The Death of Religion in the UK

Here's an extract from Christie Davies' book:

The death of religion & the fall of respectable Britain

At the end of the nineteenth century, there were comparable levels of religiosity in Britain and the United States. The British lived in a culture in which the assumptions of Protestant Christianity were taken for granted. Few people believed strongly, but everyone believed a little. Throughout the population there was a somewhat vague general acceptance of central Christian beliefs, a strong respect for sacred things, a liking for church-based rituals to mark the turning points in life (and particularly its ending), a moral code of helping others that was rooted in Christian ethics, and a liking for and ability to sing hymns, both of which had been learned in Sunday School. Even football crowds sang “Abide with Me” or “Bread of Heaven”; today they sing songs full of thoughtless blasphemies, obscenities, and thought-out sexual and racial abuse to upset their opponents. Regular attendance at Sunday School was a standard part of most people’s youth, and it was the place where standards of respectability were inculcated. Britain’s was a society with a remarkably low and falling incidence of violent and acquisitive crime, illegitimacy, and addiction to opiates. Public drunkenness was a problem, but it was gradually ceasing to be so; by the 1920s it had all but disappeared.

This is the world Britain has lost. The first turning point was the First World War. Before that war there was already a degree of uneasiness about the strength of religion in Britain; after the war it was clearly in decline. The decline of religion was slow and punctuated by periods of recovery, such as the early 1950s. From the mid-1950s onwards, however, the previous prevailing religious culture collapsed, and by the millennium Britain was one of the most thoroughly irreligious countries in the world. Less than half the population believes in God. For many of those who do believe in God, their belief is not in a personal God who is a guide to conduct or a source of solace but a mere impersonal and irrelevant something-or-other.

In 1901–1911, half the British population under fifteen was enrolled in Sunday School; in 1957 three-quarters of those over the age of thirty had attended Sunday School at some time in their lives. By the end of the twentieth century, less than 10 percent belonged to a Sunday School. An entire culture had been lost. In England in 1913, 70 percent of all live births were baptized in the Church of England; in 1956, it was still 60 percent, but by 1997 it had fallen to less than a quarter. In the 1950s in Britain two-thirds of those questioned said they believed Jesus was the son of God and only a fifth expressed disbelief. By the 1980s, less than a half of those asked said they believed this and nearly 40 percent said they did not believe. In the 1950s most people believed in the central tenets of Christianity or at least went along with the dominant belief of their culture. By the 1980s, this was no longer the case. By the end of the millennium, many Christian denominations in Scotland, as well as in England and Wales, were predicting their own imminent demise in the twenty-first century. A few evangelical, Pentecostal, and fundamentalist groups thrive, but they lack numbers, have little influence on the wider culture, and are ignored and even snubbed and discriminated against by the secular liberals, who control broadcasting and education.

One consequence of this, or at least a social change that is closely correlated with it, is the collapse of respectable Britain. By the standards of 1905 or 1925 or 1955 Britain is a criminal society, a society with a substantial minority of violent people and an even larger minority willing to indulge in planned dishonesty. In 1927, there were only 110 robberies reported to the police; there were thirty times as many in 1997. Most of this increase occurred after 1955. Even if some part of the recorded increase may be dismissed as merely greater reporting and improved recording, it remains a massive change. In 1927, one’s chance of being mugged was absolutely negligible. Even today it is not all that likely an experience, but it has become one of the ordinary risks of life to be thought about and around which life is planned—enough to constitute an important qualitative change.

In 1957, half a million notifiable offenses were recorded by the police, but in 1997 it was 4,500,000; much of this is petty theft, but one crucial change to be noted is the shift over time in the ratio of violent to acquisitive crime. In 1900, violence against the person was 2.4 percent of all reported crime; by 1937 it had fallen to 1 percent and, in 1967, 0.9 percent, but by 1997 it had risen to 5.6 percent. Part of the change is due to the fall in binge drinking and public drunkenness in the early years of the twentieth century, due in part to the pressure from Protestant temperance groups, followed by a marked return of these problems in the latter part of the century. Drunken and often violent hooliganism is now a standard feature of Friday and Saturday nights in most towns; small towns that in the 1950s were remarkably peaceful are now unpleasant to walk through on those evenings, and their local casualty departments are busy patching up the victims of affrays with fist, boot, knife, and bottle. Baseball bats are widely in use in England, but not for playing baseball.

Another part of the change is due to the growth of an aggressive and violent underclass whose members are willing both to attack innocent passers-by and to settle their own disputes by violence and even murder. Murder remains a rare crime in Britain but its incidence is rising, and in particular the number of male victims is rising. The number of homicides in relation to population nearly doubled between 1967 and 1999/ 2000. The number of female victims has long been roughly constant—i.e., the number of domestic murders, sparked off by sudden emotional explosions within families, is not increasing. The significance of the rise in male victims is that these are murders in public, murders as a result of the general rise in violent crime. Liberals may quibble about the reporting and recording of violence but a corpse is a corpse is a corpse. But for the increased skill of the medical profession in saving lives, the number of murders would have risen faster; likewise Britain’s doctors have to spend more of their time on patching facial injuries from fights, and staff in accident and emergency units have to be issued stab-proof vests. Britain has become a violent society.

One consequence of Britain’s slide into violence and dishonesty is that the prison population has grown massively. In 1937 there were only about 10,500 prisoners and only 800 male prisoners were serving sentences of more than three years (9 percent of the total number in jail at any one time). In 1997, there were 64,000 people in jail, 23,000 of whom were serving terms of over three years (half of the prison population at any one time). This growth in the volume of prisoners occurred despite an increasing reluctance on the part of the authorities to send people to prison. Britain has over time become far less punitive, and many offenders who in 1955 would have gone to prison are now given more lenient non-custodial sentences. The increased number of prisoners in Britain is entirely due to the rise in serious crime.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the incidence of illegitimacy in peacetime was very low, perhaps 4-5 percent of all live births and particularly low in urban areas. It began to rise in the mid-1950s, however, and by 1968 it was 8.5 percent. Illegitimacy has continued to rise to the point where over a third of all births are to unmarried parents, but many of these children are, in fact, being brought up by both parents. Nonetheless, at a time of declining fertility, the number of bastards born to traditional unmarried mothers rose from 41,400 in 1966 to 51,000 in 1996. A high and increasing proportion of these were born to mothers under twenty.

During the nineteenth century the consumption of opiates in Britain declined, and by the early 1950s, addiction was a negligible problem. In 1953, only 290 addicts were known to the Home Office, the lowest figure ever recorded, and there was no significant drug-related crime. By 1968, there were 3,000 registered heroin addicts, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century there were 20,000. In total there are probably between 200,000 and 400,000 regular users of heroin in Britain. There is a substantial black market in drugs; addicts commit robberies and burglaries to finance their habit, and gangs of drug dealers settle their disputes with violence; they may well badly beat up any addict who is heavily in debt to them, or thought to be an informer.

There has, then, been a series of linked changes in Britain, that I have termed the rise and fall of respectable Britain. In the late-nineteenth century, crime rates fell dramatically, as did drug and alcohol abuse, and illegitimacy became less common. All these indexes of deviance were fairly steady between World War I and 1955. After 1955 they all rose massively to create a U-curve of deviance, over the period from 1847 to 1997. Behind it lies the rise and fall of British respectability, of which the rise and fall of the Sunday Schools is both an index and a cause. In the late nineteenth century, the Sunday Schools grew rapidly in numbers and influence to a peak in the decade 1901–1911. After the First World War they declined slowly, and after a brief revival in the early 1950s, they collapsed totally in the last half of the twentieth century. The two patterns fit together very well indeed.

The story outlined above may well have many echoes in the American experience—but, given the greater religiosity of the United States, it might have to be told in a very different way. I leave that to American observers and historians to decide.