Does Christianity matter?
Stephen Logan
THE DEATH OF CHRISTIAN BRITAIN by Callum G. Brown Routledge, £12.99, pp. 272, ISBN 0415241847 The title doesn't mean that there are no Christians left in Britain, but that Britain can no longer be described as a Christian nation. Clearly there are still people, though admittedly a small and decreasing proportion, who go to church and accept the basic doctrines of Christianity. Equally clearly, a large proportion of people living in England, Scotland and Wales would say that they believe in God, though they could not state, and would not want to accept, the doctrines which define Christianity. The authority of the Bible as the expression (however oblique) of the will of God has been, if not exactly rejected, then allowed to lapse, along with the authority of most other things including the concept of authority itself.
Callum Brown does not really concern himself with the question of whether the decay of a Christian culture in Britain is good or bad. This, to me, lessens the interest and appeal of his book, which I would otherwise think more timely and important. It is very difficult, on the whole, to remember that the present is a period and that, in time, its own characteristics will be as clearly visible as those of any other. First-year undergraduates will talk, and often be encouraged to talk, about (say) the Enlightenment or Romanticism in ways which imply that the foibles of their respective eras were the more risible for being now so obvious. The corollary, however, is that, unless we believe the present is uniquely characterised by wisdom, our foibles will soon become equally apparent. If this is so, then perhaps it would be beneficial to try and recognise a few of them now.
One such foible, I would suggest, is the complacency with which the decline of Christianity is proclaimed. Influential public commentators, such as Richard Dawkins, will meet relatively little opposition if, for example, they oppose 'Thought for the Day' on the grounds that it indoctrinates the public in a religion which is widely assumed (rather than believed) to have been discredited. Proponents of the natural sciences, knowing that scientific method receives a potent sanction from the materialism and rationalism of our own age, are perhaps too confident that their own, largely unconscious, attempts at indoctrination, will not be noticed.
For there are benefits, as well as disadvantages associated with a Christian culture and the balance between them is not so indubitably settled as to make the decline of Christianity an occasion for unequivocal rejoicing. Take, for example, a statement like 'There, but for the grace of God, go I'. On the evidence of Brown's book and (I would expect of most readers' personal experience) this remark is far less widely current than it was 30 years ago. My own experience, as a professional student of literature, teaches me that style and sentiment are intimately related. The remark is no longer current, in part because the attitudes that sustained it aren't. So most people now do not believe themselves subject to the grace, any more than to the authority, of God. The idea (once a commonplace) that reality is not coterminous with the objects of sensory perception — i.e. that you don't necessarily get more reality by getting a stronger telescope — is now largely extinct. Even a phrase like Hamlet's 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt on in your philosophy,' is now scarcely intelligible without an extreme effort of metaphysical re-orientation. Every day's newspaper points out the deterioration in our social lives of attitudes of humility, mutual respect and empathy. Yet it is worthy of a discussion, which Brown does not attempt, as to whether the growing violence, suspicion and selfishness of modern metropolitan life doesn't have some relation to the erosion of values once supported in no small measure by Christianity.
Brown does not tackle this question, partly because he is engaged in a controversy within his own discipline of social history. His quarrel with his colleagues has three main aspects. First, he cogently argues that the degree to which a religion pervades a culture cannot be measured by statistics of church attendance and other formal indications of belief. It's more, he says, a matter of the background music of assumptions, attitudes and values. Second, he contends that the orthodox view of the decline of Christianity is historically mistaken. Whereas it is usually argued that British Christianity began to be dislodged by Enlightenment rationalism in the 18th century, he maintains that it was the 1960s which really put paid to it. I agree that scepticism spread faster in the Sixties than ever before; but the orthodox view of how the decline began still seems to me secure. Finally, he says he has come to recognise that the methods of post-structuralist historians are not serviceable to him, being themselves part of the problem to be analysed. Again I agree, but with a difference of emphasis.
It seems to me that the relativistic spirit of our age is evident in the conduct of Brown's own argument. Neutrality is not the same as impartiality. Brown, however, generally excludes from his writing the very accents of personal involvement which would command attention to his subjectmatter. The principal reason for being interested in whether Christianity is in remission or terminal decline is (in my view) inseparable from the question of whether it matters. If Christianity is bad, let's have its demise duly celebrated. If it's good, let us count what we have lost in letting it go.
The most animated parts of Brown's book are those where he comments on extracts from the huge body of tracts, reports, songs and personal diaries which he has consulted in charting both the rise of Christian evangelism (culminating in such things as Sunday Schools) and the secularisation of popular culture. Elsewhere, his prose makes some sacrifice of vigour before the idol of neutrality. Both his style and his argument would benefit, I feel, from exposure to the evidence within canonical English literature regarding the state of Christian belief. His chapter on the feminisation of angels and the angelisation of women should surely mention Coventry Patmore's poem, 'The Angel in the House; and it is strange to read about the surge of Christian belief in the 1930s and 1940s with no mention of C. S. Lewis. These particular examples are important not so much in themselves as in their relation to the broader historical picture. Conceptions of the 'good wife' which Brown treats as Victorian find close parallels in Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare. Brown's book is nonetheless very valuable, being full of incitements to answer the questions he refrains from addressing, such as why modern films are so full of spilled religion.
Previous page
