Secularisation in the Christian World: Essays in Honour of Hugh McLeod

SECULARISATION IN THE CHRISTIAN WORLD The power of modernity to secularise has been a foundational idea of the western world. Both social science and church history understood that the Christian religion from 1750 was deeply vulnerable to industrial urbanisation and the Enlightenment. But as evidence mounts that countries of the European world experienced secularising forces in different ways at different periods, the timing and causes of de-Christianisation are now widely seen as far from straightforward. Secularisation in the Christian World brings together leading scholars in the social history of religion and the sociology of religion to explore what we know about the decline of organised Christianity in Britain, Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia. The chapters tackle different strands, themes, comparisons and territories to demonstrate the diversity of approach, thinking and evidence that has emerged in the last 30 years of scholarship into the religious past and present. The volume includes both new research and essays of theoretical reflection by the most eminent academics. It highlights historians and sociologists in both agreement and dispute. With contributors from eight countries, the volume also brings together many nations for the first consolidated international consideration of recent themes in de-Christianisation. With church historians and cultural historians, and religious sociologists and sociologists of the godless society, this book provides a state-ofthe-art guide to secularisation studies.

Hugh McLeod

Secularisation in the Christian World

Essays in honour of Hugh McLeod

Edited by C A L L U M G. B R O W N

University of Dundee, UK and MICHAEL SNAPE

University of Birmingham, UK

ASHGATE

© The editors and contributors 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Wey Court East Union Road Famham Surrey, GU9 7PT England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington VT 05401-4405 USA

www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Secularisation in the Christian world. 1. Secularism. 2. Secularism—History. 3. Church history. 4. Christianity and culture— History. I. Brown, Callum G., 1953- II. Snape, M. F. (Michael Francis), 1968306.6'3—dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Callum G., 1953— Secularisation in the Christian world / Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7546-6131-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Church history. 2. Secularization. I. Snape, M. F. (Michael Francis), 1968-11. Title. BR162.3.B75 2009 306.6'3—dc22 2009030044 ISBN 9780754661313 (hbk) ISBN 9780754699309 (ebk) III

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Contents

Notes on Contributors 1

2

3

4

5

Introduction: Conceptualising Secularisation 1974-2010: the Influence of Hugh McLeod Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape

vii

1

Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation: A Progress Report Jeffrey Cox

13

Implicit Understandings of Religion in Sociological Study and in the Work of Hugh McLeod Linda Wood head

27

Protestant Migrations: Narratives of the Rise and Decline of Religion in the North Atlantic World c. 1650-1950 David Hempton

41

Protestantism, Monarchy and the Defence of Christian Britain 1837-2005 John Wolffe

57

6

Australia: Towards Secularisation and One Step Back David Hilliard

75

7

Secularisation or Resacralisation? The Canadian Case, 1760-2000 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau

93

8

A Classic Case of De-Christianisation? Religious Change in Scandinavia c. 1750-2000 Erik Sidenvall

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War, Religion and Revival: the United States, British and Canadian Armies during the Second World War Michael Snape

135

9

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Women and Religion in Britain: the Autobiographical View of the Fifties and Sixties Callum G. Brown

159

11

The Strange Death of Dutch Christendom Peter van Rooden

175

12

Europe in the Age of Secularisation Lucian Hölscher

197

13

Secularisation in the UK and the USA Steve Bruce

205

14

Thinking Broadly and Thinking Deeply: Two Examples of the Study of Religion in the Modern World Grace Davie

Index

219

233

Notes on Contributors

Callum Brown is professor of religious and cultural history at the University of Dundee. He is the author of Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (1997), Up-helly-aa (1998), The Death of Christian Britain (2001, 2009), Postmodernism for Historians (2005), and Religion and Society in Twentieth-century Britain (2006), and is co-editor of Everyday Life in Twentieth-century Scotland (2009). Steve Bruce was educated at the Queen Victoria School, Dunblane, and the University of Stirling. He taught at The Queen's University of Belfast from 1978 to 1991 and has since been professor of sociology at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of 18 books, including The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right: Protestant politics in America 1978-88 (1988), The Red Hand: loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland (1992). Choice and Religion: a critique of rational choice theory (1999), God is Dead: secularization in the West (2002), and Paisley: Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland (2007). Nancy Christie holds the J.B. Smallman Chair in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. She has published widely in the histories of religion, gender and the family, and the welfare state, including Engendering the State: Family; Work and Welfare in Canada (2000), and (with Michael Gauvreau) A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900-1940 (1996), as well as edited volumes including Households of Faith: Family; Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760-1969 (2002). Her current research explores the interplay between strategies of authority, the Canadian family, and the emergence of liberal values during the nineteenth century. Jeffrey Cox is professor of history at the University of Iowa, and the author of The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (2008), Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940 (2002), and The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870-1930 (1982). Grace Davie is professor in the sociology of religion at the University of Exeter. She is the author of many articles, and of Religion in Britain since 1945 (1994), Religion in Modern Europe (2000), Europe: the Exceptional Case (2002), The Sociology of Religion (2007), co-author of Religious America, Secular Europe? (2008), and co-editor of Predicting Religion (2003). In 2003, she was president of the American Association for the Sociology of Religion.

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Michael Gauvreau is professor of history at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. He has published widely in the religious, cultural, and intellectual history of English Canada and Quebec in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (1991), The Catholic Origins of Quebecs Quiet Revolution, 1931-1970 (2005), and (with Nancy Christie) A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900-1940 (1996). His current research explores the relationship between Catholicism, public culture, and dechristianisation in Quebec between 1945 and 2000. David Hempton is the Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland (1996), Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (2005), and Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (2008). David Hilliard holds academic status as associate professor in the Department of History at Flinders University in Adelaide where he taught for many years. He has published widely on the history of Christian missions in the Pacific Islands and the religious and social history of Australia. Lucian Hölscher is professor for modern history and the theory of history at the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. He has published seven books, including Die Entdeckung der Zukunft (1999), Geschichte der protestantischen Frömmigkeit (2005) and most recently Semantik der Leere (2009). He is also chairman of the supervisory board of the Institute for Genocide Studies. Peter van Rooden studied church history at Leiden University, and is currently head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. His thesis was: Theology, Biblical Scholarship and Rabbinical Studies in the Seventeenth Century: Constantijn UEmpereur (1591-1648), Professor of Hebrew and Theology at Leiden (1989). He has published a study of the radical changes in the relation between religion, society, and political power in the Netherlands since the sixteenth century: Religieuze Regimes. Over godsdienst en maatschappij in Nederlandy 1570-1999 (1996). He is currently working on a book, based on oral history, about the radical dechristianisation which took place in the Netherlands since the 1960s. Erik Sidenvall is associate professor of church history at the University of Lund. He has written about religion and social change during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from a variety of perspectives. His recent publications include The Making of Manhood among Swedish Missionaries in China and Mongolia, c. 1890-c. 1914(2009).

Notes on

Contributors

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Michael Snape is a senior lecturer in modern history at the University of Birmingham. His doctoral thesis was supervised by Hugh McLeod and he has written extensively on the eighteenth-century Church of England and, more recently, on war and religion in the English-speaking world c. 1700-c. 1950. John Wolffe is professor of religious history at The Open University. He is the author of The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain 1829-1860 (1991), God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843-1945 (1994), Great Deaths: Grieving Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (2000) and The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney (2006) as well as numerous articles and edited works. Linda Woodhead is professor of sociology of religion at Lancaster University. She is Director of the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society national research programme. Her books include Religions in the Modern World, second edition (2009), The Spiritual Revolution (with Paul Heelas, 2005), Congregational Studies in the UK (with Mathew Guest and Karin Tusting, 2004), An Introduction to Christianity (2004) and A Very Short History of Christianity (2004). She is currently completing A Sociology of Religious Emotions (with Ole Riis).

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Conceptualising Secularisation 1974-2010: the Influence of Hugh McLeod Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape

Secularisation is a promiscuous concept. It crops up in all sorts of disciplines, bandied about by scholars of diverse interests. It is studied using varied methods of inquiry, and is portrayed in no single language of expression. For generations it has been the subject of publications and conferences, and it has had few competitors in its capacity for spawning almost endless international debate. Though widely seen as a subordinate offshoot of the wider sociological concept of modernisation, secularisation has outshone its 'parent'; some regard modernity as time-barred, an historical period, overhauled by late modernity, post-modernity or late capitalism. Meanwhile, secularisation seems timeless. Surviving the linguistic turn has led in recent years to fresh branches of the academy taking secularisation to their work; literary studies have engaged with it in ways virtually unknown a few decades ago. So, its longevity may in part be a product of its licentiousness. The absence of agreement on its definition, characteristics, timing, causes, or applicability to particular places or cultures, makes secularisation handy in argument through widespread application (and not a little flagrant abuse). It has survived because of its weaknesses, and it still snuggles in the intellectual backpack of the social scientist, historian, anthropologist and artist. Since the mid 1970s, one historian has stood out as the intellectual and research leader in the field of secularisation studies. Hugh McLeod, Professor of Church History at the University of Birmingham, has developed a breadth of knowledge on secularisation in the Christian world since the eighteenth century unsurpassed by any other scholar, developing extensive first-hand archival knowledge of the changing social significance of religion in England, Germany and the United States, and further extensive research knowledge through both primary and secondary sources of the rest of Britain, Europe, Australasia and Canada. His comparative perspective is quite unsurpassed. No other historian has attempted to bring the modern Christian world to such a state of consolidated comprehension in its social aspect. Along the way, he has nurtured scores of students and new scholars from his base in the departments of Theology and History at the University of Birmingham; approached by the young and eager researcher for advice, he has always endeared himself by being more eager than his acolytes that he should learn from them.

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After each presentation to a conference or seminar, Hugh has captured names and contacts in his little notebook. His self-effacing and unpretentious manner has made him the ideal leader of an international network of scholars whom he has brought together in many conference projects and edited collections. His command of the subject has been such that, though he supervised thirteen doctoral students at Birmingham, he was external examiner for a further 27 in 17 universities across four countries. With visiting lectureships and professorships at five overseas universities plus numerous consultancies and much committee work, his stature in the profession was shown by his appointment as deputy chair to the UK RAE2008 Panel for Theology, Divinity and Religious Studies, in his election as Fellow of the British Academy in the same year and in his elections in 2002-2003 as President of the Ecclesiastical History Society, and in 2005-10 as President of the Commission Internationale d'Histoire et d'Etude du Christianisme. In this way, Hugh McLeod is universally recognised as the father of the social history of religion in the late modern period. Still, there is much more to Hugh McLeod than his distinction as a leading researcher, considerable though that is. Although less obvious to the outside world, throughout his many years at the University of Birmingham he has distinguished himself as much in his teaching and administrative roles as he has in his research, continuing to teach first-year undergraduates with the same care and enthusiasm that he brings to his research students and serving successively as head of department, dean of faculty and sitting on the university senate. Whatever its future, the corporate life of the University of Birmingham will be much the poorer for his impending retirement. However, Hugh's non-academic interests and commitments also say much about the man; a committed Quaker, Hugh's social activism is well known to his family and to his friends and colleagues. Passionately and publicly opposed to capital punishment (which he chose as the subject of his presidential address to the Ecclesiastical History Society conference in 2002),1 to war and to racial injustice, Hugh's practical Christianity has also found expression in his work for prisoners and for refugees and also in his services as Quaker chaplain to the students and staff of the University of Birmingham. This book is a festschrift to Hugh's remarkable career. Scholars from around the world, ranging across church history, social history and sociology of religion, have come together to acknowledge his friendship as much as his intellectual leadership. Here we create a guide to the state of knowledge in the study of secularisation in the western Christian world, concentrating on Hugh's well-worn intellectual stamping grounds on both sides of the Atlantic and in Australasia. A central difficulty has been that of leaving out Hugh McLeod as a contributor, but the authors here provide both overviews and new research that leads, in many cases, where Hugh has pointed over the last three decades.

Introduction:

Conceptualising

Secularisation

1974-2010

3

The Development of Secularisation as an Historical Concept Secularisation is a concept that has not only survived, but has increasingly brought scholars from different countries together in the burgeoning international debates of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries concerning religious change. Where once it was a predominantly Anglophone idea, generating interest in the north Atlantic and Australasian world, it has since the 1970s spread into academic study in Europe and into inter-continental debate about the changing patterns of the social significance of religion across the globe. In this process, the methods of inquiry and suppositions as to what secularisation is or has been have not suffered compression into a single definition, but, much to the unalloyed irritation of graduate students and young researchers almost everywhere, definitions and conceptualisations have mushroomed, generating a field of study with such complexity in theory and concept as to make agreement seem almost impossible. And yet, study and international interchange thrive. Lack of agreement as to what we are all talking about has not stopped the talking. We are still keen to debate the interminable debate. The scholarship that led to this present state of affairs arose especially from debates between the late 1950s and the mid 1970s about the place of Christianity in British and American society. Part of the discussion was generated in sociology, where the concern was with the religious state of society in the present time - the middle decades of the century. British-based sociologists of religion like Bryan Wilson, David Martin and more recently Steve Bruce joined scholars like Peter Berger and Rodney Stark from the USA in conceptualising the changing nature of religion in contemporary society. But the other part of the debate was generated by historians, both social historians and ecclesiastical historians. Leading figures here included those from a left-wing social-history background such as Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, and John Foster.2 Amongst historical sociologists and anthropologists were figures such as Robert Currie, Robert Moore, Allan MacLaren and David Clark.3 Amongst those working within church history, Owen Chadwick was especially important in developing an intellectual approach to the study of secularisation.4 The framework of understanding amongst sociologists and historians developed during the 1950s and 1960s was partly shared but partly diverging. What was shared was an acceptance that Britain and the United States were already 'secular' countries, where the place of religion was jeopardised by large scale indifference to religion, significant hostility to the churches, and the declining institutional strength of religion in state and civil affairs. Behind this resume rested an intellectual agreement on the impact of what sociologists called modernisation and what historians, suspicious of the undifferentiated concept, labelled as a mixture of urbanisation, industrialism and the impact of the Enlightenment. There was general acceptance that religious decline was something to be measured more holistically than merely church decline, and there was agreement with Bryan Wilson's 1966 definition of secularisation as 'the declining social significance

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of religion'. 5 Moreover, historians and sociologists agreed that this was a longterm process, one that had certainly got under way in the eighteenth century and accelerated so far in the nineteenth century as to constitute a major century of secularisation. But the longevity of the process was accepted by many as older than that. Sociologists and Weberian social historians attributed the sixteenthcentury Reformation with instituting an economic and intellectual secularisation triggered by the built-in secularising materialism within 'this worldly asceticism' of Protestant entrepreneurship and individualism; capitalism itself, Protestant and North European in its centre, lay at the heart of an historical-materialist vision of religious change which in the 1960s chimed with the Marxist times of the new social history. And that new social history had an early-modern branch that was developing a 'golden age' vision of The World We Have Lost which contrasted with our own age: as Peter Laslett wrote, 'All of our ancestors were literal Christian believers, all of the time.' 6 The aggregate effect was to see secularisation as a gradualist phenomenon lasting at least half a millennium (and even longer).7 Late-modern historians asked not too many questions about the empirical basis of the 'golden age'; we should have been more alert to the importance of many early-modern historians not being especially interested in the question of when secularisation started, as this might have triggered more close examination of the empirical weaknesses of this argument.8 Where historians and sociologists could differ substantially was over causes. The driver of secularising in the sociology of religion developed as a self-evident process. For most sociologists, secularisation was the handmaiden of the much larger process of modernisation, in which the decline of a rural-based harmonious and largely unified society, headed by a powerful feudal or neo-feudal aristocracy, fomented the breakdown of a single world view. Religion was strong when it held the community together in a single vision of the world, expressed through joint worship in a universal church (usually an established state church) which interpreted 'this world' for the people and offered harmonious social relations based on an harmonious religious monopoly. Secularisation lay in the breakdown of the coherent world view; pluralism of religion through the rise of dissent invoked the gradual collapse of the other-worldly monopoly as visions first multiplied then let in the unbelieving option. Social discipline was no longer hitched to religious discipline, and the western Christian world careered towards an inevitable decline of the social significance of religion.9 This view was heard by social historians of religion, but rarely was it fully engaged by them. There was a quiet cynicism, not overtly pronounced, that led historians to search for a much greater degree of specificity over the timing and cause of secularisation. This had given rise to a growing interest in the social mechanics of economic change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an interest sparked in 1957 by E.R. Wickham's study of Sheffield and in 1963 by Inglis' study of the churches' poor relations with the Victorian working classes. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this was translated by a new generation of historians into a full-bodied focus on class formation in the industrial revolution

Introduction:

Conceptualising

Secularisation

1974-2010

5

as the propellant of secularisation. This started in particular with E.P. Thompson's study of Methodism in his The Making of the English Working Class, which pointed to the double-edged qualities of evangelical Protestantism as both a source of middle-class social control in forming a compliant and industrious factory proletariat, and as the internal 'slave-driver' that diverted the working man from considering revolution in favour of gradualist improvement within the capitalist system. This was followed by a highly influential study by Harold Perkin which pointed to how religion may have been what he termed 'the midwife of class' in Britain between 1780 and 1880.10 With other works, the net effect in the early 1970s was to push historians to recognise not the weakness of religion in the early industrial revolution but its strength in the transition years, and the battling of the churches to redeem their early neglect and reclaim the workers for Christ and the church. Historians layered more and more detail in local case studies to show the significance of religion in the society of the world's first industrial revolution and first rapidly urbanising people. There were obvious weaknesses in the state of affairs in the 1960s and 1970s. The first and the foremost was the way in which the issue of the history of secularisation was centred on the British and American experience. The comparative experience across the rest of Europe, in other Christian countries, and beyond the Christian tradition, were matters which were not central to the ways in which scholars in history reflected on their work. Second, the conceptualisation of secularisation was occurring in two mismatched dimensions: one at the level of high generalisation from within sociology, the other from detailed case studies mostly done on a town-by-town basis by historians of eighteenth and nineteenthcentury Britain. The result was that secularisation as a term was rarely used by historians, and the field was left too open for sociologists. At this intellectual point, a new book appeared. 'The colours of London are grey and brown - the grey of sky and river, the brown of the brick.' Characteristically sensitive to environment, so opens Hugh McLeod's highly influential 1974 study of religion in late Victorian London. This represented one of the key shifts in British religious historiography - from a focus on early industrialism to a focus on the fin de siecle. As he said at the start of his book: 'By the 1880s, the substantial separation from the churches of the urban working class had for long been an accomplished fact. Now the association between religion and civic duty was beginning to weaken. The churches were slowly turning towards a sectarian position.'11 The product of his doctoral thesis, Class and Religion defined the period 1880 to 1914 as the most important transition from what McLeod called a 'Victorian religious pattern' of religious consensus to one in which the middle and upper classes moved on from perceptions drawn from that consensus and still clung to by working-class Christians. As a period of transition, McLeod pointed to the decline of Sabbath seriousness, the decline of double church attendances on Sundays, and the alienation of the middle and upper classes from a serious Christian ritual. The search for pleasure had taken precedence, overtaking the mid-Victorian evangelical outlook especially. But he

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made an even more enduring empirical impact in providing the best-supported case for seeing the key to the religious differentiation of the British people being the result of social class. With his trademark use of carefully-compiled and closely-analysed statistics, he argued that the London case demonstrated how the impact of industry or even urbanism was much less important than 'the division of a city into separate worlds, marked by radically different styles of life, and between which there was little communication'. 12 What quickly became a defining characteristic of the McLeod style of history was evident in this book - the intense care for detail, for context and reflection on the sophisticated interaction between ideas, social class, status and materiality. The environment was ever-changing for individuals. McLeod concluded: Such formulae as 'industrial society', or 6 secularisation' may be useful as long as it is recognised that they are no more than concepts. But they can be given a spurious reality, and thus become vehicles for a mechanical theory of human motivation, in which human thoughts and actions merely reflect their environment, or those aspects of the environment that the historian chooses to select.13

The working class has always been a central concern of McLeod's work. Their alienation from the churches and indeed from organised Christianity was something he emphasised, and which he increasingly located in a wider context of Europe and the United States. In 1980 he emphasised how there was a: fully formed European working class of the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, a class conscious of its distinctive identity, living apart from the rest of the urban community in its own distinctive working class districts, or in vast proletarian zones like the East End of London, possessing its own distinctive institutions, notably the socialist parties and trade unions, and existing in a condition of intermittent war with state and employers. 14

But he started to show, too, the divergences in experience - from the conscious irreligion engendered by French radicalism to the often casual indifference of many British workers. He showed that the starting points were different too: 'although "dechristianisation" is the dominant fact,' he wrote, 'it could happen in many different ways. ... casual labourers and factory workers have seldom had a reputation for religiosity [whilst] artisans and domestic textile workers were quite often noted for orthodox piety or sectarian activism5.15 From here McLeod started a strain of his work to develop alternative 'models' of dechristianisation or secularisation, suggesting that the working classes of town and city often differed in this route, as did the working class of different regions and countries. Rural and urban secularisation differed, but still, McLeod noted, the rise of the middle classes and their liberalism conjured a proletarianisation of the skilled artisan classes of Europe as a whole. From this rose the impact of urbanisation, in

Introduction:

Conceptualising

Secularisation

1974-2010

17

which he emphasised the changing nature of the city - its fracturing into separate districts with their own lifestyles, and the resultant disintegration of the united urban community. With this, the multi-class church of the ancien regime became threatened, often by the simple expedient of the middle classes attending in the morning and the working classes in the evening, but sometimes by the creation of sects.16 The route to religious alienation fascinated McLeod. He started to study Germany in detail, in large measure because it offered a diverse level of religiosity rarely matched in a single country, as well as a country more equally Protestant and Catholic than most others. He showed how the course and, indeed, the timing of the dechristianisation of the working class varied from town to town - some in 1848, some in the 1850s, whilst mushrooming Ruhr towns of the later century fostered a strong religiosity amongst swelling numbers of in-migrants desperate to cling to some identity brought from their rural homes. When alienation came, McLeod identified three stages: loosening of ties arising from rapid economic and social change, growing working-class disaffection from the churches in favour of alternative identities, ending with an explicit rejection of Christianity. 'Socialism,5 McLeod wrote in 1982 of late nineteenth-century Germany, 'completed the alienation from the church of many workers.517 By the early 1980s, McLeod was ready to offer one his most important services to the historical community - his synthesis of the state of knowledge, added to his first-hand research, which produced a master narrative of religious change in Europe from the French Revolution to the present. Produced first in a widely-acclaimed book, then in article form, he characterised the period from the 1790s to the 1960s as a distinct phase of European religious history marked by revolt against the official churches, collapse of religious unity, and the rise of religious polarisation.1S The polarisation was started by the French Revolution but accelerated by industrialisation, rapid urbanisation and the widening gulf between rich and poor, middle and working classes. Showing how the patterns were subtly varied across (and indeed within) European countries, he produced a narrative that emphasised how the fading of this pattern of polarisation was largely a twentiethcentury phenomenon, under way in Britain and Scandinavia from 1900, but most strongly in evidence for decades more; 'it was the 1960s which brought this phase of religious history to an abrupt end'. 19 This marker of the sixties as the end of a Christian epoch in Europe was to become significant for the later development of secularisation studies. But in the meantime, McLeod went on to publish in 1984 an influential short survey of the literature on working-class religion in Britain - a pamphlet that was to remain on student reading lists for decades.20 During the 1980s, attention across the historical community was turning increasingly to look at the personal experience of ordinary people. This was reflected in the rise of oral history, observable in numerous projects of testimony collection in the mid and late 1980s, and in the increasing use of oral testimony and autobiographical material in both academic and popular projects. In the field of the social history of religion, it was again McLeod who led the way. In one

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sense, this merely reflected how, since his earliest work on London, he had given recognition to the individual in the process of religious change. This now became a hallmark of his work. In 1986 he published a landmark article in Oral History Journal in which he analysed the results of his survey of three large oral history databases (the most significant being Paul Thompson's 'Edwardians' archive at the University of Essex). In this he acknowledged that he may have underestimated the strength of working-class religiosity at the turn of the nineteenth-into-thetwentieth century. He showed through statistical counts of parental churchgoing and extensive quotation the significance of both churchgoing and less formal religious connections in the lives of working-class families and communities. A strong sense of the rich religious texturing of working class life comes through, and how the cultural ambience of even low-church-going areas like London could be strongly veined with religious ideas and motifs. But he again was able to show how great were the regional differences in religious adherence and practice, and how individual material and ideological circumstances could make the experience of religion anything but uniform. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, an international community of social historians of religion started to take shape. First, there were the beginnings of extensive conversation taking place between historians and sociologists on the issue of secularisation - discussions in which McLeod was central; he reflected on the nature and meaning of describing cities as 'secular', adding to many works he produced around this time on religion and urbanisation.21 Second, McLeod encouraged the formation of international seminars on secularisation and cities, including an important meeting at the 1990 History Congress in Madrid which led on indirectly five years later to McLeod's editing of European Religion in the Age of Great Cities 1830-1930 which energised scholars to engage together on the theme of urbanisation and religion.22 Lastly, this period was characterised by McLeod's path-breaking, and still unmatched, research on German and American religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This led to numerous articles which raised the profile of the field.23 It also produced one of his masterworks - his 1996 book Piety and Poverty, a study of Berlin, London and New York between 1870 and 1914.24 In this he demonstrated the depth and subtlety of his empirical knowledge of working-class religiosity in three countries and he also postulated a large model of secularisation. Drawing on his earlier three-stage process, outlined in his 1982 article on Protestantism in Germany, he now applied this to looking at three cities which, at the same moment in time, exhibited the three stages. Berlin he showed as a highly secular city in 1870-1914, in which the working-class rejection of religion became principled and organised. London in those same years he showed to be a city in which the classes had drawn apart, the middle classes by their suburbanisation and suburban liberal values, throwing the working classes upon community and socialist identities. And New York in the same decades was a city in which ties of religious belonging and church connection were weakening by economic degradation, but which still held in this period comparatively strong religious practice. The elegance of his analysis was profound. He demonstrated the

Introduction:

Conceptualising

Secularisation

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9

mechanics of gradual alienation from religion, constructed in a class-based analysis which reasserted, in the face of some other historians' work, the significance of class differences and class antagonisms.25 This he reinforced in a 2000 book, Secularisation in Western Europe, which offered a detailed examination of both the range of interpretations and the evidence for the changes between the 'crazy' and 'holy and terrible year' of 1848 and what he called 'the even crazier, more terrible and completely unholy year' of 1914.26 During the 1990s and 2000s, gender analysis of religion in the late modern period was trying, slowly, to catch up with the much more advanced work on the medieval and early-modem periods. McLeod wrote earlier than most on gender issues - including, in 1982, his reflections on the spiritual division within German marriages.27 He then started to provide an important narrative on gender. He did this first in a 1996 text book in which he devoted sections to 'manliness' and 'female piety' in Victorian England, discussing his special interest in religion and sport, and representations of female religion in sermons and popular culture (thus predating similar work by other scholars years later).2* Then, in the second edition of his Religion and the People of Western Europe published in 1997, he gave the first international overview of women's dominance of Christian church services, and provided a guide through a series of analyses that had appeared.29 In the late 1990s, McLeod was being drawn more and more to consider the post-1960 period. One of the initial fruits of this was to reflect even more on the inadequacies of secularisation theory and the place it held for urbanisation as a causal factor in religious decline. In an important but perhaps under-rated paper in 1999, McLeod worried over the declining influence of the city in the twentieth century. He wrote: 'The essential point is that, slowly since the later nineteenth century, and very rapidly since the 1960s, social changes have been blurring the distinction between town and countryside, and rendering the continuing differences less and less important.' He noted the importance of the nineteenth century in providing sectarian community identities for migrants and religious minorities who found the city could grant freedom. But he went on referring to the post-1960 era: 'It is the contemporary period which has offered an individual emancipation, as religious, political and ethnic communities have become oppressive to many of those within them. But the city is no longer central to this process.' 30 It was to the contemporary period that McLeod was being inexorably attracted after 2000. Reflecting a wider move of the profession into a study of the last one hundred years, he undertook numerous works on the century, including editing the twentieth-century volume in the Cambridge History of Christianity, to which he contributed an astonishing five chapters - almost a book in itself.31 But of even greater significance to the social history of religion was his next landmark book in 2007, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s. This constituted a fundamental shift, not just in McLeod's own research but in that of historians of secularisation more generally, from a focus on the 1780 to 1914 period to looking at the sixties. McLeod saw the 'long sixties' from 1958 to 1974 as vital: 'In the religious history of the West these years may come to be seen as marking a rupture as profound as that

10

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brought about by the Reformation.' 32 Examining England, Western Europe, North America and Australasia, McLeod showed that a crisis erupted to mark the final end of the Christian religious world formed in the shadow of the French Revolution. Eschewing single explanatory models, he considered in detail the internal decline of Christendom, the impact of the rise of affluence, the radical ideas which reached a culmination in 1968, the impact of sexual and gender change, and the rise of civil societies based on a secular, not specifically Christian, national ethos. Perhaps the most important quality of the book was its argument that the crisis was to a great extent formulated within Christianity itself. Radicals, liberals and what he called 'pragmatic Christians' within the churches played a major role in precipitating the crisis, he said, contrasting with the argument of some other scholars who stressed the external threats to Christianity. In his conclusion he wrote of three levels of secularisation: 'secularization at the level of individual belief and practice; at the social and political level; and at the cultural level'.33 He judged that at the first and second levels, the legacy of the 1960s was mixed. Church-going dipped but alternative spiritualities rose, whilst the churches remained influential in education and, in the USA, in national political life, whilst the law became more secularised and, in Europe, overtly Christian political parties and social 'pillars' collapsed. It was at the level of culture that the sixties was so influential a decade. Whilst he had noted in 2001 that Christianity may have declined by 1914, it still provided a common language which united all but the most committed of unbelievers. But in the 1960s, he noted, this common language was breaking down. He wrote: These latter changes can be seen as an aspect of secularization, but might more precisely be seen as marking 'the end of Christendom'. I say 'more precisely', both because Christianity is not equivalent to or dependent on the maintenance of Christendom, and because those who reject Christianity do not necessarily replace it with a purely secular world-view. Christendom was a social order in which, regardless of individual belief, Christian language, rites, moral teachings, and personnel were part of the taken-for-granted environment. As the indifferent and the hostile claimed the right to do things differently, one of the pillars of Christendom fell. 34

Accompanied by the liberalisation of the law and the decline of the Christian socialisation of the young, the religious crisis marked the rupture from the Enlightenment world to a new world in which Christianity no longer crafted a normative religious culture. After nearly forty years, Hugh McLeod is still steering the community of scholars. Coming so closely up to the present in his studies means even greater engagement with sociologists of religion, and the contribution of three of their leading figures to this volume indicates the esteem in which he is held. For social historians of religion, he has shown repeatedly over his career that innovations and shifts of method and period are constantly necessary. He has pioneered in so many ways, and each of the chapters that follow show, in some way or other, the

Introduction: Conceptualising Secularisation

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11

influence of McLeod's thinking upon the field of study. The state of research is shown to be vibrant, international and comparative, the methods varied, and the concepts constantly revised and restrained by the need for empirical evidence. This is the enduring legacy from a man who still has much to offer - not least his long-awaited book on the history of religion and sport.

Notes 1

See the incisive reappraisal and radical reinterpretation of abolitionist arguments in H. McLeod, 'God and the gallows: Christianity and capital punishment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries', in K. Cooper and J. Gregory eds, Retribution, Repentance and Reconciliation (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 330-56. 2 E. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1968), Chapter 3; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1963); J. Foster, Class Struggle in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974). 3 R. Currie, Methodism Divided: A study in the sociology of ecumenicalism (London, 1968); R. Moore, Pitmen, Preachers and Politics: the effects of Methodism in a Durham mining community (Cambridge, 1976); A.A. Mac Laren, Religion and Social Class: The Disruption years in Aberdeen (London, 1974); D. Clark, Between Pulpit and Pew: Folk Religion in a North Yorkshire Fishing Village (Cambridge, 1982). 4 O. Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1976). 5 B. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 14. 6 P. Laslett, The World We have Lost (London, 1965), p. 71. 7 A. Gilbert, The Making of Post Christian Britain (London, 1980). 8 See the review of these questions in M. Spufford, 'The importance of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries', in idem ed., The World of Rural Dissenters 15201725 (Cambridge, 1994). 8

See R. Wallis and S. Bruce, 'Secularization: the orthodox model', in S. Bruce, ed., Religion and modernization: sociologists and historians debate the secularization thesis (Oxford, 1992), pp. 8-30. 10 E.R. Wickham, Church and People in an Industrial City (London, 1957); K.S. Inglis, The Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London, 1963); Thompson, The Making; H. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780-1880 (London, 1969). 11 H. McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London, 1974), pp. x, I. 12 Ibid., p. 281. 13 Ibid., p. 285. 14 H. McLeod, 'The dechristianisation of the working class in western Europe (1850\900)\Social Compass vol. xxvii (1980), pp. 191-214atpp. 191-2. 15 Ibid., p. 196. 16 Ibid., p. 205. 17 H. McLeod, 'Protestantism and the working class in Imperial Germany', European Studies Review, vol. 12 (1982), pp. 323-44, at pp. 326-7, 337.

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H. McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789-1970 (Oxford, 1981); H. McLeod, T h e age of polarisation', Annual Review of the Social Sciences of Religion, vol. 6 (1983), pp. 1-22. 19 H. McLeod, Religion and the People, p. vi. 20 H. McLeod, Religion and the Working Class in Nineteenth-century Britain (London and Basingstoke, 1984). 21 H. McLeod, 'Secular cities?', in S. Bruce ed., Religion and Modernization: Historians and Sociologists debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford, 1992), pp. 59-89. See also H. McLeod, 'Urbanisation and religion in 19th century Britain', in K. Elm and H.-D. Loock eds, Seelsorge und Diakonie in Berlin (Berlin and New York, 1990), pp. 63-80. 22 H. McLeod ed., European Religion in the Age of Great Cities 1830-1930 (London, 1995). 23 See for instance H. McLeod, 'Popular Catholicism in Irish New York, c . l 9 0 0 \ in W.J. Sheils and D. Wood eds, The Churches, Ireland and the Irish (Oxford, 1989), pp. 353-73; H. McLeod, 'The "Golden Age" of New York City Catholicism', in J. Garnett and C. Matthew eds, Religion and revival since 1700 (London 1993), pp. 249-71. 24 H. McLeod, Piety and Poverty: Working-class Religion in Berlin, London and New York 1870-1914 (New York and London, 1996). 25 See ibid., especially pp. 103-26, 207. 26 H. McLeod, Secularization in Western Europe 1848-1914 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 4, 9. 27 McLeod, 'Protestantism', pp, 338-9. 2K H. McLeod, Religion and Society in England 1850-1914 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 149-68. 29 H. McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789-1989 (second edition, Oxford, 1997), pp. 28-35. 30 H. McLeod, 'The urban/rural dichotomy in European and North American religious history from the eighteenth century to the twentieth', Social Compass vol. 45 (1998), pp. 7-19 at pp. 9, 18. 31 H. McLeod ed., The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 9 World Christianities c 1914-2000 (Cambridge, 2006). 32 H. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), p. 1. 33 Ibid., p. 264. 34 Ibid., p. 265.

Chapter 2

Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation: A Progress Report Jeffrey Cox

My own interest in secularisation is rooted in a childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s among Southern Baptists. The old pre-fundamentalist, prohibitionist, segregationist Southern Baptist Convention was terribly anti-intellectual in those days but largely a-political in any partisan sense, and strongly opposed to religious creeds of any sort. Support for racial segregation, and the State of Israel, were not so much argued as taken for granted. The focus in the local church was on the drama of sin and salvation in the individual heart. The very large bureaucracies of the denomination were committed above all to church growth. Despite the anti-intellectualism, until I went to university in the 1960s, I learned far more history in church than I did in school, where history consisted primarily of heroic Americans overcoming the Great Depression in order to single-handedly defeat Hitler with a small boost from Churchill. After that the government foolishly allowed Communists to take over half the world, and now we were required to fight them in Viet Nam. Baptist church history by way of contrast stretched back over two millennia, as true Christians (under many bewildering names) survived centuries of persecution by Catholic and other established churches in order to find at last a safe haven, and flourish, in the Land of the Free.1 It was as an undergraduate in Texas that I developed what were to become my two major research interests, the first being missionaries and the second the history of religion in Britain, especially as it contrasts with the United States. In the summer of 1968 the Baptist Student Union sent me to Danang, Viet Nam, as a student missionary. The experience of watching the American military attempt to destroy a country in order to save it left me with an abiding conviction that war is the greatest evil known to humanity, but also with an enduring interest, which later became an academic interest, in the relationship between religion and imperialism. It was in the classroom rather than a war zone that I first encountered the problem of secularisation, and it came not from historians but from sociologists, all of them British - Alasdair Mclntyre, Bryan Wilson, and David Martin.2 Although sociologists, they approached the history of religion in a comparative historical framework, and wrote beautifully at a time when American sociology

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was being choked with social scientific jargon. I could not help but notice, though, that the world of American religion that I knew so well posed a problem for the classic theory of secularisation. America was industrial, technological, urban and, by any definition of the word, modern. With a few exceptions, such as the habit of praying for rain when desperate, or holding mild doubts about whether natural selection had entirely banished the argument from design, scientific reasoning had triumphed and the external physical world had been de-mystified. None of this prevented Americans from holding orthodox Christian beliefs or attending church on Sunday in numbers that, I was told, were much larger than those in Europe. In Texas nearly everyone claimed to have attended church at one time or another. One of the things that I have learned from Hugh McLeod is that the contrast between Europe and America was exaggerated before the late-twentieth century, but there was nonetheless something sufficiently striking about American religious practice to pose a problem for the theory of secularisation, particularly as outlined by Bryan Wilson in Religion in a Secular Society. The contrast between Great Britain and the United States was particularly interesting, since both nations exhibited a combination of Protestant diversity with a Roman Catholic minority. When I first visited Britain as a student, I naturally went to church. In Britain there were Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Congregationalists and even scattered outposts of the Assembly of God and the Disciples of Christ. Why shouldn't their congregations be thriving in the same way as they were in Houston? There were only two general responses available to answer that question in the late 1960s, and both were variants of the theory of secularisation. Secularisation was the rule, and America was the exception, either because America was uniquely suited to the practice of religion or because American religion was uniquely superficial. The first of these focused on the success of religious entrepreneurs in America, from George Whitefield to the present. Triumphalism in American church history has flourished during the last thirty years, largely because of the growth of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity with its mega-churches, its political engagement, and its success in securing a vice-presidential nominee in 2008 who appeared to believe in exorcism but undoubtedly believed in the rapture. Just as the evangelical triumphalist argument is rooted in historical reality, so is the superficiality argument. Any popular religion like American Christianity is bound to include vast numbers of nominal practitioners and conformists who do not wish to stand out on their street or at work. Bryan Wilson dealt with the problem of America's evident religiosity by treating American religion as not really religion at all, but a secularised residue, a continent wide and an inch deep. This was in some respects a point of logic. In the inherently teleological concept of secularisation, religion could by definition thrive in a modern society only by evacuating itself of any serious religious content. Therefore, America was just as secular as Britain, only in a different way. Its religion was secular. The American churches succeeded only because of what Wilson referred to (in 1966) as the 'vacuousness of popular religious ideas'. 3

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There is much to be said for that point of view, but at the time I first read it I had just returned from a summer as a Baptist student missionary. From my own personal knowledge of American religion I found something wrong, perhaps badly wrong, with that picture. There were many unpleasant things that could be said about American religion as I knew it, and I have mentioned some of them, but that religious ideas were uniformly vacuous was not among them. The difficulty I faced with my discomfort with American exceptionalism, whether in its triumphalist or dismissive varieties, was the lack of an alternative way to think about American religion in the Christian world. That is the recurring difficulty with the concept of secularisation: if one is to think in a comparative way about the Christian world, and think about it in broad terms, there is no alternative to secularisation. It was then that I came upon David Martin's article, 'Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation', first published in 1965 and then republished in 1969 in his The Religious and the Secular. Martin's attack on secularisation was as wholesale as the theory itself. Historicising the idea, he drove a wedge between the dual uses that secularisation served for Enlightenment thinkers and their heirs. They regarded themselves as arbiters of the laws of science, including history, but were also engaged in a rhetorical war on those who opposed them. Secularisation served as both a scientific description of the direction of history, and a rhetorical weapon in the grand struggle between science and religion. Secular thinkers armed themselves for the war against religion by aligning themselves with the forces of history, a rhetorical device that can generate an almost impregnable sense of self confidence. To define secularisation as something other than a scientific law, or an objective description of the direction of history, as Martin did in his essay, opens up the possibility of alternative ways to look at history. Martin though did not explore ways in which the concept might be eliminated, but instead published A General Theory of Secularization in 1978. There one finds the concept of secularisation modified, qualified, and otherwise altered, set in abroad historical and comparative context designed to warm the heart of a historian, but secularisation it remained. Referring to his earlier essay, he explained, 'I intended to open a debate rather than to banish a word, and I think I have had some success in this'. 4 The subsequent debate has been global and very extensive, but there is a pattern here of criticism followed by a return to the theory that requires some attention. In his subsequent work Martin has proceeded along another path to a critique of secularisation, one that involves the invocation of Christian growth in the non-western world as evidence that history is not moving inevitably in a secular direction. This is combined with a persuasive attack on the link between the modern and the secular that is at the heart of the concept of secularisation. If the word modern means anything, then it is very difficult to dismiss the thriving evangelical, charismatic, and pentecostalist churches of Latin America and Africa (not to mention the United States) as anything but modern in their approach to religion. The difficulty with Christian third-worldism is that the teleological capacity of the concept of secularisation is so spacious that it allows for religious growth to thrive

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in the third world, since it is well known that modernity proceeds from the western world outwards. Christianity might thrive temporarily in a non-western context, just as it grew and prospered during some stages of the modernisation of Great Britain and the United States, but secularisation will catch up with it eventually. Bryan Wilson made precisely that point in a review of David Martin's Pentecostalism. The World Their Parish. 'May not the current of secularisation, running powerfully in the West, overtake or eviscerate the Pentecostal Revival in the Third World?'5 Standing behind him one could almost hear T.H. Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, who summarised the voice of the modern secularised intellectual in his comments for the late Victorian Encyclopedia Britannica: 'That this Christianity is doomed to fall is, to my mind, beyond a doubt; but its fall will neither be sudden nor speedy.'6 The concept of secularisation serves the dual purpose of predicting the future, although not precisely, and reassuring intellectuals who might be going through a temporary panic at the presence of growing religious institutions and unaccountably persuasive religious ideas in a period of history where religion is supposed to be marginal. Martin is right to invoke a successful, thriving Christianity outside of Europe as evidence that religion is not headed for global marginality in a reasonably foreseeable future. But his work on non-western Christianity, unlike his early and sweeping attack on the concept of secularisation, provides very little help in understanding the history of European Christianity during the last 300 years. Callum Brown took up that challenge with a different kind of critique of secularisation, one that was empirical rather than conceptual, in an article in Urban History Yearbook, 'Did Urbanization Secularize Britain?' (1988).7 Brown attempted to be more specific, knocking down individual pillars of the classic theory of secularisation by reference to empirical data, he continued in a more systematic way in 'A Revisionist Approach to Religious Change' (1992).8 Beginning before Brown published his first work on secularisation, other historians sceptical of the concept took another approach, the local study. Beginning with Hugh McLeod's first book, Class and Religion in the late Victorian City, and Stephen Yeo's study of Reading, Religion and Voluntary Organizations in Crisis, historians took a look at religious change on the ground without assuming that the classic elements of secularisation explained historical change. One of the most irreligious parts of England by conventional standards, South London, was examined in detail in books or dissertations on Lambeth, Croydon, Bermondsey, and Southwark. Mark Smith looked again at Anglican growth in the north of England during the early days of industrialisation, and Simon Green contributed a grass roots study of Sunday Schools in Yorkshire that examined reasons for their decline rooted in the institutional history of the Christian churches. Hugh McLeod weighed in with a comparative local study of religion in working-class neighbourhoods in London, New York, and Berlin, a city that serves as a kind of ground zero for the impact of secularisation.9 It is difficult to read these and similar studies with any care and come away without a conviction that the classic concept of secularisation provides very

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little help in understanding the history of Christianity in the modern world. The achievement of the sceptics, though, is smaller than the sum of its parts. Their work (including mine) constitutes a collection of dissenting monographs rather than the elaboration of a new concept of religious change in the modern world. Peter Berger has asserted that secularisation is a scientific theory and that doubts raised by the accumulation of empirical data have led him to abandon it.10 In Brown's work, and in the collected monographs of the dissenters, a large body of doubts have been raised about the validity of the concept of secularisation, yet it remains the only general account of religious change in the modern world, one that the sceptics themselves repeatedly invoke when attempting to think big. Bryan Wilson argues that secularisation is merely a description of changes in the modern world, and others have followed his lead, arguing that it is safe to use the concept if only in a descriptive way, ignoring its teleological and causal core.11 Historians who attempt to use the theory in a purely descriptive way find the word being deployed in their own work in a way that is teleological and causal, despite their best efforts at re-definition. Hans Knippenberg's recent book12 contains repeated generalisation of this sort: secularisation has proceeded further in the cities of the Czech Republic than in rural areas. He does not say why, but many readers, perhaps most of them, will fill in the blanks. Urbanisation is one of the features of modernity that is inherently inimical to religion. Secularisation is best understood less as an empirical theory subject to confirmation or refutation than as a master narrative, a large organising story, rooted in centuries of rhetorical engagement about the direction of modern history. Steve Bruce is right to explain it as a 'general orientation' rather than a scientific thesis.13 As a master narrative, or as general orientation, it can only be approached with an attempt to think through and argue through the elements of an alternative master narrative, a better general orientation about the history of the Christian world. It is impossible to tell if secularisation is the best story to tell about history until we can compare it with another story. Until then, all of the empirical modifications in the world will run up against the impotence of the empirical rebuttal. David Martin found all of his work on Latin American pentecostalism dismissed by Bryan Wilson as merely a question of timing. Secularisation has been a bit slower than we thought. Sarah Williams' local study of Southwark was dismissed with identical logic by Albion Urdank: 4 Williams succeeds not so much in debunking the concept of secularisation, but rather in altering its timing (especially evident in the retreat of superstitious thinking): the lag merely stretched a tad longer than we used to think.'14 The importance of Hugh McLeod's work, along with that of Callum Brown, is that they have not been content with empirical refutations alone. They have attempted to transcend the local study and the elaboration of empirical evidence with elements of a broader master narrative. The elements of this rethinking consist of re-periodisation and re-naming. As Jonathan Clark demonstrated in English Society, 1660-1832 Religion, Ideology, and Politics During the Ancien Regime, choosing different dates and names for fundamental historical periods is

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one of the most powerful tools of historical revisionism. In Brown's The Death of Christian Britain (2001) and Religion and Society in Twentieth Century Britain (2006) and in McLeod's The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (2007), we can find the elements of a new religious chronology of modern history, one in which the crucial turning points are the 1520s, the 1790s, and the 1960s. The period between the 1790s and 1960s becomes a discrete period in the history of the Christian world, one that McLeod provides with new names: 'late Christendom', and 'the new confessionalism'. In the work of Brown and McLeod there are components, shadowy as of yet, of an alternative master narrative of religious change in the Christian world. Brown and McLeod agree that the 1960s is a crucial turning point, although they disagree about the features of the 1960s that led to a rapid decline of Christianity. Once the 1960s has been chosen as a pivotal decade, then the characteristics of the age preceding and following it must be defined. The logic of a focus on the 1960s leads to an emphasis on the Christian nature of Europe between the 1790s and 1960, and this has led to a welcome opportunity to examine the extent to which non-Communist Europe in the first half of the twentieth century might be described as a Christian Europe rather than one in which religion had become marginalised. The elements of confessional Christianity - religious education in the schools, the prevalence of confirmation, a broad willingness in many countries to pay what had become a voluntary church tax, a general assent to doctrines that bear a close resemblance to orthodox or liberal Christian doctrines - are now seen to be important characteristics of late Christendom. The spread of a secular point of view, it appears, and the growth of an un-churched population, was very much a minority affair before the late-twentieth century. The Age of Faith, formerly a title for the Middle Ages, is now to found in the early-twentieth century. Brown refers to the Edwardian Age as 'The Faith Society'. What about decline before the 1960s? However religious Europe might have been in the mid-twentieth century, there is abundant evidence of a long term decline in the importance of religious institutions in the early-twentieth century, especially in Protestant Europe. Although the decline may well have been slower than we thought, there appears to have been in most of Protestant Europe a slow decline in support for Christian institutions, and a slow growth of the percentage of the population that ignored Christianity altogether. Since the Enlightenment, and perhaps before, there had always been a segment of the population that conformed to the point of view described in Greville's Memoirs of Holland House, dated Good Friday, 1843: 'Everybody knew that the House was skeptical, none of them ever thought of going to church, and they went on as if there was no such thing as religion.'15 In the late-nineteenth century Sunday church attendance was undoubtedly declining in England, even while other forms of religious participation appear to have been stable or even growing. For a historian, the central questions concern the size of the un-churched population and the social significance of religious institutions. How are they changing, and why?

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Where Brown uses the invocatory term secularisation for the 1960s and after, McLeod avoids using the term in The Religious Crisis of the 1960s for the post or pre-1960s periods. Early in this book he chooses instead of secularisation an alternative phrase for the historical process of religious change, 'the decline of Christendom'.16 Christendom refers to a distinctive form of European Christianity (although elements of it may be found throughout the Christian world) that was territorial, parochial, and elitist, linked closely to government and the law, and heavily reliant upon the catechism (and later government funded elementary education) to promulgate a Christian outlook. In the nineteenth century it became even more dependent on a combination of voluntary support of elites as well as access to public funds from centralised governments. It was a religion for the people rather than a religion of the people, although in many parts of Europe it had become a religion of the people as well, as conservative electoral politicians throughout Europe discovered to their advantage in the late-nineteenth century. In The Death of Christian Britain and The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, Brown and McLeod have provided the elements of an alternative master narrative, but one that leaves many problems to be examined In his book, McLeod simply ignores secularisation as a description of historical change. The word barely appears in the book. By way of contrast, in his recent general history, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (2006), Brown returned to the practice of thinking big rather than focusing on one decade. The striking feature of this book is the extent to which it returns to an invocatory use of the classic theory of secularisation to fill in the gaps in the narrative. Having undermined the classic theory with empirical arguments, and outlined some elements of a new theory of secularisation based on changes in gender roles in the 1960s, Brown finds the concept of secularisation necessary in order to provide a broad general picture of religious change in the late-twentieth century. Like Martin before him, he refines and redefines the elements of secularisation. However much the elements of the general theory are re-arranged and re-defined, it is insufficient to banish the weight of history that lies on the word itself Secularisation appears in Religion and Society in Twentieth Century as a thing that causes other things to happen: 'It is first vital to appreciate how catastrophically secularisation came by the end of the century to undermine conventional religion.'17 Both Brown and McLeod have begun the process of working out an alternative master narrative of religious change in the Christian world, one that can be set alongside the hidden and invocatory master narrative of secularisation. Many questions remain, though, including how to do without a concept that appears to be irreplaceable because of its sheer usefulness. I have always found it annoying when historians set out a research agenda for other people, so I will end this paper by setting out some questions that appear to be important in my own thinking and research about the nature of Christianity in the modern world.

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How is it Possible to Avoid the Word Secularisation Altogether Insofar as it is Used as a Description of Historical Change? David Martin disavowed any attempt to banish the word, but until it is possible to think of an alternative general story of religious change in the modern world, the word when used as an explanation of historical change is toxic. Martin believes that secularisation can be redefined; Brown believes that it is a perfectly good word, but only for the late-twentieth century. Both run up against the fact that the word secularisation is inherently invocatory, and the story invoked is inherently teleological and causal, whether it is applied to the mid-Victorian age or the late-twentieth century. There are limits to our ability to redefine words when they carry centuries of historical associations. It would be sound practice in the history of religion to avoid the word altogether until it is possible to set the concept of secularisation side by side with an alternative and broadly recognizable general theory of religious change. McLeod does just that in The Religious Crisis of the 1960s.

How do we Avoid Binarism in Comparative Religious History? For some scholars, the concept of secularisation has shrunk over the last thirty years. What formerly applied to the entire world is now restricted to Europe. In recent debate on this question, there has been a tendency, reflected in Peter Berger and Grace Davie's book, Religious America, Secular Europe?, to create two different religious settlements in Europe and the United States. Berger puts a label on one of them, 'Eurosecularity', which is, I believe, our old friend the theory of secularisation re-named and cut down to size, a European size, but with the same invocatory, teleological, and causal characteristics as the global theory. Euro-secularity proceeds from core to periphery in Europe as 'countries are pulled into secularity to the degree by which they are integrated into Europe'.18 Instead of reinstating secularisation as a European phenomenon, it is worth paying close attention to those changes in Europe that are distinctive, and those changes that represent trends evident in other parts of the Christian World. The problems faced by American Methodists, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians over the last 40 years bear a striking similarity to the difficulties faced by the established or formerly established Protestant churches of Europe during the same period. The Roman Catholic Church in America has lost 50 per cent of its parochial school students during the last generation, a downward slope that rivals those of some of the large European Christian denominations, including Roman Catholicism. Instead of thinking of secular Europe and religious America, it makes more sense to think of the predominantly Christian nations of the world as being arranged on a spectrum according to the percentage of the population with identifiable religious faith, practice, or institutional connection on the one hand, and the percentage with no identifiable Christian belief, practice, or institutional

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connection on the other. The precise nature of that relationship then becomes a matter of historical inquiry.

What is the Comparative Importance of the Burden of Institution Maintenance? The mainline Protestant churches of the United States, mentioned above, face serious problems in maintaining their physical plant as their numbers decline, as does the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. A very large amount of lay and clerical effort is devoted to that task, effort that cannot be devoted directly to recruitment or church growth. These problems pale when set beside those of Europe. In The Conversion of Europe. From Paganism to Christianity 371-1386, Richard Fletcher tells the story of the creation of a distinctive European form of Christianity that was territorial, elitist, and ultimately parochial, committed to covering Europe with Christian parishes where the people would be Christianised from above.19 The Reformation and Counter-Reformation saw an extension of that form of Christianity, labeled 'confessionalism' by many historians. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the new urban Europe was blanketed with parishes and new church buildings. The result is an enormous and expensive set of ecclesiastical institutions that must be maintained. By a recent estimate there are 48,807 Christian churches in the United Kingdom.20 7,000 churches still in use were built before 1300, and over 10,000 Anglican churches were Misted', that is subject to historic preservation orders.21 It is not only buildings that must be maintained, but clergy and ministers, 35,265 of them in Great Britain alone in 2001.22 A similar story could be told in any part of European Christendom. There are many large and growing Christian congregations in Great Britain, and if they are entirely new they have the advantage of what economist Alexander Gerschenkron referred to as 'the advantages of backwardness', therefore they can start from scratch without the inherited burden of institution maintenance.23 These advantages are multiplied in countries where the new churches are not overshadowed by the huge burden of institutional maintenance in Christendom. In writing the history of Christianity in the modern world, it appears likely that this contrast can be quantified.

What is the Comparative Importance of Ecclesiastical Entrepreneurship? One of the insights of the church growth school of missiology in the late-twentieth century, which emerged as a means of explaining which missionary methods might work, was the importance of religious recruitment. The implication of their work, which has been broadly discussed in the context of domestic church growth in both Europe and the United States, is that churches that make an attempt to grow are more likely to succeed at that task, other things being equal, than those that have other priorities, such as institution maintenance, or the pursuit of social

22

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justice, or the search for influence in public life, or electoral and parliamentary politics.24 American church historians have emphasised the success of religious entrepreneurs from George Whitefield to Rick Warren of mega-church fame. I have already noted the comparative burden of institution maintenance borne by the old European Christian denominations. Catholic and Protestant alike also have a long history of assuming a public role in promoting Christian influence rather than recruiting new Christians into the pews. Upon becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 2004, Rowan Williams defined a measure of his success or failure as 'whether I've managed to persuade anybody out there that the Christian religion is worth taking seriously, intellectually and imaginatively and spiritually, pushing it back a little bit towards the cultural mainstream. Or maybe even drawing the cultural mainstream back towards Christianity'. All of the major Christian denominations of Europe have a tradition of clergy, ministers, and priests acting as influential members of the community, whether local, regional, and national, giving advice and expecting or hoping that it will be heeded. Influence is important in history, but it is difficult to measure. In early twenty-first-century Britain, public comments by bishops are taken seriously in the press and parliament, and throughout Europe the Pope can count on television and internet coverage when he speaks on matters of public policy. There is no real equivalent to that phenomenon in the United States despite the much higher adherence to orthodox Christian doctrines. Many priests, clergymen, ministers and religious activists in all of the old mainstream denominations of Europe find it difficult to engage in recruitment. Acting more like a union organiser, or a commercial salesman, or an evangelist, does not come easily for some religious professionals. A Canon of Westminster Abbey, interviewed about the prospects of the Church of England advertising on television, said: 'We are tackling the question of whether the church should advertise at all. Should we be advertising God? Should we be trying to get people into church? I do not think we have satisfactorily answered those questions.'25 Religious liberals throughout the Christian world are often highly allergic to any association with evangelism, which they associate with evangelicals and pentecostals, not to mention Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. Members of the Quaker meeting that I attend appear to be incapable of taking any steps to publicise the existence of their religion, for reasons that are rooted in the history of Quakerism and the theology of liberal Protestantism. Quakerism remains small but also influential. Too much could be made of this supply-side contrast, though, since there are many examples of American religious leaders who are concerned with institution maintenance, social influence, and political action of both left and right wing varieties, and whose churches, due to their social location, have grown and prospered. Furthermore, many and varied efforts have been made throughout Europe to recruit people into the churches. The church growth school focused less on methods than on the nature of the target population, which had to be a receptive one before any method could work. Without a receptive population, no method

Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation: A Progress Report

23

will work, as many evangelical activists have found when they attempt to sell God in Europe. Recently a group of Southern Baptists from the young adult singles group at the First Baptist church of Arlington, Texas, went to Zurich and hit the streets to survey people about, as they put it, their religious affiliation, the needs of the community, and what a church could do to be more relevant to their lives. More than 1,500 people were surveyed, and only five said they were Christians. The rest said they were either agnostic or atheist. One of the stunned Texans said: 4 We discovered that not only did they not know God, they sincerely felt there was no need for him in their lives. They knew of God, as he was a part of their history, but they didn't see any reason to have a personal relationship with him. To be in the midst of all that Protestant history and for there to be no spirit was pretty amazing.' 26 The presence in Europe of a significant de-Christianised population, resistant to any efforts at recruitment into churches, brings us to another question.

Is it Possible to Estimate the 'Critical Mass' Factor in Matters of Belief and Unbelief? Conformism is one of the great driving forces in religious faith and practice, as it is in politics. Many people who do not think very much about politics and religion vote like their neighbours do, or go to church like their neighbours do, or send their children to Sunday School like their neighbours do, or do not. After suffering a decline in religious participation in the 1960s, American Christianity began to grow in the 1970s, reaching a critical mass of institutional affiliation and practice that is largely responsible, in my opinion, for the strikingly high levels of American assent to the doctrines of orthodox Christianity. At some point after the 1960s, the percentage of people in some of the historically Christian nations of Europe who lacked any connection with any church, and a lack of any religious belief that could be reasonably defined as Christian, even very liberal Christian, reached a critical mass. This had happened before among some small but influential sections of the population. Evelyn Waugh put those attitudes into the mouth of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, as he was forced to explain his agnosticism: I had no religion. I was taken to church weekly as a child, and at school attended chapel daily, but, as though in compensation from the time I went to my public school I was excused church in the holidays. The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth, and that opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of present value, a division in which the main weight went against it.27

A secular critical mass characterised a section of, for lack of a better word, the intelligentsia, well before the 1960s.

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in the Christian World

Since the 1960s the assumption that a lack of connection with Christian institutions, and a resulting lack of anything resembling Christian religious faith, is natural and normal has spread widely among the general public in many European nations. The work of Brown and McLeod on the 1960s is important precisely because it opens the way for further comparative discussion of the question of critical mass. It is also important to avoid invoking the concept of secularisation with its teleological underpinnings which turn this into a predictable change rather than a historical problem that requires explanation.

What is the Comparative Importance of Immigration? The American Roman Catholic Church has suffered from a striking institutional decline during the last generation, with a sharp fall in recruitment to the priesthood and enrolment in parochial schools. Mass attendance in its heartland in the northeast is falling, as Catholics of Irish and Polish and Italian descent begin to conform more closely to patterns of religious participation shown by their (historically) Protestant neighbours. At the same time, though, levels of mass attendance have held steady in the country as a whole because of the entry into the United States of tens of millions of Spanish speaking immigrants, many of them illegal but un-deportable due to sheer numbers. As mass attendance falls in the northeast, it grows in the southwest, although Spanish speaking Catholics for the most part do not send their children to parochial schools. In many parts of the country the Roman Catholic Church is acting as an advocate for Spanish speaking people facing discrimination from their neighbours and what can only be described as widespread persecution by the federal government. Irish immigration rejuvenated the nineteenth-century English Roman Catholic Church in the same way, as Catholicism grew from 2 to 3 per cent of the population to around 10 per cent between 1850 and 1950. In the early twenty-first century, as the descendants of Irish immigrants began to conform to Protestant and secular neighbours in matters of religious practice, several hundred thousand Polish immigrants appeared in some British and Irish cities, and some of them began to appear at mass. The scale of this receptive population, though, is fundamentally different from the scale of immigration in North America. European immigration has been far more heavily Muslim, a notably unreceptive population from the point of view of church growth theory. Once again, the work of McLeod is relevant to this question. He demonstrated in his comparative study of religion in London, New York, and Berlin that not all immigrant groups, even Christian immigrant groups, respond to the efforts to recruit them into Christian institutions in the same way. Immigration does not appear in the classic theory of secularisation at all, but some elements of the relative importance of Christian and de-Christianised sectors of the population in the Christian world appear to be related to the comparative history of immigration.

Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation: A Progress Report

25

Has any Progress been made Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation since David Martin First made the Suggestion in 1965? The concept is still with us, defining the direction of history for us, neatly solving problems for us that should be the focus of sceptical scholarly inquiry. It is not surprising that secularisation is still widely invoked, for new master narratives in history cannot be made up on the spot. They emerge from a long process of discussion and argument. A great deal of progress towards defining an alternative master narrative can be found in the work of Martin, Brown, and McLeod, even when they are reluctant to banish the word altogether. Their work opens up fundamentally new ways to approach the history of religious change in the Christian world.

Notes 1

J.M. Carroll, The Trail of Blood\ or Following the Christians Down Through the Centuries from the Days of Christ to the Present Time (Lexington, Ky., 1931). 2 A.C. Maclntyre, Secularization and Moral Change, Riddell Memorial Lectures 1964 (London, 1967); Bryan R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society a Sociological Comment (London, 1966); D. Martin, 'Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation,' in J. Gould ed., Penguin Survey of the Social Sciences (Harmondsworth, 1965); D.A. Martin, The Religious and the Secular; Studies in Secularization (New York, 1969). 3 B.R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society: a Sociological Comment (London, 1966), p. 122. 4 D. Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford, 1978), p. viii. 5 B. Wilson, 'Can the "Latter Rain" Survive Consumerism?' TLS, 29 March 2002, 8. 6 Encyclopedia Britannica, eleventh edition (1910), vol. XIV, p. 20b. 7 C.G. Brown, 'Did Urbanization Secularize Britain?' Urban History Yearbook 1988, pp. 1-14. 8 C.G. Brown, 'A Revisionist Approach to Religious Change,' in Steve Bruce ed., Religion and Modernization Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford and New York, 1992), pp. 31-58. 9 S. Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis (London, 1976); H. McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City. (Hamden, Conn., 1974); J. Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870-1930 (New York and Oxford, 1982); J.N. Morris, Religion and Urban Change. Croydon, 1840-1914 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK Rochester, NY, 1992); A.B. Bartlett, 'The Churches in Bermondsey 1880-1939' (Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, 1987); S.C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southward c. 1880-1939 (Oxford and New York, 1999); M.A. Smith, Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth, 1740-1865 (Oxford, 1994); S.J.D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline. Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 18701920 (Cambridge, 1996); H. McLeod, Piety and Poverty. Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London, and New York 1870-1914 (New York, 1996).

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P.L. Berger, G. Davie and E. Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations (Aldershot, 2008), p. 10. 11 B. Wilson, 'Reflections on a Many-Sided Controversy,' in S. Bruce ed., Religion and Modernization, p. 209. 12 H. Knippenberg, The Changing Religious Landscape of Europe (Amsterdam, 2005). 13 S. Bruce, Religion in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1995), p. 135. 14 A. Urdank, 'Review of S.C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c. 1880-1939' American Historical Review, vol. 106, no. 5 (December 2001), pp. 1879-80. 15 C. Greville, The Greville Memoirs, 1814-1860 (London 1938), V, p. 87. 16 H. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), p. 18. 17 C.G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow, England and New York, 2006), p. 315. Berger, Davie and Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europep. 11. 19 R. Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe. From Paganism to Christianity 371-1386 (London, 1997). 20 P. Brierley, UK Christian Handbook Religious Trends No. 7 (Swindon UK, 2008), p. 12.3. 21 P.W. Brierley, The Tide is Running Out: What the English Church Attendance Survey Reveals (London, 2000), p. 208. 22 Brierley, UK Christian Handbook Religious Trends No. 7, p. 12.3. 23 A. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. a Book of Essays (Cambridge, Mass, 1962). 24 For recent studies see Brierley, The Tide is Running Out, R. Finke and R. Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-2005. Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ, 2005); W. Hemmingerand H. Hemminger, Wachsen mit Weniger. Konzepte Für die Evangelische Kirche von Morgen (Basel, 2006); D.T. Olson, The American Church in Crisis: Groundbreaking Research Based on a National Database of Over 200,000 Churches (Grand Rapids, MI, 2008). 25 The Times, 20 January 1993. 26 G. Henson, 'Arlington Missionaries Find Disbelief Among Swiss,' Baptist Standard, 28 April 2003, 11. 27 E. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited. The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, reprint, 1999 (New York, Boston and London, 1944), pp. 85-6.

Chapter 3

Implicit Understandings of Religion in Sociological Study and in the Work of Hugh McLeod Linda Woodhead

Insofar as one of the central interests of Hugh McLeod's work is secularisation, he shares an agenda with the sociology of religion. It is therefore interesting to compare his approach to religion with that of sociologists. In The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (2007) McLeod makes his own suggestions about how he differs. First, he takes account not just of social trends, but also of significant events, and the actions and influence of individuals.1 Second, he eschews grand theories which try to explain secularisation in terms of a single explanatory variable, and prefers to see religious decline as over-determined by a range of different factors, operating on several scales.2 In what follows I want to reflect upon another area of similarity-in-difference or difference-in-similarity between the work of McLeod and many sociologists of religion: their implicit models of religion. Few who write about religion, in any discipline, begin with a definition. In this they are no different from political theorists, economists, or sociologists, who rarely start by defining what they mean by politics, economics or society. There is a good reason for this, since all these terms are generalised concepts or labels which direct attention to complex constellations and aspects of social and material relations for certain purposes. Their meaning and power lies in the way they are utilised, and their adequacy can be judged from their application and ability to illuminate. Although definitions can be proposed, they necessarily remain general and abstract. As such, they are subject to interminable criticism and debate; abstracted from actual contexts of use, the wheels and gears of defi nition grind and slip. It is not surprising, then, that McLeod does not spend time defining religion. But like all who write on this topic, his work assumes, carries and constructs an implicit understanding of religion. It is this which I seek to explore, and to contrast with sociological approaches to religion. I do so by isolating four main models of religion which can be discerned in sociological study of religion, and in the work of McLeod. The first two models - of religion as belief/meaning, and religion as identity - I consider dominant in recent social scientific work. The third - of

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religion as value-commitment, and religion as power - I consider recessive in sociology, but more prominent in Hugh McLeod's work (and probably in history of religion more generally, although I do not investigate that claim here). To the extent that he directs attention to all four models of religion, I believe that McLeod's approach to religion has important things to teach sociologists, who often take a narrower view. Yet I go on to argue that there is also a neglected aspect of religion in McLeod's work - as of most sociological approaches to religion - which has to do with what I refer to as 'super-social relations'. In order to give the discussion a clear focus, and because it provides such a good example of McLeod's mature thought on religion and change in the West, I largely confine my attention to The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (2007). This book is referred to throughout this essay as Religious Crisis and unreferenced page numbers refer to this work.

Four Models of Religion Religion as Belief A great deal of contemporary discourse about religion, including that of politicians, legal professionals, and journalists, assumes that being religious is primarily about believing certain things. On this account, to be religious is to subscribe to a set of beliefs that a non-religious person disputes, in particular beliefs about the existence of supernatural beings and forces. A closely-related, broadly cognitive, approach to religion has also been dominant in sociological study since the 1970s, partly as a result of the influence of Peter Berger. Berger's book The Sacred Canopy (1967) is the single most important theoretical work on religion in the post-war period, its influence reinforced by Berger's subsequent single- and co-authored publications. For Berger, religion provides a system of meaning for making sense of the world, and for covering contingency with a canopy of sacrality and taken-for-grantedness. In relation to secularisation, Berger argues that religion is undermined not so much by the breakdown of social community, but by the rise of cognitive pluralism in modern societies in which individuals can hardly avoid coming into contact with a plethora of other belief systems. In Berger's early work he said that pluralism undermined religion. In more recent work, he has altered his position to say that it doesn't affect the fact that people still believe, but changes the way in which they believe.3 Within the sociological tradition, Berger's work has obvious continuities with Max Weber's approach to religion, insofar as Weber understood religion - in modern societies at least - as a cultural, cognitive force which helps to make sense of the world by providing meaning, values, and sacred symbols. Thus, for Weber, a key way of classifying religions is in terms of their theodicies, that is to say, the ways in which they explain the inexplicable, and hence render life meaningful. For Weber, it is when religious understandings of the world become implausible, in the context of rationalisation, that religion comes under challenge.

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29

These sophisticated cognitive accounts of religion are simplified and reduced in derivative accounts which reduce religion to a set of beliefs. The crudest assimilate religion to a set of beliefs equivalent to scientific belief, the only difference being that religious beliefs are less accurate or plainly false. Many legal definitions of religion also treat religion as a matter of belief which must be held 'sincerely' to count as religion. Such accounts are prone to take an unreflectively individualistic form, which reduces religion to a matter of personal opinion. They are not unknown in historical and sociological studies of religion, especially where religion is treated narrowly and exclusively as a sub-species of'culture'. The model of religion as belief has rightly been subject to considerable critique. Some have pointed out the ethnocentrism of such an approach4 and others have suggested that it assimilates all religion to a form of Christian Protestantism5 (I would dispute whether it is even true to the breadth of Christian Protestantism). In a similar vein, others have pointed out that much religion has far more to do with practices, and practical misfortune-management, than beliefs about God.6 A new theoretical emphasis on the importance of the body, ritual and bodily practices in religion furnishes a further line of attack,7 and that on religion as material culture another.8 Riis and Woodhead argue for putting emotions back into the study of religion, and argue that narrowly belief-centred accounts of religion neglect developments in neurological and linguistic research which show that all human cognition, including self-conscious rationality, is much more closely linked to emotions, the body, and social action than rationalistic accounts have appreciated.9 Hugh McLeod's work escapes such critique, since he never succumbs to the temptation to reduce religion to belief. Indeed, there is an important sense in which belief is the most neglected dimension of religion in McLeod's work, as I will argue at the end of this chapter. Religious Crisis is indicative. Although McLeod gives more attention to belief than historians who reduce religion to class struggle or other socio-material processes, his attention is selective. He pays more attention to debates about ecclesiology and ethics than to doctrine or popular beliefs about the divine - as we see, for example in his treatment of Vatican II. His interest is in beliefs which have direct political and institutional relevance, rather than in beliefs which might be of greater personal significance to 'the believer' him- or herself. Thus, changing understandings of God receive little attention in McLeod's work, and we get little sense of what is at stake in terms of changing cognitive commitments for the person who leaves behind Christianity and becomes, say, an atheist or a pagan. Here we see a contrast between McLeod's work and that of his main conversation-partner, Callum Brown,10 whose cultural focus and method of discourse analysis produce a much more vivid account of the 'drama of salvation' at the heart of evangelical life, and of the real and vivid presence of God the Father and Jesus Christ in the life of believers. In that sense, belief, whether popular or academic, is not McLeod's central concern. For him, other aspects of religion have greater importance.

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Religion as Identity-Shaping and Boundary-Forming The idea that religion has less to do with belief than with the creation and maintenance of social identity is associated in sociological tradition with the work of Emile Dürkheim. For Dürkheim, religion and society are inseparable. Religion is the place where a society holds up an image of itself, reaffirms its bonds, renews its emotional ties, marks its boundaries, sets itself apart - and so brings itself into being. In Durkheim's famous definition, religion names the 'beliefs and practices' relative to what is sacred and 'set apart' which unite into a 'single moral community' those who adhere to them.11 Interestingly, this model of religion has been somewhat marginalised in the Sociology of Religion in recent decades. It is has been criticised as narrowly 'functionalist', as too broad and vague to operationalise in the study of religion (what would not count as religious?), and as ethnocentric (not all societies draw a dualistic distinction between realms of the sacred and profane). Theorists of secularisation like Bryan Wilson12 and Steve Bruce13 take it seriously not so much as an account of religion today, but as an account of what has been lost in the process of modernisation. For both of them the breakdown of local ties of solidarity helps explain the decline of religion: as societies modernise, forces like societalisation and differentiation corrode local bonds and in the process seal the fate of church-religion. The 'identity model' of religion has more enduring influence in the anthropological study of religion. It is in active use in many studies, including studies of contemporary social developments in complex societies - see, for example, David Lehmann's interpretations of globalising forms of religion in terms of the different ways in which they dissolve and re-form social boundaries,14 or Timothy Jenkins's studies of English congregational life.15 In sociology of religion, Hans Mol proposed a theory of'identity and the sacred' which owed much to Dürkheim, but has not proved widely influential.16 What has happened recently, however, is that the category of identity has entered the sociology of religion not in direct descent from Dürkheim and his disciples, but from the sideways influence of identity discourses in general sociology. For example, there is much talk of 'Muslim identity' and Islam in Europe is often approached primarily in terms of religious and ethnic 'identity'. Such talk of identity may indicate individual self-identity, group identity, or societal identity. Because it is not set in a clear theoretical framework, its methodological implications remain vague, and it can support anything from media analysis, to interviews, to discourse analysis. Although McLeod makes little use of the term 'identity', he is well aware of western Christianity's role in shaping what he often refers to as 'communities', both by affirming likeness between those who belong, and difference from those who do not. In this sense, he has a strong Durkheimian awareness of religion as boundary-forming. Throughout his work on religious history, McLeod pays great attention to the importance of Protestant, Catholic and secularist boundaries in pre-sixties Europe. Indeed, his highlighting of the importance of these bounded communities is a key contribution of his work, and his analysis of their breakdown

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31

is a major part of his attempt to explain secularisation or, more precisely, the 'decline of Christendom'. In Religious Crisis McLeod explains this community breakdown in terms of a number of factors, including, first, the blurring of ideological boundaries (which was precipitated by churches and political parties, including Christian parties, trying to win wider support), second, growing tolerance and willingness to compromise (linked with the growing power of a 'new middle class' including academics, social workers and journalists, who rejected clerical privilege and sought a more liberal, pluralistic political establishment), and third, growing affluence (which made church-based local support networks less important, opened up more opportunities, and resulted in greater mobility) (pp. 73-9). Overall, the change was bound up with an identity-shift, whereby identity came to be formed not so much by membership of religion, class, community and party, but by personal choices, achievements and compromises. As McLeod puts it, there was 'a move from a politics based on identity and loyalty to one based on pragmatic assessment of a particular situation' (p. 78). Religion as Value-Commitment The importance of values and normativity within the complex that we call 'religion' has been seriously neglected in much recent historical and sociological work, even though it has a distinguished history in the sociological study of religion. Although not their central focus, both Weber and Dürkheim have a lively appreciation of the normative dimension of religion, and the most important exponent of this approach, Talcott Parsons, is inspired by both. For Parsons religion is, above all, a source of societal values.17 That is crucial, because for Parsons social action is valuedirected, and social coherence is undergirded by value-convergence. Religion is essential for a functioning society, since it provides it with the shared goals which make it coherent, and which can maintain coherence even in the face of functional differentiation. Unlike Weber, then, Parsons does not see modernisation as corrosive of religion, but as involving a transformation of religion. Indeed, for Parsons modern American society is inconceivable without its underpinning in the value-system of liberal Protestantism.18 To some extent Parsons' 'value model' of religion lives on in the work of his disciples. The most prominent in the sociology of religion, Robert Bellah, developed Parsons' conception of an American 'civil religion', and taxonomised American religion and culture in terms of its value-orientations in Habits of the Heart?9 Bellah's collaborator, Steven Tipton, also exemplifies this approach.20 In Europe an approach which took values seriously was institutionalised by way of the European Values Surveys and, later the World Values Surveys, both of which have roots in (Catholic) sociology of religion. Yet a values approach to religion has failed to inspire the sociology of religion as much as a meaning model, and - despite huge potential - has not been extensively applied to help understand secularisation or recent religious change.

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Here McLeod is particularly illuminating, for he leaves his readers in no doubt about the importance of the value-dimension of religion, and his approach demonstrates the benefit that taking values seriously can have in exploring religious change and explaining secularisation. In Religious Crisis, McLeod sets religious change in the wider context of value-change in western societies. If by values we mean representations of the good life in a good society, we can trace a shift from the 1950s which privileged a return to a 'normality' in which people 'knew their place' and respected the proper authorities (both human and divine) to a post-50s situation in which greater emphasis was placed on the importance of breaking free from convention and authority and on making your own way in a society which placed fewer restrictions on personal freedom. Drawing on English oral history archives, McLeod notices how older working-class people would explain why they had done things by saying 'it was the thing to do', whereas the catch phrase of the 1960s was 'do your own thing'. 21 Thus there is a shift from values of order, decency, respectability, authority, convention and 'normality' to values of freedom, extended democracy, personal empowerment, self-expression, equality and participation. What McLeod notices is that these 'sixties values' are themselves intensely moral if not moralistic; far from being about the rejection of morality, he rightly presents the dynamics of the sixties as intensely moral. As he reports a student at the LSE in 1968 commenting: 'The fact that you were morally superior mattered, people were making a life choice at some level or another. The breaking up of the old world and the searching for a new had some apocalyptic element to it'.22 Rather than presenting the sixties as a hinge between religion and secularity, McLeod thus presents a more nuanced account of the sixties 'revolution' as ethical and religious. Many of those who supported radical change were inspired by a religious or quasi-religious dream of a better society, a heaven on earth, in which divisions of class, race and gender would cease and an era of perfect equality and communion would dawn. He shows that Christians and churches were just as often on the side of this revolution as ranked against it, and that the split between opponents and supporters was at the basis of the split between religious liberal and conservative which would deepen in the latter part of the twentieth century, and come to supplant earlier divisions of denomination and community. Far from seeing the churches and Christians as merely passive or resistant in the face of change, McLeod therefore presents a much more accurate and interesting picture of elements of Christianity which were willing to surrender established privileges and tear down boundary-markers in order to further wider social and ethical reforms. For example, he points out that relaxation of harsh laws on homosexuality, abortion and divorce in England and Wales were not only supported, but partly initiated, by the established church;23 the campaign for civil rights in America was at first led by Christian actors;24 and reform of the Catholic Church and historic Protestant churches was not imposed from outside but inspired from within.25 In the case of some radical elements of Christianity, including the Death of God school, some interpretations of Bonhoeffer, and some

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forms of Liberation Theology, theologians and churchmen were even willing to see the demise of the churches and 'religion' as a necessary step in the creation of the Kingdom of God on earth.26 Religion as Power An important respect in which the model of religion as value-commitment goes further than the model of religion as belief or religion as identity is by taking power more seriously. Power here means simply capacity, the ability to act, to make, to do. As McLeod makes clear, having and making moral commitments enhances the power of groups and individuals to act - whether with others, or in opposition to them. It also gives them a clearer identity, and assists them in the task of making sense of the world. Although some awareness of the power dimension may be implicit in all the models of religion I have reviewed above, in the way they are normally developed it is left out of the analysis. Thus, religion as belief is simply said to enhance people's ability to make sense of the world, thereby providing comfort and existential security (even if false), whilst religion as identity is assumed to serve merely to position people in relation to one another and 'others', but there is little reflection on how such alignments enhance or diminish the power of individuals and groups. Indeed, attention to the ability of religion to empower and disempower - and the sense that religion is a powerful force in social and personal life - remains rare in recent academic discourse. Here again, McLeod's approach serves as an important corrective. It is not that the sociological study of religion has wholly ignored the theme of power, but it has tended to restrict it. Dürkheim, for example, was well aware that ritual gatherings empowered their members, but confined his attention to the functioning and survival of the group. Weber considered religion a key form of cultural power, and explored its relations with other forms of social power, including economic power, but his approach, as we see in a Weberian analysis of religious power like that of Michael Mann,27 tends to focus too narrowly on religion's ideological power alone. McLeod constructs a richer and more internally-differentiated account of religious power. Not only is he aware of the different sources and forms of religious power, he shows how religion empowers both individuals and communities, the different ways in which it does so, and the many different forms of competition and powerrelations which are involved. Thus, McLeod sees that religion may have not only ideological power, but also political, and economic power, as well as influence. As we have already noted, for example, he takes into account the importance of Christian political parties in the early post-war period, in a way sociologists of religion rarely do. Likewise, he considers the role of the churches in political movements like the civil rights movement, and in politico-economic initiatives like the founding, maintenance and running of welfare institutions. He does not neglect the role of the churches as major landowners, diplomatic powers, and employers, and he does not forget that religion provided important material services and social support, as well as

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normative and ideological direction. This sensitivity to the multi-faceted nature of religious power also allows McLeod to take seriously struggles for power between religious and secular institutions as a key factor in secularisation. He notes the importance of the rise in power of secular professionals and professional institutions, and their vested interest in removing religion from spheres in which they wished to claim full autonomy, including politics, law, medicine, and education. McLeod's approach to religion also takes account of its important role in relation to formations of class and gender. Indeed, part of the central argument of Religious Crisis, against Callum Brown, is that class is more important than gender in explaining the decline of churchgoing, and probably the decline of Christendom as well. In support of this, McLeod cites the way in which religion served both to uphold class difference and inequality, and to provide a source of social solidarity, identity and empowerment for different classes and their struggles to better their position. Part of the story of secularisation as he tells it is, first, a story of how the working classes in many European countries were alienated from religion because of its failure to support their interests, and because of growing loyalty to communist and socialist parties and struggles.28 As this story develops in the 1960s, McLeod then points to a growing dissatisfaction on the part of many of the 'new middle class' against not so much Christianity per se, but the power of the churches and their clerical elites.29 McLeod shows how reformist and liberal agendas in Christianity often expressed the interests of constituencies in the churches seeking to wrest power from clergy. Although he subordinates the structured power inequalities of gender and age to class, McLeod also takes account of their significance in explaining religious change. Unlike Brown, he does not have a clear account of why women were preponderant in the churches until (and beyond) the 1960s, or of why the 1960s might have led to specifically feminine or feminist forms of alienation from the churches - something which he largely denies, even though he admits the importance of feminism and changed education and employment patterns for women. McLeod implies that the sixties simply saw women being affected by the same sorts of influences as men - including a desire for greater autonomy - with similarly corrosive effects for church-going. He is clearer that the sixties were uniquely revolutionary for 'youth', due to extended education and increased affluence which gave young people the means and security to develop separate sub-cultures and associated identities, and to campaign for greater power and autonomy from parents and other adults. Overall then, McLeod is sensitive to the multi-dimensional power of religion, and to the importance of struggles for power within, between, and against various forms of religion, in a way which sociology of religion has generally failed to be. As such, his work, especially in combination with Callum Brown's, serves as an important corrective for models of religion which neglect the power dimension in favour of meaning-provision or identity-formation of a bloodless and powerless kind.

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An Additional Model: Religion and Super-Social Relations In the discussion so far I have tried to show that McLeod's treatment of religion not only encompasses existing sociological models of religion, particularly the models of religion as belief and religion as identity, but highlights the importance of two more neglected models: religion as value-commitment and religion as power. As I hinted in relation to McLeod's discussion of belief, however, there is also an aspect of religion which he neglects. This is a consideration of God or, more broadly, a consideration of the divine, the super-sensible, the supra-empirical (where empiricism denotes the boundaries of legitimacy of current scientific endeavour). Thus, one can read and absorb Religious Crisis, but still come away with only a sketchy impression of what it was like to be a Christian before, during or after the 1960s. What one would understand are some of the outward and social manifestations of religion, but little of the ritual, experiential, emotional and cognitive dimensions of belief. Exactly the same criticism can be made of much sociology of religion, especially that which deals with secularisation. Sociologists often defend themselves by saying that they are only equipped to deal with empirically-observable social relations, and that the sphere of the super-sensible falls outside their purview. I wish to argue against this self-imposed limitation from a sociological perspective, and to suggest that it represents not a proper 'scientific' limitation, but an imposition of unexamined secularist sensibilities which artificially distort religious data. In making this case, the most illuminating support comes not from sociology, nor history, but anthropology. What some anthropologists recognise, in a way few sociologists or historians are willing to, is that religion usually has to do not only with social relations between members of a living community, but relations with ancestors, deceased holy men and women, legendary/traditional figures, super-human beings, and/or a supreme Being. Morton Klass shows clearly what is at stake when he writes that: Religion in a given society will be that instituted process of interaction among the members ofthat society - and between them and the universe at large as they conceive it to be constituted - which provides them with meaning, coherence, direction, unity, easement, and whatever degree of control over events they perceive as possible. 30

Klass seeks to break down the natural-supernatural distinction, which he sees as a modern, scientistic and ethnocentric imposition on other cultures and historical eras. Who is to say why some things are 'natural' and others are not? For the farmer in Trinidad, he argues, the di (spirit of the field, spirit of the person who first cultivated the field) is just as important and real, and not categorically different, from the landlord. Both must be given offerings and treated with respect. Both are beings the farmer has never met, who form part of the network of everyday social relations in which he engages, and who demand offerings. In a sense, the notion of a landlord, depending on a whole set of ideological assumptions which

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could easily disappear, is the more fragile and incredible. If we wish to understand the farmer's religion, we must take him on his own terms, and avoid imposing liberal institutionalised scepticism upon his social world. He does not differentiate categorically between the di and the landlord, and neither should we if we seek to understand and represent accurately. The approach I am advocating, in continuity with Klass's arguments, can be called a 'super-social relations model' of religion. It is more scientifically open than a secularist approach, because it seeks to ascertain the full range of social relations which shape and form individuals' lives, rather than to impose an a priori limit on what the extent of those relations must be. To take an example from my own fieldwork, for a female evangelical Christian in the West today, Jesus may be just as real and important and loved and adored as her husband, and in some cases more so. She may give him more time, resources and devotion - to such an extent that jealousy may arise. To say that the woman's relation with Jesus is not relevant to academic study of religion, or falls beyond its competence, is arbitrary. I am not claiming that we study Jesus per se, but that we study the woman's relation with Jesus, the beliefs, emotions, bodily practices and material objects which are involved, its connections with her other social relations, with her membership of a church, with dominant evangelical discourses, relevant social identities and so on. This may require methodological innovation and flexibility, but it does not take us outside the bounds of sociological or historical enterprise, and it rewards us with a much richer account of religious life. To some extent the 'cultural turn' in the social sciences may help deliver such an outcome, at least to the extent that it diverts attention away from solely sociomaterial processes - important as these are. I have already mentioned the way in which the cultural focus in Callum Brown's work helps conjure a much more vivid sense of religious life than we find in McLeod's. But the cultural tum is also subject to unexamined ethnocentric and secularist biases, and has a tendency to get fixated on 'discourses' and 'symbols' at the expense of social relations in their complex and extensive reality. Although extremely illuminating, Clifford Geertz's famous definition of religion as: 'a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic',31 can be faulted for reducing religion to a system of internallyreferential symbols, and not taking seriously the way in which symbols have an 'iconic' relationship with what they represent. I take Asad to be making such criticisms of Geertz when he takes him to task for refusing to understand religious practices on their own terms.32 Geertz's model of religion, though valuable for taking symbols and emotions seriously, does not go far enough into the embodied and situated super-social relations which constitute religious life - nor to the structuring of power inherent in such relations. For the model of religion as super-social relations which I am proposing there is no hard and fast line between religious and non-religious social relations, and

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it is always a matter of interpretation - and often of contestation - what counts as religion. What is most obviously distinctive of religions, however, is the fact that they often involve relations with: 'the universe at large as they conceive it to be', 33 'a general order of existence'34 or, as Geertz puts it even better elsewhere, religion 'moves beyond the realities of everyday life to wider ones which correct and complete them'. 35 As Geertz's last comment suggests, religions claim to represent, prefigure and embody foundational forms of ordering - forms which go beyond the contingent and imperfect relations of everyday life to give access to truer, more real, more lasting, more illuminating, more powerful forms of order, which can illuminate, purify and correct everyday relations. Religions appeal by showing where power really lies (in forces of both good and evil), and allowing people to enter into relation with it: by understanding it, revering it, worshipping it, appeasing it, drawing upon it, manipulating it, railing against it, meditating upon it, making offerings to it, falling in love with it - and so on, depending on the religion and circumstances.

Conclusion It should be clear by now that in reviewing different implicit models of religion and proposing an additional one - I am not wishing to commend or reject a single one. Rather, I propose that all are needed for a full and rounded study of religion, and I have tried to show that Hugh McLeod's work serves as a valuable example of what such an approach might involve. My discussion has also tried to show how each model naturally includes, or gives way to, one or more of the others. To study religion as belief naturally leads us to see how belief empowers; to study religion as a set of values reminds us how identity often crystallises around shared commitments; to study religion as a set of social relations may lead us to recognise that those relations extend to the dead and the legendary - and so on. Despite my hesitation to define religion with no particular purpose in mind, a tentative working definition of religion for sociologists and social historians which combines these different models might state that religion is a normative, patterned set of social, super-social and material-symbolic relations which instantiate a structure of power. To a large extent, apart from the neglect of super-social relations, I think that this chimes with McLeod's approach. Nowhere is that clearer than in a wonderfully concise passage in which he sums up much of the argument of Religious Crisis by saying: On the one hand, shared symbols, values, and moral rules gave the conformist majority a sense of belonging, moral guidance, and a strong sense of identification with a society whose governing principles they had internalized. On the other hand, these all served to marginalise and sometimes to cause the persecution of those minorities who rejected parts of, or even all of, the dominant religion and morality.36

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Religions claim not just to represent normative and social power and ordering, but to bring them to life. Those who participate in a religion participate in the order to which it bears witness, and are thereby brought into direct contact with the 'powers that be', both human and supra-human. The personal and collective power which accrues thereby serves not only to set the 'chosen' people apart, but to diminish, disempower, or persecute those who 'deviate', both within their own communities, and in relation to the 'other'. As McLeod shows so well, religious change is not so much a matter of the operation of impersonal processes, but the outcome of active struggles, conflicts, and alliances, in which real people struggle for real power. This tentative definition is only a provocation to look more closely - and more broadly - at the social and historical landscape for the traces of religion. In practice, certain religions and certain traditions within them, may privilege one of the models reviewed over another. Religions in affluent and literate societies able to support a full-time priesthood, for example, often emphasise the scriptural, theological and belief-based dimension of a religion to a high degree. By contrast, religions of the poor who cannot support a priestly caste, or who rebel against it, may place more emphasis on emotional and embodied practices and on mutual support and common identity. Some religions are particularly concerned with individual empowerment (for example, many forms of contemporary spirituality), others with collective empowerment, and others with the empowerment of a religious elite. There is also no hard and fast line between the religious and the non-religious, and it is always a matter of interpretation - and often of contestation - what counts as religious. Detailed research and analysis is what is needed to determine which dimensions count in a particular context, and in what ways. Any definition of religion, however capacious, is dangerous if it is used as a shortcut or alternative to real research and investigation. What is needed is proper openness and flexibility. Our models help direct our attention and our research, but our research must constantly reshape and revise our models. We can see this dialectical process at work in the historical writing of Hugh McLeod. In this, as in so many ways, his remarkable lifetime contribution to the study of religion is a model from which we still have much to leam.

Notes 1

H. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), p. 10. Ibid., p. 15. 3 R Berger, 'Secularization and De-Secularization', in L. Woodhead, R Fletcher, H. Kawanami and David Smith eds, Religions in the Modern World (London, 2002), pp. 340-47. 4 See, for example, T. Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity (Stanford, 2003). 2

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S.N. Balangangadhara, The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion (Leiden, 1994). 6 For example, see on religion in Japan I. Reader and G.J. Tanabe, Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan (Honolulu, 1998). 7 P. Mellor and C. Schilling, Re-forming the Body: Religion, Community and Modernity (London, 1997). 8 C. McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, 1995). 9 O. Riis and L. Woodhead, A Sociology> of Religious Emotion (Oxford, 2010). 10 C. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London, 2000); idem., Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow, 2006). 11 E. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Li fe (New York, 1912 and 1965), p. 62. 12 B. Wilson, '"Secularization": Religion in the Modern World', in S. Sutherland and P. Clarke eds, The World s Religions: The Study of Religion, Traditional and New Religions (London, 1988), pp. 195-208. 13 S. Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford, 1996); 'The New Age and Secularization', in S. Sutcliffe and M. Bowman eds, Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 220-36; idem., God is Dead. Secularization in the West (Oxford, 2002). 14 D. Lehmann, 'Religion and Globalization', in L. Woodhead, H. Kawanami and C. Partridge eds, Religions in the Modern World (London, 2009), pp. 345-64. 15 T. Jenkins, Religion in English Everyday Life. An Ethnographic Approach (New York, 1999). 16 H. Mol, Identity and the Sacred: A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion (Oxford, 1976). 17 T. Parsons, 'The Place of Ultimate Values in Sociological Theory', International Journal of Ethics, vol. 45 (1935), pp. 282-316; 'Christianity', in D. Sills ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (18 vols, New York, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 425-47. 18 Ibid. 19 R.N. Bellah, R. Madsen, W.M. Sullivan, A. Swidler and S.M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart. Individualism and Commitment in American Life. (Berkeley, 1985). 20 See, for example, S.M. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties (Berkeley, 1982). 21 McLeod, Religious Crisis, pp. 108-9. 22 Ibid., p. 143. 23 Ibid., pp. 217-31. 24 Ibid., pp. 91-2. 25 Ibid., pp. 92-9, 151-9. 26 Ibid., pp. 86-7. 27 M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power (2 vols, Cambridge and New York, 1986 and 1993). 28 McLeod, Religious Crisis, pp. 51-8. 29 Ibid., pp. 73-9. 30 M. Klass, Ordered Universes: Approaches to the Anthropology of Religion (Boulder, 1995), p. 38. My italics.

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C. Geertz, 'Religion as a Cultural System', in M. Banton ed., Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London, 1971), p. 4. 32 T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore and London, 1993), pp. 27-54. 33 Klass, Ordered Universes, p. 38. 34 Geertz, 'Religion as a Cultural System', p. 4. 35 Ibid., p. 27. 36 McLeod, Religious Crisis, p. 235.

Chapter 4

Protestant Migrations: Narratives of the Rise and Decline of Religion in the North Atlantic World c. 1650-1950 David Hempton

Perhaps no theory has exercised as profound an influence over the writing of religious history in the West as secularisation theory, which in its classic statements suggested that the social significance of religion has inexorably declined in tandem with modernisation defined as social differentiation, societalisation, and rationalisation.1 In other words, the religious domain in western societies has steadily shrunk as a result of the rise of states, bureaucracies, cities, sects, science, and technology. In its classic phase secularisation theory also assumed that religious pluralism contributed to secularisation because it inexorably eroded the universal truth claims of established churches. That proposition soon experienced difficulties, because it ran counter to the alleged greater religiosity of the United States by comparison with Europe, despite the fact that the US displayed much greater religious pluralism than most of Europe. Out of that realisation grew an even greater emphasis on a pre-existing discourse of American exceptionalism. Despite being a modern, technologically sophisticated society, the United States, so the argument now goes, did not experience the same degree of secularisation as its European comparators. Rather, religious pluralism, far from eroding American religiosity, saved it from the fate that befell the European established churches. In this religious version ofAdam Smith's Wealth of Nations (Smith incidentally was all too aware of the religious implication of his economic theories) American religion is regarded as more vibrant than European religion because of the separation of church and state, the democratisation of Christianity, the spread of markets and liberal capitalism, the durability of the evangelical impulse, the importance of voluntary associations, and the ubiquity of the congregational model. Many of the most influential books on American religious history and sociology in the past quarter of a century either articulate or self-consciously contest some or all of the above propositions.2 And yet there is a persistent strain of writing, as evidenced most recently in Charles Taylor's important book A Secular Age, that while acknowledging a degree of American exceptionalism, the West as a whole shares a common experience

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and discourse. Central to this discourse is the idea that a new concept of human improvement arising out of the Reformation has produced western societies where one of the options for humans is that there is nothing, at least nothing supernatural, beyond the pursuit of human flourishing. The roots of secularity, suggests Taylor, lie in the separation of the natural from the supernatural and then living in the natural. The first was striven for, the second happened inadvertently but inexorably, and both have occurred, albeit in manifold different ways, throughout the West, not just in Europe. The purpose of this essay is to explore these ambiguities of religious revitalisation and secularisation through an aspect of modernity that all too often is overlooked in Anglo-American discourse, namely population migration, new cultural encounters, and the expansion of Christendom into new geographical and social spaces. For the first time in history, Christianity, as a result of migration, empire, mission, and conquest, became a genuinely global religious tradition in the period 1500-1900. Although much of this expansion in the early modern period was pioneered by the Roman Catholic religious orders, for present purposes I want specifically to concentrate on Protestantism, which, after a century-long life-and-death struggle against Counter Reformation Catholicism, became a surprisingly mobile and expansionist faith tradition. Pietists, Puritans, Methodists, Baptists, and other populist movements too numerous to list began as explicit or implicit critiques of the alleged mediocrity of Europe's established confessional churches whether Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran or Reformed. Most of these traditions carried with them built-in revivalist and secularisation narratives as the respective poles within which they understood their crucial part in the divine economy. In fact their very mobility was based on the assumption that the confessional churches of Western Europe had conspicuously failed to sustain the purity and vibrancy of early Christianity. Corrupted by Constantinianism, governed by corrupt hierarchies, weakened by priestly sacerdotalism, stained by violence (especially the Thirty Years War), protected by privilege, and characterised by pastoral mediocrity, Europe's established churches were literally heading for a fall from which the godly needed to remove themselves. In this way sectarian Protestants constructed secularisation narratives about the fate of religion in Western Europe long before they were adopted by academic elites. But they also constructed revivalist narratives for those who could extricate themselves from 'carnal' established churches and find new space to grow and prosper. The problem they encountered was that the mobility and zeal of the first and second generations could not be sustained indefinitely, resulting in the re-application of secularisation narratives, this time directed at themselves, or in the case of holiness and Pentecostal traditions, against the Protestant faith traditions from which they too seceded. Ironically, and with huge consequences for the fate of religion in the modern world, a similar pattern of popular Protestant self-fashioning operated among black and latino/a traditions of Christianity. The structure of this essay will reflect those dynamics by first concentrating on the mobility of Puritans and Methodists and then saying something about how a mobile tradition of black

Christianity encountered a colonial version of Western European Christendom in West Africa. The result of this encounter helps explain why Christianity did not wither, as one would have expected it to, with the European colonialism with which it had symbiotically expanded. Indeed if current trends are sustained, Jenkins has made the bold prediction that by the year 2050 only about one-fifth of the world's three billion Christians will be non-Hispanic whites.3 Thus no account of the secularisation of post-Reformation Christianity can afford to ignore the fact that European secularisation, however it is to be interpreted, co-existed with an unprecedented expansion of extra-European Christianity. What follows is an attempt to unravel some of these themes through a selective analysis of three successive waves of popular Protestant migrations across the Atlantic and beyond comprising Puritans, Methodists, and African-American evangelicals. Following these populist Protestant traditions on their travels sheds fresh light on some of the thorniest problems and questions associated with secularisation such as: is America exceptional, and if so, why? To what extent do religious communities create their own secularisation narratives? Finally, why were some forms of Christianity able to thrive in the majority world even after colonialism was overthrown?

Puritanism and the Congregational Impulse The Puritan migrations across the Atlantic to colonial New England in the earlyseventeenth century represent an early protest against the impurities of established churches. The pre-eminent historian of the religious communities resulting from those migrations to the New World, David Hall, has for long been uneasy about the respective poles of secularisation theory and American exceptionalism within which American religion is often conceptually located.4 Right from his early work the Faithful Shepherd through to his more recent reflections on secularisation, Hall has recognised that the framing of these discourses of secularisation and American exceptionalism lie deep within New England Puritanism itself, with its neuroses about religious declension, its unintended facilitation of pluralism through antinomian controversies, half-way covenants, and sectarian fragmentations, and its continual negotiations (both literal and metaphorical) between its European roots and its new American setting, between European Calvinist confessions and American wilderness locations. The declension, fragmentation, and secularisation strand of this narrative was absorbed by Perry Miller, who framed it in terms of coherence giving way to dispersion, and was ironically appropriated by new social and cultural historians who deplored Miller's intellectual history methods while uncritically accepting his conclusions about the fate of American religion. Here then, it seems to me, is a law of religious history. The foundational myths of nations, and the narrative structures that sustain them, continually weave their way in and out of their historiographies, even when they are being repudiated, and contribute to the construction of discourses which claim to be methodologically

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rigorous but are often mere reproductions of the jeremiad tendencies of past idealists, whether Christian or secular.5 What then of American exceptionalism and secularisation? Hall's view is that the story is and always has been deeply paradoxical, and that American culture is characterised by the coexistence of the secular and the religious. 4It is the dialectical relationship between these forces on which we should focus,' he writes, 'tracing how each involves the other and how the boundary between the secular and the religious is continually negotiated.' Such an approach privileges historical context, change over time, and the porous membranes of cultural categories, and inevitably challenges both the meta-narrative of decline and the meta-myth of American exceptionalism. 'Consequently, the one and only road for the historian to take,' states Hall, Ms to insist that "religion" is a fully historical phenomenon, always and everywhere caught up in the rhythms of decline and renewal, change and continuity.'6 And yet there are patently clear differences between Europe and America with regard to secularisation. To begin with, in America there were no church lands to secularise (the root meaning of secularisation), very little vitriolic anticlericalism (though more subtle forms are detectable), and no state-church operating against the perceived political and social aspirations of the lower classes. What American and European historians of secularisation have come to understand is that religion fared better in states where the national project, however that was conceived, ran with the grain of the religion of the people not against it. Thus in Ireland and Poland that meant adopting Roman Catholicism as a bulwark against foreign imperialism, whether of the British, Russian, or Prussian varieties, while in the United States the national project was the separation of Church and State, federalism, democratisation, territorial expansion, and the rise of a market economy. Moreover, as some recent work has shown, secularisation discourse in the United States is often framed by Protestants with a vested interest in celebrating their democratic civil identity and in repressing, sometimes violently, 'outcasts' and 'losers' in their construction of that identity.7 When it comes to secularisation theory, as with other subjects, questions about who shapes the discourse, and for what ends, are crucial. In that sense secularisation discourses are notoriously unstable, partially politically produced, and often based on false dichotomies between the secular and the sacred. Where this debate will go in the future is hard to say, for many of the major players have changed their views quite significantly in the past few decades. Peter Berger, for example, has recently pared down a half century of scholarship to a few simple propositions.8 They are that Marx, Dürkheim and Weber were dead wrong about the alleged link between modernity and secularity. Second, modernity is not necessarily secularising, but it is necessarily pluralising, for it is not characterised by the absence of God but by the presence of many gods. And finally, serious religiosity, sometimes angry and fundamentalist, is the default position of the modern world except in Europe and among the enlightened elites of the West. These two locations, one geographical and the other sociological, are the exceptions to a general global tendency towards religiosity, not the trend itself

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Some of the more creative books on this topic in recent times also have drawn attention to the greater cultural reach of social elites in Europe than in America, where a federalised and diffusive political structure allows conservative religious groups to construct and protect religious subcultures from elite interference.9 They also point to the inexorable commodification of American religion, suggesting that American religion is heartily popular because it is so heartily secular.10 The most recent of all contributions to this ongoing debate takes the view that Europe is secular not because it is modern, but because it is distinctively 'European' in its historical evolution.11 Another important difference between Europe and the United States, identified by Hall as the 'free church' or congregational principle, also had deeply Puritan roots. The giant congregational surveys of American religiosity that have been completed in the past decade have shown that if the United States is a federal union of fifty states; it is also a federation of some three to four hundred thousand religious congregations.12 These surveys have shown that quite apart from the religious and spiritual priorities of congregations they are also at the centre of a vast web of religious consumerism and community organisations. American congregations generate and consume an astonishing array of religious goods and services from teaching materials and liturgical resources to devotional objects and trinkets. They also contribute money and goods, share space, and supply volunteers for a surprisingly wide range of community organisations with which they form partnerships to serve, advocate, admonish, benefit, enrich, and teach. Congregations are multipurpose communal expressions of the wild diversity of American religious traditions. The American 'religious experiment' within which most congregations are located has lasted for over three hundred years. To begin with it was a largely Protestant and Puritan phenomenon, and although the majority of American congregations is still Protestant, the congregational model has been adopted and adapted by a bewildering array of religious traditions including Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Mormon, and Muslim. Like species adapting to new habitats, religious traditions that were never organised on a congregational basis in their various places of origin, acquire new congregational characteristics as they modify ancient polities to conform to the American rage of voluntarism. According to Nancy Ammerman a pattern of religious practice grew up in America free from both state regulation and state support. Religious groups thrived only in proportion to the strength of their voluntary zeal, and had to recognise, sometimes unwillingly, that religious pluralism and toleration imposed limits to the exercise of their power. No denominational tradition has won control over the public square, although white mainline Protestants sometimes came close to it and more recently Moral Majoritarian Evangelicals unrealistically aspired to it. Through their religious congregations Americans have been taught to remember narratives, negotiate diversity, embrace community, value tolerance, seek transcendence, expand markets, serve the needy, and to become activists in the public sphere without necessarily expecting their private religious views to triumph on every occasion. Of course there is another side to American congregations which can

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also promote racism, ignorance, narrowness, and bigotry. Whether noble or nasty, however, American congregations and voluntary associations have sustained far higher levels of communal participation than the almost moribund established churches of some parts of Europe. The pluralism unintentionally created by Puritans (through the failure of their theocratic experiment) and wildly extended by successive waves of migration and sectarian fragmentation created conditions within which American religion could build its sub-cultures away from the withering gaze of increasingly secular elites or the restrictionist inclinations of the state or state churches. Congregationalism and voluntarism have proved to be remarkably adaptable and durable features of the American religious landscape right down to the present cultural symbioses of the burgeoning mega-churches.

Methodism, Migration, and the Market In his work on the rise of global Pentecostalism, David Martin explicitly draws parallels between the earlier mobilisations and migrations of what he calls 'laissez faire lay religion running to and fro between Britain and North America' in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the 'stomping' expansionism of Pentecostalism in tandem with modernity in the twentieth century.13 In particular he states that Methodism 'traveled in the ambit of a mobile society, a global movement prior to globalization, above all on the American frontier but also on the British frontier in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific islands.'14 Methodism, he asserts, escaped social and ecclesiastical hierarchies based on territory, built a worldwide voluntary association, and mobilised upstart women and men for serious religious purposes. Following Nathan Hatch's influential book on The Democratization of American Christianity, Martin portrays the Methodists as free market religious populists migrating west with the march of the frontier mobilising blacks, women, and lower class whites along the way.15 In a recent book I have attempted to supply the social historical foundations of thinking about Methodism as a genuinely international movement which have been largely ignored by historians operating out of the provincialism of national historical traditions.16 Where then did Methodist expansionism come from and how does it relate to our main concern of revitalisation and secularisation? The idea that Methodism was an international religious movement with roots in European intellectual culture in the age of Enlightenment, has been amplified in a triptych of important books by W.R. Ward.17 In The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (1992) Ward locates the seeds of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening among the anxieties of European Protestants in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. A combination of low morale, fear of persecution, confessional conflict, heightened eschatological expectation, and pious devotion, characterised the Protestant communities of central Europe at a time of religious and political instability. The religious life of Europe was quite simply breaking free from state imposed confessional control at precisely the time when such control was

pursued with renewed vigor. As a result the pietism of Halle and Herrnhut was fanned into revivals in various Protestant comers of the Habsburg Empire and was then carried to the British Isles and North America by sweeping population movements and by a remarkable collection of revivalists who knew of each other's labours, believed themselves to be part of a worldwide movement of grace, and corresponded vigorously with one another. In addition to the mountain of evangelical correspondence, both the Moravians and the Methodists frequently gathered for 'letter days' on which letters were read aloud about the progress of religious revivals. The aim was to spread news, stimulate prayer, and persuade the faithful that they were part of a worldwide movement of grace transforming the world in their own lifetimes. Not only were letters and print circulating at remarkable speed, but also revival groups borrowed from one another's liturgical forms, organisational structures, and disciplining techniques. In short, the revived saw themselves as an expanding, communicating, and connecting movement not confined to a particular locale or country. As letters circulated so too did the people who wrote them. A combination of confessional cleansing, imperial expansion, cultural fascination with the peripheries of empire, religious revivalism, the rise of global trade (including the execrable, but flourishing slave trade), and the movement of armies all combined to produce a remarkably mobile population of popular Protestants in the eighteenth century. The migrations of European pietist minorities, displaced and persecuted as a result of 'confessional cleansing', came into contact with a new kind of enthusiastic Protestantism in Britain and Ireland, which was then exported to America and Canada. This was powerfully emblematic of the awakenings of the eighteenth century. There are yet further dimensions to how this worked. Methodism thrived, for example, among soldiers in barracks and garrisons. A combination of a dangerous occupation and mutual dependence, whether in mines, seaports or armies, was always good for Methodist recruitment. But armies were particularly useful as a means of transmission, because they moved, conquered, and demobilised. Michael Snape has shown that Methodism was particularly strong among the ranks of British soldiers in the eighteenth century, including some remarkable instances of Methodist-inspired revivalism in Flanders in 1745. In the same year John Wesley preached to Dutch, Swiss, and German troops on station in the north of England to suppress the Jacobite Rebellion. Snape concludes from all this that although the international dimension of Methodism has been emphasised in recent years 'its military dimensions have been largely ignored, notwithstanding the fact that the wars of the mid-eighteenth century helped to displace tens of thousands of Protestants in northern Europe, the British Isles and North America and bring them into much closer contact with one another'. 18 Indeed, wherever one looks at the spread of Methodism in its pioneering phase, soldiers patrolling the empire were often key figures in its transmission, helping to dispel the idea, at least in the early modem period, that warfare was in itself a prime agent of secularisation.

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In this way the symbiosis of a Methodist structure that was built for mobility and an international order of unprecedented population movement was a particularly important factor in the rise of Methodism from an English sect to an international movement From the sugar plantations of the Caribbean Islands to the trading routes of the East India Company, and from the southwestern migrations of American slaves to the convict ships bound for Australasia, Methodists exploited the mobile margins of trade and empire establishing societies as they traveled.19 Equipped with a flexible ecclesiology that easily facilitated expansion, and armed with a sense of being part of a growing international movement of millennial bounty, Methodism was highly mobile. The Methodist laity, identified by their ubiquitous class membership tickets, which acted as both religious currency and abbreviated letters of recommendation, could change their location without changing their religious tradition. Similarly, the Methodist ministry was actually conceptualised and organised as an itinerant and mobile enterprise, at least until pastoralia and families took over from evangelism and celibacy, and Methodism 'settled5. The glory days of Anglo-American Methodist expansion reached their zenith in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and as the growth rates declined so too did the old millennial optimism. As with the Puritans before them, Methodists then began to construct their own secularisation narratives. At the end of a century of almost uninterrupted expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans Methodism became inundated by 'croaking narratives' as old itinerant preachers, partly out of nostalgia, compared their heroic evangelism with the settled pastorates of their comfortable and conformist successors.20 Moreover, Methodist 'croaking' partly created the myth that Methodist evangelistic success had been based on the heroic labors of male itinerants, thereby further marginalising the contributions of women who had always formed the majority of Methodist members. Croaking narratives also fed into a much wider discourse of discontent about the lack of genuine holiness in a tradition that once described its mission as 'spreading scriptural holiness across the land.'21 The resultant rise of separatist holiness traditions within American Methodism, culminating in the birth of Pentecostalism, may be regarded on one level as an expression of cognitive dissonance in a movement designed to spread holiness but without much holiness left to spread.22 Anglo-American Methodism, as with the Puritanism that preceded it, condemned established churches for their mediocrity, migrated westwards, fractured into many pieces, and then constructed a secularisation discourse that partly paved the way for further revivals of populist Protestantism. If space permitted a similar tale could be told of the Protestant engagement with the new industrial cities of nineteenth-century America. In places like Lowell, Massachusetts, America's first industrial city, Protestants first dreamed of establishing new republics of religion and virtue among newly arrived (and predominantly female) migrants, then used every market strategy they could think of to build them, before a combination of working-class male indifference, Roman Catholic immigration, and unrealistic expectations caused them to construct new secularisation narratives. But these were produced largely by middle-class males

while Lowell sustained a vibrant religiosity among women, French Canadian and Irish Catholic migrants, and those associated with Protestant voluntary organisations.23 As New England Protestants laboured to build their new industrial 'Edens' European visitors admiringly contributed to the discourse of American religious exceptionalism which, dangerously, contained just enough truth to persuade western Europeans that America, even grimy industrial America, was indeed the religious counterfoil to European secularisation. As in other aspects of this subject, the discourse of American exceptionalism came to have more durability than the social reality it sought to describe.

Africans, African Americans, and the Migrations of the Marginalised My third case study, and the one with the most salience for the globalisation of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is located in West Africa, or more particularly, in Sierra Leone. As is well known the first planned settlement under evangelical auspices, the 'Province of Freedom,' which was initiated by Granville Sharp in 1787 for freed British slaves, was a grim failure, wracked by disease, desertion, and disillusionment.24 Within a year of arrival more than half of the almost four hundred settlers had died, run away, or been discharged. The second attempt was both more unusual and more promising. Most of the 1,100 men and women of African descent who migrated from Nova Scotia to Freetown in 1792 were once North American slaves. The black Nova Scotian community from which this reverse transatlantic migration originated had its roots in the promises made to black slaves in the American colonies by the British in return for their assistance in the American revolutionary war. Some of these unlikely empire loyalists brought with them a religious faith birthed in colonial revivals which was given a further evangelical and radical twist by the red hot evangelicalism preached by Baptists and Methodists in Nova Scotia.25 Out of this unlikely community of migrants came David George, born a slave in Virginia in 1743 and revived in South Carolina before the American Revolution, who then became the first Black Baptist pastor in Canada and the first Baptist pastor in Africa. He has left a spiritual autobiography that was transcribed from oral delivery and published in the Baptist Annual Register (1790-93). According to this narrative, George, while a slave, picked up the various Christian influences that wafted around the southern colonies in the 1760s and 70s. White Anglican plantation religion, the influence of slave believers, and New Light Baptist preaching all played their part in bringing George eventually to a classic evangelical conversion experience of awareness of sin, self-loathing, and joyful release. But, as Hindmarsh has pointed out, this was not quite a classical conversion narrative, for George was illiterate at the time of his conversion and only later imbibed from the biblical narratives the formal template for his own experience. 'I can now read the Bible,' he states later, 'so that what I have in my heart, I can see again in the Scriptures,' indicating that 'the oral and the personal was anterior to the written and the discursive element in his

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experience.'26 Here then is an example of how a European tradition of penitential Christianity and release from sin could be stripped of its literary superstructure and act directly in the experience of a black slave who experienced a different kind of bondage. George's 'peculiar antinomian blend of American southern and Nova Scotian New Light popular evangelicalism' was first preached to the black empire loyalists in Canada and was then carried back to Sierra Leone where it encountered an even more diverse cultural melting pot. The Sierra Leone colony expanded exponentially after the act abolishing British participation in the slave trade (1807) led to African recaptives from all over the continent being settled there. British colonial administrators envisaged the colony being Christianised and civilised (the words were often interchangeable) through the creation of model villages supervised by ministers and schoolteachers and united by the universal application of rules and sacraments. This tidy reapplication of the European Christendom model of the ecclesiastical parish lacked many of the elements that made it work, after a fashion, in Europe. In Sierra Leone there were no resident squires supplying a measure of economic stability and social deference, no fully agreed Christian tradition and authority to impart (there were representatives from a proliferation of European missionary societies and religious traditions, and no resident bishops), and little homogeneity among the idealised settlements. These parish-style villages, quaintly named after British people, places and battles, 'transformed Freetown into a black diaspora, a bustling entrepot of refugees at large, with Freetown becoming a creolised, Caribbean-style cultural experience on African soil, a teeming crossroad of African and Western ideas stirred with an admixture of religious elements, Muslim, Christian, and indigenous'.27 So extravagant was the diversity that the CMS German missionary linguist Sigismund Kölle in his Polyglotta Africana (1847) was able to document some 120 different languages spoken in the colony. Some of the manifold ways in which these religious and cultural confluences played out have been richly documented by the missiologists, Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh, but for present purposes what is particularly significant is the way in which the Freetown Nova Scotian contingent operated both as missionary selves and as missionised selves simultaneously. At the same time as they were being disciplined into model Christian settlements they were also Christianising, albeit African American Christianising, the African recaptives. Here are multiple levels of hybridity that gave rise to some revealing encounters. The British organisers of the Sierra Leone colony reported in 1795 that the Nova Scotians in their religious observances were punctual, Sabbatarian, well-dressed, and disciplined, but that some had imbibed 'very inadequate or enthusiastic notions of Christianity; a few perhaps who set up hypocritical pretensions to it.'2S Part of what was happening in Freetown was a version of the contest between European establishmentarian Christianity and new forms of populist evangelicalism that was being played out in many different geographical locations in the British Isles and North America, but the demographic collisions and cultural resonances of Sierra Leone also produced distinctively African expressions. The historical trail of what was going on,

according to Sanneh, stemmed in one direction from the eighteenth-century Great Awakening, and in another from the African American missionary impulse, but there were also strands of European pietism (with its radical distrust of religious establishments), and slave religion (with its heart-stirring aspiration for spiritual and physical liberty). What came out of these different strands were not only different visions of how Christianity should function in new colonial spaces, but also different constructions of the kinds of selves that should be fashioned. Consider the following three encounters. The first is between the Evangelical Anglican governor of Sierra Leone (1793-99) Zachary Macaulay and David George. Macaulay regarded George and the Nova Scotians he represented as antinomians, a most 'seductive' creed in which there were: 'No means to be used, no exertions to be made, no lusts to be crucified, no self denial to be practiced5. Instead, they constructed their faith round instantaneous conversions, 'inexplicable mental impressions and bodily feelings,5 and the 'delusive internal feelings of a corrupt imagination'. After a twelve hour discussion and debate between the two men Macaulay5s observation was that if any Nova Scotian believers were asked how they knew themselves to be a child of God they would answer not from proof drawn from the Bible 'but because (perhaps) twenty years ago I saw a certain sight or heard certain words or passed thro a certain train of impressions varying from solicitude to deep concern and terror and despair thence again thro fluctuations of fear and hope to peace and joy and assured confidence5.29 Macaulay believed that God5s evangelical kingdom in Africa could not be built from such ephemeral and transient materials. A similar conclusion was reached by one of his successors as Governor Sir Charles MacCarthy an Anglican from a Roman Catholic background, and 'an establishment man, and a soldier, with a very clear idea of where his duty lies, and an acceptance of the alliance of religion and duty'. MacCarthy was no evangelical and his vision of Christianisation and civilisation in Africa was to divide the Sierra Leone colony and then the entire continent into ecclesiastical parishes within which universal baptism would make a uniform Christendom.30 Not even the European missionaries with their evangelical roots could buy into that vision, never mind the Nova Scotians, and never mind the even more eclectic recaptives. W.A.B. Johnson, a CMS missionary, told MacCarthy that he would not baptise more Africans 'unless God first baptized their hearts. He [MacCarthy] said that the reason why so many were baptized on the Day of Pentecost was that the Apostles despised none. I replied that they were pricked in the heart, and that I was willing to baptize all that were thus pricked in the heart. He thought baptism an act of civilisation, and that it was our duty to make them all Christians.'31 Our third encounter is probably the most significant of all. Moses Wilkinson, a blind, lame slave from Virginia escaped to Nova Scotia during the American Revolution and was one of those who sailed to Freetown in 1792. As someone who had suffered more than most from the perfidy and broken promises of white officials and who practiced and preached a populist evangelical message (he gave out his hymns and texts from memory) Wilkinson objected to the official

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Christianity of the Sierra Leone colony. One suspicious colonial official, who showed up to mock his preaching, came away impressed by his ability to affect his hearers. 'Many of the wise and learned in this world,' he wrote, 'if they were to see and hear such a man as our brother, professedly engaging in endeavouring to lead their fellow creatures from sin to holiness, would at once conclude it to be impossible for them to effect the object which they have in view. Experience, however, flatly contradicts such a conclusion. Numbers have been led by their means to change their lives ....' 32 Colonial officials were justifiably nervous about the enthusiasm, antinomianism, indiscipline, and potential political radicalism of black preachers like Wilkinson, but there was no denying the fact that their version of Christianity was the one most likely to succeed among the burgeoning communities of recaptives deposited by the British navy in Freetown. A shared suffering of body and spirit and a shared sense of being marginalised by the structures of economic and political power enabled preachers like Wilkinson to build a base of communal authority that could not be matched by colonial officials or white missionaries. To these very different visions of how freed Africans and transplanted African Americans should reconstruct their selves, their communities, and their continent can be added still more layers of interpretation carrying enormous consequences for the globalisation and indigenisation of Christianity. Working out of the Sierra Leone experience Lamin Sanneh suggests that the religious independency and charismatic authority exemplified by the Nova Scotians and recaptive converts are threshold phenomena that can thrive 'at the boundary between establishment values and the ideals of a people in transition.' In short, Christianity does not have to be regarded as a mere extension of Western Christendom norms but carries within it 'pre-thematic local resonance' for those on the frontiers of 'disruption, dislocation, resettlement, and restoration.'33 For the kind of Christianity forged by ex-African slaves in South Carolina, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone to thrive beyond local boundaries required the practical defeat of the European Christendom model, a vernacular Bible (translation as empowerment), and the transmission of Christianity shorn of western cultural specificities and receptive to indigenous religious sensibilities.34 In Sierra Leone, for example, receptive Yoruba diviners who were 'thoroughly at home in the world of divination, visions, and the crowded company of unseen spirits, welcomed the challenge of missionaries saying they were happy to add the Christian divinity to the Yoruba pantheon because a place already existed for that'.35 What Sanneh has called 'the local religious grammar' of rites, customs, and language shaped the emergence of a distinctively African form of Christianity and laid the foundations for its mass transcontinental appeal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.36 In the long run there was to be no happy ending in Sierra Leone for the Christianity that was minted by the combined and often contradictory efforts of missionaries, settlers, recaptives, and colonial officials was largely obliterated by the political anarchy and civil war of recent times. But something very significant had happened at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in colonial West Africa. Apparently inconsequential

selves, refashioned in and out of slavery by the unlikely resources of populist evangelical Christianity, had demonstrated a capacity for large-scale transformation not only in North America but also in the continent from which they had been so brutally seized and so serendipitously resettled. Colonial officials envisioned the future of African Christianity as a remodeled version of European Christendom replete with educated clergy, ecclesiastical parishes, universal baptism, and political acquiescence. White evangelical missionaries envisioned the future of African Christianity as an extra-European extension of the Evangelical Revival characterised by conversion narratives, biblical literacy, ethical sobriety, and colonial obedience. But the African American/African ex-slaves who migrated to colonial Sierra Leone fashioned an altogether different form of vibrant religiosity with greater capacity for indigenisation. The first two versions of Christianity made an indelible impression on Africa, and inextricably tied Christianity to colonialism, but it was the third kind that swept over large parts of the continent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Conclusions With their origins in Europe in the wake of devastation wrought by the Thirty Years War, forms of populist, pietistic Protestantism have thrived on dispersion and mobility often promoted by disagreeable things such as 'confessional cleansing', state persecution, transcontinental slavery, colonial warfare, and rural poverty. As in the primitive church models they appealed to for divine authentication, popular Protestants appeared to prosper in adversity even as they relentlessly applied themselves to godly discipline and self-improvement. Mobility also produced fragmentation, for fast-moving traditions of populist religiosity do not sit easily under confessional authority and earthly hierarchies. Endless separations and divisions, or what social elites have called the inexorable sectarianism of Protestantism, ironically helped create religious pluralism which could act as an antidote to the establishmentarian stasis of the old Christendom model. Over time, however, mobile populations eventually settled and discovered the difficulty of sustaining religious enthusiasm into the second, third and fourth generations of progeny. Almost without exception that is when they created their own secularisation narratives. For New England Puritans the inability to replicate in perpetuity 'authentic' conversion narratives led on the one hand to pragmatic ecclesiastical accommodation, and on the other to self-loathing, guilt, and the desire for more seasons of blessing. In a sense the successive great awakenings of the American historical tradition are the results of these solenoid-like oscillations. For Methodists their upward social mobility and desire for bourgeois respectability both in Britain and America distanced the movement from the exotic supernaturalism of its origins and set in train the rise of new holiness and Pentecostal movements that have grown with prodigious fecundity. However, they too are beginning to display the ubiquitous cycles of institutionalisation, numerical decline, and the

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construction of their own secularisation discourse. But secularisation narratives also can be proto-revivalist narratives, for only when the revived need reviving are religious revivals to be eagerly anticipated and earnestly worked for. Finally, for Africans and African Americans who were forced to be mobile through the execrable cruelties of the slave trade, populist forms of evangelical Christianity, even when mediated through the white Christians who directly or indirectly exploited them, supplied the rhetoric of deliverance from captivity. But there was to be no easy deliverance for transplanted slaves who even after Lincoln's emancipation proclamation discovered the shocking truth that slavery had been as much an instrument of race control as a labour system. Repeated black migration in post-Civil War America, first into eastern border towns and cities and then north and west in the era of the Great Migration, had a similar effect as the earlier migrations of Pietists, Puritans, Baptists, and Methodists. As they moved they carried with them inherited traditions of black spirituals, aspirations for deliverance, and a desire for individual assurance and communal discipline. The ubiquitous storefront black churches and Pentecostal mega-churches that proliferated in northern cities like Chicago during the Great Migration, and which are now replicated in the waves of Hispanic migrations to American cities, are just some of the most recent examples of the power of populist forms of supernatural religiosity among the poor in transit.37 Secularisation theories, which are often constructed by the disenchanted heirs of these once vigorous faith traditions, had better not ignore them.

Notes 1

For classic formulations of secularisation theory see S. Bruce ed., Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford, 1992); and D. Martin, A General Theory> of Secularization (New York, 1978). For an important recent interpretation see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007). 2 For example, R. Finke and R. Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J., 2005); D.L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a 'Christian Country'Has Now Become the Worlds most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco, 2001). 3 P. Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford, 2002), p. 3. 4 D.D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: a History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, 1972). 3 For examples of how this works see E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1992). 6 D.D. Hall, 'Religion and Secularization in America: A Cultural Approach,' in H. Lehmann ed., Säkularisierung, Dechristianisiering, Rechristianisiering im neuzeitlichen Europa: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung, Veröffentlichen des Max Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 130 (Göttingen, 1997), pp. 118-30.

7

See, for example, T. Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, NJ, 2007). 8 See both his brilliantly provocative The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY, 1969) and his more recent article 'Secularization Falsified,' First Things (February, 2008), pp. 23-7. 9 S. Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford, 2002), pp. 204-28. 10 R.L. Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York, 1994). 11 P. Berger, G. Davie and E. Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations (Burlington, VT 2008), p. 6. For what this means in more concrete and empirical terms see D. Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven, CT, 2005), pp. 189-201. 12 N.T. Ammerman, Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and their Partners (Berkeley, 2005) and M. Chaves, Congregations in America (Cambridge, MA, 2004). 13 D. Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford, 2002), p. 5. 14 Ibid., p. 7. 15 N. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT, 1989). 16 Hempton, Methodism. 17 W.R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992); idem, Christianity under the Ancien Regime, 1648-1789 (Cambridge, 1999); and idem, Early Evangelicalism: a Global Intellectual History, 1670-1789 (Cambridge, 2006). 18 This subject is treated in more depth by M.F. Snape, The Redcoat and Religion: The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War (London, 2005), pp. 7-68. The direct quotation is from page 57. 19 D.E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 35-8; W.J. Townsend, H.B. Workman and G. Eayrs, A New History of Methodism (London, 1909), vol. 2, pp. 237-81; and I. Breward, A History of the Churches in Australasia (Oxford, 2001). 20 J.H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York, 1998). 21 For a recent corrective to the predominantly male discourses of Methodist expansion see P. Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge, 2008). 22 The best treatment of how this worked is by G. Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2001). See also A. Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism (Cambridge, 2004). Wacker states that 'the story of the early pentecostals casts grave doubt on the glib use of secularization theory. The revival changed in countless ways, but long-term evolutionary progression from otherworldly saintliness to thisworldly secularity was not one of them. Believers juggled those forces from the outset, hour by hour, day by day' (p. 17). 23 See E. Baldwin, 'Religion and the American Industrial City: Protestant Culture and Social Transformation in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1824-1890', PhD dissertation (Boston University, 2009). Baldwin's evidence and conclusions are strikingly similar to those of Callum Brown in The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation (London,

2001).

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The story is well told in L. Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. 41-3. 25 For the flavour of this evangelicalism as preached by the likes of Henry Alline, William Black, and Freeborn Garrettson see G.A. Rawlyk, The Canada Fire: Radical Evangelicalism in British North America 1775-1812 (Kingston and Montreal, 1994). 26 Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, p. 321. See also the account in Rawlyk, pp. 3 3 ^ 3 . For a modern edition of George's spiritual autobiography see G. Gordon, From Slavery to Freedom: the life of David George, Pioneer Black Baptist Minister (Hansport, Nova Scotia, 1992). 27 L. Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (Oxford, 2008), pp. 127-8. 28 An Account of the Colony of Sierra Leone, second edition (1795), p. 80, quoted by A.F. Walls, 'A Christian Experiment: The Early Sierra Leone Colony', Studies in Church History 6, in G.J. Cuming ed., The Mission of the Church and the Propagation of the Faith (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 107-29. 29 Rawlyk, pp. 37—41. 30 A.F. Walls, 'A Colonial Concordat: Two Views of Christianity and Civilization,' in D. Baker ed., Church, Society and Politics (Oxford, 1975), pp. 293-302. 31 See W. Jowett, Memoir of the Rev W.A.B. Johnson (London, 1852), p. 94, quoted by Walls, 'Two Views of Christianity and Civilization,' 300-301. 32 Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations, p. 173. 33 Ibid., p. 176. 34 For more sustained and far more expert analyses of how these processes operated see A.F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll,NY, 1996), and idem, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Maryknoll, NY, 2002). See also D.L. Robert, Christian Mission: How Christianity became a World Religion (Maiden, MA, 2009). 35 Ibid., p. 128. 36 Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad, p. 125. 37 W.D. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago 1915-1952 (Princeton, NJ, 2005) and E.S. Glaude, Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago, 2000). For the role of black religious music in sustaining post-Civil War migrations of freed slaves see Carolynne Hitter Brown, 'Singing through Struggle: Music as a Mode of Cultural Exchange in African American Border City Churches after Emancipation, 1862-1890,' PhD Dissertation (Boston University, 2009). For recent interpretations of cultural encounters and migration in latino/a religion see G. Espinosa and M.T. Garcia eds, Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism and Culture (Durham, NC, 2008).

Chapter 5

Protestantism, Monarchy and the Defence of Christian Britain 1837-2005 John Wolffe

A commemorative card marking Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887 juxtaposed a contemporary image of the sovereign with one of the youthful monarch at her accession in 1837, shown against a backdrop of Windsor Castle, English oaks, exotic palm trees, European, Indian, African, Chinese and native American figures (see the illustration on p. 58). It was headed: 'Protestantism and Prosperity' and carried part of the text of the Coronation Oath: 'Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel and the Protestant Reformed religion established by law?'1 Fourteen years later, a few months after the Queen's death, a full-page advertisement appeared in The Times headed: 'The King's Protestant Declaration Against Transubstantiation'. It was placed by the Imperial Protestant Federation and related to ongoing discussion in parliament of a proposal to revise the statutory Accession Declaration recently made by Edward VII in order that future sovereigns would not have to perpetuate the explicitly anti-Catholic clauses in the existing text. The Imperial Protestant Federation was passionately opposed to revision, believing it a matter of the highest importance that the declaration remained unaltered, in order to maintain and hand 'down intact to our children that national Protestantism which ... has made the British nation the greatest nation in the world'.2 The Accession Declaration and the related question of the Coronation Oath were pivotal issues linking two historically key forces in the shaping of British national identity, Protestantism and the monarchy. Protestantism has been explored by a number of scholars, with attention particularly focused on the eighteenth century. The subsequent period since the early-nineteenth century has been portrayed as something of a gradual diminuendo, with Hugh McLeod assessing Protestantism as 'central' to national identity up to 1860, and 'important' up to 1914, but giving way after the Great War to ' a more generalised Christianity'. Then after the Second World War even that Christian basis 'dwindled away'. 3 The monarchy's role has followed a rather different chronology, with a period of partial eclipse in the midnineteenth century being followed in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods by a growth in importance as a national symbol, stimulated by the jubilees of 1887 and 1897, the deaths and funerals of sovereigns in 1901 and 1910 and the coronations

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of 1902 and 1911.4 In the two world wars of the twentieth century successive sovereigns benefited from their perceived role in personifying national resolve, and even the abdication crisis of 1936 proved to be no more than a temporary setback to royal prestige.5 Uncritical adulation of the monarchy as a foundation of British identity persisted well into the reign of Elizabeth II. Only from the 1980s onwards did the monarchy's prestige seem to wane, but it still proved resilient enough to weather the crisis arising from Princess Diana's death in 1997, and to enter the new millennium with continuing, albeit more muted, popular support. Moreover, despite all the changes in the British religious landscape during the last half century, the succession to the throne continues, in effect, to be limited to Protestant Christians.6 The purpose of the present essay is to test and develop these two chronologies, by concentrating particularly on the interactions between Protestantism, what McLeod terms 'more generalised Christianity', and the monarchy. Changes in public sentiment were evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but they were nevertheless focused and symbolised by the uneven and sometimes unpredictable course of specific events relating to the monarchy. Attention will therefore be concentrated on four short periods of crisis and transition, which successively saw significant shifts from a distinctively Anglican monarchy towards a broadly Protestant one (1868-72); from assertive towards eirenic Protestantism (1897— 1910); from Protestant dogma towards Christian morality (1935-37); and from Christianity towards religious pluralism (1992-2005).

Church and Queen in Danger 1868-1872 The years surrounding the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (enacted 1869; implemented 1 January 1871) also saw the monarchy's position looking more vulnerable than at any time since the Queen Caroline crisis of 1820-21. There was an organised republican movement feeding on public resentment at the Queen's perceived inactivity since Albert's death in 1861 and further fuelled by influence from France following the downfall of Napoleon III and the advent of the Paris Commune.7 Some of the more hysterical supporters of the Irish Church thus came to see its fate as closely linked not only to its English counterpart, but also to that of the monarchy and the existing constitutional order. One Protestant pamphleteer deemed disestablishment to be 'revolutionary' in its implications, and believed that the 'Papal brigade' would see it as merely a first step towards Catholic ascendancy: 'Next the Throne itself will be attacked, then the House of Lords; public meetings interdicted, and lastly the press fettered'. 8 For Henry Robert Lloyd, preaching at St Mark's Kennington on the thirtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's Coronation (28 June 1868), the crosses affixed to the orb and the sceptre were symbolic of profound ties between Crown, Church and State. These would be disastrously ruptured by the 'national calamity and crime' of

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Irish disestablishment, which would further the interests of 'the Infidel and the Romanist'. 9 As the Irish Church Bill progressed through the parliamentary process, some of its more diehard opponents came to see the possibility of a royal veto as their last and best hope. They argued that Queen Victoria's Coronation Oath 'to maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the United Church of England and Ireland' meant that it would be conscientiously impossible for her to give her assent to disestablishment. The oath was not a mere compact with her people that could be overridden by parliamentary majorities, but a solemn undertaking before God to which she was irrevocably committed. The only circumstances in which royal assent to disestablishment could be a possibility would be in a subsequent reign after revision of the oath itself.10 Such arguments were supportedby reference to historical precedent, to the belief of George III and his son the Duke of York that the Coronation Oath precluded royal assent to Catholic Emancipation, and to George IV's well-known discomfort in eventually giving that assent. William IV's strong professions of support in 1834 for the Church of Ireland were recalled together with his telling observation that 'I cannot forget what was the course of events that placed my family on the throne which I now fill'. For some it seemed that were his successor to consent to Irish disestablishment she would be undermining the very principle of Protestant succession that legitimated her dynasty's claim to the throne.11 In reality, however, Victoria's situation and inclinations in 1869 were very different from those of William IV in 1834, when driven by his concern for the Irish Church, he had dismissed the Whig ministry. Her own religious outlook was influenced by Albert's Lutheranism and by her growing affection for all things Scottish, and in 1867 she had described herself as 'very nearly a Dissenter - or rather more a Presbyterian - in my feelings.' 12 It followed that she had little sympathy with the more assertive constitutional and ecclesiastical pretensions of the 'United Church of England and Ireland'. Although she deplored the manner in which Gladstone had raised the disestablishment question, and was apprehensive as to the consequences of what she perceived as misguided appeasement of the Catholics, she does not appear to have had any conscientious difficulties on account of the Coronation Oath. Far from contemplating a veto, in view of the 'overwhelming and steady majority' for the bill in the Commons, she exercised her influence to prevent the Lords from rejecting it, instigating Archbishop Tait also to throw his weight 'on the side of prudence and moderation.' Her assent to the bill was given promptly on 26 July 1869.13 It followed that the Protestantism of the monarchy was now to be understood in a broadly interdenominational rather than narrowly Anglican framework. The Queen's attitude reflected a wider trend in public opinion. In the general election campaign of 1868, the strategy of Disraeli's Conservatives had been staunchly to defend the Irish Church as a bulwark of Protestantism. This approach had been successful in Lancashire, but elsewhere Nonconformists saw no inconsistency between their brand of Protestantism and support for disestablishment

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and Gladstone's Liberals.14 On the contrary, for the pro-disestablishment Liberation Society and the Nonconformist newspaper 'the dissidence of dissent' was inherently bound up with 'the protestantism of the protestant religion', and the Liberal victory in the election, which made Irish disestablishment inevitable, was 'the Lord's doing'. 15 Recognition of non-Anglican Protestants was confirmed in the thanksgiving service to mark the Prince of Wales's recovery from typhoid, held on 27 February 1872. The background to this event lay in the nadir in royal popularity during the two preceding years. As Gladstone pithily put it in a private letter at the end of 1870, 'the Queen is invisible and the Prince of Wales is not respected'.16 Antagonism to the cost of the monarchy was crystallised in early 1871 by controversy over the provision of a dowry for Princess Louise from public money. There was an upsurge in overt republicanism, rooted in the English radical tradition, further inspired by the Paris Commune and securing a prominent, if temporary, parliamentary spokesman in the person of Sir Charles Dilke. Then, however, in late 1871 the Prince of Wales did a notable service to his family by becoming dangerously ill with typhoid - the very illness that had reputedly killed his father - thus stirring a groundswell of public sympathy which sharply checked the progress of republicanism.17 Gladstone, a committed monarchist at heart, persuaded a reluctant Queen and still convalescent Prince to capitalise on this opportunity by participating in a state procession through London and a service at St Paul's Cathedral. The occasion proved to be a popular triumph described by one scholar as 'a turning point in the history of the British monarchy'. 18 In the current context, however, the significance of the service lay in its giving high-profile ceremonial expression to an inclusive rather than narrowly Anglican Protestantism. The Lord Chamberlain's Office files show that considerable pains were taken to invite appropriate representatives of the main Nonconformist denominations to join the congregation, who generally responded enthusiastically to the opportunity.19 None of them were given any active part in the service itself, but the Queen's insistence on brevity had the important consequence of precluding the performance of the full Anglican liturgy. In response to the Queen's own anti-liturgical preferences, the content was limited to the Te Deum, prayers, an anthem, a sermon and a hymn and it was accordingly easy for all but the most scrupulous Nonconformists to feel at home.20 Moreover, although the Lord Chamberlain also invited Archbishop Manning, the latter's courteous refusal ensured that Protestant sensibilities were not offended by the presence of a Roman Catholic prelate.21 The linkage of Protestantism and the monarchy had been redefined but it still seemed secure.

The Protestant Succession 1897-1910 Against the dominant chorus of celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 there were some jarring notes. These were primarily struck by radicals, but from a Protestant perspective the festivities served to prompt retrospects of the reign and

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consciousness of the Queen's mortality. In a pamphlet, Charles Stirling, formerly vicar of New Maiden, argued that since 1829 there had been a disastrous sequence of Protestant declension and compromise with Rome. With the failure of the Church Association's long campaign against the ritualists, the Church of England itself was 'flooded with Romanism'. Stirling therefore believed that the hubris of the Jubilee obscured an underlying reality of national decline.22 Looking to the future, Protestants were concerned both about the possibility of revisions to the Coronation Oath at the next accession, and the Prince of Wales's allegedly Romanist inclinations.23 When Queen Victoria died in January 1901 issues that were inevitable in the long term but hitherto avoidable in the short term were abruptly brought into focus. How secure was the throne as a Protestant symbol, subject as it now was to a change of occupant and to the opportunity to reopen constitutional questions that had in practice been abeyance for over sixty years? One response to this new uncertainty was careful cultivation of the Protestant image of the late monarch. A proposal to include in her funeral service the Russian Kontakion, with its implied prayer for the dead, was rejected by Edward VII on the advice of Bishop Randall Davidson, because of anxiety that it would offend 'the Nonconformist conscience'.24 The Protestant writer and organiser Walter Walsh, best known for his widely-read Secret History of the Oxford Movement, published a book entitled The Religious Life and Influence of Queen Victoria. Walsh stressed her Evangelical upbringing and subsequent broadminded but biblically-based Protestantism. He was not afraid to acknowledge and address incidents that were problematic from his perspective. Although he claimed she disapproved of the 'peculiar doctrines' of Roman Catholicism he recognised that she did not want to offend her Roman Catholic subjects. According to Walsh, her assent to Irish disestablishment was due to her recognition that refusal would provoke 'dangerous agitation'; and her readiness to exchange diplomatic courtesies with the Vatican to her constitutional inability to overrule her unwise advisers.25 There were two distinct occasions on which a new monarch was required to make a solemn public affirmation of Protestantism. First there was the Accession Declaration, made at the opening of the first parliament of the new reign, and required by the Act of Settlement of 1701. Two centuries later the original wording appeared offensively archaic to many. On 14 February 1901 Edward VII was obliged 'without any evasion, equivocation or mental reservation whatsoever' to describe the religious beliefs of millions of his subjects as 'superstitious and idolatrous'. Although he reportedly made the Declaration 'in a clear ringing voice' the King subsequently made known his 'disgust' at the wording and the government began moves to have it revised in time for the next accession.26 The proposed changes however provoked extensive Protestant agitation culminating in the advertising campaign mentioned at the beginning of this essay, which were successful in causing the proposed changes to be quietly dropped.27 The issue, after all, might well have remained dormant for another generation.

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Second there was the Coronation Oath, the substantive formulation of which dated back to the coronation of William and Mary in 1689. Whereas the Accession Declaration was made in a secular setting, the Coronation Oath was administered by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the context of a solemn sacramental liturgy. The wording that had been used at Queen Victoria's Coronation was as follows: Wil 1 you to the utmost of your power maintain the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel and the Protestant Reformed religion established by law, and will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the United Church of England and Ireland, and the doctrine, worship and discipline thereof, as by law established within England and Ireland, and the territories thereto belonging?

For Edward VII, this formulation was unchanged except for the omission of any reference to the now-disestablished Church of Ireland. It was less controversial than the Accession Declaration insofar as it positively affirmed Protestantism rather than negatively denounced Roman Catholicism, but it was still problematic for Anglo-Catholics, who feared that it would 'create an erroneous impression that the religion of the Church of England was in some way opposed to Primitive and Catholic antiquity'. They particularly resented its inclusion in the prescribed liturgy to be used in the special services held across the country to coincide with the Coronation.28 Despite such protests, however, it is striking that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and with a new monarch whose personal religious inclinations towards Catholicism were conciliatory rather than confrontational, the traditional Protestant affirmations survived unscathed. This outcome probably owed much more to what the King called the 'Nonconformist Conscience' than to the historic Anglican defenders of the Declaration and the Coronation Oath. Nevertheless this Protestant victory proved a short-lived one. Edward's personal concern to conciliate Roman Catholics was particularly apparent during his visit to Ireland in 1903, when the recent death of Pope Leo XIII prompted him to a well-received public expression of sympathy. For their part Protestants, now finding their religious convictions in tension with their loyalty to the throne, muted their reservations about his behaviour.29 Then in May 1910 the King's unexpected death re-opened the controversy over the Accession Declaration much sooner than anyone could have foreseen in 1901. This time, however, George V, conscious no doubt of his father's embarrassment and mindful of the mounting tensions in Ireland, discreetly made it known that he would refuse to open Parliament if required to make the Declaration in its existing form.30 On this matter the prime minister, H.H. Asquith, was wholly in sympathy with the King, and, according to Archbishop Davidson, in 'a condition of extreme irritation against the ecclesiastical mind generally'.31 When Asquith had calmed down, Davidson commended to him a form of words designed to appeal to Nonconformist rather than Anglican sensibilities and an Act to implement them was easily passed.32 The amended Declaration was much shorter than the one it replaced, and free

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from language explicitly hostile to Roman Catholicism. It continued, however, unequivocally was to affirm the Protestant identity of the throne: I, George, do solemnly and sincerely, in the presence of God, profess, testify, and declare that I am a faithful Protestant, and I will, according to the true intent of the enactments which secure the Protestant succession to the Throne of my Realm, uphold and maintain the said enactments to the best of my powers according to law.

Nevertheless, more hard-line Protestants were outraged by the revision, perceiving it as unacceptable compromise with Rome and lambasting parliamentarians of all parties for their connivance in the matter.33 It was unthinkable for them that their Protestant King was himself fully in accord with the change of wording. In reality, however, the 1910 revision was overdue and secured the future of the Declaration in the twentieth century, because it was now free from offensive language that seemed incompatible with an inclusive modern monarchy.34 The succession remained Protestant, but the sovereign was no longer required to denounce Roman Catholicism.

Affirming Christian Morality 1935^1937 The public perceived George V as a straightforward moderate Protestant, and his personal religious position was indeed less complicated than either his father's or his grandmother's. His message to the Bible Society in 1911 that 'the English Bible is the first of national treasures' and the subsequent publicity given to the fact that he himself read a chapter of it each day pleased the Protestant lobby.35 They were much less happy about the King and Queen's visit to the Pope in 1923, but the indiscretion was attributed to 'unscrupulous politicians and Roman Catholic Foreign Office Permanent Officials'. 36 In general the reign could be perceived as a period of Protestant consolidation in view particularly of the parliamentary rejection of the allegedly more Catholic 1928 Anglican Prayer Book.37 Thus the Silver Jubilee of 1935 was hailed as also an occasion for Protestant celebration, which like the battles over the Prayer Book brought together the Free Churches and Evangelical Anglicans.38 The thanksgiving service at St Paul's saw the first actual participation by a Nonconformist, Dr. S.M. Berry, moderator of the Federal Council of Evangelical Free Churches, who read a lesson.39 Less than a year later, however, George V was dead and as in 1901 and 1910 dormant issues resurfaced. One straw in the wind, which indicated how much had changed since Queen Victoria died, was when Archbishop Lang noted, with satisfaction, with reference to a broadcast interdenominational memorial service for the late King: 'It was significant to hear Prayers for the Dead read with full unction by a Moderator of the Kirk.'40 A practice regarded as dangerously Catholic in 1901 was uncontroversial in 1936. A further hint of changing times came when

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Lang had 'quite a long talk' with the new King, Edward VIII, and found it clear 'that he knows little, and I fear, cares little, about the Church and its affairs'. 41 In 1932, as Prince of Wales Edward had alarmed hard-line Protestants by visiting Lourdes and kneeling in the rain when the consecrated Host was carried past him.42 Lang's comment indicates that he was not so much a crypto-papist as an ecclesiastical innocent, but by the same token his readiness to make the Protestant Accession Declaration when he opened Parliament in November 1936 was a matter of constitutional routine rather than the serious matter of conscience it had been for his father. By the autumn of 1936, however, it was becoming clear that the central difficulty Edward VIII presented for the image of the monarchy was not the nominal nature of his Protestantism, but his readiness to defy both traditional Christian sexual morality and his family's ethic of placing public service above private wishes by insisting on marrying the divorced Mrs Simpson.43 Lang was agonising privately over whether he would feel conscientiously able to crown the King,44 and AngloCatholics began to contemplate the possibility of disestablishment as the only means by which the Church of England could maintain its integrity. The Protestant Alliance, however, came out strongly against this possibility, arguing rather that the Church's role was to win the King over 'by moral suasion and example' to acknowledge his obligations to the country.45 Edward was of course not to be persuaded, but his abdication not only limited the damage to the monarchy but averted a potential crisis in relations with the Church. In the present context however, the significance of the abdication crisis and its aftermath lay in the extent to which, paradoxically, it focused attention on the role of the royal family as a perceived model of general Christian moral and family values. This perception had been gaining ground in the later years of George V's reign, particularly through the King's Christmas broadcasts, which began in 1932 and made strong links between his own family, Christmas as a family and Christian festival, and the wider imagined family of the British empire.46 It obscured although it did not wholly supersede the residual role of the monarchy as a cornerstone of national Protestantism. Edward's poignant reference to his brother in his abdication broadcast set the tone: 'And he has one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you and not bestowed by me - a happy home with his wife and children.'47 George VI took up the theme in his speech to his accession council by saying that he took up his 'heavy task' 'with my wife as helpmeet by my side'.48 The perceived ideal Christian family life of George VI, Queen Elizabeth and the two young princesses was reinforced after 1939 by the manner in which they seemed to epitomise defiant normality in the face of the Second World War. From 1952 Elizabeth II, Prince Philip and their children sustained the image for a further three decades until in the late 1980s and 1990s it was to be shattered by the failed marriages of the next royal generation. In the meantime, with a different king in the central role, the Coronation already planned for May 1937 went ahead. This time the Coronation Oath, substantively unchanged in 1902 and 1911 had to be amended to reflect the enhanced independent

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constitutional status of the Dominions. Moreover the Irish Free State, the French Canadians, and Australia, whose current prime minister was a Roman Catholic, objected to the King making an unqualified promise to maintain the 'Protestant Reformed Religion as by law established', as inapplicable to their territories. Archbishop Lang and Malcolm MacDonald, the Secretary for the Dominions, struggled for a long time to secure a workable revised wording of the Oath.49 The eventual formulation was: Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant reformed religion established by law?

This, however, was perceived by the Protestant lobby as a less than acceptable compromise, insofar as it not only unprotestantised the Dominions but weakened the implicit identification in the earlier version between 'the true profession of the Gospel' and 'the Protestant reformed religion'. They attempted to prevent the change, which was made by government action without statutory endorsement, by seeking an injunction to require the Archbishop to administer the oath in its original wording, but their action was blocked by the Attorney General.50 A further indication of decline in the Protestant significance of the monarchy was the sense of incongruity felt by many when, because George VI had not yet opened Parliament, the Accession Declaration had to be incorporated into the Coronation service.51 Nevertheless the residual constitutional identification between Protestantism and the monarchy persisted. At the accession of Elizabeth II, discussion of the Coronation Oath occasioned what Archbishop's Fisher's biographer described as 'a mild flurry in the ecclesiastical dovecotes', but both the Oath and the Declaration escaped any further revision.52 Indeed the prominent roles taken by several Ulster Protestants in the Coronation of 1953 reinforced 'the symbolic/ emblematic function of monarchy as the embodiment of a Protestant nation'.53 A survey published in 1966 provided corroborative evidence that the monarchy was still perceived as a Christian, and specifically Protestant and Anglican institution, insofar as 76 per cent of Anglicans, 67 per cent of Nonconformists, but only 59 per cent of Roman Catholics and 52 per cent of 'Others' viewed it in a favourable light.54 On the other hand, in an increasingly ecumenical age, churchmen preferred to dwell more on the symbolic importance of the monarchy for personal morality. For example in his sermon at the Silver Jubilee of 1977, Archbishop Coggan spoke of 'something at the heart of our national life of incalculable value - a spirit of devotion to duty and of service to others which has found its focus in a family and in a person'. He went on to frame this conception of the monarchy in explicitly Christian theological terms.55

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A Pluralist Monarchy 1992-2005? In a personal reflection published in The Times on the marriage of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer in July 1981, Archbishop Runcie wrote that the ceremony was 'an assertion and a confirmation of what remain, I believe, the deepest convictions of our country' in upholding 'the ideal of marriage as a lifelong partnership, nourished by shared joy and by hardships faced together'. 56 The breakdown of that marriage after barely a decade meant that, in retrospect, the Archbishop's observations acquired an unwittingly sharp double edge. Marital failure was, of course, nothing unusual in the late-twentieth century. Indeed, in this respect the very public personal tragedies of Elizabeth II's family reflected a common experience in a rather similar manner to that in which Victoria's bereavements and near bereavements had reflected a more general experience of untimely deaths a century before. Nevertheless it decisively shattered 'the stuff of which fairy tales are made' 57 of which Archbishop Runcie had spoken in his sermon in 1981. In 1992 and 1993 the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales stirred echoes of the abdication crisis and speculation regarding the future of the relationship between the monarchy and the Church.58 Although formally the marital status of a future monarch did not raise constitutional issues, it was inevitable in view of the manner in which the religious image of the royal family had come to highlight Christian personal morality that this development seemed deeply problematic. It was therefore no coincidence that debate on the long-dormant question of the Coronation Oath was reopened, with both the Archbishop of Canterbury (Carey) and the Archbishop of York (Habgood) initially declaring themselves in favour of revision.59 Then in a television interview in summer 1994, the Prince of Wales, who was becoming very conscious of the religious pluralism of contemporary Britain, said that he would prefer the title 'Defender of the Divine' to that of 'Defender of the Faith'. He subsequently explained, however, that this did not mean he was advocating disestablishment or a revision of the Coronation Oath. By this time Archbishop Habgood had changed his mind about amending the Coronation Oath, from fear that 'it would be a difficult and dangerous thing to start tampering with it because in the process of picking out some threads you do not know what else will unravel'. On the other hand he welcomed the Prince's remarks 'about the importance of faith in an increasingly secular society, and his concern for all subjects of the Sovereign, regardless of religion'.60 The eventual divorce of the Prince and Princess of Wales in July 1996 was hardly unexpected, but then as in 1871, 1910 and 1936, events took an entirely unforeseen course, with Princess Diana's untimely death in a Paris car crash in August 1997. Whereas the Prince of Wales was beginning to make links between the monarchy and organised religious traditions other than Christianity, his former wife, in death even more than in life, associated royalty with diffuse Christianity and undoctrinal popular religiosity. The Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow struggled to find a precedent for interpreting the public response, in particular the

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accumulation of flowers and candles outside Kensington Palace, and eventually settled on the 'extraordinary politico-spiritual outpouring' that accompanied Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland in 1980.61 The countless tributes from members of the general public attached to flowers, written in condolence books or published in newspapers often contained generalised religious reference to God, Jesus, heaven, angels or saints, but only a very small minority articulated sentiments that could be equated with Christian doctrinal orthodoxy, let alone specifically Protestant teaching.62 Although the funeral service included that great Welsh Protestant hymn 'Guide me O thou great Redeemer', it also included very unprotestant extracts from Verdi's Requiem and the Russian Kontakion, and the non-specific patriotic religiosity of Elton John's Candle in the Wind: Goodbye England's rose; may you ever grow in our hearts. You were the grace that placed itself where lives were torn apart. You called out to our country, And you whispered to those in pain. And now you belong to heaven, And the stars spell out your name.63

Conversely the irreproachably Protestant immediate response of the royal family, including the bereaved young princes, to the Princess's death — attendance at an ordinary Church of Scotland service at Crathie Kirk — came to be portrayed as indicative of their insensitivity to the public mood.64 Protestantism, it seemed, was no longer nearly enough. This trend was confirmed, albeit in rather paradoxical fashion, by the royal events of 2002. The warm public reaction to the Queen Mother's death on 30 March suggested that the image of the monarchy was recovering from the difficulties of the 1990s, but despite the deceased's lifelong Christian piety and the fact that she died on Easter Eve, the dominant tone of the mourning appeared more secular than in 1997. Although the Dean of Windsor affirmed that 'Easter Day of all days speaks to us most eloquently of the hope for those whom we love but see no longer,' even the Archbishop of Canterbury seemed to perceive the coincidence with a major Christian festival as more of an embarrassment rather than an opportunity.65 The most eloquent linking of Christianity and the monarchy was a negative one by the sceptical Guardian columnist Decca Aitkenhead who denounced both as non-rational and concluded that: 'Without a divine being to anoint the royal family, how can we be expected to think of them as different?'. 66 The content of the funeral service was traditionally Protestant, with a reading from John Bunyan, and no Requiem or Kontakion let alone any counterpart to Candle in the Wind. The formula was acceptable enough in view of the Queen Mother's great age, but proved more elegiac than popular.67

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Among subsequent royal generations, including the Queen as well as the Prince of Wales, there was though an increasing concern to reflect the multifaith character of contemporary Britain. Monarchical consciousness of religious diversity was nothing new, as Victoria and her immediate successors were very conscious of the circumstances of India, notably in Victoria's insistence on 'the equal and impartial protection of the law' for all faiths in the sub-continent, and in George V's participation in the Delhi durbar and subsequent neo-Mughal ceremony of darshan in 1911.68 From the 1980s Elizabeth II's Christmas broadcasts increasingly acknowledged and affirmed diversity, although the Queen continued at times to highlight her personal Christian convictions. She did so most conspicuously in 2001 when in response to the horror of the 9/11 attacks she asserted that 'we look to the Church to bring us together as a nation or as a community in commemoration and tribute.' She went on, however, to offer the balancing observation that 'We all have something to learn from one another, whatever our faith - be it Christian or Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or Sikh'.69 During the Golden Jubilee celebrations the following year, serious efforts were made to reflect the multi-faith character of contemporary Britain, both through royal visits to non-Christian places of worship and through the prominent seats given to 'world faith representatives' at the thanksgiving service in St Paul's Cathedral.70 Participation in the service itself was limited to Christians, but a much more serious effort was made than on previous such occasions to reflect not only the denominational range, but the gender, generational and cultural diversity of the Christian tradition in the Commonwealth.71 Nevertheless, although as a whole the Jubilee celebrations made notable connections with popular culture, notably through a pop concert in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, they failed to tap so effectively into the unofficial religiosities apparent in the response to Princess Diana's death. Eight years later, as Elizabeth II in her tum approaches her Diamond Jubilee, a sense of long run continuity again combines with growing awareness of the potential for rapid change in the future. Despite occasional flurries of debate and expressions of Protestant concern at ecumenical and inter-faith gestures by the Queen and the Prince of Wales,72 the Accession Declaration has remained unchanged since 1910 and the Coronation Oath since 1937. It is improbable that any government will choose to grapple with such potentially contentious issues until forced to do so by the accession of a new monarch, but equally unlikely in the vastly changed circumstances of the early-twenty-first century that these texts would then remain unaltered without considerable controversy. In the meantime events in 2005 provide an interim if somewhat muted coda to this analysis. The Prince of Wales's remarriage on 9 April to the divorced Camilla Parker-Bowles was a low key affair relative to his first marriage a quarter of a century before, but despite the superficial similarities to Edward VIII's situation in 1936, it stirred little controversy or suggestion that it made Charles unfit to be king. It was also symbolic that the date had been changed at the last moment for reasons that a century before would have caused a Protestant outcry, the decision of both the

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Prince himself and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to attend the funeral in Rome of Pope John Paul II.73 If the next king still feels able to declare himself a 'faithful Protestant' he will do so in a very different sense from his predecessors.

Conclusions At first sight the constitutional formalities discussed in this chapter might seem rather far removed from the broader social and cultural changes more normally associated with the analysis of secularisation. However the Protestant and Christian associations of the monarchy, its sensitivity to public opinion, and its residual capacity to influence wider popular consciousness rendered it a significant if sometimes paradoxical indicator of ongoing shifts in the religious climate. The role of the monarchy as a pillar of national Protestantism persisted throughout the period under examination, but shifted from a sectarian to a symbolic understanding, and by the end of the twentieth century was widely perceived as an anachronism. In the course of the period 1860 to 1914, during which McLeod sees Protestantism as 'important' to national identity, the monarchy was successfully repositioned to represent an interdenominational and non-sectarian Protestantism rather than a more narrowly Anglican and explicitly anti-Catholic one. Thereafter its predominant religious associations shifted again towards an emphasis on upholding family life and service to the nation, readily characterised as 'Christian', but lacking specific doctrinal content. At the end of the twentieth century, changes in wider social mores reflected in the behaviour of the royal family itself weakened this conception of monarchy, although it was still tenaciously maintained by Elizabeth II. It was now complemented, however, by a growing concern to reflect the religiously pluralist nature of contemporary Britain. This process is broadly consistent with Callum Brown's hypothesis of a 'death of Christian Britain',74 but with two important qualifications. First the chronology is different insofar as the key period of crisis and change for the monarchy occurred in the 1990s rather than the 1960s,75 an indication specifically of the inherent conservatism of the institution, but more broadly that the 'death' of Christian Britain was a complex process that was by no means complete even at the end of the twentieth century. Secondly, in trying to navigate this transition, the monarchy has been looking towards a Christian Britain giving way to a religiously pluralist Britain rather than a secular one. In the aftermath of Princess Diana's death, royalty also became linked to 'alternative' forms of contemporary spirituality. Reflection on the monarchy is particularly germane to a central strand in Brown's analysis, his stress on the role of women in the maintenance of Christian Britain until the 1960s. The subsequent shift in their attitude to the churches was, he argues, pivotal to the collapse of a cultural ascendancy of organised Christianity that had already, in general, lost its authority among men. A striking feature of the British monarchy since 1837 has been the extent to which it has become a de

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facto matriarchy, with a female sovereign from 1837 to 1901 and since 1952. The combined length of the reigns of Victoria and Elizabeth II has now exceeded 120 years, whereas four successive male sovereigns between them reigned for only 51 years. Moreover during that intervening half century successive queens consort played a key role in shaping the image of the monarchy: Alexandra (1901-10), Mary (1910-36) and Elizabeth (1936-52) were all deeply pious Christians, who counterbalanced the moral or emotional weaknesses of their respective husbands. In this context the immediate unacceptability of Wallis Simpson, and the ultimately explosive tensions associated with Diana Spencer become readily comprehensible. Diana, herself a child of the 1960s, became a powerful role model for younger women, who might still respect her husband's mother, grandmother and sister, but could no longer identify with them.76 In January 1993, the distinguished journalist Simon Jenkins called in The Times for the dismantling of residual links between the monarchy and the Church. He acknowledged that state occasions stirred 'patriotic tears' in his eyes, but, he wrote, 'forgive me if I afterwards lunch with Voltaire.'77 Jenkins did not mention that it was exactly two centuries, almost to the day, since the French revolutionaries had executed Louis XVI and subsequently attempted the dechristianisation of Britain's nearest European neighbour, but looking even further into the past he did feel that he had at times to pinch himself to be sure he was living in 1993 not 1593. If Voltaire and the 'Age of Reason' have been instrumental in the secularisation of the European mind, the process has been an extremely uneven and protracted one.

Notes 1

British Library 1882 c. 2 (3). The Times, 27 June 1901. 3 H. McLeod, 'Protestantism and British National Identity 1815-1945', in P. van der Veer and H. Lehmann, eds, Nation and Religion (Princeton, Princeton U.P., 1999), p. 44. 4 D. Cannadine, 'The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the "Invention of Tradition", c. 1820-1977' in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 101-64; J. Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000). 5 D. Cannadine, History in Our Time (New Haven and London, 1998), pp. 28, 63^4. 6 For a useful summary of the legal and contemporary political context see L. Maer and O. Gray, 'The Act of Settlement and the Protestant Succession', House of Commons Library, Standard Note SN/PC/00683, 27 Aug. 2008. 7 F. Prochaska, The Republic of Britain 1760-2000 (London, 2000), pp. 98-119. 8 Philolutherus, Romes Conspiracy Against Britain (London, 1868), p. 86. 9 H.R. Lloyd, Church and Queen (London, 1868), pp. 14—15. 10 W.J. Phillpotts, The Binding Nature of an Oath (London, 1868); J. Pulman, A Letter Addressed to Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, on the Coronation Oath (London, 1869). 2

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J. Begg, The Proposed Disestablishment of Protestantism in Ireland (Edinburgh, 1868), p. 25; J. Flanagan, Voices of the Past. Warning for the Future (Dublin, 1869). 12 Quoted by W.L. Arnstein, 'Queen Victoria and Religion', in G. Malmgreen ed., Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760-1930 (London and Sydney, 1986), p. 113. 13 R.T. Davidson and W. Benham, Life of Archibald Campbell Tait Archbishop of Canterbury (2 vols, London, 1891), ii. 23-4; Arnstein, 'Queen Victoria', p, 118; P.M.H. Bell, Disestablishment in Ireland and Wales (London, SPCK, 1969), pp. 145, 154. 14 Bell, Disestablishment, pp. 85-109. 15 Quoted W.H. Mackintosh, Disestablishment and Liberation (London, 1972), p. 152. 16 Quoted S. Weintraub, Victoria (London, 1987), p. 360. 17 Prochaska, Republic of Britain, pp. 104-18. W.M. Kuhn, Democratic Royalism: The Transformation of the British Monarchy 1861-1914 (Macmillan, 1996), p. 47. 19 National Archives, Kew (hereafter N.A.), LC/2/91/4-8. 20 St Paul's Cathedral Library, 'Prince of Wales Thanksgiving' volume, Dean Wellesley to Dean Church, 26 Jan. 1872, and Form of Service. 21 N.A., LC 2/91/5, Manning to the Lord Chamberlain, 11 Feb. 1872. 22 C. Stirling, The Decline of England; or the Other Side of the 'Diamond Jubilee' Shield (London, 1897). 23 Protestant Observer, 8 (1896), p. 96; 9 (1897), p. 174. 24 Lambeth Palace Library, Davidson Papers, Vol. 19, no. 101, fos 26-7. 25 W.Walsh, The Religious Life and Influence of Queen Victoria (London, 1902), pp. 1-5,150-52,204-5,245-6,251. " 26 Protestant Observer, 13 (1901), p. 34; Reformer, 972 (Christmas 1936), quoting Daily News of 23 March 1901. 27 Protestant Guide (London, 1902), pp. 90-122; J. Wolffe, 'Anti-Catholicism and the British Empire, 1815-1914' in H.M. Carey, ed., Empires of Religion (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 52-3. 2X E.G. Sandford, ed., Memoirs of Archbishop Temple (2 vols, London, 1906), ii. pp. 371-2. 29 J. Loughlin, 'Crown, Spectacle and Identity: the British Monarchy and Ireland under the Union, 1800-1922' in A. Olechnowicz, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation 1780 to the Present (Cambridge, 2001), p. 126. 30 H. Nicolson, King George the Fifth (London, 1952), p. 162. 31 G.K.A. Bell, Randall Davidson Archbishop of Canterbury (2 vols, London, 1935), i. p. 615. 32 Ibid., i. pp. 616-17. 33 Protestant Observer, 22 (1910), p. 135. 34 The declaration was made to Parliament by Edward VIII in November 1936 tHansard, 103, cc. 1-6), and by Elizabeth II in November 1952 (Hansard, 179, cc. 1-5) and by George VI at his Coronation (The Times, 13 May 1937). 35 The Reformer, Jan. to March 1935. 36 A.W. Close, Jesuit Plots Against Britain from Queen Elizabeth to King George V (London, 1935), p. 25. 37 For a recent detailed analysis, which highlights the important role played by Nonconformists in the rejection of the revised Prayer Book see J.G.Maiden, 'The Anglican

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1837-2005

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Prayer Book Controversy of 1927-28 and National Religion', University of Stirling PhD thesis, 2007. 3X The Reformer, Midsummer 1935, pp. 4-13. 39 Thanksgiving Service in Commemoration of the Twenty-Fi fth Anniversary of the Kings Accession to the Throne (London, 1935). 40 J.G. Lockhart, Cosmo Gordon Lang (London, 1949), p. 394. 41 Ibid., p. 395. 42 Close, Jesuit Plots, p. 25. 43 P. Williamson, 'The Monarchy and Public Values 1910-1953' in Olechnowicz, ed., Monarchy and the British Nation, pp. 250-55. 44 Lockhart, Lang, pp. 398-9. 45 Reformer, 972 (Christmas 1936), p. 6. 46 These linkages were particularly strong in his final Christmas broadcast {The Times, 27 Dec. 1935). 47 The Times, 12 Dec. 1936. 4X Ibid., 14 Dec. 1936. 49 Lockhart, Lang, pp. 412-13. 50 A.W.L., The Coronation Oath What About It? (London, 1937); The Times, 18, 20 Feb., 2 March 1937. 51 Ibid., 13 May 1937. 52 E. Carpenter, Archbishop Fisher - His Life and Times (Norwich, 1991), p. 252. 53 J. Loughlin, The British Monarchy and Ireland 1800 to the Present (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 356-7. 54 L.M. Harris, Long to Reign Over Us? (London, 1966), pp. 144-5. 55 The Times, 8 June 1977. 56 Ibid., 28 July 1981. 57 Ibid., 30 July 1981. 58 Ibid., 5 Sept. 1992. 59 Ibid., 1 Feb. 1993. 60 Ibid., 2, 11 July 1994. 61 The Guardian, Sept. 8 1997. 62 Personal observation. For one substantial sample of tributes publ i shed in a provincial newspaper see Express and Echo [Exeter], 6 Sept. 1997. 63 The Times, 6 Sept. 1997. 64 Independent, 4 Sept. 1997. 65 The Times, 1 April 2002. 66 The Guardian, 2 April 2002. 67 The Times, 10 April 2002. 6S Arnstein, 'Queen Victoria', pp. 120-21; The Historical Record of the Imperial Visit to India (London, 1911), pp. 256-74. 69 The Times, 26 Dec. 2001. However the dramatic decline in the audience for the Christmas broadcasts, from 27 million in 1987, to 15.7 million in 1994 and 7.7 million in 2007 (The Times, 24 Dec. 1995, 24 Dec. 2008) suggests that the Queen was no longer articulating a cultural consensus.

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The Queen s Golden Jubilee: Ceremonial: A Thanksgiving Service at St Paul s Cathedral (London, 2002), p. 9; The Times, 24 April 2002. 71 A Service of Celebration and Thanksgiving on Occasion of the Golden Jubilee of Her Majesty the Queen (London, 2002). 72 The Times, 25 Nov. 1995; The Reformer (May/June 1999, p. 14) asserted that Charles was 'manifestly unsuitable' to be King. 73 The Times, 9 April 2005. The leader-writer was supportive of the Prince, both in relation to his re-marriage and his attendance at the Pope's funeral. Even the Reformer, although highly critical of the Prince on other occasions, let these events pass without comment. 74 C.G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (Routledge, London and New York, 2001). 75 Cf. ibid., pp. 170-92. 76 Cf. ibid., especially pp. 58-87; C. Campbell Orr, 'The feminization of the monarchy, 1780-1910', in Olechnowicz, Monarchy and the British Nation, pp. 76-107. 77 The Times, Ilten. 1993.

Chapter 6

Australia: Towards Secularisation and One Step Back David Hilliard

Christianity has had a presence in Australia since the founding of the first convict colony in 1788 but the dominant national story has been a secular one. Historians and social critics have rarely allowed Christianity a significant or creative role in the shaping of Australian culture.1 Usually they have depicted religion as a private matter, important for individuals and for local communities but mostly peripheral to the main concerns of society and practically irrelevant to large areas of Australian life. Nor have they recognised the ways that religious impulses and themes have been expressed in Australian literature and art. Some scholars, more dramatically, have portrayed the history of Australia as a confrontation between the Christian faith and secularist philosophies in which religious believers have always been on the defensive and the latter, in the long run, have been victorious. In 1976 an eminent historian of Australian Catholicism encapsulated this pessimistic view of the place of religion in Australia's cultural heritage by suggesting that Australia might be understood best as 'the first genuinely post-Christian society5, perhaps even 'the first modern society without religious roots'.2 About the same time, public opinion polls began to show a downward slide in the proportion of Australians who attended church and believed without doubt, and denominational statistical tables revealed a consistent pattern of falling membership. So the word 'secularisation' - in this period usually defined in Bryan Wilson's words as 'the process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance' - began to appear in popular books and academic articles on modern Australia.3 Since then, some historians of Australian religion have portrayed the latter decades of the twentieth century as 'the emergence of a truly secular society'.4 Writing in the 1980s, Alan Gilbert concluded that religion 'has become a subcultural element in Australian life' .5 Two decades later it is appropriate to look again at these claims. What have been the main contours of religious change in Australia over the last two hundred years? What is the evidence for religious decline or secularisation since the mid-twentieth century? Is the widely applied label 'secular Australia' a myth?6 Unlike the United States, the idea of the godly colony is absent from Australia's founding story. There were no religious motives or objectives in the

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initial decision of the British government to found convict colonies at Botany Bay (Sydney) in New South Wales, on the east coast of the continent, and later on the island of Van Diemen's Land (later Tasmania). The British government and its local representatives saw the Christian religion as taught by the Church of England as a means of instilling morality into convicts and their locally-bom children and an essential component of the social and political order. The gap between religious profession and practice was very large; for several decades less than one in ten of the convict and settler population regularly attended church. Many of the convicts and ex-convicts had a distrust of organised religion, which they saw as part of the penal system. Unless compelled by government orders to attend church, they stayed away. It was also a matter of supply, for until the 1840s clergy and church buildings were very thinly spread among a European population that was scattered over hundreds of miles of south-eastern Australia. In addition, attitudes to churchgoing were affected by Australia's open spaces, temperate climate and abundant sunshine, which created an outdoor culture. Sunday, as a day free from work, was widely seen as an opportunity to enjoy the physical pleasures of boating, gambling, and eating and drinking with family and friends. With the ending of transportation to eastern Australia between 1840 and 1853 the influence of convictism faded. From the mid-1830s, the combination of state aid from the government to the major religious denominations and a spirit of competition produced an upward surge in the number of church buildings and clergymen. After years of neglect, 'religion distinctly gained ground5.7 The gold rushes that began in New South Wales and Victoria in the 1850s brought to Australia a huge wave of immigrants who swamped the ex-convict component of the population. These were followed by thousands of free settlers and assisted immigrants from all parts of the British Isles. From contemporary accounts and comments we can see the emergence of some distinctively Australian attitudes towards organised religion. These include a distrust of authoritarian and moralistic religious leaders, a preference for 'practical Christianity' over rigorously defined doctrine, and a widespread attachment to the idea - much disliked by clergy with firm convictions - of a 'common Christianity' that transcended denominational divisions. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Australian radical nationalists who idealised 'the Australian dream' were inclined to dismiss the Christianity of the churches as one of the 'old-world errors and wrongs and lies' (wrote the poet Henry Lawson) that had no place in the new world emerging in the South. However, this scepticism was often conjoined to a reverence for the person of Jesus, 'the Galilean carpenter', who was invoked by working-class movements and nationalist writers as the teacher of human brotherhood and 'practical' Christianity: 'a non-supernatural power for social improvement'. 8 The idea that the 'typical Australian' is an egalitarian and extrovert white male who is sceptical about religion has had a long life. It found expression in a patriotic song 'Advance Australia Fair', written in the 1870s (by a Scottish migrant who was a Presbyterian elder) and adopted officially by the Australian government in 1984 as the national anthem. It celebrates a people who are 'young

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and free', living under a 'radiant Southern Cross' in a land abounding in 'Nature's gifts' with 'boundless plains to share', but it makes no reference to either God or providence. In the Australian colonies there was a preference for keeping religion out of politics, but the line of separation was permeable. Starting with South Australia in 1851, state aid to religion was withdrawn in each colony. This reflected a shift in colonial opinion towards the idea that the spheres of church and state should be kept separate, that the practical need for government subsidies was past, and that religion would flourish best under the voluntary system. The churches also lost their influence in education. Many colonists, opposed to denominational segregation and divisiveness, began to support the view that only the state could provide an efficient and universal system of elementary education. From the 1870s colonial governments introduced centralised systems of 'free, compulsory and secular' education and withdrew aid from denominational schools. At the same time, governments saw themselves as committed to the enforcement of Christian morality and the creation of a Christian society. This was demonstrated, for example, by the introduction, from the 1860s, of prayers into both houses of each colonial legislature to open each day's proceedings, the support through legislation of the Christian moral code, and the insertion, after much debate, of the words 'humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God' into the preamble of the proposed constitution for the Commonwealth of Australia (1901).9 Since 1828 every Australian census has asked a question on religion. This data provides a solid base for charting trends in religious affiliation. During the nineteenth century, through immigration from the British Isles (and Germany) and the introduction of new varieties of Christianity from the United States, Australia's religious culture became more of a mosaic, but its fundamental shape remained remarkably stable. Until the 1960s, over four-fifths of the population identified with one of four branches of Christianity: Church of England (Anglican), Roman Catholic, Presbyterian or Methodist. In this, Australia was similar to Canada and New Zealand, though the proportions of each major denomination were different. In Australia the Anglican Church, brought by immigrants from England, was the largest religious body, claiming some 40 per cent of the population in 1901. Roman Catholics, comprising one in five Australians, were predominantly Irish by birth or ancestry. About one in ten Australians were Presbyterians, mostly Scottish immigrants and their descendants. Methodism, through immigration from southwest England and its own evangelistic efforts, grew to a similar size. These four denominations had a presence in almost every major town and suburb. Australians sought to reproduce as far as possible the worship and church life they had known in England, Scotland and Ireland. The great majority retained some kind of attachment to the religion of the family in which they had been brought up. The relationship of the Indigenous population of Australia to the Christian Church was very different. During the nineteenth century Christian missions to the Aboriginal people gained individual converts, but in only a few cases was

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Christianity adopted by a whole community. Those Aboriginal people who lived in isolated regions continued to follow their traditional belief and ritual systems.10 The English novelist Anthony Trollope, an astute social observer, formed an opinion during his visit to the Australian colonies in 1871-72 that 'religious teaching, and the exercise of religious worship, are held as being essential to civilisation and general well-being' and that 'the feeling is stronger there than it is at home'.11 The figures on colonial church attendance are patchy, but two governments, New South Wales and Victoria, collected returns of church attendance over a long period. There were no detailed censuses of church attendance that would enable a precise analysis of the relationship between religious practice and denomination, social class, size of town, region and gender. However, the available evidence indicates that the overall level of regular churchgoing was broadly comparable with England. In New South Wales in 1850, some 35 per cent of the adult population were regular churchgoers, with regional variations, and the overall attendance rate rose during the second half of the nineteenth century to 45 per cent in 1900. In Victoria the reported attendance rate was higher: about 60 per cent in the 1880s.12 Everyone agreed that women outnumbered men in the pews by two or three to one; churches were always seeking ways of attracting more male worshippers. The pattern of religious practice in Sydney, Melbourne and the other colonial capitals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had much in common with the English cities described by Hugh McLeod.13 Anglican and Protestant churches established a strong presence in the middle-class and wealthy suburbs where they had their largest congregations. In the inner belt of working-class and industrial suburbs, though the level of adult attendance was lower, churches were widely used for rites of passage and were connected to the local community through their Sunday schools, youth organisations and sporting clubs. It was in these same inner suburbs that Catholics were numerically strong, comprising up to a third of the population. There they created a cohesive Irish-Australian subculture, with its own schools run by nuns and religious brothers, and became the largest body of churchgoers. In Australia, the principal contrast was between, on the one hand, the churchgoing habits of the suburbs and provincial towns, where corporate church life was generally well-supported and, on the other, the 'religious destitution' of sparsely settled areas, 'the bush', where distances between settlements were vast, churches were few and itinerating clergy were rarely seen. The Australian bush was a harsh environment. With a thinly scattered and shifting population, it was hard to create religious institutions that would sustain faith. The majority of the workforce - shepherds, shearers, drovers, navvies, timber workers, agricultural labourers - were itinerant and without families. The Australian pastoral frontier produced no eruptions of revivalism or radical religious movements as occurred in the United States. Well into the twentieth century, at each census the highest proportion of (male) self-declared agnostics, atheists and freethinkers lived in the outback, in mining towns and on the goldfields.

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The widespread perception of 'appalling ignorance of religion' among settlers in remote rural areas was encapsulated in a comic poem of the early-twentieth century by a Catholic priest-poet, 'John O'Brien'. The subject was a confirmation in a bush church at 'Tangmalangaloo', a place where 'Christian Knowledge wilts'. The visiting bishop quizzed a lanky teenager: Come, tell me why is Christmas Day the greatest of the year? ... The ready answer bared a fact no bishop ever knew 'It's the day before the races out at Tangmalangaloo. ,u

Yet in the outback a diffuse Christianity rooted in childhood memories of family prayers and Sunday school could be re-awakened by a visit from a travelling clergyman. Usually he was welcomed, and his services in a school or on a farmhouse verandah would be crowded with people who had travelled long distances. The burial of the dead - as portrayed in Frederick McCubbin's evocative 1890 painting, 'A bush burial' - might be accompanied by Christian prayers, often read from a battered copy of the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer. Male rural workers, on the other hand, often preferred to create their own burial rituals, without religion, which involved a demonstration of respect for the dead and a rowdy celebration of mateship through beer and macabre humour.15 Intellectual secularisation first became visible in Australia in the 1840s. Those who were publicly sceptical of the doctrines of Christianity and antagonistic to the social influence of the church were found mostly among the middle-class intelligentsia and political radicals. Some educated people were sympathetic to the deist idea of a God who did not intervene in human affairs: 'that the affairs of the world are left to the uncontrolled management of natural causes'.16 Many male leaders of the movement for colonial democracy and self-government regarded institutional religion as a bulwark of political conservatism. The colonial universities were set up to impart 'purely secular instruction' and were open to all, with religious teaching undertaken by affiliated denominational colleges which remained on the edge of university life. During the latter decades of the nineteenth century the first books appeared that directly challenged Christian orthodoxy. For instance, a Melbourne bookseller, E. W. Cole, published The Real Place in History of Jesus and Paul (1867), which was an account of the origins of Christianity without the divine or the miraculous. During the 1880s some sixteen freethought societies were formed in cities and towns, and secularist lecturers drew big crowds, but this movement soon faded. During the first half of the twentieth century, when the great majority of Australians identified with a religious denomination, the universities were almost the only public institutions where agnosticism was socially acceptable, even taken for granted. An influential centre of religious scepticism was the department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney under Professor John Anderson who was willing to describe himself as 'a materialist, a positivist, an empiricist, a realist'.17 Anderson created an indigenous philosophical school that encouraged critical

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scrutiny of all systems of thought and dismissed religious claims as irrational. His department was attacked by church leaders - the last eruption of protest occurred in 1961 - as a dangerous place where lecturers corrupted the young and subverted society by teaching that there was no God and no divinely authorised moral law. Anderson's ideas shaped the thinking of several generations of Sydney intellectuals and permeated New South Wales society through his students. However, relatively few Australians were confident enough in their unbelief to declare it openly: 0.18 per cent of the population in 1901 and 1933, and 0.35 per cent in 1947. Men were three or four times more likely than women to declare they had no religion. Observers agreed that religious 'indifference' was more prevalent than unbelief. The First World War both challenged traditional patterns of religious belief and behaviour and stimulated new expressions of religious feeling. Australian losses were high. Of the 330,000 young men who (as volunteers) served overseas, from a population of five million, almost one in five (61,000) were killed; this was the highest proportion of deaths to enlistments of any country in the British Empire. The majority of clergy endorsed the war effort both as an expression of their loyalty to the British Empire and in the hope that the experience of sacrifice would lead to a national spiritual awakening and repentance. In this they were disappointed. An army chaplain who had thought deeply about the significance of the war for Australian Christianity observed both the religious scepticism of soldiers - 'many men think their faith is reeling because they cannot believe that God caused the war' - and the persistence of belief in destiny (or fate), in prayer at moments of acute danger and in life after death: 'The dead still seem to belong to the battalion.' 18 The ways in which Australians commemorated their war dead, in their architecture and symbolism, reveal much about their religious beliefs. There were those who found comfort in the symbol of the cross, which linked Christ's sacrifice with the deaths of the young soldiers who had died for the British Empire. Others were unable to draw much sustenance from the doctrines of Christianity. War memorials - seen as sacred sites or 'holy ground' - were intended to represent the whole community. In their words and images the language of Christianity was implicit, but they also looked back to ancient Greece and the stoic virtues of endurance and fidelity. The massive Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, dedicated in 1934, resembles a Greek temple surmounted by a pyramid. The texts inscribed on the walls of war memorials sometimes included the words 'For God and Country' but more often they were undogmatic: 'Greater love hath no man' (from John 15:13), 'We will remember them', 'Lest we forget'.19 The annual commemoration of the war dead on Anzac Day (25 April), which marked the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli in Turkey in 1915, became a national sacred day. The culture of Anzac as it evolved during the 1920s had both a secular and a religious dimension. The Anzac service of prayers and hymns was Protestant in style while its words were broadly theistic. As a religious observance, it drew upon the Christian tradition but was unconnected with any particular church and was open to those of other beliefs. This distinctly Australian

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commemoration of the war dead has remained almost unchanged in form for some ninety years. After the First World War the level of nominal adherence to the four main denominations remained high, but there was a detectable slackening of active involvement in church life and a perception that the level of weekly churchgoing was falling off.20 'The fact is,' the Anglican bishop of Adelaide lamented in 1924, 'religion is not fashionable to-day. Men and women are none the worse thought of if they do not "go to church.'"21 In part, this was a result of the war. A significant body of returned soldiers kept their distance from the churches of their upbringing, finding a new community in associations of ex-servicemen, though they retained respect for individual army chaplains who had demonstrated their worth on the front line. When contemporaries sought to explain the prevailing 'spirit of apathy' towards public worship they pointed to new opportunities for amusement and leisure. They blamed the popularity of the cinema, the national 'obsession' with outdoor sport and the rise of car ownership - by 1938 one in fi ve families had one - which made it possible to go out on Sundays for picnics and excursions. Although the majority of children were still sent to a Sunday school, from the early 1930s enrolment figures in almost every denomination started to decline. In South Australia, for example, a close study of the census data for religious adherence over four decades combined with the denominational statistics of church or communicant membership reveals that Protestant church membership lagged behind population growth. The social penetration of the main nonAnglican Protestant churches reached its highest point in the years immediately before the First World War. By 1947 the total membership density of these same denominations, as a proportion of the state's adult population aged 15 and over, was three-quarters of its level in 1911.22 After the social dislocation caused by the Second World War, as in Europe and North America, there was a modest upswing of religious interest and church membership.23 This was largely due to a sharp rise in the number of births after the war and the shaping of Australian society during the 1950s around an idealised model o f ' t h e family' and 'the home'. Church leaders and conservative politicians, disturbed by the threat of 'godless' Communism, the rising figures for marriage breakdown and the new problem of 'juvenile delinquency', invoked Christian morality and family worship as the ultimate sources of social stability and good parenthood. In the ever-spreading new suburbs that ringed every capital city Sunday school enrolments swelled, as did the membership of church-linked organisations for youth. Increasing prosperity and the introduction from 1954 of American methods of church fund-raising led to a wave of church-building and fuelled ambitious programs of church extension. Regular church attendance rose slightly, measured in Australia for the first time by opinion polls, though these tended to over-count the number of actual worshippers. By 1960 about 30 per cent of the adult population claimed to attend church weekly or almost weekly.24 Of these, about half were Roman Catholics. During the post-war years the Catholic Church in Australia was numerically reinforced by large waves of migrants from

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Italy, Poland and other parts of Catholic Europe, and in the 1980s it supplanted the Anglican Church as the nation's largest religious denomination. Uneasy about what they saw as growing materialism and moral decline but confident of their moral authority, every major denomination during the post-war years embarked on a series of evangelistic campaigns and movements that aimed to revive church life and boost Christian influence in the wider community. These efforts climaxed in 1959 in the first visit to Australia of the American evangelist Billy Graham, supported by all the Protestant churches and by many Anglicans.25 Fifty years later some evangelicals have claimed that the 1959 Billy Graham crusade was the closest Australia ever came to a religious revival. But it was not very close. The first comprehensive survey of the religious beliefs and practices of Australians was conducted in 1966 by sociologist Hans Mol of the Australian National University and published in 1971.26 Among its findings were that 90 per cent of Australians had been baptised (though there were more unbaptised people in the younger age-groups), that 90 per cent believed in a God or higher power, that churchgoers were fairly evenly distributed between the different age groups, and that the differences between adherents of the main denominations in social class, education and occupation were quite small. Mol concluded that Australian religious institutions had shown 'remarkable resilience' in the face of secularising forces but predicted that in the future they would be 'even more auxiliary and peripheral' rather than being central to the life of the nation.27 The tide was already turning. It was recognisably the same shift in mentality and behaviour that Hugh McLeod has recently described of England in the 1960s.2KAs in other Western societies, social changes were eroding the family-centred religious culture: the arrival of television in 1956, increasing household affluence, the return of married women to the workforce, the entry of the first cohorts of postwar 'baby-boomers' into their teenage years, the emergence of a commercialised youth culture, the expansion of higher education, and the liberalisation of state laws and local council by-laws that had regulated the observance of Sunday. More fundamental was a new spirit of criticism of established political and religious institutions and the pushing of cultural boundaries, shown by the emergence in the mid-1960s of satirical television programmes and magazines (such as Oz) which made fun of authority figures, and by challenges to the laws that censored films and banned books. It was a social climate that encouraged rejection of tradition, self-expression and a personal search for truth rather than a loyal adherence to the religious denomination of one's birth. Young people in large numbers dropped out of the churches of their upbringing and mostly did not return in later years when they had their own families. Around the universities some younger church members were excited by the radical theologies emanating from Britain and the United States, especially the idea that Christianity needed to be reformulated in order to speak to 'modern secular man' and that existing religious institutions were irrelevant or even an obstacle to an effective 'Christian presence' in the modern world. Meanwhile, in the Roman Catholic Church the reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), interacting with the social changes

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of the 1960s and 1970s, dissolved many of the rules and prohibitions that had separated Catholics from the Protestant majority. As in Britain and North America, the inward-looking Catholic subculture crumbled and so did the once familiar markers of Catholic identity.29 From about 1965 the various measures of religious adherence and participation fell away sharply, though there were wide differences in the timing and extent of change. Melbourne, which was the centre of liberal-progressive thinking in Australian Christianity, felt the impact of modernising theological trends and 'the ferment in the church' much earlier than predominantly rural states such as Queensland and Tasmania where orthodox Christian beliefs were rarely challenged and traditional patterns of church life were widely supported until the 1970s. Conservative evangelicals, who had a strong presence in Sydney, dismissed radical theology as incompatible with the essentials of Christianity and fought its influence but during the next few decades they too experienced downturns in participation and social influence. All the statistical evidence indicates an erosion of religious belief and a drift from involvement in traditional religious institutions. First, there was a decline in the proportion of Australians who admitted to belief in God or a higher power. From a level of 90 per cent until the 1960s it had fallen by the 1990s to 80 per cent, but this figure includes a higher proportion who believe with doubts or with mixed feelings (35 per cent) and who believe in a higher power rather than a personal God (13 per cent).30 At the census, the proportion of Australians who described themselves as Christians declined from 88 per cent in 1961 to 64 per cent in 2006. Those who claimed 'No Religion' rose from 0.4 per cent of the population in 1961 to 13 per cent in 1986, and to 19 per cent in 2006; this percentage is comparable with figures for North America and Great Britain but is lower than New Zealand (35 per cent). The 'No Religion' census category embraces self-described agnostics, atheists, humanists and rationalists and those who have no interest in religion but does not exclude those who see themselves simply as 'spiritual'. The level of nonbelief is highest among the university-educated and in the 15-34 age group. In 2006 a further 11 per cent of the population did not answer the census question on religion and it is unclear how this non-response should be interpreted.31 Secondly, contrary to Mol's prediction in 1971 that Christian rites to mark birth, marriage, and burial were unlikely to be abandoned, a rising proportion of Australians ceased to participate in religious rites of passage. The trend became apparent in the early 1970s when the Australian government appointed celebrants to make civil marriage more widely available, thus providing an attractive and flexible alternative to churches. In 1970, 12 per cent of all marriages were conducted without a religious ceremony; the proportion rose to 36 per cent in 1980, 53 per cent in 2000 and 63 per cent in 2007. There are no comparable statistics for the rate of infant baptism. It is likely, however, that the figures for the Anglican Church in South Australia are representative of a general trend. In 1954, for every 1,000 births in the state there were 206 Anglican baptisms; this ratio fell to 181 in 1966, 155 in 1976 and 54 in 2004.32 Funeral rituals have likewise become

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more secular. Civil celebrants supplied by funeral directors are now widely used by the families of non-churchgoers who previously would have expected a funeral to be conducted by a member of the clergy. These civil ceremonies, though they may include a religious or 'spiritual' component, indicate a declining attachment to institutional Christianity. Thirdly, there was an overall decline in religious practice. Self-reported weekly church attendance, as measured by public opinion polls, declined from 30 per cent in the late 1950s to 20 per cent at the end of the 1970s, and to 17 per cent in the early 1990s. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, on the basis of figures collected by the National Church Life Survey and other data, it is estimated that the total number attending church on a typical Sunday represents some 8 per cent of the population; about 14 per cent attend at least once a month. This downward trend is confi rmed by (patchy) denominational statistics, by studies of religion over several decades in a rural community (St Arnaud) in Victoria and of the religion of students at the University of New England in rural New South Wales, and from the personal experience of many parish clergy and ministers who have had to deal with the practical problems of ageing and shrinking congregations, falling income and the need to close redundant churches.33 In the Anglican diocese of Melbourne, for example, the number of Christmas communicants dropped from c. 60,000 in 1970 to 32,000 in 2006, and this is paralleled in other Anglican dioceses where comparable figures are available.34 Catholics, while remaining the largest body of churchgoers, became more casual in their observances and less involved in parish life than in the buoyant years following the Second Vatican Council. Diocesan figures for weekend Mass attendance chart a steady decline. On a typical Sunday in the 1960s some 50 per cent of Catholics attended Mass, 30 per cent in 1980, 15 per cent in 2001,14 per cent in 2006.35 Compared with other Western countries, by the standard measurements the overall level of religious involvement in Australia at the beginning of the twenty-first century falls between relatively devout nations such as the United States and Italy and the low levels of participation found in northern Europe, but it is closer to the latter. Fourthly, the traditional pattern of religious socialisation and recruitment was broken. As in Britain, and for similar reasons, Anglican and Protestant Sunday school enrolments fell sharply, to become a small fraction of what they had been at their post-war peak in the early 1960s. This removed the pool from which the churches had traditionally drawn the majority of their adult members. Without significant replenishment, the age profile of regular church attenders, over time, has become much older than the wider community. The Catholic school system, educating some 20 per cent of Australian children, has been much less successful than in earlier years in transmitting commitment to Catholic teachings and practice. Although the majority of its school-leavers still regard themselves as Catholics, a high proportion reject particular teachings of the church and rarely or never attend Sunday Mass. In a bid to counter this trend, to ignite the faith of young Catholics and create a new cohort of committed believers, the Catholic Church in Sydney hosted World Youth Day in July 2008. This was an international festival

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for Catholic youth, which drew two hundred thousand pilgrims from every part of Australia and from overseas. It was an impressive display of youthful religious exuberance; its permanent results are keenly awaited. The extent of the waning of Christian belief among younger age-groups in Australia is shown in a major study (conducted between 2003 and 2006) of the spirituality of Generation Y: young people born between 1981 and 1995. Of those studied, 46 per cent regard themselves as Christian in some sense, though less than half of that figure have any kind of church involvement and denominational affiliation is fading in significance; 17 per cent follow New Age and alternative spiritualities; 28 per cent have no belief in God or are undecided.36 The number of younger Australians who follow a secular path and disclaim any religious affiliation is growing. In all the major denominations women continue to outnumber men as attenders (by a ratio of 6 to 4), but since the 1960s the attendance level for women has declined to a greater extent than among men. Evidence from several surveys indicates that women participating in the paid workforce now attend church in almost the same proportion as working males in the same age-groups; both women and men under the age of 40 are significantly under-represented. Even after adjusting for the effect of other variables, however, there still appears to be a significant difference in the religious orientation of women and men and in the orthodoxy of their Christian beliefs. Women are consistently more religious than men while men outnumber women among non-believers. Nevertheless, the feminist movement from the late 1960s left its mark on the religious thinking of a generation of women - mostly younger and university-educated - and profoundly changed the way they saw Christianity. Some prominent feminists rejected the idea of a patriarchal god, the church's male leadership and the male imagery of its worship as beyond reform.37 One of the best known was the writer Germaine Greer, but her alienation from Catholicism had started at her convent school in Melbourne in the 1950s. Yet feminism also opened up new ways of thinking about religion which some women found liberating. From the 1970s they began to contest the male control of church structures and religious texts. An organisation that expressed the aspirations of one wing of the Christian feminist movement was the (predominantly Anglican) Movement for the Ordination of Women. It achieved its first goal in 1992 when the Anglican general synod voted to allow the ordination of women to the priesthood. From the 1990s, in most denominations, the number of women in pastoral ministry (not all of them ordained) increased at a faster rate than did the number of men. Other women activists, influenced by international feminist theologies, sought to create egalitarian communities that explored feminist spirituality and devised new religious rituals and prayers, shaped by the lived experiences of women. Those women influenced by feminism who stayed within the church have been drawn towards less dogmatic and masculinist expressions of Christianity and a more fluid spirituality.38 There are exceptions to the general pattern of Christian decline. In the Anglican, Baptist and Uniting39 churches, some congregations with a definite evangelical message have had success, in some places, in attracting young families and their

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children by providing a committed and supportive community that sees itself as separate from the secularised society outside. More significant has been the growth of the Pentecostal movement.40 Before the 1960s Pentecostal churches had been on the edge of Australian religious life. Then, boosted by the cultural style of the period with its emphasis on informality and immediate experience, they began to expand in numbers. Their exuberant style and supernatural ist message made them a popular subject of television documentaries and magazine articles. At the beginning of the twenty-first century they comprised some forty autonomous groupings, the largest being the Assemblies of God. As a percentage of the Australian population, self-described Pentecostals have quadrupled in thirty years, though from a very low base: 0.3 per cent of the population in 1976, rising to 1.1 per cent in 2006. Collectively, they now account for one in ten of regular church attenders (outnumbering churchgoing Anglicans) and their age profile is younger than the wider community. Their numerical strength is in the outer suburbs of the capital cities and in regions of high population growth and large mortgages, where young families and second-generation migrants have settled. Pentecostal megachurches such as Hillsong in Sydney and CityLife in Melbourne, with thousands attending worship centres surrounded by huge car parks, are comparable to suburban shopping malls. As the centres of a seemingly egalitarian community that welcomes newcomers, they have created 'a new suburban social landscape'.41 In many country towns, too, while the old-established denominations languish, the local Pentecostal churches commonly have the biggest and most youthful congregations. Two other trends are discernible. The first is diffuse and hard to measure: the emergence of new ways of being religious. Some observers have charted a rise of popular interest in spirituality, especially among young adults, in reaction to the secularisation of public culture.42 This is a search for individual religious experience, a desire for 'connectedness' with a larger whole, which is detached from the churches and the idea of'absolute' religious truth. The sources of inspiration are diverse and eclectic, with ideas circulating internationally through the internet. They include ecospirituality, the teachings and texts of Eastern religions, the 'ancient wisdom' of Aboriginal Australians, Celtic spirituality, and the New Age movement. Another sign is the willingness to create new rituals of mourning and commemoration unconnected with existing religious institutions, such as roadside memorials for the victims of motor vehicle crashes, and the growing popularity of Anzac Day observances. The nature of this new spirituality and its social significance is a subject of debate. The second trend is the way Australian religion is being changed and, to some extent, revitalised by immigration. Since the late 1970s new waves of immigrants from Asia, the Middle East and Africa have brought an influx of adherents of world religions and their growing presence has challenged those Australians who envisage a secular future for the nation. The proportion of self-described Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus rose from 1.4 per cent of the population in 1986 to 4.6 per cent in 2006. In some suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne the Islamic and Buddhist communities are highly visible: new

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11

mosques and temples stand adjacent to old-established churches that are struggling to survive. As with earlier waves of settlers from Europe, many of these migrants have found that in a new country religion is a powerful source of identity. Among Muslim youth, for example, there is evidence that religion is more important than it was for their parents, who may have been rather casual in their observances, though this is less apparent among young Buddhists. Migrants who are Christians have reinvigorated ageing Christian congregations in the places where they have settled. This trend is very marked in the Roman Catholic Church in the capital cities where in many older suburban parishes most of those who attend Mass and send their children to the parish school are recent migrants, mainly from SouthEast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. With the falling-off in the number of Australian-born seminarians, young Asian men are a significant proportion of students for the Catholic priesthood. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population of Australia (2 per cent of the total) has a distinctive religious composition. Some Christian groups reflect evangelical and charismatic influences while others are connected with the major denominations. Although some Christians repudiate traditional practices, many others accommodate them alongside their Christian faith. At the 2006 census 1.3 per cent of Indigenous people reported adherence to an Aboriginal traditional religion and 24 per cent claimed 'No Religion', compared with 19 per cent of nonIndigenous Australians. The latter proportion is highest among those who live in the major cities. The older churches, despite a fall in their active membership, have expanded their roles in social welfare and education. They have also gained new prominence in public debates that involve ethical issues. For much of the twentieth century social policy in Australia was based on the state, which took primary responsibility for the provision of services for the whole community, as a universal entitlement, without reference to religion. During the 1990s, however, the Australian government began to reduce its welfare commitments by tendering out government services to non-government (mostly church-linked) agencies. Through changes in methods of funding, it has also encouraged the growth of non-government schools, almost all of which are linked in some way with churches. At the same time, new social and moral issues have emerged for which there are no clear or commonly agreed solutions. Religion has therefore come to the forefront both as a subject of public policy (as in the management of religious diversity and competition), in the delivery of public policy (as in assistance to disadvantaged groups, aged care and education), and in the framing of social policy (in areas such as embryonic stem cell research, same-sex unions, abortion and euthanasia).43 In these areas, churches and religious organisations have an opportunity, and are expected, to contribute to the process of decision-making. In addition, politicians are more inclined than ever before to use religious language and are less reluctant to be seen attending church. The greater visibility of religion in the public sphere during the government of John Howard (1996-2007) led to a clutch of books and academic studies investigating the influence of particular religious groups in the formation

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of socially conservative policies and the alleged use by politicians of symbols and coded language, 'dog whistles', to appeal to conservative Christian voters.44 In this new atmosphere it was no disadvantage for Kevin Rudd, leader of the Australian Labor Party and prime minister from 2007, to publish a theologicallyinformed article in a national journal setting out his views on the relationship between Christianity and the political order.45 In contrast with the prevailing outlook of the 1970s and 1980s, when sociologists and historians tended to assume that religion was evaporating and that the nation's future would inevitably be a secular one, at the beginning of the twenty-first century scholars (and newspaper journalists) are more inclined to write about the influence of religious groups in politics, the emerging religious marketplace, and the ways that Australians are seeking a sense of the transcendent and exploring new religious movements outside the traditional churches. Cultural historians have begun to address the religious dimensions of Australian life. Conservative Christians, attached to the idea of a 'Christian country', have urged greater public recognition of what they see as Australia's neglected Christian heritage. The title of a recent sociological study of Australian religion by Gary Bouma encapsulates the new thinking: Australian SouL Adopting a definition of secularity as a social condition in which 'the religious and spiritual have moved out from the control of religious organisations', Bouma sees in Australia a process of religious change and reconfiguration rather than simple decline. Although the 'mainstream' denominations are shrinking, so that some bodies which were once quite central to Australian life will become more marginal, he detects signs of religious revitalisation and innovation. These indicate that 'religion and spirituality will be a significant part of Australia's near future'. 46 However, this optimistic assessment may not take sufficient account of the growing number of Australians who have no particular religious or spiritual beliefs and do not engage in religious practices; they will be a major influence in the future. Religion is not disappearing from Australian life but it is becoming more diverse, more fragmented and more a matter of individual choice. In the Australia of the twenty-first century there will be a wider range of religious alternatives than ever before but no common story, no shared faith reinforced by social institutions.

Notes 1

R. Ely, 'Secularisation and the sacred in Australian history', Historical Studies, vol. 19, no. 77 (1981), pp. 553-6. For a survey of religious themes in recent 'secular' histories, see H.M. Carey et al., 'Australian religion review, 1980-2000', Journal of Religious History, vol. 24, no. 3 (2000), pp. 302-6. 2 P. O'Farrell, 'Writing the general history of Australian religion \ Journal of Religious History, vol. 9, no. 1 (1976), p. 70. He later modified this view in 'The cultural ambivalence of Australian religion', in S.L. Goldberg and F.B. Smith eds, Australian Cultural History (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 7-14.

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11

B. Wilson, Can God Survive in Australia! (Sutherland, NSW, 1983); R. Ireland, The Challenge of Secularisation (Melbourne, 1988); J. McCallum, 'Secularisation in Australia between 1966 and 1985: a research Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, vol. 23, no. 3 (1987), pp. 407-22; I. McAllister, 'Religious change and secularization: the transmission of religious values in Australia', Sociological Analysis, vol. 49, no. 3 (1988), pp. 249-63. 4 H. M. Carey, Believing in A ustralia: A Cultural History of Religions (Sydney, 1996), p. 172. See also R.C. Thompson, Religion in Australia: A History (Melbourne, 1994, second edition, 2002), pp. 116-38. 5 A.D. Gilbert, 'Religion and polities', in A. Curthoys, A.W. Martin and T. Rowse eds, Australians: from 1939 (Sydney, 1987), p. 213. 6 The most recent study of the state of religion in Australia is by G. Bouma, Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the Twenty-first Century (Melbourne, 2006). 7 J. Barrett, That Better Country: The Religious Aspect of Life in Eastern Australia, 1835-1850 (Melbourne, 1966), p. 205. 8 S. Piggin, 'Jesus in Australian history and culture', in S. Emilsen and W.W. Emilsen eds, Mapping the Landscape: Essays in Australian and New Zealand Christianity: Festschrift in Honour of Ian Breward (New York, 2000), pp. 152-5. 9 T.R. Frame, Church and State: Australia's Imaginary Wall (Sydney, 2006); A. Winckel, 'Almighty God in the preamble', The New Federalist: The Journal of Australian Federation History, no. 4 (1999), pp. 78-83. 10 J. Harris, One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity: A Story of Hope (Sutherland, NSW, 1990, second edition, 1994). 11 A. Trollope, Australia and New Zealand (London 1873, reprinted 1968), vol. 1, p. 224. 12 W.Phillips, 'Religious profession and practice in New South Wales, 1850-1901: the statistical evidence', Historical Studies, vol. 15, no. 59 (1972), pp. 378—400; H.R. Jackson, Churches and People in Australia and New Zealand\ 1860-1930 (Wellington and Sydney, 1987), chapter 5. 13 See notably H. McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London, 1974). 14 J. O'Brien [Patrick Hartigan], Around the Boree Log and other Verses (Sydney, 1921, 1968 edn), pp. 100-102. 15 P. Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840-1918 (Melbourne, 2002), pp. 253-60. 16 A. Atkinson and M. Aveling eds, Australians: 1838 (Sydney, 1987), p. 428. 17 J.A. Passmore, 'Philosophy', in A.L. McLeod ed., The Pattern of Australian Culture (Ithaca NY and Melbourne, 1963), p. 149. 18 K.T. Henderson, Khaki and Cassock (Melbourne, 1919), pp. 149-52. 19 K.S. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne, 1998), pp. 158-60, 462. 20 F.B. Smith, 'Sunday matters', in B. Gammage and P. Spearritt eds, Australians: 1938 (Sydney, 1987), pp. 391-405. 21 Bishop A. Nutter Thomas, pastoral address to synod, in Year Book of the Church of England in the Diocese of Adelaide ... 1924-1925, p. 91. 22 C.P. Barreira, 'Protestant Piety and Religious Culture in South Australia, c. 1914—c. 1981', PhD thesis, Flinders University, 2003, chapter 3, at p. 122.

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D. Hilliard, 'God in the suburbs: the religious culture of Australian cities in the 1950s', Australian Historical Studies, vol. 24, no. 97 (1991), pp. 399-419. 24 Australian religion in the early 1960s is surveyed by K.S. Inglis, 'Religious behaviour', in A.F. Davies and S. Encel eds, Australian Society: A Sociological Introduction (Melbourne, second edition, 1970), pp. 437-75. 25 S. Piggin, Evangelical Christianity in Australia: Spirit, Word and World (Melbourne, 1996), chapter 7. 26 H. Mol, Religion in Australia: A Sociological Investigation (Melbourne, 1971). The survey was based upon responses to a detailed questionnaire from a sample of 2,600 adults in three states. 27 Ibid., p. 306. 2K H. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007). 29 D. Hilliard, 'The religious crisis of the 1960s: the experience of the Australian churches', Journal of Religious History, vol. 21, no. 2 (1997), pp. 209-27. 30 M.D.R. Evans and J. Kelley, Australian Economy and Society 2002: Morality and Public Policy in International Perspective, 1984-2002 (Sydney, 2004), pp. 27-30. 31 Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006 Census of Population and Housing. 32 Figures derived from parochial statistics in the yearbook of the dioceses of Adelaide, Willochra and The Murray and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. 33 K. Dempsey, 'Country town religion', inA.W. Black and P.E. Glasner eds, Practice and Belief: Studies in the Sociology of Australian Religion (Sydney, 1983), pp. 25-42; D.R. Beer, "'The holiest campus", its decline and transformation: the University of New England, 1946-79', Journal of Religious History, vol. 21, no. 3 (1997), pp. 318-36. 34 Figures drawn from parochial statistics in the yearbook of the diocese of Melbourne. 35 For analysis of the 2001 Mass attendance figures, see R.E. Dixon, The Catholic Community in Australia (Adelaide, 2005), chapter 6. For the 2006 figures see http://www. ppo.catholic.org.au/pdf/SummaryReport_MassAttendanceInAustralia.pdf, accessed 20 October 2008. 36 M. Mason, A. Singleton and R. Webber, The Spirit of Generation Y: Young People s Spirituality in a Changing Australia (Mulgrave, Vic., 2007); The Spirit of Generation Y project, at ^ittp://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/ccls/sppub/sppub.htm, accessed 20 October 2008. 37 E. Diesendorf, 'Why women leave the church', Women-Church, no. 2 (1988), pp. 25-30, no. 3 (1988), pp. 30-35. 3K A. O'Brien, Gods Willing Workers: Women and Religion in Australia (Sydney, 2005), chapter 10. 39 The Uniting Church in Australia was formed in 1977 by a merger of Methodists, Congregationalists and the majority of Presbyterians. 40 P.J. Hughes, The Pentecostals in Australia (Canberra, 1996). 41 J.Connell, 'Hillsong: a megachurch in the Sydney suburbs', Australian Geographer, vol. 36, no. 3 (2005), pp. 315-32, at p. 330. 42 D. Tacey, The Spirituality Revolution: The Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality (Sydney, 2003); N. Leaves, 'An Australian perspective on the current demise of the churches', Theology, vol. 107 (2004), pp. 257-64. 43 Bouma, Australian Soul, chapter 8.

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D. Marr, The High Price of Heaven (Sydney, 1999); M. Maddox, God under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics (Sydney, 2005); A. Lohrey, 'Voting for Jesus: Christianity and politics in Australia', Quarterly Essay, no. 22 (2006), pp. 1-79. 45 K. Rudd, 'Faith in polities', The Monthly, no. 17 (October 2006), pp. 22-30. 46 Bouma, Australian Soul, p. 208.

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Chapter 7

Secularisation or Resacralisation? The Canadian Case, 1760-2000 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau

The religious history of the past five decades in Canada has posed a conundrum for scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1946, rates of weekly church attendance stood at 67 percent,1 a figure for a highly urbanised and industrialised society that far exceeded comparable measurements in both western Europe and the United States. Despite some significant decline among Protestants, Canadian church attendance in 1965 still attained a robust level of 55 per cent. However, the experience of the subsequent two decades was catastrophic for both Roman Catholic and Protestant churches: by 1985, weekly church attendance was a distinctly minority experience, falling to 35 per cent; and the 2001 national census recorded a fall to 20 per cent,2 somewhat lower than the U.S. figure, and barely higher than the British levels. Historians observing Canada have displayed considerable uncertainty as to how to explain the causes of both the extremely high rates of religious adherence prior to the 1960s and the abrupt collapse of churchgoing thereafter. Some insist that the nature of the Canadian religious experience can be described as a variant of North American 'exceptionalism' by which both the United States and Canada have resisted the pattern of dechristianisation now prevalent in western Europe.3 Indeed, Canada has, like the United States, undergone a political insurgency of evangelical Christians who, between 2004 and 2006, launched a successful takeover of the Conservative Party and elected a neo-evangelical as prime minister. However, media stories of declining and aging church congregations and the closing of church buildings lend credence to recent statistics which report both steady decreases in regular church attendance and a sharply rising number of Canadians identifying themselves as possessing 'no religious affiliation', a percentage now larger than that of the United Church, Canada's biggest Protestant church.4 This, coupled with the inability and unwillingness of the governing Conservative party to reverse the legalisation of same-sex marriages, and the spectacular failure of the political party supporting publicly-funded faith-based schools in the 2007 Ontario provincial election, suggest that Canada's religious future is possibly more closely linked with the religious exceptionalism of a 'greater Europe' postulated by Callum Brown, where both the public sphere and private identities have been largely eviscerated of Christian content.5

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But what of Canada's religious past? How to account for the persistence, far into the twentieth century, of levels of church attendance far surpassing those of the United States and Europe, uncontested popular allegiance to religious institutions, a continued adherence to publicly moral views of society and the state, all of which was supported by high levels of personal piety and belief in God? Since the 1940s most Canadian historians of both Catholicism and Protestantism have worked within a framework of'modernisation as secularisation' in which the high degree of religious pluralism, in turn amplified by the advent of an urban industrial culture was thought to lead inevitably to the decline in the cultural power of the church in the wider society. Perhaps the most influential Canadian interpretation of secularisation was advanced by the sociologist S.D. Clark in 1948 who posited a dialectic between the cultural dynamic force of popular religious movements and the stultifying and ultimately secularising forces of modem bureaucracy, epitomised by the mainstream institutional churches, which he considered the expression of capitalist forms of organisation and middle-class cultural values. In his dynamic, identification with the middle classes meant loss of spirituality in favour of rational discourses, modem techniques of communication, and formalised (and therefore secularised) religious practices. All of this provoked the consequent alienation of workers and rural folk from this supposed middle-class social and cultural hegemony.6 In Quebec, reformist Catholic intellectuals of the post-war period advanced another version of this argument in attempting to explain the 'exceptional' nature of their society, which they maintained had been kept since the 1840s outside of modernity by a monolithic, clericalised and immobile Roman Catholic Church. They posited that a rural 'folk' religion had sustained an anti-modern Catholic hegemony that deliberately held back Quebec's entry into the fraternity of modem western societies, a situation that had only dramatically altered with the onset of industrialisation and urbanisation after 1945.7 This historical trajectory has been continued in the recent historiography of Canadian religion by scholars influenced either by cultural Marxism or the American religious paradigm of revival and revitalisation. Both paradigms cast the churches, especially after the 1850s, as simply hegemonic expressions of middleclass notions of social order. By becoming hopelessly elitist they necessarily stood outside of dynamic social forces. This equation between class specificity and secularisation has informed the work of a wide range of scholars from such varied perspectives as conservative evangelical to Thompsonian Marxist/ In various ways, these scholars favour interpretations which are wedded to the metaphor of 'revival' which is concerned not with the dynamics of religious institutions themselves but with the charismatic role of exceptional individuals. If revivalism constitutes the key leavening agent in the religiosity of the wider society, then it restricts the meaning of religion to those phenomena that are extra-institutional, emotional, and beyond the immediate control of the clergy, and at the same time posits a theoretical framework which states that church institutions cannot be sites of dynamic social transformation or lay initiative.

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The Canadian Case,

1760-2000

95

In order to understand the continuous, enormous social and cultural authority of religion in Canada, this paper argues that it is necessary to alter an older historiographical convention which treats 'popular religion' and the institutional churches as dichotomised entities. We maintain that religion as a cultural expression and the churches as institutional forms must be seen as interconnected and existing in constant dynamic tension with one another. Recognition of this ongoing relationship between private and public expression of faith, or between extra-institutional and institutional modes of religious practice, will allow us to better understand the phenomenon of religious change without positing an a priori identification of religious transformation as decline or secularisation.9 In short, we would argue that religion can undergo institutional decline or even failure without having secularisation, as long as personal belief remains at the centre of everyday life - even if it no longer resides robustly within a realm of public discourse. This balance between personal faith and religious practice within the institutional life of the churches shifted dramatically in Canada between 1760 and the 1960s, but one of the most characteristic features was that cultural conformity to institutional religion actually increased throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here, the dynamic element of the narrative is provided less by 4 external 'motors such as industrialisation, class identity, or rival ideological systems than by the shifting 'internal' imperatives and strategies of the institutional churches themselves. This contrasts fundamentally with the experience of both the United States and Western Europe where the churches occupied a much more restricted social and cultural space. In Canada, where for a long period the Christian churches remained the most important cultural institutions (apart from the family) in a liberal society characterised by a weak state and a truncated associational life, religion exerted a powerful cultural influence and articulated and transmitted the core elements of both public and personal identities.

The Age of Counter-Re volution, 1760-1880 The religious experience of the North American colonies that remained within the British Empire after 1783 took a significantly different trajectory from that of Western Europe and the United States. In Britain and continental Europe, the years after 1750 were marked by a series of revolutionary challenges to the ancien regime structure of established churches, which resulted, according to Hugh McLeod, in an 'age of religious polarisation' where religion ultimately became a source of class division and oppositional identities. Aristocracies and social elites in a number of countries vociferously defended church establishments, while dissenting Protestant churches and emerging secularist movements found their supporters among proletarians, artisans, and the lower middle classes.10 In the new American republic, the revolution constitutionally separated church and state, and the result was an environment of extreme religious pluralism, characterised by a 'hothouse' proliferation of religious tendencies and movements.11 Although firmly

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anchored in the cultural space of North America and inheriting the constitutional structure of the British parent state, the religious situation in the colonies which eventually federated as Canada was marked by a precarious equipoise rather than a polarisation or disconnection between popular religion and the institutional churches. Rather, the two entities existed in an uneasy symbiosis that is best described as a controlled form of religious pluralism in which the institutional churches wielded considerably more social and cultural authority than in western Europe or the United States. Canada's colonial status meant that from the eighteenth century until the 1870s, there was a shortage of clergy and churches outside the urban areas, and that a good deal of religious belief and practice occurred outside the immediate oversight of the clergy. This implied a considerable degree of religious pluralism, but it also conferred a higher degree of sacredness upon the private home and family than would have prevailed in Europe.12 The fact that private and family worship occupied such a large social space meant that first, the institutional churches invested heavily in the discursive practices of patriarchy and the regulation of male behaviour, because social order rested upon the supremacy of men within the family and their participation as heads of families, in public worship, which in tum were considered key attributes of political citizenship. In this key respect, Canada's trajectory of religious modernity was, unlike that of Britain, not marked by what has been termed the 'feminisation' of piety, a process in which women and female values were accorded a central place in the articulation and transmission of Christian identities.13 Both Catholic and Protestant churches continued to promote discourses and practices that regulated male behaviour, because they considered male authority in both private and public spheres as essential to the reproduction of a Christian order in both family and civic spheres.14 Of equal significance, the relative poverty of the institutional structures of religion gave laypeople the cultural resources to contest the clergy's control of both sacred space, ritual and liturgy, and the moral requirements of Christian life. Indeed, the North American environment considerably weakened the public authority of the clergy because, for the most part, they were to some degree financially dependent on their congregations, even if their stipends were partially paid by colonial establishments or overseas missionary bodies. Even a wellentrenched entity like the Roman Catholic Church in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Quebec, was subject to these constraints. Although at one level, as Olli vier Hubert has recently argued, the clergy was successful in the colonial period at gradually enforcing their control over the ritual apparatus,15 both the power of the priest to determine access to the sacraments and, indeed, the institution's definition of the ideal of clerical conduct, remained hotly contested, and was frequently a subject of negotiation.16 In the newer British settlements settled in several waves after 1760, there was an initial phase of 'radical' evangelicalism that coincided with migration of Americans to these colonies. After 1815, with the massive emigration of settlers from the British Isles, a distinctively Canadian pattern of religious pluralism

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emerged. Most of these English, Scottish, and Irish immigrants would have already been experiencing a growing opportunity for religious choice in their home societies,17 but a set of considerations structured their religious choices. First, the vast majority saw institutional churches as central to community formation and to the replication of systems of relationships and order with which they were familiar. One of the central tropes of immigrant epistolary discourse is that of seeking the 'comfort' of church ordinances to which they were accustomed. Second, they tended to prefer those religious bodies which could, at least partially, contribute to the erection of church buildings and schools, and to pay part of the clergyman's stipend.18 In practice, this gave the 'established' churches of Britain (the Church of England and the Church of Scotland) a distinct advantage over 'American' denominations like Congregationalists and Baptists and other radical sectarian forms of Protestantism like Universalists and Unitarians. Even most Methodists, who prior to 1830 had close American connections, had by the 1840s linked themselves with the socially and politically conservative British Wesleyans. Thus, the first religious census of Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec) in 1842 revealed that the vast majority of Protestants belonged to three dominant groups, all with 'establishment' proclivities: the Anglicans, the Presbyterians, and the Methodists.19 Significantly, in areas heavily settled by Americans, such as the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada, which bordered the American states of New York and Vermont, 'radical' populist forms of evangelicalism flourished briefly but in the long run failed to compete with the well-funded and more culturally conservative British-oriented denominations.20 However, denominational boundaries still remained highly fluid as the 1842 census revealed 16 per cent of people declaring no religion which did not necessarily mean they were secularists or irreligious but that many of them were unable to choose among the plethora of organisational forms thus becoming either backsliders or dependent upon private or family worship. Religion did not constitute a fixed or primary identity in the nineteenth century and many people engaged in the practice of changing churches several times during the life course.21 Factors such as one's choice of a marriage partner, one's age, personal preferences regarding theology and ritual, or level of identification with one's family, were key determinants of religious adherence. However, class was not a primary consideration in dictating either the choice of church or whether you attended church or not.22 The implications of these high levels of religious fluidity and the remarkably low levels of church membership as opposed to adherence (membership usually hovered about 20 per cent for most Protestant denominations over almost two centuries)23 were that the clergy were unable to foster intergenerational religious stability hence the intense clerical discourse in both the Roman Catholic and various Protestant denominations regarding the direct connection between marriage, family and religion. In addition, such fluidity meant that while denominational identity was not as firm as historians had previously assumed, it also explains the popular origins of the distinctive Canadian form of

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evangelicalism which many commentators have argued was more irenic than its American counterpart.24 Religious fluidity and institutional pluralism even penetrated the Catholic Church where the clergy were frequently forced to compromise on issues of doctrines and sacraments because of Protestant competition. For example, Catholic bishops in Lower Canada watered down the canonical prohibitions against marrying kin within the seventh degree because of the ease with which people could marry before Protestant ministers or civil judges.25 Fears within all denominations that one might lose a potential church member through a mixed marriage explains why 'dissenting' clergy campaigned so vociferously for the legal right to perform marriages which they obtained in 1831 but it also forced clergymen to either lower or dispense with their fees in order to induce marital partners to join and support their congregation. The need to control parishioners in such a competitive religious market also explains the persistence or rejuvenation of older forms of church discipline by which local clergy could exert some form of control over religious choice and conformity to church rituals. For example, in the Presbyterian and Baptist churches early modem church courts, long abandoned in Britain and Europe, flourished between the 1820s and 1880s. In part they survived because church practices meshed with systems of community control which began to break down especially in urban centres by the late-nineteenth century.26 In addition, both in Catholicism and Protestantism, the theology of fear persisted well into the 1880s among both local clergy and parishioners, despite the attempts of ultramontane Catholic clergy to institute a more liberal understanding of confession and communion. Without altering the outward form of the ritual, these reformers shifted the meaning of the sacraments from a reward for a devout elite to a more inclusive and optimistic notion of self-improvement and sharing in God's love rather than his judgement, a change that was expressed through frequent church attendance and participation in the sacraments.27 A similar shift occurred within Protestantism where by the late-nineteenth century the discourse on a 'good death' was jettisoned (except in children's Sunday school literature) in favour of a more upbeat kind of evangelicalism, which emphasised the redeeming presence of God in everyday activity, rather than the gloomy visitations of Providence upon the sinner. Some historians have argued that this transition to a more modem form of evangelicalism was driven by a new middle-class constituency, but it could likewise be argued that this change in evangelicalism was motivated by the ongoing financial imperatives of local churches, which remained cross-class institutions which relied upon the modest support of a large number of ordinary people rather than a few wealthy benefactors. Despite the relative weakness of the institutional churches in this period and the contested nature of the clergy's authority, the churches in Canada were politically, intellectually, and culturally in a far stronger position than their British, European, and American counterparts. From the late-eighteenth century onwards, both Protestant and Catholic churches established a near-monopoly over higher education and carved out a significant presence in some colonies in the

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field of primary schooling. In this respect, they had emerged, by the 1830s, as the institutions articulating and diffusing a Christian version of the Enlightenment mediated through versions of Scottish Common Sense, in the case of major Protestant denominations,2* and through doctrinal traditions of Catholic philosophy, in the case of communities like the Sulpicians who founded a network of schools and colleges in Montreal.29 These truncated versions of the Enlightenment, although certainly oriented to rational inquiry, stressed the preservation of social hierarchy and order, the restriction of speculative inquiry especially in areas of the Bible and Christian doctrine, and relied heavily on a transatlantic culture of natural theology to mediate the impact of new sciences like geology whose findings troubled many in the British established churches in the early-nineteenth century.30 Transplanted to the colonial context, the Enlightenment did not act as the wellspring of an anti-religious secularism, but actually served as the foundation of the clergy's professional and public authority, insofar as most congregations, even Methodists and Baptists, preferred preaching that concentrated upon rational, dogmatic themes rather than emotion. Of equal significance, the Christian versions of the Enlightenment promulgated by the clergy were central to the articulation of the ethos of colonial elites, who balanced the emerging liberal values of self-improvement and education with allegiance to the monarchy and constituted order. Prominent clergymen like John Strachan (Anglican), Egerton Ryerson (Methodist) and Thomas McCulloch (Presbyterian), who were frequently the poles of political controversy and heartily disliked by many within their own denominations, attained the status of the chief public moralists in the fledgling British North American intellectual world. One of the key features that differentiated Canada from both Western Europe and the United States was the non-conflictual relationship that developed during 1815-70 between the institutional churches and the liberal state, an arrangement that developed without recourse to the republican separation of church and state that characterised the United States. From 1760 onwards, the British government both at home and in the colonies supported a variety of forms of church establishment as the necessary precondition of social order in a revolutionary age. Prior to 1830, the colonial government clearly preferred a single established church (the Church of England) except in Lower Canada (Quebec), where it had to concede considerable latitude to a well-entrenched Roman Catholic Church, a policy driven by a new more multicultural theory of empire following the American Revolution.31 There, Catholicism acquired even more political and social influence than it had done under the French regime, and acted decisively in moments of crisis such as the Rebellions of 1837-38 to shore up British authority.32 By the 1840s, the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec had obtained exclusive control over social services and charities dispensed to its own members, and was able to insist upon the organisation of a confessional system of common schools, an arrangement exported in 1867 to Ontario. As a result, the Roman Catholic Church became the key institution anchoring a very conservative form of liberalism in which many functions of the state devolved to private associations.33 In Upper Canada (Ontario) the

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Anglican Church found its establishment status hotly contested by Methodists and Presbyterians, and in the interests of political harmony, the colonial government moved gradually to a de facto system of plural establishment in which a number of denominations enjoyed financial ties with the state - a pragmatic arrangement heartily sought by most Christian denominations because they continued to see family, church, and the political sphere as indissolubly bound together. The result of this flexible system of accommodation was a de-politicisation of potential areas of tension between church and state, and the ending of the system of Clergy Reserves in 1854 precluded the emergence of political identities around the establishment/ dissent nexus. Canadian political parties, though adopting the British labels of 'Conservative' and 'Liberal' were alliances that transcended religion, and both included churchmen, dissenting evangelicals, and Roman Catholics. It was not until the 1880s that there occurred a re-politicisation of evangelical Protestants around the moral legislation advanced by figures like Oliver Mowat (the Liberal premier of Ontario) and William Howland (the mayor of Toronto).34 By 1870, the institutional churches were the central pillars of a state structure that can best be described as Liberal-Tory: anti-revolutionary, anti-republican, small-scale, and reliant on voluntary, confessional institutions to deliver education and social services. However, because political liberalism in Canada did not become a vehicle for secularism, the confessionalisation of Canadian society lagged behind that of Belgium and the Netherlands, and was largely restricted to the terrain of education and charitable provision.35

The Rise of the Associational Church and the Salvation Machine, 1880-1910 Increasingly after the 1880s, both Catholic and Protestant churches shed their earlier form as small, self-sufficient communities of the devout, where religious practice was limited to participation in rituals and the occasional prayer meeting and revival. Clergy now defined a 'good Christian' as a self-governing individual whose quality of religious adherence was measured not in simple attendance at rituals or engaged in private prayer, but was active in a wide range of voluntary moral improvement, mutual benefit, educative, and charitable associations, all closely tied to the church. A new religious discourse focused upon articulating a 'Christian public sphere' which the clergy of all major denominations imagined as coextensive with the new political nation of Canada that had been created in 1867, and was followed over the next two decades by the nationalisation and institutional consolidation of the Presbyterian Church (1876) and the Methodist Church (1884). The new institutional priority was inclusiveness, and a growing desire, which was given more concrete form after 1910, to 'save the social' through the redemption of the individual.36 The principal catalyst for this transformation was the urban environment itself.37 What did the churches encounter in the city that induced them to adopt new definitions of Christian living and new organisational machinery to give it form?

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Most tellingly, urban clergymen experienced, in heightened form, the religious competition and fluidity of identities that be-devilled denominational finances and fostered persistent organisational instability and, in particular, they worried increasingly about how to ensure the participation of men in congregational life, the only sure way of fostering a firm tie between family and church, thus ensuring the constant reproduction of new members. The intent behind the vast panoply of Sunday Schools - with their specialised age cohorts, youth societies for young men and women, missionary societies, married men's and women's associations, church-led mutual benefit societies, choirs, boxing clubs, skating parties and church gymnasia - was not, as might be supposed, the creation of institutional machinery to ensure closer middle-class supervision of an increasingly alienated working class, but the breaking down of the congregation into gender and age segments, and the crafting of a specialised Christian message and forms of activity that would organise the believer's life from cradle to grave. The central concern was to ensure the smooth passage of youth (especially male youth) from the Sunday School to fully-fledged, paying church membership by enlisting them, from early childhood years, in a complex web of loyalty to clergy and the visible denomination. The great casualty of the new associational church and its machinery of salvation was the family, and the period between 1880 and 1910 witnessed a significant movement away from the family religion that had characterised the earlier period towards more intrusive systems of institutional control. Within Protestantism, the Sunday School, and in Catholicism, the confessional common school, replaced the family as the primary religious educator,38 and it was the school, rather than the family, that increasingly provided the individual with a passport to both religious and civic orders. This marked a significant accretion of power into the hands of the clergy and the institutional church. As well, the new clerical strategies entailed a conscious masculinisation and a closer identification between the institutional church and patriarchy, and a consequent diminution of the power of women within Christianity - and this despite both Catholic and Protestant discourses of Christian femininity and moral motherhood. Competing with this discourse was the explicit identification of the new 'public' Christianity of social improvement with 'male' values of rationality and action, and the castigation of older forms of inward-looking piety as 'emotional', 'traditional', and linked with the female sphere. In a movement like Methodism, which in terms of membership was highly 'feminised', women found their access to voting rights and church officeholding systematically curtailed during this period. Indeed, women only acquired citizenship rights within the churches after they had been granted the political franchise in 1918.39 The result of this exclusion was that women who desired to express their piety through active engagement in the public institution flocked to the foreign mission field after 1880 in order to gain the opportunities for leadership and service that were denied to them in the churches at home.40 Age, gender, and the organisational constraints of the new urban environment were the primary causes of this redefinition of Christianity. By contrast with Britain and Europe, the issue of the alienation of the working classes, and the supposed link

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between church membership, churchgoing and middle-class respectability formed little part of the discourse of Canadian clergymen. The first surveys of church attendance, which were taken in 1882 and 1896 in Toronto, suggested, relative to Europe, high levels of religious participation that crossed class lines: in both, 46 per cent of the city's population attended a place of worship on Sunday.41 Where in Britain and Europe religion had, since the early-nineteenth century, constituted one of the fundamental demarcators of working-class and middle-class identity,42 the Canadian story was remarkably different. The consolidation of national, centralised denominations - considered one of the key hallmarks of middle-class hegemony - actually allowed the churches to soften working-class alienation by providing the financial means to build more churches and accommodate more people and gradually abolish visible marks of status differentiation such as pew rents to ensure greater inclusivity. Thus, religion did not become a flash-point of class conflict in Canadian society after 1880, and churches were not the space where class identities and consciousness were formed. Canadian cities exhibited the paradox of religious spaces becoming less cross-class and more homogeneous in their social composition, but this did not lead to a framework of class polarisation through a system of exclusions. Denominational centralisation allowed for a pluralism at the local level that provided the working class more alternative forms of religious expression, many of which they managed themselves.43 A second key feature that differentiated the Canadian religious landscape from its British and European counterpart was the effective integration of the working classes into the new salvation machinery. Industrialisation and urbanisation, rather than leading to the alienation of workers and the identification of the churches with the middle classes, led to increased opportunities and venues for working-class religious participation, whether in sectarian, otherworldly forms of piety such as the Christian Workers' Church of Hamilton or in the hastily-established gospel halls of north-end Winnipeg;44 the noisy, enthusiastic Salvation Army which arrived on the Canadian scene in the mid-1880s; the cross-class congregations such as those in small-town Thorold, Ontario, where skilled workers participated with their middle-class co-religionists in churchgoing, membership, and church management;45 and the homogeneous working-class churches in the industrial neighbourhoods of Hamilton and Montreal, which exhibited some of the highest levels of associational life within their respective denominations, as churches offered significantly more opportunities for access to employment for those newly arrived in the industrial city, leadership and civic participation than did the trade unions and secular associations of the early-twentieth century.46 It is of particular interest that many Canadian historians have explained the religious changes of this era not in terms of a discarding of older strategies and an invention of newer forms of religious action, but in the conventional terms of decline and secularisation. They have adduced various causes: the impact of evolutionary thought and the higher criticism of the Bible; the alienation of the industrial working class from the churches, which in tum became hegemonic institutions dominated by a business-driven, middle-class elite; and the watering-

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down of older evangelical 'orthodoxy' in favour of a more optimistic, inclusive message of salvation and more rational and effective methods of communicating that message.47 All of these identify the churches, and religion, with traditional forms of community experiencing the assaults of modernity in its various guises. None of these interpretations make a great deal of sense in the Canadian religious context. First, organised Christianity exerted a powerful influence over higher education, both in terms of direct institutional control and in the cultural life of professors and students, a situation which persisted well into the twentieth century,48 and ensured that the versions of evolutionary thinking that believers were exposed to, if at all, were those compatible with evangelical Christianity and the older natural theology. Believers were regularly reassured by prominent Christian educators that the findings of evolutionary science and history did not challenge the inspiration of the Bible, and that these could be accommodated into a structure of Christian belief and morality.49 Like the Enlightenment, evolutionary thought was rather painlessly integrated by the churches, refracted through Christian epistemologies that insisted upon the priority of faith over research, and turned into a discourse that enhanced the professional authority of the clergy by pointing to their mastery of esoteric techniques of biblical interpretation. Occasional heresy trials, such as those of the Presbyterian D.J. Macdonnell in 1876 and the Methodist George Workman in 1890, were internal matters that had little impact on the wider culture largely because the higher criticism had little impact upon the Sunday sermon and thus remained removed from congregational life. Until the advent of social Christianity and the integration of the mainstream Protestant denominations with a wider reformist network, sermons remained doctrinal in emphasis. Second, the rise of denominational and associational machinery seems to have worked to more effectively integrate and accommodate working-class religious aspirations, and it is not coincidental that this pattern of working-class religious affiliation and church activity largely prevented the emergence in Canada of mass socialist political parties or the types of socialist or republican-secularist sub-cultures that posed such a challenge to Christian notions of the public and social order, so well delineated by Hugh McLeod in countries like Germany and France.50 In this way, the Christian churches as institutions were able, without a great deal of challenge or competition from ideological alternatives, to occupy a very wide social and cultural terrain. Finally, while it is important to bear in mind Rene Hardy's caution that the multiplication of religious practices does not necessarily mean a deepening of faith,51 it is impossible to ignore the fact that the new strategies adopted by the churches provided both Catholic and Protestant Canadians with more opportunities and spaces for conversion and religious expression, although both tended towards greater supervision by the clergy. It is true that episodic mass revivals were often geared to working-class and popular audiences - especially audiences of men - but these spectacular phenomena, while continuing to attract the attention of historians because their sponsors astutely marketed them as a mass cultural phenomenon,52 generally remained peripheral to the less spectacular but more effective machinery of the institutional churches

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in fostering religious conformity among working-class people. If the currently fashionable metaphor of 'culture wars' has any applicability to the Canadian religious experience,53 it was certainly not a struggle between Christianity and secularism nor, despite the occasionally inflamed rhetoric, between Catholic and Protestant, because at an associational and cultural level, both sought to organise social and individual life through similar organisational models and concepts of Christian living. Rather, the rise of the new salvation machine, with its oppositional language of tradition and modernity, provoked divisions at a number of levels within Protestantism as those who preferred a more emotional, simple gospel, or who feared the accretion of power away from the local congregation to larger, bureaucratic church structures, gravitated towards more sectarian forms of piety, such as holiness movements or enthusiastic expressions of religiosity like the Salvation Army. Others adopted a rhetorical opposition to evolutionary thought and higher criticism to signify their dislike of the growing professionalisation of the ministry, preferring what they believed was an older standard of Christian ministry as based on a conversion experience, rather than the trappings of ancient languages, history, and rational theology that increasingly dominated Protestant colleges after the 1880s. After the 1880s there emerged a conservative discourse of a lost 'golden age' of evangelicalism, which was characterised by a definitive, emotional and instantenous conversion moment,54 language which was deployed to advance the claim that any divergence from this model constituted declension and secularisation. This was a trope which persisted and resurfaced periodically to disparage movements within the church which were perceived to be too modem.

Sacralising the Nation 1910-1940 The religious landscape of early-twentieth-century Canada has no parallel in the European or American experience. In no other society were the institutional churches so effective in mediating modernity - defined here as new forms of social knowledge, the liberal reform of industrial capitalism, and the introduction of New Liberalism or Progressivism which mandated greater state intervention. In Europe, Britain and the United States, the emergence of progressive reform networks and social inquiry largely occurred outside the churches. For example, while in Britain idealist philosophers were at the forefront of reinterpreting liberalism in light of the industrial age, in Canada this was accomplished for the most part either by clergymen who were educated in latest trends in British and American political economy and sociology or by active laymen who saw the new social imperatives as clearly dependent upon an overtly Christian ethos of individual and social salvation. Between 1900 and 1930 the churches envisioned their mission as nothing less than the complete Christianisation of Canadian life. The movement for saving the social, with its recognition of the increasing complexity and interdependence of modem society and its redefinition of the individual in terms of social experience, was unique in the wider transatlantic context of the reinterpretation

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of liberalism. The redefinition of the individual, represented by social evangelism within the Protestant churches and Catholic Action within Roman Catholicism,55 was not merely an intellectual phenomenon. Rather, this transformation cannot be understood from its direct links to a powerful current of pragmatic social action. Garbed in the optimistic millennialism of social evangelism, the Protestant churches expanded their popular base through denominationally-controlled mass revivalism, established social work and sociology in Canadian universities and church colleges, and aggressively sought out the leadership of social reform by incorporating independent reform organisations into the church-sponsored Social Service Council of Canada. Inspired either by 'new liberalism' in the case of the Protestant churches, or the doctrines of social corporatism, given wide currency by the Papal Encyclicals of 1891 and 1931 among Roman Catholics (both of which sought to ameliorate the abuses of capitalism and offer a Christian alternative to materialistic forms of socialism), both Protestant and Catholic clergymen were also instrumental in utilising the most up-to-date methods of social investigation to pave the way for the application of expert knowledge to the formulation of social legislation, thereby helping transform the scope and responsibilities of the modem state. The churches became, in this period, national bureaucratic organisations and, indeed were larger than some provincial governments. Until the advent of university-based social planning in the 1940s, when Keynesian economics came to dominate state policymaking, the churches remained the gravitational centre for a wide variety of social reform movements and the foremost sponsors of modem social policy and the interventionist state.56 Some historians have seen in the movement of social Christianity the seeds of secularisation. Rather, far from bringing about secularisation, the movement towards social Christianity actually expanded the scope of church involvement in Canadian society and markedly increased the wider cultural authority of the institutional church. This enabled them to function as the primary lobby group agitating for the expansion of the federal and provincial state until the Second World War. The liberal movement of church progressives was so successful in redefining the purview of religion that it now included not only the institutional church, but also 'secular' sites such as the university, the state, labour movements, and generally the notion of 'social endeavour'. Thus one of the era's leading leftwing politicians, the former Methodist minister J.S. Woodsworth, could sincerely claim that there was no distinction between sacred and secular and that he could just as easily serve God as a clergyman, university professor, or as a politician. It is likewise significant that the political leader who dominated Canadian politics between 1919 and 1948, Prime Minister Mackenzie King, subscribed to the central tenets of social Christianity, believing as did Woodsworth on the political left, that he could best fulfil the Christian imperative of service in the political sphere rather than as a clergyman. The movement towards social Christianity dominated the churches for several decades, and allowed the churches to penetrate into diverse forms of social and cultural modernity. In large measure they were able to control both the pace and the shape of emergent values and practices.

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Between 1910 and 1940 the mainstream Protestant denominations, paralleled by comparable movements within Roman Catholicism in Quebec, redefined the individual as a social being, broached a cultural idiom in which secular and sacred were tightly fused, and redefined the function and role of both the church and its clergy as co-extensive with the modern nation itself. In Quebec, this was the zenith of clericalism, an age in which the numbers of priests and nuns expanded more quickly than the population itself, and the church had no difficulty staffing the growing system of hospitals, schools, and social agencies with clerical directors and experts, many drawn from the religious orders. In Protestant Canada, these functions were carried out by laypeople whose training and values were closely tied to the institutional churches. As a result of this broad new scope for Christian endeavour throughout the community, the Protestant and Catholic churches took a leadership role in creating the new discipli nes of sociology, social work, and political economy, all of which remained subservient to the overriding Christian imperative into the 1960s, and the presence of the churches constrained the emergence of behaviourist or Marxist-inspired forms of social knowledge.57 In both English Canada and Quebec all the major social work programs were sponsored by church organisations and most of their graduates were either clergy or women who served in church-based philanthropies and all of the significant social research between 1910 and 1935 was carried out under the auspices of the mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches. In short, the mainstream churches in Canada were able to effectively capture all manner of reform movements under their aegis and they were able to become the primary lobby group for a vast range of state legislation from temperance, mother's allowances, the reformation of child labour laws, the creation of foster homes, public health initiatives, and the major advocates of the modern welfare state structure of social insurance and protective wage legislation. Their persistent advocacy of a concept of a 'living wage' in tum defused left-wing and secularist labour agitation, with the largest labour federation, the Trades and Labour Congress, acting as a junior partner to the churches in the Social Service Council after 1914. It is significant that the first national democratic socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) founded in 1932 was in large part, as Richard Allen has argued, the political affirmation of the central elements of social Christianity.58 By the mid 1930s, however, cracks were beginning to appear in the project of building a Christian nation. Two forces were at work in driving Canada's largest Protestant denomination, the United Church (a fusion of Methodists, Congregationalists and some Presbyterians in 1925) away from its commitment to social evangelism. Social Christianity was never hegemonic within these denominations: in fact, it had driven many believers to embrace more fundamentalist 'old style' forms of evangelicalism.59 This movement was increased during the 1930s, when the Great Depression seemed to compel ordinary people to tum their backs on the social and led them towards religious tendencies, such as the Oxford Group Movement, which placed a new value on individual experience and the personal nature of religion. A similar trajectory characterised Roman Catholicism

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where in the early 1930s a new form of Catholic Action emerged which was highly critical of the strategies of institutional management favoured by the clergy. While in its earlier phase Catholic Action had, like the Protestant denominations, actively supported movements of Christian social reform and was instrumental in generating a climate of social criticism and action within the universities, Catholic trade unions, and within the government, this new phase, inspired by the French philosophy of personalism, adamantly located spiritual virtue within the individual and his or her relationships rather than within the institutional church. The consequence was a powerful current of Catholic anti-clericalism, produced in part by the paradoxical situation of a movement created to combat Marxism and fascism but which, in Quebec, could locate its opponents only among fellowCatholics. Unlike in Europe, where there was greater cohesion among clergy and laity, this generated a radical cultural polarisation in which the lay youth who led the Catholic Action movements castigated the clergy as hopelessly mired in tradition and spiritually unfit to lead the nation. As a result of these divisions, the late 1930s witnessed a backing away from large-scale projects of reform towards a re-emphasis on private life, the family, marriage and child-rearing as the key terrains of Christian activity. This tum sowed the seeds for further cultural conflict in the post-war period, as family and marriage were areas in which a celibate clergy could claim no expertise or authority over laypeople.60 A similar privatisation of religious endeavour occurred within Protestantism. Troubled by the emergence of decidedly secular and anti-Christian political ideologies like Communism and Fascism, progressive clergymen, many of whom had spearheaded the expansion of the church into the wider culture, began to reassess the equation which they had previously drawn between church and nation - the secular and the sacred. Increasingly, prominent clergy began to question the idea that had sustained social Christianity - that all manner of cultural and social relationships fell under God's grace. Moreover, in the psychologically oppressive atmosphere of the Great Depression, many clergy believed that it was easier for people to get a sense of forgiveness for individual sins than to attempt to solve social problems that now so decisively appeared to beyond the control of individual action. It is fair to say that the decisive shift away from the social application of Christian belief towards a renewed emphasis on individual conversion was driven by popular religion. More significantly, in order to paper over the widening division between the political right and left within the United Church, its Board of Evangelism and Social Service, which had been so instrumental in constructing the new evangelism of the 1920s which integrated individual evangelism with social service, once again, in 1934, reinterpreted evangelism, in which the Christianisation of the social order was no longer seen as part and parcel of evangelicalism.61 Henceforth, the Christianisation of the world was not to be brought about by institutional strategies, rather, according to church leaders, both within Catholicism and Protestantism in Canada, society would be reformed by sending out Christian individuals in its midst.

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However, the shift away from the social towards an ideal of piety which was founded upon the individual personality was not dictated by a collapse of the institutional church, or by any sense that they were losing their substantial working-class constituency. By any measurement, churches both in the Christian mainstream and among newer forms of sectarian religion were enormously buoyant, both in terms of expanding the institutional provision of religion and in occupying a significant space within commercial popular culture. As many church leaders commented, church attendance was at its highest in the midst of the Great Depression and indeed by 1946 it had reached the unprecedented level of 67 per cent nationally. Where social service had been the watchword of the 1920s, the idea that the spiritual individual was the measure of all things was resurrected because of the resurgence of personal forms of piety during the 1930s. While it might be possible, as some historians have done, to read the withdrawal of the mainstream churches from a wider engagement with the political sphere as a symptom of decline, it can also be convincingly argued, if one adopts the perspective of Lucian Hölscher, that churches constantly reinvent themselves, and that concepts of piety and religious practice might change from generation to generation.62 Thus, the shift from a social imperative to a personalist and more inward-looking spirituality marks not a capitulation of religion to the forces of secularity, but simply a reinterpretation of Christianity which better enabled the churches to avoid the 'Scylla of radicalism and the Charybdis of reaction'63 and, in a changed political climate, preserve internal cohesion.

The Age of the 'Sovereign Individual Conscience', 1940 to the Present The two decades between the end of the Second World War and 1965 were, at the level of statistical measurements of religious belonging and participation, prosperous years for the institutional churches. Although many pessimists feared that the war and its consequent migrations from overseas and within Canada had emancipated individuals from the bonds of community and Christian morality, the statistics on church-going and church expansion indicated that the majority of Canadians and recent immigrants continued to see the churches as fundamental both to their individual and collective identities.64 The mainstream churches successfully negotiated the challenges of high immigration and the movement from inner-city neighbourhood to suburb. The United Church alone built 1,500 new churches between 1945 and 1966, while in Quebec, the Roman Catholic Church created nearly 500 new parishes, most of these being sub-divisions of older parishes which allowed the church to improve the ratio of priests to people. Catholicism was successful in reinvigorating the idea of the parish as an urban community centre, a strategy which both modernised the Church and allowed it to further control social change in an urban milieu.65 Although more financially dependent on the state for its system of education and social services, the Catholic Church in Quebec remained, until the late 1950s, that society's largest employer,

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and the clerical career enjoyed a high level of social and cultural prestige until the early 1970s, when religious vocations plummeted. One significant explanation for both the success of the churches in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and the difficulties which they faced after the mid-1960s was their decision to position themselves culturally as the defenders of personal religious beliefs and values, located within the family, as the basis for individualism, democracy, and freedom in the modem world. With the rapid growth of the state in the wake of the war, the Protestant and Catholic denominations remained chary of the public sphere. This entailed the close identification of religion with the family, with its conservative gender roles and the sanctity of marriage.66 On the one hand, the churches acted as the chief bastions of post-war social and cultural conservatism, but on the other, their emphasis on harmonious relations within the family led to the promotion of liberalising currents especially by the mid-1950s, when the United Church became more sympathetic to divorce (in order to attract more church members) and promoted the idea of female sexual pleasure in part to keep women in the home and out of the workforce. Implicitly, this and a tepid, more inclusive, view of homosexuality dethroned Christian morality as an absolute standard, and led to the evisceration of evangelicalism in the name of sanctifying individual choice.67 There may have been fundamental rifts occurring over whether evangelicalism would remain at the core of Canada's largest Protestant church, but the right and left agreed on the priority of individual conscience as the leitmotiv of modem Christianity. Within Catholicism, reformist clergy and laity adopted a similar strategy of relating the church to the preservation of the private realm, and in order to elevate marriage as a satisfying emotional experience, they articulated, as a result of popular pressure, a concept of Catholic birth control (based on the rhythm method) which was fairly successful in keeping the next generation within the Church, at least until the papal proscription of the birth control pill in 1968.6S One of the significant turning-points in twentieth-century Canadian history was the rapid uncoupling of the state and public expressions of Christianity that occurred between 1960 and 1982. Because the first stages of this process occurred in a period in which church attendance was high and religious identities remained largely intact, the 'externalist' explanation that Christianity and the churches were eroded by the explosion of a highly-sexualised youth culture in the 1960s and a series of challenges to the authority of the churches in the media and the wider culture needs to be substantially modified by a more 'internalist' dynamic.69 The abandonment by the state of most elements of the Christian moral code in the divorce and criminal code reforms of 1967, and the widespread support for these measures among the Canadian public in general, can in a large part be explained by the liberalisation in sexual values and attitudes to the family that had occurred in the mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches since the 1940s. These reforms, which established critical momentum for a 'rights revolution' culminating in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1982, were carried out by the Minister of Justice and later Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, a devout but reformist Catholic whose

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convictions were powerfully influenced by personalism.70 A second major element was a convergence of views between political elites and mainstream church leaders, increasingly evident by the mid-1960s, that older forms of ethnic nationalism, centred on a British Protestant English Canada and a French Catholic Quebec, must give way to an inclusive, pluralistic civic nationalism founded on official multiculturalism, constitutional guarantees for personal rights, anduniversal access to social services. The dominant note here was not hostility to Christianity, but the realisation that the public sphere must now recognise a variety of religious and cultural options beyond the conventional forms of Protestantism and Catholicism that had sustained the old liberal-tory state structure.71 The most dramatic example of the dismantling of the old partnership of church and state occurred in Quebec, where between 1960 and 1970, the state took over the direct management of public education from the Catholic Church and de-confessionalised hospitals and social services. An understanding of the nature and pace of this transformation must proceed less from the 'external' cultural challenge to established institutions and authority that swept over the churches in Canada during the 1960s, than from the fact that it was initiated by reform-minded Catholics (both lay and clerical), responding to internal shifts within both Quebec and international Catholicism. Their central concern was not to remove Christianity from the public sphere, but to refurbish a partnership between church and state that rested upon a more sociallyengaged and spiritually-efficient Catholicism.72 If attendance at Sunday services experienced a decline among Protestants between 1956 and 1965, the decline in Catholic attendance was really only evident after the mid-1970s. Levels of religious belief remained largely intact. In 1960, fully 42 per cent of Canadians read the Bible privately at least once a week. According to the 2001 Canadian Census, this pattern of behaviour was still evident. While only 32 per cent of adult Canadians attended religious services monthly, 53 per cent reported engaging in religious activities 'on their own' at least once a month.73 The institutional churches came, for the first time, under a concerted attack from quarters outside church structures both in English Canada and Quebec, most famously with the media personality Pierre Berton's The Comfortable Pew (1965) and Jean-Paul Desbiens' Les insolences du Frere Untel (1961). Significantly, both Berton and Desbiens remained committed Christians and far from advocating a secular humanism, they assumed that modern Canada was still a society of Christian believers which desired a revitalised and a sociallyand politically-engaged religion. Their attack upon the church was not so much directed at the failure of institutional Christianity; rather, these writers utilised the example of the church as part of a more general critique of the conformist nature of modern institutional life. The real butt of their polemic was the degree to which capitalist values and their resulting social cleavages had infected Canadian life, and were undermining humanistic values such as faith and spirituality. These critics represented the interests of new university-educated, professional urban young adults who had been exposed to a wide range of social analysis which focused upon themes of social conformity, cultural elitism, and social alienation,

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and they deployed these to castigate a church which they now defined as singularly identified with the middle classes, a perspective which became a dominant trope of sociological and historical scholarship regarding explanations of secularisation. It was with this generation of thinkers and social critics that class became embedded as the central vector of religious change in modem society. Although these intellectuals identified the 1960s as a period of religious crisis, which correctly pointed to a weakening of the public presence of the institutional churches, the cultural force of personal faith remained remarkably resilient. In 1965, fully 84 per cent of Protestants stated that they believed in a personal God, 81 per cent in the divinity of Christ, and an outstanding 85 per cent reported that they had undergone a conversion experience at some point in their lives. Two decades later, the sociologist Reginald Bibby's survey of religious belief revealed an almost identical high level of belief in the divinity of God and more surprisingly still, that fully 89 per cent of both men and women continued to keep some kind of church affiliation,74 if only for the purposes of baptism, marriages and funerals. Such statistics point to the conclusion that although the church as an institution may have suffered between 1840 and 2000, and that the laboriously constructed structure of institutional identities and church authority may have been rapidly dismantled between 1960 and 1980, religion as a system of private practices and personal beliefs and values remained remarkably unchanged despite the vast social, economic, and political alterations in the fabric of Canadian life. And while the institutional church and its function in defining private and public identities appeared to have become more contested, when viewed within a longitudinal analysis, the element of continuity was that there was always an uneasy tension between church and religion, between the institution and the people. Canada may in a public sense be a society no longer in need of churches, but it is not a post-Christian or post-religious society, because at the level of private identity, Christian beliefs and values remain vital and relatively constant. If anything, the Canadian experience suggests the need to urge historians to a more analytical treatment of the public discourse of the churches and the way in which the church as an institution has redefined itself constantly in various historical contexts. The Canadian trajectory is not a linear narrative of rise and decline, and consequently the great expansion of the institution that occurred between 1880 and 1930 cannot be taken as a benchmark of what constitutes 'normal' religious practice. Rather, it exhibits a cyclical pattern of oscillating importance between private and public imperatives. In this sense, the story of post-war Canadian religion is not one of dechristianisation, but of retraction to its pre-1840 basis in personal and family life, and in the local congregation.

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Notes 1

R. Bibby, Fragmented Gods: The Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada (Toronto, 1987), p. 17. The figures for Protestants were 60 per cent, and for Roman Catholics, 83 per cent. 2 Bibby, Fragmented Gods, 17. The 1956 figures for Protestantism stood at 43 per cent, declining to 32 per cent by 1965, and 25 per cent by 1975. Catholic figures for weekly attendance at Mass held up remarkably well until 1965, when they matched the post-war figure of 83 per cent, declining to 61 per cent by 1975 and to 43 per cent by 1986. 3 For this interpretation see Jon Butler,' Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History', Journal of American History, vol. 90:4 (March 2004), pp. 1360, 1362. Callum Brown's earlier treatment of secularisation in Britain, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000 (London and New York, 2000), p. 197 offered a similar characterisation of Canada. 4 Those professing 'no religion' increased from 1 per cent in 1961 to 16 per cent in 2001. This census category includes atheists and agnostics, as well as those indicating no formal religious identity or affiliation. See M. Valpy, 'Churches Come Tumbling Down,' The Globe and Mail, 22 Dec. 2007, A21. The figure of 16 per cent replicates the proportion of those colonial Canadians who stated a similar religious preference in the first religious census of 1842, before the era of the growth and consolidation of the institutional churches. 3

C.G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 2006), p. xv. S.D. Clark, Church and Sect in Canada (Toronto, 1948). 7 M. Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebecs Quiet Revolution, 1931-1970 (Montreal and Kingston, 2005). 8 G. Rawlyk, The Canada Fire: Radical Evangelicalism in British North America, 1775-1812 (Montreal and Kingston, 1994); W. Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal and Kingston, 1989); N. Semple, The Lords Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal and Kingston, 1996); L. Marks, Revivals and Roller-Rinks: Religion, Leisure and Identity in Late-NineteenthCentury Small-Town Ontario (Toronto, 1996). 6

9

We advance the interface between popular and institutional expressions of religion as an answer to Jeffrey Cox's recent call for historical treatments that can posit religious decline and vitality without relying upon the master-narrative of secularisation. See J. Cox, 'Master narratives of long-term religious change,' in H. McLeod and W. Ustdorf, eds, The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750-2000 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 201-17. 10 H. McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe, 1789-1970 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 15,22. 11 J. Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianising the American People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). 12 See the introduction and essays in N. Christie, ed., Households of Faith: Family; Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760-1969 (Montreal and Kingston, 2002). 13 For the connection between feminisation and modernity in Britain, see the compelling discussion in Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, pp. 58-87. 14 O. Hubert, 'The Invention of the Margin as an Invention of the Family: The Case of Rural Quebec in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries', in N. Christie and

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M. Gauvreau, eds, Mapping the Margins: The Family and Social Discipline in Canada, 1700-1975 (Montreal and Kingston, 2004), pp. 183-208; and for English Canada, N. Christie, 'Introduction: Family, Community, and the Rise of Liberal Society,'in Christie, ed., Households of Faith, pp. 3-33. 15 O. Hubert, Sur la terre comme au ciel: la gestion des rites par I'Eglise catholique du Quebec (mi-XVIIe siecle - mi-XIXe siecle) (Ste.-Foy, 2000). 16 O. Hubert, 'Ritual Performance and Parish Sociability: French-Canadian Catholic Families at Mass from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries,' in Christie, ed., Households of Faith, pp. 37-76; C. Hudon, 'Beaucoup de bruits pour rien? Rumeurs, plaintes et scandales autour du clerge dans les paroisses gaspesiennes, 1766-1900', Revue dfhistoire de VAmerique franqaise, vol. 55 (2001), pp. 217^40. 17 C.G. Brown, The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730 (London and New York, 1987); McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe; D. Hempton, 'Established churches and the growth of religious pluralism: a case study of Christianisation and secularisation in England since 1700', in McLeod and Ustdorf, The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, pp. 81-98. For recent studies, see J.I. Little, Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity, 1792-1852 (Toronto, 2004); M. Gauvreau, 'The Dividends of Empire: Church Establishments and Contested British Identities in the Canadas and the Maritimes, 1780-1850', in N. Christie, ed., Transatlantic Subjects: Ideas, Institutions, and Social Experience in Post-Revolutionary British North America (Montreal and Kingston, 2008), pp. 199-250. 19

For the religious census, see J.W. Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto, 1988). 20 Little, Borderland Religion. 21 Where Catholics and Protestants lived in close proximity, there was both a high degree of intermarriage and a significant number of cases where entire families crossed the religious divide. See C. Hudon, 'Family Fortunes and Religious Identity: The FrenchCanadian Protestants of South Ely, Quebec, 1850-1901', in Christie ed., Households of Faith, pp. 138-66. 22 H.M. Lane, 'Tribalism, Proselytism, and Pluralism: Protestants, Family, and Denominational Identity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century St. Stephen, New Brunswick', in Christie, ed., Households of Faith, pp. 103-37; Lane, '"Wife, Mother, Sister, Friend": Methodist Women in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, 1861-1881', in J. Guildford and S. Morton, eds, Separate Spheres: Women s Worlds in the 19tb-Century Maritimes (Fredericton, New Brunswick, 1994), pp. 93-117. 23 The figure of around 20 percent of adherents for church membership or communicant status was relatively constant and was evident across a variety of denominations and geographical contexts. See L. Marks, 'Exploring Regional Diversity in Patterns of Religious Participation', Historical Methods vol. 33 (2000), p. 247. 24 M.A. Noll, 'Canadian Evangelicalism: A View from the United States,' in G.A. Rawlyk, ed., Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience (Montreal and Kingston, 1997), pp. 3-20. 25 See the fascinating study on this theme by S. Gagnon, Mariage etfamille au temps de Papineau (Ste.-Foy, 1993). 26 L. Marks, '"No Double Standard?": Leisure, Sex, and Sin in Upper Canadian Church Discipline Records, 1800-1860', in K. McPherson et al., eds, Gendered Pasts:

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Historical Essays on Femininity and Masculinity in Canada (Toronto, 2003), pp. 48-60; N. Christie, 'Carnal Connection and Other Misdemeanours: Continuity and Change in Presbyterian Church Courts, 1830-90', in Gauvreau and Hubert, eds, The Churches and Social Order, pp. 66-108. 27 For this new approach to Catholic sacraments, generally described as 'ultramontanism', see C. Hudon, Pretres et fideles dans le diocese de Saint-Hyacinthe, 1820-1875 (Sillery, 1996); R. Hardy, Contröle social et mutation de la culture religieuse au Quebec, 1830-1930 (Montreal, 1999). 28 A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Montreal and Kingston, 1979); for the intersection between varieties of Common Sense and evangelicalism, see M. Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal and Kingston, 1991). 29 See on the Catholic colleges of Quebec, Claude Galarneau, Les colleges classiques au Canada franqais, 1620-1970 (Montreal, 1978); and on the Sulpician educational enterprise in Montreal, O. Hubert, 'Petites ecoles et colleges sulpiciens', in D. Deslandres and J.A. Dickinson, Ollivier Hubert eds, Les Sulpiciens de Montreal: Une histoire de pouvoir et de discretionf 1657-2007 (Montreal, 2007), pp. 395-444. 30 For the role of natural theology in legitimating the scientific enterprise in Canada, see C. Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada (Toronto, 1983). 31 This shift in the motivations of imperial policy-makers has been recently treated in E.H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2000). 32 R. Hardy, 'Regards sur la construction de la culture catholique au Quebec au XIXe siecle', Canadian Historical Review, vol. 88 (2007), pp. 7-40. 33 J.-M. Fecteau, La liberte dupauvre: sur la regulation du crime et de lapauvrete au XIXe siecle quebecois (Montreal, 2004). 34 P. Rutherford, 'Tomorrow's Metropolis: The Urban Reform Movement in Canada, 1880-1920', Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers, 1971, pp. 203-24; for Mowat's legislation, focusing on factory acts to regulate child labour, see N. Christie, Engendering the State: Familyf Work and Welfare in Canada (Toronto, 2000), chapter 1. 35 On the Netherlands example, see P. van Rooden,' Long-term religious developments in the Netherlands, c. 1750-2000', in McLeod and Ustdorf, eds, The Decline of Christendom, pp. 113-29. On Belgium, see C. Strikwerda, 'A Resurgent Religion: The Rise of Catholic Social Movements in Nineteenth-Century Belgian Cities', in H. McLeod, ed., European Religionin the Age of Great Cities, 1830-1930 (London and New York, 1995), pp. 61-89. 36 K.L. Draper, 'Redemptive Homes - Redeeming Choices: Saving the Social in LateVictorian London, Ontario', in Christie, ed., Households of Faith, pp. 264-89. 37 For Montreal, see J.-M. Fecteau and E. Vaillancourt, 'The Saint Vincent de Paul Society and the Catholic Charitable System in Quebec (1846-1921)', in Gauvreau and Hubert, eds, The Churches and Social Order, pp. 195-224. For Toronto, see Brian Clarke, Piety and Nationalism: Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850-1895 (Montreal and Kingston, 1993). 38 B. Caulier, 'Developing Christians, Catholics, and Citizens: Quebec Churches and School Religion from the Turn of the Twentieth Century to I960', in Gauvreau and Hubert, eds, The Churches and Social Order, pp. 175-94; for Protestantism, see Christie, 'Young Men and the Creation of Civic Christianity'.

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M. Whiteley, Canadian Methodist Women, 1766-1925: Marys, Marthas, Mothers in Israel (Waterloo, ON, 2005), pp. 219-38. 40 See R. Compton Brouwer, New Women for God: Canadian Presbyterian Women and India Missions, 1876-1914 (Toronto, 1990); R.R. Gagan, A Sensitive Independence: Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881-1925 (Montreal and Kingston, 1992); M. Rutherdale, Women and the White Mans God: Gender and Race in the Canadian Mission Field (Vancouver, 2002). 41 The statistics were skewed by extremely low levels of church attendance among Anglicans. Even so, the 46 per cent Toronto figure compares favourably to the 25.8 per cent attendance recorded in the London (U.K.) Religious Census of 1902-1903. For the other major Protestant denominations and Roman Catholics, the figure was in excess of 60 per cent, double or triple what would have been the case in British cities at the turn of the twentieth century. See Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, p. 148. 42 H. McLeod, Religion and the Working Class in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1984), 59. 43 N. Christie and M. Gauvreau, 'Modalities of Social Authority: Suggesting an Interface for Religious and Social History', Histoire sociale/Social History, vol. 36:71 (2003), pp. 1-30. 44 K.L. Draper, 'A People's Religion: P. W. Philpott and the Hami Iton Christian Workers' Church', Histoire sociale/Social History, vol. 36:71 (2003), pp. 99-121; N. Christie and M. Gauvreau, '"The World of the Common Man is Filled with Religious Fervour": The Labouring People of Winnipeg and the Persistence of Revivalism, 1914-1925', in Rawlyk, ed., Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, pp. 337-50. 45 Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks, pp. 140-88, 22-80. 46 Gauvreau, 'Factories and Foreigners'. 47 R. Cook, The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late-Victorian English Canada (Toronto, 1985), pp. 7-25. Marks, Revivals and Roller-Rinks, pp. 3-21; D.B. Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief 1850-1940 (Toronto, 1992), pp. 72-98. 4K C.A. Gidney, A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920-1910 (Montreal and Kingston, 2004). 49 Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century, pp. 125-80. 50 McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe, pp. 15-17; H. McLeod, Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848-1914 (New York, 2000), p. 153. 51 Hardy, 'Regards sur la construction de la culture catholique quebecoise au XIXe siecle', p. 8. 52 For a most recent example, see K. Kee, Revivalists: Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884-1957 (Montreal and Kingston, 2006). 53 See C. Clark and W. Kaiser, eds, Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2003). One perceptive recent American study has suggested that between 1870 and 1920, that society experienced a 'secular revolution' that made religion in American public life and institutions highly contested. See C. Smith, 'Introduction: Rethinking the Secularization of American Public Life', in C. Smith, ed., The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley, 2003), pp. 1-96. 54 P.D. Airhart, Serving the Present Age: Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal and Kingston, 1992).

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J. Hamelin and N. Gagnon, Histoire du catholicisme quebecois: le XXe siecle, tome 1, 1898-1940 (Montreal, 1984). 56 N. Christie and M. Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900-1940 (Montreal and Kingston, 1996). For the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec, see J.-R Warren, Lf engagement sociologique: La tradition sociologique du Quebec francophone (1886-1955) (Montreal, 2003). 57 Christie and Gauvreau,Full-Orbed Christianity, chapter 4; Warren, L'engagement sociologique. 58 R. Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914-28 (Toronto, 1973). 59 Christie and Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity, pp. 224—43; Kee, Revivalists, pp. 53-95. 60 Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebecs Quiet Revolution, 1931-1970. 61 Christie and Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity, pp. 225—43. 62 L. Hölscher, 'Secularization and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century: An Interpretative Model', in McLeod, ed., European Religion, pp. 263-88. 63 Christie and Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity, pp. 225—43. 64 For the strong post-war identification between new immigrants and the institutional churches, see R. Perin, 'The Churches and Immigrant Integration in Toronto, 1947-1965', in Gauvreau and Hubert, The Churches and Social Order, pp. 274-91; J. Stanger-Ross, 'An Inviting Parish: Community without Locality in Postwar Italian Toronto', vol. 87 (2006), pp. 3 8 1 ^ 0 7 . 65 G. Routhier, 'La paroisse quebecoise: evolutions recentes et revisions actuelles', in S. Courville and N. Seguin eds, La paroisse. Atlas historique du Quebec (Sainte-Foy, 2001), pp. 46-59. 66 For Protestantism, see N. Christie, 'Sacred Sex: The United Church and the Privatization of the Family in Postwar Canada', in Christie, ed., Households of Faith, pp. 348-76; Christie, '"Look out for Leviathan": The Search for a Conservative Modernist Consensus', in N. Christie and M. Gauvreau, eds, Cultures of Citizenship in Post-War Canada, 1940-1955 (Montreal and Kingston, 2003), pp. 61-94. For parallel developments in Catholicism, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, chapters 3, 4, and 5. 67 Christie, 'Sacred Sex'. 68 Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, chapter 5; and Gauvreau, 'The Emergence of Personalist Feminism: Catholicism and the Marriage-Preparation Movement in Quebec, 1940-1966,' in Christie, ed., Households of Faith, pp. 319-47. 69 For the 'externalist' argument, see A. Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford, 1998); Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, pp. 170-92; Brown, Religion and Society in TwentiethCentury Britain, pp. 224-70. Hugh McLeod argues for the importance of long-term factors and to cultural transformations within the churches themselves. See 'The Religious Crisis of the 1960s', Journal of Modern European History, vol. 3 (2005), pp. 205-30. 70 For Trudeau see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, chapters 1 and 2; G. Egerton, 'Trudeau, God, and the Canadian Constitution: Religion, Human Rights, and Government Authority in the Making of the 1982 Constitution', in Van Die and Lyon, eds, Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity, pp. 90—112.

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J.E. Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945-71 (Vancouver, 2006); G. Miedema, For Canada s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Remaking of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal and Kingston, 2005). 72 Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, chapter 6. 73 W. Clark and G. Schellenberg, 'Who's religious?', Canadian Social Trends (Statistics Canada), summer 2006. 74 Bibby, Fragmented Gods.

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Chapter 8

A Classic Case of De-Christianisation? Religious Change in Scandinavia c. 1750-2000 Erik Sidenvall

Most of the recent works based on the findings of the World Values Surveys and European Values Surveys tend to place the Scandinavian countries (for our purposes Denmark, Sweden and Norway) among the most secular societies in Europe, thus appearing as the heartland of secularism from a global perspective. In the current debates about European 'exceptionalism',1 Scandinavia therefore occurs as the exception par excellence. In these studies Scandinavia emerges as a post-modem region embodying individualistic values of self-fulfilment, wellbeing and independence. In terms of religious practice all three countries get low scores on regular church attendance and on questions that try to measure the acceptance of traditional Christian beliefs.2 Even in the present surge of revisionist studies very few attempts have been made at writing an alternative narrative of the de-Christianisation3 of the Scandinavian countries and to offer alternative explanations as to its allegedly secular present condition. Therefore, for those endorsing an 'orthodox' model of the 'secularisation theory' Scandinavia seems to offer a case in point. According to sociologist David Martin, Scandinavia 'has long been a prime exhibit (with France) in the straight case for secularisation'.4 Andrew Bucksner, in an article on secularisation in Denmark, makes a similar observation: 'The one exception to this re-evaluation is Fennoscandia, which remains widely accepted as a good case for secularisation.'5 Even though the 'orthodox model' has much in its favour when applied to the Scandinavian countries, in light of the present debates over the 'secularisation thesis' there is still a need to reconsider the assumed disintegration of the Christian cultures of Scandinavia. Why does the 'secularisation thesis' work for Scandinavia while being increasingly regarded as problematic when applied to other regions? To simply say that it does 'work', without further explaining the reasons why, may become a conclusion that rests upon a circular argument. Since we know the outcome, we are easily tricked into seeing the preconditions that we deem necessary to explain the present day situation. But were they really 'there'? For example, was the 'modernisation' of Scandinavia different in a significant way

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from that of other countries of north-western Europe? Was Scandinavia more urbanised, industrialised and intellectually advanced than other countries in this region? Or was the Entzauberung, or disenchantment, of the world, advanced by an educated and vocal elite, much more in evidence in Scandinavia than in, for example, Britain or Germany? From a historical perspective we may question the wisdom in answering such questions in the affirmative. Those adopting a 'functionalist' understanding of secularisation, focussing on the loss of purpose of religious organisations in the modern world, may avoid some of these problems. Scholars advocating such a view of de-Christianisation generally point at the development of an extensive welfare state to explain why Scandinavia emerges as such a secular region after the Second World War. Scandinavian churches were simply deprived of their occupation and their raison d'etre with the post-war construction of a secular welfare state (the proverbial nail in the coffin). Indeed, given the comprehensiveness of the social security system in Scandinavia such a view may explain why this region was different from most other parts of Europe, but is the functionalist approach to religious change tenable? Critics have pointed to the evolutionary determinism that seems to be an integral part of this view. If we attempt a logical analysis we may also argue that: 'An erosion of the social purpose of the church through functional differentiation does not necessarily mean that the core moral and spiritual roles of religious institutions are diminished or lost - indeed, they could become more important.' 6 Furthermore, and as we shall see, it is by no means certain that those who constructed the welfare state envisaged no further need for the churches within the new society. Today the most prominent champions for an alternative model that can help us explain the peculiarities of the de-Christianisation of Scandinavia are found among those who put forward a 'supply-side' interpretation of religious decline. These scholars in general target the poorly developed religious 'markets' of the Scandinavian countries. By using metaphors derived from the sphere of economics it has been pointed out that the religious 'monopoly' of Scandinavia created a rigid religious system with little consumer choice; the National churches manufactured a 'product' no one really wanted and hence de-Christianisation occurred. This model also has the advantage, its proponents claim, of being able to account for the signs of growing religious interest in a contemporary, much more pluralist, Scandinavia.7 In spite of the obvious merits of this model, it is still an easy target for criticism. Again, we have to ask ourselves: if de-Christianisation (and secularisation) is the result of undeveloped religious 'markets', why did it occur in Scandinavia and not in the same way in other European religious 'monopolies', such as Spain and Poland?* On their own neither one of these models can offer a convincing explanation to the 'classic case' of Scandinavian de-Christianisation. But on the other hand, as has often been remarked, they are not completely untrue either. For social and cultural historians these mostly sociological models carry with them other fundamental deficiencies. It may be argued that since most of the theories presented above have been supported by empirical evidence that consists mostly of statistics targeting official religious practise (in the forms most favoured by the

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churches themselves) and by figures indicating the spread of traditional Christian beliefs, they tend to operate with an unduly narrow definition of what religion (and indeed Christianity) is. As David Martin has noted: 'The frames which govern our understanding of secularisation are the frames which govern our understanding of religion.'9 Such studies, particularly when applied to historical material, tend to overlook certain expressions of Christian belief and practise. For example, most scholars of nineteenth-century European Protestantism would recognise the increased importance of private forms of religious practise. In an era when great stress was placed on family life and domestic arrangements, above all among the middle-classes and in 'respectable' working-class circles, many Christian organisations emphasised the need for what may be called 'family religion'. This was a type of Christianity that emphasised collective family prayers, children's bedtime devotions and the private reading of the Bible and other devotional texts (to be found in magazines, tracts and sermons). Doctrinal instruction was also to be carried out within the family circle (often through female agency) or at a church-sponsored Sunday school. To be sure, none of the framers of such forms of Christianity would have seen these private practises as alternatives to official religious services but for some people at least the Christianity of the home supplanted that of church and chapel.10 If we do not look in the right places, we are likely to miss such popular expressions of religion and hence, in a worst-case scenario, we may mistake a vital religious culture for a secular one. Indeed, as Hugh McLeod has argued in his magisterial Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848-1914, the continued strength of Christianity in Europe is to be found as an aspect of identity and within the framework of popular culture - expressions that are easily missed if statistics provide the foundation for our conclusions.11 Furthermore, leading scholars of de-Christianisation in Scandinavia have not given enough attention to popular expressions of religiosity. In most of the studies that try to monitor the 'progress' of the de-Christianisation of Scandinavia expressions of popular piety (inside or outside of the churches) are simply left out.12 This has certainly contributed to the myth that Scandinavia is the showcase of secularism. For example, one religious phenomenon that unites these three nations is the widespread use of Christian rites - baptism, confirmation, marriage and funerals - among the native bom. Today all three nations have low quotas of professed Christian believers and only a slight proportion of the population attend Sunday services regularly, yet these rites enjoy enduring popularity; a condition that indeed can be said to unite the de-Christianised heartland of northern Europe with the much more religious Catholic and Orthodox European south. How should such phenomena be interpreted? What can they tell us about the state of Christianity in Scandinavia? Do these customs signify the force of traditions now bereft of their respective religious content - the vestiges of a Christian culture? Or do they signify a popular Christianity that lives on the fringes of orthodoxy? In this essay I will revisit the question of the de-Christianisation of Scandinavia. After a brief section in which the religious history of the region from the Reformation until the mid-eighteenth century will be surveyed, the next section

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will discuss the demise of official religious practise in the Scandinavian countries during the nineteenth century. As sociologist Rodney Stark states in an influential article from 1999: 'claims about a major decline in religious participation are based in part on very exaggerated perceptions of past religiousness'.13 Even though such statements should be used with caution, it is my argument that diminishing religious observance during the nineteenth century should be understood within the context of a historical continuum that embraces not just the time when urbanisation and industrialisation occurred but also takes into account prior developments within agrarian society. By focussing on the relationship between popular culture and Christianity in twentieth-century Scandinavia, the last section will present an alternative view of the state of Christianity in northernmost Europe today. I will argue that, if we include popular culture within our conception of present day Christianity, we may reasonably conclude that there is still a long way to go before the de-Christianisation of Scandinavia is complete.

The Confessionalisation of Scandinavia In general terms, the Reformation in Scandinavia should be understood as orchestrated 'from above'. Except in a few towns in Denmark and Sweden, in which the teaching of the reformers gained a foothold and was officially endorsed by the magistrate, we can find few expressions of a popular movement in support of doctrinal and devotional change. It was a new generation of powerful monarchs, Gustavus I in Sweden, but above all Christian III in Denmark, that propelled the movement to reform the church. Under Christian's rule this led to the formation of a national Lutheran Church in Denmark (and in Norway, which was under the dominion of the Danish monarch until 1814), conforming to the Lutheran Confessio Augustana (1530), with a new and sympathetic episcopate and a centralised government firmly in the hands of the king by 1537. In comparison to Denmark, developments in Sweden were much more hesitant and remained ambiguous for several decades; in spite of early beginnings in the 1520s, the national Church did not receive its first set of official statutes until 1571 and it was not until 1593 that it declared its adherence to the Confessio Augustana.14 During the 1980s the concept of'confessionalisation' was invented to outline the fundamental politico-religious logic of early-modem Europe.15 Although not easily expressed in English, this term has proved to be of value when conceptualising the reconstruction of nations, and the reorganisation of national life, following the shattering of the oikoumene of Medieval Europe in the wake of the Reformation. The concept of religious unity continued to be a fundamental political principle, only with the modification that that religion may differ from region to region ('Cuius regio, eius religio\ as it was articulated by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555). Nationhood and confession coincided, and church and state merged. Expressions of the prescribed confession of society were henceforth omnipresent, following men and women throughout their lives and penetrating

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the social hierarchy at every level. Scandinavian historians of the Reformation have made surprisingly little use of the concept of confessionalisation. Maybe this situation can be explained by the simple fact that this process in Scandinavia was so successful that it has become almost invisible to the present day observer. Unlike other 'Protestant' countries, such as Britain, parts of Germany and the United Provinces, where confessionalisation was always contested and its realisation incomplete, Scandinavia witnessed the birth of a religiously homogeneous society founded on the Lutheran confession during the sixteenth century. Roman Catholic competition for the religious allegiance of the nation could do very little to challenge the national churches; although the bogey of'Papism' could emerge in the popular imagination, neither Denmark nor Sweden had Catholic minorities that could threaten their religious unity. Unlike in Germany and Britain, the radical branches of the Reformation made little progress in Scandinavia either. Even Calvinism, which had not been lacking in support among some sixteenth-century theologians and monarchs, was later counted among the 'heresies' against which the national churches should contend. In the latter half of the seventeenth century the politico-religious principles of the religious monolith were proclaimed in the Danish King's Law {Kongeloven) of 1665 and, when Toleration was being mooted in England, the Swedish Church Law (Kyrkolagen) of 1686 revealed a very different frame of mind: Those of the clerical estate, as well as others of whatever estate they may be, should herewith be solemnly prohibited from contemplating and proclaiming any opinion that is in divergence from [the Church Law], or to use any offensive phrases to trouble and harm God's congregation. If anyone does so, and after having been solemnly warned, does not reform, after legal trial and judgement, will be called an apostate and lose his office and be sentenced to expatriation. 16

At a parish level the national churches tried to foster adherence to the teaching of the Reformation by instruction in the Lutheran catechism, by communal singing of Lutheran hymns and by way of sermons and a reformed liturgy. The clergy were, in general, reasonably well-educated and through long years of residence in their respective fields of work (the English pastoral problem of 'non-residence' was virtually non-existent in Scandinavia) in tune with parish politics and rivalries. In all Scandinavian countries, catechising and regular communion in the parish church were not optional practises; they were, in fact, the fundamental prerequisites of citizenship. And just as state and church merged, so did the local community and the Christian congregation. Nevertheless, if we focus on expressions of popular piety it is difficult to gauge the extent to which Lutheran orthodoxy was embraced by the early-modern inhabitants of these countries; it has been argued that'traditional religion', intensely communal in character and with floating boundaries between the sacred and the profane, continued to exist within the Lutheran establishment. Leading clerics tended to look with contempt upon popular religiosity and frequently encouraged

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local ministers to increase their efforts to reform their parishioners. The local clergy were, however, relatively reluctant to heed such calls; while subscribing to the official statutes, they remained broadly tolerant of the practices and traditions of local society.17 Often being farm-boys themselves they were more inclined to sympathise with their rural parishioners than with higher ecclesiastics operating from remote diocesan centres.18

De-Christianisation - Rural and Urban What forces within this early-modem cultural environment can be said to have paved the way for the late-nineteenth-century decline in religious practise? In order to answer such a question we need to begin with a closer look at the social history of rural life in Scandinavia between 1750 and 1850. The social structure of the Scandinavian countries was more or less the same throughout the earlymodem era. These were predominantly rural nations in which about 90 per cent of the population lived off agriculture. The parish structure, inherited from the medieval church, remained more or less intact. With only slight increases in the number of inhabitants the need to reform this structure was, in most places, nonexistent. A more general alteration in the dynamics of agrarian society can be traced to the rapid growth in population that occurred after 1750. In all three countries the total population doubled between the mid-1700s and the mid-1800s.19 With the ratio of city dwellers remaining more or less the same until the 1850s, this represents a virtual explosion of the agrarian population. In Sweden 2,117,824 lived on the countryside in 1800; in 1855 that figure had risen to 3,261,472.20 In Norway the growth of the rural population was marginally slower: 805,845 in 1801, rising to 1,292,232 in 1855.21 Although the rural population at large appears to have increased, it was those sections of the population with little or no land that increased most rapidly during these years. For example, in Sweden the number of crofters (who, though poor, were not destitute) rose more than fivefold between 1751 and 1845.22 The proletarianisation of large sections of the rural population between 1750 and 1850 was accompanied by an increasing self-awareness among the freehold farmers. As Finnish historian Panu Pulma has stated: 'The rapid population increase, the growth of the rural proletariat, and the agricultural reforms changed the social structure of the countryside. The peasantry started to form an intermediate group in society, a rural middle class that, together with the clergy, civil servants, and other burgesses, was in charge of local administration.'23 A milieu that had previously been comparatively homogeneous was now replaced by an increasingly stratified rural society. Within this milieu the calls of church leaders to reform the customs of the rural poor gained support among those who increasingly regarded themselves as the stewards of rural life. During the first decades of the nineteenth century freehold farmers were, in general, inclined to adopt new standards of behaviour, in accordance with their new-found prestige and as a way to set themselves apart from

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the rural poor. In that situation the church leaders' century-old calls harmonised with the farmers' own agenda. As Pulma's statement indicates, farmers bent on 'self-reform' often allied with the clergy (now increasingly recruited from 'higher' social strata) in their attempts to discipline 'traditional religion'. Practises that were once as natural as the church hymns and the catechism could now be looked upon as unwanted remnants of a scandalous past. Patronised by these local elites, a new form of Christianity, often of a Pietist and revivalist flavour, emerged. This was a type of religiosity that was more orderly in character and much more individualistic in nature. Its proponents often maintained that they only struggled to re-create the traditional piety of their forbears, but they were in fact reformers hitting hard at the symbiosis between 'traditional religion' and Lutheranism. This separation deeply affected the religious establishment at a local level and there is a need to look more closely at the consequences of this departure from 'traditional religion'. Although rural revivals in many regions secured high levels of church or mission hall attendance (at least until the early twentieth century) and were, therefore, able to fill the vacuum left by the decline of older religious customs, in other places religious habits never recovered from the blow of being severed from ancient beliefs and practises. The available studies suggest that Christian habits were declining already long before the advent of modernity and long before urbanisation set in.24 There is regrettably little work done on the actual state of religion among the rural poor in the Scandinavian countries in the nineteenth century. Some evidence suggests that the rapidly expanding group of proletarians was beginning to slip through the churches' system of pastoral care during the first decades of the nineteenth century. These were increasingly mobile people who did not fit into the static ecclesiastical system. In many parishes the established churches were not adequately staffed, nor mentally prepared, to deal with the ruptures in rural life. Already in 1788, Hakan Sjögren, a future dean of Växjö Cathedral in southern Sweden and a man of considerable intellectual distinction, complained to his bishop about the sad state of his parish: In this parish there are, regrettably!, many destitute farmers, crofters [and] paupers ... and these people ... often absent themselves from catechetical instructions ... until they [have] reached the age of 15 or beyond that. One must be content, if not happy, if they eventually can be drawn into the community and the ordered life of the congregation with the limited amount of knowledge that has been given them on the rare occasions one has encountered them.25

We know that some of the clerical reformers of rural religion clearly struggled to include them in their vision of a re-born society in which the Lutheran Church, purged from its past 'lax' practises, was to take a pivotal role.26 While we find some of these people in the early Pietist revivals that were occurring in the countryside,27 the overall picture seems to be that the rural poor were never truly 'at home' within these movements. Furthermore, for those who were not to find a place within these

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revivals, it seems reasonable to assume that the contemporary departure from the inclusiveness of 'traditional religion' distanced them from the life of the parish church; socially as well as religiously they were set adrift. When industrialisation and urbanisation became visible in Scandinavia in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, and the migrations of the rural poor took them even further away, eventually forcing them to take up permanent residence in bleak working-class districts, the ultimate consequences of earlier shifts in rural religion became apparent. It has been observed that, with the rapid influx of workers into many Scandinavian cities after 1870, the percentage of churchgoers fell abruptly. In some cities, communicants were less than 10 per cent of the population by 1890.28 With this picture in mind, we may conclude that this manifest decline in religious practise cannot simply be ascribed to the onset of 'modernity'. People who had already been estranged from the religious life of their home parishes, and among whom was very little knowledge of Christianity, no doubt found it only too easy to wander further away while settling themselves as city-dwellers. Without a prior fracture in rural religion such rapid decline could hardly be imaginable. Significantly, the religious services provided by the National churches in the cities did little to encourage new religious allegiances among these men and women. Many clerics observed with increasing dissatisfaction the growth of the un-churched masses on their doorsteps, but most of them could do very little to stem the tide. With an ecclesiastical system firmly woven into the fabric of the state, questions of church extension often turned out to be protracted bureaucratic affairs running all the way through government offices in Copenhagen and Stockholm. Towards the end of the nineteenth century new churches were being built (sometimes, as in the case of Copenhagen, as a result of lay initiatives) and new clergy commissioned to cater for the religious needs of new parishes, but by then it was already too late. At this stage even the most well-meaning cleric would have found the working-classes distinctly lukewarm towards his work. Some of those who were estranged from the National churches found room in the various evangelical agencies that came to life in the mid-nineteenth century. Between 1845 and 1860 the religious legislation of all three countries underwent substantial liberal reform (from 1814 Norway was united to Sweden but preserved a great deal of autonomy in its domestic affairs). With the exclusiveness of previous legislation in retreat, space was created within which independent (or quasiindependent) religious bodies could be formed. The Inner Missions of Norway and Denmark, and in Sweden Evangeliska Fosterlands-stiftelsen (the Swedish Evangelical Mission) all of whom claimed to be the heirs of earlier revivals, became independent low-church agencies within the National churches; others, such as the Methodists and the Baptists, eschewed all such connections. To be sure, they made considerable gains. Organisations of the Inner Mission type came to form powerful parties within the established churches and, in some regions, the 'free churches' created virtual strongholds in which they could reasonably claim to be viable rivals to state-supported religion. In the cities some agencies, first the Methodists and later the Salvation Army, could also claim to have a working-class

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following. Undoubtedly, various people were attracted to this kind of Christianity, as well as the 'democratic promise' 29 that was to be found within these evangelical organisations. Still, in overall terms they were to remain a minority phenomenon. There are many reasons for their failing to attract a more substantial proportion of the population. First, we have to consider the class-structure of Scandinavian societies at large. As has been frequently observed, the triumph of evangelicalism in nineteenth-century Britain can be explained by its ability to cater for the needs and tastes of the urban middle classes. In Scandinavia, this section of society was in general poorly developed and was consequently lacking in political power during the crucial decades when many evangelical organisations came to life. Hence, evangelicalism in Scandinavia never became the religion of this social stratum in quite the same way. Secondly, towards the end of the nineteenth century the expansion of most evangelical agencies was checked by the simultaneous spread of a generally hostile brand of socialism. Thirdly, their enlargement was also hindered by the position of the National churches, or rather, the way in which these religious bodies came to express the communal identity of the populace at large. That church and nationhood coincided was taken for granted by most men and women, even when the legal bonds that tied the populace to Lutheranism were loosened. In subsequent years, leading figures in the established churches were to claim, with some effect, that the ethos which had been fostered by state religion was a true expression of the National spirit. The latter two of these explanations are of central importance not only for our understanding of the position of evangelicalism in northernmost Europe but also for our knowledge of the state of Christianity in this region during the twentieth century.

Christianity and Modern Popular Culture In the year 1900 the Scandinavian countries were much more heterogeneous in terms of religion than they had been a century earlier (though, as has often been remarked, this pluralism was not as developed as in most other western nations at this time). Baptists, Methodists, Roman Catholics and various schismatic descendants of the 'low church' parties had established themselves on the Scandinavian religious scene. Conservative ecclesiastics regarded this development with hostility; their ideal, infused with a Romantic view of society as an organism, was still the integral Lutheran church-state. But by now most leading churchmen had discerned new threats towards the position of the established churches. Even though advanced continental scholarship was far from unknown in Scandinavia before 1880, it was during the final decades of the nineteenth century that the onslaught of modemist scholarship on traditional Christianity made a significant impact on the Scandinavian public. With the influential Danish publicist Georg Brandes tilting against the churches, the celebrated Norwegian writer Bjornstjerne Bjornson calling the truth of Christianity into question, and a new generation of theologians of a decidedly rational bent taking up positions within the faculties of theology

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that trained the Lutheran clergy, it was increasingly difficult for conservativeminded clerics to defend traditional church life in public. The emergence of a socialist critique of the churches, appearing at about the same time, only added to this trend. In general, socialists in Scandinavia adopted a fiercely hostile attitude towards organised Christianity; inspired by continental socialists they attacked the churches as the handmaidens of the rich and the powerful. Whatever criticism was expressed before of organised religion among the expanding working classes, socialist ideology now provided them with a political as well as an intellectual platform in their quest for improved conditions and a re-born society. However, with the benefit of hindsight, it has to be pointed out that the gloomy vision of doom to which many church leaders had succumbed during the early 1900s was not an adequate perception of what lay ahead. The progress of secular modemist thought did tum a substantial segment of the intelligentsia away from Christianity yet we may question its impact on the attitudes of the population at large, at least before the latter half of the twentieth century. The anti-religious attitude of the socialists was gradually defused and the social democratic and workers5 parties mostly found it unrewarding to target organised Christianity. Instead, they opted for pursuing disestablishment and the exclusion of the churches from the public realm, a political program for which they could expect at least some liberal backing. In principle, even the convinced socialist should be free to practise the religion of his or her choice or no religion at all. In years to come, parties of a social democratic orientation were even to revise their attitude towards the issue of religious establishments. Already during the first decade of the twentieth century, Norwegian socialist Olov Kringen had advanced the idea that the established churches, close to all-embracing as they were, could be cured of their innate conservatism and used to advance equality, further democracy and promote an up-to-date and inclusive liberal theology. For those adhering to such a line, which was most strongly felt among the Swedish social democrats, disestablishment remained a distant goal but, for a number of reasons, it was an issue not to be rushed. Even before the beginning of the Second World War, the Scandinavian National churches found themselves in a bewildering situation. On the one hand, only a fraction of the population could be counted as regular churchgoers. As early as 1927 the Bishop of Karlstad in Sweden, J.A. Eklund, at that time a powerful conservative voice, proclaimed that Sweden was 'the wasteland of the deserted churches'.30 But such statements captured only fragments of reality. On the other hand, the National churches were still integral parts of society. In general, the local minister was treated with a certain respect and the parish church was seen as the locus of the communal spirit. Christian rites performed by the local minister were woven into the rich tapestry of everyday life. Such attitudes and practices were expressed within a cultural/political climate, whose origin is traceable back to the era of confessionalisation, within which notions of social unity and homogeneity loomed large.

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Within the post-war construction of the Nordic welfare state, which was masterminded by leading social democrats, the position of the churches became circumscribed and their internal modes of government were eventually reorganised in accordance with the ideals of modern democracy. In other respects the new welfare state was less inclined to go against or to reform national religion. The Lutheran churches were to remain large-scale institutions with a comprehensive network of parishes offering religious services of various kinds to the people. Elements of the traditional culture of the churches still prevailed and continued to be counted among the core values of the nation. Expressions of a civic or national identity were (and still are) intertwined with national religion - 'the difference between them is not clear at all5, as a leading social scientist has observed.31 With this in mind, the continued popularity of the rites offered by the National churches is more easily understood; it also helps to explain why baptism and confirmation still carry with them blurred connotations of conferring both citizenship and a vague Christian identity.32 But our analysis should not stop here. The continued popularity of the rites performed by the National churches opens a window through which we can perceive an alternative religious reality in Scandinavia. Such acts are a part of a much larger spiritual tapestry, a popular religious culture within which some aspects of Christianity are still integral parts. For some time sociologists have attempted to paint the contours of what has been called a Nordic 'folk religion'. This type of religiosity is centred on a romantic admiration of nature, a belief in a creator, a veneration of churches as visible links to the past and a close identification between the National church and the people.33 As a phenomenon it is to a significant degree an independent entity with a life of its own, and is consequently able to adapt and include various popular trends; however, to some extent it is still dependent on the National churches. Several of its key features presuppose the existence and continued activity of these largescale religious bodies. It may not be Christian in the orthodox sense of the word, but it still contains beliefs of a Christian origin and still nourishes a sense of living within the orbit of the National churches. The existence of such a popular religious culture secures both the continued support of the Lutheran churches as national institutions among the population at large, and high levels of participation in those religious services that are seen as essential. It may, therefore, be claimed that they co-exist or have even entered a symbiotic relationship, very similar to that which once tied church and 'traditional religion' together.34 Quite paradoxically, therefore, the most post-modem of nations are in some respects also the most traditional ones. The prospects for the quasi-Christian aspects of Scandinavian 'folk religion5 are uncertain. Some scholars, while studying de-Christianisation as it appeared during 'the long 1960s', have located a number of shifts that occurred during this decisive era that may affect its future. Swedish political scientist Magnus Hagevi has demonstrated that, around the year 1970, there was a sudden drop in parental instruction in Christianity.35 Such an observation may mean that 'generation X' is much less likely to express a 'folk religion' that contains Christian elements than

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previous generations have been. Yet it is still too early to predict the definitive decline of this popular phenomenon. Its ultimate fate depends on how a number of issues will be handled in the near future - among which should be included the political will to create multicultural societies and the way in which the churches respond to popular practises and attitudes.

Conclusion: What was 'Exceptional' in Scandinavia? Should Scandinavia still be regarded as the 'exception' that can be used to demonstrate the ultimate truth of the 'secularisation thesis'? In this essay I have attempted to outline an alternative image of de-Christianisation in Scandinavia. In place of the 'modernisation', 'functionalist' and 'supply-side' theses, I have argued for a longue duree historical and multidimensional perspective on deChristianisation. Contrary to what has often been affirmed, this essay has suggested that a fundamental shift in Scandinavian religion occurred in the decades surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century. It has focussed more on early religious and social developments within agrarian societies than on what happened in the cities decades later in order to explain the demise of some aspects of Christian life in Scandinavia. In a certain sense de-Christianisation can therefore be understood as antedating the arrival of modernity. Simultaneously, Scandinavia has evinced a more arcane quality. An amorphous 'folk religion' is still nourished by large sections of society. This phenomenon has to be taken into account at least when we try to understand the peculiar position of National churches. Just as low attendance figures may be used to demonstrate the indifference of the population at large, we may come to a different conclusion when we consider the roles performed by the National churches within this realm of popular religiosity. American sociologist Jose Casanova has recently hinted at a problem that seems to be peculiar to European de-Christianisation: why is it that people have proved unwilling to embrace alternative options once the dominant churches ceased to function as 'community cults'?36 In the case of Scandinavia the answer seems simply to be that the churches still function as 'community cults'; consequently, people tend to be reluctant to discontinue their membership and still use the services of the churches at certain times in their lives. To be sure, if we examine the religious history of Scandinavia many peculiar traits emerge. However, instead of talking of Scandinavia as an oddity to be found on the margins of Europe, it should be regarded as but one example of a de-Christianising Europe where the exceptional was (and still is) the rule.

Notes 1

See P. Berger ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, 1999); G. Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case. Parameters of

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Faith in the Modern World (London, 2002); D. Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Aldershot, 2005). 2 See for example R. Inglehart and W. Baker, 'Modernization, cultural change and the persistence of traditional values', American Sociological Review, 65 (2000), pp. 19-51; P. Norris and R. Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 70-74, 90-91. 3 I will here use the term 'de-Christianisation' instead of 'secularisation' since the latter term is replete with connotations of a decline not only in Christian beliefs but in religiosity altogether. 4 Martin, On Secularization, p. 125. 5 A. Bucksner, 'Religion, Science, and Secularization Theory on a Danish Island', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion vol. 35 (1996), pp. 432^41 at p. 432. 6 Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, p. 10. 7 A classic article presenting this argument is R. Stark and L.R. Iannaccone, 'A supply-side reinterpretation of the "secularization" of Europe', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 33 (1994), pp. 230-52. See also L.R. Iannaccone, 'Religious markets and the economies of religion', Social Compass vol. 39 (1992), pp. 123-31. The argument is applied to Scandinavia in E.M. Hamberg, 'Christendom in decline: the Swedish case', in H. McLeod and Werner Ustorf eds, The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, / 750-2000 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 47-62; E.M. Hamberg and T. Pettersson, 'The religious market: denominational competition and religious participation in contemporary Sweden', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 33 (1994), pp. 205-16. 8

The weakness of this theory in accounting for the apparent religious vitality of southern Europe has been pointed out in J. Verwein, P. Ester and R. Nauta, 'Secularisation as an economic and cultural phenomenon: A cross-national analysis', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 36 (1997), pp. 309-24. 9 Martin, On Secularization, p. 127. 10 A classic study of these themes is S.C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southward c. 1880-1939 (Oxford, 1999). 11 H. McLeod, Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848-1914 (Houndmills and New York, 2000), pp. 285-6. 12 In addition to studies mentioned in this article, an English-speaking readership will find the following useful: A. Bäckström et al., Religious Change in Northern Europe: The Case of Sweden: From State Church to Free Folk Church (Stockholm, 2004); T. Pettersson and O. Riis eds, Scandinavian Values: Religion and Morality in the Nordic Countries (Stockholm, 1994); O.G. Winsnes ed., Contemporary Religion and Church: A Nordic Perspective (Trondheim, 2004). 13

R. Stark, 'Secularization, RIP', Sociology of Religion, vol. 60 (1999), pp. 249-73. For an international audience an introduction into the scholarly debates surrounding the Reformation in Scandinavia can be found in O.P. Grell ed., The Scandinavian Reformation: From Evangelical Movement to Institutionalisation of Reform (Cambridge, 1995). Those versed in Scandinavian languages will benefit from reading I. Brohed ed., Reformationens konsolidering i de nordiska länderna 1540-1610 (Oslo, 1990). 15 See H. Klueting, Das Konfessionelle Zeitalter 1525-1648 (Stuttgart, 1989); H. Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung: eine Fallstudie über das Verhältnis von religiösem und sozialem Wandel in der Früh-neuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe (Gütersloh, 1981). 14

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1686 ärs Kyrkolag (Stockholm, 1936), p. 5. Such a discussion, about the 'failure' or 'success' of the Reformation, was initiated by Gerald Strauss in 'Success and failure in the German Reformation', Past and Present no. 67 (1975), pp. 30-63. Its applicability to the Swedish arena has been discussed in G. Malmstedt, Bondetro och kyrkoro. Religiös mentalitet i stormaktstidens Sverige (Lund, 2002). IK For the social profile of the clergy see S. Carlsson, Ständssamhälle och ständspersoner 1700-1865. Studier rörande det svenska ständssamhällets upplösning (Lund, 1949), p. 205. 19 Historisk statistik för Sverige. Del 1. Befolkning, 1720-1967 (Stockholm, 1969), pp. 44-5; B.R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750-1988 (New York, 1992), pp. 3, 7. 20 Historisk statistik, pp. 44-5 21 Historisk statistikk 1968 (Oslo, 1969), p. 33. 22 Historisk statistik, pp. 80-85. 23 P. Pulma, 'The Nordic countries', in Peter N. Steams ed., Encyclopedia of European Social History: From 1350 to 2000 (6 vols, New York, 2001), vol. 1, pp. 357-69 at p. 361. 24 Scholars of de-Christianisation in Scandinavia have generally not considered the possibility of religious decline antedating the year 1860. However, some older historical studies present relevant data. A study of communion attendance in the diocese of Västeräs in central Sweden suggests that initial departures from traditional practises occurred around 1820, see E. Enochsson, Den kyrkliga seden med särskild hänsyn till Västeräs stift (Stockholm, 1949), p. 354. Similar trends can be observed in the diocese of Skara, see S. Plith, Kyrkoliv och väckelse. Studier i den nyevangeliska väckelsens genombrott i Skara stift (Stockholm, 1949), pp. 262-75. 25 Quoted in H. Pleijel ed., Gustavianskt kyrkoliv i Växjö stift. Prästerskapets svarpä biskop Wallquistspromemoria 12 nov. 1787 (Växjö, 1981), pp. 61-2. 26 Discussed in E. Sidenvall, 'Association i bondesamhället. En mikrohistorisk Studie av missionsintresset i Tygelsjö, cirka 1835-1855', Historisk tidskrift [Sweden] 127 (2007), pp. 25-44. 27 See the detailed mapping of the early revivals in Denmark found in A.P. Thyssen ed., Vcekkelsernes frembrud i Danmark i forste halvdel af det 19. ärhundrede (7 vols, Kebenhavn, 1960-1977). 28 A. Bäckström, När tros- och värderingsbilder jorändras. En analys av nattvardsoch husförhörssedens utveckling i Sundsvallsregionen 1805-1890 (Stockholm, 1999), pp. 50-55. 29 S. Thome, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, 1999), p. 126. 30 A survey carried out by the leading Stockholm daily, Dagens Nyheter, indicated that 5.3 per cent of the population at large (with significant regional variations) attended Sunday services in 1927. See Göran Gustafsson, 'Svenska kyrkan 1999 och 1927', in M. Skog ed., Det religiösa Sverige. Gudstjänst- och andkatsliv under ett veckoslut kring millennieskiftet (Örebro, 2001), pp. 73-103. 17

31 32

Martin, On Secularization, p. 53. Bäckström el al, Religious Change, chapter 4.

A Classic Case of De-Christ ianisation? 33

133

See, for example, G. Gustafsson, Tro, samfund och samhälle. Sociologiska perspektiv (Örebro, 2000), pp. 170-72; J. Straarup, Kyrkan iförorten (Stockholm, 1985). 34 As early as 1960 Danish church historian Hal Koch argued that such phenomena should be seen as continuations of much earlier popular religious practises. See H. Koch ed., Et Kirkeskifte. Studier over brygninger i dansk kirke- og menighedsliv i det 19. ärh (Kobenhavn, 1960). 35 M. Hagevi, 'Religiositet i generation X', in H. Oscarsson ed., Spar i framtiden: Ung-SOM-undersökningenr Västsverige 2000 (Göteborg, 2002), pp. 39-77; See also S. Sundback, Sekularisering och kyrkotrohet i Danmark. Ett sociologiskt fallstudium av utträden i Ärhus 1930-1981 (Aarhus, 1989), pp. 41-9. 36 J. Casanova, 'Beyond European and American exceptionalisms: towards a global perspective', in G. Davie et al. eds, Predicting Religion: Christian, Secular and Alternative Futures (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 17-29 at p. 26.

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Chapter 9

War, Religion and Revival: the United States, British and Canadian Armies during the Second World War Michael Snape

'The Second World War was a notably secular affair', 1 pronounced Paul Fussell in his acerbic study Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989), before proceeding to contradict himself in his complaint that contemporary Americans - 'at least' - were liable to see it 'as virtually a religious operation'.2 Such confusion is not helped by the fact that, outside the world of Holocaust studies, the religious experience of the bloodiest conflict in human history has been badly neglected by historians of religion and, consequently, by the historiography of secularisation in the West. Nowhere is this neglect more apparent than in the historiography of religion in Great Britain, the United States and Canada, the western societies that played the greatest role in the defeat of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Japanese empire.3 While certain studies have emerged (chiefly of chaplains, pacifists and clerical opinion),4 the coverage is decidedly patchy. What are notable by their absence are studies of religion on the home and fighting fronts, with only Great Britain receiving any significant coverage.5 This is a major gap, for not only does religion tend to be sidelined and even ignored in wider and influential studies of the war experience,6 but the war itself served to demarcate decades of apparent religious decline (which was very largely felt by the Protestant mainstream)7 from an era of apparent religious revival in Great Britain, Canada and the United States, a post-war revival that was instanced by growing church attendance, by a church-building boom (especially in Canada and the United States) and by a conservative moral consensus in all three countries.8 Within the broad chronology of secularisation, the religiosity of the 1950s has been seen in fairly general terms as a reaction to the turmoil of the war years and as a function of the ideological tensions of the Cold War. This essay, however, looks more closely at the wartime religious experience of more than twelve million American, British and Canadian soldiers and identifies this experience as a significant contributory factor to the religious revival of the postwar era. In doing so, it sheds light on a neglected dimension of the Second World War; it supports Hugh McLeod's case against overstating the distinctiveness of

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America's religious history (at least until the 1960s),9 and casts further doubt on the well-wom assumption that modem war is by nature a secularising agent. Although their armies (including, in the American case, the United States Army Air Forces) comprised by far the greatest part of their countries' armed forces, in contrast to the First World War, popular perceptions of the Second World War have generated little interest in the religious experience of contemporary British, American and Canadian soldiers. If there is an assumption that religion was simply less important to this generation, for these countries at least the Second World War lacks the compelling backdrop of the mass carnage that occurred in the trenches of the Western Front from 1914 to 1918. In contrast to the naive faith and idealism of their fathers' generation, the children of the Depression era have been viewed as products of a more sceptical age who had fewer illusions to lose.10 Furthermore, a major proportion of the soldiers of the western democracies saw little if any action; for a host of military and even political reasons (especially in Canada) many American, British and Canadian troops never left home shores and, when they did go overseas, the newly mechanised nature of war ensured a marked preponderance of service to combat troops. One survey conducted in 1945 found that less than 40 per cent of American soldiers who had gone overseas had seen any kind of action, leading John Ellis to surmise that, as far as the western Allies were concerned, 'only between a fifth and a quarter of any army's paper strength was actually involved in the shooting war'. 11 While the concentration of combat experience among a relatively small element of front-line soldiers helps to explain why no battle of the Second World War has quite the emotional resonance of the Somme or Passchendaele for these societies, this did not mean that their victory in the Second World War was cheaply bought in human terms. Despite the leading role played by the Red Army in the defeat of Germany and the western Allies' crude, if generally effective, reliance on overwhelming firepower, losses were heavy: excluding non-battle casualties, 235,000 soldiers and airmen of the United States army were killed; the British army lost another 127,000 and the Canadians a further 18,000.12 Needless to say, these losses were largely borne by front-line units and especially by the infantry. Despite representing only a fraction of the United States army, American infantry units suffered 70 per cent of its battle casualties in the ground war.13 For the British and the Canadians the situation was essentially the same: more than 70 per cent of British casualties in Normandy in 1944 were infantrymen and the monthly casualty rates of British infantry battalions in northwest Europe in 1944-45 were closely comparable to their predecessors of 1914-18.14 In addition to its costs in dead and wounded, the psychological impact of prolonged fighting was also severe: a contemporary report for the Third Canadian Infantry Division (which suffered a casualty rate of more than 50 per cent between June and October 1944) warned of an ominous sense of'futility' among its numerous neuropsychiatric casualties: 'The only ways one could get out of battle was [sic] death, wounds, self-inflicted wounds and going "nuts".' 15

However, the war took a heavy toll in more insidious and ubiquitous ways, equally affecting those who never went near a battlefield. An obvious factor that distinguished the experience of the Second World War from that of the First was its longer duration; whereas Great Britain and Canada were at war for four years and three months in the First World War, they were at war for six years in the Second; similarly, while the United States was at war for 19 months in 1917-18, it fought for 45 months a generation later. In combination, the profound dislocation of ordinary life and the sheer length of the war placed a very heavy strain on armies of citizen soldiers drawn from cultures in which home and family life were sacralised by the churches and idealised by society in general. If effective postal systems played a key role in supporting morale by sustaining links with loved ones,16 this general fixation with home proved distinctly double-edged. Through its routine censorship of soldiers' mail, the British army came to recognise that one of its deepest and most intractable problems was that of the 'anxious soldier' fretting over his marital and domestic affairs, concerns that were naturally heightened by German bombing of British towns and cities.17 Under these circumstances, the war produced unprecedented rates of marital breakdown. In Great Britain, petitions for divorce rose from just under 10,000 in 1938 to nearly 25,000 in 1945; significantly, in the last year of the war 70 per cent were on the grounds of adultery and twothirds were filed by men.18 These patterns were reflected in the United States and Canada; the American divorce rate 'more than doubled' from 1940 to 1946 and, in Canada, where grounds for divorce remained 'excruciatingly narrow', it more than trebled between 1939 and 1946.19 Unease and disquiet could be expressed in some worrying cases of collective indiscipline, notably among British troops at Salemo in October 1943 and among Canadian conscripts at Terrace, British Columbia, in November 1944.20 However, dissatisfaction was more commonly reflected in high desertion rates. Whereas the desertion rate in the United States army ran at only 1 per cent in the First World War, by 1944 the de facto desertion rate in the American armed forces stood at over 6 per cent, being a particular problem among soldiers in Italy and northwest Europe (there were fewer places to run in the Pacific).21 By this stage of the war, the problem of desertion was also acute in the British army, which had of course been fighting for longer; by the end of the war, the number of desertions in the British army exceeded 100,000 and, in the spring of 1944, as many as 30,000 of its soldiers may have been 'on the trot' in Italy alone.22 It was, of course, no accident that in both armies the great majority of deserters came from infantry units,23 the toxic mix of weariness and calculation being reflected in one veteran's assertion that: 'If Churchill instead of his blood, sweat and tears thing had said "Any man or woman in the forces who would like to give it all up and go home, can" - he wouldnae have got the microphone out of his mouth before he'd been trampled to death in the rush.' 24 These indicators of the state of morale and discipline in the British, United States and Canadian armies during the Second World War underline a critical point: in the absence of effective deterrents (the death penalty for cowardice and

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desertion had been abolished in the British army in 1930 while the United States army shot only one of its 40,000 official deserters)25 these citizen soldiers of the western democracies needed to be coaxed, reassured, supported and reasoned with to an unprecedented extent. Furthermore, as products of culturally Christian societies, it was inevitable that religion and religious agencies should play a significant role in this complex and ongoing process of negotiation. Indeed, the privileges accorded to organised religion were emblematic of the cultural and ideological differences between the British, United States and Canadian armies on the one hand and the Red Army and the Wehrmacht on the other. For all the fanfare surrounding the wartime rehabilitation of the Russian Orthodox Church, Stalin did not revive the old Tsarist institution of military chaplaincy.26 Similarly, while Protestant and Roman Catholic chaplains were present in the German army theirs was a difficult and frustrating lot. Largely retained as a concession to conservative feeling among senior army officers, Wehrmacht chaplains ministered in a hostile ideological environment under growing restrictions;27 none were appointed after 1942 and, whereas the German army numbered more than 6,500,000 men at its peak in 1943, only a thousand chaplains ever seem to have passed through its ranks.28 In contrast with the situation in their own army, under American interrogation in May 1945 a group of senior Wehrmacht chaplains claimed to be 'in great admiration' of the Corps of Chaplains of the United States army: 'Commenting on our 15 chaplains in the division, they asserted that they had great difficulty with the Nazis to have one Catholic and one Protestant assigned to each division. Their senior rank was admitted to be a Hitlerian front and a sop to the religious-minded people in Germany.'29 However, the United States was not alone in supporting a large and conspicuously privileged body of army chaplains, for the British and Canadian armies also maintained, respectively, the Royal Army Chaplains' Department and two parallel Chaplain Services (Protestant and Roman Catholic) for the benefit of their soldiers. In all three cases, provision was maintained by complex systems of collaboration between the military authorities and the civilian churches. In the United States, for example, the Chief of Chaplains worked with a number of denominational 'endorsing agencies' including the Roman Catholic Military Ordinariate, the Jewish Welfare Board and the General Commission on Army and Navy Chaplains, a body that represented around 40 Protestant denominations.30 Despite some lingering doubts as to the moral legitimacy and constitutional legality of military chaplaincy,31 the army's Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, sanctioned a de facto ratio of one chaplain for every thousand soldiers, with denominational quotas being determined by the results of the 1936 census of religious bodies.32 The result was that by September 1945 more than 8,000 chaplains of almost seventy denominations were serving in the United States army, a figure that represents the largest number of military chaplains ever produced by a nation at war.33 British and Canadian provision (which turned on a comparable system of committees and on quotas determined by soldiers' declared religious allegiance) was hardly less remarkable. By 1945, almost 3,000 chaplains were serving in the RAChD and almost 900 had joined Canada's two Chaplain

Services.34 Unlike their beleaguered counterparts in the Wehrmacht (most of whom were classified as civil servants)35 all full-time military chaplains in the United States, British and Canadian armies enjoyed an officer's rank or status with its attendant pay and privileges.36 Significantly, if German and Soviet soldiers could have considerable difficulty in practising their religion, their British and Canadian counterparts often had the opposite problem for throughout the war, and under King's Regulations, regular if not weekly Sunday worship was a matter of compulsion in the British and the Canadian armies (in the United States army, attendance was officially voluntary but there were many local violations of this principle).37 Although compulsion was objectionable to different shades of secular and religious opinion in Great Britain and Canada (largely because of its attendant parade ground rigmarole and its violation of the voluntary principle in religious matters), the ideological context of the Second World War seemed to lend this time-honoured tradition a new and urgent meaning. In January 1945, for example, a Canadian training manual declared that 'One important reason for the church parade is that it is a public and frequent acknowledgment of our national dependence on Almighty God, a thing our enemies have largely left out of their reckoning'. 38 Among the British and the Canadians, a new and less controversial supplement to this sacred square-bashing was 'Padre's Hour'. Pioneered by Britain's elite First Airborne Division, padre's hour built on earlier experiments and spread rapidly throughout the British and Canadian armies from the autumn of 1942. Intended to provide an element of religious instruction (and thereby enhance motivation, discipline and morale) padre's hour took the form of a weekly meeting for informal discussion between chaplains and ordinary soldiers, discussions which took as their subject any one of a host of religious and moral questions.39 A compulsory part of training, and suitably resourced by study aids provided by the civilian church, padre's hour seems to have become a genuinely popular institution; one memorandum prepared for the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942 listed 83 different questions already discussed by the chaplains and men of the First Airborne Division, questions that included 'Religion in Russia', 'Has not Psychology explained away religion?' and 'Can we believe in Immortality?'.40 While groups naturally varied in character and responsiveness, the significance of the initiative is clear; given the millions it directly affected, padre's hour seems to have amounted to the largest exercise in adult religious education ever undertaken in British or in Canadian history. In addition to leading religious services and providing religious instruction, chaplains assisted morale in many other ways. An important aspect of ministry to front-line soldiers was being a visible and encouraging presence among them; this was appreciated even in the Wehrmacht, which ordered its chaplains into the thick of any fighting through its infamous 'Uriah Law' of 1942.41 In the British, Canadian and United States armies, when in action front-line chaplains were normally assigned to medical posts and their casualties reflected the manifold dangers of their forward ministry, which often included medical care as well as

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spiritual assistance to the wounded.42 Significantly, the number of fatal casualties suffered by the RAChD over the course of the war was almost exactly in proportion to those of the British army as a whole; similarly, in proportionate terms the combat losses of the United States army's Corps of Chaplains were exceeded only by those of its infantry and by the aircrew of its Air Forces.43 In the aftermath of anyfighting, it was the chaplain's task to see that the dead were decently buried. The interment of the dead (however harrowing a task) was a matter of great concern, and not only for religious reasons. As one senior British chaplain wrote from Italy in 1943, it was essential to ensure that the dead were properly buried in formal cemeteries as 'it definitely has a bearing on morale' 44 Among the Americans, the weight of expectation even obliged chaplains to venture into uncleared minefields in order to recover unburied bodies, a lethal task which exacted a steady toll in life and limb.45 However, given the minority of fighting soldiers and the personal and domestic pressures of war, the chaplain's role as the soldier's friend was most widely evidenced off the battlefield, for the chaplains of all three armies played a major role in counselling and supporting troubled soldiers. Despite the creation of a separate Directorate of Welfare and of a system of local welfare officers by the British army,46 chaplains continued to dispense practical help and advice to untold thousands throughout the war.47 As one British observer remarked as early as 1941: 'When a soldier is in difficulty of any kind and needs advice or help, he can always approach the padre; and, indeed, many padres foreseeing this need make it their business to be available to the men for private consultation at a fixed time and place.' 48 In his history of the Canadian Chaplain Service (Protestant), the Baptist chaplain W.T. Steven noted ruefully that 'as the months dragged into years, [the Canadian soldier] developed a technique at grousing which has seldom been equalled and probably never surpassed'.49 Despite the weariness this may have engendered, it certainly meant that the chaplain's services were in demand. As Steven went on to note: 'In all there have been hundreds of thousands of personal interviews .... It is safe to say that in most units the padre was the first man thought of when trouble arose.'50 American sources provide an even clearer picture of the magnitude of the chaplain's role in this respect. Significantly, the phrase 'Tell it to the chaplain' became idiomatic in the American army during the Second World War,51 but however freely it was used it was at least indicative of the chaplain's established role as a shoulder to cry on. In 1942 it was estimated that each American chaplain was conducting an average of 53 personal interviews per day and, the following year, research by the Army Special Services Division concluded that 'next to the commanding officer a far greater proportion of men went to see the chaplain than any other officer'. 52 As a natural corollary of their welfare role, a vast amount of correspondence also flowed between chaplains and the home front.53 However, chaplains also ventured into the public arena in order to champion the soldier's interests. Diligent research conducted by British army chaplains in 1946 led them to the 'appalling conclusion' that one in five soldiers' wives had proved unfaithful after three years of wartime separation, findings that were duly reported in The Times.54 In a similar vein, and while the war was still

in progress, an American army chaplain sparked a national debate after penning a forthright letter to the Chicago Daily News on the subject of 'Cheating War Wives'.55 However, the army's support for religion was not simply expressed in a plentiful supply of chaplains. The almost inescapable quality of religion in all three armies was reflected in the official practice of stamping an abbreviated form of a soldier's religion on his identity discs (or 'dog tags') as part of an irreducible minimum of personal information. For the British and the Canadians, this allegiance was prominent and closely defined; among the latter, for example, no fewer than twelve denominational classifications were in use, including 'GC' (Greek Catholic),'C-SCI' (Christian Science) and 'OD' ('Other Denomination5).56 While this routine identification could cause problems for Jewish soldiers in danger of capture by the Germans,57 a common complaint about the American system (which recognised only Catholics, Protestants and Jews) was that it was neither transparent nor specific enough. An American sergeant wounded in the Ardennes in December 1944 remembered that he was brought back to an aid station where he duly encountered a Jewish chaplain: 'I could dimly make out his collar ornament which was a Star of David. He, in turn, misread my dog tag, thought I was a Catholic and gave me last rites. I remember thinking that I really had all bases covered.' 58 Despite some administrative confusion in the United States army, the importance of religious consolation to the wounded was recognised to the extent that, early in the Normandy campaign, Eisenhower ordered that a full record of religious ministrations be noted in American field medical records and on emergency medical tags.59 In addition to the provision of chaplains and the support of a sympathetic bureaucracy, the official encouragement of religion was expressed in a number of other ways. For example, the American Forces Network served up a rich diet of religious programming. Every Sunday from October 1943, American personnel in Great Britain and northwest Europe were regaled with 'Radio Chapel', a programme that consisted of prayers, hymns and a sermon. Eventually, this was joined by 'Music for Sunday', a programme produced by the Armed Forces Radio Service which featured the vocal talents of leading artistes. In Lent this schedule was augmented to include 'a daily four-to-seven-minute meditation'just before the six o'clock news. Significantly, the tempo of religious broadcasting increased in the build up to the cross-Channel invasion, when 'for nine months preceding 6 June 1944, spot announcements encouraging Sabbath and Sunday chapel attendance were carried on Friday and Saturday evenings'.60 All of this, it must be stressed, was over and above the religious programming of the BBC which, in addition to the 'Radio Padre' (the avuncular Ronald Selby Wright, who commanded audiences of up to seven million from 1941 )61 also featured Sunday morning services for 'Isolated Units', 'Christian News and Commentaries' for service personnel and, after 6 June 1944, more than twenty religious broadcasts for the edification of the Allied Expeditionary Force.62

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While religious broadcasting was clearly indicative of an official concern to promote organised religion, all three armies made further contributions to its cause through the provision of military chapels. Speaking in a wartime radio address, George C. Marshall promised Americans that the standard of religious provision in the army would be comparable to that found 'in the average city parish', stating that: 'There should be no fear that any young man will suffer spiritual loss during the period of his military service ... on the contrary, we hope that the young soldier will return to his home with a keener understanding of the sacred ideals for which our churches stand.'63 Consequently, and after the introduction of conscription under the Selective Service Act of September 1940, the War Department sponsored one of the largest and most rapid church-building programmes in history. In 1940, only 17 out of 160 army posts in the United States had chapels of their own;64 however, by September 1945, and at a cost of well over $30 million, 1,500 military chapels had been built at more than 400 locations in the United States.65 While unable to match the speed or scale of this process, from 1942 the Canadian government (with some chivvying from the churches) also funded the construction of additional military chapels at training camps in Canada.66 If the British army was alone in having a significant infrastructure of military chapels across Great Britain and the Empire, in active theatres of war improvisation was the order of the day for all three armies, especially given the scarcity of churches in North Africa, the Pacific and the Far East and the general ban on Protestant chaplains making use of Catholic churches in Italy and northwest Europe.67 Hence, even the British army was obliged to provide a number of motorised churches (essentially converted lorries) for the use of its chaplains in North Africa and northwest Europe, the latter being solemnly consecrated and landed in Normandy shortly after D-Day.68 Much less conspicuous than the provision of chaplains and military chapels was the vast quantity of religious literature supplied to British, Canadian and American soldiers at public expense. Although the British army had issued suitable editions of scripture to its soldiers since the early-nineteenth century, a practice that was continued by the Canadian army,69 constitutional sensitivities meant that the Anglo-Canadian example was not followed by the Americans until 1941. Once again, this concession was aimed at soothing anxieties on the home front, a Mrs. Evelyn Kohlstedt of Ayrshire, Iowa, having reproached President Roosevelt with the salutary example of 'King George of England' in a much-publicised letter of October 1940.70 Although this development enraged American secularists, who saw it as a clear violation of the First Amendment,71 their indignation did not prevent the distribution of eight million army testaments between July 1941 and September 1945; while most were given to individual soldiers, others were stashed as emergency stores in the lifeboats of transport ships or in the life rafts of transport planes.72 Indeed, they were published in such quantities that over a million surplus copies were donated to civilian agencies by the Chief of Chaplains after the war, many finding their way into the American prison system.73 Besides these testaments, millions of other service books and hymnbooks were procured by the War Department and issued to army personnel. In a telling insight into

the United States army's policy and mindset, one million copies of a pamphlet entitled Hymns from Home were stuffed into emergency ration cartons by the Quartermaster Corps.74 A far less novel feature of the war for all three armies was the mandate given to civilian religious agencies to pursue their varied work among soldiers, work that had been pioneered in the British and American contexts during the Crimean War (1854-56) and the American Civil War (1861-65). Building on its earlier work during the Boer War (1899-1902) and the Spanish-American War (1898), the Protestant, non-denominational Young Men's Christian Association had been particularly active in all three armies during the First World War, providing wholesome recreation and thousands of canteens and hostels at home and overseas. However, while this work resumed in the Second World War, the ascendancy of the YMCA was much less marked. From November 1939 welfare work in the Canadian army was entrusted to a Directorate of Auxiliary Services, a body that co-ordinated the work of the YMCA, the Salvation Army, the Knights of Columbus (a Roman Catholic men's organisation), and the secular Canadian Legion. Each organisation had a special, though not exclusive, sphere of labour (the Salvation Army, for example, was primarily concerned with running canteens and recreation huts) and was supported by government subsidies. The reach of these organisations was certainly impressive; three million visitors passed through a single YMCA club in Ottawa between July 1941 and the end of the war.75 British and American practice followed the Canadian pattern. Anxious to eliminate the competition - and even rivalry - which had existed between religious organisations serving British soldiers between 1914 and 1918, the War Office created a Council of Voluntary War Work in 1939 that orchestrated the efforts of, among others, the YMCA, the Young Women's Christian Association, the Salvation Army, the Catholic Women's League, the Church Army, Toe H and the Church of Scotland's canteen service. While the canteens and hostels of its component organisations were frequented by millions of British service personnel, in the wake of the cross-Channel invasion, the CVWW quickly mustered a fleet of 30 motorised canteens to support the troops in Normandy.76 The American counterpart of the Directorate of Auxiliary Services and the CVWW was the United Service Organization, a body created by President Roosevelt in February 1941 which represented an unlikely partnership between the YMCA, the YWCA, the Salvation Army, the National Catholic Community Service, the Jewish Welfare Board and the Christian-inspired National Travelers Aid Association.77 Although confessional and denominational rivalries simmered under the surface,78 USO centres and shows (700 per day by 1945) proved highly successful in entertaining American soldiers in their leisure hours. Furthermore, its component organisations also gave more specialised help; for example, the National Travelers' Aid Association provided scores of 'troop transit' lounges across the United States while the YMCA ran counselling seminars and a Film Exchange for army chaplains.79 Beyond these official partnerships, the churches were busy in other respects. Almost inevitably, civilian religious movements took root in all three armies,

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ranging from the British Roman Catholic Sword of the Spirit to the American fundamentalist Youth for Christ.80 New organisations were also created for service personnel; in the United States army these included a plethora of informal fellowship groups, the Serviceman's Christian League (which recruited 250,000 members in the twelve months following its inauguration in November 1942) and, for Roman Catholic airmen, the Knights of Our Lady, Queen of the Skies.81 Despite the impressive scale of army provision, civilian sources also deluged the troops with religious literature and devotional aids. In a single year of the war, the American Bible Society distributed more than 2.75 million Bibles, testaments and scripture portions to service personnel;82 such was its zeal that it supplied 4,000 New Testaments to British prisoners of war in Germany before the United States even entered the war.83 Inevitably, such massive supply fed lavish distributions. As troops marshalled for D-Day, American chaplains doled out '200,000 tracts and pamphlets, 4,900 Protestant Testaments, 400 Jewish Scriptures, 650 Jewish Prayer-books, 7,600 Catholic prayer books, 5,300 medals and crosses, and 3,768 rosaries'.84 During the subsequent Normandy campaign, their British equivalents distributed 30,000 New Testaments in their own right and, although religious literature and devotional aids were the norm, less conventional gifts from pious civilians were also in evidence, including the company flags that were carried ashore on D-Day by the Second East Yorkshire Regiment, flags that had been sewn for the battalion by the ladies of a Hampshire Congregational church.85 British, Canadian and American soldiers were also the beneficiaries of what were widely billed as morale-boosting visits from leading civilian clergymen. Francis Spellman, the Archbishop of New York and the Military Vicar of the United States Army, visited Europe, Asia, Africa and South America in 1943, returning to Europe on two occasions in 1944, when he observed the Allied invasion of southern France from the safety of an aeroplane.86 Similarly, while discrimination at home and segregation in the military meant that African American troops (who composed nearly 10 per cent of the United States army by 1943) had much to complain about,87 at the invitation of President Roosevelt they were visited in Europe and in the Pacific by the emollient figure of John Andrew Gregg, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and an ambassador of the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches of America.88 The importance of religion was also endorsed and amplified by many of the war's senior commanders. While General Omar Bradley could be mistaken for a Muslim in North Africa,89 the British, United States and Canadian armies were largely led by members of a professional and overwhelmingly Protestant military caste which had long held religion to be an indispensable aid to military discipline and efficiency. Indeed, the mid- to late-nineteenth century had been the golden age of the Protestant 'soldier saint' on both sides of the Atlantic, fostering the cults of Sir Henry Havelock, Charles Gordon, 'Stonewall' Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Given their own celebrity status in this new age of the newsreel, the radio and the photo magazine,90 the public gestures and pronouncements of great commanders were often addressed as much to civilians as to their own soldiers. For example,

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George C. Marshall, a devout Episcopalian and the nation's senior soldier, was lionised in the American church press where he was acclaimed as being just as concerned 'with the moral and spiritual welfare of the men' as he was to see them 'well equipped with arms, food, and clothes'.91 Widely reported was Marshall's pronouncement that: It is the morale - and I mean spiritual morale [of an army] - which wins the victory in the ultimate, and that type of morale can only come out of the religious nature of a soldier who knows God and who has the spirit of religious fervor in his soul. I count heavily on that type of man and on that kind of Army.92

However, the relatively self-effacing Marshall was wholly out-performed by Dwight D. E isenhower, Mark C lark, Douglas Mac Arthur and even George S. Patton, whose notorious profanity and aggression masked a 'deeply religious' outlook that combined High Church Episcopalianism with a belief in reincarnation.93 In 1944, for example, Eisenhower assured the Serviceman's Christian League that: The Allied soldier sees himself as a defender of those great precepts of humanitarianism preached by Christ and exemplified in the way of life for which all true democracies stand. He sees this conflict as a war between greed and selfishness and love of power today typified in Nazism, Fascism and Shintoism.94

In this respect, Patton's finest hour came as commander of Third Army in December 1944 when he obtained a seemingly effective prayer for fair weather from its senior chaplain, who thus became 'the only U.S. Army chaplain ever decorated with the Bronze Star for writing a prayer'. 95 However, the British and Canadians were not to be outshone in leading generals who stressed the importance of religion as part of a new and populist style of command. The flamboyant if notoriously egotistical Bernard Law Montgomery (the son of a bishop and the elder brother of an army chaplain) was fulsome in his praise of padres and emphatic about their importance in modern warfare, even declaring that 'I would as soon think of going into battle without my artillery as without my Chaplains'.96 While other British generals were also liable to invoke or to attest the aid of the Almighty (among them Harold Alexander, Kenneth Anderson, William Dobbie and Orde Wingate),97 a similar situation existed among the Canadians. As their commander in Europe, Lieutenant-General Andrew McNaughton was the principal sponsor of padre's hour in the Canadian army and was observably punctilious in his attendance at church.9* Similarly, Charles Foulkes, who commanded the Second Canadian Infantry Division in Normandy and the First Canadian Corps in Italy and northwest Europe, was a firm supporter of Canadian chaplains and viewed the war as a 'life and death struggle for our free democratic way of life, which has its basis in the Christian Revelation'.99 Given the mood of the times and the need to boost morale, the Allied soldier was liable to be depicted as a new crusader. While in North Africa in 1943 Patton

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assured his largely untried soldiers that, although their German adversary was 'a war-trained veteran', his defeat was a foregone conclusion: 'We are brave. We are better equipped, better fed, and in the place of his blood-glutted Woten, we have with us the God of Our Fathers Known of Old'.100 While Eisenhower slipped comfortably into a crusader's mantle,101 his most celebrated wartime ascription of this status to those under his command came on D-Day itself when, in a public message to the Allied Expeditionary Force, he described the invasion as 'a great crusade' and called for 'the blessing of almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking'.102 Naturally, his British allies also made attempts to inspire their soldiers with a similar sense of exalted purpose, using the term 'Crusader' to name a tank, a soldiers' magazine and even the offensive that relieved the Libyan port of Tobruk in November 1941; indeed, a range of new insignia was devised that incorporated the motif of the crusader's cross.103 Nine days after the cross-Channel invasion, F.L. Hughes, Montgomery's senior and most trusted chaplain, even claimed on the BBC that: 'Many, many thousands of men [had gone] forth for righteousness' sake and for no other reason.'104 However, the evidence suggests that a crusading identity was far more commonly ascribed than actually felt. While that from the British army is anecdotal (and chiefly concerns the wariness with which British soldiers treated crusading rhetoric by the latter part of the war)105 American sources are characteristically more precise. In 1943, for example, and 'at a time when government information agencies had been trying to popularise the "Four Freedoms" concept of war aims' (which included the freedom of religion), a survey of more than 3,000 soldiers in the United States found that 'over a third ... had never even heard of the Four Freedoms' and that 'only 13 per cent could name three or four of them'.106 The survey concluded that 'beyond acceptance of the war as a necessity forced upon the United States by an aggressor, there was little support of attempts to give the war meaning in terms of principles and causes involved, and little apparent desire for such formulations'.107 Besides plain ignorance and basic indifference, an obvious reason why Allied soldiers found such rhetoric and ascriptions unconvincing was because their experience of war and of military service was so often antithetical to those moral standards in civilian society that were usually identified with the good Christian life. Naturally, the elemental savagery of war was all too apparent to front-line soldiers. While the ground war against Germany was brutal enough, the war against Japan was routinely pitiless. If Japanese skulls were often treated as trophies by American servicemen in the Pacific,108 by the end of the war the animus against their Japanese enemy was equally strong among the British in Burma. As one British soldier remembered: 'Very few of us, whether professional soldier or conscript or volunteer, felt any twinges of remorse when one either saw a dead Japanese or killed a live one ... We had, after all, spent the whole war learning how to kill the enemy - and he us. No one expected any mercy.'109 However, much more widely felt were the moral pitfalls of army life and of an existence beyond the confines and restraints of home. Profanity, drunkenness and promiscuity were endemic and there was a worrying incidence of petty crime. While looting was

rife in Germany in particular, a surprising number of Eisenhower's crusaders had a disconcerting habit of helping themselves to church plate across northwest Europe, sacrilege that British and American chaplains were at pains to prevent.110 However, given the material riches of the armies and the relative poverty and even destitution of civilian populations, pilfering and racketeering also flourished.111 If Naples acquired notoriety as a latter-day Sodom, after the defeat of Germany British chaplains voiced fears that the conduct of the victors in the British zone of occupation was jeopardising the projected rechristianisation of German society.112 While the rampant exploitation of many vulnerable women (and, less commonly, rape) also marked the path of the liberators in Italy and northwest Europe,113 prostitution greatly exacerbated the problem of venereal disease in almost every theatre of war, an affliction that served to deprive the armies of much-needed manpower and which said little for the moral state of army life. As the churches viewed the issue as 'a moral problem with medical implications' rather than the reverse,114 the chaplains' stand for fidelity, purity and self-control was generally at odds with the more pragmatic approach of the military authorities, who usually sought to combat VD through a combination of moral suasion, sex education, free contraceptives and punitive sanctions against the infected (nor, indeed, was the discreet regulation of brothels entirely unknown).115 Notwithstanding these symptoms of the wholesale erosion of civilian moral standards, the experience of war did not serve as a major secularising agent for service personnel. Contemporary surveys conducted by Mass-Observation show that the war had a more positive impact than otherwise on religious attitudes and practices among British civilians.116 While a Mass-Observation survey from 1941 shows that this pattern was also reflected in the Royal Air Force,117 comparable evidence is lacking for the soldiers of the British army. Nevertheless, a similar reaction was identified among their American counterparts. Central to understanding this phenomenon is the fact that the great majority of American soldiers 'remained emphatically civilians at heart', seeing their years in uniform as a more or less unwelcome and disruptive aberration.118 If fundamentally civilian, their underlying attitudes were also strongly traditional, the 'surprisingly conservative' views of America's 16 to 24 year olds being one of the keynote findings of a Gallup poll published in October 1940, just after the passage of the Selective Service Act.119 Despite the degree of moral delinquency produced by wartime conditions, the tenacity of this conservative outlook among American soldiers was reflected in their overweening attachment to home and in their idealisation of virtuous womanhood. Largely due to the wild and salacious rumours that surrounded the organisation, army censors found that male soldiers were universally opposed to wives, girlfriends or female relations joining the Women's Army Corps.120 Representative 'soldier comments' included 'I want to come home to the girl I remember' and 'The service is no place for a woman. A woman's place is in the home'.121 Furthermore, surveys established that the American soldier's favourite female icon of the war was not the muscular and independent Rosie the Riveter but Greer Garson's Mrs. Miniver

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(1942), Hollywood's conventionally religious, middle-class English housewife who sustained family life amid the turbulence of the home front.122 A telling insight into the general character of America's soldiers during the Second World War is provided by their levels of religious practice in civilian life and in their attitudes towards religion in general. Surveys conducted in 1943^44 established that 68 per cent of the army's wartime recruits attended church at least once a month prior to joining the army, 16 per cent attended at least 'Several times a year' and only 16 per cent 'Almost never'. If there was little variation according to education or marital status, those who went to church at least 'two or three times a month' were strongly represented among the army's younger soldiers; while this applied to only 45 per cent of those aged over 30, it applied to 58 per cent of those aged 20 to 24 and to 71 per cent of those aged under 20.123 Furthermore, in all three armies there was an overwhelming sense of affi liation to one religious tradition or another. While levels of affiliation in the British army may have been boosted by the unofficial penalties that were inflicted on atheists and other awkward minorities for not attending church parade on Sundays (in 1942 more than 99 per cent of British soldiers claimed to belong to the army's eight largest denominations)124 these sanctions did not apply in the United States army. Nevertheless, it was still estimated that 95 per cent of all American soldiers identified themselves as Protestant, Catholic or Jewish (likewise, of recruits for the navy it was said that 'not one in a thousand' were professing atheists).125 If the voluntary nature of church attendance, the availability of civilian churches and specific denominational loyalties among Protestants made it hard for chaplains to gauge levels of churchgoing among soldiers stationed in the United States,126 the comparative religiosity of American soldiers (as instanced by large turnouts for voluntary services) occasioned favourable comment in Great Britain and in Europe, where the weakness of the churches' hold over young men was a salient feature of the religious landscape.127 Nevertheless, and despite additional evidence of large numbers of vocations to the ministry and priesthood among military personnel,l2K American churchmen still raised fears about the negative impact of the war experience. In December 1943, for example, Dr. Daniel Poling, editor of the Christian Herald and president of the World Christian Endeavor Union, expressed grave concern over the' overwhelming indifference to organised religion' which he had detected on his travels overseas.129 Moreover, and according to an army survey conducted in December 1945, 30 per cent of all enlisted men 'with combat experience' and 35 per cent of those without believed that their stint in the army had left them 'less religious' (the figures for those who felt 'more religious' were 29 per cent and 23 per cent respectively).130 However, the wider context suggests that these sentiments were induced by factors such as the weakening of church ties, or perhaps a sense of moral failure, as belief in God seems to have been overwhelmingly strengthened by the experience of war. According to the same survey, 79 per cent of men with combat experience and 54 per cent of those without felt that their experiences had 'increased faith in

God' whereas those who felt the reverse amounted to only 19 per cent and 17 per cent respectively.131 Such evidence lends some substance to the wartime claim that 'There are no atheists in foxholes', an aphorism attributed to the United States army chaplain William T. Cummings.132 If it was also claimed that 'there are no atheists among aviators',133 there can be little doubt that the prospect or experience of combat usually served to heighten religious awareness and quicken the religious pulse. Despite a common animus against church parades, a wealth of anecdotal evidence indicates that British front-line chaplains in northwest Europe had few problems in attracting willing congregations to their voluntary services,134 the same being true of the Canadians. For example, the number of Catholic communicants in the Second Canadian Infantry Division quadrupled between April and September 1944 while the number of confessions doubled, patterns that bear testimony to its preparations for, and experience of, the Normandy campaign.135 Among the Americans, similar patterns prevailed. A census of church services in the Thirtyfourth Infantry Division on a Sunday prior to an attack in Tunisia in April 1943 showed that some 7,000 men - almost half the division - were present; at around the same time, soldiers of this division also purchased life insurance worth $26 million.136 While 'fox hole religion' was liable to be dismissed by rigorists as craven and self-centred (one British soldier admitted praying 'Oh, God, don't let me die yet. I promise that I will always be good if you let me live')137 there can be little doubt as to its diverse origins as a phenomenon, its ubiquity or its value as a coping mechanism. One American infantry officer tellingly remarked that: Many [soldiers] were devout with deep religious roots - others could trace their religious conviction to the same time they heard their first German artillery. But no matter what their religion, almost all were closer to God than they had been for years ... The religion of the foxholes was a serious matter to all of us, and no man hid his piety.138

The accuracy of this statement is corroborated by surveys carried out in 1944 among the men of four American infantry divisions in the Pacific and among four other infantry divisions in Italy in 1945. In both contexts, prayer was shown to be the most common source of support for enlisted men 'when the going was tough', being cited by 70 per cent of soldiers in the Pacific and 83 per cent of those in Italy. Among the latter prayer proved to be of greatest help among those who had most exposure to action; no less than 84 per cent of privates and 88 per cent of noncommissioned officers who had seen more than nine months of combat agreed that prayer had 'helped a lot'.139 Significantly, this reaction to prolonged danger and hardship may also help to explain the religious susceptibilities of many Allied prisoners of war, especially those in Japanese hands or in German captivity as conditions worsened towards the end of the war in Europe. Both contexts proved to be fertile ground for local religious revivals, some of which savoured of acts of

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resistance, especially among Jewish prisoners of war in German hands and British prisoners of war in Japanese camps, where a remarkable number of makeshift chapels dedicated to St. George were in evidence.140 Inevitably, what fuelled suspicion of 'fox hole religion' and its symptoms were those myriad manifestations of other personal coping mechanisms such as fatalism or a belief in luck or in talismans. The eclecticism of the combat soldier in this respect was highlighted by a study entitled The American Soldier, which was published in 1947 under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council: Many magical or semimagical practices have been reported among combat men. Men might carry protective amulets or good-luck charms, some of which had a religious symbolism and some of which did not: a cross, a Bible, a rabbit's foot, a medal. They might carry out prebattle preparations in a fixed, 'ritual' order. They might jealously keep articles of clothing or equipment which were associated with some past experience of escape from danger. They might scrupulously avoid actions regarded as unlucky (some with implicit rational grounds): 'three on a match', or saying 'My number is about up.' Among fatalistic beliefs expressed in the talk of combat men were such things as: you will not be killed until 'your time has come'; 'it's all a matter of luck'; and a man is 'using up his chances.' 141

While the pragmatic quality of this eclecticism was epitomised by the popularity of steel-plated pocket Bibles among American soldiers,142 British and Canadian evidence points to an identical situation. In addition to various secular artefacts, rosaries and miraculous medals were widely carried or worn by Protestant soldiers (a tendency that greatly complicated field burials) and a comprehensive post-war survey of English society and culture deduced that, during the war years, 'roughly one serving man or woman in three had his or her private means of solid magic'. The domestic provenance of many if not most talismans was implied by the fact that those most likely to make use of them were 'married men aged 25 to 34'.143 Clearly, and if only on the basis of the limited evidence discussed in this chapter, the Second World War was very far from being the 'notably secular affair' perceived by Paul Fussell. Despite the secular tone of the American constitution, the United States army in the Second World War was the largest army ever produced by a western Christian society and it was supported by the largest body of army chaplains ever assembled, by the massive and co-ordinated efforts of numerous religious organisations, by an unprecedented state-sponsored dissemination of religious literature and by a church-building programme whose scale and momentum has few parallels in the history of western Christianity. While the smaller British and Canadian armies were also lavishly supported by chaplains, religious welfare bodies, religious broadcasting and religious literature, in addition to being bound by military custom to regular religious observance they also generated the largest programme of adult religious education in their national histories. However, if chaplains and other representatives of organised religion played a key role in

supporting soldiers' morale on and off the battlefield, it seems equally clear that, despite the exhortations of their commanders and others, religious ideals seldom served to motivate soldiers to fight. Nevertheless, evidence from across the United States, British and Canadian armies suggests that religion very often proved to be a critical source of personal support, especially in times of crisis. Furthermore, American sources (which are exceptional in their completeness) also demonstrate that the experience of war had an overall tendency to deepen belief in God, to heighten faith in the power of prayer and to reinforce conservative moral values - even as soldiers themselves felt that their military service and the innate brutality of war weakened existing religious ties and compromised normal moral standards. In other words, it would seem that the soldiers of the United States, British and Canadian armies were exposed to an institutional process of rechristianisation during the Second World War, a process that was widely reinforced by a deepening of religious faith at a personal level. If so, the implications of this situation for the religious history of the post-war years are highly significant. By the late summer of 1945, more than eight million American, three million British and three quarters of a million Canadian soldiers looked forward to their return to civilian life. With a raft of fi nancial and educational schemes at their disposal in all three countries, these comparatively young and upwardly mobile returnees were ideally placed to reinforce a religious revival that was stirring in the war years and which was to mark all three societies until the religious ferment of the 1960s.

Notes 1

P. Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford, 1989), p. 51. 2 Ibid., p. 166. 3 See A. Chandler, 'Catholicism and Protestantism in the Second World War in Europe', in H. McLeod ed., The Cambridge History of Christianity Volume 9: World Christianities c. 1914-c. 2000 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 262-84. 4 See, for example, A. Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform? Warf Peace and the English Churches {London, 1986); A.J. Hoover, God, Britain, and Hitler in World War II (Westport, 1999); G. Sittser, A Cautious Patriotism: The American Churches and the Second World War (Chapel Hill, 1997); R. Gushwa, The Bestand Worst of Times: The United States Army Chaplaincy 1920-1945 (Honolulu, 2004); D.F. Crosby, Battlefield Chaplains: Catholic Priests in World War II (Lawrence, 1994); A. Robinson, Chaplains at War: The Role of Clergymen during World War //(London, 2008); M.F. Snape, The Royal Army Chaplains1 Department 1996-1953: Clergy Under Fire (Woodbridge, 2008), 261-340; T. Hamilton, '"Padres Under Fire": A Study of the Canadian Chaplain Services (Protestant and Roman Catholic) in the Second World War' (University of Toronto PhD, 2003); Y. Pelletier, 'Faith on the Battlefield: Canada's Catholic Chaplaincy Service during the Second World War', Historical Studies, 69 (2003): pp. 64-84. 5 R. Pierard, 'Christianity Outside North America', in L.E. Lee ed., World War II in Asia and the Pacific and the Wars Aftermath, with General Themes (Westport, 1998),

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p. 378. For the British Experience see S. Parker, Faith on the Home Front: Aspects of Church Life and Popular Religion in Birmingham, 1939-1945 (Bern, 2006); M. Snape, God and the British Soldier: Religion and the British Army in the First and Second World Wars (London, 2005); M. Snape and S. Parker, 'Keeping Faith and Coping: Belief, Popular Religiosity and the British People', in P. Liddle, J. Bourne and I. Whitehead eds, The Great War 1914-1945 Volume 2: The People s Experience (London, 2001), pp. 397-419; C. Field, 'Puzzled People Revisited: Religious Believing and Belonging in Wartime Britain, 1939— 45', Twentieth Century British Histoiy, vol. 19 (2008): pp. 445-79. 6

See, for example, J. Gardiner, Wartime: Britain 1939-1945 (London, 2004); D.M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford, 2005). 7 R.T. Handy, 'The American Religious Depression, 1925-1935', Church Histoiy, vol. 29 (1960), pp. 3-16; C. McDannell, 'Christianity in the United States during the InterWar Years', in McLeod ed., World Christianities, pp. 236-51; R. Currie, A. Gilbert and L. Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 30-31, 88-9; S. Mews, 'Religious Life Between the Wars, 19201940' in S. Gilley and W.J. Sheils eds, A History of Religion in Britain (Oxford, 1994), pp. 449-66; B. Clarke, 'English-Speaking Canada from 1854', in T. Murphy and R. Perin eds, A Concise History of Christianity in Canada (Toronto, 1996), pp. 340^48. 8

D. Kirby, 'The Cold War', in McLeod ed., World Christianities, pp. 297-9; C.G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow, 2006), pp. 177-223; H. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), pp. 34-42; Clarke, 'EnglishSpeaking Canada', pp. 355-6. 9 H. McLeod, 'Religion in the United States and Europe', in H. Lehmann ed., Transatlantische Religionsgeschichte 18. bis 20 Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 131—45. 10 Fusseil, Wartime, pp. 129-31; R. Mitchell, 'The Gl in Europe and the American Military Tradition', in P. Addison and A. Calder eds, Time To Kill: The Soldier s Experience of War in the West 1939-1945 (London, 1997), p. 311. 11 J. Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (London, 1993), pp. 157-8. 12 www.history.army.mil Department of Defense, 'Principal Wars in which the United States Participated. U.S. Military Personnel Serving and Casualties' accessed 10 March 2009. 13 Ellis, Sharp End, p. 158; S.E. Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers (New York, 1997), pp. 273, 280-83. 14 Ellis, Sharp End, p. 158; D. French, Raising Churchills Army: The British Army and the War Against Germany 1919-1945 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 154-5. 15 J. Bouchery, The Canadian Soldier in Northwest Europe, 1944-1945 (Paris, 2007), pp. 12-14, 158;T.Copp, Cinderella Army: The Canadians in Northwest Europe 1944-1945 (Toronto, 2006), p. 309; T. Copp, "'If This War Isn't Over, And Pretty Damn Soon, There'll Be Nobody Left, In This Old Platoon ...": First Canadian Army, February-March 1945' in Addison and Calder eds, Time To Kill, pp. 147-58. 16 G.F. Linderman, The World Within War: Americas Combat Experience in World War II (New York, 1997), pp. 300-303; L. Kennett, G.I The American Soldier in World War II (Norman, 1997), pp. 72-5. 17 Gardiner, Wartime, p. 97; D. Fraser, And We Shall Shock Them: The British Army in the Second World War (London, 1983), p. 105.

18

Gardiner, Wartime, pp. 97-8; J. Costello, Love, Sex and War: Changing Values, 1939-45 (London, 1985), p. 275. 19 J.W. Jeffries, Wartime America (New York, 1996), p. 89; J.A. Keshen, Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada s Second World War (Vancouver, 2004), pp. 121, 123, 267. 20 R. Holmes, Firing Line (London, 1994), pp. 212-13; N. Davies, Europe At War 1939-1945 (London, 2006), pp. 233-4; D. German, Tress Censorship and the Terrace Mutiny: A Case Study in Second World War Information Management', Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 31 (1996-97): pp. 124—42. 21 J.W. Chambers II ed., The Oxford Companion to American Military History (Oxford, 1999), p. 212; Ellis, Sharp End, p. 244; Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers, pp. 342-4. 22 R.H. Ahrenfeldt, Psychiatry in the British Army in the Second World War (London, 1958), p. 273; R. Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy 1943-1944 (New York, 2007), p. 508; Fraser, We Shall Shock Them, p. 276. 23 Ellis, Sharp End, p. 244; I.C.B. Dear and M.R.D. Foot eds, The Oxford Companion to the Second World War (Oxford, 1995), p. 297; Fraser, We Shall Shock Them, p. 107. 24 Fussell, Wartime, p. 151; Fraser, We Shall Shock Them, pp. 106-7. 25 D. French, 'Discipline and the Death Penalty in the British Army in the War against Germany during the Second World War', Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 33 (1998), p. 535; Holmes, Firing Line, p. 339; Fraser, We Shall Shock Them, p. 106; Ellis, Sharp End, p. 243; Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers, pp. 343-4. 26 R. Overy, Why the Allies Won (London, 1985), p. 283. 27 D.L. Bergen, '"Germany is Our Mission-Christ Is Our Strength!" The Wehrmacht Chaplaincy and the "German Christian" Movement', Church History, vol. 66 (1997), pp. 522-36; D.L. Bergen, 'German Military Chaplains in World War II and the Dilemmas of Legitimacy', Church History, vol. 70 (2001), pp. 232-47. 2 * Dear and Foot eds, Oxford Companion, p. 468; Bergen, German Military Chaplains, pp. 233—4; General Board, 'The Army Chaplain in the European Theatre' (1945), Appendix 11. 29 'The Army Chaplain', pp. 67-8. 30 Sittser, Cautious Patriotism, p. 156; Gushwa, Best and Worst of Times, pp. 97-8. 31 Sittser, Cautious Patriotism, pp. 162—4. 32 Ibid., pp. 160-61; R.J. Honeywell, Chaplains of the United States Army (Washington, 1958), pp. 215-17; U. Lee, United States Army in World War II Special Studies: The Employment of Negro Troops (Washington, 1966), p. 227. 33 Honeywell, Chaplains, pp. 215-17; Crosby, Battlefield Chaplains, p. 10. 34 Snape, Royal Army Chaplains'Department, p. 9; Hamilton, "'Padres Under Fire"', p. 158. 35 D. Chandler ed., The D-Day Encyclopaedia (Oxford, 1994), p. 150; 'The Army Chaplain', Appendix 11. 36 Gushwa, Best and Worst of Times, pp. 175-7. 37 Snape, God and the British Soldier, pp. 139-42; W.T. Steven, In This Sign (Toronto, 1948), pp. 49-52; Gushwa, Bestand Worst of Times, p. 122; 'The Army Chaplain', pp. 41, 47-8. 3 * Steven, In This Sign, p. 50. 39 Snape, God and the British Soldier, pp. 123-4; Snape, Royal Army Chaplains' Department, pp. 310-11; Steven, In This Sign, pp. 39—44. 40 Lambeth Palace Library, London, Temple Papers, vol. 51, p. 366.

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Bergen, German Military Chaplains, p. 242. Snape, Royal Army Chaplains9Department, pp. 299-301; Gushwa, Best and Worst of Times, pp. 147-51; Hamilton, '"Padres Under Fire"', pp. 304-14. 43 Snape, God and the British Soldier, p. 137; P Howson, 'Deaths Among Army Chaplains, 1939-1946', Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, vol. 85 (2007): pp. 162-72; Gushwa, Bestand Worst of Times, p. 141. 44 Snape, Royal Army Chaplains'Department, p. 302. 45 Atkinson, Day of Battle, p. 253; Crosby, Battlefield Chaplains, pp. 95-6, 103-6, 108-9. 46 J. Crang, The British Army and the Peoples Wart 1939-1945 (Manchester, 2000), pp. 90-93. 47 Snape, Royal Army Chaplains'Department, p. 329. 48 A.G. Mclver, 'The Church and the Soldier', Life and Work, 136 (April 1941): p. 79. 49 Steven, In This Sign, p 35. 50 Ibid., pp. 46-7. 51 Honeywell, Chaplains, p. 295. 52 D.B. Jorgensen, The Service of Chaplains to Army Air Units 1917-1946 (Washington, 1961), p. 196. 53 Ibid., pp. 56, 66. 54 The Times, 2 April 1946, p. 5. 55 Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, p. 196. 56 Bouchery, Canadian Soldier, p. 107; V. Billiet and R. Le Chantoux, 'Les Aumoniers de l'Armee de terre Britannique en 1939-1945', Militaria Magazine, 239 (June 2005): p. 28. 57 Snape, God and the British Soldier, pp. 146-7; Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers, p. 484; R. Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War In North Africa, 1942-1943 (London, 2003), p. 356. 58 Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers, p. 211. 59 Honeywell, Chaplains, p. 293. Similar concessions had been granted to Catholic chaplains in the British army in April 1944. RAChD Archive (Roman Catholic), Bulford Camp, Box 3, 'The Campaign in North West Europe. R.C. Chaplaincy Services', Appendix. 60 'The Army Chaplain', p. 58. 61 Snape, Royal Army Chaplains1 Department, pp. 312-14. 62 Ibid., p. 312; 'The Army Chaplain', p. 58. 63 Gushwa, Best and Worst of Times, pp. 106-7. 64 Ibid., 113; Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, p. 237. 65 Gushwa, Best and Worst of Times, pp. 113-16; Honeywell, Chaplains, pp. 264—6. 66 Y. Pelletier, 'Fighting for the Chaplains: Bishop Charles Leo Nelligan and the Creation of the Canadian Chaplain Service (Roman Catholic), 1939-1945', Historical Studies, vol. 72 (2006), pp. 115-16; Steven, In This Sign, p. 148. 67 Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, pp. 242-8; F.L. Hughes, The Chaplains of the Grand Assault (n.p., 1944), p. 26; RAChD Archive (Roman Catholic), 'Campaign in North West Europe', p. 15. 68 Snape, God and the British Soldier, 22 7; Snape, Royal Army Chaplains'Department, Illustration 29. 42

69

M. Snape, The Redcoat and Religion (London, 2005), p. 95; Bouchery, Canadian Soldier, p. 34. 70 Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, p. 256. 71 Honeywell, Chaplains, p. 261. 72 Ibid., p. 261; Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, p. 257. 73 Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, p. 258. 74 Ibid., pp. 255-6. 75 Keshen, Saints, Sinners, aw/ Soldiers, pp. 27-9. 76 Snape, God aw/ f/ze British Soldier, pp. 222-6. 77 Chambers ed., Oxford Companion to American Military History, p. 745. 78 Sittser, Cautious Patriotism, pp. 154-6. 79 www.travelersaid.org accessed 23 February 2009; Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, pp. 199 and 207; www.uso.org accessed 8 April 2009. 80 S. Mews, 'The Sword of the Spirit: A Catholic Cultural Crusade of 1940', in W. Sheils ed., 'The Church and War', Studies in Church History, vol. 20 (1983), pp. 409-30; Sittser, Cautious Patriotism, p. 105; Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, p. 211. 81 Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, p. 211; 'The Army Chaplain', pp. 59, 68-9. 82 Gushwa, itesf aw/ Worst of Times, pp. 171-2. 83 Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, p. 258. 84 'The Army Chaplain', p. 78. 85 M. Hastings, Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy 1944 (London, 1999), p. 417; Chandler ed., D-Day Encyclopaedia, p. 149. 86 F.J. Spellman, 'Like Crusaders of Old', in E.C. Nance ed., Faith of Our Fighters (St. Louis, 1944), p. 247; Crosby, Battlefield Chaplains, pp. 140, 144-5. 87 Dear and Foot eds, Oxford Companion, pp. 5-8. 88 Gushwa, Best and Worst of Times, p. 174; www.ead.diglib.ku.edu/xml/ksrl. kc.greggjohna.html accessed 25 February 2009. 89 Atkinson, Army at Dawn, p. 486. 90 Fussell, Wartime, pp. 159-61. 91 W.L. Stidger, 'General Marshall - He Speaks Our Language', in Nance ed., Faith of Our Fighters, p. 189. 92 Ibid., p. 191. 93 E.C. Nance, 'Vital Faith Revealed in Letters and Reports from Combat Zones', in Nance ed., Faith of Our Fighters, pp. 206-7; Atkinson, Day of Battle, p. 172, 182-3, 267, 376; Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, pp. 180, 277; Crosby, Battlefield Chaplains, p. 191; W.L. Stidger, 'General MacArthur - A God's Book Man', in Nance ed., Faith of Our Fighters, p. 193; Atkinson, Army at Dawn, p. 402; C. D'Este, Patton: A Genius for War (New York, 1996), pp. 2-3; M. Blumenson, The Patton Papers, 1940-1945 (Boston, 1974), p. 266. 94 Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, p. 96. 95 D'Este, Patton, pp. 685-8; G.S. Patton, War As I Knew It (Boston, 1947), 184-6. 96 N. Hamilton, Monty: The Field Marshal 1944-1976 (London, 1986), p. 804. 97 Snape, God and the British Soldier, 76-82; M. Parker, Monte Cassino (London, 2003), p. 305; Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, pp. 276-7.

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Steven, In This Sign, p. 40; W.E, Smith, What Time the Tempest (Toronto, 1953), pp. 99-100. 99 Dear and Foot eds, Oxford Companion, p. 391; Steven, In This Sign, pp. ix, 57. 100 Atkinson, Army at Dawn, p. 433. 101 Ibid., pp. 465-6. 102 J. Gardiner, D-Day (London, 1994), p. 180. 103 Snape, God and the British Soldier, p. 184; H. Cole, Formation Badges of World War Two - Britain, Commonwealth and Empire (London, 1985), pp. 16, 23^4. 104 Chandler ed., D-Day Encyclopaedia, p. 149. 105 Snape, God and the British Soldier, p. 185. 106 S.A. Stouffer, The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life (Princeton, 1949), p. 433, Table 2 p. 436. 107 Ibid., p. 433. 108 Fussell, Wartime, pp. 116-17; Linderman, World Within War, pp. 181-3. 109 M. Hastings, Nemesis: The Battle for Japan (London, 2007), p. 349. 110 'The Army Chaplain', pp. 89-90; RAChD Archive (Roman Catholic), 'Campaign in North West Europe', pp. 15, 24-5; R. Fellowes ed., Fragments of Battle (Matlock, n.d), p. 38. 111 112

Kennett, G./., pp. 200-205. Snape, Royal Army Chaplains' Department, p. 346; Parker, Monte Cassino, pp.

215-22. 113

Keshen, Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers, p. 254; Kennett, G./., pp. 203, 217-18; Costello, Love, Sex and War, pp. 142-6. 114 'The Army Chaplain', p. 36. 115 Ibid., pp. 35-6; Ellis, Sharp End, pp. 303-8; Davies, Europe At War, pp. 260-61, 341; Snape, Royal Army Chaplains'Department, pp. 326-9. 116 Snape and Parker, 'Keeping Faith and Coping', pp. 406-8. 117 Mass-Observation Archive, FR 622 'R.A.F. Trends' (March 1941). 1,8 Kennett, G./.,p. 72. 119 Ibid., p. 6. 120 M.E. Treadwell, United States Army in World War IISpecial Studies: The Women s Army Corps (Washington, 1954), pp. 207, 211. 121 Ibid., p. 213. 122 M.C.C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore, 1994), p. 70; Costello, Lovey Sex and War, pp. 105, 178-9, 183-4, 230-31. 123 Stouffer, The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life, p. 140. 124 The National Archives, Kew, WO 365/39 'The British Army - Religious Denominations'. 125 Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, p. 164; J.E. Johnson, 'The Faith and Practice of the Raw Recruit', in W.L. Sperry ed., Religion of Soldier and Sailor (Cambridge, 1945), p. 45. 126 Gushwa, Best and Worst of Times, p. 187. 127 Ibid., p. 164; 'The Army Chaplain', p. 48. 128 Jotgensen, Service of Chaplains, p. 282. 129 Ibid., p. 278. 130 S.A. Stouffer, American Soldier: Combat and its Aftermath (Princeton, 1949), p. 187. 131 Ibid.

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Crosby, Battlefield Chaplains, p. 26. Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, p. 289. 134 E. Gethyn-Jones, A Territorial Army Chaplain in Peace and War (East Wittering, 1988), pp. 106, 118-19; P. Delaforce, The Fighting Wessex Wyverns (Stroud, 2002), p. 40; P. Delaforce, Monty s Iron Sides (Stroud, 2001), p. 93; P. White, With the Jocks (Stroud, 2002), p. 153; J. Fraser McLuskey, Parachute Padre (Stevenage, 1997), pp. 78-80, 160-61. 135 W.F. Deedes, The Daily Telegraph, 5 July 2005, p. 22; Steven, In This Sign, pp. 89-90; Pelletier, 'Faith on the Battlefield', pp. 64-84. 136 Atkinson, Army at Dawn, p. 472. 137 W.D. Cleary, The Chaplain, in Sperry ed., Religion of Soldier and Sailor p. 79; E. Atkins, 'A Soldier's Second Thoughts', in Sperry ed., Religion of Soldier and Sailor pp. 102-3; Atkinson, Day of Battle, p. 525. 138 P.S. Kindsvatter, American Soldiers: Ground Combat in the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam (Lawrence, 2005), p. 114. 139 Stouffer, American Soldier: Combat and its Aftermath, pp. 176-7. 140 A. Gilbert, POW: Allied Prisoners in Europe, 1939-1945 (London, 2006), pp. 226-33; 'The Army Chaplain', pp. 85-6,88; Honeywell, Chaplains, pp. 278-81; Jorgensen, Service of Chaplains, pp. 280-81; Crosby, Battlefield Chaplains, pp. 166-7; Snape, God and the British Soldier, pp. 173-7. 141 Stouffer, American Soldier: Combat and its Aftermath, p. 188. 142 Fussell, Wartime, p. 234; Atkinson, Day of Battle, p. 62. 143 G. Gorer, Exploring English Character (London, 1955), p. 265; Fussell, Wartime, pp. 48-51; R. Trevelyan, The Fortress (London, 1985), pp. 24, 77-8; Snape, God and the British Soldier, p. 35; Smith, What Time the Tempest, p. 294; L.F. Wilmot, Through the Hitler Line (Waterloo, 2003), pp. 113-14. 133

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Chapter 10

Women and Religion in Britain: the Autobiographical View of the Fifties and Sixties Callum G. Brown

Karen Armstrong, the religious historian and autobiographer of her experience as a nun in the sixties, has written: 'During the 1960s religion had died in Britain, and church attendance plummeted. England was fast becoming one of the most secular countries in the world, topped only by the Netherlands.'1 Hugh McLeod has concluded of the'long 1960s'between 1958 and 1974: 'In the religious history of the West these years may come to be seen as marking a rupture as profound as that brought about by the Reformation.'2 He has pointed to the many different factors - from affluence to radicalism - that helped foment the dire circumstances for Christendom in the West in these years. One specific set of changes, those to sex and gender, have been an area of significant interest, including to McLeod and to the present author.3 Whilst I have looked elsewhere at evidence of demographic changes involving both men and women during this period,4 the present chapter explores what light a study of women's autobiographies might throw upon the tensions between religion and feminism in women's experiences of the period from 1945 to 1974. Some women's autobiographical accounts of feminist awakening in the sixties make scant reference to religion.5 However, similar accounts dealing with the origins of proto-feminist consciousness in the 1950s tend to talk far more about it, and usually in extremely negative ways.6 That change in treatment may in itself be indicative of the impact of feminist change upon the religious life of young women in the post-war years. More particularly, this change addresses one important feature - the linking of religious and feminist aspects to the emerging tension in the mother-daughter relationship, a tension which is such a prominent characteristic of many memoirs of these years. Women growing up in the fifties and sixties were coming of age at a moment of profound change in sexual and religious matters, and it emerged in a difficult family context.

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Knuckling Under The problems women faced emerged first from wartime experiences. The war's end brought a depression to many women whose role in war work was invariably taken from them at the peace. Finding a new role could be difficult if a woman failed to fit one of the traditional, narrowly-defined roles. After running a junk shop for charity in northwest England during the war, Nella Last wrote in her diary in June 1945: 'We never knew the happiness we brought to poor P.O.W.s, but could feel our work was worthwhile. I felt I was a soldier like my [son] Cliff - and we will be demobbed about the same time .... I can never go back to that harem existence my husband thinks so desirable. Barrow is strangely short of interest - constructive ones. I detest politics. I had enough of it years ago. I'm not a churchgoer, so work on Mothers' Unions - horrors! - is denied me.' 7 A dissonance was emerging between women's experience and longings, and the 'harem existence' of a married woman seemed hugely uninviting - though, it must be said, endured by probably hundreds of thousands of British women in the late 1940s and 1950s. Joan Bakewell later regretted not being more sensitive to her mother's depression in that period; a clever woman, her hopes for training and a career were denied her, leading to stress and frustration, and being labelled by her own daughter 'a difficult woman'. Bakewell notes that wives like her mother 'had no option but to accept the inevitability of a woman's lot'. 8 Daughters like her were later to feel guilt at being unable to recognise their mother's lot - one in which, between 1945 and 1960, the material circumstances of the age framed the cultural ones. Forbidden activities and consumption abounded for women. Bakewell recalled: I grew up i n a world where much was not allowed. A glimpse of stocking had only recently stopped being shocking. Low cleavage was still a daring thrill. Nudity on stage and in film, sexual description in novels, theatrical representations of God, Jesus Christ and any member of the royal family were absolutely not allowed. Almost anything on a Sunday was strictly forbidden. Laws and social disapproval saw to that.9

Denial by convention or by the state led to, and was meant to lead to, self denial. There was a reaction to the sexual licence of the war years when casual relationships had been formed, in part through American soldiers being 'over paid, over sexed and over here', and which had resulted in a surge of illegitimacy (which rose in England and Wales from 4.2 per cent in 1939 to a peak of 9.3 per cent in 1945).10 With the damaged veterans returning to damaged homes, it was woman who was in the moral firing line. The overweening determination to return to a pre-war 'normality' drove Britain into an 'age of austerity' that impinged upon women's lives and identities in inter-locking material and moral dimensions. One result was that illegitimacy was driven down again (to 4.7 per cent by 1954). But the

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economic austerity of the post-war years, caused by national indebtedness to the USA and the shortages resulting, also impacted most directly on women. Rationing from the mid forties to the mid fifties was the daily beast faced by women, causing a daily drudgery of queuing for scarce supplies, of eking out food and clothing, and of juggling competing demands for a variety of goods and services. No matter that this was a period of low unemployment and steady income levels, the ability to spend was limited by the reduced availability of fashionable clothing, furniture, ribbons, threads and fabrics. In both economic and sexual terms, the return to peace impinged most deeply upon women. This made a woman's economic identity extremely important in the 1950s, a feature that struck Carolyn Steedman very forcibly. Her part-autobiography, parthistory book Landscape for a Good Woman showed how girls and women had until the mid-twentieth century displayed an economic understanding of their identity. But this vision of a woman's capacity for economic independence had been swept out of society for good social-welfare reasons and for the protection of children, but it left older women, like Steedman's own mother, misunderstood. Here lay the origin of Steedman's searing, guilt-ridden account of her mother's very difficult economic circumstances. 'Women are the final outsiders', she wrote.11 The same guilt came to Jenni Murray. In the midst of a contest with her mother over how a young girl should express her femininity in the 1950s and 60s, Murray seems to suggest the same sense of guilt in remembrance of how her mother's 'memories of her schooldays were equally heartbreaking tales of unimaginable poverty'.12 Economics had been a moral quality for a woman's identity, part of the discursive baggage of Victorian femininity that lingered so strongly into the era of rationing and post-war moral austerity. Post-war daughters recalled how material shortage in the forties and fifties confined the culture of youth generally, and a girl's femininity in particular. This was signified in the heavy emphasis on training and retraining women in 'keeping the house'. The BBC radio programme 'Woman's Hour' devoted a considerable quantity of its post-war output to this task: how to cook inviting food with limited material, items on 'How to choose a corset', and ways to improve doing the laundry. Rationing became a virtue; one speaker in 1946 told an estimated 4.6 million listeners that 'even before bread rationing made me think twice about every slice, I began to realise I was eating too much bread'. By 1947 the word 'shortage', it was said, was 'one of the most familiar, but least popular words in the English language', and until the end of rationing in the mid 1950s it was the bane of a woman's life.13 As Martha Kearney recalled: 'After the war, during which women had done so many traditionally male jobs, there was almost a fetish for housework.'14 This extended to Sunday schools. Sian Phillips in Wales recalls that she and other children laboured in Sunday school sessions over subjects like 'Everyday Life in the Time of Jesus, with Special reference to Cooking and Hygiene'.15 Even in religion, there was no escape from rationing culture. But the young girls of the decade did not accept this culture being impressed upon them by their mothers and others. Karen Armstrong recalled: 'Young Britons, like myself, who came to maturity in this twilight confusion of austerity,

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repression, nostalgia, frustration and denial, wanted not only a different world but to be changed themselves.'16 This willingness to resist involved rejecting their mothers' injunctions to submit, thus forming the recipe for tension, contest, guilt and later regret. Discipline and guilt are two of the most common words in women's recollections of the 1950s. Joan Bakewell reports how school lessons were 'formal and unquestioning': 'We sat in neat rows and took down "the facts" in notebooks, which we conned by heart and regurgitated for exams. Talking in class was a detention offence. The slightest step out of line was instantly jumped on. We grew up orthodox and conformist, but secretly seething with rebellion. That rebellion was to come out later in our lives - Witness the 1960s.'17 In adulthood, women continued to be made the object of so much scrutiny that guilt was the intended state of being. Sheila Hancock was reminded how, as a young actress in touring theatre in the late 1950s, people were very suspicious of actors - a profession long the object of evangelical scrutiny. Most towns, she reports, had a Watch Committee composed of local dignitaries keeping an eye on the company's behaviour; at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight they watched the actors 'lest our embraces on stage became too explicit', and formally complained to the theatre management that Hancock's shorts 'were too short for walking down the High Street'.18 At the heart of young women's sense of scrutiny lay the extraordinary effort put in by relatives to make them conform to quite a narrow conception of femininity. Jenni Murray's autobiography is centred round the leading efforts of her mother to make her daughter ladylike and respectable: 'It seems astonishing to me now that so much time could have been spent on keeping up appearances and trying to figure out how to feminise such a natural tomboy to fit the requirements of the 1950s female ideal.'19 Women's dress was an outer confirmation of conformity. One common observation is that by Martha Kearney: 'young men and women still dressed like their parents: the boys in suits and the girls in twinsets and sensible shoes'.20 It was not just that they were forced to do this; it was their aspiration. Two students at Glasgow Royal Technical College, Pat Fraser and Elizabeth McCudden, recalled the dress code of the late 1950s as a dark skirt with a blouse and a cardigan: 'We dressed like our mothers! We were terribly conservative.'21 In a similar vein in southern England, Karen Armstrong recalled: 'In the 50s, when I had grown up, young people had looked like miniature versions of their parents. Boys wore flannel trousers and ties; and girls were clad in demure twinsets and prim pearl necklaces. We were kept under fairly strict surveillance. I had been only seventeen years old when I had left this world, a product of convent schooling with an ingrained fear of sexuality. 522 Clothing coupons were only part of the cause of utility wear in the fifties: it was the cultural expectation that young girls wanted to dress and be like their mothers. Trousers or dungarees were out of the question for true conformity, as the actual wearing of the skirt demanded a unique performance of respectable femininity; Jenni Murray reports the instructions given: 'In a skirt it was always, "Sit down nicely. Don't cross your legs. It's not polite to sit with your knees apart. Only boys and bad girls would sit like that. Put your legs to one

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side when you sit and it's all right if you want to cross your ankles. That's quite dainty.'"23 Before getting to their later teens, girls dressed to exhibit their inner morality; failure to do so would instil a strong sense of guilt. Angela Carter set the tone when she wrote: T grew up in the fifties - that is, I was twenty in 1960, and, by God, I deserved what happened later on. It was tough, in the fifties, Girls wore white gloves.'24 In Carter's case, the Sunday-best dress of frilly frock and whitelace gloves is recalled with a horror that earlier generations of women did not share; indeed, Sunday-best dress was recalled by those growing up in the 1910s, 20s and 30s with great enthusiasm.25 But the fifties' generation were expected to be different. The fifties sought to recreate in the young an evangelical state of anxiety about worthiness. Sheila Rowbotham was sent by her father to a Methodist boarding school in North Yorkshire. 'We were meant to be pure as well as tough', she recalled of the school's cold dormitories. 'At school assembly tapers would be lit and passed round like a lamp of purity'. Even as a rebellious sixth-former there, she was intensely acculturated to guilt: 'Beneath my overt rejection of conventional morality, I continued to be haunted by the fear of condemnation, a fifties hang-over which remained powerful in I960.' 26 The power of guilt, indeed, was central to later feminist autobiography when recalling the 1950s. Its basis was laid in the fifties' culture. Valerie Walkerdine: 'The ordinariness of manners, or please-and-thank-you'd politeness, of being a nice girl, who went to the Brownies and Guides, and for whom the competitions in the annual Produce Association show provided one of the most exciting occasions of the year.'27 The 1950s was regarded by these young women and girls as a period when 'suburbanism' reached its highest expression, enjoyed by their parents after two world wars and economic depression, but who imposed on their offspring Sunday-school respectability, the Cubs' 'Bob-a-job-week' and the Brownie's 'Purpose Day'. 28 This could be intensely oppressive for young girls: 'I see now', wrote Carolyn Steedman thirty years later, 'the relentless laying down of guilt'.29 The guilt was greatest over pregnancy outside of wedlock. There were few, perhaps no, liberal institutions in 1950s Britain that would countenance this. Universities were hostile; a pregnant student was sent down or left before the shame erupted. At Glasgow's Royal College (shortly to be Strathclyde University) in the late 1950s, sexual relations were very few, but one 'more fashionable' student who 'had boyfriends' and 'went places at night', got pregnant, had to marry and 'caused a real stooshie'. Her fellow women students spoke of her with hushed tones: 'we all spoke about it with a low voice ... you only whispered it to your pal. You wouldn't have spoken about it to anyone else'.30 Through pregnancy women lost education, careers, prospects and respectability. In the mid 1960s, Janet Street-Porter feared loss of her student training as an architect and had a backstreet abortion.31 Many lost their families - both the child and their parents. One woman who experienced the ferocity of unmarried pregnancy was Lorna Sage who recalled the fifties as the period of 'post-war moral rearmament, with everyone conscripted to normality and standing to attention'.32 Sage was destined by family culture to early marriage,

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but she resisted in her mid teens, planning with her best friend to stay unmarried. Her scheme failed when she became pregnant at the age of 17, and faced the prospect of being sent by her parents to a Church of England Home for Unmarried Mothers: 'where you repented on your knees (scrubbed floors, said prayers), had your baby (which was promptly adopted by proper married people) and returned home humble and hollow-eyed. '33 Like Rowbotham at exactly the same time, Sage read Simone de Beauvoir and was self-radicalised, and pre-empted parental action in 1959 by getting married: It was an insult to matrimony. It was also shaming, it would make us look lumpen, real white trash, common as muck. On the other hand if we were bold enough to go to a magistrate for permission we'd probably get it, because I was pregnant and we weren't - they weren't - respectable or well-off enough for their objection to count. And the case would be in the Whitchurch Herald.34

Joan Bakewell also grew up in a world of sexual guilt. She felt a personal relationship to Jesus from early on. 'It was quite a personal matter, directly between myself and Him. I knew what He looked like from the picture on the wall at Sunday School, which we attended every week as routinely as we went daily to school.'35 She said prayers nightly kneeling either in the bedroom or living-room, and her mother listened to these and was the focus for the development of her sense of guilt. 'I knew that home, the Church and school all talked the same language of morality with absolute certainty, and much of it was directed at me.' 36 Though her parents were rarely churchgoers, she grew into a regular attendee as a teenager, becoming more and more serious. For her, church, home and school - 'the three presented a formidable array of pressure, overlapping and reinforcing the only values I knew'. And what she calls the 'combined fire-power' of the three institutions was directed 'with particular keenness and unanimity at one unambiguous target: sex'.37 And from that point on, her mother impressed a tremendous guilt over even the mildest and non-physical of relationships with boys, beginning with shaming her for a holiday romance: I didn't know what to do with the shame. I went upstairs, sat on the bed and stared out of the window for a long time. There were no tears, just shock. Suddenly I was savagely and tremblingly angry. All the judgements being passed, the controls inflicted, must be defied and defeated. I could assess as well as she what was good or bad, right or wrong. In all my childhood, that was the moment when I had a sense of growing, of my essence under pressure to change, and deciding to be myself. That was the end of innocence, not the loss of virginity or any fumbling that fell short of it. It was when I crossed into adulthood, knew my own mind and was sure of who I was.38

Despite this decisiveness, the guilt kept returning, induced by her mother with a frosty silence at various turns in her teenage and student years.

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Jenni Murray felt the same religious-framed inducement of sexual guilt from her mother who despised 'the selfishness or simple immorality' of the 'unmarried mother'. Jenni's mother was a 'believer in no sex before marriage and complete fidelity thereafter'. 39 Her mother's conceptions of traditional femininity did not rest on a strict personal religiosity, but, despite her father's atheism, her mother created a Christian culture that dominated their family home: 'I would not describe her as a religious woman - she always called herself loosely C of E, and never attended church except for occasions of hatch, match or dispatch, but she appeared to have absorbed with unquestioning faith God's diktat in Genesis chapter 3 to the wayward Eve.'40 The sense of religious-sexual guilt was strong for girls raised in the fifties and sixties in Roman Catholic schools and convent schools. Julie Walters was brought up in Birmingham by an austere Catholic mother, but it paled beside the violence and sheer terror induced by a regime of nuns at school; girls were struck with real violence for invented 'sins'. 41 The sense of guilt was greatest for some of the nuns themselves. Writing from her own personal experience, Karen Armstrong has written how before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council 'it had unfortunately become customary to train young nuns by making them excruciatingly aware of their failings'. 'This meant,' she went on, 'that most of us lived in a state of such acute anxiety and preoccupation with ourselves that a positive religious experience could become well nigh impossible.'42 Armstrong explained in a later autobiography of 2004 that her first autobiography of 1981 had concealed some of her frustration with religion during her seven years as a nun in the 1960s. Armstrong brought this out in her later work: she spoke about the way Christian authorities behaved in 'haranguing the faithful on their sexual lives, telling them what to believe, and what kind of contraception they could use.' Most of all, 'I was appalled by their attitude to women'. Through her later television programmes she spoke to, as well as of, the thousands of Christians who had been 'crippling their minds' by suppressing rebellious thoughts and dogmatic constraints. Release from such constraints had not come to all in the sixties, and there remained work to be done; for Armstrong herself, her own release from the convent in 1969 left indelible marks.43 This was the oppressive mental world that enveloped much - arguably the majority - of 1950s Britain. Young girls from all social classes were especially loaded with guilt and apprehension about sexual matters, even when they might know absolutely nothing about it. Indeed, this was the greatest, ironic way in which the guilt worked. What it was that the young woman was to have feelings of guilt about was 'unknown'. The religious woman was expected to be ignorant about sex, to be literally unknowing of the facts of life; to admit knowledge of them, even on the wedding night, was in itself a sign of unrespectability. This instilled a regime of anxiety and incomprehension amongst women in the mid-twentieth century 44 And this extended to knowledge of birth control and, according to historian Kate Fisher, distinctly hampered its use. Fisher's findings are easily related to the religious underpinnings of a woman's respectability; indeed, it is related to the

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very construction of gender itself in the period down to the 1950s. Women, she states, asserted their ignorance as a means of reinforcing their virtue.45 Talking of sex was about talking about 'it'. 46 Women's autobiographies recalling the 1940s and 1950s bear out strongly Michael Snape's conclusions elsewhere in this book on the strength of Christian religiosity amongst British troops at war's end. In Wales, Sian Phillips recalled: 'When I was a girl in the Forties, during and after the war, life was still chapeldriven', though she reports that it 'was becoming fashionable in "advanced" circles to sneer at non-conformism'. Her Sundays were spent reading 'improving' books: 'in an excess of zeal and virtue, [I] decided to read the whole of the Old Testament... I plunged ever deeper into the scarcely credible accounts of sex and violence among the tribes of Israel.' Her family environment was one in which knowledge of the bible, memorising chunks of the Old Testament, and reciting at Methodist chapel and Sunday school formed the cultural milieu.47 In a similar vein in London's King's Cross in the late thirties and early forties, Sheila Hancock attended a Catholic school, though she was not a Catholic, and 'learned my Catechism and all the rules and regulations like a good little child of the faith'. She also imbibed the Christian culture of the neighbourhood: 'Every Sunday morning I donned my best dress with matching apron, made by my mum, and collected a pint of winkles and shrimps for our tea from the barrow on the corner.... I lingered to sing jolly hymns with the Salvation Army band outside the pub, sometimes bashing a tambourine, and sat on the stoop with my fizzy lemonade and a bag of crisps with a twist of salt in blue paper inside.'48 Formal religious connection in the forties and fifties was, for most autobiographers canvassed in this study, surrounded with oppression and guilt. Child enrolment in Sunday schools was still quite high, and in some churches was growing significantly in the first ten years of peace after the war. Rich and poor, though taught in different ways, were still drilled in religion. David Profumo's mother, the actress Valerie Hobson, 'fiddled for much of her life between various wavelengths of Christianity', but saw the need to install a bible-spouting Christian governess with her seven-year-old son in 1963.49 London-raised Janet StreetPorter locates church connection in the midst of rising teenage schism with her parents. She, like many children of the post-war decades, was packed off with her sister to Sunday school so that her parents had time alone, possibly for sex as she speculates: 'We would put on our best overcoats and shoes, comb our hair and then walk down the road to the church. ... How I longed to be transported to the set of Dirk Bogarde's latest offering, instead of studying the good deeds of Jesus and his ruddy disciples. As I got older I loathed Sunday school.' It was in the sphere of organised religion that Street-Porter began her kick against authority, including her parents. She rebelled against Sunday school by skiving to the Science Museum to 'scour the galleries looking for boys to sneer at and shout at'. She went to the church junior and then youth clubs after school, where, from five to twelve years of age she attended parties in the church hall and seaside trips. She was confirmed aged twelve 'somewhat reluctantly (my parents insisted on it), and I never attended

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communion again'. 50 In her mid teens, her mother started to go to church and tried to get Janet to accompany her: 'I told her to forget it and there was a screaming row. Attending a church school, I had enough religion shoved down my throat all week, thanks a lot'.51 Here in the early 1960s, Street-Porter formulated her consolidated rebellion against religion, parental control and authority generally, and began her own sexual liberation in the early years of London's pop culture of The Rolling Stones.

How the Religious Mould was Broken In contrast to the remembrance of adult female sexual knowledge in the 1950s, much of the literature from the pens of 1960s' feminists gives the strong impression of the importance of sexual experimentation as the first bold step to breaking this mould, to shattering the encasement of discourses in which their mothers had been 'trapped'. This was not a straightforward thing. Sheila Rowbotham recalls that going to university made some differences, but not in the discursive sexual oppression. She wrote: By the end of my first year I had grasped that beneath the superficial resemblances between Methodist Hunmanby [Boarding School] and life in an Oxford women's college there were very significant differences. Methodist Hunmanby, preparing us for a life of moral witness had instilled the virtues of honesty: regardless of the consequences, you answered to your inner conscience. Ruling-class Oxford, in contrast, was based on getting round the rules; the crime was to be found out - especially if you were female. 52

Whilst Rowbotham found that the freedoms had not yet emerged in Oxford, Bakewell presents Cambridge as accommodating. She describes how in the early 1950s the students challenged the sexual rules, pushing back the boundaries of the permissible in women's roles (especially on the student stage), sexual activity and religious blasphemy. Oxford and Cambridge universities seem to have been extremely important centres of sexual learning and experimentation in the 1950s, and students like Rowbotham and Bakewell, coming from the North of England, found it to be a wholly different cultural environment for sex. This helps to explain the highly unusual evidence from Girton College, Cambridge, where, in 1950-54, 33 per cent of female students claimed to have had pre-marital sex (and 57 per cent by 1960 -61).53 Student sexual activity elsewhere was much less. Most students outwith Oxbridge lived at home with their parents, thus curtailing sexual experimentation. At the Royal College of Glasgow, rules made it like school; in some classes students sat alphabetically, while political campaigning was forbidden, and swearing was only allowed in the male-only beer bar of the Union. The small numbers of women students neither challenged the

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men nor sought sexual liaisons. Pat McCudden recalls there in the late 1950s: 'We were very accepting. We were there to be prepared for the world of work. And you work hard and then you get on with it and that was it. It would never have entered our head to kick and want to be with the boys, would it?' Sex might be on their minds, but there it stayed. With no sense of breaking the mould for most female students, male-female student cohabitation was, with few exceptions in that decade, out of the question. There is equally little evidence of the religious mould being broken in the 1950s. All the statistics of religious adherence show the 1950s to have experienced a rise in adherence per capita from the end of the war until 1956, and from then until 1962 only a minor downturn.54 From the sheer weight of personal testimony, the freedom of sexual liberation appears to have come for most much later - in the years from 1963 to 1970 with the arrival of pop culture, and for many with the arrival of the oral contraceptive pill for single women in 1968.55 For most students, going to university was by then a combination of sexual and religious liberation. Religious affiliation tumbled, and sexual activity shot up. At Sheffield University, church attendance amongst students crashed from 46 per cent in 1961 to 25 per cent in 1972 and 15 per cent in 1985, whilst sex outside marriage amongst 16-17 year old British girls rose from 15 per cent in 1964 to 58 per cent in 1974-75.56 Autobiography and oral testimony on the 1960s, certainly in published form, gives an impression of a massive outburst of sexual freedom - of multiple sexual partners, acceptance of nudity in public, accompanied by drugs, popular music and 'dropping out' from conventional lifestyles. A woman who broke the taboo about sexual knowledge, let alone sexual activity, was invariably doing so as part of a wider revolt against the gender stereotype - the discursive construction of the respectable woman. When Janet Street-Porter had sex with Jimmy, she was 'relieved I'd finally done "it"'; when next she saw her Mum, 'She could tell'. But, fitting Kate Fisher's analysis, her knowledge and use of contraception was lacking: 'my diaries of these years have joyful circles round that date each month when I got my period'.57 Eventually, in 1965, StreetPorter got pregnant and, unable to tell her parents, 'as we had never discussed sex at all', she describes in candid detail having an abortion for £25 on the edge of a woman's table.58 Street-Porter admits to having a 'totally childish attitude' to sex: 'I was totally amoral', she reports, sleeping with one student as a £5 bet with some of the boys in college.59 Her autobiography is one that conveys a strong sense of a conjunction of religious rebellion, rebellion against parents, sexual revolution and women's liberation as one seamless journey from the fifties into the 1960s. The association of sexual liberation with liberation from religion, evident in many British women's autobiographies of the long sixties, seems too strong to be overlooked. Routes to feminism invariably involved some encounter with religion, usually confrontational and rebellious, and often, too, sexual liberation in some guise or other. The degree of confrontation with religion varied; sometimes it was only a cultural confrontation with a parent, rather than directly with a church or belief as such. On applying to Hull University in the late 1960s, Jenni

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Murray had insisted on her application that 'I was pretty much a heathen, northern working class and smoked like a chimney'. On first arrival at her digs, she marked her liberation from her mother's version of femininity when she 'hitched up my skirt to make it even shorter', and put up a poster displaying a woman having an orgasm. Having learned how to get hold of contraception, Murray recalled, 'We generally had a ball.' 60 And she makes clear that it was the 'women's movement that changed everything for my generation', led by readings in Female Eunuch (1970) and Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973).61 This confluence of sexuality, feminism and an a-religious lifestyle recurs frequently. At the same time as Sheila Hancock became a feminist around 1970 (strongly influenced by a personal acquaintance with Germaine Greer), she moved from Christianity to what she called 'a new humanist approach' which 'demanded I relinquish hope of divine intervention and do it myself'. Part of this process, she acknowledges in almost the same breath, was an element of sexual liberation: 'I loved the idea of promiscuity but was hopeless at doing it.' 62 In nurse's training in 1969, Julie Walters lost her virginity, and in so doing came up against her mother's older conception of respectability: 'My mother might not have been religious but she was of the same generation as Mary Whitehouse [and] when it came to sex before marriage she virtually shared the same views as this woman.' The result was a period of negotiating parental disapproval over cohabitation and use of the pill.63 For Joan Bakewell, sexual experience started long before she awoke to feminism in 1963 through reading Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. She acknowledged in her autobiography that she too had been complicit in the mystique that had enslaved women and caused misery and depression in many (including her own mother). But yet, her remembrance of the sexual adventurousness of her generation in the private world of Cambridge University heralds the conjunction of feminism, sexual liberation and career liberation that only really fostered open cultural revolution from the mid sixties.64 The place of religion in all this seems central, if not critical. Whether coming from working- or middle-class backgrounds, young women carved out a new liberated social construction of their gender in the long 1960s. Religion featured frequently in the decision to commence sexual experimentation. One woman recalled her early sexual encounters, and how it began with lengthy 'snogging' sessions in groups at parties or youth clubs, and how one encounter led from snogging to groping; Christian guilt stopped her: 'I was still very religious - about thirteen or fourteen - and he undid my jeans, they were very, very, very tight and he undid them and I thought, if he's doing that I ought to do something back. So I undid his jeans. I thought I ought to respond, but I was racked with guilt and I went off to confession and felt I'd really sinned.'Another woman remembered: 'In my teens I didn't have sex. I took the Catholic faith very seriously, and decided that for me it was sex within marriage - and I didn't want to get married - and that was it. So I'd go out with boys, but not go too far. Then at seventeen, when I was going to be confirmed, I fell in love.'65 Changing her attitude, she lost her virginity. Sexual experimentation was delayed for some young women by religion and fear

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of loss of respectability. The pop singer Lulu was a star at the age of 16 years, but four years later in 1970 she was still a virgin - despite 'obstacles, temptations and some marathon kissing sessions'.66 Religion and sex came together in various ways; Jenni Murray notes learning about sex in part through lessons on the Ten Commandments.67 Though female memoirs of this period may not all articulate such a connection, the link between sexual experimentation and overcoming the training of religious-framed self-restraint seems a widespread theme. It was perhaps most common amongst those who became members of the London-based 'scene'; as Richard Neville has written: 'The concept of "swinging London" caught on because the rest of the country was a graveyard.' 68 In part, as Karen Armstrong has noted, 'It was quite easy to ignore religion in London ... religion, it appeared, was quite risible.'69 But this metropolitan view is contradicted by plenty of autobiographies from women living in provincial Britain, where multiplesexual partners before marriage seem likely to have been the norm by the end of the long sixties.

Conclusion Most of the women featured in this chapter developed high profile careers, and most developed a feminism of various degrees of activity, passion and influence. They did so against the grain of post-war expectations; they had to fight, first against parents, then against wider cultural forces at work in education and the workplace. Jenni Murray recalled how at her school 'it was assumed the best one could hope for was a short career in teaching, marriage, children and then perhaps returning part-time'; only self-sacrificing spinsters and the childless could expect anything more.70 In each of the autobiographers there was clear engagement with religious issues early in their journey from childhood to adulthood; usually in their teens there is clear evidence of either determined abandonment of Christian faith or worship, or a mounting disinterest. It often involved a 'generation gap' from their parents' religious world, and their vision of what a girl should aspire to be. Jenni Murray's mother spent all her life encouraging her to 'ladylike' behaviour, to the point of severely alienating Jenni for long periods from her mother's discourse; yet there was an acknowledgement that her mother wished her daughter to succeed in the outside world too.71 For Janet Street-Porter, the generation gap was even more severe, featuring again a mixture of alienation from parental expectation for both religious behaviour and life destiny. The sixties transition for women from religious youth to humanist, atheistic or religiously-indifferent young adulthood was not necessarily a permanent state. Later in life, more that forty years after the sixties, Sheila Hancock came to question her atheism; but she had limited choices: 'The Anglican Church was a non-starter, with its absurd reluctance to accept women priests', making it impossible for her to contemplate even entering one of their buildings. After she 'tested many weird and wonderful approaches to the religious life', her feminism, humanism, pacifism

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and disregard for authority led her to the Society of Friends.72 Jenni Murray seems to have steadied her religiosity in a permanent atheism (though she was willing to swear documents on the Bible to speed a legal process73). But judging by their published memoirs, religion failed to return in either the vigour or the femininityframing format that had so dominated the lives of their mothers, and that had so much dominated their childhood experiences.

Notes 1 2 3

K. Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: A Memoir (London, 2005), p. 137. H. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), p. 1.

See for instance C.G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000. Second edition {London, Routledge, 2009); idem, 'Secularisation, the growth of militancy and the spiritual revolution: religious change and gender power in Britain 1901-2001', Historical Research vol. 80, no. 209 (August 2007), pp. 393-418. 4 C.G. Brown, 'Masculinity and secularisation in twentieth-century Britain', in Y.-M. Werner ed., Christian Manliness - a Paradox of Modernity (Leiden, forthcoming). 5 Such as those in S. Maitland ed., Very Heaven: Looking back at the 1960s (London, 1988). 6 Such as those in L. Heron ed., Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing up in the Fifties (London, 1985). 7 R. Broad and S. Fleming eds, Nella Lasts War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49 (London, 2006), p. 281. 8 J. Bakewell, The Centre of the Bed (London, 2003), p. 18. 9 J. Bakewell, The View from Here: Life at Seventy (London, 2006), p. 71. 10 C.G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-century Britain (Harlow, 2006), p. 32. 11 Her mother's story, seen through a daughter's awareness, seeks to find for women a self based on 'a psychology where once there was only the assumption of pathology or false consciousness to be seen'. C. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London, 1986), p. 144. 12 J. Murray, Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter (London, 2008), p. 69. 13 Mary Manton and Joan Petrie, cited in C. Bums et al., eds, Woman s Hour from Joyce Grenfell to Sharon Osbourne: celebrating sixty years of women s lives (London, 1996), pp. 9,21. 14 Ibid., p. 51. 15 S. Phillips, Private Faces: The autobiography (London, 1999), p. 14. 16 Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase, p. 3. 17 Bakewell, The View from Here, pp. 191-2. 18 S. Hancock, The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw (London, 2004), p. 90. 19 Murray, Memoirs, p. 53. 20 Martha Kearney, in Bums, Woman s Hour, p. 54. 21 Quoted in C.G. Brown, A. Mclvor and N. Rafeek, The University Experience: An Oral History of the University ofStrathclyde (Edinburgh, 2004), p. 88. 22 Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase, p. 26.

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Murray, Memoirs, p. 58. Murray notes than even in her first job at the BBC in the mid seventies, only women in the Arabic Service were permitted to wear trousers; ibid., p. 185. 24 Maitland ed., Very Heaven, p. 210. 25 See discussion of this in Brown, Death of Christian Britain, pp. 128-32. 26 S. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (London, Verso, 2001), pp. 2, 4, 6. 27 V. Walkerdine, 'Dreams from an ordinary childhood', in Heron ed., Truth, Dare or Promise, p. 65. 28 Ibid., p. 72. 29 C. Steedman, 'Landscape for a Good Woman', in Heron ed., Truth, p. 117. 30 Testimony of Pat Fraser and Elizabeth McCudden, quoted in Brown, Mclvor and Rafeek, University Experience, p. 100. 31 J. Street-Porter, Baggage: My Childhood {London, 2004), pp. 209, 221. 32 L. Sage, Bad Blood (London, 2001), p. 89. 33 Ibid., p. 237. 34 Ibid., p. 244. 35 Bakewell, The Centre of the Bed, p. 72. 36 Ibid., pp. 73-4. 37 Ibid., p. 75. 38 Ibid., p. 79. 39 Murray, Memoirs, pp. 13, 73. 40 Ibid., pp. 19,304. 41 J. Walters, Thats Another Story: The autobiography (London, 2008), pp. 69-76. 42 K. Armstrong, Through the Narrow Gate: A nun s story (orig 1981, revised edition 1995), p. xiv. 43 Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase, pp. 260-62. 44 K. Fisher, Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 48-50. 45 Ibid., pp. 56, 67-8. 46 J. Green, It: Sex since the Sixties (London, 1993). 47 Phillips, Private Faces, pp. 14, 22, 89. 48 Hancock, The Two of Us, pp. 5, 7. 49 D. Profumo, Bringing the House Down: A Family Memoir (London, 2006), pp. 169-71. 50 Street-Porter, Baggage, pp. 59-61. 51 Ibid., p. 151. 52 Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream, pp. 48-9. 53 McLeod, Religious Crisis, p. 165. 54 Brown, Religion and Society, pp. 177-223. 55 H. Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English women, sex and contraception 1800-1975 (Oxford, 2004). 56 Brown, Religion and Society, p. 227; J.K. Lewis and K. Kiernan, T h e boundaries between sex and marriage, nonmarriage, and parenthood: changes in behaviour in postwar Britain,' Journal of Family History vol. 2 1 (1996), pp. 373^4. 57 Street-Porter, Baggage, pp. 190-91.

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Ibid., pp. 209, 221. Ibid., p. 237. 60 Murray, Memoirs, pp. 133^4, 139. 61 Ibid., pp. 214-15. Shirley Conran's Superwoman (1975) had a similar impact. 62 Hancock, The Two of Us, pp. 153-4, 249-50. 63 Walters, That's Another Story, pp. 124-5. Ironically, Walters went on to play Whitehouse in television play. 64 Bakewell, The Centre of the Bed, p. 161. 65 Quoted in Green, IT, pp. 60-61, 63, 266. 66 Lulu, I Don't Want to Fight (London, Time Warner, 2002), p. 123. 67 Murray, Memoirs, p. 98. 68 R. Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake: the Dreams, the Trips, the Trials, the Love-ins, the Screw-ups ... the Sixties (Bloomsbury, London, 1995), p. 71. 69 Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase, p. 192. 70 Murray, Memoirs, p. 81. 71 Ibid., p. 43. 72 Hancock, The Two of Us, pp. 153-4, 249-50. 73 Murray, Memoirs, p. 247. 59

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Chapter 11

The Strange Death of Dutch Christendom Peter van Rooden

During the last forty years, Dutch Christianity has collapsed.1 It is no exaggeration to characterise the development as a sudden and almost total dechristianisation. In 1960, the Netherlands were one of the most Christian countries of Europe. Personal involvement with Christianity, as expressed in regular church attendance, was extra-ordinarily strong. Moreover, believers led almost all of their social and cultural lives within densely organised confessional subcultures, whose borders were jealously guarded. Since the introduction of universal suffrage, at the end of the First World War, Christian political parties had enjoyed an absolute, stable majority in parliament. They had used their political power to enact laws supporting Christianity. Confessional schools were financed by the state. A Christian, patriarchal morality had been enshrined in public law.2 At the beginning of the twenty-first century this extremely robust position of Dutch Christianity has collapsed. The churches have suffered a horrendous loss of members, amounting to something like a third of the Dutch population. Remaining members are mostly old, and their commitment wanes year after year. The great confessional subcultures have disappeared. Confessional schools still exist, even enrolling a majority of Dutch children, but have lost their Christian character. Christian morality is no longer upheld by law. Christian arguments play no role in the Dutch public sphere. Remarkably little study has been devoted to this development. What we know, rests mainly upon large-scale opinion surveys, held since the 1960s and since then regularly repeated.3 Scholarly attempts to explain what has happened are rare. It is as if the demise of Dutch Christianity is considered by historians and social scientists to be a natural and self-evident development, and not as something very strange, as a real problem. Hypotheses to explain the Dutch development therefore have to be derived from studies analysing the modem religious history of other West-European countries. This method seems entirely justified. The Dutch development was not unique, just an extreme form of a common pattern. During the long 1960s, all West-European societies witnessed a radical weakening of the social importance of religion.4 According to secularisation theory, this was merely the completion of a much older development. Social historians of West-European religion, however, have tended to interpret the 1960s as a rupture. Numerous local studies

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had made clear that the social aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religion had been much more important than supposed by secularisation theory. Religious organisations, representations and experiences were always intertwined with political, economical and regional differences and conflicts. Religion was always completely embedded in social modernisation and a gradual secularisation did not take place. In his magisterial synthesis of this social historical work on religion, Hugh McLeod has explicitly rejected the link between modernisation and secularisation.5 During the last two centuries, European religious history was characterised by conflict. As the churches lost their overarching place, they could not avoid becoming parties in the fierce conflicts dividing nineteenth-century Europe. In the process, they both lost and gained. They could no longer speak for society as a whole, but gained the loyal and enthusiastic adherence only a party can engender. The ideologically based subcultures that emerged during these nineteenth-century battles were able to reproduce themselves for several generations, until they dissolved in the 1960s. McLeod considers the socialist and communist movements as such ideological ghettos as well. In this way, he implicitly rejects the notion that religion is a separate field within the social world. In this framework, the West-European dechristianisation of the 1960s can no longer be explained by a supposed conflict between modernity and religion. The histories of organised irreligion and organised religion marched in step during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before the 1960s, secularisation was mainly an expression of a collective identity, communist, socialist or liberal. The fragmentation of religious life taking place during the 1960s was something else completely. The social-political movements that had been the carriers of irreligion before the 1960s, suffered even greater losses than the churches. The most recent and original interpretation of the religious history of Western Europe bears a post-structural and post-modern character. In his The Death of Christian Britain Callum Brown argues that the overwhelming attention paid to objective social factors by both secularisation theorists and social historians rests upon a fundamental misapprehension of the nature of modem British Christianity.6 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, religion in Britain existed mainly as a shared discourse, enabling people to think about themselves and their way of living. Although Brown recognises that this common discourse was always framed by highly different social contexts, he emphasises its omnipresence. Even the autobiographies of socialist workers, with their testimonies of a pub-visiting, frivolous youth followed by a book-reading adulthood, dedicated to the labour movement, rest upon the evangelical trope of sin and conversion. According to Brown, secularisation in Britain did not take off till the 1960s. Alternative ways to understand and express oneself became available, and the Christian discourse suddenly lost its hegemony. The main factor contributing to the decay of Christianity was practical feminism, the new ways of life that became available for women. Christian discourse had been suffused with notions about the proper way of life of women, motherly purity and virtue guaranteeing the Christianity of husbands and children. In the nineteenth century, piety had been feminised, as

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femininity had become pietised. According to Brown, gender, not class, unlocks the meaning of the modem British history of religion. The great methodological innovation in the research of McLeod and Brown is their implicit refusal of a premature theoretical closure of the question of what religion actually is. Secularisation theory presupposes that religion ultimately rests upon the intellectual and emotional relations between the individual and a supernatural reality. Religion as a social phenomenon is supposed to receive its form from the practical consequences individuals draw from the nature of this bond. McLeod and Brown operate with a much looser and less intellectualist notion of religion. Religion can assume many, radically different forms, and to understand what has happened with West-European religion since the long 1960s, one has to empirically determine what, exactly, religion in these years was. McLeod and Brown use re-analyses of the numerous oral-history projects undertaken in Britain since the 1960s to achieve this end. In the Netherlands, oralhistory, especially professional oral history, has not been undertaken on a similar scale. The existing projects hardly look at the role of religion in the life of ordinary people. The following offers the results of an exploratory study, undertaken to find out if oral history can contribute to the understanding of the recent history of Dutch religion. In the course of this research 43 semi-structured interviews were held with older people. The questions focused upon the role of religion during the youth of the people interviewed and upon the changes in their religious behaviour in the course of their lives, with a strong implicit emphasis upon gender. Most of the interviews took some two hours. The respondents were gathered randomly. Geographically, socially and religiously, they are a fairly representative sample. Similarities and consistently recurring motives in the interviews proved to be adequate to reconstruct an image of what religion was in the Netherlands before the 1960s. It was not really possible to establish distinctions within the sample, for instance between Protestants and Catholics, or between different generations. For instance, several interviews suggest that the 1950s might have been more religious and churchly than the 1930s, but this impression might easily be the result of chance. Further research would be necessary to determine such questions. Oral history is tricky, and its practitioners have devoted considerable thought to its methodological pitfalls. The main problem springs from the fact that people remember and construct their lives from their present. The interview, usually undertaken by a much younger person, tends to strengthen this mechanism. These problems must be confronted in this research as well. All persons interviewed expressed a strong awareness of the difference between their past and the present, and explained the role of religion in their youth by contrasting it with their image of the present-day Netherlands. This was actually the main device used by the interviewees themselves to make sense of their lives. The religious world of their youth, which used to go without saying, had become incomprehensible, even to those who were still religiously engaged. This lost world could only be integrated into their life-stories by means of contrasts and

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oppositions. A photographer, bom in a Catholic working-class family in Bergen, told how, in 1940, as a twelve-year old, he met a girl he did not know on the street, who enthusiastically exclaimed: CI have done my no vena and I am a child of God now. I can jump in front of a horse and wagon and nothing will happen to me!!' He told the story as a joke, expressing his intense amusement, yet went on to explain that her exclamation had not struck him as something extra-ordinary at the time, because he did not know better and had never read anything. The laughter and the rhetorical form of the joke expressed his incomprehension of what used to be his own world and life. The explanation that he did not know better, because he had not read anything, was an attempt to bridge this gap with his own past. Very few people gave up all such attempts. The most important interpretations enabling people to recognise the distance to their own past and simultaneously integrate this past in their lives derive from the present. Most interviewees underscored the lack of knowledge and lack of autonomy which according to them had characterised their religious life during their childhood. These lacks are opposed to the knowledge and autonomy which people today are supposed to enjoy. By means of these contemporary values people find words to express the incomprehensible elements in their youth, recognising and justifying why their past has become so strange. The total absence of the notion that religion in the past buttressed social injustice makes clear how these ways to integrate the past in life-stories rest upon presentday values. People never use the disappearance of the explicit Dutch class society of the first half of the twentieth century to interpret or justify the changes that have taken place in their religious life. Till far into the 1950s, most Dutch church services were above all a ritual expression of social inequality and hierarchy, as they had been since at least the seventeenth century. Important and rich people sat in front, while poor people sat in the back. This social inequality does not play any role as an integrating mechanism within the interviews. It is not the case that people have forgotten the free pews reserved for the poor in the back of the church. Quite a number of people, especially those who used to sit in them as a child, remember them quite well. The son of a Catholic worker in the harbour of Amsterdam, bom in 1942, told how his father only went to church on special days, and then sat down in a rented and thus reserved place. When someone came to remove him, he would say: cGod is there for me too ... A good one who can send me away.' The story tells something about the attitude of the father, but the son did not connect it with his own view of the church or the interpretation of his own religious development. Only an unskilled worker from the Jordaan, a workingclass neighbourhood of Amsterdam, whose father had died in 1916, when his mother was pregnant with him, used the memory of these bitter social cleavages to express his current attitude towards religion. Religion, worthless. When I was born, I was baptised, and my mother got a loaf of bread and a red cabbage. But as my mother worked day and night, she had no time to go to church, and then she did not get anything anymore. That's religion.

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He had been a communist all his life. Other people from working-class families did not use their memories of the close links between religion and social inequality to explain the religious changes during their lives. Collective notions about social inequality are far less important in the present-day Netherlands than the ideal of individual self-realisation.7 That is why the religious past is remembered in terms of a lack of knowledge and autonomy, but not as an instance of injustice. The motive of the lack of autonomy emerges in many different ways. Four Catholic interviewees repeated the well-known Dutch story about the priest, who, a year after the birth of the last child, visited their family and asked about its reproductive endeavours. The last of these stories was situated in the 1970s, although the head of the Catholic working-class family in Amsterdam-Noord with two children who was visited, remembered how he had then sent the priest away for good. The emphasis on rules and obedience, which is always a part of these interpretations of the past as characterised by a lack of autonomy, often slips into a rhetorical depiction of fear. I was terribly afraid, I was really afraid to do something wrong. During communion there were these special pews in which you had to kneel, with cloth to cover your hands when the priest laid the wafer on your tongue, and you were not allowed to bite on it, as it was Christ's body, and then blood could flow. You could not pick up the wafer when it fell, the priest had to do that, everything was holy, holy, holy ... You were burdened all the time ... Everything was pressure, you were always in a state of sin.

Other memories, however, make clear that people in these years easily negotiated the rules and did not experience them as a burden. A Catholic woman, who worked in a child care centre in the 1950s, told about a friend who had some broth left on a Friday and used it to prepare dinner. Just at that moment a priest came to visit her. She greeted him with the words: 6 Yeah, well, you don't have to smell, because I am finishing it, otherwise I can throw it away. And you guzzle eel! [interviewee breaks into laughter].' A retired teacher sketched the 1950s in considerable detail as a grey, unpleasant and corrupt period, characterised by such a strong and rigid exercise of power by the Catholic clergy that it simply could not last. His sketch was more of a lecture than a memory, however. His own stories were about negotiating the rules. Together with the other members of his soccer club he would walk out of church when a lengthy mass threatened to make them late for their game. A Calvinist woman from Amsterdam, bom in 1931, told how she always had been a rebel, had doubted the truth of religious dogmas from very early on, and had never been interested in church. During the interview, she stumbled upon the memory of how she, together with a boy friend, had visited a movie theatre on a Sunday and had felt terribly guilty about this. She immediately neutralised the opposition between this strange guilt and her current self-interpretation: 'I did not feel guilty towards a God or something, it was just something that had been imposed upon you again and again: social control. It

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was just a feeling, it was not rational'. Yet she fondly remembered the way in which her parents upheld Sunday rest. They had been, she explained, inwardly convinced of the need to rest on Sundays, not externally forced. Later on in the interview she revealed how she too, years later, had forbidden her daughter to take part in sport on Sunday. The point is not that there was no coercion, but that this pressure usually was not experienced as coercion, as an external force that was imposed upon a rebelling and struggling self. There were rules. People could negotiate those rules. Some people were more afraid than others to break or stretch these rules. The other main way to make clear the distance to the past and simultaneously integrate it within one's life is stressing the lack of knowledge that supposedly characterised the earlier life, thus contrasting it with the intellectual autonomy of the present. This emphasis on a former lack of knowledge was mainly brought forward by people who are still involved with religion. A man, born in 1935 in a Catholic family of shopkeepers in Voorburg, characterised the beliefs in which he was raised as a thoroughly traditional religion, resting upon indoctrination and the suppression of all other information. He was one of the few interviewees doubting the sincerity of the belief of his parents. According to him, their Catholicism had been just a way of placating their customers. In his life story, he described how he, after a long religious quest, which had led him through several denominations, had learned Hebrew in his middle age to be able to understand the Bible for himself. The depiction of ignorance and indoctrination in his youth was quite clearly intimately linked to his present-day search for religious knowledge. A woman, bom in Belgium, who in 1960, at 25-years old, had followed her husband to the Netherlands, formulated this motive of ignorance very sharply: 'I believed because I did not know better. You were kept in a state of ignorance and everything was theirs and God's ... everything you did was sin.' Yet her memory was based upon a present-day, deeply committed membership of a left-wing congregation in Amsterdam. Even within these stories about ignorance and lack of intellectual autonomy some people realised that they did not experience religion in their youth in this way. A woman, bom in 1934 in a Catholic working-class family in Vaassen, described confession during her youth as a mechanism of control and repression, yet at the same time remembered her enjoyment of the ritual, a contentment she could no longer understand. You had to grow into it, you know. You get used to it, if you do not do it a child, you won't do it when you are bigger ... So it was a [means] for the priest, what the children were doing. So that the priest knew what the adults were doing. That they knew it. It was a covert, how do you say, to find out what people were doing. What do we have to preach about? Yet the strange thing is that I always was happy after confession, that I was God's child again.

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The most illuminating remarks about the differences and similarities between religion before the 1960s and present-day life were brought forward by a 74-yearold Catholic woman with only primary schooling. She had been bom in a large working-class family, that moved from Tegelen, in the Catholic south, to Zaandam when she was four. There, her father read a Communist newspaper and visited the pub, while her mother took the children to church, to sit in the pews reserved for the poor. The priest often visited, and admonished her father. In her interview, she emphasised how her father and mother had been very religious people, even if the family was not very churchly: 'She was really, really pious, in her heart, inside. Not for the people.' This opposition between a belief that is an inward and personal possession and religious acts that take place because one's social world expects them recurred within her depiction of her own involvement with the church. I don't go there anymore, but I loved to go ... I still go sometimes on high days. I don't want to go to church to show: here I am. It must come from the inside. Not: look at me sitting here. I like to be liked, but not because I go to church. They must take us as we are. That's what I do too.

Yet she did not use this opposition to make a difference between collective coercion in the past and individual freedom in the present, as almost all other informants did. She offered a post-modernist interpretation of the religious changes having taken place in Dutch society. Hers was not a story about the growth of individual freedom, but a sketch of different disciplining worlds. She related the strength of her beliefs to the strict discipline to which she had been subjected in her childhood. When she was seventeen, her parents died, and she was put into service in a Catholic hospital in Maastricht, run by nuns. She was treated very harshly: 'I am still subservient because of these days. But I did not mind believing, you had to do it and I was raised in it.' She used this relation between discipline and interiority (Michel Foucault and Talal Asad would easily agree with her self-analysis) to interpret the changes which had taken place during her life. I would never touch the holy wafer, or distribute it, but today laypersons are allowed do all these things, it was always forbidden ... Everything has changed. I would like to go to church, but then I would like to hear a good sermon, really laying it upon you, a proper sermon. I like that, because I was raised that way, you know. As a Catholic, you used to go to church on Sundays. Today you can go on Saturday night, so you don't have to go on Sunday. There used to be obligations, you had to go on Sunday. If you did not go, you committed a mortal sin. That is no longer the case, so it has been modernised. Everything used to be proper, today everything is modem. People used to take care of each other, they lived together much more. Now it seems that people are always envious of each other. The feeling is different. Children are raised in a much too modem way. Everything is outward and external and you cannot depend on that. It used to be totally different. It used to be that you had to, you were born and you had to. That

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feeling never goes away, because it has been taught to you. That I still love Him so, you know, Him ... I do not dare to say it... God, you know, I don't know, that feeling never goes away, because it has been taught to you, you have taken it in with your mother's milk, as they say.

Her clear observation that true and inner feelings are the result of a disciplining process ('It used to be that you had to, you were bom and you had to. That feeling never goes away.') enables her to characterise the externality and superficiality of modern life, where people just want to upstage each other, using the same opposition between internal and external motives that she had also used to describe the religious world of her childhood. It is now possible to see how the interviews can be used to reconstruct the nature of Dutch religion before the 1960s. People understand their past looking back from the present, and most of the interviewees reconstructed their religious childhood by means of the opposition between the individual freedom and authenticity that are supposed to characterise the present and the imposed knowledge and ways of acting of the past. This is, however, a discursive, rhetorical opposition. Even when one wants to make such an opposition (something a social scientist or historian should not aspire to, as all behaviour is thoroughly social), the post-modernist insight of the working-class woman from Tegelen has to be taken seriously. True feelings and spontaneity were possible in the past, just as conformity, coercion and ignorance are possible ways of life in the present. When we want to know what religion was in the Netherlands before the 1960s, we ought not to base ourselves on the overarching interpretations, by means of which people shape their life stories, but on the stories, anecdotes, memories and contradictions that are not totally integrated into these interpretations. When one reads the interviews in such a reflexive way, a coherent religious world emerges. Religion was not just coercion and ignorance. It was also a world of its own, with strong attractions. In several interviews, the beauty of church buildings is fondly remembered, together with the singing, music, flowers and the liturgical vestments of the priest. A girl bom in an un-churched Catholic working-class family in Assendelft attended church for the first time as a ten-year old, when an aunt of hers got married, and was deeply touched by the sensual impressions. This inherent attractiveness of religion made possible the influence that believing friends or relatives could exercise on children that grew up in un-churched families. A woman who is no longer a member of a church, although she is still interested in religion, remembered how a Catholic girl friend had taken her to church when she was young and had explained everything to her: 'Look, God lives in that cupboard. Well, and then the cupboard was opened, and the wafers were shown. I really was impressed.' It was the beginning of her religious life. A son from a completely un-churched Catholic working-class family, living in Amsterdam-Noord, in the 1930s tried not to eat meat on Fridays, although his mother did not follow the rules concerning fasting. He was influenced by a grandmother and an aunt. In the 1950s

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he became a truly committed member of the church, and, thanks to the Catholic school system, was socially very successful. Religion had a broad presence in society. The importance of Sunday schools was touched upon in several interviews, especially for children whose parents were not religiously involved. Some interviews suggest the existence in the 1950s of an implicit, hegemonic conviction that without religion, moral life is not really possible. Several people who were raised in un-churched families emphasised that they and their parents had been truly moral people: 'Well, my parents were very class-conscious. They were not really into intellectual or cultural things, but they stood for the poor, for the workers.' An Amsterdam woman of 86, who had left the church in her youth to become active in the socialist labour movement, remembered her Lutheran mother saying to her: 'Even if you are not a Christian, you do quite a lot', when she took care of her during an illness. Nevertheless, the main sites where religion was reproduced were family, church and school. Within families, both Protestant and Catholic, rituals surrounding meals, like praying and Bible-reading, were most important. A man from Alkmaar, who grew up in the 1950s in a Calvinist lower-middle-class family, remembered a transgression of this ritual quite vividly. Once, my sister and I accidentally broke into laughter during prayer. My mother shouted 'Now it is enough!' [interviewee gestures violently] And she rammed her fork into the table [more gestures]. But then she hurt her hand, and became even angrier as we started to laugh even louder. We had to go to our room, off to sleep without dinner. No, one did not mock prayer [he wags his finger].

It was, by the way, as we shall see below, characteristic that it was the mother who upheld the religious order. Sunday was a special day, upheld by both Protestants and Catholics, even if the latter were allowed to play sports. Most people remembering Sundays tended to protect their parents and stressed the voluntary and interior nature of their behaviour, explicitly rejecting the notion that it was the result of social pressure to conform. The interpretive device that religious life in the past can be characterised by a lack of autonomy almost always breaks down when remembering parents and Sundays. Other religious periods were upheld as well. Catholics remembered the month of May, devoted to Mary, when many special religious rituals took place. An Arminian family in The Hague lived very strictly during the Holy Week. Birthdays falling on Good Friday were not celebrated, and laughter was frowned upon during the whole week. Families enforced the ban on interconfessional marriages. Such marriages were more numerous among the interviewees and their surroundings than the existing literature suggests. Usually they resulted into the conversion of one of the partners, but even then tensions between the converted partner and his or her inlaws were quite common. This rule, too, could be negotiated. In 1945, a Catholic, working class boy from Bergen chose to date a Protestant Frisian girl, because

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he knew that their relation could not lead to a marriage. When she began to take lessons with a priest, as a preparation for her conversion, he broke up with her. The involvement with ecclesiastical rituals was checked by the family as well. It was quite common that parents asked their children about the sermon, not to check their understanding, but to make sure that they had attended church. Attending church was an important presentation of the self. A woman identified Sunday clothing with religion when commenting upon the sons of a Calvinist family from the Zaanstreek: 'They were really raised religiously. You don't want to believe they came to church with clogs.' The interviews suggest that women's clothes were more important and neater than those of men. A Catholic woman, born in an Amsterdam working-class family, told that she had not married in church, because they were too poor. This might (apart from the large number of 'forced' marriages) help to explain the relatively low percentage (less than 60 per cent) of marriages in the 1950s that were also celebrated in church, in a period when church membership stood at more than 80 per cent of the population.8 Children attended religious rituals mostly at school. Catholic boys and girls attended mass every day, either at school or in a church. Prayers were usual at the beginning and end of breaks. Protestant children started and ended every school day with prayer and sang a psalm every morning. The overwhelming impression left by the interviews is that religion before the 1960s went without saying. Above all, religion was present in acts and rituals framing everyday life.9 Obviously, all these acts were accompanied by speech, and were linked to a discourse, but no one spoke about what all these acts and words that went without saying could mean. The discourse accompanying the rituals was totally unreflexive. Asked, 'Did you sometimes speak about religion?', a Catholic woman, who grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Den Bosch, replied, 'Well, in May we had to pray Hail Marys on our knees with the rosary.' This is a recurring motive: 'There was not so much philosophising as these days. It was part of life, it was the rhythm of your life, it was peaceful.' A former priest, who had laid down his priesthood in 1968, when he was 32, told about his childhood in a family with nine children. His parents, mainly his mother, had decided quite early that he would become a priest. It was not a matter of discussion: 'You were part of it and you went along.... The first who asked for my opinion was my present wife.' People did not speak about what religion could mean for themselves. The discourse that accompanied the rituals was markedly non-reflexive. This did not mean that religion could not be interiorised or appropriated by individuals. When people did so, however, they did not follow a personal preference, choosing a form of religion because it corresponded to their perceived needs or inclinations. Dutch religion before the 1960s was not commodified. The appropriation of this non-reflexive, non-commodified religion appears from the high number of interviewees (7 of 43) who, without prompting (the subject was not part of the list of topics prepared for the interviews) brought up the relevance of religious vows. A Protestant farmer's daughter, bom in Lunteren in 1926, said: 'I have done my confession of faith and therefore I shall never leave the church.' A Protestant

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woman, who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in a dirt-poor working-class family in Rotterdam, used exactly the same words to explain why she was still a member of the Protestant Church, although she heartily disliked her local minister and usually visited meetings of the Salvation Army. It is interesting that the five interviewees linking vows with their public confession of faith are all Protestants, while the two Catholics talked about their marriage vows. One might be tempted to link this characterisation of Dutch religion before the 1960s with the overrepresentation of Catholics among the people interviewed. A persistent nineteenth-century tradition depicts Catholicism as a ritual religion. Yet this temptation ought to be resisted. A thorough study of the religious life of forty core members of the Calvinist Church in Drente, undertaken in the 1980s, concluded that these people hardly ever talked about religion.10 The conclusion fits in with the data of these interviews. Organised orthodox Protestant ministers were usually in full teaching mode, talking down. University-trained, they preached learned sermons, which were inevitably ritualised by their flock. They did not produce a discourse that members of their church could use to reflect on their lives. How did this non-reflexive religion relate to gender issues and sexuality? Sexual matters, like religion, were not discussed or talked about before the 1960s. Even menstruation was a difficult topic, usually only alluded to by mothers when they talked with their daughters. Words to denote the more concrete aspects of sexual life were not used at all within families. Most interviewees considered this the main difference with the way they had raised their own children. They did talk about sex. The silence about sexual matters was, however, not a monopoly of religiously engaged people. A man who in the 1950s grew up in a Communist working-class family in the Zaanstreek, succinctly stated: That was not spoken about.' No discourse did not mean no practice. Between a quarter and a third of the interviewees remembered having sex before they were married, although almost always with their future husband or wife.11 A forced marriage and, especially, an illegitimate child were a source of shame. A daughter from a very large Catholic working-class family from Vaassen was disowned by her parents in 1955, when they found out that she had been pregnant when she got married. The Communist family in the Zaanstreek too, took much greater care of the girls in the family. Some women did not know at all about contraceptives, while others actively searched for them. A Catholic woman who lived alone in Rotterdam in the 1950s, working in a Protestant bookshop, attended mass every day, to show that she was a good Catholic, yet also secretly visited, with her fiancee, meetings of the Neo-Malthusian Society to leam how not to get pregnant. Women who got married, both religious and un-churched, stopped working. No interviewee related these rules concerning sex and gender roles to religion. When a link was made in the interviews between religion and sexuality or gender, it had a purely formal nature. People simply compared the strictness of their parents regarding religion and sexuality. Before the 1960s, in the Netherlands, there was no discursive link between religion and women. Femininity and the rules associated with it were not expressed

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in religious terms, and religion was not a discursive monopoly of women. The close link between religion and women that did in fact exist was not discursive, but practical. Almost all interviews make clear that women played the most important roles in religious socialisation, the supervision of the religious rituals, and the religious involvement of the family. The daughter of a butcher from Tilburg, who grew up in the 1930s, remembered that: 'the children were raised by mother. Father thought that mother ought to transmit religion.' An Amsterdam woman, who decided at the end of the 1970s, when she was in her fifties, to attend church no longer, was followed by her husband, to her amazement, because he had always been much more involved with the church than she. The daughter of an un-churched Groningen captain of a barge married in 1956 a son from an orthodox Protestant family from the Veluwe. Although they married in church, because of his parents, she never felt at ease with her in-laws. She put out the baptising of their first child to her husband: 'You have to want it and you have to ask the minister.' She clearly told the story because it was unusual. The same important role of the mother emerged from an interview with a woman from The Hague, who told how her brother had waited to leave the priesthood until their mother had died. Other women played a role upholding the rules as well. A Catholic working-class boy in 1959 went on a date with a girl from the solidly Catholic Spreeuwenbuurt neighbourhood, in Amsterdam-Noord: 'One of the first times when I went with her to the movies, we had to make a detour, so as not to pass that aunt and that aunt and that friend of grandma.' They avoided a geography of female supervision. Even before the 1960s changes in religious behaviour were not uncommon. Children bom in un-churched families became religiously involved. Men or women changed their religion when they married someone from another confession. Some interviews relate a change in religious behaviour to a sudden event. An Amsterdam woman, from a liberal, but un-churched Protestant middle-class family related how she had been arrested by the Gestapo during the war. In prison, she suddenly knew that she would be let out. When this took place, she became deeply involved with the church. Another woman told how her father, shortly after the war, lost his wallet with several important papers. A friend took him to mass to pray, to ensure that the thief would be plagued by guilt. When the wallet was returned, her parents suddenly started to take their Catholicism seriously. These are not traditional stories about conversion. There is no inner struggle or sudden transformation of the self. Provoked by a special event, people decide to take seriously a repertoire of religious acts which lies at hand. In the interviews only one comparable story was told about the 1960s and 1970s. The foster son of the Catholic working-class woman from Tegelen, quoted above, broke with the church and with God when his 17-year-old son suddenly died of a heart-attack. She was horrified. In one interview, a woman remembered the moment when the taken-for-granted nature of her religious life was first undermined, and the fright and excitement that accompanied the moment.

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What I found great was the song 'Jesus redt' [Robert Long, 1974]. There [the church] was made fun of. I found it embarrassing, but I also thought 'that is how it is\ It was full of criticism that we felt as well, 'God, you have done some strange things', criticism of the Pope. Marvellous. [Interviewee starts glowering.]

Her whole family listened to the song. Yet her life story makes clear that even before they listened to Robert Long, the family used to visit a progressive Catholic church, remaining involved for a long time afterwards, their involvement declining only gradually. Religious change in the 1960s and 1970s is a recurrent element in the life stories in the interviews, always in the direction of a lower religious engagement. Excepting the story about the foster-son, people never remembered a decisive moment, when they made a choice and left the church doubting its message or rebelling against its social pressure. Sometimes, the depiction of slowly drifting away from religion is linked with fond memories of the church. The woman who had listened to Robert Long described her religious development in the 1970s in such a way. Q. Did you pray before meals? Yes, I think so. I think it stopped when they [the children] left the house. Q. Why did it stop? Did you no longer feel the urge? That's it, of course. You start thinking, why should I do it? Yet I have to say, that church in Amsterdam-Noord, we used to go there, that appealed to us. That was not all bullshit [She laughs] That was a very nice man. He openly disagreed with Rome that you could not use contraceptives, those kinds of things. That was all talked about. There were women praying the gospels and I know not what... I did like that church in Noord. But I felt something like 'when you're involved, you have to give something, to do something'.

Another Amsterdam woman told how she gradually drifted away from church and the religious habits of her childhood in the late 1960s, when she was almost forty. She too, did not remember when and why this happened: 'Trying to believe slowly ebbed away.' What took place was the opposite of a conversion. The change can not be interpreted as the conscious abandonment of a particular way of life in favour of another one, the result of a choice for a new direction of life. Instead, a religious pattern of behaviour, which went without saying, slowly disappeared, without this being noticed or discussed. In their memories of these changes, people do not relate them to other events taking place in their lives in these same years, even when such a relation imposes itself upon the reader of the interviews. Three women described how they enrolled in higher education in the 1960s and 1970s, after their children had left home, and found jobs. Somewhere else in the interview they described how they had drifted away from religion in these same years. Yet

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they did not relate both developments. A woman from an un-churched Amsterdam middle-class family had joined the main Protestant Church in the 1950s because of her religious fiancee. She had always devoted her life to him, and during the interview interpreted her traditional marriage, in modem terms, as the result of a lack of self-respect. In the 1970s she began to study, found a job and a male friend. The marriage ended in divorce. During these same years she left the church, and developed an interest in Eastern spirituality. That both developments took place in the same years, only becomes clear when one interprets the interview quite carefully. Memories of religious change in the 1960s and 1970s are never brought forward as stories of conversion or emancipation. The abandonment of religious practices, that had been such an important part of their lives in earlier years, is not an important element in the life stories of the people interviewed. Gradually, religion became less important in their lives. Even the frequently mentioned interests in new forms of spirituality that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s were not the result of a transformation of existing religious practices, but arose apart from them. A Calvinist woman from a middle-class family in The Hague, who had loosened her ties with the church and with religion during her student-days, in the early 1960s, although she had taken part enthusiastically in various Calvinist youth organisations, years later became involved with Buddhism, during a troubled period in her life. It was only afterwards that she had made a connection between this spiritual interest and her religious childhood: 'And someday you think back, you think about belief, and you realise, yes, it was actually about the same things. There used to be a hereafter there, too.' This is, of course, a re-interpretation. In the 1970s she was interested in this Buddhism with a hereafter because she thought it might help her to find an answer to her problems. She used it to think about herself and confront her personal troubles. Her Buddhism had an individual and reflexive character. In her childhood, religion had been something completely different: unreflexive, going without saying, not mainly discursive, but expressed in practices, not something that helped one to find one's self, but something that expressed the belonging to a group. In three interviews this collective aspect of Dutch religion before the 1960s is indirectly brought forward as a reason for taking leave of the church. The rituals which had been the main expression of Dutch religion in the 1950s had always also been the expression of group membership. The Catholic woman, who had listened to Robert Long in 1974, motivated her leaving the church, although she enjoyed her local church and priest, by expressing her resistance to the collective obligations she considered to be entailed with religion:' But I felt something like "when you 're involved, you have to give something, to do something."' A woman who, having had a traditional Christian upbringing, had become a member of various New-Age groups, that she always left when they started to feel too constricting, looked back self-consciously and satisfied on her spiritual development: 'So I do not belong to anything anymore now, and I think that's OK.'Another woman, asked why so

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few people go to church nowadays, answered, 'They have less fear and you had to belong to something How do these interviews fit in with existing theories explaining the change in the social place of Christianity in West-European societies? Secularisation theory supposes that modernisation erodes the social relevance of religion indirectly, by making religious conceptions less plausible. This theory can be subjected to heavy theoretical objections,12 and is falsified by the history of Dutch Christianity between 1800 and 1960. Yet some interviews might be used to find in individual, intellectual doubt an explanation of the decline of traditional religion. In these interviews the radical liturgical changes within the Catholic Church after Vatican II are remembered. Several interviewees expressed their confusion about these changes quite strongly. A woman from a middle-class family from Hoogkarspel, who was in her twenties when the changes took place, coupled her disapproval of the rituals before Vatican II with an even stronger condemnation of what replaced them: You could not just not go to church anymore, could you? Yet I knew there was nothing there for me anymore. Those rituals, confession for instance. You thought that was normal, but when you thought about it, it was ridiculous. I always confessed the same things in that box, and later they dispensed with it and introduced some kind of communal confession. You got a common absolution, that was so ridiculous!

Yet these objections appear to be interpretations and justifications developed after the people offering them had left the church. Elsewhere in the interview, the woman from Hoogkarspel described how she was involved with all kinds of religiously experimenting groups in her parish, and celebrated the ritual changes. In the 1960s and 1970s the Dutch Catholic Church engaged upon a ritual revolution to raise the awareness and understanding of believers, that is to say, to change religion into a discourse that the laity could apply to themselves. The changes made a big impression, as religion before the 1960s had rested mainly upon rituals, and it is very probable that this radical change has contributed to the huge losses the Dutch Catholic Church has suffered these last forty years, larger than those of the Protestant churches. Yet the changes did not induce intellectual doubt; they facilitated and speeded up the process by which religious practices became less important in the lives of the believers. The fact that Dutch religion before the 1960s articulated itself above all in non-reflexive practices is also the main stumbling-block in the way of a direct application of Callum Brown's interpretation of the death of British Christianity to the Netherlands. Twentieth-century Dutch Christianity did not exist as a commonly shared discourse, but as several blocks of particular rituals, practices and rules within different sub-cultural groups, that could not be used to reflexively shape individual selves. Moreover, there was no Dutch discursive identification of piety and femininity. Not only the interviews support this interpretation. Dutch women's magazines, like Margriet, were hugely popular. In the 1950s, they subscribed to a

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patriarchal morality, yet they did not support this morality with religious discourse, as they targeted women within different religious groups.13 Women played an important role in supervising and enforcing religious rules and practices, but this was a matter of practice, not of discourse. Still, Brown's interpretation offers the key that makes it possible to understand the demise of Dutch Christianity in the 1960s and 1970s. Brown constructs, loosely following Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self an overarching interpretation of the development of British religion during the last two centuries.14 Before 1800 religion was the background of everything people did, felt and thought. In Taylor's words, in this period: In our public and private life of prayer, penance and devotion, religious discipline, we lean on God's existence, use it as the pivot of our action, even when we aren't formulating our belief, as I use the stairs or the banister in the course of my focal action of getting down to the kitchen to cook a meal.15

After 1800, according to Brown, evangelicalism and enlightenment worked together to change religion into something that the individual could and ought to possess consciously. The evangelical discursive structure of sin and conversion was placed in the foreground. In the 1960s, the discursive power of this kind of Christianity was broken. Brown interprets the 1960s as the popularisation, the introduction into mass culture, of what Taylor, who based himself on high literature and philosophy, analysed as the last transformation of the Western conceptions of the self, 'the internalizing move of modem humanism, which recognises no more constitutive goods external to us'. 16 In this world the paramount values are those of authenticity, expressivity and reflexivity. This interpretation of the 1960s as the penetration within mass culture of the ideals and the practices of the expressive and reflexive self can help us to understand what has happened within religion in the Netherlands since the 1960s. Brown's periodisation of British religion, however, does not fit Dutch religious history. In the Netherlands, after the emergence of modem mass-politics in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, religious subcultures emerged, guarding their borders by imposing strict ritual practices.17 Consequently, the nature of Dutch Christianity during the twentieth century mostly resembled Taylor's depiction of Christianity before 1800. Dutch Christianity, in its Catholic, Calvinist or Liberal form, was a background that went without saying. This criticism, however, does not impinge upon Brown's central thesis: the cultural revolution of the 1960s, interpreted as the emergence within mass culture of the ideal and practices of the expressive and reflexive self explains the collapse of West-European Christianity. All developments taking place in Dutch society in the 1960s resulted in a more lavish flowing of the sources of the expressive and reflexive self.18 The sudden growth of affluence and the emergence of a mass consumer society made it possible to fashion the self in many more ways.19 Clothes and the interior of the home became expressions of individual taste. The explosion of mobility that was the

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result of the common possession of cars resulted in familial trips devoted to enjoy oneself apart from larger social groups. In general, the reduction of the working week and the introduction of all kinds of housework appliances, left much more time to cultivate the self. Women, especially, had to take part in many more social worlds. The introduction of easy contraception and the loosening of sexual morals made it possible to explore and express the self in its most intimate core. Popular music celebrated the expressive self, and one could speculate that television, with its visual representation of individuals living in a world consisting of consumer goods, has a greater affinity with the ideal of the expressive self than radio. The changing power relations in society and within families were both reaction to, and expression of this new stress on the individual self. The logic of the new practices and discourses that made possible the emergence of the expressive and reflexive self stood in marked contrast with the nature of Dutch Christianity before 1960. The nature of this contrast has to be understood well. It was not a contrast between explicit ideals or philosophies. Traditional religion and the new notion of the self were embedded in different practices, taking place in different domains of daily life. It was quite possible to overhaul the interior of one's home and make trips with one's car, or to let one's hair grow long, wear jeans, and sleep with a girl-friend, and still pray before meals and visit church. Only the Sunday was a possible site of contention. Yet, in general, people were not forced to make a conscious choice. The emergence and flowering of the practices of the expressive and reflexive self slowly pushed traditional religious practices ever farther away from the core of personal life until they simply became irrelevant. In the interviews this process is reflected in the implicit descriptions of the gradual abandonment of religious practices, and in the way people do not integrate this dying off of the religion of their childhood with other elements of their life stories. Dutch Christianity died when the collective, ritual and non reflexive religious practices in which it had articulated itself since the last quarter of the nineteenth century gradually became less important in the lives of believers, in the wake of the popularisation of the discourses and practices of the expressive and reflexive self. This interpretation offered here can be misunderstood in three ways. In the first place, there is no inherent reason why Christianity should not be able to flourish in a post-modem world, where the expressive and reflexive self is the highest ideal. It is not very difficult to justify this ideal, using intellectual resources from the Christian tradition. Since the 1960s, Dutch churches have continuously experimented with new religious practices and discourses to find a way to link up with the new ideal of the self. Yet, in practice the shift proved to be very difficult, and was probably impossible. Dutch Christianity was not a women's magazine. Margriet succeeded, without too much trouble (a single editor had to be removed), in transforming itself into a guide for the discovery of the modem female self.20 It became a moral authority in the fields of consumption, female self-representation, sexuality, and the new relations within the family. The Dutch churches, however, were burdened by their traditions and proved themselves to be inherently elitist

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even in their attempts to modernise themselves. Progressive theologians despised the wishes, sentiments and tastes of the laity.21 Moreover, the Dutch churches had no experience at all with offering Christianity as a commodity on a cultural market. This is much harder than it sounds. Most importantly, defining Christianity is not a monopoly of the churches. The ritual and collective nature of pre-1960s Dutch Christianity determined for a long time, up to the present, what even un-churched people thought that religion ought to be. Being a member of a particular group, social obligations, and a particular life style are still considered to be essential parts of any form of ecclesiastical religiosity. Secondly, the interpretation brought forward here might be misunderstood as an up-to-date, less intellectualised version of secularisation theory. This misunderstanding would go as follows: Dutch Christianity collapsed from the bottom up when the believers, once emancipated from their collective obligations, ran away to develop themselves and thus achieve personal autonomy. Such an interpretation would raise the native point of view of the 1960s - that it was all about emancipation and individual self-realisation - to the status of historical knowledge and social-scientific explanation. It is rather easy to get entangled into this analytical confusion, as both McLeod and even the post-modem Callum Brown tend to interpret the events of the 1960s as an emancipation. Brown privileges practical feminism in his interpretation.22 McLeod underlines the attractiveness of affluence and the ideals of individual self-realisation in his description of the collapse of the ideological ghettos in the 1960s, yet also notices that the power these subcultures could exercise over their members lessened.23 This second element should probably have been brought forward even more strongly. The patronage networks which formed the base of the power of the ideological ghettos were eroded by the rise of the welfare state and the growing economy. Yet the (correct) understanding that strongly bounded political and social groups were an essential part of Dutch religion before the 1960s, should not lead to an interpretation that considers the rise of the expressive and reflexive self as an instance of individual liberation and emancipation. As the working-class woman from Tegelen remarked, modem people too are determined in their practices by what is expected from them. The self of the sixties too rested upon a regime, that is to say, upon forms of authority external to the self.24 This argument has been mainly developed in social-scientific studies of the religiosity of New Age movements,25 but can easily be expanded to include the modem self as a whole. The discourse and practices of the expressive and reflexive self are spread by, and rest upon, existing authorities like the welfare state, the labour market, and above all the world of consumption, as Colin Campbell brilliantly has argued.26 Although present-day Dutch in overwhelming numbers say that they value freedom and autonomy above all,27 they tend to have the same opinions, while their behaviour is markedly similar, and can be predicted quite accurately using objective, structural factors.28 In his The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, Hugh McLeod had gently taken issue with this argument. He states that stressing the ethos of emancipation in the 1960s is still valid, both because so many people understood what they were doing in these

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terms, and because the range of areas in which state, church, employers, or even family could prescribe behaviour was diminishing.29 I do not deny either point, but would argue that having an expressive and reflexive self is actually very hard work. It is not simply a mentality, but involves constant refashioning of the home, raising one's children in a very careful way, investing a lot of time in one's spouse, and filling leisure with all kinds of activities.30 One might very well, is seems to me, interpret all these activities as the result of a Foucauldian discipline. Finally, the characterisation of Dutch religion before the 1960s offered here might be misunderstood. One might devaluate this religiosity as something that was not 'real' religion, because it was just ritual and non reflexive habit. Then, the collapse of Dutch Christianity is no cause for surprise. It had rotted from the inside. This is a misinterpretation brought forward not only by some interviewees, but also by modem church historians and philosophers. This analysis too raises a native point of view to the status of scholarly explanation. It is the view of all those nineteenth- and twentieth-century clergy who considered personal, conscious piety to be the core and basis of religion, all social aspects being, in last analysis, secondary. This has proven to be a remarkably stubborn interpretation, which has only been slowly discarded by the anthropology of religion.31 The interviews, however, make clear, especially by the importance attributed to vows, how such a complex of religious duties and practices could be appropriated and internalised by individuals. The most important contribution of oral history to the history of religion seems to be exactly this. It makes it possible to see how the personal is always embedded in the social and thus enables one to describe what religion in a certain period really was.

Notes 1

This article was the fruit of an undergraduate seminar within anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. The participating students - Daan Beekers, Iris Boering, Marieke van Eijk, Sarah van Groeningen, Franziska Jentsch, Janneke Maessen, Renate Moria, Joni Uhlenbeck, Sam van Vliet, Carlijn ter Weer en Nikki de Zwaan - undertook the interviews, and were also involved in the writing. Their strong commitment was quite impressive. 2 S. Stuurman, Verzuiling, kapitalisme enpatriarchaat. Aspecten van de ontwikkeling van de moderne Staat in Nederland (Nijmegen, 1983), pp. 222-4, 233-4. 3 An overview of all surveys can be found in the latest of these endeavours: J. Bemts, G. Dekker, J. de Hart, God in Nederland, 1996-2006 (Kampen, 2007). 4 H. McLeod, W. Ustorf, eds, The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 17502000 (Cambridge, 2003). 5 H. McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe, 1789-1989 (Oxford and New York, 1997). 6 C.G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: understanding secularisation 18002000 (London and New York, 2001).

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K. Schuyt, E. Taverne, 1950. Welvaart in zwart-wit (Den Haag, 2000), pp. 300-302. E.H. Bax, Modernization and cleavage in Dutch society. A study of long term economic and social change (Groningen, 1988), p. 164. 9 An excellent description of the Catholic version of this world in H. Pijfers and J. Roes, Memoriale. Katholiek leven in Nederland in de twintigste eeuw (Zwolle, 1996). 10 R.J. Benjamins and P.A. van der Ploeg, Gewoonweg gereformeerd. Een onderzoek naar geloofsoverdracht (Franeker, 1988). II This fits rather well what is known. T. Engelen, 'Stiekem en met mate? Huwelijk en voortplanting in Nederland tijdens de jaren vijfitig', in P. Luykx and P. Slot, eds, Een stille revolutie? Cultuur en mentaliteit in de lange jaren vijftig (Hilversum, 1997), pp. 131-46, 143. 12 P. van Rooden, 'Secularisation and the trajectory of religion in the West', in H. Krop, A. Molendijk, H. de Vries, eds, Post-Theism: Reframing the Judeo-Christian Tradition (Leuven, 2000) 169-88; Talal Asad, Formations of the secular: Christianity; Islam, modernity (Stanford, 2003). 13 C. Brinkgreve and M. Korzec, 4 Margriet weet raad\ Gevoel, gedrag, moraal in Nederland 1938-1978 (Utrecht, 1978), pp. 16,21. For the (too) small market of confessional women's magazines: Angelie Sens, Margreet Hagdom, ed., Van zeep tot soap. Continuiteit en verandering in geillustreerde vrouwentijdschriften (Amsterdam, 2004), pp. 43-7. 14 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, pp.194-6. 15 C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: the making of the modern identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 491. 16 Ibid, p. 94. 17 P. van Rooden, Religieuze regimes. Over godsdienst en maatschappij in Nederland, 1570-1990 (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 147-99. Schuyt and Taveme, 1950. Welvaart in zwart-wit, pp. 274-85. 19 J.C. van Ours, Gezinsconsumptie in Nederland, 1951-1980 (Meppel, 1985). 20 Brinkgreve and Korzec, Margriet weet raad, pp. 21, 33. 21 Wouter Goddijn, the leader of the progressive forces within Dutch Catholicism, memorably remarked in 1966: 'A huge tyranny is exercised by the believers; Damn, they stop so many things. Many people simply do not know what is going on ... Ideas emerge among the elite': E. Simons, L. Winkeler, Het verraad der clercken. Intellectuelen en hun rol in de ontwikkelingen in het Nederlandse katholicisme na 1945 (Baarn, 1987) p. 276. 22 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, pp. 175-81, 193-8. 23 McLeod, Religion and the People, pp. 136^43. 24 C.P. M iddendorp, Ontzuiling, politiseringen restaur at ie inNederland. Progressiviteit en conservatisme in de jaren 60 en 70 (Meppel/Amsterdam 1979), p. 33 already spoke about: 'the greater possibilities for many (often also the necessity [my italicis]) to determine their behaviour according to their own wishes and desires'. 25 N. Rose, 'Authority and the genealogy of subjectivity', in: P. Heelas et al., eds, Detraditionalization: critical reflections on authorithy and identity (Oxford, 1996), pp. 294—327; P. Pels, 'Religion, consumerism and the modernity of the New Age. A review essay', Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, vol. 29 (1998) pp. 263-72. 26 C. Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Consumerism (Oxford and London, 1987). 27 A. Felling, J. Peters, P. Scheepers, eds, Individualiseringin Nederlandaan het einde van de twintigste eeuw. Empirisch onderzoek naar omstreden hypotheses (Assen, 2000). x

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* J.W. Duyvendak and M. Hurenkamp, eds, Kiezen voor de kudde. Lichte gemeenschappen en de nieuwe meerderheid (Amsterdam, 2004). 29 H. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), p. 262. 30 Ibid., p. 259. 31 T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion: discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, 1993).

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Chapter 12

Europe in the Age of Secularisation Lucian Hölscher

In the twentieth century, Europe has passed through an age of secularisation. The evidence for this most contentious assertion may be taken from the obvious fact that no other concept that describes the religious character of our time has become more popular and widespread within the last half century. Before the 1950s the term 'secularisation' was rarely used in public discourse; before the 1920s it was almost unknown even among specialists. But from the 1950s there has been an increasing number of references to the concept of 'secularisation' in all Western countries, not only in academic and church circles but also in newspapers, public speeches and private discourse regarding the changes in religious life which had already occurred or which were going to occur in the near future. What were the factors behind the development of this concept? When we look to the social and political phenomena bound together in the concept of 'secularisation' it is difficult to understand what is distinctly new about the quality of religious life which is now defined as 'secularised'. True, in many European countries attendance at church services (and the number of baptisms, weddings and religious funeral ceremonies) have been in decline and a growing number of people have abandoned church membership; but that is nothing new. This has been happening for centuries and, in general, the aftermath of the Second World War saw a slight improvement in the situation. The same is true of the separation of church and state, which today is taken as another indicator of secularisation. Despite its differing forms in various European countries, the exclusion of the established churches from public authority has been a common feature of European constitutional development from the lateeighteenth century and the acceptance of this principle in most constitutions all over the world seems a convincing justification for the secularisation thesis. But once again, there is nothing new about this; the mid-twentieth century did not see a new experience that justified the invention of a new concept. It is not my intention to go deeper into the debate about the secularisation process on the level of discussing the various social indicators of growth and decline that usually dominate the arguments of religious sociologists. After half a century of intense controversy, what seems to have emerged is a kind of deadlock. Whether there is a process of secularisation or not in modem societies very much depends on what we take as fundamental to the concept of secularisation: the

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decay of religious rituals, the decline of the public power of the churches, the loss of religious norms, symbols or of religious explanations of the world and its problems (not to speak of the functionalist definition, which takes secularisation as a kind of social differentiation, with the religious system as one of the sub-systems in modem society). I believe that there is no point in pursuing this line of argument any longer, no hope of finally coming to a conclusive and comprehensive model of secularisation which does justice to all major aspects of religious change in modem societies. For describing social changes in religious life in modern societies it seems to be more appropriate to use other and more specific concepts of religious transformation, which today dominate the debate of sociologists: concepts such as 'privatisation', 'individualisation', 'pluralisation' amongst others. But there is one disadvantage to them all which leads us back to the concept of 'secularisation': none of these models discusses secularisation in theological terms. They all take it for granted that religious change is a social process divorced from religious feeling and theological reasoning. As far as they use the concept, secularisation has been wrenched from its theological context and employed as a purely 'secular' category. Of course, one may understand this as a consequence of the process of secularisation itself but from a theological point of view it is an impoverishment, the end of a long tradition of theological reflection on the course of history. From these descriptors religious people derive no religious insights; from the religious point of view, religious change makes little or no sense. If we want to ascribe a religious meaning to religious change in our times it is necessary to go back to the theological implications and connotations of the concept. This is not only a strategy of conceptual reassurance but also the expression of a conviction: it makes no sense to deal with religious phenomena in history without reference to theological arguments. Outside of theological circles and debates, it has almost been forgotten that the concept of 'secularisation', parallel to the French concept of laicite, had a theological semantic background. In the Romanic languages the term 'secular' was present in the late middle ages; to the German language it was less familiar. As late as 1800, the Latin term saeculum usually referred to the tum of a century. In political discourse (together with adjectives such as 'worldly' and 'temporal') the term 'secular' defined a semantic distinction from the 'eternal' and the 'spiritual', a distinction that was basic to early modem society. The term was used to define political and social institutions, for instance in differentiating between the legitimate powers of the king and of the church, of 'worldly' and 'spiritual' courts of justice, of 'temporal' and 'eternal' things. Looking at this usage from the point of view of the history of ideas, one may argue that the semantic distinction 'secular'/'spiritual' simply reflected the political and theological structures of premodem society. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did the term 'secular' gradually change its meaning by being used in semantic opposition to the term 'religious'. This may be observed in new concepts such as 'secularism', invented by the freethinker George

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Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906) in the late 1840s, and in 'secularisation', invented some decades later. Instead of denoting a position within the structure of society, the term now referred to a world outside religion, replacing the older dichotomy of 'spiritualVeternal' and 'worldly'/'temporal' with the new dichotomy of'religious' and 'secular'. By representing an alternative to Christian and other religious ideologies, since the late-nineteenth century 'secularism' (as much as 'laicism' in France at the same time) established a new semantic structure of religion in the modern world. This structure is basically dependent on ideological assumptions, by which I mean that two interpretations of reality compete with one another. Religious phenomena may be interpreted in secular terms and vice versa. From the religious point of view, the secular may be seen as a kind of religion: socialism, for example, is described as a secular ideology by some authors but as a religion by others. But there is also a secular understanding of religion: for instance, Christian belief in a life after death may be taken as a false promise or the church as a purely social institution alongside many others. That is why today it hardly makes sense to speak of secularity without reference to some kind of religion and vice versa. The secular is but one side in a semantic dichotomy, which may be declared to be secular or religious. But even when taken as a secular dichotomy one has to keep in mind that the term 'secular' may be read in a religious and in a secular context. The meaning of the concept is very much affected by these different readings. While secular discourses tend to read the concept in terms of the sphere of state and society, religious discourses usually imply some kind of'worldliness' with a strongly religious dimension. Why is this important in defining the concept of secularisation? In terms of lexicographical analysis the semantic structure of the term 'secular' may seem to be characterised by an irritating semantic ambivalence, but in terms of discourse and conceptual analysis it affords an opportunity for understanding the usage of the concept in post-war debates on secularisation. The term serves as a link between theological and sociological analyses of religious change, making sense as much in the (theological) history of salvation as in the (sociological) history of society. In theological analysis it refers to saeculum, in sociological analysis to societas. Since both meanings have become almost interchangeable in today's usage of the term (a fact which is most significant for theological and religious discourses in the twentieth century) much turns on the semantic ambivalence of the concept. The practice of describing religious change in terms of social history is well established today but it was a new paradigm at the tum of the twentieth century. In nineteenth-century discourses (theological as much as historical) it was by no means a common practice to describe religious change in terms of social or institutional change. In those days the kingdom of God was still seen as a counter reality to the kingdom of man; the church as a counter organisation to all 'temporal' institutions. Only after the First World War was it a common practice in theological and ecclesiastical history to treat the churches as social institutions with more or less public influence and responsibility. In theological terms, references to

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society and to the 'world' were taken as equivalent to, and interchangeable with, the concept of 'secularity'. For the discourse of secularisation this equivalence was crucial, because it allowed the transformation of theological concepts and messages into socio-political messages and concepts. In the following discussion this is demonstrated with reference to the experience of Germany. In 1953 the German Protestant professor of theology in Göttingen, Friedrich Gogarten, published a widely read book with the title Verhängnis und Hoffnung der Neuzeit. The main argument of this book was to demonstrate that Säkularisierung (taken as a theological concept) should not be defined as the decline of church or of religion but rather as the incarnation of God. In terms of God's message of salvation, to become secular, Gogarten argued, was as much as to become realised. According to Gogarten, God's kingdom had to become 'secular' in order to conquer the world and to subdue evil. Gogarten's positive redefinition of the negative concept of 'secularisation' was widely accepted in Germany because it was in tune with certain ambitions among the Protestant elite. Irrespective of their involvement in the activities of the Deutsche Christen or of the Bekennende Kirche in the Third Reich, they had learned from the past that the Christian churches had to get rid of the political and social isolation which had limited their influence in the 1920s and 1930s, as much under the control of democratic as of totalitarian governments. As in other European societies, after 1945 the stabilisation of church power in Germany coincided with a redefinition of the churches' role in politics and social life. Leading church officials looked to play down the old confessional conflicts between Catholics and Protestants and to cooperate with non-Christian groups (and especially with the socialist parties) in important political and social projects. They also sought to assume wider responsibilities not only by dominating secular organisations but also by opening church organisations to civil society. This had an impact on various fields of church activity. For example, the churches opened church organisations to all kinds of consumers; in Catholic hospitals non-Catholic patients were accepted and, in Protestant nursery schools, children of non-Protestant parents. In the newly established governing boards of broadcasting and television companies, church representatives cooperated with representatives of the trade unions and other social organisations. In the primary school system, they abandoned 'confessional schools' (Konfessionsschulen), which were open only to children and teachers of one confession. In welfare policy they defined a concept of Gesellschaftsdiakonie (social deacon service), which was open to all parts of society. In terms of Christian mission they refrained from turning 'heathens' into Christians by fighting against non-Christian groups and organisations. But in doing so the churches were careful to keep their influence in public affairs; for example, by ensuring religious education in schools and by developing educational programmes with an implicitly Christian agenda. In the end, the churches profited enormously because they were accepted as public organisations with considerable moral authority. But what was even more important was that through these measures the boundaries between religious and secular

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groups were broken down or at least lost their power of preventing exchanges between them. Using the term 'secularisation'with respect to the decline of church and religion would have missed the point of this policy, for what the churches had lost in terms of traditional 'rights' and traditions they had gained in terms of public authority and participation. Secularisation turned out to be a strategy of de-qualifying and undermining the dichotomy between church and society, the religious and the secular. The churches profited from the separation of church and state and they even began to argue for the 'worldliness of the world'. By opening themselves to 'the world', therefore to social and political responsibility, church officials now had influence over a broad range of new activities. In following this kind of secularisation policy new church organisations such as church academies and church congresses (Evangelische Kirchentage and Katholikentage) gained a high reputation and considerable popularity. In church academies representatives of all parts of society met to discuss problems of public interest - sometimes without starting from Christian principles, but in the end always introducing a Christian aspect to the discussion. The organisers, who were often lay people without a formal ecclesiastical training, refrained from using a specialised Christian vocabulary, convinced that the problems discussed had their own logic and terminology. But they were busy and very productive in translating civil values into Christian principles and vice versa. It is worth looking more closely at these techniques in order to understand how secularisation worked in a progressive Christian context. In the centre of the secular discourse a number of concepts defined the basic values of Christian argument, concepts such as responsibility, tolerance, freedom, justice, emancipation, solidarity, maturity, conscience, confidence, dialogue, human dignity and pluralism. Some of them could be easily linked to Christian doctrines while other concepts, such as democracy, had no direct biblical sanction and therefore had to be justified by new Christian arguments. How this was done may be illustrated by a conference on 'Co-determination in the Public Service' which was held at the Protestant academy of Bad Boll in 1969. In his opening speech Dr. Dietrich Bauer, scientific adviser of the Protestant action group for labour affairs in Germany, declared that the partnership of employers and employees was of special concern to Christian social ethics: 'Without a minimum of freedom in decision making human dignity cannot be preserved.' 1 On the following day, Kurt Heinkele, factory manager of the trade union 'Public Service, Transport and Traffic' in Stuttgart, answered: 'Yesterday evening the paper of Dr. Bauer ended with the beautiful idea that co-determination is an expression of charity. I am very happy that there are still such optimistic people who view charity in this way and do not exile it to the realm of myth. In this respect I do have strong reservations, although I would support this idea very much.' 2 The next paper, on 'The contribution of the Churches to Democratisation', was read by Pastor Günther Hekler who commenced by admitting that democratisation had only a short history as a Christian concept. But, as Hekler argued, one should

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not take the statements of the Bible at face value; rather, one should translate them into the present context and here there was no doubt that the New Testament would challenge Christians 'to present their own responsible concept of political ethics'. From the available evidence, political and sociological, he drew the conclusion that the creation of dialogue was the most important concern. In a world built on the division of labour, for the sake of human dignity and to maintain some kind of freedom, a structure of dialogue was essential to social life and should be the governing principle of social construction.3 Three characteristic points may be drawn from this. Firstly, in supporting the same political issues representatives of the Protestant church and of secular institutions such as the trade unions began to converge. Secondly, while secular representatives profited from direct support of their political positions, church representatives profited from demonstrating the political relevance of the Bible. Thirdly, both sides came together in focussing on the same concepts such as charity, dialogue, freedom, responsibility, democracy and human dignity. Political and theological concerns thus went hand-in-hand, supporting one another. What the academies realised in the form of critical dialogues about every aspect of modem society, the church congresses tried to propagate in various other forms: besides providing panels and platforms they also instigated major events devoted to one key issue. Through these activities the churches came to be associated with some expertise in questions such as conservation, economic justice, nuclear disarmament, global opposition to racial and gender discrimination and so on. In their public speeches (whose audiences sometimes exceeded 100,000 people) prominent speakers usually tried to develop a language open to the secular language of politics as much as to theological reasoning: human solidarity was translated into Christian charity; ecological concern for nature into concern for God's 'creation'; social responsibility into God's incarnation in Jesus Christ and His care for 'the world' in general. By gaining a distinct profile in political debate, the Christian gospel was translated into political demands; for instance, on the part of the oppressed peoples of the Third World, prisoners, women and others. Through this secularisation of Christian terminology, religious concepts became more concrete and lost their moral distance and neutrality in social and political conflict. However, they also became more biased and more contested too, producing new internal debates and controversies. In both Christian churches in Germany, reformers and conservative groups began to struggle over secularisation by the 1960s. Whereas the reformers argued for 'modernising' the church by adjusting its institutions to democratic society and its liturgy and its language to the demands and understanding of ordinary people, conservatives argued for the identity of the church by keeping to its traditional forms and norms. In the early 1960s, the reformers were strongly supported by the public mass media but this wider support tailed off later in the decade. The 'secular' mass media now chose to support conservative positions such as the authority of the pope and the supernatural nature of 'miracles'. In many cases, it was even argued that religion could only be described in terms of irrational, non-

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modern ideas - ideas which many commentators did not believe in but which were declared to be essential to a religious system. It was an unholy alliance between religious conservatives and secular non-believers, parties who differed in terms of religious belief but who shared the same categories in describing it. This was the beginning of the end of secularisation. Secularisation did not come to an abrupt end in the 1970s but an opposing position grew in strength. It demonstrated the limits of a historical perspective that had trusted in the convergence of modernisation and religious salvation. Today the strategy of secularisation still survives and many leading representatives in both churches ally themselves to the principle of religious secularity. But a new strategy of cooperation without convergence between the churches and the secular world has emerged. For example, it has been demonstrated by Pope Benedict XVI in his policy of dialogue with Islam and Judaism; they agree on common political and social ideals but insist on their religious differences. In this essay the evidence for my historical sketch has been taken mainly from German sources and it will be necessary to prove its validity in other European contexts. Looking back on the age of secularisation it may be helpful to accentuate the most important features of the concept: 1. The age of secularisation cannot be defined by a clutch of social indicators such as church attendance, religious education or the separation of church and state, which vary at different times and in different places. Rather, it may be defined by the formation of a public discourse dominated by the concept of secularisation. 2. Secularisation is a hybrid concept, taking the term 'secular' as much as a religious than non-religious category. From the religious point of view it may be understood as a concept of decline and of increase. However, conservatives tend to delineate secularisation with reference to traditional indicators of the strength of Christianity such as church attendance and obedience to traditional Christian norms while progressives usually identify the positive aspects of secularisation, a tendency which stems from their assumption that things have to change in order to improve. 3. In church politics secularisation may be defined as a strategy ofconvergence between the demands of social modernisation and of the spiritual realisation of God's kingdom in this world. For this, church institutions have to be opened to all parts of society. Secular discourses used by Christians are constructed in such a way that their basic concepts are open as much to theological as to political and social understanding. 4. Since this strategy reached its height in the 1960s, secularisation may also be taken as the name for an age, an age in which religion was predominantly defined in social terms and society in religious terms. It was an age in which the ideas of 'the world' and of 'society' fused in one concept - the concept of the 'secular'.

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Notes 1

Dietrich Bauer, Demokratie in der Wirtschaft, Mitbestimmung im öffentlichen Dienst. Tagung 21-23 April 1969 (Bad Boll, 1969), p. 11. 2 3

Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 49.

Chapter 13

Secularisation in the UK and the USA Steve Bruce

Introduction The proposition that modernisation weakens religion has a long sociological pedigree. Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Dürkheim all foresaw a major decline. Religion's ability to provide a single, integrated and generally-held conception of meaning was being fatally eroded by three things: the emergence of a range of life-experiences deriving from widely differing relationships to a rapidly changing social order; the increasingly rationalistic organisation of an industrialised mass market economy; and more universalistic conceptions of citizenship. Bryan Wilson's 1966 Religion in Secular Society was for many British sociologists the key text. After examining detailed evidence for the decline in church adherence, declining status of the clergy and the like, he concluded that modernisation had brought two different forms of secularisation. In Britain, people abandoned churches. In America, churches remained popular by subordinating themselves to secular values. Pre-empting what was to become a common criticism, Wilson argued: the concept of secularization is not employed in any ideological sense, neither to applaud its occurrence, nor to deplore it. It is taken simply as a fact that religion - seen as a way of thinking, as the performance of particular practices, and as the institutionalization and organization of these patterns of thought and action - has lost influence.1

Wilson was careful to specify that what modernisation brought was the declining social significance of religion and not the decline of religion per se. Although the British evidence suggested that significance and popularity were closely related, Wilson's reading of America allowed that churches might remain popular social institutions despite becoming less religious and more marginal. In 1966 there was little dissent from this argument. It was largely accepted by church leaders, who were aware of the decline of Christianity, and by the social science community at large, which could see that the salience of religion in the fields which they studied had declined. In the USA, secularisation in the Wilsonian sense fitted easily with the then-dominant structural-fiinctionalism of

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Talcott Parsons. The key Parsonian idea was that as societies become richer they became more differentiated. Spheres such as the economy and the polity became increasingly specialised and autonomous, driven by their own value-systems, and religion became privatised and marginalised. Given that the most radical rejection of the secularisation paradigm later came from the USA, it is worth adding that it was American social scientists, driven by the belief that the United States was the model for the evolution of the rest of the world, who were most likely to present the secularisation paradigm as a template for the developing world.2 The Wilson-Parsons strand of the secularisation paradigm was essentially concerned with the social structural changes that marginalised and privatised religion. American sociologist Peter L. Berger added an important line of argument by integrating insights from phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, and symbolic interactionism to show how social (and hence cultural and especially religious) diversity undermined dogmatism and certainty.3 Once one rejected the possibility of re-establishing religious uniformity (by murder, expulsion or forced conversion) diversity had the consequence of making us all heretics. In the face of competing claims, we could either become universalists (and suppose a common core to all religions) or relativists (and suppose that your God rules you and my God rules me). In either case, the impetus to evangelise or to pass on one's faith to one's children is weakened. Contra to the later caricatures, there was nothing in the secularisation paradigm that required the declining social significance of religion to be universal, unremitting, or even. Nor were its proponents blind to the importance that religion could retain in a range of circumstances that can be grouped as cultural defence and cultural transition.4 An example of the former would be the role as guarantor of national identity that the Catholic Church acquired in Ireland and Poland. An example of the latter would be the part that a shared religion plays in assisting migrants to adapt to their new world. Academic orthodoxies are always challenged by the next generation. One bad reason for revisionism is reputation-seeking: there is more notoriety in iconoclasm than in working within a paradigm. Another is sloth: few scholars read back beyond the works of their supervisors so that gradually ideas become caricatures. The good reasons for revisionism are new evidence about the past and novel circumstances. In this brief essay I will juxtapose changes in the religious climates of the UK and USA and changes in the standing of the secularisation paradigm.

Religious Change in the UK Since 1966 every index of interest in Christianity has continued to decline. Church membership, church attendance, assent to Christian beliefs, number of full-time clergy, numbers of active churches and chapels, the religious celebration of rites of passage: the decline has been unremitting. Wilson described average Sunday

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church attendance as being between 10 and 15 per cent. It is now around 5 per cent.5 That new alignments within the shrinking pool (such as the charismatic movement) or the arrival of Christian migrants from first the West Indies and then Africa (the growth in Pentecostalism) occasionally produced church growth does nothing to change the overall pattern. Nor does the expansion of the religious repertoire. Christianity's declining ability to stigmatise alternatives opened space for the new religious movements of the 1970s and the alternative spirituality of the 1980s, but all attempts to gauge the scale of these new expressions of religious sentiment are clear in that they come nowhere close to compensating for the collapse of the Christian churches. A detailed study of Kendal, for example, suggested that 1.6 per cent of the population engaged in some 'holistic spirituality milieu' activity in a typical week.6 Given that some 50 per cent of Kendal attended church in 1851 and in 2001 only 8 per cent did, we can see the discrepancy in scale. The Kendal project also showed that half of those who took part in yoga and meditation classes or paid for various forms of healing did not regard their activity as spiritual. They were primarily seeking physical and psychological well-being, not religious enlightenment.7 Although Wilson's 1966 intemal-secularisation-of-the-churches case was made with regard to the USA, we find plenty of evidence for it in Britain. Forty years after David Martin wrote A Sociology of English ReligionI asked him to reflect on its predictions. He said he had not anticipated how enthusiastically the churches would collude in their own demise. He had not expected the mainstream churches to jettison so much Christian belief and ritual in the hope that imitating secular culture would make them more attractive. Encouraged by the bright young things who ran television, vicars vied with each other to argue that socialism, communism, feminism (indeed any secular 'ism') was really more Christian than Christianity.9 Although there were small counter flows, the churches succumbed to a lay version of the rationalising spirit that had pervaded academic theological circles since the start of the century. God became some vague higher power or just our own consciences; the Bible became a commonplace book of ethical and moral guidelines for living; miracles became natural phenomena misunderstand by ignorant peasants; Christ became an exemplary prophet and teacher; and heaven, hell and salvation became psychological states; which is pretty well what Wilson had expected. The one thing that Wilson did not anticipate was that the arrival of non-Christian religions, political shifts in the Islamic world, and conflict between west and east would eventually make religion contentious in a way it had not been for a century. But religion being troublesome and religion being popular are not the same things. There is no sign of a Christian revival in response to Islamic terrorism; on the contrary, survey evidence suggests that the British are being reinforced in their impression that religion taken too seriously is a bad idea.

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Critiques of the Secularisation Paradigm in the UK While the rate and extent of secularisation has exceeded Wilson's predictions, the response to his work from students of religion has run in the opposite direction. Much of the criticism has always been misplaced. Martin and others have accused secularisationists of being secularists: promoting what they claim to observe. This was never true for Wilson, who in classic Durkheimian fashion feared that the loss of a collective conscience would require that social cohesion be imposed by external (and unpleasant) social control. But what Wilson wished is irrelevant for his descriptions or explanations. Equally irrelevant is the criticism that the secularisation paradigm improperly assumed a golden age of informed Christian orthodoxy in the Middle Ages. It did no such thing. 4 All that needs to be assumed is that society was much more preoccupied with supernatural beliefs and practices and accorded them more significance than it does now'. 10 A better challenge argues that concentrating on formal church involvement exaggerates the secularity of the present. Grace Davie subtitled Religion in Britain Since J945 'believing without belonging'.11 She cited various illustrations of a more diffuse interest in religion to argue that the fall in church adherence was a symptom of a loss of interest in organised social activities, not a loss of faith. Although popular with church leaders looking for reasons to be cheerful, 'believing without belonging' did not fare well under empirical scrutiny. Using a data set that was unrivalled in its size, Voas and Crockett demonstrated that church attendance, religious belief, and religious identification had declined in tandem and that, were one to separate the three indices, believing had declined faster than belonging.12 Another major test, this time using European and World Values survey data also failed to find any support for the 'believing without belonging' notion.13 Davie has since proposed that a large proportion of Britons outside organised religion are 'vicariously religious'. 'By vicarious I mean the notion of religion performed by an active minority but on behalf of a much larger number, who implicitly at least not only understand, but clearly approve of what the minority is doing\14 As evidence for this she cites various examples of non-churchgoers making occasional use of church facilities and church officials. One such case is the local Anglican vicar's role in responses to the 2002 murder of two schoolgirls in Soham, Cambridgeshire. The vicar became the spokesman for the family. His church served as venue for individual and collective acts of mourning. And he led a public 'act of closure' when he addressed the entire school at the start of the next school year and released two doves into the sky. A detailed critique of the idea of vicarious religion is presented elsewhere,15 but its weakness is simple to identify. There are undoubtedly some people (the more respectable members of the Orange Order, for example) whose behaviour suggests that they have a sympathy for Christian religion that comes close to the medieval practise of one person paying another to do religious work on his behalf. But the majority of Davie's examples show only that many approve of the secular work of religious institutions. When I donate money to the Salvation Army to run doss houses I am not signalling an

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implicit wish to be a Salvationist myself and I am no more hoping to benefit from the Salvation Army's work in the next life than I am hoping to enjoy a stay in one of its doss houses in this life. Another version of the claim that we exaggerate current secularity is found in the idea of'folk' or 'popular' religion. Sarah Williams draws on her study of extrachurch religious beliefs and rituals in Southwark between 1880 and 1939 to argue that the secularisation paradigm is basically mistaken.16That there is religion beyond the churches is not in dispute. What would refute the secularisation paradigm is evidence that 'popular' religion was as popular now as in 1939 or, better still, that it had grown to fill the gap left by the decline of the churches. Williams offers no such evidence. The same challenge must be addressed to Davie's vicarious religion. That some people see continued secular utility in organised religion is not the issue: what matters is whether that view is now more or less popular and the evidence seems unambiguous. The change in the extent and influence of religion beyond the churches does not suggest some steady-state religious economy; it suggests that an active core sustains various outer rings, which shrink as the active core shrinks. The above criticisms challenge the implied slope of decline by setting the levels of religiosity at whatever is taken as the starting point lower, and making current levels of religiosity higher, than is assumed by secularisationists such as Wilson. British historian Callum Brown's work is interestingly different in that he challenges not the extent but the timing of decline. In the Death of Christian Britain (2001) he embraced entirely the parlous description of current religiosity but argued that the change was both more rapid and more recent than sociologists assumed. Presumably inspired by McLeod's comments on the role of the permissive society of the 1960s in challenging all sorts of conservative orthodoxy,17 Brown decided that secularisation began in the 1960s. While the 1960s was certainly a period of conspicuous rejection of organised religion, Brown over-states his case. Against his own assertion that the churches were in good heart in the late 1950s, he admits that church attendance had started to decline at least 80 years earlier. And he makes much of the rapid disappearance of women from the churches in the 1960s without noting the implication of the fact that churches were by then heavily dependent on women: the male half of the population had already been seriously secularised. There are two subtle problems with a 1 ate and abrupt dating of secularisatio n. First, it treats the novel opportunities of the 1960s (for example effective contraception and growth in affordable secular leisure activities) as irresistible. Yet we know that strong conservative religious cultures such as those of Ulster and the Western Isles were relatively immune to such distractions. That so many were willing to give in to temptation suggests that we need to work back to explain why their faith was weakened. Second, Brown assumes that the explanation for secularisation lies in the same period as its major symptoms. But the decline of the churches is only partly explained by adult defection. Much of it is the result of the failure to recruit children at the rate necessary to replace the elderly as they die. We also know that

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the recruitment of children is heavily dependent on the commitments of parents. Particularly important is the pattern of religious inter-marriage. Contemporary surveys show that two parents of the same religion have a one-in-two chance of retaining their children in the faith1K and any degree of marrying out (even if that is just Anglican-Methodist) halves that reproduction rate. If the change to be explained is the failure of those aged 16 to join the churches in 1968, then the crucial time may be at least 17 years earlier when one young adult marries out and the couple decides not to press any particular religion on their children. Marrying out is in part a matter of opportunity and the war mobilisation of the years 1939^45 provided an unprecedented degree of population movement within the United Kingdom. It is also a matter of attitude. Young adults who had been successfully socialised as conservative Catholics, Brethren, Baptists or Methodists would not be readily attracted to someone from a different background. If we tease out the causal connections between weakening faith and failure to ensure one's children retain some church involvement, we come to a rather different conclusion to that of Brown's abrupt dating or even McLeod's more moderate emphasis on the 1960s. We see that period less as a cause of secularisation and more as the coming to fruition of more subtle changes in previous generations.

Challenges to Secularisation Theory in the USA In 2008 Berger wrote: 4 Most sociologists of religion now agree that [secularisation] theory has been empirically shown to be false'. 19 Part of that recantation was irrelevant. Those of us who saw ourselves explaining the past of European societies and their settler offshoots were not at all surprised that religion remained powerful and popular in Africa, Latin America, most of Asia and the Middle East: societies in most of these settings had not 'modernised'. Their elites had become more affluent and adopted some modern technology (sadly often the weapons) but they patently lacked many of the features that secularisationists thought explained the decline of religion in the West: in particular, the rationalistic organisation of an industrialised mass market economy and more universalistic conceptions of citizenship. The egalitarianism and liberalism that turned diversity into first toleration and then indifference were largely missing, as were the political stability and increasing affluence that were vital to people putting individual preferences before group loyalties. The more pertinent reason for rejecting the secularisation paradigm was the continuing popularity of religion in the USA. In an effort to explain the vitality of US Christianity, many scholars returned to the nineteenth-century observations of the peripatetic Frenchman Alexis de Toqueville. He summarised his impressions of the USA in a simple contrast. In France the single hegemonic religion was unpopular; in America, where a plethora of churches competed on an equal footing, religion was thriving.

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Rodney Stark and colleagues elaborated de Toqueville's virtues of voluntarism into a complex 'supply side' theory of religion. This was Stark's second attempt. Having initially espoused conventional secularisation views,20 with William Bainbridge he later developed a theory of rewards and compensators.21 The scarcity of rewards leads people to seek compensators (usually an untestable promise of the reward at some future date); because religion can invoke the supernatural, it offers the most persuasive compensators; therefore religion is indispensable. Although elegantly elaborated, this challenge to secularisation attracted little support, probably because its terms were so flexible that anything and everything could be made to fit it. Stark was more successful with his second approach. The supply-side theory argued that differences in rates of popular participation were caused by market conditions. Just as free markets in consumer goods produced greater variety, lower prices and greater take-up, so too in the sphere of religion. State-supported monopolies and hegemonies were inefficient, inflated entry costs for new providers and hence stifled diversification, removed from the clergy incentives to win or keep a following, and thus depressed the take-up of religion.22 What made this a rebuttal of the secularisation approach was the underlying assumption that demand for religion was stable and universal. Stark and colleagues produced many studies which supported the general proposition that (contra the secularisation approach) diversity was positively correlated with religiosity. Others failed to replicate those results and there are grounds for suspecting that the confirmatory evidence was often a by-product of the measurement techniques. For example, the diversity of the United States was inflated by treating language and race variants as options. A town with two black Baptist churches and two white Baptist churches was scored as having four outlets when the racial barriers meant that residents only had two choices. A detailed critique of the supply-side approach must be found elsewhere.23 I will make just two points. First, whether we take Canada, Australia, Norway, Scotland, Holland, or the United States, we find that, as these countries have become more diverse, they have become secular. Second, the most religious countries are the least religiously diverse. The supply-side approach provided serious intellectual under-pinning for de Toqueville's contrast by drawing on the right-wing economics of Gary Becker, who believed that all behaviour could be explained by the wish to maximise utility. Even most economists find this implausible. The free market model works best for fields where general demand is high but brand loyalty low, and where costs and benefits of choices are clear; then we can engage in utility maximising. An example would be the market for cars. The demand for personal transportation is high, we are not raised to despise any particular brand as the work of Satan, and the costs and benefits of owning a car are fairly readily calculable. None of these things is true for religion. For most of the world, religion is not a preference; it is an inherited social identity, closely tied to other identities and changeable only at considerable personal cost. And the costs and benefits of alternative religions are

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not knowable in a manner that permits rational choice. Being a Moonie may be more 'costly' (in money, time, social prestige and so on) than being a Unitarian but this side of death I cannot know which (if either) will deliver the desired benefit of eternal life. The irony of the supply-side model is that, if it works at all, it does so only in societies where religion is so little connected to other social identities that it can be treated as an almost trivial personal preference, to be altered at will: which is rather the point that Wilson was making in 1966.

Religious Change in the USA The de Toquevillian contrast of secular Europe and religious America is so popular that important changes in American religion are often overlooked. While American churches are more popular than their European counterparts, they are less popular than they used to be. Reliance on opinion polls has long disguised a decline in church-going.24 In a pair of well-crafted projects, Kirk Hadaway, Penny Marler and Mark Chaves compared actual and claimed church attendance.25 A careful count of how many people in Ashtabula County, Ohio, attended services on a particular Sunday was made and the following week, researchers used a standard telephone survey to ask a sample of Ashtabulans if they went to church the previous week. They discovered that the observance claimed by their respondents was 83 per cent higher than their best estimates of actual attendance. Hadaway and Marler then repeated the study with a Baptist church in a metropolitan area of Alabama. They found that 984 people were at worship on a particular Sunday: about 40 per cent of the membership. During the following week a sample of 300 members of the congregation were interviewed about various matters, including their church attendance in the previous week. 70 per cent said they attended. Even more compelling evidence of over-claiming was produced by comparing actual attendance at the adult Sunday school (where the names of those present were recorded) with what members said when asked in a telephone poll the following week: 'Sunday school attendance at this church was over-reported by 58.8 per cent'. 26 The contrast between the UK and USA is also exaggerated by forgetting the influence of immigration. In 1998 the number of immigrants in the USA was 26.3 million, almost one in ten of the population, and the highest figure in 70 years. The largest proportion of these, almost a third, were from Mexico.27 The Caribbean and Asia came next. Very few migrants were from Europe. Unless the migrants are quite untypical of their native religious cultures, they will be considerably more devout than the typical US-bom American. The most contentious part of Wilson's depiction of US religion was his claim that the churches had been internally secularised. What he meant can be illustrated with the career of Norman Vincent Peale. Peale was a successful New York liberal Presbyterian minister and author of The Power Of Positive Thinking.2* In the first

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two years after its publication, the book sold over 2 million copies. For Peale the Christian message was a battle between good and evil but these were not external to us. Evil was a lack of self-confidence; good was positive thinking. Those who think positively (while conforming to the norms of suburban middle-class 1950s America) will be successful; this is salvation. Those who do not will be damned: that is, they will be unhappy. The spirit of Peale lived on in the theology of Robert Schüler, who in the 1950s started preaching at a drive-in cinema in Garden Grove, California. Televising the service as The Hour of Power brought a growing congregation and in 1980 he opened the $16 million Crystal Cathedral, a modemist edifice walled and roofed in glass. In the mid-1980s, The Hour of Power was the most popular religious programme on US television. Schüler preached what he called 'possibility theology'. Its deviation from traditional Christianity is neatly symbolised in the title of his most popular book. With no trace of irony, The Be-Happy-Attitudes promises that those who believe in Christ will be rewarded with health, prosperity and happiness in this life. From the 1920s to the late 1960s conservative Protestants defined themselves by their refusal to modernise their faith. They could resist new attitudes because they did not so immediately benefit from the prosperity that encouraged the innovations. Puritanism reconciled them to poverty by making a virtue of deprivation. Television was sinful when most fundamentalists could not afford televisions. As the communities in which fundamentalism and Pentecostalism were strong prospered, Puritanism waned. Dancing, eating out, expensive clothes and make-up were sinful until Pentecostalists could afford them and then the lines shifted. In 1988, the Church of God (the oldest US Pentecostal sect), voted to change its moral code: 'It is not displeasing to God for us to dress well and be well-groomed'.29 So long as Pentecostalists were so poor that the break-up of the family would have pushed them into destitution, divorce was entirely unacceptable. As they became better off so too that line was moved. A Bama survey in 2000 showed that born-again adults were more likely than others to have experienced a divorce.30 James Hunter in 1982 surveyed evangelical students with a series of questions that had been used in the 1950s and 1960s.31 In 1951, almost all of those asked thought that social dancing was 'morally wrong all the time' and most were similarly opposed to folk dancing. In 1982, none of the young evangelicals objected to either. A similar proportion of the first generation (98 per cent) regarded drinking alcohol as sinful; in 1982, only 17 per cent thought it morally wrong. In 1951, almost half thought watching 'Hollywood-type' movies was morally wrong; in 1982 none did. The consensus against 'petting' and sexual intercourse was so strong in 1951 that questions about sex were not asked. In the early 1960s, 81 per cent of evangelicals thought 'heavy petting' morally wrong all the time. Twenty years later, less than half Hunter's sample took that view. An important element of Peale's psychologising of religion was its positive valuation of the self. Evangelicals were bitterly critical of liberals for abandoning the idea of sin and for recasting salvation as this-worldly therapeutic improvement.

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Yet a generation later, evangelicals were re-writing the gospel in the same way. Hunter makes the point by noting that the best-selling evangelical books of the 1980s included: You Can Become the Person You Want to Be; The Healthy Personality and the Christian Life, How to Become Your Own Best Self and SelfEsteem: the New Reformation,32 In the explanation of secularisation, I mentioned practical relativism. One common feature of religions in modem democracies is a shortening of reach, so that injunctions that were once applied to all of God's creation are now thought to apply only to those who freely accept them. There are clear signs of such relativism becoming common among American Christians. In the 1920s, Robert and Helen Lynd studied life in a small American city they called Middletown. They asked for responses to the statement that 'Christianity is the one true religion and all people should be converted to it'. 33 Of those asked, 94 per cent agreed. When the same question was put in 1977 to a sample of church-going young people, only 41 per cent agreed. The authors of the re-study summarised that section of their book by saying: 'half of Middletown's adolescents who belong to and attend church ... do not claim any universal validity for the Christian beliefs they hold and have no zeal for the conversion of non-Christians'.34 Hunter's study of young evangelicals suggested similar changes. While their views on what they had to do and believe in order to attain salvation remained orthodox, they had softened considerably their views of other people's chances of being saved. The Middletown work also contains one observation that accords well with Wilson's view that there has been a significant change in the reasons for church adherence. The Lynds asked why people went to church and the most popular answer was 'obedience to God'. In the 1977 re-study, the most popular reason given for church-going was 'pleasure'. Wade Clark Roof, who has spent 30 years documenting shifts in American religious life concluded a broad survey of changes with: 'the religious stance today is more internal than external, more individual than institutional, more experiential than cerebral, more private than public'.35 The political activism of evangelicals and fundamentalists from the late 1970s onwards is often presented as refutation of the secularisation paradigm's expectation of the marginal isation of religion.36 While the Christian Right's impact on the Republican party has indeed been impressive, its appearance and record can be read in a very different light. First, we should note that conservatives became politically active because they had lost their social and cultural dominance: there was no need for a Christian Right in the 1950s. Second, for all the money and effort that has been expended conservative Christians have not won a single battle. Abortion has not been banned. The proportion of mothers working outside the home has not been reduced. Patriarchy has not been restored. Divorce is not more difficult or less popular. Far from being forced back into the closet, homosexuals have made considerable advances in public acceptability. Biology classes continue to teach Darwin. And the general constitutional prohibition on public statesupported religious acts and symbols remains in place.

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Behind the specific failures is the failure to reverse the general trend towards greater universality. Most Americans seem to appreciate the practical benefits of liberalism and toleration. Some have a conscious commitment to the separation of church and state; others just have a vague sense that preachers should not be telling them what they cannot do. A major survey sponsored by an organisation in favour of greater religious influence in public life found that 58 per cent of the public thought it wrong for voters 'to seriously consider the religious affiliation of candidates'. When asked what they thought of faith-based charities receiving government funding for welfare programmes, 44 per cent were in favour but a quarter of them thought it only a good idea if such programmes stay away from religious messages. Nearly a third thought it a bad idea for the state to fund religious organisations for any purpose. Most telling where the responses to questions about public prayer in schools. Only 12 per cent of evangelicals thought that such prayers should be specifically Christian and 53 per cent of evangelicals (the same as for the general public) thought that a moment of shared silence was the best solution to the problem.37 Jose Casanova's work on the public place of churches is often presented as rebuttal of the marginalisation element of the secularisation paradigm but his key point is that organisations such as the Catholic Church were only able to re-enter the public sphere once they accepted essentially secular rules of engagement.38 They could promote their activities and perspectives on the grounds of secular social utility or universal values (such as basic human rights); they could not claim that they deserved special attention because they had God on their side. The same is true for the conservative Protestants of the Christian Right. They cannot say that Creation should be taught in schools because God requires it. They have to accept the primacy of secular science and argue that 'intelligent design5 is as consistent with the scientific evidence as any other explanation. They cannot assert that God forbids divorce. They have to argue that divorce is socially dysfunctional. Legal battles over abortion are fought on the secular principle that abortion infringes the universal right to life. Most conservative Christians accept that they cannot demand a privileged position for their culture; they have to argue for their rights as a cultural minority. Wilson did miss one trick. He did not anticipate the extent to which the diffuse nature of social, political, economic and cultural organisation in the USA would allow conservative Protestant minorities to build introverted sub-societies. Independent Christian schools, fundamentalist colleges and universities, Christian TV networks, programmes, films, radio stations, web sites, shopping guides, holiday resorts, and enclosed housing complexes all help protect believers from alien cultures and ensure that they have almost no significant positive social interaction with unbelievers. But even with those structures, evangelicals and fundamentalists are moving in the same direction as the mainline churches in the 1960s: dogma and doctrine are giving way to personal experience and therapy, social mores are being relaxed, and sectarian certainty is giving way to toleration.

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Concluding Thoughts and Grand Narratives Auguste Comte's nineteenth-century vision of religion being replaced by Positivism was a 'grand narrative' (which is a polite way of saying 'big fairy tale'). The caricature of secularisation that Stark and his colleagues ritually slay in every new publication is a grand narrative but one of their own imagining. The real secularisation paradigm is a somewhat dull and plodding series of explanations of documented changes in the social significance and popularity of religion in the western world since the Reformation. It has no posited endpoint, it does not judge the patterns it identifies, it does not generalise beyond its evidence base, it allows and accommodates many exceptions, and it never loses sight of the complexity of the causal connections it tries to unravel. Furthermore, unlike normative social theory and theology, it is notan alternative to the work of historians such as Hugh McLeod. Our naturally contrary natures cause us to exaggerate differences, but empirically-minded sociologists (and I have no brief for the other sort) and historians are in the same trade. Sociologists may lean towards the wholesale end and historians towards retail but they are in the same business. The sociological search for broad and long-term patterns and underlying general causal sequences may sometimes seem very different to the historians' stress on detail but the best in each camp often overlap.

Notes 1

B. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 11. For example D. McClelland, The Achieving Society (Glencoe, 111, 1961). 3 P.L. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (London, 1969); P.L. Berger and T. Luckmann, 'Secularization and Pluralism', International Yearbook for the Sociology of Religion, vol. 2 (1966), pp. 73-84. 4 S. Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: from Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford, 1996), pp. 96-128. 5 P. Brierley, Pulling Out of the Nosedive: A Contemporary Picture of Church-going (London, 2006). 6 P. Heelas and L. Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford, 2004). 7 D. Voas and S. Bruce, 'The spiritual revolution: another false dawn for the sacred', pp. 43-62 in K. Flanagan and P. Jupp eds, A Sociology of Spirituality (Aldershot, 2008). 8 D. Martin, A Sociology of English Religion (London, 1967). 2

9

For a thoroughly documented review of this period, see H. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007). 10 B.R. Wilson, 'The debate over secularization: religion, society and faith', Encounter 45/4 (Oct, 1975), p. 79. 11 G.R.C. Davie, Religion in Britain Since 1945: believing without belonging (Oxford, 1994).

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D. Voas and A. Crockett, 'Religion in Britain: neither believing nor belonging', Sociology, vol. 39 (2005), pp. 11-28. 13 O. Aarts, N. Need, M. Te Grotenhuis, and N.D. de Graaf, 'Does belonging accompany believing? Correlations and trends in Western Europe and North America between 1981 and 2000', Review of Religious Research, vol. 50 (2008), pp. 16-34. 14 G.R.C. Davie, The Sociology of Religion (London, 2007), p. 127. 15 S. Bruce and D. Voas, 'Vicarious religion: an examination and critique', British Journal of Sociology, forthcoming. 16 J. Garnett, M. Grimley, A. Harris, W. Whyte and S. Williams eds, Redefining Christian Britain: Post 1945 Perspectives (London, 2006). 17 H. McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789-1989 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 132-43. 18 D. Voas and A. Crockett, 'Religion in Britain: neither believing nor belonging', Sociology, vol. 39 (2005), pp. 11-28. 19

RL. Berger, G. Davie and E. Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations (Aldershot, 2008), p. 10. 20 C. Glock and R. Stark, American Piety: the nature of religious commitment (Berkeley, 1968). 21 R. Stark and W.S. Bainbridge, The Future of Religion (Berkeley, 1985), idem, A Theory of Religion (New York, 1987). 22 L.A. Young ed., Rational Choice Theory and Religion (New York, 1997); R. Stark and R. Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley, 2000). 23 S. Bruce, Choice and Religion: a Critique of Rational Choice Theory (Oxford, 1999); T. Jelen, ed., Sacred Markets, Sacred Canopies: Essays on Religious Markets and Religious Pluralism (New York, 2002). 24 Apart from the problem of inaccurate self-reporting, reliance on opinion polls has the general characteristic of under-sampling young working people and transient populations and thus exaggerating church attendance. 25 C.K. Hadaway, RL. Marler and M. Chaves, 'What the polls don't show: a closer look at UC church attendance', American Sociological Review, vol. 58 (1993), pp. 741-52. 26 RL. Marler and C.K. Hadaway, 'Testing the attendance gap in a conservative church', Sociology of Religion, 60 (1997), p. 4. 27 S.A. Camarota, Immigrants in the United States 1999: a snapshot of America s foreign-born population (Center for Immigration Studies website: www.cis.org, 1999). 28 C.V.R. George, Gods Salesman: Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking (Oxford, 1994). 29 J.B. Tamney and S.D. Johnson, 'The popularity of strict churches', Review of Religious Research 39 (1998), p. 219. 30 G. Bama, 'The year's most intriguing findings', Barna Research Online, www. bama.org, 2000:3. 31 J.D. Hunter, Evangelicalism: the Coming Generation (Chicago, 1987), p. 59. 32 Ibid., pp. 69-70. 33 R.S. Lynd and H.J. Lynd, Middletown: a Study of Contemporary American Culture (New York, 1929), p. 316. 34 T. Caplow, H.M. Bahr and B.A. Chadwick, All Faithful People: Change and Continuity in Middletown s Religion (Minneapolis, 1983) p. 98.

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W.C. Roof, 'God is in the details: reflections on religion's public presence in the United States in the mid-1990s', Sociology of Religion, vol. 57 (1996), p. 153. 36 J.K. Hadden and A.D. Shupe, Televangelism: Power and Politics on Gods Frontier (New York, 1988). 37 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (2001), It's wrong to base voting on religion, say most Americans. Pew Trusts web-site: www.pewtrusts.com. 3X J. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994).

Chapter 14

Thinking Broadly and Thinking Deeply: Two Examples of the Study of Religion in the Modern World Grace Davie

In the last couple of years, I have been lucky enough to receive for review two impressive volumes, the first edited by Hugh McLeod and the second written by him.1 Taken together they represent not only a very significant contribution to the literature on religion in the modem world, but the multiple talents of their editor/author - clearly a scholar who can command an exceptionally wide range of resources and can use them to the best possible advantage. The first of these is an overview of world Christianity from 1914 to 2000, which is global in its reach and brings together over 30 meticulously-edited chapters. In this McLeod 'thinks broadly'. The second constitutes a focused and singleauthored account of the 'religious crisis' of the 1960s in the modern West. Here McLeod 'thinks deeply'. The following chapter takes these volumes as a starting point. It begins by outlining both the contents and the talents displayed in these books, each of which provokes a more extended discussion. It then develops an idea that emerges in both of them: that is the extent to which it is possible to speak of 'the West5 as a single entity in terms of its religious life in the late twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. More precisely it will interrogate a question that I have discussed many times with Hugh McLeod and which recurs at various places in this festschrift. This relates not only to the observable differences between West Europe and the United States in terms of their respective religious trajectories, but to the reasons for these. On the latter point in particular we hold somewhat different views. In order to illustrate this point in more detail, I will draw finally on Hugh McLeod's contribution to a book edited by Hartmut Lehmann - a distinguished German historian of religion - devoted specifically to this question.2 I will contrast this with the argument presented in a recent (co-written) contribution of my own on the same theme.3

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Thinking Broadly Hugh McLeod is the editor of the final volume of the prestigious Cambridge History of Christianity - itself entitled World Christianities c. 1914-c. 2000. It was published simultaneously with the volume on the nineteenth century edited by Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley.4 Both, significantly, use the plural 'Christianities' in their respective titles, emphasising the diversity in the subject matter - these editors are most certainly 'thinking broadly'. Each of these very substantial books could, and indeed should, be considered separately given that each contains a set of carefully crafted chapters relating to the period in question. That said, it is important to grasp the links between them given that they quite clearly add up to more than the sum of their parts. As a pair they constitute a formidable overview of the evolution of Christianity across the world over two centuries. The story, moreover, is continuous: the earlier volume devotes its third (and final) section to the expansion of Christianity to every continent; the later one develops the narrative, including its more unexpected elements. In terms of the unexpected, two points are immediately clear: first the dramatic development of Christianity in the global south in the later decades of the twentieth century and, second, the fact that this seismic shift was not anticipated by scholars of religion - or indeed by anyone else (politicians, policy makers, development workers and so on). Nor was the resurgence of religion as a critical factor in the modem world order. Such oversights reveal a persistent weakness in the social scientific study of religion, the essence of which can be captured in the form of a question. Why was it that the rise of religion in the global agenda caught everyone by surprise? Why, more searchingly, did scholars of almost every discipline fail to predict the pivotal events of the late twentieth century - the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade later, and the cataclysmic attack on the Twin Towers in 2001? Could it be that more attention to religion might have made a difference? An extended answer to these questions lies beyond the scope of this chapter, the more so in that they include the Muslim as well as the Christian world. The quality of scholarship found in the latest volume of the Cambridge History of Christianity should, however, be read with this in mind - the global emphasis is crucial. The preceding volume puts this in context and is dedicated to the 'long' nineteenth century - from 1815 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. It is particularly pleasing to see Brian Stanley, a specialist in mission, involved in this enterprise given the significance of mission to the nineteenth-century story, secular as well as religious. All too often, this factor is conspicuously absent - including, paradoxically, in debates that deal with globalisation. In this volume, it constitutes a central theme, with considerable space given not only to what happened in different parts of the globe (crucially the movement of people who took with them their religious understandings), but to the complex and difficult discussions that surround the three Cs - Christianity, commerce and civilisation - the more so when the three are considered together. No combination, following both Brian Stanley

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himself (Chapter 27) and Andrew Porter (Chapter 34) 'encapsulated more pithily the fundamental dynamism which mid-nineteenth-century Christians believed underpinned the expansion of their faith overseas'. 5 But no combination, equally, raises more searching questions. This is a story in which motives are necessarily mixed and outcomes are far from predictable. A key moment arrives in 1910 with the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh. It is at this meeting that the globe is divided between its evangelised and the non-evangelised components - with the strong assumption that the 'sending' nations are those in the north and the 'recipients' those in the rest of the world. How different this looks a century later as the missionary chickens come home to roost - a fact openly acknowledged in the anniversary celebrations of the Edinburgh Conference.6 Interestingly, the 1910 meeting was an equally important marker for the ecumenical movement as those involved in mission began increasingly to realise that they were exporting the divisions within the churches along with the gospel. Something had to be done: an idea that bore fruit after the Second World War in the World Council of Churches. Mission, however, is not the only theme of this volume - nor should it be. Gilley and Stanley divide their material into three sections. The first deals with the relationship between religion and modernity, tackling this necessarily complex field from a variety of perspectives - cultural as well as institutional. Popular forms of both religion and irreligion are also included. The second section focuses on the links between the churches and national identities, beginning with the different countries of Europe but gradually working outwards - first to the Americas and then beyond, an emphasis that leads easily into the third section on global expansion and, thus, to the following volume for which McLeod himself was responsible. More than anything else, the seven hundred plus pages dedicated to the twentieth century substantiate the dramatic shift in the distribution of Christians across the globe: a transformation that surpassed even the wildest dreams of nineteenthcentury missionaries. At the beginning of the century, approximately 80 per cent of the world's Christians lived in Europe, the Russian Empire and North America. By 2000, this had dropped to around 40 per cent while the proportion living in Asia and Africa had risen from a mere 5 per cent to 32 per cent.7 In terms of religious activity, moreover, the shift is even more dramatic - Christians in the global south are markedly more engaged than those further north, a contrast that brings with it concomitant problems. It is central, for example, to the increasingly tense situation discovered in all the major denominations between historic, financial and to some extent theological power in the north and demographic power (the sheer weight of numbers) in the global south. This tension is experienced differently in the Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion and the World Lutheran Federation, but the underlying question remains the same: how is it possible to accommodate within one institution the theological conservatism of the developing world alongside the more progressive views of at least some churches in both Europe and the United States without the whole thing falling apart?

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The major denominations, moreover, are increasingly challenged by the growth of new forms of church life - among them Pentecostalism, the fastest growing form of Christianity in the modem world.8 Pentecostalism grows exponentially among groups of people who find in this particular form of Christianity both a vision for themselves and a means of support for their families. Both are important. On the one hand, Pentecostal communities look up and out. Theologically, they offer a vision for the individual Christian who has been redeemed from past experience, blessed by the spirit and opened to new opportunities. But in a much more tangible sense, such communities are linked to an ever expanding network of churches and organisations that, by their very nature, transcend boundaries, whether national, political or ethnic. The fact that these chains of communication are frequently English speaking is of significance in itself. Equally important, however, are the capacities of Pentecostalism to provide a refuge. This is true in terms of teaching (conservative readings of scripture) and of practice (protection from the vicissitudes of life). Hence a set of communities that are freely joined but firmly directed - leadership is often authoritarian. In the fragile economies of the developing world, where alternative sources of welfare are conspicuous by their absence, this has proved a winning combination. Taking all these things into account, it becomes harder to speak in terms of secularisation as a global trend, though decline remains a significant theme in some parts of the world. More precisely, Christendom in its European form has very largely collapsed. Exactly what will emerge in its place poses, however, a rather more difficult question - Christendom is not the same thing as Christianity. Precisely this point becomes clear with reference to the United States, where voluntarist Christianity remains relatively vibrant, though it too has been subject to a certain re-balancing as conservative denominations grow at the expense of their more liberal counterparts (see below). As we have seen, however, the future of Christianity belongs to the south. Mission, it follows, is no longer a north-south movement associated with colonial expansion. It is a movement from everywhere to everywhere else, including the increasingly secularised societies from which the European missionaries first set out. The assumptions of those assembled in Edinburgh in 1910 have very largely been turned on their head. The chapters included in McLeod's carefully constructed volume exemplify and explain these complexities. As in the earlier volume, the material is contained in three sections: the first on the institutions and movements of the Christian churches, a second on narratives of change (including the shock of two world wars), and a third on the social and cultural impact both of and on the churches (including the relationships between Christianity and other world faiths). Running through the volume are five major themes and one further, less explicit, idea. Two of these have already been discussed (global expansion and Western, notably European, decline). The third (interfaith dialogue) and fourth (the impact of war) are integral to the twentieth-century story. Intriguingly, by the end of the century they become increasingly intertwined as war not only changes in nature but becomes - at least for some - inextricably entangled with questions of religious identity. The fifth

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theme is interesting and concerns the ambiguous relationship between Christianity and the emancipation of oppressed groups. Here McLeod is anxious to correct the 'traditional', somewhat one-sided accounts in which Christianity is seen simply as the oppressor. Indeed, the ambiguity of these relationships in many ways mirrors those that relate to mission in the earlier volume. McLeod's final idea concerns the increasing speed of communications that dominated the late twentieth century, becoming ever faster as the decades pass. The implications are huge for almost every aspect of Christianity as they are for everything else. The closing remarks on China, written by McLeod himself, capture the essential point. What happens in China will determine the future of the modem world: that much is clear. What is less often appreciated is the significance of the religious element within this, including Christianity - itself the result of earlier missionary endeavour outlined in the volume on the nineteenth century, and brutally suppressed at the time of the Cultural Revolution. How the wheel turns! One statistic illustrates the significance of what is happening. According to a 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, 31 per cent of the Chinese public considers religion to be very or somewhat important in their lives, compared with only 11 per cent who say religion is not at all important.9 A third of any population normally denotes an element worth taking into account. A third of the Chinese population, however, is an enormous number of people - more or less the equivalent of the whole of Europe. Even more important is the fact that in China, as in much of the developing world, it is the middle classes (urban, educated and critically engaged in the economic development of their countries) who are attracted to religion, including Christianity. The assumed incompatibility between religion and modernity - the focus of much discussion in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. McLeod is also the author of Chapter 18 entitled 'The crisis of Christianity in the West: entering a post-Christian era?' - an account of what is happening to the Christian churches in the 'modern' world (which is, West Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). The idea of 'crisis' prefigures the more detailed analysis of the 1960s found in the monograph to be discussed in the following section. Even in the summary form, however, McLeod observes that the United States takes a rather different tum in the later decades of the twentieth century in terms of its religious life, noting in particular the trend towards political conservatism - itself bound up with the re-emergence of the south in the economic and political life of America. Several points are worth noting in this connection: the careful attention to detail in even a short chapter (generalisations are carefully qualified); the importance of nuance (the possibility that more than one thing is happening at once, not least in Europe); and the capacity to embed the facts and figures about the churches in a broader economic, social and political context. Why, though, did the United States take a different turn at this point and what are the reasons for this? What, more broadly, are the similarities and differences between Europe and America? We shall return to these questions in due course.

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Thinking Deeply Before doing so, it is important to 'think deeply', recognising that The Religious Crisis of the 1960s is very different sort of book. It too, however, exemplifies all the characteristics of Hugh McLeod's work: it is scrupulously researched, attractively organised and very easy to read. At one level the book is chronological. McLeod uses the term the 'long 1960s' (following Arthur Marwick's concept) in order to grasp not only this pivotal decade itself, but the period leading up to it - and indeed its aftermath. When, and from where the movement for change came constitutes a recurring motif. More precisely, the reader is able to appreciate the very different moods that characterised the early, mid and late 1960s, culminating in the tumultuous events of 1968. The chain of events that was set off in that memorable year - the Tet offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Prague Spring, the student riots in Paris which led to major industrial unrest - did not come from nowhere. As McLeod makes clear in the early chapters of this book, the time was ripe for a wider variety of reasons. Alongside this chronology, McLeod explores four interrelated themes, which unsurprisingly - reflect similar, if not identical, ideas to those set out in the edited volume. These are: the increase in the range of beliefs and world-views accessible to the majority of the population; a shift in the way that people in most western societies understood the religious identity of their own societies; the profound changes in religious socialisation over the period; and finally the reconfiguration of religious life in the West as the major Christian denominations moved closer together at the same time, paradoxically, as the divisions within each of these churches grew deeper. The first three of these themes reveal a transformation in the taken-forgrantedness of Christianity as the dominant religion of the West. By the end of the 1960s, it was much less easy for populations simply to assume either that they were 'Christian', or that they lived in a 'Christian5 country - though exactly what these terms meant was much less clear. It was even harder to define what these societies had become: were they secular, pluralist, post-Christian or what? Here the emphasis lies on the earlier point - the underlying shift in religious life in which the 1960s mark a watershed: no longer was it possible for those living in the West, or indeed in most other places, simply to inherit the faith of their parents or grandparents on the assumption that this is the one and only (and therefore true) religion. In other words, religious pluralism was definitively recognised as a fact of modern life bringing with it unavoidable consequences. But what are these consequences? In the 1960s, it was widely assumed (in, for example, the early work of Peter Berger)10 that pluralism spelt danger for religion: if there were several versions of religion, there much be several versions of 'truth', which implied that truth was relative rather than absolute. The sacred canopy that protects us all is irretrievably damaged. This, moreover, is a necessarily secularising process. Pluralism is an integral part of modernisation, so therefore

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must be secularisation: the two ideas are intrinsically linked. The fact that even in the 1960s, the data - particularly the global data - were beginning to suggest otherwise was, quite simply, beyond comprehension. The following anecdote illustrates the power of this 'dominant ideology'. From 1998-2003, I took part in a working group associated with the World Council of Churches. The group was charged with understanding better the nature and forms of religion in the modem world, paying careful attention to the implications of these changes for the future of the ecumenical movement.11 About ten of us met regularly over the five year period, each individual representing a different part of the Christian world. The Europeans were in a minority. Two of our number (one from the Philippines and one from West Africa) each told the same story regarding secularisation. Both of them, educated in the late sixties and seventies, had been obliged to leam the 'secularisation thesis' as part of their professional formation. Both of them knew that the thesis was at best inappropriate, at worst simply wrong, a point of view overwhelmingly vindicated by subsequent events. But learn the thesis they had to - it was part of 'proper' education, necessary if they were to receive the qualifications essential for their respective careers. The empirical situation which they knew so well was simply put on one side: theory took precedence over data. McLeod's fourth and final theme - the divisions within rather than between the major denominations of the Christian churches - raises similar issues. Once again, it is worth underlining the strength of the assumptions that dominated in the 1960s. In this decade, it was axiomatic that to be modem meant to be secular. To be secular, moreover, meant to be innovative - in other words to cast aside traditions and to embrace new ideas. Many of these ideas came from the secular agendas of international organisations in which the discourse of human rights was central. The churches, in contrast, were considered narrow, repressive and all too often associated with national (meaning restrictive) concerns. Paradoxically, some 40 years later, it is often the more conservative elements in these churches who are seeking alliances outside the West (notably in the global south) in order to promote their cause, a fact that reflects the changing fortunes of many established interests. One way of illustrating this shift is to look in more detail at the World Council of Churches, an organisation that has already been referenced in this chapter.12 Officially founded in 1948, the WCC became the channel through which the varied streams of ecumenical life that already existed were brought together - here is the positive side of McLeod's fourth theme. From the start the WCC was clear about its goal: this was not to build a global 'super-church', nor to standardise styles of worship. It was rather to call both Christians and churches 'to visible unity in one faith and in one eucharistic fellowship, expressed in worship and common life in Christ, through witness and service to the world, and to advance towards that unity in order that the world may believe' (WCC Constitution).13 Such aims are laudable and, in many respects, much progress has been made; it is not the fault of the WCC that 'visible unity' remains as yet an aspiration.

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The WCC, however, was founded on two assumptions: first that the world would become an increasingly secular place, and second, that the best way forward in this situation was for the churches most open to change and most attentive to the modem world (notably the liberal Protestants) to group together in order to sustain each other in a necessarily hostile environment The churches that resisted 'the world' would automatically consign themselves to the past. Both assumptions were incorrect. The world is not 'an increasingly secular place'; as we have seen it is full of very different forms of religious life, many of which are expanding rather than contracting. It is, moreover, those forms of religion least interested in ecumenism that are developing with the greatest confidence, notably Pentecostalism. Coming to terms with such shifts constitutes a major, and as yet unresolved, challenge to the WCC. So too does the changing nature of the organisation itself, as it gradually evolves from a modem, bureaucratic and centralised institution into what is best described as a late-modem, dispersed and global network. In The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, McLeod develops a more general point which puts this discussion into context. The sixties are often portrayed as a decade in which the major events took place at the expense of religion and religious organisations. McLeod, however, notes the turmoil going on within as well as outside the churches - they were as much a part of the sixties as they were victims of events beyond their control. This, in fact, was the decade of innovation and modernisation, of learning from the world rather than standing against it. The mood is nicely expressed in the term aggiornamento, used primarily of the Catholic Church at the time of the Second Vatican Council but applicable more widely - indeed to the WCC itself. The WCC, surely, constitutes an example of the churches replicating, at times almost too closely, the international organisations of the period. Its creation in 1948 reflected a whole series of initiatives aimed at establishing and maintaining world peace.14 In its early years, the WCC was deeply influenced by the Cold War and its consequences for church life. The movement looked for ways to overcome the divisions between East and West, especially in Europe - encouraging, as far as this was possible, contacts with the churches in central and East Europe. Strong support was given to those who brought together the insights of Marxism and Christianity, including the advocates of liberation theology. A recurring theme can be discerned in these statements: the 1960s were a decade in which secular thought not only dominated but displayed a confidence in itself that has been hard to recover since. This after all was the decade in which man (and it was man) reached the moon: even the heavens - it seemed - could be conquered, given sufficient input of time, energy, expertise and resources. The mood of the 1970s was very different, though the shift took time to show. Economic optimism was harder to sustain as the oil crisis took its toll: unemployment rose bringing with it both individual and collective hardship and - unsurprisingly - a more general loss of confidence. It is at this moment, moreover, that right across the world the religious indicators begin to shift: gradually, but inexorably, they tum upwards posing searching questions not only about cause and effect, but about the fundamental relationship between religion and modernity. It is at this

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point that McLeod notices the markedly different trajectories of West Europe and the United States. Before turning to this question definitively, two further features of The Religious Crisis of the 1960s deserve our attention. The first concerns its methodological features. This text is innovative in every sense of the term; it is also qualitatively rich in that it pays particular attention to the views of 'ordinary' people and how these diverse individuals experienced the 1960s. To do this, McLeod exploits large and so far unpublished bodies of oral testimony, providing thereby not only a much more nuanced account of what was happening than is often the case, but a much more enjoyable one. The book is a good read. Excellent examples can be found in the chapter on 'Sex, Gender, and the Family'. Not everyone changed their sexual habits overnight; that is clear. Beneath the surface, however, the ground shifted (markedly so) - meaning that what was simply unthinkable a decade earlier was now considered 'normal,' though not always condoned. With hindsight, the radical nature of these changes becomes even clearer. The second feature reflects the complex nature of social change. Specifically, explanations for religious change operate at three levels: 'the long-term preconditions, the effects of more immediate social changes, and the impact of specific events, movements, and personalities'.15 McLeod cites - and indeed respects - the work of scholars who emphasise any one of these at the expense of the others, but repeats his conviction that the sixties did not simply happen. They must be placed in a much longer historical story, recognising nonetheless that they constitute a 'hinge' decade which separates the relative stabilities of the post-war period from something very different. I am of the same opinion. I am less convinced about McLeod's argument when it comes to the various cases presented in this book - namely the European, the American and the inbetween situations in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. That said, I fully agree with the first part of his analysis: all of these societies experienced parallel upheavals in the 1960s with similar effects on religion and for the same reasons. All of them, for instance, were post-Enlightenment, modem democracies which were moving in the same direction. The content of their 'protests' might have been different in each case, but the underlying causes were the same: a rejection of traditional values per se and of the institutions that upheld them, including the churches. It is worth noting, moreover, that this was as much the opinion of dominant intellectuals in the United States as it was of their European counterparts. McLeod cites, for example, the uncompromising views of Sydney Ahlstrom, a church historian from Yale, who maintained unequivocally that America was 'moving rapidly towards a crise de la conscience of unprecedented depth'. 16 Words such as permissive, secular and post-Christian were as common in American debate as they were in Europe. The outcomes, however, were different. As McLeod himself puts this, there was, from the 1970s onwards, a 'parting of the ways'. Europe became more secular as the decades pass, and the United States less so. Again I agree. We differ, however, when it comes to explanations. I see these lying not so much in the later post-war decades, as in the long-term histories of the two continents - notably in

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the different institutional and cultural understandings of religion. But whatever our differences, one point remains clear: The Religious Crisis of the 1960s will become a classic in the literature. It will be widely read, not only by current students of religion but by those who lived through that heady decade and will recognise themselves in these pages.

Understanding 'the West' This chapter was drafted shortly before Barack Obama was inaugurated as the fortyfourth President of the United States. Obama's religious background is distinctly unusual for an American President. Unlike his predecessors, Obama does not come from an established Christian denomination, indeed from any denomination at all; he is the son of an unbelieving mother and African, nominally Muslim father. As he makes plain in his own publications, he discovered the significance of faith for himself working in the community organisations of Chicago's South side, embracing Christianity as it was presented to him by a dynamic black church in the area. The following statement is unequivocal: 'In time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life'.17 Faith, moreover, figured significantly in his campaign for the White House - much more so than it did for John Kerry in 2004. Indeed, it is generally agreed that in both 2000 and 2004 the Democrats underestimated the importance of religious issues for the average American. This is not simply a Republican or 'new Christian right' affair as the European press would have us believe; it is much more deep-seated than that. How can we explain the difference between Europe and the United States in this respect? And to what extent is the marked - and in all likelihood growing - disparity between the two cases a recent thing? In his interesting contribution to the chapters gathered together by Hartmut Lehmann, McLeod takes the following view: 'In spite of important and interesting differences, the shape of American religious history is not so very different from that of many European countries'.18 Just like its European counterparts, the United States has moved from the confessional age of the seventeenth century, through the Enlightenment to the religious revivals of the nineteenth century. Equally important in both places are the economic and social upheavals of the industrial age, the physical and mental shock of two world wars, and the new ideas associated with science and biblical criticism. The impact of these changes was felt throughout the West - changes which led in the fullness of time to a similar crisis for churches in the 1960s described in the previous section. Bearing these similarities in mind, McLeod advocates a careful and systematic comparison of the two situations rather than polemical and, at times, ideological claims about a 'religious' America and a 'secular' Europe, with the strong implication that one is better or worse than the other - which one, of course, depends on your point of view. McLeod, generously, excludes me from such

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claims;19 he nonetheless maintains that I see the difference between West Europe and the United States as something qualitative, rather than simply one of degree. He is right. I would also maintain that these differences are very deeply embedded. They may be more apparent at the present moment than they were in the first half of the twentieth century, but the underlying causes lie deeper - not only in a very different set of institutional arrangements, but in contrasting understandings of cultural change. Before elaborating my own case, it is important to set out McLeod's position in a little more detail. For McLeod, the real divergence comes in the 1970s for the following reasons: the very marked regional difference in the United States; the relationship between religion and politics in America, paying particular attention to what has become known at the new religious right; and finally - and perhaps most importantly - the degree to which religion penetrates popular culture in the United States. The first two are well-known, inter-related and much written about. Striking in both cases has been the revival of the south as an economic as well as a cultural entity in America, which has reshaped political as well as economic life. An important consequence of these changes has been new and distinctively American opportunities for certain religious groups to optimise their political potential. These situations are not evidence of any innate religiousness of the American population but of a specific set of circumstance that encourage both religious individuals and religious groups to act politically as well as religiously. The inter-connections of religion and popular culture are less well-known, but are none the less pervasive. Take, for example, an instance not cited by McLeod but which fits easily into his analysis - that is the readiness with which those who appear on Broadway (or indeed in any other theatre) to articulate their thanks to God, as well as to their families and mentors, for their talents and successes. That, to say the least, would raise eye-brows in London's West End. The same is true in the world of sport, noting that the 'national' games are very different in each case. Most striking of all are McLeod's illustrations from more individual sports, including weight-lifting and wrestling: 'lifting to the Lord' is a delightful phrase but would not play well in Europe.20 That said, in terms of team games, there are some signs of change on this side of the Atlantic as well, as the major clubs in European football recruit from the developing world. At least some of these new arrivals bring with them a commitment to religion long since lost from organisations that in a surprising number of cases started their lives as off-shoots of church youth groups. Indeed a close reading of McLeod's chapter leads me to the following conclusion. In many ways our accounts of the evidence are very similar, though we draw on different examples. Our differences are more theoretical. My own position can be found in Religious America, Secular Europe: A Theme and Variations (Aldershot, 2008). In it, two elements are crucial: the first concerns the churches as institutions, the second underlines the nature of the Enlightenment. In every country of Europe, there exists a dominant church. Nobody disputes that these churches are now weakened (though more radically in some places

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than others), and that many of them have been challenged by alternative forms of religion. The assumption, however, that a dominant church is the 'normal' form of religious organisation in Europe remains strong. Such churches can be Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant. They are all, however, 'churches' in the sociological sense: that is inclusive institutions into which you are bom and of which you remain a member unless you do something specific to end that membership. They are, to be direct about it, the place in which your funeral will take place unless you, or your representative, suggest something different. These are, moreover, territorial institutions, and at every level of their existence - local as well as national - a fact that gives them both permanence and stability (local populations relate strongly to thesebuildings). Achurch embedded in territory, however, is a static church - necessarily so. Hence the following crisis. The forms and structures of religion that worked so well in the long-term stabilities of premodem Europe, came under severe strain at the time of the industrial revolution. Rapid industrialisation, and the equally fast urbanisation that went with this, were devastating for structures that were primarily anchored in place. The onslaught came differently in different parts of the continent but there can be little doubt that the profound dislocations that took place in Europe at this time were disastrous for churches in which the rural parish was central. Quite simply, they were unable to move fast enough into the rapidly growing cities where their 'people' now resided; as a result they increasingly lost their control over the beliefs and behaviour of European populations. This was a blow from which these institutions have never fully recovered. It is here, moreover, that the assumed link between modernisation and secularisation has found its raison d'etre, a link embraced by the founding fathers of sociology and, almost without exception, by those who followed after. Too quickly, however, the wrong inference was drawn: that there is a necessary incompatibility between religion per se and modem, primarily urban life. This is not the case. Something quite different happened in the United States, where significantly - territorial embedding had never taken place. Instead the key building blocks of American religion lie not in a dominant church, but in the myriad freestanding denominations brought to America by wave after wave of immigrants. No denomination was given precedence over others and all are independent from the state - a principle enshrined by the Constitution and dear, very dear, to the hearts of the American people. The result was an upward rather than downward spiral as churches moved easily into the nascent cities of modem America and became integral to their well-being - as Obama found in Chicago. In America, nation building, economic expansion, rapid urbanisation and an influx of new people interact positively to promote growth rather than decline in the religious sector. Each of these factors supports the others - a far cry from the vicissitudes of Europe's territorially-embedded state churches in the same historical period. That, however, is not the only contrast. These spirals, both downward and upward, are reinforced by different understandings of the Enlightenment. It is important not to oversimplify, but - by and large - the European Enlightenment

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(most notably in its French forms) can be characterised as a 'freedom from belief'. Here, more precisely, is Voltaire's ecrasez l'infäme, meaning the Catholic Church which stood for obscurantism and repression, closely allied in French society with all those opposed to new ideas and the beginnings of a modem democracy. Here, in other words, is the legacy of the state church in its more brutal forms. Across the Atlantic the situation was very different. Right from the start, a 'freedom to believe' (a markedly different formulation) becomes not only the rallying cry of new immigrants, but the motivating force of the American Revolution - a social movement carried by means of religion (the myriad, mostly Protestant denominations already referred to), not against this. Britain, as ever, hovers somewhere in between, a point recognised by McLeod, but also by Gertrude Himmelfarb in her controversial account of the British Enlightenment, in which she see a strong affinity with the American case rather than the French.21 The essential question can be put as follows: where is the step change in this debate? Is it between France and Britain, or between Britain and America? Himmelfarb quite definitely locates this between France and Britain: hence her desire to rehabilitate the British Enlightenment at the expense of the French. It is equally clear, however, that you cannot simply move from Britain to America without appreciating the fundamentally different position of religion in American society - hence the contrasts set out above. Britain has (or had) a dominant, territoriallyembedded state church. America does not. And for this reason, Americans are likely not only to accept religion, but to embrace this as a central, indeed indispensable feature of political, social and cultural life. Here, quite clearly, is an additional reason for the very different trajectories of religion found in the American and European cases. It is something that Barack Obama understands very well.

Concluding Remarks The primary purpose of this chapter is not, however, to predict the future of the United States under the leadership of President Obama. It is to affirm Hugh McLeod's position as a leading scholar in both the history and the social scientific study of religion. As he moves towards retirement, I hope that there will be more time not only for writing but for extended discussion of these issues. As religion increasingly moves centre-stage in global debate, our need for his very evident talents will continue to grow - in saying this, I have in mind both his grasp of the big picture (thinking broadly) and his meticulous attention to detail (thinking deeply).

Notes 1

H. McLeod ed., The Cambridge History of Christianity Volume 9: World Christianities c. 1914-c. 2000 (Cambridge, 2006); H. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007).

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H. McLeod, 'Religion in the United States and Europe', in H. Lehmann ed., Transatlantische Religionsgeschichte 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 131—45. 3 R Berger, G. Davie and E. Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe: A Theme and Variations (Aldershot, 2008). 4 S. Gilley and B. Stanley eds, The Cambridge History of Christianity Volume 8: World Christianities c. 1815-c. 1914 (Cambridge, 2006). 5 A. Porter, 'Missions and Empire, c. 1873-1914', in Gilley and Stanley eds, World Christianities, pp. 560-75 at p. 560. 6 See http://www.edinburgh2010.org/ accessed 4 April 2009. The website includes a regularly updated resource page. 7 H. McLeod, 'Introduction', in McLeod ed., World Christianities c. 1914-c. 2000, pp. 1-14 at p. 1. 8 See http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=140 and also http://pewforum.org/surveys/ pentecostal/latinamerica/ accessed 4 April 2009. 9 See http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=301 accessed 4 April 2009. Clearly both the questions asked in this poll and the statistics which emerge must be treated with caution given the specificities of the Chinese case. That said, the growth of religion in general and of Christianity in particular merits very careful attention. 10 P. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York, 1967). 11 The fi ndings of this working party can be found in J. De Santa Ana ed., Religions Today: Their Challenge to the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva, 2005). 12 In this connection, it is worth noting David Thompson's section on the World Council of Churches in his essay 'Ecumenism', in McLeod ed., World Christianities c. 1914-c 2000, pp. 50-70 at pp. 59-63. 13 The Constitution of the WCC can be found on http://www.oikoumene.org/en/whoare-we/self-understanding-vision/constitution-rules.html accessed 4 April 2009. 14 The most obvious parallel can be found in the United Nations, an organisation which - some 60 years after it inauguration - is coming under considerable strain. It too must adapt to changing circumstances. 15 McLeod, Religious Crisis, p. 257. 16 Ibid., p. 246; S. Ahlstrom, 'The Radical Tum in Theology and Ethics: Why it occurred in the 1960s', Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, 387 (1990), pp. 1-15 at p. 2. 17 This sentence is taken from a speech delivered in June 2007. See http://pewforum. org/religion08/profile.php?CandidateID=4, accessed 4 April 2009, for more details about President Obama's religious profile. 18 McLeod, 'Religion in the United States and Europe', p. 131. 19 Ibid., pp. 131-2. 20 Ibid., p. 143. 21 G. Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The Britishf French and American Enlightenments (New York, 2004).

Index

Aboriginal people, 76-7, 86 abortion, 32, 87 Act of Settlement (1701), 62 agnostics, 78, 83, 112; see also atheists, humanists, no religion, secularism Allen, Richard, 107 Africa, 15, 49-53, 206, 210, 221 Ammerman, Nancy, 45 Anderson, John, 79-80 Anglo-Catholics, 63, 65 Anzacs, 80-81 Day, 86 Armstrong, Karen, 159, 161-2, 165, 170 Asad, Talal, 181 Asia, 46, 86-7, 144, 151,210,212,221 Asquith, H.H., 63 Assemblies of God, 14, 86 atheists, 23, 29, 78, 83, 112, 148-9, 170, see also agnostics, humanists, no religion, secularism Australia, 1, 48, 66, 75-88, 211, 223, 227 autobiography, 7, 159-71 Awakening, the Great, 51 Bainbridge, William, 211 Bakewell, Joan, 160, 162, 167, 169, 171 Baptists, 13-15,23-6, 49, 54, 85-6, 97-9, 126-7, 140,211-12, 220 Bauer, Dietrich, 201 Beau voir, Simone de, 164 Belgium, 100, 114, 180 belief, 23-4, 29-30, 33, 83, 85, 107, 110-11, 180, 206; see also Christ, God Bellah, Robert, 31 Benedict XVI, Pope, 203 Berger, Peter, 3, 17, 20, 28, 201, 210, 224 Berlin, 8, 16,24 Berry, S.M., 64 Berton, Pierre, 110 Bibby, Reginald, 111

Bible, 49-52, 64, 99, 102-3, 110, 121, 144, 166, 171, 180, 183, 202, 207 Bible Society, 64 Birmingham, University of, 1-2 birth control, 109, 147 black Christians, 42-54, 144 Botany Bay, 76 Bouma, Gary, 88 Bradley, Omar, 144 British Columbia, 137 Britain, 3,4-6, 14, 22, 32, 57-71, 135-51, 205-16 Brown, Callum, 16-19, 25, 29, 33, 36, 70, 176-7, 189-90, 192,209-10 Bruce, Steve, 3, 17, 30 Bucksner, Andrew, 119 Buddhism, 69, 86-7, 188 Calvinism, 123, 183, 188, 190 Cambridge, University of, 167, 169 Canada, 1,49-50, 66, 93-111, 135-51,211, 223,227 capitalism and religion, 1,4,41, 104-5, 110; see also Weber, Max Carter, Angela, 163 Casanova, Jose, 215 Catholic Action, 105 censorship, 82, 137 censuses, 76, 81, 87, 93, 149 Chadwick, Owen, 3 chaplains, 136-42, 150 Charles, Prince of Wales, 67-8 Chaves, Mark, 212 China, 223 Christ, Jesus, 29, 36, 68, 76, 79, 89, 91, 145, 153, 160-61, 164, 166, 179, 187, 202, 207 Christendom, collapse of, 222 Christian III, King, 122 Christian Science, 131 Christmas, 69

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Church Army, 143 church attendance, 10, 81, 84, 93-4, 108, 110, 112n2, 115n41, 125, 132n30, 135, 148, 159, 197,206, 212; double, 5 buildings, 21 decline, 3, 201, 206-7 membership, 113n23 Church Missionary Society, 51 Church of England, 12, 16, 21-2, 42,49-51, 59, 60-61, 63-6, 68, 70-72, 74-8, 81-6,97, 99-100, 125, 164, 170, 208,210,221; Prayer Book, 64, 79 disestablishment of, 65 Church of Ireland, 59-60, 63 Church of Scotland, 68, 96-7, 143 cinema, 71, 166, 213 Clark, David, 3 Clark, Jonathan, 17-18 Clark, S.D., 94 class see social class, middle classes, working classes clergy, 21-2, 34, 53, 76, 78-80, 84, 94, 96-107, 123, 125, 128, 144,179, 193, 205-6, 211; shortage of, 96; see also by church Coggan, Archbishop Donald, 66 Cold War, 135, 226; end of, 220 Cole, E.W., 79 Comte, Auguste, 216 Confessionalisation, 122—4 Congregationalists, 14, 20, 43, 45-6, 90, 96-7, 101, 106, 144 conversion, 49, 188, 206 Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, 106 coronation oaths, 57-9, 63-7, 69 Council of Voluntary War Work, 143 culture, 29, 36 Crockett, A., 208 Cummings, W.T., 149 Currie, Robert, 3 Czech Republic, 17 Darwin, Charles, 16, 214 Davidson, Archbishop Randall, 63 Davie, Grace, 20, 208 D-Day, 142

dechristianisation, 6 Denmark, 119-26 Desbiens, Jean-Paul, 110 Diana, Princess of Wales, 67-71; death of, 59 Disciples of Christ, 14 divorce, 32, 109, 13, 214; and born-again Christians, 213 Dürkheim, Emile, 30-31, 44, 205, 208 East India Company, 48 Ecclesiastical History Society, 2 ecumenism, 66, 221, 225-6 Edinburgh, 221-2 education, 76, 86, 167, 200 Edward VII, King, 57, 62-3 Edward VIII, King, 65, 69 Eisenhower, Dwight, 141, 145, 147 Elizabeth, Queen, the Queen Mother, 68 Elizabeth II, Queen, 59, 65-6, 69 Enlightenment, the, 15, 18, 46, 71, 99, 190, 230-31 entrepreneurship, 21-2 Episcopalians, 14, 20 Europe, 1,3-14, 20-23,26, 34,41-6, 5 1 - 3 , 5 5 , 8 1 , 9 2 , 96, 99, 102, 120, 122, 142, 175-6,212,219,221, 227, 230; see also by country euthanasia, 87 Evangelical Free Churches, Federal Council of, 64 evangelicalism, 5, 14, 35, 42-54, 64, 83, 85-6, 96, 104, 126-7, 190, 213-14 exceptionalism, American, 5,41, 43^4, 49, 83, 93, 133, European, 119; Scandinavian, 130 fascism, 107, 135 feminism, 85, 159-71, 176, 207 First World War see? World War I Flanders, 47 Fletcher, Richard, 21 folk religion, 94, 129-30 Foster, John, 3 Foucault, Michel, 181, 193 France, 6, 59, 199,231 Free Churches (England), 64, 66 French Revolution, 7

Index Friedan, Betty, 169 fundamentalism, 13, 44, 106, 144,213-15 funerals, 83-4, 150, 197 Fusseil, Robert, 135, 150 Gallipoli, battle of, 80-81 gay issues see homosexuality Geertz, Clifford, 36 gender, 8-9, 33, 166, 177; see also women George V, King, 63-4, 69 George VI, King, 65, George, David, 49, 51 Germany, 1, 7-8, 135, 149, 197-203 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 21 Gilbert, Alan, 75 God, 23, 29, 35, 44, 53, 68, 79, 82, 85-6, 89-91,94, 98, 105, 107, 111-12, 114-17, 123, 139, 145-6, 148-9, 151, 160, 163, 165, 178-80, 182, 186-7, 190, 193, 199, 200, 202-3, 205,217-18, 229; death of, 32 Gogarten, Freidrich, 200 gold rushes, 76 government and religion, 76, 95-100, 105, 122-4, 197; see also censuses Graham, Revd Dr Billy, 82 Green, Simon, 16 Greer, Germaine, 85, 169 Gustavus I, King, 122 Hadaway, Kirk, 212 Hall, David, 43, 45 Hancock, Sheila, 162, 166, 169-70 Hapsburg Empire, 47 Hatch, Nathan, 46 Heinkele, Kurt, 201 Hekler, Günther, 201-2 Hinduism, 69, 86 Hitler, Adolf, 13 Hobsbawm, Eric, 3 Hobson, Valerie, 166 Holyoake, George Jacob, 198-9 homosexuality, 32, 109, 214 Howard, John, 87-8 Howland, William, 100 Hubert, Ollivier, 96 humanists, 83, 170 see also agnostics, atheists, no religion, secularism

235

Huxley, T.H., 16 imperialism, 13 India, 69 industrialisation, 5-7, 94-5, 102, 122, 126, 210,230 Iran, 220 Ireland, 47, 206 Irish disestablishment, 59 Islam, 24, 50, 69, 86, 207, 228 Israel, 13 Italy, 84, 135, 147 Jacobite Rebellion, 47 Japan, 135, 146, 149 Jehovah's Witnesses, 22 Jenkins, Simon, 71 Jews, 45, 69, 138, 141, 143-4, 148, 150 John, Elton, 68 John Paul II, Pope, 68 Johnson, W.A.B., 51 justice, social, 21-2; see also welfare Kearney, Martha, 161-2 Keynesian economics, 105 King, Mackenzie, 105 Klass, Morton, 35-6 Knippenberg, Hans, 17 Kohlstedt, Evelyn, 142 Kölle, Sigismund, 50 landowners, 33 Lang, Archbishop Cosmo, 64-6 Laslett, Peter, 4 Last, Nell a, 160 Latin America, 15, 17 Latter Day Saints, Church of, 22, 45 Lawson, Henry, 76 Lehman, David, 30 Leo XIII, Pope, 63 liberals, religious, 22-3, 31, 34, 104, 190, 226 liberation theology, 33 Lloyd, Henry Robert, 59 London, 5-6, 8, 16, London School of Economics, 32 Lulu, 170 Lutheran churches, 44, 60, 119-30, 183, 221

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Lynd, Robert and Helen, 214 MacCarthy, Sir Charles, 53, McCubbin, Frederick, 79 McCudden, Pat, 162, 168, 172 McCulloch, Thomas, 99 MacDonald, Malcolm, 66 Mclntyre, Alasdair, 13 MacLaren, Allan, 3 McLeod, Hugh, 1-2, 5-11, 14, 16-20, 24-5, 27-38, 57, 59, 78, 82, 95, 135, 159, 176-7, 192, 209-10, 216, 219-20, 222-3, 225, 227-9, 231 Macaulay, Zachary, 51 Marler, Penny, 212 marriage, religious, 83 Marshall, George C , 138, 142, 144-5 Martin, David, 3, 13, 15-17, 20,25,46, 119, 120, 207 Marx, Karl, 44, 205 Marxism, 94, 106, 226 Mass-Observation, 147 Massachusetts, 48 Methodists, 14, 20, 42-54, 77, 90, 97-100, 103, 105-6, 113, 115, 126-7, 144, 163, 166-7,210 middle classes, 5, 48-9, 94, 124, 223 migration, 24, 42, 53, 76, 81-2, 86 Miller, Perry, 43^4 Miniver, Mrs (film), 148 modernisation, 30, 119-20, 224-5; theory of, 1,3 Mol, Hans, 30, 82-3 monarchy, 57-71 Moore, Robert, 3 moral majority, 45 morality, 64-6, 76, 100, 109, 147, 191, 213 Moravians, 47 Mormans see Latter Day Saints Montgomery, B.L., 145 Mowat, Oliver, 100 Murray, Jenni, 161-2, 165, 168, 170-71 Muslim see Islam Netherlands, 100, 175-93 Neville, Richard, 170 New Age, 85-6 New England, 49

New South Wales, 75, 77 New York, 8, 16, 24, 97 New Zealand, 80-81, 223, 227 nine/eleven, attacks on, 69, 220 Nonconformists see Free Churches (England) no religion, people of, 18, 23, 80, 83, 87,97, 112, 128,221 \ see also agnostics, atheists, humanists, secularism Northern Ireland, 66, 209 Norway, 119-30,211 Nova Scotia, 49-52 Obama, Barrack, 228, 231 Ontario, 93, 97, 99-100, 102 oral history, 7-8, 32, 168, 177-93, 227 Parker-Bowles, Camilla, 69 Parsons, Talcott, 31, 206 Patton, George S., 145-6 Peale, Norman Vincent, 212-13 peasantry, 124 Pentecostalism, 14, 16, 42, 46, 48, 55n22, 86, 207,213,222 Perkin, Harold, 5 Philips, Sian, 161, 166 pluralism see religious pluralism Poland, 206 Poling, Daniel, 148 power, religion as, 33^4, 37-8 Presbyterians, 20, 76, see also Church of Scotland Profiimo, David, 166 Protestantism, 7, 14, 21-2, 24, 29, 32, 42-54, 57-71, 80-81,93-111,121, 123, 138, 142, 148,200, 202,213, 215, 226 Pulma, Panu, 124-5 Puritans, 42-54 Quakers see Society of Friends Quebec, 94, 96-7, 99, 106-8, 110 Queensland, 83 racial discrimination, 143 rationalisation, 28 rationing, 161

Index recruitment, church, 22, 209-10 Red Army, 136, 138 Reformation, the, 4, 10, 42, 122-4, 159, 216 religion, defining 27-38 religious pluralism, 4, 14, 41, 46, 59, 67-70, 96-7, 198, 224-5 religious polarisation, 7, 17, 95, 105-6, 112, 117 religious revivalism 16, 42, 43-9, 78, 82, 84, 93-5, 100, 125, 197,218 ritualism, 62 Roman Catholicism, 7, 14, 20-22, 24, 32, 42, 48, 57, 59, 63-4, 66, 70, 75-6, 79, 81-2,84-5,93-111, 122-3, 138, 142, 165, 179, 185,200, 206, 215; and birth control 109, 165 Roof, Wade Clark, 214 Rowbotham, Sheila, 163-4 Royal Navy, 52 Rudd, Kevin, 88 Runcie, Archbishop Robert, 67 Ryerson, Egerton, 99 Sabbath observance, 5, 141, 166, 180, 183; breaches of, 76, 81-2 Sage, Loma, 163 St. Paul's Cathedral, London, 64 Salvation Army, 126, 143, 166, 208-9 Sanneh, Lamin, 50-52 satire, 82 Scotland, 211 see also Church of Scotland Second Vatican Council see Vatican II Second World War see World War II secularisation, concepts of, 1-11, 1 3 - 2 5 , 2 7 - 3 8 , 4 1 ^ , 53-4, 119-20, 197-203 intellectual, 79 secularisation, theory of, 9, 13, 55n22, 175-6, 205-16,225 secularism, 30, 36, 75, 99-100, 104, 106, 119, 121, 128, 198-9; see also agnosticism, atheism, humanism, no religion sex and religion, 10, 65, 109, 159-82, 185, 191,213, 227 Sharpe, Granville, 49 Sheffield, 4-5; University of, 168

237

Sierra Leone, 49-51 Sikhism, 69 Simpson, Wallis, 65, 71 sixties, the, 9-10, 18-19, 24, 32, 34, 151, 159-71, 175-93, 224 Sjögren, Hakan, 125 slave trade, 47 Smith, Adam, 41 Smith, Mark, 16 Snape, Michael, 47, 166 social class, 7, 33, 95, 165, 169, 178; see also middle classes, working classes social control, 5, 179 socialists, 128, 176, 179, 183,207 Society of Friends (Quakers), 2, 22 soldiers, 47, 80-81, 135-51 South Australia, 83 Southern Baptist Convention, 13, 23; see also Baptists Stark, Roger, 3, 122,211,216 Steedman, Carolyn, 161, 163 Stirling, Charles, 60 Strachan, John, 99 Street-Porter, Janet, 163, 166-8, 170 Sunday schools, 16,23,81,98, 121, 161, 183,212 Sweden, 119-30 Switzerland, 23 Sydney, 76, 83 Tasmania, 76, 83 Taylor, Charles, 41-2, 190 television, 22, 67, 82, 86, 165, 173, 191, 200, 207,213 terrorism, 207; see also nine/eleven Texas, 13, 23 Thompson, E.P., 3, 5, 13, 15, 94 Thirty Years War, 4 2 , 5 3 Thompson, Paul, 8 Tipton, Steven 31 Toe H, 143 Toqueville, Alexis de, 210 trade, 47 trade unions, 6, 102, 200-202 transubstantiation, 57 Trinidad, 35 Trollope, Anthony, 77

238

Secularisation in the Christian World

Ulster see Northern Ireland Ultramontanism, 98 unbelief, 23-4; see also belief, no religion United Church of Canada, 93, 107, 109 United States, 1, 3, 6, 8, 13-25, 31-2, 41-54, 75, 78, 84, 93, 135-51, 205-16,222-3, 227,229-31 Uniting Church (Australia), 85-6 Universalists, 97, 206 Unitarians, 97, 212 universities, 79-80, 82 urbanisation, 3, 6-9, 12, 17, 94, 102, 122, 125-6, 230 Urdank, Albion, 17 Values Surveys, 31, 119, 208 Vatican II, 29, 82-4, 189, 226 Victoria (Australia), 76, 78 Victoria, Queen, 57, 59-64, 69 Vietnam, 13 Voas, D., 208 Wales, 68 Walkerdine, Valerie, 163 Walls, Andrew, 50 Walters, Julie, 165 Ward, W.R., 46 Warren, Rick, 22 Waugh, Evelyn, 23

Weber, Max, 4, 28, 31, 44, 205 welfare, social, 87, 106, 119-20, 129, 143, 214 Wesley, John, 47 Whitehouse, Mary, 169 Whitefield, George, 14, 22 Wickham, E.R., 4 - 5 Williams, Rowan, 22, 70 Williams, Sarah, 17, 209 Wilkinson, Moses, 51-2 Wilson, Bryan, 3, 13-14, 16-17, 30, 205, 208,212,215 Windsor Castle, 57 women and religion, 9, 34, 85, 147, 159-71, 190 Woods worth, J. S., 105 working classes, 4-6, 8-9, 32, 103-4, 127 World Council of Churches, 221, 225 World Missionary Conference (1910), 221 World War I, 80-81, 136-7, 143, 175, 199 World War II, 57, 59, 65, 105, 108-9, 128, 135-51, 197,221 Yeo, Stephen, 16 Yorkshire, 16 YMCA, 143 Zen see Buddhism