Callum Brown

The costs of pew-renting: church management, church-going and social class in nineteenth-century Glasgow

The letting of pews was virtually a universal practice in the churches of nineteenth-century Britain. Although letting and private ownership of seats were well known before the 1700s and have continued in the present century, the renting of fixed seats for use during divine service reached its height in the Victorian period. Worshippers paid anything from one shilling to thirty shillings or more to reserve a seat for one person for a year. It thus became a considerable expense to accommodate a large family. By its ubiquity it is clear that the practice was accepted by church-goers as a facet of ecclesiastical life and was accepted by church authorities as a necessary feature of congregational management. But the fact that the system was generally introduced and operated at the discretion of individual congregations or their owners and patrons, with little or no interference from denominational authorities, has meant that comparatively meagre attention has been paid to how it worked in practice and to what its effects were on congregational life.

The necessity of atheism: making sense of secularisation

Atheists and atheism have a negligible place in the historiography of secularisation. This is because, it is argued here, secularisation is something that is too often measured from religion and, in one influential narrative, has a strongly Christian character to its progress and its outcome. Taking Charles Taylors A Secular Age (2007) as a foil, this article explores longstanding suppositions about the nature of the religious past. It explores on the one hand the persistence of the notion of the “enchanted world” of medieval Europe despite the accumulating evidence to the contrary, and on the other hand the conception of late-modern secularity as veined through with concealed religiosity. Instead, the author posits that secularisation requires an appreciation of the possibility of atheism in all human periods, and quickly assesses some of the evidence, and then argues from oral history evidence that much can be learned from examining contemporary atheist life narratives about the diversity of forms this takes. The article proposes five foundational principles about atheism across the last 1,500 years.

Contesting the Moral High Ground: Popular Moralists in Mid-twentieth Century Britain. By Paul T. Phillips

27 9 Countering existing London-based literature concerning the Mods, Gildart examines the influential (among Mods) magazines Mod Monthly and Rave to establish more clearly the national Mod influence. He discovers that it was, indeed, a country-wide phenomenon, albeit with significant regional variations. Rave, for example, addressed the issue of regionality and published a national map of mod clubs. The Mods’ lasting legacy was in ‘shaping challenges to popular conceptions of gender, sexuality and race’ (p. 124), which was developed further by Glam Rock and David Bowie. The significance of Mods’ dress code is, perhaps, over-intellectualized, and Townsend’s influence as an ‘organic intellectual’ overstated. Individual commentators like Townsend may be open to question as ‘reliable witnesses’ and their recollections are not necessarily definitive. Ray Davies of Kinks fame produced a legacy of songs that capture different aspects of Englishness, frozen in time. Gildart likens him to Orwell and Hoggart. Davies’ songwriting career establishes him as a working-class organic intellectual who consistently depicts working-class themes and creates ‘a perception of “them” and “us”’ (p. 142). Part III provides a thorough study of the Glam-Rock groups Slade and Sweet and their influence on working-class youth culture, which, avoiding musical judgements, Gildart compares with David Bowie’s. Slade affirmed class identity whilst promoting hedonism; Bowie’s message, however, was more complex and self-conscious: it forgot about class and culture through images of other worlds that hadn’t heard of the cultural and social values of the 1970s. The chapter ‘Darkness over England’ presents an intriguing and detailed account of the development of a moral panic. It follows reactions to the Sex Pistols Anarchy tour around Britain and makes connections to earlier ‘folk devils’ researched by Stan Cohen and Sarah Thornton. This was at a time when ‘class identity was taking on new forms’ (p. 176), unions and universities were permanent reactionary forces and the Sex Pistols were symptomatic of post-war decline. A detailed account of the Sex Pistols gig in Caerphilly and the range of local responses is a gem of historical investigation and analysis. Gildart has a solid grounding in working-class history that informs his approach, research and analysis. His extensive knowledge of and passion for popular music enlivens the debates on youth, social change and class relationships in the shifting cultural landscape of 1955 to 1976. Images of England lends a cultural voice to young people previously overlooked and adds to the body of academic literature that seeks to explain the importance of popular music in the everyday life of young people.

Unfettering religion: women and the family chain in the late twentieth century

There is a significant case to be made that women are central to the secularization of the West since the midtwentieth century. This case has started to be argued in a variety of ways. A number of scholars have linked secularization to women via change to the family. In 1992, French sociologist Daniele Hervieu-Leger theorized secularization not as the collapse of religions but as modernity’s transformation of conventional forms of religion (especially Judaism and Christianity) into ‘the religious’ – a state of sacredness devoid of shared liturgy, even of belief in God, but characterized by belonging to new types of secular institution (notably she cited football clubs), and instigated by the collapse of the nuclear family (what she called ‘the traditional family’). In this process, she suggested, what modernity had done was to sustain a ‘chain of memory’ of religious ritual, but not of religious beliefs. At the heart of Hervieu-Leger’s narrative of causation of the ‘religious crisis’ that was ending belief, she identified the collapse of the traditional family through the coming of ultra-low fertility in the 1960s and 1970s. She wrote that the ‘collapse of the traditional family’ was ‘the central factor in the disintegration of the imagined continuity that lies at the heart of the modern crisis of religion’, pinpointing the period ‘around 1965 with the downturn in the statistics of births and marriages which had risen markedly in the period 1945-50’. With falling fertility and marriage, and rising divorce, cohabitation and births outwith marriage, ‘[i]ndividual well-being and fulfilment take precedence.’ Although the British religious sociologist Grace Davie used Hervieu-Leger’s concept in support of her thesis of Christianity’s survival through believing without belonging, the French sociologist was explicitly not sanguine about the fate of the Churches: ‘The rise of the religious does not necessarily give rise to religion.’ Hervieu-Leger regards the change in the family resulting from the 1960s as putting organized religion in a parlous state in western Europe, whilst Davie sees the secular family as relying vicariously by 2000 on religion for the enactment of a Christian or Jewish liturgy on behalf of the secular.

Men Losing Faith: The Making of Modern No Religionism in the UK, 1939–2010

Losing religion has become a very important phenomenon of our times. The people of no religion have been growing very rapidly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They represented less than 2 per cent of the population of most Western nations in 1960, but numbers started to rise in the late 1960s and continued to do so. At the 2001 census, 14.6 per cent of English people, 18.5 per cent of the Welsh, 27.6 of the Scots but only 1 per cent of those in Northern Ireland ticked ‘no religion’. By the 2011 census, the figures had risen sharply to 24.7 per cent for England and to 32.1 for Wales.1 Over less than a century, a very large number of people have signalled that they have lost religion. How that ‘loss’ is to be construed is the subject of extensive scholarly disagreement.2 Notwithstanding this, the scale of the change has led a leading religious statistician to comment that ‘defection or disaffiliation of Christians since 2001 is a probable major cause of the decline of Christian allegiance over the decade. Even though it is not the complete answer (after all, the net decline in Christians constitutes no more than 64.1% of the net growth of “nones”), it should undoubtedly be a primary focus of research effort.’3 With a history of only seven decades, the process of mass demographic loss of religious identity is comparatively recent to human experience.