Secularisation in 1960s Britain: triumph of rationalism or self-fulfilling prophecy?

Abstract

Up to the 1990s, scholarship on secularisation and religious change in 20 Century Britain was dominated by three broad schools of thought. Crudely put, the first (associated with sociologists including Bryan Wilson and Steve Bruce) was the classic ‘secularisation thesis’, whereby secularisation was the more or less inexorable product of modernity, in which both intellectual and socio-economic change combined to fragment traditional communal ties, shatter the ‘sacred canopy’ of religious plausibility, and make religious belief and practice ever more a matter of personal choice (Wilson 1966; Bruce 1996). A second view, associated with Grace Davie (1994, 2000), was that religion was not so much disappearing as mutating. True, traditional forms of Christian belief and practice were in decline in Western Europe, but the European experience was an exceptional case. Even in Western Europe, the picture was not one of ‘secularisation’ perse, but of religious change, with the gap left by declining Christian belief and practice partially filled by a re-sacralisation of other aspects of personal and communal life. Challenging the first two hypotheses was a third, newer approach to religious change, offered by historians of religion including Hugh McLeod (2000) and Jeffrey Cox (2003). In this view, secularisation was not so much predictive as descriptive; an account of historically contingent religious change which was neither uniform nor inevitable. Despite robust debate between those advocating versions of these three broad streams of thought, certain assumptions nevertheless continued to be shared. One such assumption was that whatever the nature or causes of late 20 Century secularisation/religious change, it was part of a much longer historical process dating back some centuries, and was more evolutionary than revolutionary in nature – even if at times accelerated by particular events or cultural conditions. However, since the early 2000s, this view has been challenged by a number of authors arguing for a more sudden and dramatic secular