The Death of Christian Britain 1800-2000

Callum Brown published this provocative book in 2001 and a second edition came out in 2009. His thesis is that Christian Britain died in 1963 - more or less. At that point, or at least after 1960, people stopped going to church. The Christian 'bulge' of about 1947-60 stopped dramatically and everything seemed to be up for grabs.

(Interestingly, a recent programme about the early 1960s satire programme TW3 backed this up when it was said that content that would have been unthinkable 'just a year ago' was suddenly OK on TV. Something happened very suddenly in the early 1960s).

But it was not at all just about people stopping going to church. What Brown calls 'discursive Christianity' wained dramatically and Britain stopped being a Christian culture. Christianity lost its guiding role; conformity to its morality, its rituals and its values was not only questioned as never before but abandoned.

Brown's more arguable point is that the main factor was the change in the role of women. When they stopped being 'Christian', then society stopped being Christian. Cause and effect are difficult to disentangle here. It seems to me there were other deeper causative factors at work of which 'women's lib' was only one consequence.

Of course Brown, being a sociologist, cannot allow (and gives no hint of believing in anyway) spiritual influences or the possibility of God's providence overruling all. But the study is a thought-provoking one. One interesting feature is the attention he draws to the fact that up to about 1800 piety was predominantly 'masculine' - the man was the typical saint, women followed or at worst were temptresses. During the 19th century, particularly in the influential popular fiction of the era, piety was feminised. The woman became virtuous, vice was male. The home was the place where the female angel ruled ( paintings of angels became predominantly female, he says, in this century - up to that time they had been male or androgynous). Men went to church now, if at all, out of convention or hypocrisy, struggling against the demons that were more natural to them.

Well, it is all arguable, but it is interesting how commonly the Christian virtues are looked upon as rather feminine and, to men, rather boring; vice is far more exciting.

What happened in Victorian England was it seems a reduction in the sense of the seriousness of sin. Vice and virtue were measured behaviourally and superficially - as what men do (drunkenness, gambling, sex etc ) and what what women do (look after children, suffer patiently, look after the home, be kind etc) respectively.

A more radical view of sin avoids these caricatures. Sin is in the woman as much as in the man. Vice is first in our attitude to God; virtue is first in our returning to him.