Christianity in Britain, R. I. P

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2001 by Steve Bruce

The second point is that we do have evidence of changes in the popularity of beliefs. Measuring beliefs independent of people acting on them is always difficult, but we now have fifty years of opinion polls and attitude surveys and their message is consistent. The proportion of people claiming Christian beliefs is considerably higher than the proportion of people who actively support the Christian churches, but those data show a steady decline in the popularity of Christian beliefs that shadows the decline in church adherence. In the 1950s, 43 percent of those surveyed said they believed in a personal creator God. In the 1990s, it was 31 percent. In the May 2000 ORB survey the figure was 26 percent. The number of those explicitly saying they did not believe in God has risen steadily from 2 percent in the 1950s to 27 percent in the 1990s. In their summary of all the available poll data on religious beliefs in Britain from the late 1930s to 1997, Gill, Hadaway and Marler say (1998:514):

these surveys show a significant erosion of belief in God ... Second, the most serious decline occurred in specifically Christian beliefs including belief in a personal God and belief in Jesus as the Son of God as well as traditional Christian teachings about the afterlife and the Bible.... Third, while traditional Christian beliefs changed markedly, non-traditional beliefs remained stable albeit among a minority of respondents.

That last point is worth dwelling on. Keith Thomas (1978), who is favorably cited by Stark, shows that in certain times and places, significant sections of the laity of the Middle Ages were not orthodox and observant Christians. He does so by showing in great detail that they were believers in heretical superstitions and practitioners of deviant magic. The orthodox and the deviant together formed the vast bulk of the population. In twentieth-century Britain, the swing to 'non-traditional beliefs' fell a long way short of compensating for the decline in orthodox Christian beliefs.

The decline of traditional Christian beliefs should be no surprise. Whether there is some essential human need to raise spiritual questions is too broad a question to be answered here, but there is no mystery about why Christian beliefs should decline when the institutions that carry them decline. Ideologies do not float in the ether. They need to be preserved; mechanisms must exist to acquaint the next generation with those beliefs. In the 1850s, most people attended church. Basic Christian ideas were taught in school, legitimated by every major social institution, promoted by the social elites, reinforced by rights of passage, and pervaded every aspect of social life. Even in the 1930s, when church-going was becoming less common, a large proportion of Britain's children would have had some acquaintance with Sunday school. Now the vast majority of people do not go to church and only the children of churchgoers go to Sunday school. Christian ideas are not taught in schools, are not promoted by social elites, are not reinforced by rights of passage, and are not taken-for-granted in the mass media. Given those changes it would indeed be a miracle if Christian ideas were as popular now as they were in the 1950s.