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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
There is a significant case to be made that women are central to the secularization of the West since the midtwentieth century. This case has started to be argued in a variety of ways. A number of scholars have linked secularization to women via change to the family. In 1992, French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger theorized secularization not as the collapse of religions but as modernity’s transformation of conventional forms of religion (especially Judaism and Christianity) into ‘the religious’ – a state of sacredness devoid of shared liturgy, even of belief in God, but characterized by belonging to new types of secular institution (notably she cited football clubs), and instigated by the collapse of the nuclear family (what she called ‘the traditional family’). In this process, she suggested, what modernity had done was to sustain a ‘chain of memory’ of religious ritual, but not of religious beliefs. At the heart of Hervieu-Léger’s narrative of causation of the ‘religious crisis’ that was ending belief, she identified the collapse of the traditional family through the coming of ultra-low fertility in the 1960s and 1970s. She wrote that the ‘collapse of the traditional family’ was ‘the central factor in the disintegration of the imagined continuity that lies at the heart of the modern crisis of religion’, pinpointing the period ‘around 1965 with the downturn in the statistics of births and marriages which had risen markedly in the period 1945-50’. With falling fertility and marriage, and rising divorce, cohabitation and births outwith marriage, ‘[i]ndividual well-being and fulfilment take precedence.’ Although the British religious sociologist Grace Davie used Hervieu-Léger’s concept in support of her thesis of Christianity’s survival through believing without belonging, the French sociologist was explicitly not sanguine about the fate of the Churches: ‘The rise of the religious does not necessarily give rise to religion.’ Hervieu-Léger regards the change in the family resulting from the 1960s as putting organized religion in a parlous state in western Europe, whilst Davie sees the secular family as relying vicariously by 2000 on religion for the enactment of a Christian or Jewish liturgy on behalf of the secular.
1 Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (Cambridge, 2000).
2 Ibid. 133-4.
3 Ibid, 133.
4 Davie wrote an introduction to the English edition of Hervieu-Léger’s book in 2000, and then reinterpreted the idea of the chain of memory for her own book of the same year. However, Davie appears to have reversed Hervieu-Léger’s meaning: Grace Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford, 2000), 33.
5 Hervieu-Léger, Religion, 166.
6 Aune, Kirsten, ‘Evangelical Christianity and Women’s Changing Lives’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 15 (2008), 277–94, at 288.Google Scholar
7 Abrams, Lynn, ‘Mothers and Daughters: Negotiating the Discourse on the “Good Woman” in 1950s and 1960s Britain’, in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, eds, The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization as History in Britain, Canada, the United States and Western Europe, 1945-2000 (Toronto, ON, 2013), 60–82, at 80.Google Scholar
8 Including Brown, Callum G., The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000, 2nd edn (London, 2009 Google Scholar; first publ. 2001). I have elaborated the arguments outlined in this essay in ‘Gendering Secularisation: Locating Women in the Transformation of British Christianity in the 1960s’, in Katznelson, I. and Jones, G. Stedman, eds, Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge, 2010), 275–94;CrossRefGoogle Scholar ‘Women and Religion in Britain: The Autobiographical View of the Fifties and Sixties’, in Secularisation in the Christian World c.1750–c.2000: Essays in Honour of Hugh McLeod, ed. Callum G. Brown and M. E Snape (Farnham, 2010), 159-73; ‘Sex, Religion and the Single Woman c.1950-1957: The Importance of a ‘short’ Sexual Revolution to the English Religious Crisis of the Sixties’, Twentieth Century British History 22 (2011), 189-215; Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s (Woodbridge, 2012); ‘Gender, Christianity and the Rise of No Religion: The Heritage of the Sixties in Britain’, in Christie and Gauvreau, eds, The Sixties and Beyond, 39-59.
9 The quantitative case for this hypothesis is made in Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution.
10 Brown, Callum G., ‘The People of No Religion: The Demographics of Secularisation in the English-Speaking World since c.1900. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 51 (2011), 37–61, at 58-9.Google Scholar
11 As is standard in oral history scholarship, all the interviewees are identified by their real names except where they have requested anonymity, in which case a pseudonym is used. All interviews were conducted under the ethics approval regimes of the University of Dundee or the University of Glasgow, and each interviewee signed Informed Consent forms prior to interview and a Copyright Release form afterwards. When the project is complete, the testimony will be deposited in an archive.
12 Accounting, for example, for the very young age profile of the group known as Skeptics in the Pub compared to the British Humanist Association.
13 Brown, Callum G, ‘Men losing Faith: The Making of modern No-Religionism in the UK 1939–2010’, in Lucy Delap and Sue Morgan, eds, en, Masculinities and Religions Change in Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 2013), 301–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 Annette Horton, b. Plymouth 1949, 1-4.
15 Joan Gibson, b. Cheltenham 1943, 5.
16 Mary Wallace, b. Northwich 1960, 3, 5.
17 Leslie O’Hagan, b. Palo Alto, CA, 1961.
18 Ruth Majors (pseudonym), b. London 1941.
19 Tanya Long, b. Sudbury, ON, 1944, 2.
20 Horton, 4-6.
21 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morgentaler=, accessed 9 July 2013. I am grateful to two anonymous respondents for discussing the significance of this case with me.
22 Gibson, 2.
23 Gibson, 5.
24 Grace Daniels, b. Vancouver 1958, 1-4.
25 Ena Sparks (pseudonym), b. Trenton, ON, 1954, 1-4.
26 Karen Bulmer, b. Livingston 1975, 2.
27 Lorraine Hardie, b. Vancouver 1939, 1-2.
28 Jutta Cahn (Poser), b. Berlin 1925.
29 Gibson, 5.
30 Sparks, 5.
31 Ibid. 6.
32 Steedman, Carolyn, Landscape for a Good Woman (London, 1986), 125–49.Google Scholar
33 Pat Duffy Hutcheon, Lonely Trail: The Life Journey of a Freethinker (Ottawa, ON, 2009).
34 Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution, 172-2 r6.
35 Brown, Death of Christian Britain.
36 Abrams, ‘Mothers and Daughters’, 79.
37 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, ch. 4.
38 A good example is Michelle Roberts, Paper Houses: A Memoir of the ‘70s and Beyond (London, 2007).
39 Minister, Kristina, ‘A Feminist Frame for the Oral History Interview’, in Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds, Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York, 1991), 27–41 Google Scholar; Portelli as discussed in Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London, 2010), 28.
40 Langellier, Kristin M. and Peterson, Eric E., Storytelling in Daily Life: Performing Narrative (Philadelphia, PA, 2004), 108–9.Google Scholar
41 Abrams, ‘Mothers and Daughters’, 61.
42 Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (London, 1975), 35.
43 Davie, Religion in Modern Europe.