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Notes toward a Postsecular History of Modern British Secularization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2021

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Abstract

This article argues that British historiography's secularization debate is largely misconceived, being enmeshed in secular ideological assumptions inherited from the West's secular revolution of the 1960s. It therefore introduces an alternative, postsecular paradigm for understanding British secularization, which conceptualizes secularity as an ideological culture in its own right, religion as secularity's othering category, and secularization as the positive dissemination and enactment of secularity. British Christianity declined gradually from around 1900, but widespread secularization in this positive sense could only happen once British public discussion had embraced secularity's ideological framework, which it did in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Before the mid-1950s, British discussion had routinely adhered to a “Christian civilization” metanarrative, which insisted that “religion” is essential to long-term social stability, such that “secularization” is a regrettable step backward in human development. Yet in the late 1950s and early 1960s British discussion abruptly embraced secularity's rival metanarrative, which states that “religion” is a primordial condition unnecessary in “advanced” societies, such that “secularization” is an irreversible step forward in human development. This conceptual revolution was contingent, culturally specific, and importantly influenced by radical rereadings of Christian eschatology. Nonetheless, it created both the secular revolution of the 1960s, and the ideological framework within which the British secularization debate continues to be conducted today.

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Journal of British Studies , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 310 - 333
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies, 2021

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References

1 The seminal work was Wickham, Edward, Church and People in an Industrial City (London, 1957)Google Scholar.

2 This definition was coined in 1966 in Wilson, Bryan R., Religion in Secular Society: Fifty Years On, ed. Bruce, Steve (Oxford, 2016), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For its endorsement by recent commentators, see McLeod, Hugh, Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848–1914 (London, 2000), 13Google Scholar; Green, S. J. D., The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c.1920–1960 (Cambridge, 2011), 32Google Scholar; Field, Clive D., Britain's Last Religious Revival? Quantifying Belonging, Behaving, and Believing the Long 1950s (Basingstoke, 2015), 2Google Scholar; Brown, Callum G., Becoming Atheist: Humanism and the Secular West (London, 2017), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For reviews of the extensive literature, see Morris, Jeremy, “The Strange Death of Christian Britain: Another Look at the Secularization Debate,” Historical Journal 46, no. 4 (2003): 963–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clark, J. C. D., “Secularization and Modernization: The Failure of a ‘Grand Narrative,’” Historical Journal 55, no. 1 (2012): 161–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morris, Jeremy, “Secularization and Religious Experience: Arguments in the Historiography of Modern British Religion,” Historical Journal 55, no. 1 (2012): 195–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See, for example, Smith, Jonathan Z., Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago, 1982)Google Scholar, xi; Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, 1993), 27–54Google Scholar, at 29; Chidester, David, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Cape Town, 1996)Google Scholar; King, Richard, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and “The Mystic East” (London, 1999)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Fitzgerald, Timothy, The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar; Dubuisson, Daniel, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology (Baltimore, 2003)Google Scholar; Masuzawa, Tomoko, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cavanaugh, William T., The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 2.

5 Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, 57–59.

6 See the intractable debates about whether Confucianism and Leninism are religions, debates that materially affect the global picture of secularization: Klaus-Georg Riegel, “Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, no. 1 (2005): 97–126; Anna Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities (Princeton, 2013). These issues are left undiscussed in Steve Bruce, “Defining Religion: A Practical Response,” International Review of Sociology 21, no. 1 (2011): 107–20. For difficulties with definitions relating to “the supernatural,” see Simon Dein, “The Category of the Supernatural: A Valid Anthropological Term?,” Religion Compass 10, no. 2 (2016): 35–44.

7 Though my focus is on the British case, it is possible that this approach might be fruitfully applied elsewhere.

8 Umut Parmaksız, “Making Sense of the Postsecular,” European Journal of Social Theory 21, no. 1 (2018): 98–116, at 109. The term secular revolution was, to the best of my knowledge, coined in Callum G. Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularization in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s (Woodbridge, 2012), 252, but is retheorized here. The connection between debates about secularization and about the so-called end of ideology was pioneeringly observed by David Martin, The Religious and the Secular: Studies in Secularization (London, 1969), 24. I use the terms secularity and its adjective secular to refer to a specific ideological culture that envisions the permanent decline of “religion”; secularism and secularist to refer to the normative belief that religion should be excluded from the state; and Secularism and Secularist to refer to a specific ideological movement dating from the mid-nineteenth century that seeks to unite all kinds of people into a common attempt to improve the world. These three entities are different and should not be confused. Further, because the debate has for so long assumed that “religion” is a valid sociological category, wherever the context does not make it abundantly clear that I am referring to religion as a concept, I put the word in quotation marks.

9 The idea that “there is a positive story to tell” is broached in Callum G. Brown, “The People of No Religion: The Demographics of Secularization in the English-Speaking World since c. 1900,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, no. 51 (2011): 37–61, at 41; see also Lois Lee, Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular (Oxford, 2015), 5.

10 Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones, “Introduction: Multiple Secularities” in Religion and the Political Imagination, ed. Ira Katznelson and G. Stedman Jones (Cambridge, 2010), 1–22; Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Marian Burchardt, “Multiple Secularities: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Secular Modernities,” Comparative Sociology 11, no. 6 (2012): 875–909.

11 Although this task is beyond the scope of this article, for an initial attempt see Sam Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism in the Church of England and the Invention of the British Sixties, 1957–1970: The Hope of a World Transformed (Oxford, 2018), 24–27, 236.

12 For theoretical context see Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges, Narratives in Social Science Research (London, 2004), 1–14. See also David S. Nash, “Believing in Secularisation—Stories of Decline, Potential, and Resurgence,” Journal of Religious History 41, no. 4 (2017): 505–31. I use a structural-hermeneutical definition of the term culture to mean a collective classificatory framework that organizes and gives meaning to the world. This definition assumes that humans cannot make sense of the world without interpreting and radically simplifying it; that therefore everyone possesses such a framework; that most people assume most of their framework unselfconsciously rather than being fully aware of it; that communication and cooperation between individuals possessing very different assumed frameworks is difficult, requiring laborious efforts of translation and being liable to result in misunderstanding and mutual recrimination; and that stable cultures consequently tend to be dominated by one such framework, whose secondary elements may be readily modified, but whose core propositions tend to be generally accepted, except in times of cultural revolution. For this structural-hermeneutical approach, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Clifford Geertz and the Strong Program: The Human Sciences and Cultural Sociology,” Cultural Sociology 2, no. 2 (2008): 157–68; William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 164–74.

13 For these beliefs in secularization historiography, see, for examples, Wilson, Religion in Secular Society, 3; Steve Bruce, Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory (Oxford, 2015), 55; Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London, 2001), 193–94.

14 Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, 58.

15 For histories on equal terms, see Carole Dietze, “Toward a History on Equal Terms: A Discussion of ‘Provincializing Europe,’” History and Theory 47, no. 1 (2008), 69–84.

16 This chronology (as opposed to the theorization it relies on) is helpfully understood as a synthesis of the apparently irreconcilable interpretations of Callum Brown and Simon Green.

17 This insistence echoes older arguments about the contingency of secularization, although most of these earlier arguments were actually about the contingency of Christian decline, not the contingency of secularization in the positive sense used here. For examples, see David Martin, “The Secularization Issue: Prospect and Retrospect,” British Journal of Sociology 42, no. 3 (1991): 465–74, at 465; Grace Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford, 2000), 32, 73; Jeffrey Cox, “Provincializing Christendom: The Case of Great Britain,” Church History 75, no. 1 (2006): 120–30, at 123; Sam Brewitt-Taylor, “The Invention of a ‘Secular Society’? Christianity and the Sudden Appearance of Secularization Discourses in the British National Media, 1961–4,” Twentieth Century British History 24, no. 3 (2013): 327–50, at 350.

18 This suggestion echoes major themes in the other, older, culturalist secularization debate, for which see Milan Babík, “Nazism as a Secular Religion,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006): 375–96, at 383–90, and, pioneeringly in the British case, Martin, Religious and the Secular, 24. For secularization having cultural causes, see Callum G. Brown, “A Revisionist Approach to Religious Change,” in Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis, ed. Steve Bruce (Oxford, 1992), 31–58, at 55–56.

19 Cox, “Provincializing Christendom,” 129–30.

20 On provincialization, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000), 3–6.

21 This periodization of British secularization follows Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 15. For the long 1960s as witnessing a “cultural revolution,” see Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford, 1998); Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), 1.

22 This section of the argument relies heavily on Ian Hunter, “Secularization: The Birth of a Modern Combat Concept,” Modern Intellectual History 12, no. 1 (2015): 1–32, at 2–3.

23 Hunter, “Secularization,” 29–31.

24 I place the term Christian civilization in quotation marks throughout to emphasize that I am using it as an emic rather than as an etic term.

25 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 1–7; Alister Chapman, “The International Context of Secularization in England: The End of Empire, Immigration, and the Decline of Christian National Identity, 1945–1970,” Journal of British Studies 54, no. 1 (2015): 163–89, at 164–65.

26 Paul Hanebrink, “European Protestants between Anti-communism and Anti-totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?,” Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 3 (2018): 622–43, at 624.

27 For an overview, see Brewitt-Taylor, “Invention of a ‘Secular Society’?,” 340–6.

28 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 190.

29 For more detail, see Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism in the Church of England.

30 Martin, Religious and the Secular, 24, 70–72.

31 See especially Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 22.

32 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York, 1962), 18–19; cited in Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, 62.

33 Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, 61; Charles Stewart, “Secularism as an Impediment to Anthropological Research,” Social Anthropology 9, no. 3 (2001): 325–28, at 325–26. The transcendentalist/immanentist distinction is borrowed from Alan Strathern, Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History (Cambridge, 2019), 27–106.

34 Jacques Berlinerblau, “Political Secularism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Secularism, ed. Phil Zuckerman and John R. Shook (Oxford, 2017), 85–102, at 86–88.

35 See John 18:36; Matthew 22:21.

36 David Knowles, “Church and State in Christian History,” Journal of Contemporary History 2, no. 4 (1967): 3–15, at 4–13; Berlinerblau, “Political Secularism,” 86–89; David VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought (Grand Rapids, 2010), 32–42.

37 Hunter, “Secularization,” 9; Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, 65; William H. Swatos Jr. and Kevin J. Christiano, “Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept,” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 (1999): 209–28, at 211; C. T. McIntire, “Transcending Dichotomies in History and Religion,” History and Theory 45, no. 4 (2006): 80–92, at 82.

38 Jan Bremmer, “Secularization: Notes towards a Genealogy,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York, 2008), 432–37, at 433; Hunter, “Secularization,” 2–3.

39 See Revelation 21: 1–4, 22.

40 Hunter, “Secularization,” 3.

41 Jonathan Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” 269–71, in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago, 1998), 269–84; John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), 170–71; Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay,” American Historical Review 108, no. 4 (2003): 1061–80, at 1074.

42 Colin Kidd, The World of Mr Casaubon: Britain's Wars of Mythography, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 2016), 32.

43 Chidester, Savage Systems, 11–16.

44 Chidester, 35–38.

45 David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. A. Wayne Colver, and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, ed. John Valdimir Price (Oxford, 1976), 94–95.

46 See, for example, Thomas Rowlandson's famous 1792 cartoon “The Contrast,” reprinted in David Duff, “Burke and Paine: Contrasts,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s, ed. Pamela Clemit (Cambridge, 2011), 47–70, at 60.

47 Sheehan, “Enigma of Secularization,” 1079–80. For examples, see Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, ed. and trans H. I. Woolf (New York, 1924), 265; Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. with an introduction and notes by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York, 1960); Chris L. Firestone and Nathan A. Jacobs, eds., The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought (Notre Dame, 2012). For post-Enlightenment examples, see Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, ed. M. D. Conway (New York, 1896), 6, 190; Mona Ozouf, “Revolutionary Religion,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 560–70; Raymond Keith Williamson, Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Religion (Albany, 1984), 122; Robert Owen, Essays on the Formation of Human Character (Manchester, 1837), 47; Dominic Erdozain, The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx (Oxford, 2015), 241.

48 Peter Elliot, Edward Irving: Romantic Theology in Crisis (Milton Keynes, 2013), 6.

49 Fitzgerald, Ideology of Religious Studies, 35.

50 Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Second Speech: On the Essence of Religion,” On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, ed. Richard Crouter (Cambridge, 1996), 24–26.

51 Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, 64.

52 Masuzawa, 22–23; Fitzgerald, Ideology of Religious Studies, 35–36.

53 Among many examples, see Fitzgerald, 164–67; King, Orientalism and Religion, 98–101; Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford, 2005), 169–70; Jason Ananda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago, 2012), 1.

54 Hunter, “Secularization,” 29.

55 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, ed. Joseph O'Malley, trans. Anette Jolin and Joseph O'Malley (Cambridge, 1970), 131.

56 See, for examples, Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866 (Manchester, 1974); Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester, 1980), x; Todd H. Weir, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge, 2014), 3; Joshua Bennett, “A History of ‘Rationalism’ in Victorian Britain,” Modern Intellectual History 15, no.1 (2018): 63–91.

57 Michael Rectenwald, Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature (Basingstoke, 2016), 74.

58 Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism, trans. J. Bridges (London, 1865), chap. 6.

59 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford, 2001), 322–23.

60 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Max Weber's “Science as a Vocation,” ed. Peter Lassman and Irving Velody with Herminio Martins (London, 1988), 3–31, 23.

61 For Soviet secularization, see Paul Froese, The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization (Berkeley, 2008).

62 For arguments that religion is a social necessity, see, for examples, Bernard Shaw's remarks reported in “Science and Happy Marriages,” Daily Mirror (here and elsewhere, London), 6 May 1930, 22; T. S. Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth,” Criterion Miscellany, no. 30 (1930): 13; Arnold Toynbee, The Prospects of Western Civilization (New York, 1949), 87–88.

63 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 9, 170–75; Dianne Kirby, “Ecclesiastical McCarthyism: Cold War Repression in the Church of England,” Contemporary British History 19, no. 2 (2005): 187–203, at 188.

64 Field, Britain's Last Religious Revival?, 19, table 2.2.

65 Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution, 60–62; Callum G. Brown, “‘The Unholy Mrs Knight’ and the BBC: Secular Humanism and the Threat to the ‘Christian Nation,’ c.1945–60,” English Historical Review 127, no. 525 (2012): 345–76, at 365; see esp. the statistics on public mistrust of atheists cited in Field, Britain's Last Religious Revival?, 83. The ambiguity between the 6 percent and the 1–2 percent figures arises because failing to answer the question “What is your religion?” with a positive response is not the same as unequivocally denying any religious affiliation.

66 “The Triumph of the Cross,” editorial, Times (here and elsewhere, London), 13 April 1933, 15.

67 “‘New Paganism’ Attacked,” Daily Mail (here and elsewhere, London), 9 October 1935, 7; see also “To Sit All Day in St Paul's,” Daily Mirror, 22 May 1935, 1.

68 “Pagan Organist Resigns,” Daily Mirror, 24 September 1932, 6.

69 “Dog Racing ‘Poison,’” Daily Mirror, 3 October 1927, 2.

70 “Churches Attack New Book,” Daily Express (here and elsewhere, London), 6 October 1932, 1.

71 Arnold Toynbee, “Post-war Paganism versus Christianity,” Listener (here and elsewhere UK), 20 January 1937, 123–24.

72 See, for examples, George Edinger, “Fingers in the Austrian Pie,” Daily Express, 5 November 1934, 12; Viscount Castlerose, “Current Events,” Daily Express, 10 July 1935, 10; Selkirk Panton, “Pope Attacks Hitler Cross,” Daily Express, 5 May 1938, 1; “‘Back to Barbaric Paganism,’” Times, 7 May 1935, 15; “Souls in Uniform,” editorial, Daily Mirror, 5 January 1937, 11; Philip Williamson, “Christian Conservatives and the Totalitarian Challenge, 1933–1940,” English Historical Review 115, no. 462 (2000): 607–42.

73 “Church and State in Germany,” editorial, Times, 13 December 1934, 17.

74 “A Case of Conscience,” editorial, Daily Mirror, 20 May 1938, 15.

75 Shaw Desmond, “Hitler's Pagan Priesthood,” Sunday Express, 12 March 1939, 16.

76 For this idea in European discussion from the 1930s to the 1950s, see Milan Babik, “Beyond Totalitarianism: (Re)Introducing Secularization Theory to Liberal Narratives of Progress,” Politics, Religion and Ideology 13, no. 3 (2012): 289–309, at 294–98.

77 See, for examples, “European Unity,” Times, 9 October 1948, 4; “Overcoming the World,” Times, 15 April 1950, 8; “Mr Attlee's Call to the Nation,” Times, 31 July 1950, 4.

78 Keith Robbins, History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London, 1993), 197–202; McLeod, Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 31–32.

79 “France,” editorial, Daily Mirror, 18 November 1939, 9.

80 “Premier's Speech,” Daily Express, 19 June 1940, 7.

81 “The Faith and the Future,” editorial, Times, 26 August 1940, 5.

82 “All at Once,” editorial, Daily Mail, 1 May 1945, 2.

83 “Hitler,” editorial, Manchester Guardian, 2 May 1945, 4.

84 Philip Williamson, “National Days of Prayer: The Churches, the State and Public Worship in Britain, 1899–1957,” English Historical Review 128, no. 531 (2013): 323–66.

85 “Is Scotland Going Pagan?,” Daily Mirror, 14 May 1934, 13.

86 A. R. Vidler, God's Judgment on Europe (London, 1940), 77.

87 “Nazis and the Church,” Times, 8 October 1935, 13.

88 T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London, 1939), 63.

89 Leslie Weatherhead, “Is Your Religion Any Good to You Now?,” Daily Express, 22 June 1940, 4.

90 R. P. McDermott, “Other Altars,” Manchester Guardian, 5 November 1944, 3.

91 R. H. Tawney, “Speech to the William Temple Society, Cambridge, 1949,” cited in Lawrence Goldman, The Life of R. H. Tawney: Socialism and History (London, 2013), 184. For the demonological reference see Matthew 12: 43–45.

92 “Spiritual Vacuum of the West,” Times, 7 November 1953, 3.

93 “The Two Cities,” Times, 22 March 1952, 8.

94 Mass Observation, Puzzled People: A Study in Popular Attitudes to Religion, Ethics, Progress and Politics in a London Borough (London, 1947), 17, 159.

95 B. S. Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: A Social Study (London, 1951), 372.

96 Edward Shils and Michael Young, “The Meaning of the Coronation,” Sociological Review 1, no. 2 (1953): 63–81, at 66.

97 Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London, 1955), 259–70; Green, Passing of Protestant England, 265.

98 Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop (London, 1945), 286. Cited in Mass Observation, Puzzled People, 90.

99 Bertrand Russell, “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic? A Plea for Tolerance in the Face of New Dogmas,” in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 11: Last Philosophical Testament, 1943–68, ed. John Slater (London, 1997), 89–92, at 92.

100 Walter Moberly, “Church, Community and State: Challenge of the New Faiths,” Listener, 13 January 1937, 49–50.

101 “Religion and National Life,” editorial, Times, 17 February 1940, 7. For the 400,000 figure, see “Religion in School and Home,” editorial, Times, 9 March 1940, 7.

102 Elizabeth “Libi” Sundermann, For God and Country: Butler's 1944 Education Act (Newcastle, 2015), 2.

103 Michael Snape, “GI Religion and Post-war Revival in the United States and Great Britain,” in Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World, ed. David Hempton and Hugh McLeod (Oxford, 2017), 213–33, esp. 231.

104 Dianne Kirby, “Divinely Sanctioned: The Anglo-American Cold War Alliance and the Defence of Western Civilization and Christianity, 1945–48,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 3 (2000): 385–412.

105 “Churchill's Fears of Soviet: Suggests Anglo-U.S. Pact,” Daily Mirror, 6 March 1946, 1.

106 Quoted in “Union Based on Christianity,” Times, 26 April 1948, 3.

107 “Crisis of the West,” editorial, Times, 24 April 1948, 5.

108 “Catholicism To-day,” Times, 31 October 1949, 5.

109 “The Communist Threat,” Times, 27 August 1952, 3.

110 “Mr. Macmillan on Prospects for Conference,” Times, 29 September 1955, 8.

111 Brown, “Unholy Mrs Knight,” 365.

112 Cited in Clive D. Field, “Another Window on British Secularization: Public Attitudes to Church and Clergy since the 1960s,” Contemporary British History 28, no. 2 (2014): 190–218, at 213.

113 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 9; Matthew Grimley, “The Religion of Englishness: Puritanism, Providentialism, and ‘National Character,’ 1918–1945,” Journal of British Studies 46, no. 4 (2007): 884–906, at 906; Chapman, “International Context of Secularization,” 167–68; Kirby, “Ecclesiastical McCarthyism,” 188. For Christianity and anticommunism in popular culture, see Tony Shaw, “‘Martyrs, Miracles, and Martians’: Religion and Cold War Cinematic Propaganda in the 1950s,” in Religion and the Cold War, ed. Dianne Kirby (Basingstoke, 2003), 211–31; Michael Paris, “Red Menace! Russia and British Juvenile Fiction,” Contemporary British History 19, no. 2 (2005): 117–32, at 123, 129.

114 See Jeremy Morris, “Enemy Within? The Appeal of the Discipline of Sociology to Religious Professionals in Post-war Britain,” Journal of Religion in Europe 9, no. 2–3 (2016): 177–200, at 186.

115 Christopher Dawson, “The Religious Problem,” Listener, 25 November 1931, 913.

116 Archbishops’ Commission on Evangelism, Towards the Conversion of England (London, 1945), 15.

117 Cyril Garbett, “The Church's Future,” Times, 5 February 1955, 7.

118 For the widespread persistence of Christian identity into the 1950s, see Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 9, 192; Chapman, “International Context of Secularization,” 172.

119 For the 1960s as witnessing a revolutionary turning point in religious and social history, see Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 1; McLeod, Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 1. See also Brewitt-Taylor, “The Invention of a ‘Secular Society’?,” 337–40.

120 Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution, 26, 60–62.

121 Secularity's binary classification of world cultures as either secular or religious is ideological because it implies that secular cultures are unique and that nonsecular cultures are all essentially the same, rather like British nationalism's classification of world cultures as either British or foreign.

122 That is, until the secular religion scholarship of the 1990s.

123 Usually around the time of the Industrial Revolution. See, for examples, Wickham, Church and People, 12; Alan Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain: A History of the Secularization of Modern Society (London, 1980), 43. This radically wrong periodization of mass secularization was not corrected until Brown's 2001 Death of Christian Britain.

124 See the debate between revolutionary and evolutionary readings of “secularization” described in Brown, “What Was the Religious Crisis of the 1960s,” Journal of Religious History 34, no. 4 (2010): 469–73.

125 On 1958 to 1962 as the Cold War's “years of maximum danger,” see Robert McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003), 79–89.

126 Brewitt-Taylor, “Invention of a ‘Secular Society’?,” 331.

127 Morris, “Secularization and Religious Experience,” 198. See also Sarah Williams, “The Language of Belief: An Alternative Agenda for the Study of Victorian Working-Class Religion,” Journal of Victorian Culture 1, no. 2 (1996): 303–17, at 304. For earlier (though not major) examples, see Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism, 70–72, 134–39.

128 Wickham, Church and People, 233.

129 Wickham, 205, 230, 236. Wickham's gendered language is retained here, to emphasize the constructed nature of the original.

130 Wickham, 182, 186.

131 Wickham, 229. See Martin, The Religious and the Secular, 35–36.

132 This becomes clearer in Wickham's later work. Edward Wickham, Encounter with Modern Society (London, 1964), 20.

133 For earlier observations of church decline, see Morris, “Enemy Within?,” 183–84.

134 Wickham, Church and People, 211.

135 Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism, 46–49.

136 Brewitt-Taylor, “Invention of a ‘Secular Society’?,” 337–43.

137 John Robinson, “Our Image of God Must Go,” Observer, 17 March 1963, 21.

138 Michael Wall, “Honest to God: A Day of Wrath,” Guardian, 8 May 1963, 1.

139 Field, Britain's Last Religious Revival?, 19, table 2.2. Robin Gill, C. Kirk Hadaway, and Penny Long Marler, “Is Religious Belief Declining in Britain?,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37, no. 3 (1998): 507–16, at 508–9, cites the theist-to-atheist ratio as 79:10.

140 Brewitt-Taylor, “Invention of a ‘Secular Society’?,” 344.

141 “Liverpool, Fatima, and Blackfriars,” Guardian, 15 May 1967, 6.

142 Green, Passing of Protestant England, 277.

143 Green, 294.

144 Helena Mills, “Using the Personal to Critique the Popular: Women's Memories of 1960s Youth,” Contemporary British History 30, no. 4 (2016): 463–83, at 464; Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism, 11–13.

145 Bremmer, “Secularization,” 436.

146 This chronology echoes Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 15.

147 Matthew Grimley, “Law, Morality and Secularisation: The Church of England and the Wolfenden Report, 1954–1967,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60, no. 4 (2009), 725–41, at 740; Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism, 144–45; Sam Brewitt-Taylor, “Christianity and the Invention of the Sexual Revolution in Britain, 1963–67,” Historical Journal 60, no. 2 (2017): 519–46.

148 Because of problems with the data, these numbers are approximate, but, as Brown observes, the overall trend seems clear. Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution, 62, 116–17; Brown, “People of No Religion,” 56.

149 Brown, Becoming Atheist; Mercadante, Linda A., Belief without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but Not Religious (Oxford, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brewitt-Taylor, Sam, “From Religion to Revolution: Theologies of Secularisation in the British Student Christian Movement, 1963–1973,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 66, no. 4 (2015): 792–811CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

150 This seems to be the implication, for example, of Bruce, Secularisation, 181–82, 189; and of the views reported in Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, chap. 1. For a contrasting view, see Chapman, Alister, “Civil Religions in Derby, 1930–2000,” Historical Journal 59, no. 3 (2016): 817–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

151 Davie, Grace, Europe: The Exceptional Case. Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London, 2002), xGoogle Scholar.

152 Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution, 43.

153 Wilson, Religion in Secular Society, 3–6, 208.

154 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 9. See, for example, Gilbert, Post-Christian Britain.

155 For the persistence of this claim, see Clark, “Secularization and Modernization,” 163. For its wrongness, see for example Tole, Lise Ann, “Durkheim on Religion and Moral Community in Modernity,” Sociological Inquiry 63, no. 1 (1993): 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ghosh, Peter, Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories (Oxford, 2014), 270CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 290. For 1950s knowledge of its wrongness with respect to Weber (later lauded as the key figure in modern secularization theory), see Talcott Parsons, introduction to Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (London, 1965), xix–lxvii, at xxvii–xxviii.

156 See, for example, Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 193–94; Bruce, Secularization, 55.

157 For classical sociology, see Swatos and Christiano, “Secularization Theory,” 209–10; Bremmer, “Secularization,” 432–36. For discussion within Christian sociology, see Morris, “Enemy Within?,” 186.

158 Martin, Religious and the Secular; Bell, Daniel, “The Return of the Sacred? The Argument about the Future of Religion,” British Journal of Sociology 28, no. 4 (1977): 419–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

159 For an earlier challenge to this assumption, see Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1. A pivotal later contribution was Jürgen Habermas's lecture, “Notes on a Post-Secular Society,” June 18, 2008, Sign and Sight: Let's Talk European (website), http://www.signandsight.com/features/1714.html (the original German version was first published in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik in April 2008). In British historiography, the secular perspective was still confidently articulated in 2001 by Brown's Death of Christian Britain, which Eurocentrically associated secularity with postmodernity.

160 See Sewell, Logics of History, 257–59.

161 This particular dimension of the controversy is usefully summarized in Brown, “What Was the Religious Crisis of the 1960s?,” 469–73.

162 See Brown, “Revisionist Approach to Religious Change,” 55–56.

163 See Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism, 15–24.

164 Bremmer, “Secularization,” 434, 436; Swatos and Christiano, “Secularization Theory,” 209–10.

165 Martin, Religious and the Secular, 24, 35–36.

166 See Davie, Europe, x. This latter category is intended potentially to include Japan. See also Reader, Ian, “Secularisation, R.I.P.? Nonsense! The ‘Rush Hour away from the Gods’ and the Decline of Religion in Contemporary Japan,” Journal of Religion in Japan 1, no. 1 (2012): 7–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

167 In this paragraph I use disenchantment in its post-1960s sociological meaning of people losing their illusions and beginning to see the world more objectively. This usage is different from that of Weber's “Science as a Vocation,” which denotes people imagining the sacred in impersonal rather than personal forms.

168 Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 322. For the late Durkheimian tradition in recent cultural theory, which I follow here, see Alexander, Jeffrey and Smith, Philip, “The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies,” Theory and Society 22, no. 2 (1993): 151–207CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 156–58.

169 Martin, Religious and the Secular, 9.

170 Pace Brown, “What Was the Religious Crisis of the 1960s?,” 470.