When did Britain stop being Christian?

A note on a momentous social change

It is sometimes assumed that Christianity in the West decisively gave way to secularism in the 1960s. The eminent historian of religion Francis Young has recently given a talk at Ely Cathedral in which he put forward what might be described as a revisionist take on this idea.

I’d like to offer this piece as a brief further reflection on the subject. I’m going to confine my focus to Britain, although I have no doubt that similar observations could also be made about most other Western countries.

The main problem that we run into when we grapple with this subject is how to measure religiosity. That in turn raises a very difficult issue. What does it mean for a person, or a nation, to be religious? What is religion?

In Christian countries, religion is often seen as being primarily a matter of belief. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty….” On this definition, religiosity is hard to measure. Belief is often complex, shifting and opaque. Opinion polls asking people if they believe in God or Jesus can get different answers depending on how the question is phrased, what answer the respondent is comfortable giving the questioner, and how the respondent happens to be feeling at the time. For many people, belief is not a stable feature of the personality. Are you clear, at this moment, on whether or not you believe in God?

If we take the Gallup polling figures at face value, belief in a ‘personal God’ (as opposed to a ‘spirit or life force’) has been a minority position in Britain since at least 1947. Oddly enough, the number of people reporting that they believe that Jesus is the son of God was over 50% until 1981-86. The apparent inconsistency between these figures emphasises the difficulty of handling this kind of evidence. In any event, the figures do not suggest that the 1960s were a turning-point.

Maybe religion doesn’t consist of belief. What about practice? If being religious means practising one’s religion, we should be able to calculate levels of Christianity by looking at church statistics.

One can prove all kinds of things with figures of this sort. Church membership rolls, for instance, peaked in the period 1904-1910. But membership is a relatively passive form of involvement: church attendance was already in decline by then. That trend set in during the decades before the First World War: it had already begun by the 1880s in some areas.

On other measures, British Christianity was already in trouble in the early Victorian period. The official census of religion in 1851 recorded 61% Sunday church attendance across England and Wales (and half of the people concerned were worshipping outside the established Church of England, but that is another story). Attending services twice on Sundays was quite common, which implies that the true figure must have been below 50% - although, conversely, some churchgoers would not have attended every week. Another relevant statistic is that the proportion of secular weddings rose inexorably after civil registration of marriages was first introduced in 1837 (albeit the absolute numbers involved were small).

So much for practice. A further way of defining religion is as identity. You are a Christian if you feel that that is what you truly are, no matter what you think about Jesus or when you last set foot in a church. Identity is the simplest index of religion to measure: it’s easy to ask people what they think they are, and they are usually happy to tell you.

The 2021 census revealed that 46% of people in England and Wales identify as Christians. It is interesting to note that in a poll in 2020 only 28% of people said that they believe that Jesus is the son of God - an illustration of how religious identities are stickier than theological beliefs. As it happens, 2021 was the first time that the number of people identifying as Christians on the census had fallen below 50%. The figure was as high as 72% as recently as 2001. The 1960s clearly had little impact on this score.

Finally, an alternative method of measuring religiosity was pioneered by the scholar Callum Brown, who attempted to track how far religious ideas permeated popular culture using sources like magazines and books. He reached the conclusion that British Christianity suddenly went into collapse in the 1960s, for a very specific reason. Christian religiosity had (he said) been dependent until then on certain socially conservative ideas about the roles of women; and it was in the 60s that women decided to reject those roles. Brown’s thesis has been challenged, and it looks like what he was tracking was not Christian religiosity but Christian-flavoured patriarchy, which is not the same thing. Indeed, evidence that Brown himself cites suggests that Christianity was culturally weak at least a generation before the advent of 60s feminism.

In conclusion, before we ask when Britain began to cease to be Christian, we have to decide how we are going to measure Christian religiosity, which itself requires us to take a view on the difficult question of what religion is. And when we have answered those questions, most of the metrics seem not to point to the 1960s as the time when the decline set in. To the extent that de-Christianisation was apparent in and from the 60s, it amounted to an intensification of trends that had already been in progress for a long time.

(PS - One final point. However we define it, religiosity moves to some extent in cycles, so a narrative of straightforward decline is simplistic in any case. The Evangelical revival which began in the eighteenth century made the country more religious than it had been before. There seems to have been an increase in religious observance after the 1851 census mentioned above, so the late Victorian decline in observance may have taken place against a rather high baseline. Similarly, the 1960s look like a period of exceptional apostasy in part because of the contrast with the religious revival of the 1950s, when conservative social values were temporarily reasserted following the horrors of the Second World War.)