It is an uncontested fact that by any reasonable, certainly by any agreed, measure of account public participation in mainstream English religious organisations has significantly declined since the end of the Second World War. It is less clear, at any rate there is less agreement upon, what this fact properly reflects.
Common-sense suggests a concomittant decline in the social significance of religion in post-war England. That is, it identifies a direct relationship between diminished membership of religious organisations, dwindling attendances at church services, even less generous financial contributions towards sacred causes — the decline of religious practice — and less well-documented but seemingly similarly motivated incredulity in matters concerning the existence of God, the historical reality of Christ the Saviour and the continuing relevance of ecclesiastical doctrine — the decline of religious belief. Putting the two together, it posits the emergence in our time of a hitherto unprecendented, uniquely rationalistic, disenchanted and discontented order of things: modern, secular, society.
But common-sense is increasingly confounded these days in the form of revisionist social science. In its most extreme variant — best represented by Stark and Bainbridge’s The Future of Religion — this bold exercise in counter-intuition goes so far as to deny that there has been any significant decrease in religious practice, either in England or any where else for that matter, over the past fifty years or so; insisting that a decline in the mainstream has been compensated for, is subject in fact to natural readjustment through, the rise of peripheral, new, religious movements.
In its more subtle exposition — exemplified in Davie’s Believing Without Belonging — it suggests that the (this time acknowledged) diminution of all forms of recognisable religious organisation has not been accompanied by any significant abandonment of religious belief amongst the English [1]. On the contrary. They continue to believe, so Davie and others insist. Now, however, they tend to do so in the privacy of their own homes.
The question is more about what they believe. Even Davie accepts that this has changed. But, in accordance with much at the “cutting edge” of the contemporary sociology of religion, she insists that change, in this respect, is not synonymous with decline; that there is something which we may call, for want of a better phrase, post-modern religious belief which does not entail traditional forms of religious practice and yet which should not be confused with the diminishing social significance of religion, or secularisation. This view I take to be mistaken.
Contrary to the academic optimists, I intend to show: first, that not only has mainstream religious participation declined in this country, but that the associational deficit which it implies has not been filled by emerging new religious movements; secondly, that the transformation of characteristic popular religious beliefs which has flowed from that change has been far more profound than that which Davie and others have acknowledged — that, in fact, it amounts to something like a degeneration of common religious belief in our time. Finally, I shall identify this contemporary degeneration of beliefs as a shift in English popular culture from ‘puritanism’ to ‘pantheism’, explaining both why I think this is important and also why I fear that it is potentially dangerous.
II The English were not an especially devout, that is, not a particularly church-going nation even before the end of the Second World War. In 1940, the number of Easter Day communicants in the Church of England fell below two millions for the first time since the turn of the century. By the end of the war, it had fallen by another two-hundred thousand. The Methodist Church, so recently united, lost nearly one-tenth of its membership, falling from just under 770,000 to little more than 690,000 in the decade after 1933. The Baptists and Congregationalists, if anything, suffered more; the former falling from around a quarter of a million to something under 220,000 in the ten years from 1935 to 1945; the latter, worse still, from 275,000 to 223,000 during the same period. Ironically, only the Roman Catholic population of England sustained its numbers at this time, at just over two millions.[2]
Put another way: on any reasonable calculation it is difficult to sustain the view that anything more than about one-fifth of the adult population of England was committed to regular attendance at Church each Sunday in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War; and of that minority, perhaps half were Roman Catholics. In this respect, the English compared poorly with their Continental neighbours, France and Italy especially; also with their British compatriots, the Welsh, Scots and Irish (both north and south). This was noticed at the time, especially by foreigners. Writing in 1945, Pierre Maillaud, an exiled French broadcaster and Anglophile, could not help observing that, “In Protestant [England] less than one-twentieth of the population goes to [a Protestant] Church regularly.”
Yet it would be wrong to conclude from such evidence, whether statistical or anecdotal, that the English either were or even that they took themselves to be an irreligious people at that time. For the most part they did not. More strikingly still, foreign observers — Maillaud himself included — insisted that they were not. Indeed, the most informed (dare one also say the most fair-minded) amongst them generally described the English as a distinctly religious race; above all, as a Protestant people, and as a Protestant people whose Protestantism was marked by a particular, peculiarly Puritan, presence. Maillaud again: “England remains a Christian country...Puritanism runs right through [it].”[3] In this view, the French journalist only corroborated the earlier judgement of a German scholar, Wilhelm Dibelius, Professor of English in the University of Berlin up to the time of the Nazi seizure of power, who observed amongst the English “a religious force of incomparable intensity.” This was the force of “Puritanism” which, he insisted, “dominates the English soul.”[4]
We might reasonably ponder how. Many contemporaries, similarly convinced at the fact nonetheless baulked at its rational explanation and settled instead for the invocation of nature. Writing to F.S. Jackson, the former England cricket captain, J.C.C. Davidson, long-time Chairman of the Conservative Party, observed that “Puritanism” was simply something “in English ... blood”. Others were not quite so sure, but most acknowledged that, viscerally imbedded or not, the sensibility of Puritanism extended far beyond the bounds of organised religion and right across the social spectrum of the time. As one commentator put it: “Puritanism’s ... life forms ... affected the entire nation ... from top to bottom ... aristocracy, bourgeoisie and proletariat ... excepting only those of ... the very lowest social grade.”[5]
In this way, it swept right across all denominations: being “the monopoly neither of dissenters ... nor even ... of protestants”; nor even, as Davidson himself had remarked of “church and chapel-goers.”[6] Thus Henry Leavis, a piano-maker from Cambridge “burned” according to his son, the rather better known Frank Raymond, with a “fierce, Protestant Conscience” — albeit one “divorced from any [orthodox] religious outlet.”[7] Indeed, it extended beyond the respectable classes into the libertines of early-twentieth century English society. Little else can explain John Maynard Keynes’s insistence that his friends in the Bloomsbury set were nothing more (nor less) than a group of idealists “in the English Puritan tradition”, concerned chiefly “with the salvation of [their] souls.”
To include Lytton Stratchey amongst the Puritans of inter-war England is necessarily to leave the religious historian with much food for thought. Yet before such seemingly implausible inclusiveness confounds the very definition of the thing, it is important to note that Keynes conceived of Puritanism as an essentially “unwordly religion”. By this, he meant a faith inspired by truths and strengthened through a sensibility which “despised” the conventional human goals of “wealth, power, popularity and success.”[8] And, in that, he described a kind of rigorousness of soul, allied to a contempt for mere form, which struck a deep chord amongst other, less sophisticated, but possibly more characteristic contemporary consciences.
To be sure, there were those — most notable amongst them George Orwell — who saw in Puritanism no more than a “prudish, ascetic ... ‘kill-joy’ spirit”, which they took to be alien to “the English people proper”, and limited only to those ever to be derided “small traders and manufacturers”.9 But most accepted Maillaud’s distinction between “the arid and limiting [ethos] with which it is sometimes identified” and the “passionate ... optimistic assertion of man” which “Puritanism” truly was.
Why optimistic? Maillaud again: “[Because] it demands much optimism to correct reality or even to tamper with it."
How passionate? Similarly: “[Because] such moral [progress] ... could be made ... only by moral pressure; or else ... in emphatic protest.”[10]
True, not all contemporary Puritans, flesh-and-blood nail manufacturers from Birmingham, despised (or at least denied themselves) every aspect of wordly success. Yet each, in the words of the French political scientist Emile Boutray, prided himself on a kind of “personal austerity”, armed with that “dislike or disdain of forms”, which left man “in normal or customary conditions”, yet supplied him “with a fund of strength ... regulated by nature for expenditure in practical life.”[11]
This brings us to the content of puritanism. Self-consciously rooted in revealed truth and grounded in Protestantism’s elevation of the individual soul it was, as Boutray correctly observed, fundamentally a “fund of [personal] strength” which found its outward manifestation in “conscience”; the strength, that is, of the lonely pursuit of righteous action, governed by simple motive. Its most significant social impact was the moralisation of all human life. Contra Tawney, puritans did not divide the world into the realms of economics and the rest. In fact, to a greater degree than all their Christian predecessors, they moralised everything in the world. That is, they deemed it all subject to moral judgement. It has become customary to castigate this effect; certainly to consider it overly judgemental. Some contemporaries, especially foreign contemporaries did too, even the otherwise sympathetic Dibelius. He called it “the parent of English cant” and the “bane of English culture”, lamenting how the English insisted upon looking at “every issue, no matter how remote ... from some ... ethical angle ... [all] with a mixture of presumptuousness and ignorance which declined correction and ... almost rejoice[d] in its incapacity to understand or accept anything new or foreign.”[12]
In so doing, he invoked a spirit — the spirit of self-conscious culture, or sweetness and light — instantly recognisable from Matthew Arnold onwards; a spirit which has, albeit far from the way in which Arnold intended it, achieved almost universal authority in our own day.[13] If so, it is perhaps important to remember that the origins of such philstinism lay in idealism.[14] One who never forgot was Stanley Baldwin, perhaps the quintessential inter-war Englishman. We can be fairly sure that he never read Dibelius yet he repeated much of his analysis word for word. For instance: “It is a genuine manifestation of our national character [he wrote] that everything ... economics, politics and art ... seems to us part of moral conduct.” Yet that implied neither aridity of mind nor infirmity of heart. Again:
This preoccupation [he acknowledged] has often puzzled Continental observers, who find it difficult to believe in the sincerity of our idealismand ... absurdly ... attributing ... cunning on our part ... where none exists ...are apt to describe it by a less pleasant name.”[15]
No doubt. But before we join in such cosmopolitan mockery, we might recall how the repudiation of the puritan ethic in our time necessarily proceeded, at least in its initial stages, only through an assumption of its authority, albeit in the service of its usurpation. In the emergence of our “permissive society” few events have been accorded more symbolic significance than the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960. Yet it is easy to forget that the book’s most eloquent apologists were the then Bishop of Woolwich, the then Mr. Norman St. John Stevas and the then Professor Richard Hoggart. It is even easier to forget — perhaps few of us can now believe — that the learned Professor defended Lawrence’s work particularly on the grounds of its “puritanis[m]”; defined, of course, according to what he called its “proper meaning”, that is, something possessed of “an intense sense of responsibility for one’s conscience.”[16]
If this was sophistry, it nevertheless alluded to a profound truth. For whatever Lawrence’s original intention, or for that matter Hoggart’s later purposes, the moralisation of life so conceived, that is, conceived as the product of individual conscience was indeed part of the tradition of English puritanism. As such, it made the most profound demands of individual human beings to be good (or responsible for their badness) and to do good in the world at all times (or take responsibility for the full amount of bad that they had done).
Put another way, it acknowledged all too fully that the world could be made good only through the continuous moral agency of righteous individuals. So great a task simply could not be entrusted to the few of God’s elect. Everyone had to be encouraged — by education and habituation if possible, through regulation and stigma if necessary — to do good in the world themselves. For some, this proved to be no more than the occasion of passing incredulity. So Lord David Cecil, on being elected to a Fellowship at Wadham College, Oxford was first congratulated by his father and then commended upon so great an opportunity “to do good in the world”. He had to confess that he never thought about the matter in those terms before.[17] But for others, it was an experience to be remembered, even to be resented, throughout the whole of their lives. Thus A.L. Rowse recalled from the Cornish Sunday schools of his youth continuous exhortation to “make the effort ... to be good”, an effort enforced through an “insistence on purity” which, in his revealing personal judgement, amounted to nothing short of a “denial of life”.[18]
For him, perhaps. But for most English men and women of his generation the moralisation of life through the medium of individual agency was nothing short of the road to liberty. It is important to remember this. Our generation has all but forgotten it. Indeed, it can scarcely comprehend that it can ever have been true. Puritanism, rooted in revealed truth and embedded in Christian morality, flowered in individual liberty. Notoriously severe in its critique of licentiousness and famous for its exposure of corruption, puritanism conceived of man’s freedom as consisting in obedience to the moral law as promulgated through God’s Church. This meant strict control of animal appetites. It also implied careful regulation of social activity. As Maillaud put it:
Amongst the English it is, of course, common knowledge that their own acceptance of Church and Chapel interference with their ways of living rests largely on the conviction that the Protestant religion was, in England, a powerful instrument of liberation.[19]
That was why Puritanism played such a profound part in English public life during the century after 1850. We now recall only the pressure-group politics which seem most extreme to us: the temperance movement above all (perhaps that might yet come again in the form of secular salvationism); sabbatarianism (still, just, with us); and finally, marital chastity and the regulation of sexual mores (now almost a crime). We tend to forget the causes fought and crusades won which we would now somehow rather not associate with puritan moralism: public health, women’s rights and animal welfare. Contemporaries remarked simply on the pervasiveness of it all. Dibelius again: “Public life in England today is still overwhelmingly Puritan.”[20]
Yet it would be a mistake to think of inter-war England puritanism as having been solely, or even for that matter primarily, a public phenomenon. As Davidson understood, its public force lay precisely in its “private ... latent ... quality.”[21] It sprang into public view continually but from deep private wells of protestant sensibility. For many, these were dug early in life.
It was, after all, in England’s Sunday school that A.L. Rowse first saw its force. And what is important to note here is not so much his miserable reaction to that exposure as the more common experience of such similar juvenile habituation. For if, crudely speaking, it was the middle classes who went to church then it was the working classes who went to Sunday school. And they did so en masse up to 1945. On the eve of the war, nearly 5,000,000 students were enrolled in Sunday schools, a figure representing about 11 per cent of the total population and perhaps two-thirds of those under the age of fifteen. As late as 1957, around 76 per cent of those over 30 years of age had attended Sunday school at some stage in their lives; though, revealingly, for the under-30’s the corresponding figure was only 61 per cent.[22]
Moreover, even if we assume that they imbibed nothing of the Christian message there, we are still left with a culture which, as even Orwell insisted, was profoundly moralistic; to him, “more Christian than the upper-classes and probably of any other European nation.” What he meant by this was its highly developed capacity to distinguish right from wrong; above all, its aversion to “power-worship” and the assumption that might was right. Hence its preference for “the little man against the big man”. This could be seen “in its folk-tales”; think of “Jack the Giant-Killer”; also in its modern, cinematic heroes; think of Charlie Chaplin.[23] But it could also be discovered in its subtler popular literature. Dibelius identified a profound puritan streak in “the novels of Dickens [whose] virtuous heroes ... must earn money and have the most correct outlook on all questions of love and marriage.”[24] In that way, a common puritan sensibility taught men and women the right way not only in simple matters but also over the course of their whole lives. No wonder Cardinal Newman lamented that English itself was an incorrigibly protestant language.[25]
That explains a lot; for Puritanism was a form of Protestantism which, precisely because it was so critical of form, needed little liturgical renewal. Hence it was curiously undisturbed by ecclesiastical failure. Similarly, it was a body of doctrine which relied less upon the spirit than the word; this is why it was a sensibility which prized the individual conscience. Not above all, of course; not above God’s truth or His Church but as the most efficient vehicle for that truth and in His Church. This made great demands of men, but it also made men — ordinary men — in a significant way, great. For it made them the originators of their own fate, on this earth at least, to a profound degree. By this I do not mean ( though I do not necessarily thereby exclude) self-help. I mean making one’s own choices. The puritan world-view presumed that such choices had to be made; that only men could make them; and that they could, if they willed it, make them well and to good effect.
Not for nothing did Neville Chamberlain copy this particular passage of Shakespeare — his favourite — into a commonplace book:
“This is the excellent foppery of the world that, when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeit of our own behaviour — we make guilty of our disasters the Sun, the Moon and the Stars; as if we were villainous by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves and trechers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulters, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of the star.”[26]
We might also ponder upon the significance of Chamberlain’s insistence, in the hour of his death, to refuse all state honours, and to die “Mr. Chamberlain, like my father before me.” No British Prime Minister has done so since.[27]
III During the years after 1945, organised religion in Britian declined from a minority to a marginal pursuit. It became very small in extent. It also ceased to be exclusively Christian, revealed, or even theistic in content. But something of the very ethos of what Grace Davie has called the “ordinary Gods” of English society changed too. Extra-organised religion, more specifically the religion of the non-devotional, indigenous, majority abandoned its social taboos and adopted the values of personal therapy. More: it repudiated the special, moral, role for individual human beings which common Christianity had insisted upon up to 1945 and increasingly integrated the human with the non-human in its prevailing religiosity. It is this shift of spiritual sensibilities which I identify as the transformation of “puritanism” into “pantheism”.
The numbers are fairly unambiguous. The number of Easter Day communicants in the Church of England, which actually rose slightly during the 1950’s, fell away precipitously after 1960; by around one-quarter in the decade to 1970, and by another quarter since. There were similar, if less spectacular, declines in the number of baptised members, the number of ministers and the number of churches over the same period. The rate of decline has diminished over the past decade but the trend is still downward and the base is now becoming dangerously small. The rates of decline for Methodism, and for the other non-conformist churches have been equally dramatic. Indeed, in some ways the only real change in the dynamics of English religious worship since the war has been the crisis in Catholicism, observable since the 1960’s. Once the odd man out in English religious decline, the Roman Catholic Church has come to feel the same ill winds in recent years. Ironically, only the number of Roman Catholic churches is now increasing.[28]
Yet membership figures, however defined and calculated, in some ways conceal the true extent of decline, especially over the last thirty years. Remember, they were never very impressive. But they were counter-balanced, until recently, by the prevalence of other forms of contact. Possibly the most associationally significant of these was Sunday school. However, that institution went into terminal decline after the war. Its numbers halved between 1931 and 1961 and then halved again during the next thirty years. Today, possibly for the first time in two centuries, a minority of the population has ever attended Sunday school.[29]
Perhaps as a result, a minority of the population now also partakes of the traditional Anglican rites of juvenile passage. In 1970, the number of Anglican baptisms per thousand births fell below 50 per cent of the cohort for the first time. Today, it is barely more than one quarter. Confirmations, at 315 per thousand in 1960, halved over the next twenty years. Only the adult rights of passage, marriage and (as we have recently seen to all too dramatic effect) funerals remain generally popular.[30]
It cannot be stated too strongly that these losses among the Christian mainstream have not been compensated for by gains in the religious periphery. True, it is possible to find some such gains. The numbers of what Brierley and Hiscock call “independent churches” (of which the house churches form the largest section) rose by nearly 40 per cent, from around 250,000 to 350,000 plus during the 1980’s.[31] The Church of Scientology has possibly quadrupled its membership, from 100,000 to perhaps 400,000 over the past twenty years.[32] And other non-trinitarian churches, making up much of what Professor Eileen Barker has called the “ new religious movements” of contemporary Britain can claim a community of possibly 600,000 members, up around 20 per cent from the figure of two decades ago.[33] Yet by any method of addition, the hundreds of thousands added to the new churches do not make up for the millions lost to the old over the same period. The loss of contact, defined either in terms of simple figures or in relation to the extent of commitment, is unmistakeable.[34]
With that loss of contact has come a change of faith. Not, to be sure, a complete loss of faith. This has not happened. The English remain by a very considerable majority a believing people. They were in 1945 and they are still now.
Mass observation, in 1948, found that four out of five women and two of three men gave “at least verbal assent to the possibility of there being a God, and most of the rest express[ed] doubt rather than disbelief. Uncompromising disbelievers in a deity amount[ed] to one in twenty.”[35] The European Values Study, conducted first in 1981 and then repeated in 1990, almost exactly replicated these earlier findings. Thirty-three years on, some 76 per cent of this (mainland) sample reported a belief in God (71 per cent in 1990). Nor was this all. Fifty-eight per cent (54 per cent in 1990) defined themselves as “religious persons”. Nearly the same proportion claimed to pray, meditate or regularly feel the need for contemplation. Conversely, only around 4 per cent — perversely a figure actually slightly lower than that of 1948 — emerged as convinced atheists.[36]
The problem is what sort of God they believed in and what kind of religious life they envisaged for themselves. For it is becoming increasingly clear that it has precious little to do with Christian theology; or, for that matter, Puritan morality. Here, it is important not to assume too much. Certainly, the assumption of an overwhelmingly Christian nation, if Christian is taken to be living in accordance with recognisable Church doctrine, should be avoided even for the period immediately after 1945. The results of Geoffrey Gorer’s classic survey of English Character proved at least that. For his investigations established that just six per cent of the population subscribed to what he called “the full dogma of Christianity”. Conversely, they suggested that something like one quarter of the English people held “to a view of the universe which can most properly be designated as magical”. This in 1951.[37]
Yet, sensational as these results appeared at the time, they did not refute the testimony of contemporary anecdotalists. For, again and again, the witnesses to English puritanism pointed not to common adherence to doctrine but rather to a prevailing morality, not to significant personal experience but rather to agreed social behaviour.
Maillaud was quite explicit on this point: “Religion in England ... is moral rather than spiritual and social rather than individual ... it [is] almost wholly unmystical ... lay[ing] stress on conduct rather than on convictions and strives to maintain or expand social discipline rather than to enhance the sense ... of worship.”[38] Moreover, preoccupied as he was with doctrine, Gorer scarcely concerned himself with morality. Had he done so, he would probably have arrived at very similar results to Lavers and Rowntree, who found religiously-inspired ethics alive and well in High Wycombe and York, also in 1951. In their own words: “The Christian ethic ... is so deeply impressed upon peoples’ minds that, even for those who would not call themselves Christians, it is in fact the Christian solution to any practical problem that more often than not they instictively recognise as the right one.”[39]
Seen in this light, the most interesting comparison between Gorer and his successors lies not in the similarities but rather in the differences which it reveals between them. Two, in particular, stand out: first, that although roughly the same proportion of the population claimed to believe in God in 1990 as in 1950, today an actual majority of those believers conceive of this God as “a spirit or a life force”, rather than “as a person”; secondly, that although the proportion of the population which either actively believes in or at least allows for the possibility of hell and the existence of the devil has diminished still further since Gorer wrote — down from about one third to around a quarter — an increasingly large proportion of the population now claims to have had some sort of (presumably good or pleasing) religious experience during their lives. Put another way, common religion during the past forty years or so has become something less of a relationship between one great and many lesser persons; similarly, it has become something concerned less with the question of His judgement upon them than of their sensitivity to the possibilities of the supernatural.[40]
It is in this context that one can begin to speak of “New Age” religion.[41] This phenomenon spans an enormously wide range of ideas. But the overwhelming force of those ideas entails ambivalence towards orthodox Christian teaching and hostility to traditional puritan morality. That is why they are so important. Certainly, to the degree that they are influential, they go far beyond the kinds of discrepancies between official dogma and common belief, noted by Gorer and his immediate successors. Indeed, they point to a different view of the very purpose of religious life. This is true, I think, in two senses: first, in its reintegration of man back into an homogenised nature; second, in its relocation of the fundamental source of the supernatural away from God the Creator to creation itself (including man). That is why, for want of a better word, I call it “pantheism”.
Such shifts of sacred sensibility are observable within new religious movements themselves; within New Age religious beliefs; and finally, as part of the common drift of popular credulity. It should go without saying that they do not exhaust the possibilities of those novel expressions of religious life. New religious movements, for instance, sometimes either affirm or at least accommodate the world (such as the Charismatic Renewal movement), or else they reject it (like the Unification Church).
New Age religion, on the other hand, sometimes offers its converts no more (nor less) than wordly success — career promotion and the like — whilst at other times it provokes experiences which convince converts of the truths which have suddenly been revealed to them. But throughout, there is an emphasis on fluidity — that is, of the sense in which things naturally flow into other things and on accessibility — that is, of the sense that what is real is immediately available to whomever wants it that makes this kind of religiosity, in Grace Davie’s provocative words: “increasingly prevalent as the twentieth century draws to a close ... almost [indeed] a fin de siecle or millenial version of common religion.”[42]
Why is this so? It may be because so much less Christian dogma is now taught, either in Sunday school (for lack of patrons) or in the maintained sector (for lack of will or competence). Certainly, most recent studies of the extent of common knowledge about Christian dogma, simple knowledge that is, as opposed to specific assent, suggest that people generally and the young especially are far more ignorant of revelation, the theory of monotheism, the significance of the trinity and the doctrine of judgement than they used to be. In that sense, the shift from a personal to a pantheistic God, similarly from a divinely-inspired to an inherently-forged spiritual life, might represent as much a choice made by default as one taken in awareness of the full facts of the matter. It has long been known that those self-consciously “religious ... people”, removed from regular religious worship, characteristically espouse beliefs which “are quite far from the orthodox Church position.”[43] It would scarcely be remarkable if still larger numbers of people, still further removed from any source of orthodox Christian doctrine, have come increasingly to experience the religious within an entirely heterodox framework.
It may also be because even those within the mainstream are now less exposed to traditional teachings than they once were. The rise of liberal theology since the 1960’s has certainly produced a cohort of ordained ministers less willing to preach unproblematic dogma than their predecessors. More still perhaps, it has nurtured a generation of clergymen actively in revolt against the puritan morality of pre-war England. No other explanation of the Church’s contemporary stance on questions relating to marital chastity, divorce or the regulation of sexual relations more generally makes any sense.[44] Yet, here, perhaps one should utter a note of caution. For, so far as we can tell, a less censorious clerical attitude towards such matter is actually more likely to win support from within the body of church attenders than amongst the general population. It is almost as if the indifferent resent the devout for failing to sustain the ideal of purity amongst them all.[45]
From the other end of the spectrum, it is worth noting that many of the new religious movements have, in a curious way, become more rather than less “religious” as they have grown over the past thirty years or so. This is true, for instance, of Scientology; similarly of Transcendental Meditation and of the Human Potential Movement. Begun, in most instances as naturalistic, psychotherapeutic, even quasi-secular organisations, they gradually acquired religious dimensions. For instance, as Dianetics developed into Scientology it also forged a theory of incarnation. Similarly, Transcendental Meditation, which had taken great pains to obscure its religious dimensions during the 1960’s, then pioneered a programme designed to release the individual’s occult powers, the “Siddhis”, during the 1970’s. (Before you laugh, remember that William Hague practices Transcendental Meditation.) Finally, the Human Potential Movement, which began in various psychoanalytic heresies, Gestalt psychology, existentialism and phenomenology later formulated various overtly spiritual practices, such as psychosynthesis and other Trans-Personal Psychologies, which took as their focus the evocation and therapeutic use of mystical states and experiences.[46]
This is important because if the new religious movements have not proved especially adept at holding on to their memberships, they have certainly proved exceptionally successful in attracting large numbers of individuals to their fleeting attention. So much so that even the most sober-minded of observers has suggested that “minimally ... one million or so people have dabbled in or flirted with one or other of the movements in Britain at some time during the past quarter century.”[47] Moreover, that million or so is almost certainly concentrated within the relatively young; just as mainstream church attendance is biased towards the relatively old. And to extrapolate from that would inevitably be to conclude that the “ordinary religion” of the people is on the verge of becoming rather extraordinary.
IV This is what Grace Davie herself concludes. Alive, of course, to the ambivalence of new age religion, especially to the extent that it: “both feeds on a consumer society (marketing its own particular and infinitely varied products), but at the same time rejects many of the assumptions that underpin contemporary materialism”, Davie nevertheless concludes that the fundamental emphasis of what she characterises as “post-modern belief” lies in what she calls its capacity to shift attention “away from rather than into industrial society”; to forge, in other words, a set of beliefs appropriate to a post-industrial, or post-modern, scheme of things. Her argument is that whilst industrialisation was bad for religion, harbinger of that secularisation of society of which believing Christians are all too well aware, post-industrialisation will be good for religion, albeit not necessarily in a way which the traditionally devout in society will recognise or even approve.48
For if industrialisation and urbanisation eventually led to a decline in the social significance of religion (one has to say eventually, remember Weber and Tawney on Protestantism and Capitalism), they nevertheless left the religious image of a personal God, institutionalised churches and what we have come to call bourgeois morality intact. Information technology and suburbanisation will not do so. They will replace God the Son by the Holy Spirit, mainstream faiths by a multivarious sacred, ethical censure by individual sympathy. Perhaps they already have. At the same time, they will reintegrate material life back into spiritual concern, so that the curious juxtaposition of reason and revelation prevalent in Western civilisation up to now will gradually be eased by sustainable development instead of rampant commercialism, ecology instead of agribusiness, holistic healing instead of medical science. Many seem to think we are already on our way.
I am not one of their number. To be sure, I recognise the symptoms. But I do not acknowledge the cure. In part, this is because I take the view, first espoused by the sociologist Bryan Wilson that new religious movements, new age religion, and contemporary sacred sensibility are all very much part of the project of modernity; that, in effect, they point to a religious life all too well adjusted to modern needs: individualistic, compartmentalised and therapeutic. Put another way, they herald a religious life which is increasingly open to, indeed conducive of, the individual apart from the generations, detached from the community, alienated from his soul.[49]
But there is, I fear, something more than this at work still. I do not intend even to try to explain it here. Rather, I shall conclude by quoting at length from its great prophet, Alexis de Tocqueville. This is what he said, incredibly, one hundred and fifty years ago:
It cannot be denied that pantheism has made great progress in our time ... This cannot I think be explained by an accident, but is due to some enduring reason.
As conditions become more equal, each individual becomes like his fellows, weaker and smaller, and the habit grows of ceasing to think about the citizens and considering only the people. Individuals are forgotten, and the species alone counts.
At such times, the human mind seeks to embrace a multitude of different objects at once, and it constantly strives to link up a variety of consequences with a single cause.
The concept of unity becomes an obsession. Man looks for it everywhere, and when he thinks he has found it, he gladly reposes in that belief. Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but one creation and one Creator, he is still embarrassed by the primary division of things and seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole. If one finds a philosophical system which teaches that all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible, which the world contains are only to be considered as several parts of an immense Being who alone remains eternal in the midst of continual flux and the transformation of all that composes Him, one may be sure that such a system, although it destroys human individuality, or rather just because it destroys it, will have secret charms for men living under democracies. All their habits of mind prepare them to conceive it and put them on the way toward adopting it. It naturally attracts their imagination and holds it fixed. It fosters the pride and soothes the laziness of their minds.
Of all the different philosophical systems used to explain the universe, I believe that pantheism is one of those most fitted to seduce the mind in democratic ages. All those who still appreciate the true nature of man’s greatness should combine in the struggle against it.[50]
Puritanism was part of that struggle; in England, from about 1820 to perhaps 1950. Its death in our time should give us cause for something other than unreflective mutual congratulation. Its substitution, in the next generation, by “post-modern belief”, might even make us properly fearful.
S.J.D. Green is Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of "Religion in the Age of Decline:Organization and Experience in IndustrialYorkshire, 1870-1920" (Cambridge University Press, 1996.) This paper is based on an address given to the Annual Conference of the English Prayer Book Society in September, 1997.
END-NOTES
1. Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularisation, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985), see esp. pp. 1–3; Grace Davie, Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing Without Belonging (London, 1994), see esp. ch. 6.
2. Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles Since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 128–9, 143–4, 150 and 153. 3. Pierre Maillaud, The English Way (London, 1945), p. 211–62.
4. Wilhelm Dibelius, England, trans. By Mary Agnes Hamilton (London, 1930), p. 399.
5. J.C.C. Davidson to F.S. Jackson, 18 November, 1923; reprinted in Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Memoirs of a Conservative: J.C.C. Davidson’s Memoirs and Papers, 1910–1937 (London, 1969), p. 188; Dibelius, England, p. 400.
6. Davidson, ibid; Émile Boutray, The English People: A Study of Their Political Psychology, trans. By E. English (London, 1904), p. 52.
7. Quoted in Ian MacKillop, F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (Harmondsworth, 1995), p. 29.
8. J.M. Keynes, “My Early Beliefs”, in idem., The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes, Volume X: Essays in Biography (London, 1972), p. 437.
9. George Orwell, The English People (London, 1947), p. 16.
10. Maillaud, The English Way, p. 62.
11. Boutray, The English People, p. 261.
12. Dibelius, England, p. 400; Tawney’s classic critique of puritanism is found in his Religion and the Rose of Capitalism (London, 1926), esp. ch. 4.
13. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. By Stefan Collini (Cambridge, 1993), ch. 3.
14. The beginnings of a critique of Arnold, much needed, can be found in Clyde Binfield, So Down to Prayers: Studies in English Nonconformity, 1700–1920 (London, 1977), ch. 6.
15. Stanley Baldwin, “Religion and National Life”, in idem, This Torch of Freedom (London, 1935), pp. 81–2.
16. Quoted in Colin Welch, “Black Magic, White Lies”, in idem, The Odd Thing About the Colonel and Other Pieces (London, 1997), p. 195.
17. I owe this information to Dr Hugh Cecil.
18. A.L. Rowse, A Cornish Childhood (London, 1942), p. 156.
19. Maillaud, The English Way, p. 204.
20. Dibelius, England, p. 399.
21. Davidson, Memoirs of a Conservative, p. 188.
22. Christie Davies, “Moralisation and Demoralisation: A Moral Explanation For Changes in Crime, Disorder and Social Problems”, in Digby Anderson (ed.), The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Britain and America (London, 1992), pp. 1–13
23. Orwell, The English People, p. 14.
24. Dibelius, England, pp. 399–400.
25. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. Charles Harrold (New York, 1947), p. 271.
26. David Dilks, Neville Chamberlain, vol. 1: Pioneering and Reform, 1869–1929 (Cambridge, 1984), p. 5.
27. Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London, 1946), p. 453.
28. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 129, 144, 150–1 and 153; Davie, Believing Without Belonging, pp. 48–9.
29. Davies, “Moralisation and Demoralisation”, p. 11.
30. Davie, Believing Without Belonging, pp. 52–6.
31. P. Brierley and N. Hiscock (eds.), U.K. Christian Handbook, 1994–5 (London, 1993), p. 282.
32. Davie, Believing Without Belonging, p. 48.
33. See esp. her New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction (London, 1985), pp. 148 ff.
34. Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, Sociological Theory, Religion and Collective Action (Belfast, 1986), p. 63.
35. Mass Observation 1948, Puzzled People: A Study of Popular Attitudes to Religion, Ethics, Progress and Politics in a London Borough (London, 1948), p. 156.
36. Davie, Believing Without Belonging, pp. 77–9.
37. Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London, 1955), pp. 252–3, 255 and 269–70.
38. Maillaud, The English Way, p. 203.
39. Seebohm Rowntree and G.R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: A Social Study (London, 1951), pp. 371–2.
40. Gorer, English Character, p. 252; Davie, Believing Without Belonging, pp. 78–81.
41. There is a truly vast literature on the definition, origins and destination of this phenomenon which I cannot explore here.
42. Davie, Believing Without Belonging, p. 83.
43. N. Abercrombie et al., “Superstition and religion: the God of the gaps”, in D. Martin and M. Hill (eds.) A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain, 3 (London, 1970), p. 124.
44. These charges, and their significance, are described in William Oddie, The Crockford Files: Gareth Bennett and the Death of the Anglican Mind (London, 1989), ch. 4.
45. Davie, Believing Without Belonging, p. 171.
46. Roy Wallis, The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life (London, 1982), pp. 92–3.
47. Barber, New Religious Movements, p. 150.
48. Davie, Believing Without Belonging, pp. 42 and 197.
49. See, inter alia, his Contemporary Transformations of Religion (Oxford, 1982), esp. ch. 6.
50. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. by George Lawrence (New York, 1969), vol. 2, pt. 1, ch. 7, pp. 451–2 .
