Death of Christian Britain : Understanding Secularisation, 1800-2000

by Brown; Callum G.

• ISBN13: 9780415241847
• ISBN10: 0415241847
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-01-25
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The Death of Christian Britianexamines how the nation's core religious culture has been destroyed. It challenges the generally held view that secularisation has been a long and gradual process beginning with the industrial revolution, and instead proposes that it has been a catastrophic and abrupt cultural revolution starting in the 1960s This book explores what it has meant to be 'religious' and 'irreligious' during the last 200 years. The concept of secularisation was created by Enlightenment rationality and scientific method, and led to the Victorian obsession with counting churchgoers and non-churchgoers which endures in today's focus on the 'church in crisis'. Brown challenges this approach by shifting attention from statistics to the media, demonstrating that from 1800 to 1960 people drew on novels, magazines, obituaries and tracts for the Christian language, morality and narrative structures with which to tell their own life stories in autobiography and oral history. But this personalChristian identity broke down suddenly in the 'swinging sixties' when new media, new gender roles and the moral revolution dramatically ended people's conception that they lived Christian lives. The Death of Christian Britianuses the latest techniques to offer new formulations of religion and secularisation. By listening to people's voices rather than purely counting heads, it offers a fresh history of de-christianization, and predicts that the British experience since the 1960s is emblematic of the destiny of the whole of western Christianity.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vii
Acknowledgements	viii
Abbreviations	x
Note on oral history	xi
Introduction	1	(15)
The problem with `religious decline'	16	(19)
The world we have lost	16	(2)
The myth of the unholy city	18	(12)
Envisioning religion	30	(5)
The salvation economy	35	(23)
The privatisation of faith	35	(4)
The salvation revolution	39	(4)
The salvation industry	43	(15)
Angels: women in discourse and narrative 1800-1950	58	(30)
The feminisation of piety	58	(1)
Evangelical sources for discourses on female piety	59	(10)
Telling stories about women	69	(10)
Evangelical narratives in the secular women's press	79	(9)
Healthens: men in discourse and narrative 1800-1950	88	(27)
The problem of male religiosity	88	(10)
The problematic piety of even holy men	98	(7)
Telling stories about men	105	(3)
Evangelical narratives on men in the secular press	108	(7)
Personal testimony and religion 1800-1950	115	(30)
Memory, discourse and identity	115	(3)
The evangelical narrative structure	118	(9)
Women's narratives	127	(9)
Men's narratives	136	(4)
Religious symbol and motif	140	(5)
`Unimpeachable witnesses': the statistics of `Christian progress' 1800-1950	145	(25)
Urbanisation and religiosity	145	(4)
Class and religiosity	149	(7)
Gender and religosity	156	(5)
Long-run change in British religiosity	161	(9)
The 1960s and secularisation	170	(23)
Return to piety 1945-58	170	(5)
The sixties' discourse revolution	175	(6)
Secular life narratives	181	(6)
The demise of Christian religion	187	(6)
The end of a long story	193	(6)
Notes	199	(34)
Sources	233	(16)
Index	249