A Reverent Nostalgia

S.J.D. Green, The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change c. 1920–1960, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 342 pages, $115. 

… the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning.
                             George Orwell, “England, Your England” (1940) 

This book by S.J.D. Green is very impressive as well as huge, at once profound and explanatorily cautious, like all the best history writing. Its focus is on how the Protestant faith has been understood, managed and applied by the English in the last two centuries, above all between 1920 and 1960. The educated reader will gain much information about the history of Protestantism in modern England and about the forces which have tended to sustain or destroy it.

One senses that the writer is a careful, open-minded British patriot, devoted to evidence whichever way it runs. He is clearly fascinated by the extraordinary story he has to tell, one that has for him a definite nostalgia. One gleans nothing, however, as to the author’s opinions of the substantive contents of the religion whose modern vicissitudes he relates. This holding back is very English, somewhat in the spirit of an Orwell. Green’s scholarship is extensive and his text dense, with an almost Germanic burden of references. Some pages have ten or more footnotes and few less than five. Moreover, there is a constant flow of judgments, usually subtly nuanced and often fascinating. It says much for the author’s prose-writing that despite the complexity of the book, the overall argument nevertheless emerges with clear contours.

Specifically, Green relates the very rapid decline, between 1920 and 1960, of one of the most benign phenomena of modern history: English Protestantism. In the eighteenth century, English Protestantism had largely set the political character of the whole of the British Isles. Green denies categorically, however, that Protestant decline rendered English society anything like fully secular, insisting that in the twentieth century, religion remained a deeply significant force in English life.

Naturally, the story cannot be confined to the English. The author deals with the different posture of Celtic Christianity in the same period. The Scots, the Welsh and the people of Ulster have not escaped the travails of religious loss; but it has affected them more slowly, less comprehensively; indeed, they have all played some part in the perpetuation of Christianity in England itself.

The book makes clear that the long-term decline of the Protestant church did not rob this persuasion of its central role in British social evolution in recent centuries. Material changes even in the not very distant past, in church and Sunday school attendance, cannot be associated mechanistically with changes today in the English worldview. Nor has the decline of Christian observance implied a widespread antipathy to religion in the English population.

Green says that the obvious retreat of the English into privacy should not be held synonymous with religious decline. The stark fact is that religious privacy and sensibility alike are elusive, difficult to investigate either orally or by questionnaire. Recent religious history has, therefore, in the very nature of things, been torn by opposing theories of secularisation and anti-secularisation; there is no general agreement among scholars. Green himself stresses that the English are not inert spiritually, even if they are not proactive. One might also add that, despite the best efforts of some of our universities, while we have seen far too much Marxism and speculative antinomianism, following the decline of Christianity in general and of English Protestantism in particular, this ideological self-indulgence has not been on the frightening scale experienced in modern France until quite recently.

It is quite widely believed, certainly, that rational modernity has cut the guts out of religion. Green would see this view as somewhat problematic even in the English case and it seems to fall hopelessly foul of the evidence abundantly supplied by the United States. Even so, the pessimists have not hesitated to assert that other societies will follow in our British footsteps, our country having been the first secular society because it was the first modern one.

In the event some societies have not complied. Many societies in the East, Green notes, have become more religious pari passu with the modernising process. Odder still, some Western societies have seemingly stalled in their religious decline, a process some thinkers at different times during the past century have claimed to detect even in England. The secularisation idea may in reality be fundamentally inadequate. Green thinks so. He finds the thesis woodenly mechanistic and determinist and closed to refutation. In other words it is not a theory. I would say that it is no better than a descriptive association between certain important phenomena. No distinguished historian or sociologist would be likely to endorse it, more than partially. For example, it is inconceivable that sociologists of the stature of Weber or Durkheim—if there are any such today—would do so, although Durkheim to some extent conceived of religion and education as having closely analogous functions. This might imply that the historic values of the former could live on through the continuance of the latter, this attitude being in our day a common resort of pious unbelievers.

Grace Davie (Professor of Sociology, University of Exeter) has tried to rework secularisation through the addition of postmodern categories. As Green says, such a question-begging move exposes our thoughts to the drifting currents of modern irrationalism. He also says that the work of Callum Brown (Professor of Sociology, University of Dundee), falls to the charge of merely describing historical trends, that is gains and losses, in religion. The advance in purely descriptive perspective may be worthwhile but understanding is not taken forward much. These approaches yield either pseudo-theories or no theories at all. Such explanatory dead-ends are not shameful; the failure reflects no more than the awesome difficulties of the questions these authors are pursuing. Green says an eclectic theoretical approach would be the way forward, but it must be particular; the search must be for change in English/British religion, not for a general theory of religious change. Nor could any explanation, however locally confined, ever be more than partial.

Green’s second chapter, “Religion in the Twilight Zone”, deals with the present conventional view of a Britain becoming increasingly secular and irreligious. The convention is undeniably correct if we stick to the empirical indices. When did the condition arise and with what results? Green says these questions are virtually unanswered. Given the Prayer Book controversy of 1927, some scholars plump for the late 1920s. Green says that perhaps the 1920s were the decade in which in some countries religion became societally trivial. In other decades there was a degree of pickup, for example, in the British instance with the Billy Graham evangelist phenomenon of the 1950s. Green holds that England herself had not ceased to be Protestant by 1920 but had done so by 1960.

This was the opening phase of secularisation, however problematically we have to regard the process. The key point is that most of the religious decline which set in was Protestant decline. It is also the case that by 1960 Protestantism had declined in political significance. Moreover inter-faith rivalry waned rapidly everywhere except Ulster and Lowland Scotland. This is a powerful indirect index of the waning of Protestant belief.

Anecdotal accounts are not wholly worthless. In the 1940s in the working-class West London street where I lived as a boy, most people were nominally Protestant, whether Church of England or non-conformist I do not know. There was a sizeable Irish minority, all of whom attended Sunday Mass. None of the non-Catholics I knew, perhaps some twenty families, attended any church. Interestingly, there seemed to be no hostility directed at Catholics, although one might need to allow for the possibility that the southern working classes were tolerant ahead of their time or perhaps just apathetic.

Green points out that there was undoubtedly a sea-change in educated British opinion in the twentieth century with respect to religion. The Manchester Guardian moved away from its traditional non-conformism and henceforth maintained its political radicalism on the secular basis with which we are today familiar. Even so, British socialists were mostly not anticlerical. The Catholic Church maintained its close links to the Labour Party until Catholicism began to wane from the mid-1960s. With respect to membership and attendance, Protestant decline in all the major denominations began earlier than the Catholic losses and occurred on a much more drastic scale. The falling off was steady from the 1920s to the 1960s and intellectual convention has subsumed its understanding of this development, says Green, within the erroneous belief that the First World War was a watershed in the fortunes of organised religion in England, the argument presumably being that the slaughter induced millions of observers and mourners to flinch away from the notion of a merciful providence. Green does not believe in any such proven outcome.

There has been a huge and incontrovertible contraction in attendance in places of worship in modern British society. Most persuasions have felt it and Protestantism has felt it most of all. There is plenty to make Protestants and now, Catholics too, anxious. We know much more, however, about church attendance than we do about substantive beliefs. In the matter of religious ups and downs, including the seeming reversals, we need accordingly to note the possible significance of some kind of privatisation process, a withdrawal into other behaviour than formal compliance. We must also note the substitution phenomenon. Just as the decline in pub-going was compensated by the rise of the off-licence culture (shops and stores where alcohol can be bought but not consumed), so radio religion filled the gap left by the empty seats in the churches. This broadcasting of religion has continued to this day with the advent of television. Whatever our worries, religion in general did not wholly perish in England in Green’s selected four decades and nor did Protestantism in particular. Some religious sense has survived the institutional collapse.

Leaving aside the changes wrought since the Second World War by immigration, we can say that the pattern of Christian commitment in these years was in many ways comparable to our contemporary one, although of course church attendance has now diminished still further, whilst non-Christian immigration has continued to swell. In the period occupying Green’s appraisal, England was less religious than Wales, Wales less than Scotland, Scotland less than British Ulster. This pattern still obtains. The Celts had in fact poured in large numbers into England, home to the most numerous and least religious of the peoples of these islands.

Green says that the Protestant decay manifested itself in the 1950s in a definite loss of clerical nerve. Furthermore, dismissive anti-religious sentiments were vociferously espoused by some very well-known and formidable writers, like A.J.P. Taylor, A.J. Ayer and Hugh Trevor-Roper. For all their erudition, these men were in matters of religion shallow. More: they were quite untypical of national attitudes. The way the modern English understand and comport themselves is incomprehensible outside a knowledge of their religious history.

Since the late 1940s there has been a non-stop influx to this country of religious people who were not Christians, making its way to the cities of the industrial North as well as to London. This movement has continued unbroken till the present. As Green points out, today what offends the more extreme elements among our religious minorities is not British religiosity but on the contrary, British secularism. One of the ironies of mass immigration, as it happens, is that the multiculturalism whose flowering served to justify it, also served to make attacks on religion rather more difficult. What the implication for religion of the present undoing of multiculturalism will be, time alone will tell. In any case, there has been an element of consolation for Christians worried about changes in religious demography, in the influx of Catholics, especially from Poland, following the collapse of communism.

Green’s musings on the complicated story are tolerant and learned. Intellectual, social and religious history are all closely intertwined. As Green says: “intellectual and political history matter in the social history of religion”. Likewise religion matters in the formation of Englishness. And more than this, religion matters because history matters. To neglect the long story and the vast achievements of Christianity, Catholic or Protestant, is to display contempt for our forebears. It is as bad, the other way round, as it would be to neglect the dark sides of faith or to fail to deal with abominations like the slave trade. Edmund Burke was quite right when he said that those who fail to respect their ancestors will be neglected by their posterity.

Those who share Burke’s view will appreciate Green’s appraisal and defence of Dean Inge (1860–1954), the brilliant Protestant who achieved such a masterly understanding of English Protestantism and, indeed, of the soul of England itself. Indeed, Green’s third chapter, which focuses on Inge, would be worth expanding into a separate book. It defends an unjustly forgotten scholar. Most notably, Inge was successful. His books made money: England (1926), deeply controversial among the cognoscenti, was a resounding success with the public. Its populist pessimism seems to have been what the crowd wanted. Great writers often lead, as well as respond to, the nation which sustains them.

Yet how many people today know anything of Inge? A Catholic like me as a schoolboy had encountered the name, but only via G.K. Chesterton’s grossly offensive attacks. Chesterton’s attempts to smear Inge in relation to his alleged sympathy for Nazi eugenics are about as convincing and accurate as his worship of all things French or his adoption of the absurd economics of “distributivism”. In the event, nevertheless, what Shakespeare calls “blind oblivion” has for the present well and truly swallowed up Dr Inge. Green offers some correction to this present depressed status, supplying us with a useful mini-biography.

Inge, says Green, was a historian and cultural critic of genius. While he cautiously approved of capitalism his thought was tinged with Malthusian pessimism. He certainly doubted that living standards could rise indefinitely. They have risen hugely since his day; we have no way of knowing whether this will go on. Time could prove him right.

In a guarded kind of way Inge approved of the British as a nation, finding them united and coherent. The Second World War surely supplied some endorsement of this view. He believed that British civilisation was outstanding and not in the “little England” version of that word. The decency of the British reflected their Protestantism and yet Inge was faced with the huge problem that religious decline and moral improvement in his lifetime had gone hand in hand. Inge died in 1954. Had he seen the period between the 1960s and the 1990s his underlying religious contentions might have seemed convincing. History is surely as full of lags as also of anticipations. Inge was moreover a modernist in his belief that the intellectual advances of religion required a commitment among Christians to the procedures of science. It is notable today that many scientists are believers and most are not hostile to the churches. Dr Green is to be thanked for making Inge’s contribution to British civilisation so graspable.

Some thinkers say religion will be with us till the end of time. Certainly there is no generally accepted theoretical apparatus for conceiving its impending end. Inge probably believed as strongly as his opponent Chesterton, that Christianity will never perish from the earth. Green may be right to opine in his concluding chapter that British Protestantism is past revival. I am not so sure. More important to me is that the Church of Rome get its act together in these islands. Sad to say, I see little sign of that in the British context. Indeed it is losing the battle even in the Irish Republic.

But the future cannot always and unfailingly or perhaps even usually be read from the past. We need to look more globally, outside these islands, outside Europe too. The decline of religion, after all, is a European phenomenon. Neither Catholicism nor Protestantism is fading and failing on a world scale. Christianity is incomparably the most successful religion in history and the basis of history’s greatest civilisation. So Europe may in time be won back for the churches. Ironically it is already apparent that European secularisation has been checked by an influx of non-Christians: Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims. In the case of the Islamic persuasion we should perhaps hope, mildly of course, that secularisation has not lost its appetite for conquest. So of course, should the French and the Germans. After all, we surely do not want Islam to be the only surviving contender for Europe’s soul. 

Dennis O’Keeffe is Professor of Social Science at the University of Buckingham and editor of the Salisbury Review.

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