Abstract
The House of Lords Select Committee, which met in 2003 to consider the issue of incitement to religious hatred, heard a great variety of evidence from a bewildering array of religious and other interest groups. Its final recommendations could scarcely avoid recognising this variety, alongside other imperatives that spoke of peace, order and the urge to empower and protect communities. The United Kingdom, in the new millennium, by now hosted many different religious traditions from its colonial past and from its status as a nation with open borders within a religious and ethnically diverse European community.
This first chapter contains some elements of the argument originally published as David S. Nash (2004) ‘Reconnecting Religion with Social and Cultural History — Secularisation’s Failure as a Master Narrative’. Cultural and Social History 1: 302–25.
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Notes
This anomaly has likewise attracted the attention of other scholars. It was similarly the starting point for Jane Garnet et al. (2006), eds, Redefining Christian Britain: Post 1945 Perspectives ( London: SCM Press). Their work seeks to redefine a research agenda around the three themes of ‘authenticity’, ‘generation’ and ‘virtue’.
It is not the intention of this chapter to revisit and restate the conventional and established historiography that challenges secularisation theory. Instead it looks at a number of the theory’s shortcomings that provide a fruitful starting point for research in other directions. For the most recent summary of the ‘case against’, see J. C. D. Clark (2012) ‘Secularization and Modernisation: The Failure of a “Grand Narrative”’. Historical Journal 55, 1: 161–94.
For other summaries see Jeremy Morris (2012) ‘Secularization and Religious Experience: Arguments in the Historiography of Modern British Religion’. Historical Journal 55, 1: 195–219;
Jeremy Morris (2003) ‘The Strange Death of Christian Britain: Another Look at the Secularisation Debate’. Historical Journal 46, 4: 963–76, and the reviews of recent work in
Dominic Erdozain (2012) ‘“Cause is Not Quite What it Used to be”: The Return of Secularisation’. English Historical Review 127, 525: 377–400. See also the ‘Introduction’ to Garnet et al., Redefining Christian Britain.
See Callum Brown (2007) ‘Secularisation, the Growth of Militancy and the Spiritual Revolution; Religious Change and Gender Power in Britain’. Historical Research 80: 393–418.
Charles Taylor (2007) A Secular Age ( London: Belknap Press). Although Taylor’s work is the latest variation on the supposed reasons for secularisation he begins with some standard definitions, which include public spaces ‘emptied of God’ and the ‘falling off of religious belief and practice’ (p. 2). See also his paragraphs specifically on definitions of ‘Secularization theory’ (pp. 423–5), which add to this the rise of unbelief, of a humanist alternative, the ‘decline of practice’, the impact of mass education and social differentiation–the last of these is a recognition of the influence of Norbert Elias. Taylor also accepts some of the orthodox explanations for secularisation (e.g. urbanisation) while noting that the ‘dominant secularization narrative’ will become ‘less plausible over time’ (p. 770).
See, for example, Jeremy Gregory (2009) ‘For All Sorts and Conditions of Men: The Social Life of the Book of Common Prayer during the Long Eighteenth Century: or, Bringing the History of Religion and Social History Together’. Social History 34, 1: 29–54. This emphasises the vibrant ‘life’ the Book of Common Prayer had beyond religious institutions.
This privatisation has been dismissed by Steve Bruce in a number of articles as a purely post-war phenomenon, as further evidence of secularisation and lastly for having a transitory impact. This analysis appears notably in Tony Glendinning and Steve Bruce (2006) ‘New Ways of Believing or Belonging: Is Religion Giving Way to Spirituality?’ The British Journal of Sociology 57, 3: 399–411
Steve Bruce (2011) ‘Secularisation, Church and Popular Religion’. The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 62, 3 (July): 543–61
Steve Bruce and Tony Glendinning (2010) ‘When was Secularization? Dating the Decline of the British Churches and Locating its Cause’. The British Journal of Sociology 61, 1: 107–26.
The most popular recent manifestation of this episodically appearing idea has been Kevin Nelson (2011) The God Impulse: Is Religion Hardwired in the Brain? ( London: Simon and Schuster).
But see also Dean Hamer (2005) The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes ( New York: Anchor Books). It is worth considering how far Charles Taylor’s description of unbelief and humanism as a later invention presupposes belief as an accepted norm that spawned attempts to reconfigure and transcend it. Taylor, A Secular Age.
See Natalie Isser and Lita Linzer Schwartz (1988) The History of Conversion and Contemporary Cults ( New York: Peter Lang ), pp. 5–7, 73.
Simon Green notes classical statements by Chadwick, Gilbert and Cox suggesting ‘Secularisation, according to this understanding, meant the systematic and inexorable decline of the social significance of religion: systematic, because religious beliefs and religious practice no longer possessed the capacity significantly to affect either the efficient organisation or the intellectual apprehension of society: inexorable, because the process provided for no element of, indeed admitted of no opportunity for, its substantive reversal.’ Simon Green (2011) The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c. 1920–1960 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ), p. 15.
See C. John Sommerville (1992) The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith ( Oxford: OUP). This work argues for a dichotomy of belief into national and individual manifestations prevalent as early as the sixteenth century.
Sociology in the United States has at least witnessed a suggestion that the theory is, as is argued here, an unhelpful irrelevance. See Stephen Warner (1993) ‘Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States’. American Journal of Sociology 98: 1044–93.
Callum Brown (2003) ‘The Secularisation Decade: What the 1960s have done to the Study of Religious History’. In Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds, The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 29–46, p. 37.
S. J. D. Green (1996) Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ), p. 7. The introduction to this work contains a sustained and telling discussion of the main categories of challenge to secularisation theory.
Hugh McLeod (2000) Secularisation in Western Century Europe 1848–1914 ( London: Routledge ), pp. 11–12.
Steve Bruce (2011) Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory ( Oxford: Oxford University Press ), p. 4.
See ibid., and for an earlier statement Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce (1992) ‘Secularization: The Orthodox Model’. In Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernisation, Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularisation Thesis ( Oxford: Clarendon Press ), pp. 8–30.
The debate opened by Steve Bruce, ed. Religion and Modernisation, Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularisation Thesis contained a serious number of dissenters from orthodox secularisation models. Although this gauntlet was more recently taken up by Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (2003), eds, The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ). Many contributors to this latter volume, it should be noted, routinely commenced with secularisation theory as the foundation for research.
We might here consider the influence of Foucault’s critique of the enlightenment and what he described as the illusory pretence of a rational world exhibiting more benign, democratic and libertarian characteristics. The search for subjectivity is certainly one route down which such anti-rationalist refusenik ideas have ventured and has been a characteristic of more modern versions of conversion (see Chapter 3 further) and an aspect of both New Age religion and conceptions of New Spirituality. For the latter see Gordon Lynch (2007) The New Spirituality: An Introduction to Progressive Belief in the Twenty-First Century ( London: I. B. Tauris).
Sarah Williams (1999) Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c. 1880– 1939 ( Oxford: OUP ), p. 163. But note the qualification and limitations upon these findings suggested by Bruce, Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory, pp. 90–2.
Jon Butler notes evidence of secular society existing before secularisation. He suggests that in 1584 a third of adults in Antwerp claimed no religion. In France 90% took communion but only 2% attended mass. He also notes a Hertfordshire reformer suggesting that in 1572 the churches were empty in favour of people who had chosen dancing as an alternative. See Jon Butler (2010) ‘Disquieted History in A Secular Age’. In Michael Warner, Jonathan Van Antwerpen and Craig Calhoun, eds, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press ), pp. 193–216, p. 205. The analytical direction of this work has been reinforced by the subsequent discovery of aspects of folk religiosity by scholars of the eighteenth century. See also Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution, p. 219 for reiteration of material on longstanding working-class absence from religious attendance.
See Vanessa Chambers (2010) Fighting Chance–War, Popular Belief and British Society 1900–1951, D.Phil. thesis, University of London.
For the early period see Jeremy Gregory and Jeffrey S. Chamberlain (2003), eds, The National Church in Local Perspective: The Church of England and the Regions, 1660–1800 ( Woodbridge: Boydell ). The numerous essays in this volume catalogue a range of experiences. Common to these is a fear of dwindling church attendance that some writers (notably Viviane Barry) consider may have been due to other forms of private devotion gaining ground. See Viviane Barry, ‘The Church of England in the Diocese of London’, pp. 53–71. See also
Ian Green (1996) The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530–1740 ( Oxford: Clarendon Press ), for a discussion of the limitations of how attachment to doctrinal Anglicanism could go in the face of much simpler devotion to ‘good works’, see especially p. 569.
Stephen Yeo (1976) Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis ( London: Croom Helm).
See also the assertions in Peter Berger (1967) The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion ( Anchor Books: New York ), esp. Chapter 6, which characterised the development of marketing strategies by religious groups as empirical and irrefutable evidence of their creeping marginality.
The image given to us by Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ also has a particular resonance, which still appears in modern religious writing as a lasting motif for the retreat of Christianity. In Blackwell’s fairly recent ‘manifesto’ series the volume speculating on the future of Christianity saw concentration upon the religious ‘tide receding’ in the West as serving to obscure the health and vibrancy of religious forms in the Third World. See Alistair McGrath (2002) The Future of Christianity ( Oxford: Blackwell ), p. 119. See also Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 390.
Robin Gill (1993) The Myth of the Empty Church ( London: SPCK).
See Timothy Jenkins (1999) Religion in English Everyday Life: An Ethnographic Approach ( Oxford: Berghahn books). This work argues for a focus upon localism and a sense of historical continuity as important in preserving modern religious belief and persuading it to function viably.
For some different perspectives on this see Margaret Spufford (1985) ‘Can We Count the “Godly” and the “Conformable” in the Seventeenth Century?’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History XXXVI: 428–38
Clive D. Field (2012) ‘Counting Religion in England and Wales: The Long Eighteenth Century c.1680–1840’. Journal of Ecclesiastical History 63, 4: 693–720.
See the account by David Hempton (2003) ‘Established Churches and the Growth of Religious Pluralism: A Case of Christianisation and Secularisation in England since 1700’. In Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds, The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ), pp. 81–98. See also Eva Hamberg, ‘Christendom in Decline: The Swedish Case’ in the same volume, pp. 47–62.
See Timothy Larsen (2006) Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth Century England ( Oxford: Oxford University Press). Larsen seeks to overturn the orthodox conception of a ‘crisis of doubt’. However, in doing so he contributes to a picture that reinforces the idea of religious change confined rigidly to a sacred and secular divide. For a critique of this position and an argument for a wider paradigm, see David S. Nash, ‘Reassessing the “Crisis of Faith”’, passim. Peter Brierley interestingly noted in 2000 that Europeans tended to display conventional church attendance patterns, among denominations, that were linked to what he describes as belief. He acknowledged the converse of this in Britain meant the attendance (or not) of individuals could not so readily be equated with indifference or non-religion.
Peter Brierley (2000) Steps to the Future: Issues Facing the Church in the New Millenium ( London: Christian Research ), pp. 10–11.
Stephen Yeo (1977) ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain 1883–1896’. History Workshop Journal 4: 5–56.
Callum Brown (2009) The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (Abingdon: Routledge, Second Edition ), pp. 109–13.
Peter Berger (1969) The Social Reality of Religion ( London: Faber ), p. 107.
Steve Bruce (2002) God is Dead: Secularisation in the West ( Oxford: Blackwell ), p. 56.
Keith Yandell (2010) Faith and Narrative ( Oxford: Oxford University Press). Yandell notes that the creation of narrative has a long history and was essential to the conveyance of the original Christian theology, eventually replicated in the development of systematic theology. He also notes that such a situation is desirable because ‘personal salvation gone awry tends to narcissism’, whereas ‘the biblical stories model’ seeks to ‘demand social justice and the emphasis on charity and grace encourages humility and service’ (pp. 8–9).
See Yasmin Gunaratnam and David Oliviere (2009) Narrative Stories in Health Care: Illness, Dying and Bereavement ( Oxford: OUP ), p. 18.
See Grace Davie (2006) ‘Vicarious Religion: A Methodological Challenge’. In Nancy T. Ammerman, ed., Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives ( New York: OUP ), pp. 21–35.
Callum Brown (2006) Religion and Society in Twentieth Century Britain ( Harlow: Longman).
Jeremy Morris (2012) ‘Secularization and Religious Experience: Arguments in the Historiography of Modern British Religion’. Historical Journal 55, 1 (March): 195–219, p. 197.
There are ‘secularisation free’ attempts to evaluate changes in the religious landscape both over time and in the contemporary world. See for example Sabino S. Acquaviva (1979) The Decline of the Sacred in Industrial Society ( Oxford: Blackwell ), pp. 196–202, for a discussion of religion as an ‘unexpressed potentiality’ (p. 200). See also
Wade Clark Roof (1999) Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion ( Princeton: Princeton University Press). Roof’s concept of ‘spiritual capital’ draws on analysis from the American context and the results, not surprisingly, draw the focus away from institutions as the centrepiece of the religious. He argues that individual conviction and belief function as conceivably the most significant manifestation of the concept of religious capital.
See Ian Archer (2002) ‘The Charity of Early-Modern Londoners’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12: 223–44. For an explanation of charitable giving during the Reformation which actively rejects the ‘Protestantism as species of secularisation’ argument. This previously accepted account would have Londoners deserting their earlier belief in purgatory and the repose of the soul as a unilinear observable process.
It is possible to see how the study of forms of religious transmission and media might achieve this. See Leigh Eric Schmidt (2000) Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). This book suggests that enlightenment knowledge about the production and purpose of sound undermined widespread faith in divine speech. This is religion as cultural history suggesting the post-enlightenment and New Age interests have us once again listening for the divine or non-rational ‘sound’.
The work of Stewart Hoover is particularly instructive in this area. See Stewart Hoover (1998) Religion in the News: Faith and Journalism in American Public Discourse ( Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage )
Stewart Hoover and Knut Lundby (1997), eds, Rethinking, Media, Religion, and Culture ( Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage )
Stewart Hoover and Lynn Schofield Clark (2002), eds, Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media ( New York: Columbia University Press).
See Kimberly Rae Connor (2000) Imaging Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition ( Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press). For a study of the persistence of a slave narrative tradition contributing to the construction of liberation theology which reappears regularly as motifs in twentieth century music and writing. See also
S. Brent Plate (2006) Blasphemy: Art that Offends ( London: Black Dog Books).
Bryan Turner notes that Human Rights discourse immerses itself in what might be considered religious stories or narratives that also have secular meaning ‘crimes against humanity, forgiveness, reparations, sacrifice and evil’. This also, so he argues, involves individuals in ‘assumptions about cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan virtue’. Turner also describes this as a ‘juridical-culture complex’ in which narratives seek to be a driving force in what we believe about religions we are familiar with and those we are not. See Bryan Turner (2011) Religion and Modern Society: Citizenship, Secularisation and the State ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. xxi.
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Nash, D. (2013). Restoring the Balance — Religious Stories and the Secular World. In: Christian Ideals in British Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349057_1
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