catholicism in post-war Britain

At first sight, it would seem improbable that the history of the Roman Catholic church in post-war Britain might provide a viable and helpful framework for the interpretation of the history of the traditional British churches in general in this period. After all, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are traditionally ‘Protestant’ countries – not, of course, exclusively, but predominantly so, and by very clear majorities in each case. Thus, English Protestantism is traditionally d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: persistence, pluralism and perplexity
• 1 Contrasts and continuities: the traditional Christian churches in Britain since 1945
• 2 Integrated but insecure: a portrait of Anglo-Jewry at the close of the twentieth century
• 3 Fragmented universality: Islam and Muslims
• 4 Hindu dharma in dispersion
• 5 Old allies, new neighbours: Sikhs in Britain
• 6 Filling a void? Afro-Caribbean identity and religion
• 7 Expanding the religious spectrum: New Religious Movements in Modern Britain
• 8 The religions of the silent majority
• Index