The decline of religion in sometime Protestant Britain is a matter of serious historical interest not because Britain is still a world power, but because it was the first country to enter modernity through the furnaces of the first industrial revolution and now lies with sometime Protestant Holland close to the epicenter of northwest European secularity. Interestingly the British pattern is reflected in Australasia, above all in New Zealand, which is England and Scotland geographically “upside down.” The other two closely affiliated societies, the U.S. and Canada, are sufficiently different in their religious patterns to continue to intrigue historians and sociologists working on comparative trajectories of secularization.
The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c.1920–1960
Cambridge University Press
342 pages
$53.99
Nearly half a century has passed since I first raised questions about secularization as a universal trend and almost as long since I proposed a delimited theory of secularization pointing to sharply varied historical patterns even in its Western European epicenter. Since then the debate has shifted back and forth, with contributions in Britain by scholars like Grace Davie stressing mutation and the exceptional character of “secular Europe,” or Steve Bruce (like Simon Green in his new book, following Bryan Wilson) stressing irreversible and potentially universal decline and religious privatization, or analyses of contemporary spirituality by scholars like Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas. Something depends on how broadly you define religion, and much depends on how wide you cast your net back in time and across cultures globally. However you look at it, Britain offers a major instance, either of the universal fate awaiting religion as a significant social force everywhere, or else of peculiar features shared with much of northwestern Europe. The debate could hardly be more fundamental.
Simon Green is a historian writing about the institutional death of Protestantism, particularly in its Puritan form as the most characteristic expression of English religion during the period between 1920 and 1960. The death of Protestantism more broadly understood, as distinct from the Puritan variants that made such an impact in the mid-17th and mid-19th century, refers to a creed mostly dominant from the 1570s on, and defining Britain as a nation, above all in its wars with France. Both Protestantism and Puritanism in Wales and Scotland eventually followed the English trajectory, but these countries only play supporting roles in the text.
Green is not writing about the death of Protestantism as such in England, let alone the death of religion or God. There is still much active religion in England, more Catholic and more diverse than before, with a mixture of superstition and magic that has once more come to the surface rather than remaining a subterranean presence. His argument could profitably be supplemented by an important book by Christie Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain (2004), and by George Dangerfield’s classic account of The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935). Dangerfield’s Liberal England died around 1920, at the beginning of Green’s chosen period, and Christie Davies’ Moral Britain (referring to a demanding and disciplined moral regime) was moribund by the 1960s.
For Green all these changes are connected, and the best place to begin is the mutation in British politics that occurred after World War I, because that was the moment when religious divides ceased closely to correspond to political divides and therefore lost the capacity seriously to affect political strategies. The Liberal Party, acting as the vehicle of the Nonconformist conscience and of what had once been Nonconformist grievances, gave way to a multidenominational Labour party and a multidenominational Conservative party, and the cancer of Irish Catholic nationalism in the Westminster Parliament was removed by the formation of the Irish Free State. The Labour Party harbored little of the anti-clerical sentiment found in Europe, partly because its program could be seen as Christianity in action, for example in the persons of politicians like the Methodist Arthur Henderson, but also because some of the historical roots of Labour lay in Scots and Welsh Protestantism and because in some key industrial areas Labour had to be sensitive towards a (largely Irish) Catholic vote.
Green concludes that by the end of World War II, membership in a church, and/or moral prudence, ceased to matter all that much for a career in politics, though some famous “gangsters” like Lloyd George and Churchill had always survived the “Puritan spirit” articulated by Baldwin. In Green’s view the motivation, organization, and even the language of politics became de-Christianized. Secular politics took over until by 2000, politics had gone the way of religion. Both sets of institutions were failing to inspire long-term commitment and experiencing the effects of privatization, even though churches were increasingly active in social comment and critique. All this may suggest that the difficulties experienced by religion in Britain were not unique but shared with other institutions requiring long-term commitment. Perhaps there was a crisis for all kinds of belief, not unconnected with what Pope Benedict criticized as a pervasive relativism. Of course, some developments that came to fruition in and after the Sixties lie outside Green’s time period, such as the influence of secular elites in an expanding and reorganized education system and a centralized media, and the romantic assumptions undergirding pop music and youth culture.
As a consequence of the disappearance of the Irish Catholics, of the decline of English Nonconformity, and of social and legal changes that made the Church more autonomous, the Anglican Church between the wars emerged as more capable of representing England than for centuries. At least part of the Church was in tune with the shift toward the politics of welfare, beginning on the Conservative side with Neville Chamberlain. That shift was articulated in the copec Conference of 1924, in the attempt of Archbishop Davidson to broker industrial peace in 1926, in the “religion of the Incarnation” as promoted by people like Charles Gore, and in the work of Tawney and Temple. The Church objectified the coming moral consensus today represented by the National Health Service. Those who felt the Church was slavishly following an unfortunate trend, like the mordant Dean Inge, could not claim to be representative, though in an extended chapter on Inge, Green offers a sympathetic portrait of him as a churchman who understood the sapping of a specifically institutional religion, and as a public intellectual and journalist who embraced what were then progressive causes, like eugenics.
The limits of Anglican influence were later revealed after World War II once it tried to differ from that consensus, for example when Archbishop Fisher attacked Premium Bonds. Arguably Fisher’s successful attempt to discourage the marriage of the Queen’s sister to a divorced person, reinforced as it was by political reasons, was a pyrrhic victory, because it focused a general realization that a specifically ecclesiastical morality could not and should not be mandatory for the royal family, let alone the whole society. It also focused on a symbiosis between monarchy and Church that could become problematic if the royal family lost its iconic status, as it did in the Eighties.
The churches also became more ecumenical, perhaps seeing the need to hang together or hang separately, or perhaps because of interdenominational contacts through the work of the scm, and Green shows in a further chapter how one of the fruits of ecumenism matured in the passing of the 1944 Butler Education Act, effectively bringing to an end the most protracted ecclesiastical dispute of Edwardian and late Victorian England.
Curiously the point where the Church of England took on this representative role roughly coincided with a moment when the modest religious stability that had continued during and after World War I entered another period of decline, if we take the figures for electoral rolls between 1924 and 1960, and it was a decline paralleled by the membership figures for the main Free Church bodies. These trends were not really broken even by the supposed postwar “revival” identified by Callum Brown, including the much-publicized Billy Graham campaigns. The Roman Catholic Church of mid-century Britain was a different matter: growing, younger, and peaking at around 15 percent, until it too stagnated in the last third of the century, first in Britain and then in its Irish stronghold. Roy Foster has described the undermining of Catholic political and cultural dominance in Ireland, above all in Dublin, as the “Protestantization” of Ireland.
When the bumpy decline of the institutions of a Protestant England began has been endlessly debated. Though the high point of affiliation was reached in 1905, the decline in the fortunes of Protestant churches goes back to the 1880s. The data for 1920 to 1960 are clear, and so perhaps are the proximate historical causes, but the large-scale and long-term causes identified by sociologists remain disputable. Perhaps the most telling statistics relate to the declining ratio of Anglican clergy to people, which signaled a crisis for the parish, and the dropping of Sunday school enrollments by more than half between 1930 and 1960, which meant the sources of future adult members were much diminished. Of course, it was always the case that most Sunday school students failed to become active adult Christians, but the Sunday school was the most important single source of a diffuse biblical Protestantism. If one had to identify other sources, they would include female primary school teachers, ancillary organizations like the Scouts, and other youth organizations, like the Methodist Association of Youth Clubs.
But these are only the statistical signs. For the cumulative and multi-form historical influences, Green turns to the doleful data of in-depth surveys by people like Gorer, and above all Rowntree’s pathbreaking (and initially much criticized) English Life and Leisure of 1951. Rowntree concluded that by 1950, the visible decline of the churches had been accompanied by an “instinctive” de-Christianization that had reduced those holding recognizably New Testament beliefs to a smallish minority, though the kind of poll data available in the Sixties suggested majority agreement with the absolute basics, supposing those data were to be trusted. The issues Green passes under review in the wake of these surveys include the declining educational difference between clergy and laity, a declining clerical status, a dislike of “paid religion pushers,” and the importance of alternative ways of spending leisure time, especially on the weekend, as well as passive participation by radio.
There was another more imponderable issue lurking here: affluence, with free time to be spent in increasingly varied ways, including crime. When it comes to crime, it is perhaps worth recollecting that the criminologist Christie Davies breaks ranks with established opinion to suppose there is a negative link between religious vitality and crime, just as some others dare to discern a positive link between religion and altruism. The impact of affluence on Protestantism can be put down to a shift from a moral economy of scarcity, for which personal indulgence (gambling, alcoholism) was morally outrageous, to a moral economy of modest abundance, for which it was merely stupid. But then one wonders why Protestantism flourishes in the outrageous abundance of Dallas. A factor has one consequence in one cultural context and quite another where circumstances are different.
Similar complex judgments are in play when assessing a shift from self-discipline or self-denial to self expression, with all that might involve for marriage ties in an era when death dallied for longer than previously and contraception loosened inhibitions. Just how moral was moral England in the past when conditions were vastly different, say in 1820? How Christian was the language of politicians in the time of Fox, Pitt, Melbourne, and Palmerston? All this is to ignore the impact of New Testament criticism, of Darwinism, and of the much-touted implication of religion in violence. The average sensual person might conclude in a confused way that the Bible was not “Gospel Truth,” and as often deployed to bolster war and intolerance as peace on earth and goodwill.
These varied historical influences were cumulative, and might provide most of what we need to know. However, sociology not only refers to the fine grain of history but also cites generalized trends or grand processes with a different intellectual genealogy, like bureaucratic rationalization, privatization, the breakdown of community, social differentiation (the increasing autonomy of social spheres like education and welfare from religious aegis), and individualization. It then sets them in the comparative perspective, first of all in Northern Europe, where similar trends are apparent, and the U.S., where similar conditions obtain, except for a church-state establishment and geopolitical decline, and yet religion flourishes at a much higher level of vitality in spite of some downturns since the 1990s. As Grace Davie has argued, Establishment may well have the effect of turning the Church into a service station, and involving it in the slow collapse of older social formations. In Britain those unable to identify themselves religiously belonged to emerging groups unable to place themselves in the old system socially, apart from members of an older working class, especially the men, for whom the culture of the Church was simply alien. (Green shows that the skew of the faithful toward women, and the single, widowed, or divorced, may well go back a century and a half.)
Of the sociological grand processes, the importance once assigned to “rationalizing bureaucracy” and “rationalization” is in doubt, but there is some consensus about the consequences of individualization and of social differentiation. Most observers agree about the effect an accent on individual autonomy and subjective judgment has on religious authority, and indeed on authority of all kinds, including political and (in some contexts) academic and scientific. The task of sociologist and historian alike is to integrate processes like social differentiation with such cumulative historical changes as social and geographical mobility, new media, alternative sources of leisure and welfare, a vague sense that science provides our only salvation, and so on. There are also middle-range conclusions emerging from cross cultural comparisons, for example between England and Holland. In both countries the decline in Catholicism came later than the Protestant decline, and Protestantism experienced something of an evangelical upsurge. But a danger point was reached for all religious minorities, like the English Free Churches and the Catholics in Holland and England, when they succeeded in gaining parity and had no further grievances to galvanize them. Another conclusion from cross-cultural comparison would be that in polities with centralized media and communications, the resistant peripheries gradually conform to the center, whether Brittany to Paris or North Wales to London.
Green points to wider historical problems that confront any sociologist anxious to take long-term and contemporary global history seriously. Historians disagree and change their minds about religion in the 20th century, for example, Callum Brown’s assertions about a postwar revival up to 1956, as well as about religion in the past, for example, arguments about whether England was all that “Christian” between 1680 and 1830, and whether 19th-century industrialization ushered in the first breakdown of religiously based communal bonds or a “second confessional phase” when competing churches mobilized themselves as successful associations. Yet maybe different degrees of industrialization make a distinctive impact: Finland, for example, has a much smaller sector of the completely unattached than Britain.
By way of an epilogue, I want lightly to sketch in some of the elements that would need to be covered in taking the story on a half century from the Sixties to the present day. One element could be covered from the data summarized in Steve Bruce’s recent book Secularization. This is a trenchant restatement of the standard argument focusing on the British case and the decline of the religion that once defined the nation. He shows that the numerical trends regarding Christian belief and practice identified by Green have continued up to the present, less through defection than failure to recruit. About these trends there is no argument. The churches remain a definable subsector of British society, but much diminished in size and heavily tilted toward the older age groups. For Bruce, Britons simply lost interest in Christianity, a conclusion that parallels suggestions that the Dutch did not so much reject Christianity as drift away out of boredom. Parents did not care enough to encourage the continuing involvement of their children. Football practice on Sunday morning or war games on the internet won.
The influences that have brought this situation about from the Sixties on are much like those identified for the earlier period by Green. I have myself argued that attitudes visible among the British elites right back in the 1880s shifted down the social scale with increasing affluence and alternative sources of leisure, to take off first in the interwar period and then again in the Sixties, with the emergence of a vast youth culture. Bruce restates the standard observation that mobility and social mixing of various kinds, especially “marrying out,” undermine the religious subcultures that held up quite well in the mid-19th century. One aspect of that mixing was highlighted in wartime as women were deployed to do the work of men, and this trend has continued. Women’s roles, and the opportunities open to them as to how they spend their time, have been greatly altered and expanded, and the patriarchal attitudes in churches have not increased the enthusiasm of women for active involvement.
Meanwhile, as suggested earlier, the restructuring of education and the media have meant that the resources for reproducing a Protestant verbal culture have been depleted, and those younger people who have gone into the dominant contemporary visual media have been disproportionately “secular” in the Sixties style. One consequence has been the triumph of image-making over both the extended political speech and the sermon, and even perhaps over the lecture. Paradoxically, the very rapid expansion of British universities has meant that the decline in the authority of religion and of politics has been matched by a crisis in the humanities. Just as the Church offers a comprehensive coverage, and just as politics is centralized, so the universities are now an integrated state-controlled system, and all three spheres are unprotected by the teeming variety and pluralism found in the U.S.
There is some debate about what weight to assign to data showing that over two-thirds of British people today still identify themselves as Christian. About religion as such, people are ambivalent. On the one hand, they welcome the voluntary work undertaken by religious bodies and regard churches as “social capital.” Indeed, governments want “faith groups” to play an even greater role as “social capital” in the voluntary sector just when their resources and personnel have been depleted. On the other hand, global events have led to an increasing perception of serious faith as leading to serious trouble, and this is fed by aggressive secularist propaganda, some of it going so far as to argue that parents should not be allowed to pass on faith to their children, and that “divisive” faith schools should not be accepted as part of the education system.
Politically, the Anglican Church played an important role in the critique of Margaret Thatcher, especially in the mid-Eighties when the opposition parties were in disarray. Oddly enough, Thatcher was one of the few major postwar politicians to care what Protestantism was about, though her favorite spokesman on social and moral issues was the chief rabbi, given the hostile political orientation of the churches. For their part, the organs of the churches (less so perhaps, the ordinary lay members) maintained an alliance with welfare as understood on the liberal Left and also produced muchdiscussed critical reports on (for example) “Faith and the City,” ecological stability, financial greed, the just war, and nuclear war. None of the churches favored the Iraq war. Moreover, the established Church provided an umbrella for religious minorities, something that many Muslims appreciated, though on more than one occasion it meant that then-Archbishop Rowan Williams was lampooned in the popular press and advised to “get his head out of the Qu’ran.” To that extent the religious voice in Britain, usually ecumenical, is heard and very far from being privatized.
However, to be heard is not necessarily to be heeded, and though in the more intimate spheres of life governments might in a rather utilitarian way stress the importance of stable family life, in practice social mores go their own way. A church racked by arguments about sexuality and the role of women in the sacred ministry is exposed to ridicule: hence the difficulties dogging Williams’ leadership in the Anglican Church. Certainly female ordination has made a major contribution to maintaining the parish system and to the quality of ordinands. To the extent that churches are identified with the restrictive regulation of personal behavior, legal or otherwise, they are ignored (at best) or strongly condemned.
David Martin is the author of On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Ash-gate); his most recent book is The Education of David Martin: The Making of an Unlikely Sociologist (SPCK/Regent College). He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
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