Sociolgi: Callum G. Brown
Sociologi: Callum G. Brown.
The 1960s and secularisation
Return to piety: 1945-58
The late 1940s and 1950s witnessed the greatest church growth that Britain had experienced since the mid-ninettenth century.
Britain was by then a “secular society”.
The period between the end of world war II and the late 1950s is “the age of austerity”.
It was an age of economic retrenchment in Britain´s old basic industries.
The ides evolved that women could combine paid and domestic work. Labour-saving devises could improve domestic efficiency.
The war had liberated women and was resolved by the suggestion that, later in the post-war years, women would turn their backs on the domestic "cage" and demand the freedom made available by the war.
Women as consumers became a primary "message" of the press in the 1950s.
Traditional values of family, home and piety were suddenly back on the agenda between the end of war and 1960. The churches benefited immediately. During the late 1940s and first half of the 1950s, organised Christianity experienced the greatest per annum growth in church membership, sunday school enrolment, Angelican confirmations and presbytarian recruitment of its baptised constituency since the 18´th century.
The Billy Graham crusades of 1954-56 were especially noteworthy.
Radio evangelism was also permitted in the early and mid-1950s.
Billy Graham meeting: for many attenders these were spectacles in the midst of austerity; for a smalle number, especially the young, they induced considerable anxiety. This was a return to an older evangelical discurtive state.
Young women and girls: their discurtive environment made them highly responsive to the Graham crusades.
Not believing in God was unpopular.
The 1950s sought to recreate in the young the evangelical state of anxiety about worthiness.
The 1950s were about perfecting Victorian values and finally distributing their fruits.
The sixties´discourse revolution
Secularisation could not hapen until discurtive Christianity lost its power.
Salvation economy had wielded a power over the individual to make the choise to absorb and adapt gendered religious identities to himself. Only when that discurtive power waned secularisation could take place.
The 1960s was a key decade in ending "the Enlightenment projeck" and modernity. In its place the era of postmodernity started to mature.
Science, social science and Christianity were equally victims in the making in the 1960s. They started to be undermined by the "linguistic turn" - the deconstruction of the role of language, signification and discourse which had constructed the Enlightenment narrative of history, rationality and progress.
Post-structuralism and feminism would come within a decade or so to challenge social science.
1962: Over the next three years, the pop record, the pop magasine, radical fashion, pop art and recreational drug-use were combined to create an integrated cultural system which swept the young peolpe of Britain.
The vinyl record displaced the printed word as the key method by which young people formed their own discursive world.
McLuhan says: The medium was the message.
Romance was the central area of interaction between religious and secular narrative structures from the 1840s and onwards.
1967: Romance had been displaced by the anti-war movement, drugs, nihilism, existentialism, nostalgia and eastern mysticism.
Female rebellion - of body, sexuality and above all the decay of religious marriage - was a transition out of the traditional discursive world.
Pop music´s impact upon girls was critical. Women had previously been the heart of famili piety, the moral restraint upon men and children. By the mid-1960s domestic ideology was assailed on many fronts, putting the cultural revolution in collision with not just the Christian churches but with Christianity as a whole.
The discursive death of pious femininity destroyed the evangelical narrative.
The spirit of the age with its new found freedoms, and its healthy intolerance og humbug and hypocrisy, challenges Christians to re-think the implications of Christian morality.
A hundred and ninety years after sunday schools first opend, the salvation industry was shutting its doors to an entire generation of youngsters who no longer subscribed to religious discourses of moral identity. Secularisations was now well under way.
Moving between the generations there is a dissapearance of evangelical narrative structure, "traditional" discourses on religiosity and morality, and a growth of "stunting" in the conseption of religion.
A factor is the interviewer: "Stunted" conception of religion which fails to provide a question to which the interviewee feels able to respond.
The "stunting" of the concept of religion is MUTUAL between interviewer and interviewee.
Conception of religiosity as "going to church" and not as a wider personal religious identity.
The 1960s had becom inarticulate about religion.
The phenomena observable in late twentieth-century testimony of younger people is not replicated in autobiography written in the same period. The post-1945 workingclass autobiography, describing lives from the 1880s onwards, shows no reluctance whatsoever in discussing religion. This disonance between the two primary forms of experiential source is revealing and important.
Dealing with lives begun in the main between the 1860s and the 1920s.
They discuss religion in great detail.
Religion is taken in as the motif of the past, which distinguishes a world we have lost.
Religion had become something to be remembered and something commoditised as nostalgia.
The autoboigraphy of the 20th century was a moral museum of community in which the writer was participant observer rather than moral hero.
The problem is, that autobiographies and oral testimony of the 60s generation are relatively few and elite,. They seem wholly antagonistic to conventional religion, and interested only in experimental religiosity such as eastern mysticism.
Church of England baptism rates and the rate of solemnisation of marriage actually started to fall in the early 1950s whilst church membership and sunday school enrolement grew very significantly.
From 1945 to 1956 British organised Christianity experienced the most rapid rates of growth since statistics started to be collected in the 19th century.
From 1956 all indices of religiosity in Britain start to decline, and from 1963 most enter free fall.
At least half of the overall decline in each indicator recorded during the century was concentrated into those years (between 1956 and 1973).
That in itself makes the "long 60s" highly significant in the history of British secularisation.
Steve Bruce says: faith itself - in God, in the afterlife, in the supernatural - has been in decline.
Even where a moral goal appears to have survived (as with sobriety when driving) this has been remoralised in discourse in a form completely divorced from religiosity and Christian ethics.
The range of the changes in demography, personal relationships, political debate and moral concerns was so enormous that it did not so much challenge the Christian churches as bypass them.
Since the 1960s, the churches have become increasingly irrelevant in the new cultural and ethical landscape.
The greatest impact of the dechristianisation of British morality has been upon women.
Even thouh male confirmations were also falling the critical fact here is that female confirmation was still extremely high in the 1960s whilst male confirmation was already low and falling.
If the analysis is correct, the keys to understanding secularisation in Britain are the simultaneous de-pietisation of femininity and the de-femininity of piety from the 1960s.
The end of a long story
At the start of the 3 millenium Britain are in the midst of secularisation. Not merely the continuing decline of organised Christianity, but the death of the culture which formerly conferred Christian identety upon the Britisj people as a whole.
If a core reality survives for Britons, it is certainly no longer Christian.
Charles Taylor: argues that in the midiaaeval and early-modern worlds, religious beliefs sank into the background.
Tayler: proposes that one of the fundamental changes wrouhgt by modernism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was the movement of Christian faith from the background to the foreground of the individuals identity.
Taylor: "we also fall silent about "the narrative construction of our lives" - in other words we no longer articulate our lives as moral stories".
In the year 2000 it is still modernism that is acting upon us tas the agent of secularisation.
Instead of retionality and religion clashing in the enlightenment, it is the story of the enlightenments boost to Christian religion that needs to be more widely accepted.
Befor 1800 Christian piety had been located in masculinity, after 1800 it became located in femininity.
Enforcement of "hypergoods" (again drawing on Tylor) was transferred from external agencies (the state and churches) to the internal of the individual.
The eradication of gendered piety signalled the decentring of Chirstianity - its authority and its cultural significance.
What has been new and unprecendented in the episteme of post-modernity since the 1960s has been the dissolution of gendered discursive Christianity.
A religious vaccum into which considerable philosophical and theological energy is beeing poured.
Tayler: it seems unlikely that there will ever be a return to an age of faith.
+
The search for personal faith is now in "the new age" of minor cults, personal development and consumer choise.
The 1960s and secularisation
Return to piety: 1945-58
The late 1940s and 1950s witnessed the greatest church growth that Britain had experienced since the mid-ninettenth century.
Britain was by then a “secular society”.
The period between the end of world war II and the late 1950s is “the age of austerity”.
It was an age of economic retrenchment in Britain´s old basic industries.
The ides evolved that women could combine paid and domestic work. Labour-saving devises could improve domestic efficiency.
The war had liberated women and was resolved by the suggestion that, later in the post-war years, women would turn their backs on the domestic "cage" and demand the freedom made available by the war.
Women as consumers became a primary "message" of the press in the 1950s.
Traditional values of family, home and piety were suddenly back on the agenda between the end of war and 1960. The churches benefited immediately. During the late 1940s and first half of the 1950s, organised Christianity experienced the greatest per annum growth in church membership, sunday school enrolment, Angelican confirmations and presbytarian recruitment of its baptised constituency since the 18´th century.
The Billy Graham crusades of 1954-56 were especially noteworthy.
Radio evangelism was also permitted in the early and mid-1950s.
Billy Graham meeting: for many attenders these were spectacles in the midst of austerity; for a smalle number, especially the young, they induced considerable anxiety. This was a return to an older evangelical discurtive state.
Young women and girls: their discurtive environment made them highly responsive to the Graham crusades.
Not believing in God was unpopular.
The 1950s sought to recreate in the young the evangelical state of anxiety about worthiness.
The 1950s were about perfecting Victorian values and finally distributing their fruits.
The sixties´discourse revolution
Secularisation could not hapen until discurtive Christianity lost its power.
Salvation economy had wielded a power over the individual to make the choise to absorb and adapt gendered religious identities to himself. Only when that discurtive power waned secularisation could take place.
The 1960s was a key decade in ending "the Enlightenment projeck" and modernity. In its place the era of postmodernity started to mature.
Science, social science and Christianity were equally victims in the making in the 1960s. They started to be undermined by the "linguistic turn" - the deconstruction of the role of language, signification and discourse which had constructed the Enlightenment narrative of history, rationality and progress.
Post-structuralism and feminism would come within a decade or so to challenge social science.
1962: Over the next three years, the pop record, the pop magasine, radical fashion, pop art and recreational drug-use were combined to create an integrated cultural system which swept the young peolpe of Britain.
The vinyl record displaced the printed word as the key method by which young people formed their own discursive world.
McLuhan says: The medium was the message.
Romance was the central area of interaction between religious and secular narrative structures from the 1840s and onwards.
1967: Romance had been displaced by the anti-war movement, drugs, nihilism, existentialism, nostalgia and eastern mysticism.
Female rebellion - of body, sexuality and above all the decay of religious marriage - was a transition out of the traditional discursive world.
Pop music´s impact upon girls was critical. Women had previously been the heart of famili piety, the moral restraint upon men and children. By the mid-1960s domestic ideology was assailed on many fronts, putting the cultural revolution in collision with not just the Christian churches but with Christianity as a whole.
The discursive death of pious femininity destroyed the evangelical narrative.
The spirit of the age with its new found freedoms, and its healthy intolerance og humbug and hypocrisy, challenges Christians to re-think the implications of Christian morality.
A hundred and ninety years after sunday schools first opend, the salvation industry was shutting its doors to an entire generation of youngsters who no longer subscribed to religious discourses of moral identity. Secularisations was now well under way.
Moving between the generations there is a dissapearance of evangelical narrative structure, "traditional" discourses on religiosity and morality, and a growth of "stunting" in the conseption of religion.
A factor is the interviewer: "Stunted" conception of religion which fails to provide a question to which the interviewee feels able to respond.
The "stunting" of the concept of religion is MUTUAL between interviewer and interviewee.
Conception of religiosity as "going to church" and not as a wider personal religious identity.
The 1960s had becom inarticulate about religion.
The phenomena observable in late twentieth-century testimony of younger people is not replicated in autobiography written in the same period. The post-1945 workingclass autobiography, describing lives from the 1880s onwards, shows no reluctance whatsoever in discussing religion. This disonance between the two primary forms of experiential source is revealing and important.
Dealing with lives begun in the main between the 1860s and the 1920s.
They discuss religion in great detail.
Religion is taken in as the motif of the past, which distinguishes a world we have lost.
Religion had become something to be remembered and something commoditised as nostalgia.
The autoboigraphy of the 20th century was a moral museum of community in which the writer was participant observer rather than moral hero.
The problem is, that autobiographies and oral testimony of the 60s generation are relatively few and elite,. They seem wholly antagonistic to conventional religion, and interested only in experimental religiosity such as eastern mysticism.
Church of England baptism rates and the rate of solemnisation of marriage actually started to fall in the early 1950s whilst church membership and sunday school enrolement grew very significantly.
From 1945 to 1956 British organised Christianity experienced the most rapid rates of growth since statistics started to be collected in the 19th century.
From 1956 all indices of religiosity in Britain start to decline, and from 1963 most enter free fall.
At least half of the overall decline in each indicator recorded during the century was concentrated into those years (between 1956 and 1973).
That in itself makes the "long 60s" highly significant in the history of British secularisation.
Steve Bruce says: faith itself - in God, in the afterlife, in the supernatural - has been in decline.
Even where a moral goal appears to have survived (as with sobriety when driving) this has been remoralised in discourse in a form completely divorced from religiosity and Christian ethics.
The range of the changes in demography, personal relationships, political debate and moral concerns was so enormous that it did not so much challenge the Christian churches as bypass them.
Since the 1960s, the churches have become increasingly irrelevant in the new cultural and ethical landscape.
The greatest impact of the dechristianisation of British morality has been upon women.
Even thouh male confirmations were also falling the critical fact here is that female confirmation was still extremely high in the 1960s whilst male confirmation was already low and falling.
If the analysis is correct, the keys to understanding secularisation in Britain are the simultaneous de-pietisation of femininity and the de-femininity of piety from the 1960s.
The end of a long story
At the start of the 3 millenium Britain are in the midst of secularisation. Not merely the continuing decline of organised Christianity, but the death of the culture which formerly conferred Christian identety upon the Britisj people as a whole.
If a core reality survives for Britons, it is certainly no longer Christian.
Charles Taylor: argues that in the midiaaeval and early-modern worlds, religious beliefs sank into the background.
Tayler: proposes that one of the fundamental changes wrouhgt by modernism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was the movement of Christian faith from the background to the foreground of the individuals identity.
Taylor: "we also fall silent about "the narrative construction of our lives" - in other words we no longer articulate our lives as moral stories".
In the year 2000 it is still modernism that is acting upon us tas the agent of secularisation.
Instead of retionality and religion clashing in the enlightenment, it is the story of the enlightenments boost to Christian religion that needs to be more widely accepted.
Befor 1800 Christian piety had been located in masculinity, after 1800 it became located in femininity.
Enforcement of "hypergoods" (again drawing on Tylor) was transferred from external agencies (the state and churches) to the internal of the individual.
The eradication of gendered piety signalled the decentring of Chirstianity - its authority and its cultural significance.
What has been new and unprecendented in the episteme of post-modernity since the 1960s has been the dissolution of gendered discursive Christianity.
A religious vaccum into which considerable philosophical and theological energy is beeing poured.
Tayler: it seems unlikely that there will ever be a return to an age of faith.
+
The search for personal faith is now in "the new age" of minor cults, personal development and consumer choise.
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