Abstract
This concluding chapter uncovers and illuminates one of Anglican Christianity’s most potent and sustained narratives. This has been an enduring and frequently revisited assertion of its own, long-drawn out, decline. The chapter examines and analyses the pronouncements, comments and lamentations of religious practitioners, of philosophers and of commentators upon religion to suggest that secularisation, like all the other religious narratives explored in this book, also has a history and a deliberate function. This has been realised consciously, although sometimes unconsciously, by those who believe themselves exposed to the worst consequences of its pernicious effects.2 The various instances and uses of decline narratives discussed here demonstrate how they provided both unwarranted cause for despondency, yet also unprecedentedly valuable spurs to action. Importantly, acknowledging such spurs to action has been an increasingly significant part of the Anglican Christian mission in England during the course of the twentieth century. Similarly these spurs regularly became the justification for altering the emphasis and purpose of religious forms of organisation and presence within the public sphere. This chapter also notes precisely who has felt compelled to use such decline narratives over the last century and the context in which they have chosen to do so.3 It also elaborates upon the groups who have refused to do this and what this demonstrates about their ideals and aspirations over the period under discussion.
Robinson had articulated questions which an introverted church had ignored to its loss during the 1950s.
David L. Edwards in the Preface to Honest to God (2001 edition)
You are living in a self-constructed internment camp ringed round by doctrines. You don’t know the large and beautiful world outside, and dare not trust yourselves to explore it.
Ernest Oaten addressing the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Committee on Spiritualism (1937)1
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Notes
Anon (1942) The Silence of Dr Lang ( London: Psychic Press ), p. 17.
Decline and ‘losing out’ to competitors is scarcely a new phenomenon. Earlier landscapes of decline are outlined in Clive D. Field (2012) ‘Counting Religion in England and Wales: The Long Eighteenth Century c.1680–1840’. Journal of Ecclesiastical History 63, 4: 693–720.
Simon Green speaks with wistfulness about the passing of a Protestant England, which invokes this unshaking rhetoric of lamented loss. In doing so he notes the danger of objective assessments of religious decline and how they might miss this wistfulness. See Simon Green (2011) The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c. 1920–1960. ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ), p. 29.
Even Charles Taylor offered a recasting of this lament with his citing of (and inclusion of verses from) Thomas Hardy’s The Oxen and a retreading of the power of Arnold’s Dover Beach. Charles Taylor (2007) A Secular Age ( New York: Belknap ), pp. 564, and 570.
Nickly Gumbell ( 1993, 2007 edition) Alpha: Questions of Life ( Brompton: Alpha ), p. 7.
See for example Stephen W. Sykes (1978) The Integrity of Anglicanism ( London: Mowbrays ), p. 15.
Jeremy Morris (2012) ‘Secularization and Religious Experience: Arguments in the Historiography of Modern British Religion’. Historical Journal 55, 1 (March): 195–219, p. 196.
Reginald John Campbell (1916) The War and the Soul ( London: Chapman and Hall ), pp. 100–1, 217–18 and 273.
William Temple (1917) The Challenge to the Church: Being an Account of the National Mission 1916 and of Thoughts Suggested by it ( London: SPCK ), pp. 77–8.
Bertram Pollock (1925) The Nation and the Church: Six Charges ( London: John Murray ), p. 36.
See David S. Nash (1999) Blasphemy in Modern Britain 1789 to the Present ( Aldershot: Ashgate ), Chapter 6.
For slightly earlier pamphlets stressing concerns about creeping Catholic practice see, for example, Samuel Smith (1900) Ritualism in the Church of England ( London: Chas J. Thynne )
J. Hughes-Games (1900) The Duty of Evangelical Churchmen under Possible Eventualities ( London: Brown and Sons). The latter of these was frightened by sacerdotalism and suspicious of the victory for this tendency that ecumenism would bring.
William Joynson-Hicks (1928) The Prayer Book Crisis ( London: Putnam’s and Sons ), p. 91.
The Bishop of Norwich (1927) The Prayer Book: A National Guide ( London: Longmans ), p. 7.
William H. Carnegie (1925) Anglicanism an Introduction to its History and Philosophy ( London: G. P. Putnam and Sons ), Passim.
For some earlier works treading this ground see Croasdaile E. Harris (1899) For Church and Crown: The Historical Protestantism of English Catholicity (Newcastle Upon-Tyne: Mawson, Swan and Morgan )
James M. Sangar (1899) The Protestant Crisis ( London: William Wileman).
Carnegie adopted a much older nineteenth-century, almost Ruskinite, critique in his suggestion that social and economic strife had been created by the ‘drudgery’ of urbanisation and ‘industrialism’. Carnegie, Anglicanism, pp. 207–10. But see also the Anglo-Catholic social conscience exemplified by individuals such as Frank Weston in Mark D. Chapman (2007) Bishops Saints and Politics ( London: Continuum ), pp. 201–2, 206–8.
Harcourt Williams (1926) The Good Samaritan: Addresses on the Parable ( London: Mowbray and Sons ), p. 29.
Carnegie, Anglicanism, pp. 217–19. The process was arguably repeated at the start of the 1970s when the scheme for Anglican Methodist reunion was defeated by both extreme wings of the Church, even involving Geoffrey Fisher, Michael Ramsey’s predecessor, who in retirement actively worked against the proposal, which collapsed in ignominy. See Michael De-la-Noy (1990) Michael Ramsey: A Portrait ( London: Collins ), pp. 88, 140, 144, 204–5. Note also p. 149, which describes Anglican assumptions about the role of the Archbishop as a leader of ecumenism involved almost compulsory presidency of the World Council of Churches. This appears to have been regarded as something of a chore.
R. J. K. Freathy (2007) ‘Ecclesiastical and Religious Factors which Preserved Christian and Traditional Forms of Education for Citizenship in English Schools, 1934–1944’. Oxford Review of Education 33, 3 (July): 367–77, p. 368.
John Pettavel (1951) The Good Samaritan ( Aldington: Hand and Flower Press ), pp. 64–5.
Stephen Neil ( 1958, 1977 edition) Anglicanism ( Oxford: Mowbray).
David Edwards (1963) ‘A New Stirring in English Christianity’. In David Edwards, ed., The Honest to God Debate ( London: SCM Press ), pp. 13–47, pp. 14–15.
David Edwards (1963) ‘Some Reader’s Letters’. In David Edwards, ed., The Honest to God Debate ( London: SCM Press ), pp. 48–81, p. 49.
Oliver Fielding Clarke (1963) For Christ’s Sake: A Reply to ‘Honest to God’ ( Wallington: The Religious Education Press ), p. 62.
T. G. A. Baker (1988) ‘Is Liturgy in Good Shape?’ In Eric James, ed., God’s Truth: Essays to Celebrate the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Honest to God ( London: ECM Press ), pp. 1–14, p. 4.
David L. Edwards (1988) ‘Why the Conservative Backlash?’ In Eric James, ed., God’s Truth: Essays to Celebrate the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Honest to God ( London: ECM Press ), pp. 81–95, p. 89.
Peter Barraclough (1965) Playing with Atheism ( London: Epworth Press ), p. 3.
Ruth Etchells (1993) ‘The Awful Truth: Thoughts on Lost Things’. In John Bowden, ed., Thirty Years of Honesty: Honest to God Then and Now ( London: SCM Press ), pp. 84–93, p. 86 and 92.
Lady Catherine Russell, quoted in Robert Towler (1984) The Need for Certainty: A Sociological Study of Conventional Religion ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul ), p. 100.
Green, The Passing of Protestant England, pp. 284–5. This also occupied the thinking of the Anglican hierarchy. See for example Michael Ramsey (1969), ed., Lambeth Essays on Ministry: Essays Written for the Lambeth Conference 1968 ( London: SPCK ). This contains a significant number of essays on the lay contribution to mission, ministry and society.
For the decline and growing isolated insularity of Anglo-Catholicism see Nigel Yates (2009) From the ‘Naughty Nineties’ to the ‘Swinging Sixties’: The Strange Phenomenon of Anglican Ultra-Catholicism and Lampeter. Wales and the Oxford Movement (University of Wales, Lampeter Trivium Publications, Occasional Papers, No. 4), pp. 18–19.
Peter J. Jagger (1978) A History of the Parish and People Movement ( Leighton Buzzard: The Faith Press ), p. 119.
Eddie Gibbs (1993) Winning them Back: Tackling the Problem of Nominal Christianity ( Tunbridge Wells: Monarch Publications ), Chapter 1, especially pp. 13–17. It is also worth noting that the ‘Putnam thesis’, which draws on American evidence, strongly argued the very makeup and stance of evangelicalism was likely to damage public manifestations of religion and eventually to destroy the link between religion and community–something intrinsically important to Anglicanism’s vision of itself. See
Robert D. Putnam (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community ( New York: Simon and Schuster).
Andrew Atherstone (2008) An Anglican Evangelical Crisis: The Churchman -Anvil Affair of 1981–1984 ( London: Latimer Trust ), pp. 6–9.
Michael De-la-Noy (1993) The Church of England ( London: Simon and Schuster ), Chapter titled ‘Dr Who?’, pp. 237–8.
John Whale (1988) The Future of Anglicanism. Mowbray’s Lambeth Series (London: Mowbray ), p. 10.
John Habgood played down the furore of the Bishop of Durham episode by suggesting that Jenkins had said nothing that had not ‘been said roughly every twenty years’. This noted a regular lapse from orthodox belief, but in this instance failed to notice that the upsurge in interest and concern should perhaps have been regarded as evidence that many still considered these matters as important. See Mary Loudon (1994) Revelations: The Clergy Questioned ( Harmondsworth: Penguin ), p. 28.
The 2002 figures on the personal belief of clergy showed a drift from orthodoxy into a more exploratory version of Christianity. In these survey figures only 66% of Anglican clergy believed in the resurrection and only 56% in the Virgin Birth. Perhaps most significant for our purposes is that only 51% believed ‘that faith in Jesus Christ is the only way by which we can be saved’. Peter Brierley (2003) The Mind of Anglicans ( London: Christian Research ), p. 12.
Whale, The Future of Anglicanism, pp. 12–13. See Also Peter Brierley (2000) Steps to the Future: Issues Facing the Church in the New Millennium ( London: Christian Research ), p. 7.
Kenneth Mason (1987) Anglicanism: A Canterbury Essay ( Oxford: SLG Press ), pp. 26–7.
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Nash, D. (2013). ‘And men were saved in a way they are not now’ — Anglican Decline Stories and the Myth of the Religious Golden Age. In: Christian Ideals in British Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349057_8
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