I

From the 1960s until today, British historiography's secularization debate has been dominated by the secular model of secularization.Footnote ¹ This model conceptualizes religion as a primordial, positively existing thing, and secularity as the relative lack of this thing, and it therefore defines secularization negatively, as the general and irreversible decline of the “social significance” of “religion.”Footnote ² Because these basic concepts are so widely accepted, British secularization scholarship has now spent the better part of two generations arguing about when and why secularization in this negative sense occurred in Britain, especially about whether it was caused by modernization, and whether it should be understood as a gradual phenomenon dating from the eighteenth, nineteenth, or early twentieth centuries, or as a revolutionary phenomenon dating from the 1960s.Footnote ³ Recently, however, this entire historiography's underlying premise has been challenged by an international grouping of postsecular scholars, often of a postcolonial bent, who critique the concept of religion as ideological and analytically meaningless.Footnote ⁴ These scholars rightly observe that religion is a Western concept, that its equivalents are rarely found in non-Western cultures prior to Western colonialism, that it arbitrarily conflates a vast and varied array of cultural groups into a single category, and that nobody has ever found a satisfactory method of defining it. Their strong implication is that it is unfit for scholarly usage and should be downgraded from etic to emic status.Footnote ⁵ If accepted, this critique raises fundamental problems for the historiography of British secularization. While talk of Christian decline seems coherent enough, talk of religious decline is simply unverifiable if we cannot satisfactorily define what religion is.Footnote ⁶

This article accepts that this postcolonial critique is correct, and it therefore introduces a distinctively postsecular framework for understanding British secularization whose defining methodological characteristic is that it uses the religion-secular binary as an emic rather than as an etic distinction.Footnote ⁷ This framework defines secularity as a positively existing ideological culture, comparable to Christianity and Islam, dominant in Britain since the secular revolution of the 1960s, which believes that it represents post-ideological neutrality and which uses religion as an othering category to denote all human cultures that are not secular.Footnote ⁸ Secularity's belief in its own neutrality causes it to define “secularization” negatively, but this postsecular approach historicizes that belief, and it therefore defines secularization positively, as the dissemination and enactment of secularity, a contingent cultural phenomenon analogous to Christianization and Islamization.Footnote ⁹ Because the post-ideological society can imagined in many different ways, there are multiple kinds of secularity, analogous to the multiple kinds of Christianity and Islam, from Western secularity to that of the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus historians of secularization must ultimately explain not merely the phenomenon of secularization but also why each particular secularity took the specific form that it did.Footnote ¹¹

This postsecular perspective is influenced by culturalist theories of human social life, and for this reason it explains secularization in terms of the acceptance and enactment of secularity's beliefs, just as Christianization can be explained in terms of the acceptance and enactment of Christianity's beliefs.Footnote ¹² The crucial difference, however, is that secularity's beliefs are not about God but about the nature of secular societies, and so secularity is best understood not as a theological belief-system but as a sociological belief-system. In particular, secularity's core tenets state that it is possible for human societies to effect a permanent escape from collective ideology and that secular societies are successfully achieving this escape in practice.Footnote ¹³ This framework is ethnocentric because it problematizes the vast majority of human beliefs and practices by labeling them religious and therefore ideological, while normalizing a minority of mostly Western cultural norms by privileging them as secular and therefore post-ideological.Footnote ¹⁴ Nonetheless, this framework was an immensely influential cultural force in twentieth-century Western history, powerfully legitimating some cultural norms whilst subverting all others. Thus if the historiography of secularization is serious about shedding its ethnocentric secular bias, it must historicize secularity's ideological framework, reconceptualize itself as analogous to the historiographies of Christianity and Islam, and focus its attention on (1) why certain groups of people began to believe that they had permanently escaped collective ideology and (2) how they then altered their existing beliefs and practices in light of their new sociological faith.Footnote ¹⁵

This postsecular approach allows the British secularization debate to be reframed in three specific ways. First, it implies that Christian decline and secularization are two quite distinct phenomena, each possessing different chronologies and sets of causes, with Christian decline being the decline of Britain's previously dominant moral culture, and secularization being the rise of its new one. In the British case, Christianity gradually declined from about 1900, but widespread secularization in this positive sense could not happen before the authoritative public dissemination of secularity's metanarrative, which first occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s.Footnote ¹⁶ Second, by characterizing secularity as a specific ideological culture, this postsecular framework insists that widespread secularization was not the natural outcome of British Christianity's decline but was instead merely one of its many possible outcomes, such that historians need to identify the specific cultural mechanisms that enabled secularity's metanarrative, rather than any other, to gain such widespread acceptance in British society.Footnote ¹⁷ Finally, the postsecular characterization of secularity as a specific ideological culture suggests that secularization cannot proceed unless secularity's characteristic categories of religion, the secular, and secularization have all been invented and had secular meanings attributed to them; and because these categories originated in Christian theology, this requirement suggests that secularity should be regarded as possessing important linguistic and ideological debts to Christianity, which is why secularization has predominantly occurred in Christian countries rather than elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁸ This suggestion doubles down on Jeffrey Cox's “provincializing” argument by insisting that, because secularization is primarily a Western phenomenon, it cannot have primarily social causes, which would be repeatable elsewhere; instead, it must be chiefly caused by local cultural factors specific to the West.Footnote ¹⁹ Only by appreciating the cultural specificity of Western secularity, the radicalness of its break from Christianity, but also its substantial ideological and linguistic debts to Christianity, does it become possible to write a genuinely “provincial” history of modern Western secularization.Footnote ²⁰

This article offers an initial attempt at a postsecular history of British secularization, which focuses especially on how Christianity provided many of the cultural preconditions for the eventual invention of secularity in the mid-nineteenth century and how secularity came to achieve cultural dominance over British Christianity during the cultural revolution of the long 1960s, enabling the onset of mass British secularization.Footnote ²¹ This account can be summarized in five points. First, a long list of cultural preconditions must be fulfilled before secularity can even be imagined, let alone enacted, and these preconditions were not fulfilled in Western cultures until around 1800.Footnote ²² In particular, Western cultures prior to 1800 typically imagined “religion” to be characteristic of advanced societies only; thus, any general decline of “religion” was considered a step backward in human development, rather than forward, which is the belief required for secularity. Second, secularity first became imaginable in Western culture from the beginning of the nineteenth century because Christian theology slowly began to reimagine “religion” as the primordial condition of all human societies, thereby making it possible to envisage a general era of “religion” progressing into a general era of “non-religion.” For this reason, the first European visions of irreversible “secularization” in the twentieth-century sense date from the 1830s.Footnote ²³ Thirdly, however, though it existed in Britain, secularity's ideological metanarrative remained the preserve of radical intellectual minorities until the mid-1950s. Throughout the Second World War and the early Cold War, Britain's predominantly Christian public discussion continued to adhere to a “Christian civilization” metanarrative, which held that “religion” is essential to long-term social stability, and that therefore any post-Christian society would regress until it succumbed to a totalitarian ersatz-religion, as had apparently happened in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.Footnote ²⁴ Because this “Christian civilization” perspective was the dominant cultural paradigm, it shaped British popular behavior throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The vast majority of Britons in this period acted on the assumptions that Christianity was normal in Britain, that Christianity was part of what made Britain great, and that they personally were Christians, even if they disagreed about the parameters of proper Christian behavior, such as whether it involved regular attendance at church.Footnote ²⁵ Consequently, while the first half of the twentieth century was a period of Christian decline, it was not one of widespread secularization; from 1917, especially, the whole idea of secularity was frequently critiqued as tyrannical and potentially communist.Footnote ²⁶ Fourth, British common sense about “religion” and “secularization” was radically altered in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in ways that still structure the British secularization debate today. By reimagining secularization as a natural and irreversible consequence of economic development, this paradigm shift radically rehabilitated secularity, cleansing it of its perceived association with totalitarianism, and simultaneously redefined religion as a primordial condition unusual in postwar Western societies.Footnote ²⁷ Since social life is enacted narrative, this cultural transformation gradually caused massive social change. By authoritatively normalizing secularity and imaginatively dethroning Christianity, it made possible the secular revolution of the early 1960s and the slow but seismic enactment of secularization that followed.Footnote ²⁸ Finally, this postsecular account explains the sudden dominance of British secularity in a formerly Christian moral culture by highlighting the role of radical Christian secular theologians in normalizing secularity's beliefs during the early phases of Britain's secular revolution.Footnote ²⁹ On this argument, it was no coincidence that British secularity emerged from Britain's “Christian civilization” and that it depended on a reinterpretation of the Christian categories of religion and the secular. It was a specifically Christian vision of humanity's glorious new secular future that normalized secularity in British public discussion, thereby laying the necessary conceptual groundwork for the British secularization debate and for the widespread enactment of popular British secularization.Footnote ³⁰

II

Although secularity presents itself as post-ideological neutrality, and therefore as a complete break from what it characterizes as humanity's religious past, postsecular scholarship is now revealing that secularity can only be invented under certain specific cultural conditions, many of which are provided by Western Christianity.Footnote ³¹ A first requirement for inventing secularity is that the culture in question must possess the concept of “religion,” but this requirement narrows the field to Western cultures and to world cultures after the advent of Western colonialism because religion is a Western category with roots in Latin Christianity.Footnote ³² In pre-Christian Rome, by contrast, an immanentist culture that did not distinguish between “religious” and “secular” spheres of life, religio simply meant the performance of obligatory rituals, whether directed to the gods, the emperor, or one's father. In this cultural context, there existed no conceptual means of distinguishing the decline of religio from the decline of culture more generally, and therefore no means of imagining secularization in the twentieth-century sense.Footnote ³³

The first step in the prehistory of Western secularization, consequently, was the Christianization of the Roman Empire, which was responsible for introducing the religious-secular binary into Western thought.Footnote ³⁴ Because Christianity is transcendentalist and monotheistic, it posits a fundamental distinction between the eternal God and the created, temporary world.Footnote ³⁵ This distinction ensured that Western Christendom always conceptualized the governance of Christian polities not as an undifferentiated unity but as a unified binary partnership, shared between the Christian state, which was responsible for temporal matters, and the Christian church or churches, which were responsible for eternal matters. This bifurcatory model of sovereignty, implicit in the Gospels, influentially expressed by Pope Gelasius I in 494 and debated for centuries afterward as the “two swords doctrine,” was one of the central methods with which medieval Europeans conceptualized sovereignty, even though there were fierce disputes about whether Christian states held their temporal power directly from God or only on loan from the papacy.Footnote ³⁶ By the early modern period, the Christian terms religious and secular, which had originally referred to different types of clergy, had come to name these two dimensions of Christendom's model of sovereignty.Footnote ³⁷ In the aftermath of the Reformation, this nomenclature gave rise to the original use of the term secularization, which denoted the transfer of a person or thing from ecclesiastical to civic authority.Footnote ³⁸ Crucially, however, this Christian usage cast Christian-secular and Christian-religious authorities as partners of each other, not as antagonists: religious and secular powers were both imagined as being permanent and cooperating components of Christendom until the awaited day of the Apocalypse, when they would be gloriously fused into an undifferentiated whole.Footnote ³⁹ For this reason, this early modern Christian distinction between religious and secular powers was also not sufficient to imagine secularization in the twentieth-century sense.Footnote ⁴⁰

A further step in the prehistory of Western secularization also occurred in the early modern period, when Europeans began to apply the term religion to non-Christian cultures, as a category of cross-cultural comparison. This usage was also deeply embedded in Christian theological presuppositions. In the sixteenth century, it typically reflected medieval Catholicism by defining religion primarily in terms of ritual participation and community membership, but by the eighteenth century, it typically reflected Protestantism by defining religion primarily in terms of adherence to systems of doctrine.Footnote ⁴¹ Most centrally, however, by linking religion to cultural traits observable in the Christian West, these early modern European conceptions of religion implied that many non-European cultures were not religious because either they had never been or they had fallen from humanity's original pristine religion as apparently described in the book of Genesis.Footnote ⁴² Until the early nineteenth century, for example, European explorers almost universally denied that African and American indigenous cultures possessed religion, because they thought that religion implied a dedicated institutional and/or doctrinal apparatus, which, in their view, these cultures did not have.Footnote ⁴³ Thus in the European encounter with non-Europeans between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries, European discussion drew a sharp categorical distinction between so-called civilized societies, which possessed religion, and so-called barbaric societies, which were thought to lack it.Footnote ⁴⁴ “Look out for a people, entirely destitute of religion,” warned David Hume's The Natural History of Religion in 1757. “If you find them at all, be assured, that they are but a few degrees removed from brutes.”Footnote ⁴⁵ These critiques were also directed at European societies that were considered to have abandoned religion. In the 1790s, at the height of the French revolution, British cartoons gleefully contrasted “British liberty,” which consisted of “religion,” “security” and “prosperity,” with “French liberty,” which consisted of “atheism,” “anarchy,” “cruelty,” and “ruin.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In this cultural framework, “religion” was a precious cultural achievement, possessed only by the civilized, whose loss was a practical and moral step backward. Even the leading figures of the Enlightenment usually envisaged future societies as having a reformed and sometimes non-Christian “religion” rather than no “religion” at all.Footnote ⁴⁷

For Western secularity to become imaginable, therefore, it was first necessary to reimagine “religion” as a universal characteristic of premodern societies. This paradigm shift was influentially begun by Romantic theologians from the beginning of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁸ Whereas the older definitions of “religion” had privileged observable criteria, thereby implying that “religion” had never existed everywhere, Romantic theology redefined “religion” as a wholly interior state, which allowed it to take the crucial step of positing that “religion” had always existed everywhere, even in the most apparently primitive societies.Footnote ⁴⁹ The essence of “religion,” argued Friedrich Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799), is humanity's innate response to the “infinite” nature of the universe; “religion” is therefore naturally possessed by all humanity, including “the ancients” and the civilizations of the “iron age.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Over the course of the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, the new idea that all societies naturally possess some sort of “religion” slowly entered European conventional wisdom and became a central element in Christian apologetics.Footnote ⁵¹ The formal Western academic study of “religion,” often dated from the publication of Max Mueller's Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873), defined “religion” as any expression of humanity's innate yearning for God, of which Christianity was considered the highest example.Footnote ⁵² As recent research has shown, however, this Western and Romantic-Christian concept of “religion” did not actually fit most human cultures, and so its universalization led to numerous cases in which imperialists or indigenous elites influentially reshaped indigenous practices to make them reflect Western categories, such as by enforcing greater doctrinal standardization, inventing scripture-based traditions, or by imposing new distinctions between “religious” and “secular” spheres of life.Footnote ⁵³

Thus it was only from the early nineteenth century that radical minorities of Europeans possessed the conceptual equipment to envision a universal age of “religion” giving way to a universal age of non-“religion,” and they actually did so from the 1830s and 1840s.Footnote ⁵⁴ One of the first groups to work within this framework was the Left Hegelians. In a central example, Karl Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843) described “religion” as a system of “illusions,” “the sigh of the oppressed creature,” whose eventual “abolition” was a crucial step on the path toward humanity's “true happiness.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Subsequently, significant numbers of European secularists, Marxists, and rationalists came to understand themselves as having departed from humanity's primordial condition of “religion” and therefore as having achieved historically unprecedented levels of epistemological clear-sightedness.Footnote ⁵⁶ In a separate development, the British freethinker G. J. Holyoake coined the terms Secularist and Secularism in 1851 to refer to a new movement that would invite both “religious” and non-“religious” people into a common attempt to improve the world.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nonetheless, outside Marxism, there was no consensus in Western sociology that religion would permanently diminish in modern societies. In 1848, Auguste Comte had imagined future societies being guided by a “religion of humanity.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1912, Émile Durkheim argued that the sacred is an enduring and necessary feature of human societies, such that the decline of Western Christianity would necessarily provoke the rise of new “gods” and “living cults.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In 1917, Max Weber spoke of “the disenchantment of the world,” but, despite later misunderstandings, he was expressly referring to changes in the sacred's form, not in its power. In modern times, he argued, “The many gods of old, without their magic and therefore in the form of impersonal forces, rise up from their graves, strive for power over our lives, and begin their eternal struggle amongst themselves.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Marxist regimes were founded in Russia in 1917, in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, and in China in 1949. Judging on the basis of headcount, they collectively comprised the twentieth century's most important cause of secularization.Footnote ⁶¹

III

In the British case, however, the “Christian civilization” metanarrative retained its cultural dominance into the mid-1950s, severely inhibiting the proliferation of secularity. This metanarrative held that the British had begun their history as uncivilized “pagans,” but had been slowly “civilized” by Roman imperialism and Christianity, allowing Britain's emergence as a Christian technological colossus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This framework insisted that humans have an innate desire for collective spirituality which causes chaos unless tamed by an orderly “religion,” and it therefore conceptualized any decline of “religion” as a step backward in Western development, as a return to Europe's pre-Christian “barbarism,” as it was called, a regression considered especially catastrophic in societies possessing advanced technology.Footnote ⁶² This “Christian civilization” ideology was especially influential during the Second World War and the early Cold War: the latter conflict, in particular, was routinely framed in British public discussion as a spiritual conflict between the Christian West and a secular Other.Footnote ⁶³ Even in the early 1960s, about 93 percent of the British population identified as Christian, and about another 1 percent as members of non-Christian religions.Footnote ⁶⁴ Conversely, the proportion of those actively defining themselves as belonging to no “religion” was no more than 6 percent and may have been more like 1 or 2 percent: people who publicly attacked Christianity were widely mistrusted in the 1950s, as indeed were atheists in general.Footnote ⁶⁵

This dominance of “Christian civilization” ideology ensured that prior to the mid-1950s, British public discussion did not primarily use secularity's distinction between religious and secular societies. Instead, it predominantly used Christian civilization's distinction between religious and pagan societies, a categorical pairing that distinguished well-ordered collective spiritualities from chaotic and destructive ones. “Beneath all our secondary troubles,” argued a Times leader in 1933, lies “the plain issue of life or death, of Christianity or paganism, that confronts us today.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This pairing was also a frequent feature of ecclesiastical rhetoric, as when the bishop of Winchester identified “the most insidious foe which confronts Christianity” as “the paganism which has been spread through all classes.”Footnote ⁶⁷

This category of paganism is important for cultural historians of British secularization, because prior to the secular revolution it provided the dominant means of describing people who reject all “religion.” As one self-identified pagan complained in 1932, “Many people assumed that a Pagan was synonymous with an agnostic or an atheist.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Because the term pagan evoked European spiritual practices prior to Christianization, this usage expressly denied secularity's claims to modernity, insisting instead that people who reject organized “religion” are less advanced than Christians. Nations that became morally complacent and embraced “the paganism of modern living,” warned the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald in 1927, would surely be ruined, “as Rome was ruined.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Modernist calls for a “new morality,” insisted representatives of the British churches in 1932, were merely “a revival of ancient paganism, which will assuredly be as completely defeated as was its forerunner.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Similarly, the historian Arnold Toynbee argued in 1937, “the really new thing in the world is not Paganism but Christianity. Our modern pagans are unconsciously looking at history in the short perspective of a pre-scientific age.”Footnote ⁷¹

This Christian characterization of secular people as regressive “pagans” carried real bite in the 1930s and 1940s because the same epithet was routinely applied to Nazism, with a view to positioning that ideology as a regression to Europe's pre-Christian Dark Ages.Footnote ⁷² In 1934, for example, the Times commented that Germany was experiencing “a struggle to save Christianity itself from being destroyed in a pagan Nazi Weltanschauung.”Footnote ⁷³ In 1938, the Daily Mirror described the pressure on German clergymen to “salute the Nazi paganism and worship its High Priest of the totalitarian sect.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Similarly, in March 1939, the Sunday Express printed a long profile of “Hitler's pagan priesthood,” declaring that a mortal spiritual struggle was currently being waged between “the church” and “the dictators.”Footnote ⁷⁵ As these quotations suggest, the “Christian civilization” metanarrative made it seem quite natural to characterize twentieth-century geopolitics in terms of competing “religions” and quasi-“religions,” and to classify Nazism and communism as spiritual rivals to Christianity.Footnote ⁷⁶ While British commentators acknowledged the decline of British Christianity, most of them had little sense of any global decline of “religion.”Footnote ⁷⁷

From September 1939, consequently, British discussion routinely framed the Second World War in spiritual terms, arguing that the defeat of Western Christianity at the hands of Nazi “pagans” would necessarily imply the collapse of Western civilization.Footnote ⁷⁸ “We are fighting to preserve Christianity, the Law, and the simple right to live decently,” declared the Daily Mirror in November 1939.Footnote ⁷⁹ “The Battle of Britain is about to begin,” announced Winston Churchill in June 1940. “Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. If we fail, then the whole world . . . will fall into the abyss of a new dark age.”Footnote ⁸⁰ “By common consent we are fighting to uphold the law of CHRIST against the law of paganism and brute force,” concluded the Times in August 1940.Footnote ⁸¹ The Allies, declared the Daily Mail in 1945, were “crusaders against a paganism which threatened to extinguish civilisation.”Footnote ⁸² “Hitler attacked both the Greco-Roman heritage of Europe and its Christian tradition, substituting for them a new paganism in which were combined the worst vices of the worst ages of history,” commented the Manchester Guardian.Footnote ⁸³ In this cultural context, it made perfect sense for the government to call National Days of Prayer for the defeat of Nazi Germany.Footnote ⁸⁴

As long as Britain's “Christian civilization” framework retained its dominance, therefore, the term secularization, when it referred to any general decline of religion, would always be chiefly understood as a regressive phenomenon that would push European civilization backward, into its pre-Christian “Dark Ages.” In 1934, for example, the Daily Mirror discussed the apparent “secularization of life” in Scotland under the headline “Is Scotland Going Pagan?”Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1940, similarly, the Anglican historian Alec Vidler could warn his readers against the “secularization and paganization of society.”Footnote ⁸⁶ By the early 1940s, it had become commonplace for British commentators to tie these tropes together and to identify twentieth-century secularization as a central cause of totalitarianism. In this framework, humanity's innate hunger for meaning ensured that the decline of orderly “religion” had inevitably caused the rise of disorderly ersatz religions such as Nazism. “Hand in hand with secularization,” the Times declared in 1935, commenting on Nazification in Germany, “goes the inculcation of the ‘new religion.’”Footnote ⁸⁷ “If you will not have God,” remarked T. S. Eliot in 1939, “you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Hitler had risen to power by manipulating “the deep religious instincts of his men” insisted the prominent free churchman Leslie Weatherhead in the Daily Express in June 1940: since humans “cannot tolerate . . . meaninglessness,” “when you have dismissed all the Christian values,” “the only religion alive” left was “the religion of the State,” in which “the State is God.”Footnote ⁸⁹ “The secularization of the Western mind has now been going on for generations,” commented a Manchester Guardian reviewer in 1943, “and we are beginning to see some of its results, notably the rise of substitute religions,” such as those of “the race or the class”—that is, Nazism and communism.Footnote ⁹⁰ “The alternative to religion is not irreligion, it is counter-religion,” insisted the historian R. H. Tawney in 1949. “The house which is vacated by Christianity does not remain empty. It is occupied by some form of ‘idolatry.’”Footnote ⁹¹ The decline of “religion,” argued Arnold Toynbee in his 1953 Gifford lectures, had resulted in a “spiritual blank,” and the result was a general search for “new objects of worship”; “distressed” modern civilization, he thought, was “ripe for deifying any new Caesar who might succeed in giving the world unity and peace.”Footnote ⁹² “A completely secular society is already being found to be unworkable,” commented a Times article in 1952. Any society that lacked “ultimate religious sanction” to inspire its citizens would be “compelled to deify itself, erecting its own claims into moral absolutes.”Footnote ⁹³

These rejections of the empirical feasibility of permanently post-ideological societies were also widely echoed by social investigators in this period. “Events in the past two decades,” commented Mass Observation's 1947 Puzzled People report, referring to the rise of Nazism in Germany, “have shown us what crazy, sinister and elaborate structures can be built in minds empty of firm aims and ideals,” which meant that in England “the immediate actions of the established Church are of vital importance to future stabilities.”Footnote ⁹⁴ In 1951 the sociological researchers B. S. Rowntree and G. R. Lavers argued that “we are in fact living on the spiritual capital of the past”; the decline of British Christianity, they feared, might well create a “spiritual vacuum” that would be “filled in the future by an atheistic and totalitarian belief.”Footnote ⁹⁵ In 1953, in their famous discussion of Elizabeth II's coronation, the sociologists Edward Shils and Michael Young reiterated Durkheim's insistence that the sacred is an essential and enduring feature of modern societies.Footnote ⁹⁶ In 1955, the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer's survey of English religion similarly failed to advocate a secularization thesis, offering instead a “paganization thesis,” according to which ordinary Britons, having come adrift from official church teaching, were becoming increasingly interested in ghosts, astrology, and lucky mascots.Footnote ⁹⁷ “The abolition of God [has] left a perceptible void,” commented Aldous Huxley in 1944. “Nation, Class and Party . . . have rushed in to fill the empty niche. For politicians . . . the new pseudo-religions have been, still are and (until they destroy the entire social structure) will continue to be extremely profitable superstitions.”Footnote ⁹⁸ “The old dogmas have perhaps decayed,” observed Bertrand Russell in 1949, “but new dogmas have arisen . . . New dogmas are much worse than old ones.”Footnote ⁹⁹

In the late 1930s and 1940s, consequently, there existed a dominant though not unchallenged consensus that keeping Britain Christian was a necessary part of combating totalitarianism. “Communism, National Socialism and the rest are really religions,” argued the philosopher and university administrator Walter Moberly in a BBC lecture in 1937. “You can only counter a religion by a religion.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In February 1940, in an editorial titled “Religion and National Life” that sold nearly 400,000 copies in pamphlet form in the first twelve days of its publication, the Times expressly placed reversing Christian decline on the same moral level as defeating Hitler. “The healthy life of a nation must be based on spiritual principles,” it argued. “It will be of little use to fight, as we are fighting to-day, for the preservation of Christian principles, if Christianity itself is to have no future, or at immense cost to safeguard religion against attack from without, if we allow it to be starved by neglect from within.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ In 1944, in a deliberate attempt to bolster Britain's “Christian civilization,” the Butler Education Act created a legal obligation for every county and voluntary school in England and Wales to begin the school day with communal worship.Footnote ¹⁰² This institutional attempt to revive British Christianity matched large-scale efforts elsewhere, especially the successful experiments conducted within the US armed forces, which meaningfully strengthened American Christianity in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote ¹⁰³ Implicit in all these efforts was the assumption that the strength of Western Christianity was not dictated by invisible social forces but was a matter for human agency and so could be substantially increased by activism, persuasion, and education.

This insistence on the necessity of defending Western Christianity did not fade after 1945, but was immediately redeployed for Britain's Cold War against the atheistic Soviet Union.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Churchill's “Iron Curtain” speech, given in March 1946, set the tone by attacking communism as “a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilisation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In 1948, his opponent Clement Attlee declared “there is no more urgent need to-day than the reaffirmation of the absolute moral values on which our Christian civilisation is based.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The decline of Western Christianity, argued the Times in the same year, was putting Europe at risk of “infection by the pseudo-religion of Communism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This Cold War rhetoric frequently cast secularity as regressive, as when in 1949 the Times praised the Catholic Church's leading role in “the struggle against Marxian paganism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In 1952, similarly, the British press reported General Eisenhower's attack on “the reactionaries of Communist materialism, violent antagonists to any form of religion,” whose “paganism” would necessarily “return man to a horrible bondage.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In 1955, while serving as foreign secretary, Harold Macmillan similarly called for “the forces of Communism” to be opposed by Christian “moral forces,” which he saw as “really the strongest weapon in the fight for the reconversion of a pagan world, and the recreation of a free and Christian way of living.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ In the same year, conversely, the humanist psychology lecturer Margaret Knight attacked Christianity on BBC radio but was widely condemned in the national press on the grounds that her atheism made Britain more vulnerable to communism.Footnote ¹¹¹ Across the population as a whole, the strength of this “Christian civilization” framework was such that, even in the mid-1960s, pollsters National Opinion Polls and Opinion Research Centre found that 80 percent of respondents considered Britain a Christian country, and 81 percent considered it important that it should remain one.Footnote ¹¹² In a much more restrained but still comparable equivalent of American McCarthyism, Christianity and anticommunism formed crucial intertwined components of British national identity throughout the early and mid-1950s.Footnote ¹¹³ In this early Cold War perspective, “religion” was not regressive: non-“religion” was regressive.

Thus when British Christians commented on the state of the British churches between the 1920s and the mid-1950s, they frequently bemoaned the decline of “religion,” and sometimes used the term secularization to do so, but they did not understand this development to be irreversible, because within their interpretative framework that would have been tantamount to predicting the inevitable disintegration of Western civilization into totalitarianism.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In 1931, for example, the Roman Catholic historian Christopher Dawson argued on BBC radio, “there can . . . be little doubt that the present phase of intense secularization is a temporary one, and that it will be followed by a far-reaching reaction.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ In 1944, the Church of England's Towards the Conversion of England report argued that most Britons were spiritually lost, but also that “man,” being “created for God,” “cannot long exist without finding some outlet for his instinct for worship,” and so Britons could never be irreversibly alienated from Christianity.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In 1955, the outgoing archbishop of York called on Christians to resist “modern paganism,” but concluded by asserting, “there is a deep ground for hope and confidence in the future of our Church.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

Even in the early 1950s, consequently, most of the crucial cultural preconditions for widespread secularization did not exist in Britain. Despite the long-term declines in church attendance and doctrinal knowledge, the dominance of “Christian civilization” ideology still ensured that mainstream British discussion overwhelmingly described itself as Christian, normalized Christianity, and powerfully Othered secularity as irrational, regressive, and pagan.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Since secularity was considered a leading characteristic of the Soviet Union, it would take a dramatic conceptual shift for Cold War Britain to reimagine itself as permanently secular.

IV

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, such a paradigm shift actually happened: British public discussion abruptly abandoned the “Christian civilization” metanarrative in favor of secularity's rival metanarrative, thereby profoundly altering the course of British cultural and social history.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The crux of this shift was the acceptance of secularity's belief in the possibility of permanently post-ideological societies, a belief that the “Christian civilization” framework had always powerfully denied, the protests of radical minorities of secularists, Marxists, and rationalists notwithstanding.Footnote ¹²⁰ This acceptance prompted a dramatic reordering of the ideological binaries with which British discussion categorized world cultures. Christian civilization's distinction between religious and pagan cultures, which denoted different types of collective ideology, was supplanted by secularity's distinction between religious and secular cultures, which classified societies as either ideological or post-ideological.Footnote ¹²¹ A second consequence was that “secular” societies were rehabilitated as normal and permanent entities in the modern world, rather than regressive routes into social pathology and totalitarianism. A third consequence was that religion was reimagined as atypical in the modern world rather than being an intrinsic feature of it, and so Nazism and communism ceased to be considered quasi-religions.Footnote ¹²² A fourth consequence was the acceptance of secularity's philosophical history of secularization, which powerfully normalized mass secularity by backdating its onset to the early nineteenth century.Footnote ¹²³ As a direct result of these developments, British Christianity abruptly lost most of its cultural legitimacy: rather than being interpreted as a necessary bedrock of British society, it was now widely interpreted, even by Christians, as a dying survival from premodernity. This was an astonishing reversal of the previous cultural framework, a transformation so fundamental that it is difficult to understand as anything less than revolutionary.Footnote ¹²⁴ In a development of striking irony, Britain public discussion spent much of the early 1950s demonizing the Soviet Union for its secularity and then, just as the Cold War reached its most dangerous phase, embraced secularity for itself.Footnote ¹²⁵

As would have been natural in a predominantly Christian culture, secularity's ideological beliefs were initially disseminated in the British public sphere chiefly by radical Christians, who took the crucial step of reformulating the Christian categories of “religion,” “the secular,” and “secularization” to express the metanarrative of the end of ideology.Footnote ¹²⁶ In the British context, the first major example of this reformulation was the Anglican clergyman E. R. Wickham's Church and People in an Industrial City (1957), which, as Jeremy Morris has observed, “was widely accepted in the 1960s and 1970s as a decisive intervention” in the field of secularization studies.Footnote ¹²⁷ Drawing on his radical reinterpretation of Christian eschatology, Wickham argued that in modern times God was merging together heaven and earth and that consequently the natural/supernatural distinction was breaking down.Footnote ¹²⁸ The result, he argued, was that “religion” was permanently declining due to the “emergence of a new type of man,” who had “a new structure of thought and a new mode of apprehending reality,” and who was determined to build “a wholly new society.”Footnote ¹²⁹ These futuristic “modern men,” Wickham argued, were post-ideological and “secular,” in the sense that they were using “empirical knowledge” and “science” to create “a new form of society.”Footnote ¹³⁰ This usage of the term “secular” to denote post-ideological humanity relied on a subtle but substantial reworking of older Christian categories. Because Wickham thought that God was inaugurating the end of history in his own era, he believed that Christendom's long-standing partnership between “religion” and “the secular” was now being ended, so that in modern times “the religious and the secular fall apart and cease to co-inhere,” creating two mutually uncomprehending cultures.Footnote ¹³¹ Rather than invoking religion and the secular to indicate the two components of Christendom, consequently, Wickham was using these categories to denote two distinct moral cultures, and to declare his radical Christian loyalty to the latter one.Footnote ¹³² This move allowed him to produce a radical reinterpretation of the decline of the British churches, a phenomenon that had been widely recognized since at least the 1920s.Footnote ¹³³ Rather than interpreting church decline as evidence of Britain's increasing vulnerability to totalitarian ersatz-religions, as had been standard, he interpreted it as evidence of British society's entry into an irreversible new era of post-ideological secularity.Footnote ¹³⁴

Secularity was then vigorously disseminated in Britain's public sphere by radical figures within Britain's churches, who believed that worldwide secularization had been gloriously prophesied by the biblical book of Revelation.Footnote ¹³⁵ The central example is John Robinson, whose international bestseller Honest to God (1963) eventually sold over a million copies, making it the most widely read British work of the 1960s to deal with “secularization.”Footnote ¹³⁶ “Modern man has opted for a secular world,” argued Robinson in his high-profile Observer article: Christians should embrace “glad acceptance of secularisation as a God-given fact.”Footnote ¹³⁷ By mid-1963, the unavoidable dominance of secularity had been essentially conceded by the Anglican hierarchy, with Archbishop Ramsey being willing to characterize the present as a secular age to which Christians must adapt.Footnote ¹³⁸ This was despite the fact that self-reported theists outnumbered self-reported atheists by about eight to one, and 93 percent of the British population still self-identified as Christians.Footnote ¹³⁹

By the mid-1960s, the belief that invisible social forces were irresistibly displacing British Christianity and inaugurating a new “secular society” had become an established commonplace in the British media, often articulated without specific reference to Christian theology, although it was still expressed in the distinctively Christian terminology of religion, the secular, and secularization.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In 1967, for example, the Guardian could comment, “Christianity as such” was “struggling to adapt historical beliefs and attitudes to the needs of human societies at different stages of secularization.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ These ideological beliefs were then influentially reinforced by secular sociologists, especially by Bryan Wilson's Religion in Secular Society (1966), which came out just as the cultural paradigm shift was nearly complete, and which took the categories of religion, the secular society, and secularization almost for granted.Footnote ¹⁴² “Almost overnight,” wrote Simon Green of 1963, it had become “educated common-sense to describe contemporary England as a secular society.”Footnote ¹⁴³ This, it must be emphasized, was a cultural paradigm shift in the absence of dramatic social change: as the revisionist interpretation of Britain's Sixties has now shown, the actual nature of British society altered quite slowly between 1955 and 1965.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Instead, as Jan Bremmer has observed, “The rise of the term [secularization] in the English world is clearly related to the theological debates of the early 1960s.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Nonetheless, now that secularity's beliefs had been widely disseminated, British culture could, for the first time, experience mass secularization.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ During the secular revolution of the 1960s, Britain's cultural elites adapted many aspects of British institutions to the imagined realities of the new post-ideological age, reforming moral legislation to allow greater personal autonomy, privileging secular moral perspectives in the national media, secularizing religious education in schools, and inventing a secular sexual revolution.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Among ordinary British people, by contrast, the enactment of secularization occurred much more slowly. As Brown's work on nonreligionism has shown, the secular revolution transformed the fortunes of nonreligious identities in Britain, but the initial increases occurred from a very low base, from no more than 6 percent during the 1950s to about 15 percent by 2001, with rapid takeoff only thereafter.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The idea that British society was now irreversibly departing from “religion” was also enacted in diverse ways on the personal level. Some felt that the apparent secular age implied adherence to a materialist atheism, some began to identify as “spiritual but not religious,” some felt it implied the pursuit of radical politics, and many continued to identify as Christians but believed that they were henceforth a shrinking minority.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In all cases, though, the embrace of secularity also meant downplaying the religious beliefs of Britain's new Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, and Hindu citizens, either by classifying these citizens in secular racial terms, or else by implicitly regarding them as premodern.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ As Grace Davie's comparative work has shown, while secularity flourished in Western cultures, it did so to a much lesser extent elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁵¹

A final and ironic consequence of Britain's secular revolution was that it embedded secularity's ideological account of its own origins into the British secularization debate.Footnote ¹⁵² Bryan Wilson's Religion in Secular Society (1966) set the parameters of the academic discussion by crystalizing secularity's ideology into two apparently objective claims: (1) secularization represents the irreversible decline of collective ideology, and (2) secularization is caused by the logic of “modernization.”Footnote ¹⁵³ The first claim concealed secularity's cultural inventedness by presenting it as post-ideological neutrality. The second successfully obscured the existence of twentieth-century Christian civilization, and of the abrupt secular revolution that eclipsed it, by retrospectively backdating the onset of mass British secularity to earlier centuries, an error that was not decisively corrected until Brown's Death of Christian Britain (2001), which rightly relocated the central turning point back in the long 1960s.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ More subtly, this second thesis also successfully reinterpreted all the major modern social theorists as secularization theorists, thus making the secularization paradigm appear to be the only mainstream sociological option—this despite the fact that this paradigm had actually been a minority position in Western sociology until the long 1960s, and that this fact was well known in the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Even today, though Wilson's second thesis has been successfully critiqued, his first—that secular societies are irreversibly post-ideological—remains a scholarly commonplace.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ From the 1960s until very recently, British religious historiography internalized secularity's analytical terminology of religion, the secular, and secularization sufficiently thoroughly to remain uninterested in these terms’ historicity, and to ignore the fact that even the term secularization was only occasionally used in classical sociology, whereas it had long been a commonplace term in Christian discussion.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Individual critiques such as those of David Martin and Daniel Bell could do little to dislodge this general cultural consensus.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ It was only from the early 2000s that a combination of wider events, including 9/11, the rise of postsecular multiculturalism, and the postcolonial turn in Western historiography, all began to unsettle secularity's belief that it represents humanity's post-ideological future, thereby making it possible for British historians to write postsecular histories of modern British secularization.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

V

This article has argued that secularity is an ideological culture in its own right and that consequently the historiography of British secularization should be rewritten in terms of the rise of the culture of secularity. Whereas secularity had existed in Britain since the mid-nineteenth century, and whereas British Christianity began its long decline from about 1900, mass British secularization could not occur until the early 1960s, because until then secularity's ideological metanarrative was not widely believed in. On the contrary, the dominance of Britain's “Christian civilization” metanarrative during the Second World War and the early Cold War ensured that permanently post-ideological societies were typically decried as impossible, and secularity demonized as a regressive and unstable route into totalitarianism. It was only in the late 1950s and early 1960s that mainstream British public discussion, influenced by radical new ideologies of modernity, came to accept the secularization metanarrative's declaration of the irreversible rise of the post-ideological society, thereby making secular personal and collective identities newly available for widespread adoption. As with any other cultural revolution, the foundational tenets of Britain's secular revolution needed to be authoritatively disseminated before they could be widely internalized and enacted.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Yet once this internalization had taken place, it was only natural that British historians would conceal secularity's cultural specificity by narrating “secularization” as the automatic and irreversible consequence of the declining social significance of Christianity.

Once secularity is provincialized in this way, it becomes possible to readdress several points of contention in the British secularization debate. First and foremost, this postsecular approach supports Callum Brown's contention that mass British secularization was a revolutionary development originating in the long 1960s by suggesting that scholars who identify widespread British secularization earlier in the century are confusing secularization with Christian decline, which did indeed substantially predate the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Second, by identifying secularity as a specific ideological culture, this postsecular account implies that widespread British secularization must have had primarily cultural causes rather than social ones, being much more a product of changes in dominant metanarratives than of economic conditions, which is why secularization has occurred predominantly in the West rather than in economically developed cultures more generally.Footnote ¹⁶² In particular, this culturalist reading insists that any convincing account of British secularization must identify the specific cultural mechanisms through which secularity's ideology came to be authoritatively disseminated and normalized in Britain. Finally, while this article has not offered a full explanation of the secular revolution of the 1960s, it has suggested that this revolution's underlying beliefs were influentially disseminated and normalized by Christian clergy, who alone in the late 1950s and early 1960s possessed the cultural authority to speak on such controversial moral matters without being decisively marginalized.Footnote ¹⁶³ This suggestion explains why subsequent debates on this subject revolved around the distinctively Christian terminology of secularization, even though this term was only occasionally used in classical sociology.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ It also explains why, as David Martin argued in 1966, the basic teleology assumed by secular accounts of secularization—that history is a linear process in which the religious and the secular initially coexist, but then religion is irreversibly eclipsed by secularity—is a recognizable variation of the basic eschatology assumed by European Christendom—that history is a linear process in which the religious and the secular coexist but are unified at the end of time.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Because the 1960s metanarrative of permanent secularization was initially normalized through a radical reworking of Christian presuppositions, it was quite natural that the 1960s secular revolution occurred chiefly within Christian cultures or in cultures deeply affected by the assumptions of the newly secularizing Christian West.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Most fundamentally, this account suggests that long-term disenchantment has never actually happened and that during the 1960s many Western cultures simply became enchanted with the idea that they, unlike all previous cultures, were entering a new age of unprecedented disenchantment.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ On this view, the contest between “Christian civilization” and secularity in 1960s Britain was not a struggle of enchantment against disenchantment but of two rival enchantments against each other. As Durkheim persuasively observed in 1912, it does seem as though human societies need a dominant collective ideology to create social cohesion; if that ideology collapses, the result is not the creation of a secular society but the disintegration of society into competing ideological factions.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ For these reasons, the secular model of secularization, which implies that Western secularity societies have indeed escaped collective ideology, must be regarded a powerful ethnocentric mythology, which, by abruptly entering British common sense in the early 1960s, itself changed the course of British history by successfully normalizing British secularity. On this view, Martin's 1965 critique of the concept of secularization was correct: it was indeed “less a scientific concept than a tool of counter-religious ideologies.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The irony was that this reality went unrecognized precisely because secularity's claims to post-ideological neutrality were so widely believed. But if British historiography is serious about unmasking its own ethnocentricity, it must treat secularity as an invented culture, whose distinctive concepts and metanarrative possess no automatic claim to intellectual authority. Though secular cultures might dream of effecting an escape from history, a genuinely non-Eurocentric perspective must grapple with the possibility that they are still trapped inside it.Footnote ¹⁷⁰