I forward this review since it deals in part with female critiques of male
drinking.  If anybody is interested, I will forward the author's reply to
the reviewer.


>Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2001 10:54:45 +0000 (GMT)
>From: Anne Shepherd <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: REVIEWS IN HISTORY: Gilley on Brown - The Death of Christian Britain
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Please note: Author's Response follows next
>
>
>Reviews in History
>
>The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding secularisation 1800-2000
>
>Callum G. Brown
>
>Routledge, London and New York, 2001, ISBN 0-415-24184-7
>
>Reviewed by: Sheridan Gilley
>University of Durham
>
>Despite a certain academic heaviness, with no fewer than fifty-seven pages
>of notes, bibliography and index, and despite an occasionally disagreeable
>academic vocabulary, of which more anon, this book has a pleasantly simple
>knock-down argument, that Christianity in Britain enjoyed a long
>nineteenth century of prosperity, between 1800 and 1960, and only began to
>go into terminal decline in the early 1960s.  Indeed the first page
>declares that this happened `really quite suddenly in 1963', irresistibly
>suggesting the famous verse by Philip Larkin:  Sexual intercourse began In
>nineteen sixty-three .  Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the
>Beatles' first LP.
>
>Brown's thesis is directed partly against Christian optimists, especially
>of the liberal kind, who consider recent social and religious change as
>being for the good of Christianity. It also, however, has as its target
>the historians and sociologists who believe that the decay of Christianity
>in Britain has a much longer history, going back to the eighteenth or
>nineteenth century, and that the recent movement towards secularity has
>merely been its acceleration.  Brown conceives the nineteenth and the
>first half of the twentieth century, 1800-1960, as the era of an ascendant
>puritan Protestant Evangelicalism, stronger among women than among men.
>Secularisation consists in good part in the abandonment by women of these
>religious values, but it is a secularisation that is no older than the
>contraceptive pill.
>
>Brown derives the idea of secularisation from the collection and study of
>religious statistics by Evangelical movements and individuals like the
>early Methodists and Thomas Chalmers. The figures which they assembled of
>converts and church members created `the myth of the unholy city' which
>was taken up by Marxists, sociologists and historians as the history of
>secularisation. Statistical enquiry, however, dispenses with large areas
>of religion which are not simply quantifiable.  Brown sets out instead the
>idea of a `discursive Christianity' or `Christian discourse' which defined
>the `protocols' of ordinary personal belief and behaviour in terms of the
>Protestant conversionism of Evangelical Christianity, and which determined
>the ordinary Briton's definition of the self and its history. This makes
>much of Brown's work read as an account of the rise and decline of
>Evangelicalism, not as an ecclesiastical movement but as a body of
>opinions and attitudes, which were reflected and expressed in popular
>literature and oral testimony about the detail of ordinary lives and about
>how religion helped or failed to make sense of them.
>
>This is the great delight of the book, its pleasure in the riches of the
>literature of propaganda and personal testimony about the role of
>religion. The chief characteristic of this literature was that women were
>regarded as innately pious, and men as naturally irreligious. Men were
>inclined to drunkenness, smoking, gambling, lust and sport on Sundays, so
>that religion itself was a profoundly gendered thing, recommending the
>female values and virtues of chastity, modesty, temperance, sobriety,
>thrift, Sabbath observance and good house keeping to a partly or mostly
>anarchic male population. Even in its decline between the wars, when an
>explicitly female religiosity was transformed into a more secular
>domesticity as a `cult of contentment', there was still a Christian
>discipline required of women. In the era before 1960, this `discourse' was
>dominant far beyond the world of militant or conventional churchgoers.
>Brown's conclusion is that the term secularisation should be ditched to
>describe the period until 1960, because the general `discourse' of
>Britain, the ideological system in terms of which women made sense of
>themselves, and through them, the `discourse' of a great many men, was
>still a Christian one.
>
>It is one of the artless elements of the book that Brown sets out the
>materials for an older, alternative view, which saw secularisation in
>terms of urbanisation or social class. Yet the easy judgement that
>religious behaviour was a bourgeois rather than a proletarian matter, or a
>rural rather than a city one, breaks down upon a closer analysis of
>ecclesiastical statistics.  Recent study indicates a much higher level of
>urban working class participation in religious institutions than has
>hitherto been suspected, a majority of churchgoers being working class
>between 1800 and the 1960s, even if these were mostly from the skilled
>working class or were women.  Statistics for church membership in Britain
>peaked in 1904-1905, but those for the later high level of 1959 were not
>far below them, and the 1940s and early 1950s actually witnessed a major
>church revival.
>
>Church attendance fell more sharply than church membership or affiliation
>in the first half of the twentieth century, but Brown is striving to show
>that in the end, the hegemony of an idea is not simply demonstrable by
>statistics, but exists in the form of a more intangible ethos and
>atmosphere, and is no less real for all that. In his view, secularisation
>is chiefly a matter of the transformation of the mores of women, and that
>suggests that the changes of the 1960s were more of degree than of kind;
>or perhaps, were of so great a degree that they constituted a degree of
>kind.
>
>I would subscribe to the latter version of Brown's thesis. This sort of
>change had been seen before, but it was on a new scale, and it happened
>now to the female population who had been most affected by religion in
>general and who constituted the mass of churchgoers.
>
>There is a nice paradox about Brown's argument. A conventional feminist
>might regard the Churches, which were nearly all led and conducted by men,
>as an instrument of control of passive and virtuous women. There are some
>hints of this in what Brown writes about feminine domesticity, but
>generally, he regards the Evangelical ethic as the means by which women
>feminised the general culture and tried to curb male vice. There is,
>however, a considerable lacuna in his work, in that Catholics are treated
>simply as a species of conversionist Protestants, which would have
>astonished both Protestants and Catholics. In fact, practising Catholics
>rather better exemplify some of Brown's themes than practising
>Protestants: they were predominantly working class and female, and their
>Church continued to grow until the late 1950s.  Again, there seems to me
>to be little attempt to relate these changes to the wider breakdown in the
>stable communities which had been gradually civilised and christianised
>after the Industrial Revolution, and which began to disappear with the
>Blitz and the post-war reconstruction and dispersal of working class
>neighbourhoods, and then the marginalisation and decline of heavy
>industry, while in a work which depends so much upon understanding women,
>there is no entry in the Index for contraception.
>
>In spite of my irritation with Brown's highfalutin' language of
>`discourses' and `discursiveness', which could be put in simpler English,
>this is one of the most entertaining, moving and stimulating works which I
>have read upon its subject, modern British Christianity. It has the ring
>of authenticity to me, coinciding, as its author also says about himself,
>with my own memories of the world I knew when I was young.
>
>December 2001
>
>
>Anne Shepherd - Deputy Editor
>"Reviews in History"
>Institute of Historical Research
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>Malet Street
>London WC1E 7HU
>
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