Christianity in Britain Since 1914
Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700-2000
Edited by David Goodhew and Mark Smith
Palgrave Macmillan, 331 pages, $159.99
Toward the end of their Introduction, the editors of this book summarize the picture that they believe emerges from the 12 detailed studies it assembles: “Modern British Christianity has dramatically declined in many ways. But it has also shown striking resilience. British Christianity has both grown and shrunk, died and risen again. Any depiction of modern British Christianity which focuses either on decline or on growth is a serious distortion.”
The evidence for growth is located principally in the second part of the book, which considers the period from 1970 to today. Goodhew and Smith suggest at the outset that “Arguably, the biggest shift in British Christianity in the last fifty years is not so much secularisation as its dramatic ethnic diversification.”
This theme comes to the fore in two studies, one of the spread of the Redeemed Christian Church of God across Britain, and the other of the 110 new churches started in Glasgow between 2000 and 2016. In both cases, the global Pentecostal movement is also a relevant factor, as it is again for Sam Jeffrey’s chapter on the Newfrontiers network of churches that emerged from the House Church Movement in Britain in the 1970s, and the influence of its transnational connections.
Inevitably, perhaps, it is not easy to bring into focus a broader picture from the six local studies presented here, some relatively narrow in their scope (four Cambridge academics, or participants in the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults in one Catholic diocese). The question of how far new churches have relied on their appeal to old (existing) Christians to drive their numerical growth is raised at various points but not directly addressed.
The essays in Part 1, covering 1914–70, have a rather different character. Four of them constitute something of a set within the book, in that they use careful analysis of changing patterns of religious practice and affiliation in a specific area to comment on broad-brush sociological hypotheses about secularization and its causes.
Alistair Beecher illustrates how an “Anglican hegemony” in rural Hampshire had survived relatively intact when the First World War broke out; Mark Smith finds little evidence that its trauma exercised profound effects upon the churches in Oxfordshire, while reflecting on the potentially long-term implications of the concern that emerged among many Anglican clergy during this period to increase the number of weekly communicants and therefore the frequency of Communion services.
Grant Masom’s study of Slough between the wars complements both by mapping the gradual loss of influence of clerical and lay church leaders on civic life there, as they struggled to position themselves effectively on questions about enabling individual choice, particularly on leisure activities, versus upholding social norms.
Ian Jones argues that after the Second World War, churches in Birmingham were energized by a focus on “first, the renewal of the local church … second, the renewal of the Christian home and the active participation of families in church; and third, the cultivation of community life,” yet the cultural purchase of this agenda ebbed away in the decades that followed.
One of the strengths of this collection is the variety of its components, in locations chosen and methodologies adopted, though the reader may not find every chapter equally compelling and may occasionally puzzle at the relation between them. I was left, however, both with a chastened sense of the complexities involved in making generalizations about the trajectory of Christian faith in Britain, and with a deep sense of gratitude for all those who have sought to respond to the challenges of its perceived decline since 1914 with faithfulness, energy, and imagination.
The Rev. Dr. Jeremy Worthen is the Team Rector of Ashford in the Diocese of Canterbury. He previously worked in ministerial formation and in supporting national ecumenical and theological work.
