Britain's Last Religious Revival?

Quantifying Belonging, Behaving, and Believing in the Long 1950s

C. Field

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137512536
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

This is a major contribution to scholarly debates on the chronology and nature of secularization in modern Britain. Combining historical and social scientific insights, it analyses a range of statistical evidence for the 'long 1950s', testing (and largely rejecting) Callum Brown's claims that there was a religious resurgence during this period.

1

Introduction

Abstract: This introductory chapter summarizes the recent historiography of secularization in modern Britain, including Callum Brown’s claims for religious resurgence during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The gloomier assessment of contemporaries about the religious health of the nation is noted, as is the relative ineffectiveness of mass evangelism during the ‘long 1950s’, notably Billy Graham’s crusades. The sources to be used in the statistical evaluation of Brown’s claims are introduced, some collected by the Churches, some by opinion poll and other social research agencies, some by individual academics. Any methodological or interpretative challenges posed by these sources are briefly mentioned. Finally, the precise chronological parameters of the study are set (1945–63) and compared with those used by Brown and other scholars.

Keywords: 1950s; Callum Brown; historiography; religious revival; secularization; statistical sources

Field, Clive D. Britain’s Last Religious Revival? Quantifying Belonging, Behaving, and Believing in the Long 1950s. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137512536.0006.

Historiography

Few observers would dispute that modern British society has become less religious over time, but fundamental disagreements exist among historians and sociologists concerning the exact chronology, nature, and causation of such a process of secularization.¹ In particular, as it affected Christianity, there are divergent views about whether it has been a gradualist or revolutionary phenomenon, originating either with industrialization and urbanization or only in more contemporary times. Much recent scholarly attention has focused on the pace of religious change during the 1960s, in Britain and other western nations, with Callum Brown advancing a strong case for regarding these years as ‘the secularisation decade’, when a ‘discourse revolution’ took place, ‘a remarkably sudden and culturally violent event’ which spelled the end for ‘discursive Christianity’ and sent ‘organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significance’.² Hugh McLeod, whom Brown regards as a member of the gradualist school of secularization, has offered a more nuanced interpretation of the ‘religious crisis’ of the 1960s, although even he still considers these years as ‘marking a rupture as profound as that brought about by the Reformation’, emphasizing especially the weakening of religious socialization of youth.³ Other present-day writers have also seen the 1960s as a turning point in Britain’s religious history.⁴

Brown’s thesis has an additional twist to it. Not only were the 1960s an era of revolutionary secularization, but they were immediately preceded by ‘something of a religious boom’ and a ‘return to piety’ during the late 1940s and 1950s, at least until 1956, in some cases even to 1959. Although he is by no means the first scholar to make such a suggestion,⁵ Brown pursues the argument with great conviction. This epoch, he continues, was characterized by ‘one of the most concerted periods of church growth since the middle of the nineteenth century’ (elsewhere he suggests since the eighteenth century), with ‘surges of ... church membership, Sunday school enrolment, [and] accompanied by immense popularity for evangelical “revivalist” crusades’. Of special significance was the ‘extraordinary’ level of religious activity among the young, who ‘became more than unusually enthusiastic patrons of churches, church coffee bars and Billy Graham’s crusade’. These years likewise witnessed ‘one of the high points of British Christian culture, surpassed only by that of the Edwardian period’, with ‘a vigorous reassertion of “traditional” values’, epitomized by an intensification of moral and sexual conservatism and a reassertion of the role of women as wives and mothers. Indeed, through ‘this conservative family context’, religion became more gendered and dependent on underpinning by a reaffirmed female ‘piety’ and ‘puritanical notions of female respectability’. Overall, ‘people’s lives in the 1950s were very acutely affected by genuflection to religious symbols, authority and activities ... Religion mattered and mattered deeply in British society as a whole in the 1950s.’ ‘Discursive Christianity’ – ‘the vigour of its hegemonic Christian culture’ – was a power in the land and ‘religious conformity was at its height’.⁶ Such claims are advanced by Brown particularly enthusiastically in relation to Scotland.⁷

Brown’s reading of the late 1940s and 1950s has not gone unchallenged. McLeod accepts the continuation of a Christian culture but contends that ‘the post-war revival was ... more modest and less widely spread than in the United States’, certainly as regards England and Wales, and proposes an alternative ‘double-sided’ relationship between the 1950s and 1960s, rather than seeing them as ‘polar opposites’.⁸ Matthew Grimley reports a mixed picture post-war, Nonconformity continuing to decline but Anglicanism rallying, while providentialist ideas and language decayed and the association between religion and national character weakened.⁹ Simon Green views the 1950s as a decade of ‘false hopes’ so far as institutional religion was concerned, dismisses its ‘so-called “religious revival” ’ as ‘a lamentable failure’, and concludes that ‘Britain had ceased to be a Christian country by 1960’.¹⁰ In a similar vein, Nigel Yates deems the revival ‘very fragile’ and notes that the religious leadership of the 1950s ‘had already prepared for ways in which the churches might come to terms with the growing secularization of society and the questioning of traditional moral values’. In general, he adds,

the two decades between 1950 and 1970 need to be seen as a single period in which considerable moral, religious and social change took place in Britain, but on the whole much more slowly and often less dramatically than some have believed ... In every case the events of the 1960s have had the ground laid for them, to a very large extent, in the 1950s.¹¹

From his Black Country perspective, Richard Sykes also contests, or at least heavily qualifies, Brown’s interpretation of the late 1940s and early 1950s, preferring to see the Second World War as a more important religious watershed.¹² However, other evidence – quantitative at the national level (analysed by Clive Field)¹³ and qualitative at the local level (Stephen Parker)¹⁴ – suggests that wartime religion was relatively resilient, and that the Second World War was not a particularly major short-term milestone in Britain’s secularization history.¹⁵ Steve Bruce and Tony Glendinning, by contrast, think the war did leave an enduring secularizing legacy by disrupting community ties and family formation and, in the long run, negatively impacting the transmission of faith from one generation to the next. They further discount Brown’s notion of post-war church growth: ‘Some indices of church involvement increase after 1945 but not all do, none does by much, and none come close to their Victorian or Edwardian peaks when expressed as percentages of the available population.’¹⁶ In this they echo the opinions of earlier religious historians such as Alan Gilbert (‘the recovery which followed in the late 1940s and early 1950s was minimal even in comparison with the short-lived upturn after the First World War’),¹⁷ or Ian Machin (‘the Protestant Churches preserved reasonable stability in the post-war years up to 1960, but did not achieve collectively a revival of numbers and influence to the levels of three or four decades before’).¹⁸

Generalist historians of post-war British society have also struggled to see how it was especially religious. Thus, for Peter Hennessy ‘mid-century Britain was still a Christian country only in a vague attitudinal sense, belief generally being more a residual husk than a kernel of conviction’¹⁹; and for David Kynaston ‘it is hard to see how Britain in the 1950s can, in any meaningful sense, be called a Christian society’.²⁰ Perhaps the latest secondary source which comes closest to validating Brown’s approach is Ian Jones’s study of Birmingham, which perceives ‘the crisis of church participation in the 1960s’ to have been preceded by ‘a genuine (if short-lived) religious renewal in the early to mid-1950s’, including ‘the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Belonging
• 3  Behaving
• 4  Believing
• 5  Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index