In March 1969, six years after he had left 10 Downing Street, Harold Macmillan visited Archbishop Tenison's Grammar School in south London to open a new building. In his speech for the occasion, Macmillan encouraged his listeners to protect church schools to the “bitter end.” “Children should have an opportunity to be brought up in an atmosphere that we had,” he went on, “that had something precious in it; and in which consciously or unconsciously, they could absorb the traditions of Christian life and civilization.” Macmillan was concerned as he watched the ebbing of the country's Christian cultural consensus. If English children were brought up with no knowledge of Christianity, he believed, the future would be one of “moral and intellectual nihilism.”Footnote ¹

Press coverage of the enthronement of Geoffrey Fisher as archbishop of Canterbury in April 1945 was very different. Most assumed that England was still a Christian community. The Manchester Guardian quoted Fisher's desire for the “Church and nation [to] stand together under God to do their interrelated duty.”Footnote ² The Economist was confident that “the nation [would] look eagerly to him for . . . religious and social leadership.Footnote ³ An article in the Spectator said that many were looking to Canterbury “to see there the clearest expression not simply of England and its ideals but of the fundamental faith that has inspired them.” “No people in the modern world,” it went on, “has been so deeply affected by Christian ideas and institutions as have the English.”Footnote ⁴

These sources illustrate one aspect of the secularization of Britain after the Second World War, namely the declining purchase of the idea that England was a Christian nation.Footnote ⁵ This article examines the change and some of the reasons for it. In particular, it explores the decline of England's Christian identity in the contexts of declining British power and increasing immigration to Britain from the Commonwealth. The article thus brings together two parts of the historiography of postwar Britain: the study of religious change, in particular the reasons for the declining social significance of Christianity, and the growing literature on the impact of the end of empire and Commonwealth immigration on British society.Footnote ⁶ The argument is that these international contexts are essential for understanding secularization in Britain.

Britain's belief in its own greatness and its religion had long been intertwined, certainly since the sixteenth century, and arguably before.Footnote ⁷ Protestantism was crucial for the forging of British national identity during the centuries of Britain's imperial expansion.Footnote ⁸ In the nineteenth century, it was common to attribute British expansion and dominance to divine providence. By the time of the First World War, the country's Protestant identity had largely disappeared outside of Ulster, but it was still common to portray England as Christian throughout the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹ After the Second World War, however, this began to change. People spoke less and less about Britain as a Christian nation. The notion that Britain was favored by God would disappear almost entirely, as would the idea that the country had a God-given duty to civilize others. This happened at the same time that Britain's reduced global power was becoming obvious, seen especially in the dismantling of its empire. It also coincided with the increase of non-white immigration.

For years, social historians dominated the discussion of secularization in Britain. More recently, however, cultural and intellectual historians have enhanced our understanding of the phenomenon by focusing on the discourses that undergirded Christian faith and practice. An emphasis on the importance of discourse has been a major contribution of the work of Callum Brown, who has argued that churchgoing declined in Britain in the 1960s as cultural change severed the links between femininity and religious piety.Footnote ¹⁰ Brown's emphasis on gender has been refreshing for debates about secularization, but Hugh McLeod and others have rightly argued that Brown places too great an explanatory burden on this single factor.Footnote ¹¹ The present article suggests that the related beliefs that Britain was great and that it was a Christian country shaped a discourse that helped legitimate Christian belief and churchgoing; and that the demise of this discourse undermined public and private expressions of Christian faith. Although the current argument is designed to stand alongside Brown's, not replace it, one of the article's conclusions is that a focus on the international context of England's religious experience has advantages over gender in explaining the particular trajectory of English, and indeed European, Christianity after the Second World War vis-à-vis the experience of the United States.

This article also extends the arguments of Matthew Grimley, who has studied ideas of the nation as a Christian community in interwar England. Grimley pays special attention to intellectual trends at a political and elite level, and argues that Anglican leaders were able to persuade many of the idea of a national moral community. He describes Christianity as England's civil religion and shows its widespread significance for political and intellectual debate. Grimley focuses on social policy, social welfare, and ecclesiastical conceptions of England as a Christian society.Footnote ¹² By contrast, this article's focus on Britain's international relations draws attention to more populist, patriotic ideas of Christian nationhood grounded in the belief that God favored Britain. Grimley's analysis takes the story up to 1945; this article looks at the difficulties faced by civil Christianity in the following decades.

The article also looks at how political and religious leaders communicated their ideas to a wider audience, through Parliament and the press. As they did so, they typically spoke of “Britain,” not “England.” This article considers Scottish and Welsh newspapers, but its emphasis is on the English press and English conceptions of English/British identity. Conflating English and British national identity was common in England during this period, and it was still very evident when Margaret Thatcher addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1988 (a speech that will be discussed later). In addition, the evidence suggests that after the Second World War the printed use of the language of Christian nationhood was more common in England than in Scotland and Wales. In Scotland, fears of Anglican imperialism tempered enthusiastic declarations of loyalty to the idea of national community, while the disestablishment of the Anglican church in Wales and the weakening of Welsh Nonconformity had a similar effect.Footnote ¹³ Again, although this article is concerned primarily with England, the messiness of contemporary conceptions of nationhood and the international focus, where England did not act alone, means that the terms Britain and British will also be used.

Finally, the article focuses especially but not exclusively on the elites who identified with the Conservative party and the Church of England. Members of other parties said that theirs was a Christian country whose idea was tied most closely during this period to the Conservative party, especially when Britain's international role was in view. The Conservatives' decision to tone down talk of Christian Britain was critical for the sharp decline in its usage—a change that helps explain why the party of Thatcher looked so different from that of Balfour. The focus on the Church of England is in part a function of the emphasis on Conservatives, given the connections between that party and the established church. This focus also reflects the ability of Anglican leaders to continue to win a hearing at a time when the declining social significance of religion meant that leaders of other denominations were finding it more difficult to do so. Anglican archbishops, bishops, and priests were more likely to speak up on matters of national importance because of their conviction that they played a special role as ministers of England's established church.

The first of the four sections of this article provides evidence of the continued use of the language of Christian Britain after the end of the Second World War. The second section looks at several developments between the early 1950s and the early 1960s that were connected with the end of empire and that made it much harder for English politicians, journalists and others to use this language. Debates over race and immigration were critical here. The third section discusses the vestigial sense of Christian national identity. The fourth offers several conclusions.

Changes in Britain's international situation were not decisive for the secularization of England after the Second World War.Footnote ¹⁴ However, the postcolonial context is an important part of the explanation for changes in English religious culture and therefore practice, and deserves more attention.

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Four months before the end of the war in Europe, Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons on the fate of the soon-to-be vanquished foes. “I am clear,” he said,

As Paul Addison has argued, Churchill was not a Christian on “any strict reckoning,” yet his romantic, Whiggish sensibilities made it easy for him to see his country as a Christian one during the Second World War.Footnote ¹⁶ Hitler appeared to be evil incarnate, and Britain was doing God's work by fighting him. Churchill had a strong sense of the guiding hand of divine providence during the conflict.Footnote ¹⁷ Many shared these beliefs, and thus the idea of England as a Christian nation was strong during wartime. After Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, historians and other public intellectuals declared that England was under the providential hand of God.Footnote ¹⁸ The majority of the public agreed.Footnote ¹⁹

When victory came, the press celebrated with the biblical language of salvation and providence. A leading article in the Daily Telegraph said that “the deliverance was so miraculous that we must, in all humility, feel that it owed something to more than human effort” and went on to quote Psalm 127:1: “Except the Lord keep the city, they labour in vain that build it.”Footnote ²⁰ The Economist made England the beneficiary of words from the Hebrew Bible intended for God's people, the Israelites, saying, “‘Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished and that her iniquity is pardoned.”Footnote ²¹ The Scotsman published a new poem by Charles Richard Cammell, entitled “Scotland's Ode to Victory,” in which Scotland stood by England and others as “th'Almighty's sword of Justice.”Footnote ²² Cardiff's Western Mail spoke of judgment and hell: all the “heathen idols whose oracle [Hitler] claimed to be” were now “flung into the pit with him.”Footnote ²³ The Times, after quoting King Alfred's “it is a divine purpose that rules, not fate,” ended its VE Day leading article with words from Psalm 115: “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give the praise: for thy loving mercy, and for thy truth's sake.”Footnote ²⁴ After VJ Day, Clement Attlee attributed Britain's victory to divine providence.Footnote ²⁵

People continued to use this sort of language after the hostilities were over. “A free and Christian country” had duties to India, Asia, and Germany, declared a leading article in The Times in 1946.Footnote ²⁶ In 1948, the London Evening Standard applauded the pro-British speeches of Richard Casey, the leader of the Australian Liberal Party, calling them a “clarion” to a nation made strong by God's providence.Footnote ²⁷ That same year, Sir Stafford Cripps, the Labour government's chancellor of the exchequer, spoke of the “free and progressive democracy which has grown to be the symbol of our country's Christian civilisation,” while William Haley, the director general of the BBC, called Britain a “Christian country,” and affirmed the corporation's commitment to “safeguard” Christian values and “foster acceptance of them.”Footnote ²⁸ After an orphanage scandal one journalist stressed that most homes were characterized by kindness and care—something that people had a right to expect in “Christian, civilised Britain.”Footnote ²⁹ In 1953, Harold Macmillan called the housing problem “a great challenge to a Christian nation.”Footnote ³⁰ “If history has any meaning,” wrote Lord Elton in 1957, “(and who can doubt that it has?) we must believe that we were permitted to survive because in God's mysterious providence some great task awaited us in the post-war age.”Footnote ³¹ The idea that Britain was a Christian country was plausible and popular after the Second World War.Footnote ³²

This was true despite the fact that the majority of English people during this period seldom went to church. Easter communicants in the Church of England hovered between four and five percent of the population in the 1950s, and other denominations were doing no better.Footnote ³³ Evidence suggests, however, that people saw no necessary contradiction between the belief that their country was Christian and a lack of personal religious enthusiasm. Two letters to the Daily Mirror in 1947 make the point. The first came from an ex-serviceman in Camden Town, who was concerned about starving children in Germany. He declared that he was not a churchgoer, but wondered whether “the Christian teaching of ‘Love your enemy’ might not be just sound sense.” “Since we're supposed to be a Christian nation,” he went on, “what about trying it?” The appeal was to a broadly shared sense of Christian identity and morality that did not depend on religious observance.Footnote ³⁴ The second letter was from a man in Hampshire who declared himself “a plain Christian,” “not the son of a parson or a Hyde Park Bible thumper.” But he believed that “until the nation, and every statesman and citizen, gets back to God, we are doomed to a worse state of affairs.” The Old Testament imagery of a nation that has departed from God's ways and will be judged if it fails to return is striking.Footnote ³⁵ The idea of the nation as a Christian community was one that could unite most of the population, from the Hyde Park preacher to the person who never sang a hymn but cared about right and wrong.

This does not mean, however, that public religion in England was devoid of doctrinal content and vague. At Christmas and Easter, newspaper editors regularly ran leading articles with strong, Christian content. At Easter 1946, the Times saw civilization as in the balance, yet proclaimed that “the faith lives on, and once again after many days may yet shake the nations, humbling them under the mighty judgment of God.”Footnote ³⁶ In 1949, the Daily Express affirmed the truth of the resurrection.Footnote ³⁷ In 1953, the paper described the crucifixion as “the terrible price paid by our Lord to save . . . souls.”Footnote ³⁸ Some leading articles quoted extended parts of the Christmas and Easter narratives.Footnote ³⁹ Others were notable for their insistence on the historical truth behind the celebrations. Footnote ⁴⁰ Civil religion was not just a vapid gloss for patriotism. The papers were not filled with worship at these times of the year: Easter in particular was often ignored apart from reports on the holiday's weather and travel conditions, especially in the local press.Footnote ⁴¹ Journalists also recognized that many no longer believed the stories and that most did not go regularly to church.Footnote ⁴² Nevertheless, a tone of reverence and faith was typical in the decade after the Second World War in a way that was not the case thereafter. Newspapers did not publish on Good Friday throughout the period.

An event that generated many heartfelt expressions of Christian Britain was the queen's coronation in 1953. The Times, for example, hoped for a new Elizabethan age, with “Christian values re-established, morals reasserted, conscientiousness revived, energy renewed, and national unity restored.”Footnote ⁴³ The Western Mail told its readers that divine providence was placing the destiny of Britain into the young queen's hands.Footnote ⁴⁴ Coronations functioned as national re-consecrations of “the people and their sovereign under divine providence.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In the words of Philip Williamson, “the monarch's religion was regarded as standing for that of the whole nation.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The lavish attention given to the queen's coronation in Westminster Abbey thus encouraged people to see their nation in Christian terms.

More important than the Coronation, however, was the Cold War. People regularly portrayed it as a struggle between Christian, western civilization and atheistic Communism in which England had an important part to play. This was Churchill's understanding of the postwar world, in which Britain and the United States needed to stand together against the threat from Moscow. “There still remain forces in our island,” he said in an election broadcast in 1950, “that can bring back all our true glories and lift our people once again to the vanguard of Christian civilization to revive and save the world.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In a leading article in 1948, the Daily Mail portrayed Christian Europe as threatened by Marxists, putting its hope in “the Christian spirit, which has always in the end conquered against the power of evil.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Field Marshal Montgomery declared that as a Christian soldier he was an enemy of Communism.Footnote ⁴⁹ “Humanity must decide between a Christian civilisation or a dark age of indefinite tyranny,” wrote a correspondent for the Picture Post.Footnote ⁵⁰ In a leading article on January 1, 1951, entitled “Mid-century,” the Times depicted a battle between those “who declare that the order of society is determined by the blind forces controlling its material environment and means of livelihood” and “the heirs of Christian civilization.”Footnote ⁵¹ According to the Daily Telegraph, the Hungarian uprising of 1956 showed that “atheistic Communism [had] quite failed to stamp out the message of Bethlehem,” claiming that “for the first time for many years, Communism rather than Christianity is on the defensive.”Footnote ⁵² There was more to this than civil-religion rhetoric: “There can be no Christian civilization without Christian belief,” said one journalist at the time.Footnote ⁵³ In a Saint George's Day sermon, Archbishop of York Michael Ramsey spoke of Russia as the “pagan enemy” yet said that England could not “expect the virtues of St. George to flourish and the civilization of which he is the symbol to prosper unless the religion of St. George flourishes as their foundation.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Historians have argued that the Cold War helps to explain the mild religious revival that took place in Britain in the early to mid-1950s, but the Cold War also contributed to the concurrent revival of the Conservatives, who had long tied Christianity to Britain's role in the world.Footnote ⁵⁵ Harriet Jones, for example, has pointed out how the Cold War and the resultant increased influence of the United States in England helped to reinvigorate the liberal economic ideas of the Conservative party. There was a corollary to this on a religious level as Conservatives piggybacked on America's religious justifications for the conflict by re-emphasizing the links between Christianity and British power.Footnote ⁵⁶

Some public voices found the nuclear standoff between East and West anything but Christian. Some of them too, however, used Christian language and appealed to Britain's Christian nationhood in order to advance the cause of nuclear disarmament. Trevor Huddleston, an English priest who had made his name as an opponent of apartheid in South Africa, said that as a Christian country England “must rely upon different weapons altogether.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In Parliament, the Welsh Labour politician Emrys Hughes called Britain a “great Christian nation” and asked “Where is the Christianity when there is talk about organising this nation for the horrors of atomic war?”Footnote ⁵⁸ From both left and right, then, national leaders framed their response to Communism around the idea of a Christian national community.

Public intellectuals also portrayed their country as Christian. Herbert Butterfield, a Cambridge historian who was master of Peterhouse and the regius professor of modern history, is best known for his critique of the Whig interpretation of history. Yet after the Second World War he developed an understanding of the West that had a Whiggish tinge. In lectures given in Toronto in 1952, he drew strong connections between individualism, the West, liberty, and Christianity. Secular and socialist societies could lay claim to many great achievements, but they were typically building on Christian foundations.Footnote ⁵⁹ Even among sceptics Christianity had a leavening influence.Footnote ⁶⁰ Arnold J. Toynbee taught history at the London School of Economics and was most famous for his twelve-volume A Study of History. Like Butterfield, Toynbee recognized that England was less Christian than it once was. In his 1952 Reith Lectures on the BBC, he said that the West was now in “what one might call a ‘post-Christian’ phase of its history.”Footnote ⁶¹ Yet when challenged in the Times by the Roman Catholic historian Douglas Jerrold, who argued that England was “still predominantly a Christian country,” Toynbee made it clear that he did not believe that Britain had left its Christian moorings altogether or irrevocably.Footnote ⁶² Toynbee wanted to see the governments of countries such as Britain and the United States adopt a posture of humility. They had fallen short of Christian ideals and should act like the penitent publican, not the proud pharisee.Footnote ⁶³ Martin Wright, another historian at the London School of Economics defended his colleague, saying that it was ridiculous to suggest that Toynbee was against the Christian idea of society.Footnote ⁶⁴ Toynbee was critical of the West, and resisted those who wanted to claim Christianity in particular for that one part of the world. But he spoke more like a prophet calling Britain back to the Christian way than a herald of a secular age. Both Butterfield and Toynbee saw problems with simple statements that England was a Christian nation, yet both saw their country's religious heritage as present and precious. Other intellectuals, including A. J. Ayer and A. J. P. Taylor, were less sympathetic to Christianity, but the voices of Butterfield, Toynbee, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and others ensured that the faith maintained its privileged place in English public discourse.Footnote ⁶⁵

Butterfield and Toynbee were not alone in the recognition that England's claim to be a Christian country was losing its plausibility. Newspaper editors acknowledged that churchgoing was not what it had been and that much Christianity was nominal in nature.Footnote ⁶⁶ Some people said the country was no longer Christian, although it was unusual to find that idea in editorial columns or parliament in the 1950s.Footnote ⁶⁷ There were changes taking place that undermined the idea that Britain was Christian, including the end of mandatory religious observance for members of the armed forces in 1946.Footnote ⁶⁸ James Hinton's micro-study of nine people during the Second World War points to the declining hold of Christianity on the populace.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nevertheless, the evidence shows that ideas of Christian nationhood and the encouragement of public piety were still very present in the decade after the Second World War. Hugh McLeod has argued that the idea that Britain was a Christian country became problematic after 1945, but in England the balance of public discourse did not tilt decisively in that direction until the late 1950s and early 1960s.Footnote ⁷⁰ People still portrayed Britain as Christian and did so in language that was theologically robust and that reflected the belief that Britain still had godly work to do in the world. Rodney Barker has argued that 1945 was not the major turning point for British politics that it is sometimes seen to be.Footnote ⁷¹ Nor was that year a significant turning point for ideas of Christian nationhood.

One other dimension of English self-understanding after the Second World War that was important for its Christian identity was Britain's relationship to the Commonwealth. In contrast to the coronation, the Cold War, and Christmas, however, the Commonwealth was a much more complicated site for the discussion of Christianity and nationhood. Indeed, in the Commonwealth lay some of the causes of the decline of Christian England.

On the one hand, the Commonwealth buttressed the idea of England as a Christian community by giving substance to the idea that it was a country with a global mission. People still talked about England's duty to civilize Africa.Footnote ⁷² In 1945, Lord Elton pictured the colonies as toddlers growing up under Britain's generous care, “standing ‘always a little more securely on their own feet.’”Footnote ⁷³ Important here, for Conservatives especially, was the influence of Lionel Curtis, a British official whose monumental Civitas Dei gave a picture of an international commonwealth, grounded in Christ, that would bring peace to the earth.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Commonwealth may not have fulfilled all the hopes of its early days, but it was an important part of British self-understanding after the Second World War. Andrew Thompson has shown that the results of the 1948 Colonial Office survey, which are often quoted as evidence of the British population's ignorance of empire, are misleading. The statistic that only half of a survey group in 1948 was able to name a colony hides the fact that many named a dominion instead. Sixty-seven percent had heard of the groundnut scheme in East Africa and there was strong public awareness of the Hola Camp brutalities in Kenya in 1959.Footnote ⁷⁵ The country's leaders certainly knew and cared about Commonwealth affairs. The Commonwealth was at the center of the strategies adopted by both Labour and Conservative governments to maintain Britain's world power. Subsequent decline should not blind us to the fact that Britain was still a great power in 1945 and planned to remain so.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Commonwealth meant the country could claim influence throughout the world.

However, the Commonwealth also undermined the Christian national identity of Britain. For while empire and Christianity had often gone hand in hand, and while the Manchester Guardian was able to remark on the contribution of missionaries at the independence of Ghana in 1957 and Uganda in 1962, much of the language used for the Commonwealth after 1945 emphasized its diversity in ways that made it awkward to hold on to the idea of Christian Britain.Footnote ⁷⁷

Britain's position in the United Nations offers a useful perspective on this tension. One of the primary commitments of the United Nations from the mid-1950s was multiracialism. Britain was an object of suspicion at the United Nations because of her continuing possession of colonies, but the growing concern for global harmony between different peoples allowed Britain to present the Commonwealth as a functioning multiracial fellowship, a model for the United Nations to follow. This was not merely a front: Britain had long experience with religious diversity in the empire, and a degree of tolerance was necessary for British rule to succeed.Footnote ⁷⁸ In addition, British leaders had already been working towards multiracialism since the Second World War, when it had been necessary to convince American leaders that the war was not about preserving Britain's huge empire.Footnote ⁷⁹ A vision for multiracialism was therefore working its way into public discourse by the postwar period: so in 1949, the Times told its readers that the members of the Commonwealth had shown “that great Hindu and Muslim countries can be united with Christian democracies in a common bond.”Footnote ⁸⁰

At the Empire Youth Sunday service at Saint Paul's Cathedral in 1953, the bishop of Adelaide sought to fuse the ideas of multiracialism and divine favor to the British peoples. He said:

As inspiring as this vision may have sounded, it would not retain its plausibility. Increasing non-Christian immigration to Britain meant that within a decade the multiracial and multi-religious Commonwealth threatened the very idea of Christian Britain. This was just one of several developments in Britain's international relations that did so, developments that are the subject of the next section.

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By the early 1960s it was less common to read about England's Christian national identity in newspapers or hear about it in Parliament. The reasons are complex, but the shift happened before the liberalizing legislation of the late 1960s and before church attendance went into free fall.Footnote ⁸² This section explains the shift with reference to a series of changes in Britain's international role and relations, all of which made it more difficult for people to talk of Christian Britain. The three developments were the decline in Conservative paternalism, the problems posed by Britain's relations with European settlers in Africa, and debates over immigration to England.

The language of Christian national identity was not the preserve of one particular party. It was, however, most popular among Conservatives. It appeared more in the Times and the Daily Express than in the Manchester Guardian or the Daily Mirror. The association of the Tory party and the Church of England dated back to the seventeenth century and was still strong in the twentieth. Many Conservatives believed some version of the idea that Britain had been blessed with global power and responsibilities by divine providence. During the interwar period, the Conservative party had plausibly claimed to represent the nation, portraying themselves as loyal to the nation and the Union Jack and the Labour party as more interested in the Red Flag.Footnote ⁸³ Although the Liberal party had often been the champion of empire in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth the Conservatives filled that role.Footnote ⁸⁴ Winston Churchill, for example, was one of the die-hards who had refused to contemplate self-government for India in the 1930s, and the 1947 party conference had “no shortage of motions calling upon the Conservatives to reaffirm themselves as ‘the great imperial party.’”Footnote ⁸⁵ Empire and religion were also central to the Conservatives' appeal in Scotland during this period.Footnote ⁸⁶

Both at home and abroad, Conservatives were still paternalists.Footnote ⁸⁷ They believed that different classes and nations were at varying points on the path to civilization, which was defined by England's elites.Footnote ⁸⁸ Their Christian duty was to lead people along the path. After the Second World War, one example of the Conservatives' commitment to empire was their links to British settler populations in Kenya and the Central African Federation of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland.Footnote ⁸⁹ British Conservatives and settlers alike believed that Africans needed European help, just as they believed that Britain's working classes needed a benevolent hand from their superiors.

After 1945, however, this way of seeing the world began to falter. Some of the difficulty came from the party's historic ally, the Church of England, whose leaders were drifting away from Toryism. The difference between the first two post-war archbishops of Canterbury illuminates the change. Geoffrey Fisher, former headmaster of Repton School, was an old-school Conservative, committed to the establishment, confident he belonged to it, and apparently willing to speak to cabinet ministers as if they were schoolboys.Footnote ⁹⁰ Michael Ramsey, who succeeded Fisher in 1961, was the son of a nonconformist and more liberally inclined. While Fisher had celebrated the union of church and state at his enthronement service, Ramsey called for the church to have greater freedom from the state. A leading article in the Daily Telegraph remarked that this was almost a threat to the government.Footnote ⁹¹ The relationship between church and state, which Edmund Burke had seen as so important to a healthy country and which was one of the pillars of Christian paternalism, was weakening. Ramsey of course wanted Christianity to flourish in England, but his vision for England as a Christian society emphasized kindness towards those outside the bounds of traditional Christian morality and belief.Footnote ⁹² That vision did not lend itself to loud pronouncements about Christian England.

There was also a growing chorus of opposition to sanctified, imperial noblesse oblige. Some said the empire had been more about taking than giving, with Muriel Nichol, the Labour MP for Bradford, striking a sour note in the self-congratulatory Commons debate on the Indian Independence Bill by saying that Britain had exploited India.Footnote ⁹³ Christians on the left were becoming more vocal in their irritation, including the left-leaning canon of Saint Paul's Cathedral, John Collins, who wrote to the Spectator in 1955 to complain about those who looked upon Africans “paternalistically.”Footnote ⁹⁴ There was also a growing number of African and Asian voices that said Britain's belief in its own kindness was a delusion. In 1954, a Nigerian student was quoted in the Times saying that “British people are not Christian at all . . . and they treat colonial students in a most unchristian manner.”Footnote ⁹⁵ A South Asian doctor wrote a sharp letter to the Manchester Guardian in 1956 complaining about how the English, who had a “tendency to patronise others,” had treated him.Footnote ⁹⁶ Such criticism was becoming more prevalent by the mid-1950s and it undermined paternalism.

Worse was to come. Paternalist convictions were further wounded by the Conservative government's handling of the 1956 Suez crisis. The Daily Telegraph was bullish at the start of the invasion of Port Said in October, saying that Britain should not have to wait on the United States before it did anything. But the subsequent reprimand in the United Nations and fierce economic squeeze by the United States laid bare Britain's dependence on America.Footnote ⁹⁷ The following month, the paper admitted that Britain had suffered “a grievous reverse.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Some had seen it coming, including the Manchester Guardian, whose leading article two days after the invasion ran under the title “Humiliation.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The Economist was even more incisive. Its first leader after the invasion was entitled “Splenetic Isolation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Two weeks later, it commented: “We cannot, as we should now know, go it alone. It is no answer to say that, if the Americans will not act, we will act without them; we cannot. . . . We must learn that we are not the Americans' equals now, and cannot be. We have a right to state our minimum national interests and expect the Americans to respect them. But, that done, we must look for their lead.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ After a hundred Conservative MPs put down a motion of censure against the United States two weeks later, the paper's staff wrote of “Britain's inferiority complex, arising from its diminished imperial present.”Footnote ¹⁰² Suez was not quite an emperor-has-no-clothes moment, but it was revealing and humiliating nonetheless. John Ramsden has pointed out the irony that what started as “Britain's most extensive post-war military action to preserve imperial heritage may have had a considerable—if unacknowledged—influence on Conservative opinion about the subsequent speed of decolonisation. After 1956, there were few Tories who wanted to stand and fight for the preservation of the colonies”—even though they may have been dismayed at the pace of change.Footnote ¹⁰³

What is most important for this article is not the geopolitical ramifications but the damage the Suez crisis and then decolonization did to the confidence of Conservative politicians. Suez and decolonization were enormous blows to Britain's stature. Ronald Hyam has argued that decolonization was a way to retain prestige as colonies became a liability to the country's reputation after 1945, but this does not mean that losing them did not hurt.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As Stuart Ward has pointed out, “Notions of duty, service, loyalty, deference, stoic endurance, self-restraint and gentlemanly conduct were insidiously undermined by the steady erosion of the imperial edifice.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Or, as the young journalist Peregrine Worsthorne put it at the time,

One should not push this too far: Bernard Porter has made a persuasive argument that the empire affected Britain less than one might suppose. Porter does, however, say that it had a major impact on the country's ruling class, the very people that Worsthorne was addressing.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ For them at least, the end of empire made it harder to believe, and harder to tell others, that God was on England's side. In Jon Lawrence's words, Suez was the moment when “British political leaders finally lost confidence in their ability to proclaim the pieties of public religion to the masses.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In reality, the change was surely more gradual, but talk of Britain as a Christian nation in the press started to become more rare from the mid-1950s, which was not only the moment of the Suez crisis but the time that Britain's empire began steadily to decrease in size.

The second challenge to ideas of Christian nationhood came from white settler populations in Africa. Their own paternalism made them natural friends of Conservatives in Britain, but after 1945 they became an embarrassment. The problems began in the British Dominion of South Africa in 1948, when the National Party won an election and began to implement a policy of apartheid. South Africa soon became an international pariah. Britain's reluctance to join the United Nations' condemnations of apartheid made life very difficult for the country's diplomats in New York.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ South Africa's racial policies also made her friendship a liability in the Cold War. As the Conservative MP Quintin Hogg put it in 1950: “Our long-run future depends on the confidence with which we are regarded by Africans. The future of our civilisation and religion very largely depends upon the extent to which we can carry these people with us in the fight against Communism.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Once African states became independent and began to criticize South Africa, this problem became acute. Files from Harold Macmillan's office, for example, show the government carefully tracking African responses to the shootings in Sharpeville, South Africa, in 1960, with news of boycotts in Ghana, assembly debates on the topic in Nigeria, and a telegram from the governor general of the West Indies.Footnote ¹¹¹ It was becoming harder to believe, and to assert, that the Europeans were the enlightened, benevolent ones in Africa.

Apartheid and white settler governments also posed a challenge to England's Christian identity. The difficulty was that South Africa and, later, Southern Rhodesia loudly proclaimed the Christian nature of their states. Their words were in line with old, Conservative verities, but with the international spotlight on these countries' repressive behavior the words seemed hypocritical at best.Footnote ¹¹² In a widely reported speech in 1952, Daniel Malan, the South African prime minister, spoke of the white South African's duty to “maintain Western European Christian civilisation in the Union.” He said that the decision to give more political freedom to the Gold Coast was “disastrous.” “How,” he asked, “can illiterate people with so little civilization and so little knowledge carry the responsibility of governing themselves democratically? It cannot be done. Ultimately it will lead to dictatorship or a return to barbarism.” Footnote ¹¹³ A year later, he was quoted in the Times as saying that his country was a Christian one.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Malan also thanked God that the British and Dutch settlers in South Africa had remained “a white, civilized, and Christian people.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ At the same time, Hendrik Verwoerd, minister for native affairs and later prime minister, accused his political opponents of being “disloyal to the true spirit of western Christian civilization.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ The preservation of Christian civilization was a central part of the stated rationale for apartheid. Meanwhile, Kenyan settlers asked the British government for assurances that “the British people will remain in East Africa as builders of Christian civilization.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Southern Rhodesia's leader, Ian Smith, was determined “to preserve our country and the Christian civilization we have built here.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ J. G. A. Pocock has argued that people need to take up the language available to them as they make their arguments.Footnote ¹¹⁹ By the mid-1950s, whites in Africa were making the language of Christian civilization and Christian nationhood toxic. Politicians, journalists, and other opinion formers in England therefore used it less as South Africa in particular became the focus of widespread public contempt.Footnote ¹²⁰ Again, developments overseas helped to shape the religious culture of Britain.

The third development that contributed to the decline in the language of Christian national identity was increased immigration to Britain, especially from India and Pakistan. The link seems obvious: Britain was becoming more religiously diverse because of new residents from the Indian subcontinent in particular, making it more difficult to conceive of or talk about Britain as a Christian country. For example, Hugh McLeod has noted the impact of non-Christian immigration on religious education syllabuses.Footnote ¹²¹ However, the reality was more complicated. Protestantism had been part of British national identity at a time when there was a significant Roman Catholic minority, and so it is conceivable that Britain could have continued to proclaim England as Christian even with the growing number of Hindus and Muslims who lived there. It was the connection between the newcomers' skin color and their religion that made the idea of Christian England extraordinarily difficult to maintain.

This can be seen in the debates over the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. In 1961, R. A. Butler, the Conservative home secretary, introduced a bill to Parliament designed to limit immigration to the United Kingdom. The resultant Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 was the first postwar restriction of entry into the country. Up to this point, both parties had argued that controls would undermine the Commonwealth, whose citizens all had a right to abode in the mother country. Why did this change? Kathleen Paul has argued that racist policy-making elites not only introduced the legislation but also stirred up popular sentiment against the growing non-white communities.Footnote ¹²² Randall Hansen has criticized Paul, defending the politicians who said that control was necessary and saying that what was surprising was the lack of controls before.Footnote ¹²³ Other factors were also important. Britain's declining power played a part: with the empire disappearing fast, the Commonwealth connections that had been used to defend immigration seemed less important. There was also the fear that Britain would have the sort of race riots that had been affecting the United States and South Africa. The British press gave extensive coverage to the mobs in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the Sharpeville shootings, and the 1958 race riots in Notting Hill and Nottingham had shown that Britain was not immune.Footnote ¹²⁴ Parliament discussed immigration just a few months after these riots. Nigel Fisher, who opposed restrictions, nevertheless said that the country faced the “same ugly, frightening, primitive emotions,” and said that Britain could “no longer point the finger of scorn at South Africa and the United States.”Footnote ¹²⁵ In March 1961, another MP asked, “Is not there enough evidence in the world today of the difficulty of multi-racial societies to give us pause before we go any further in creating a multi-racial society here?”Footnote ¹²⁶ As important as anything was that Conservative candidates saw that voters wanted restriction of immigration and chose to promise them what they wanted.Footnote ¹²⁷ The proportion of the population favoring unlimited immigration from New Commonwealth countries declined from thirty-seven percent in 1956 to ten percent by 1964.Footnote ¹²⁸ Parliamentary candidates of all parties had to reckon with the fact that opposing immigration was now a vote winner. This was political opportunism, but it should also be seen as a reflection of the decline of paternalism.

It is conceivable that Conservative MPs could have made popular headway by arguing against immigration on the basis that Britain was a Christian country. There is evidence that suggests that this may have been part of the rationale behind the legislation, with government records showing that ministers were worried primarily about those arriving from Pakistan and India.Footnote ¹²⁹ Unlike those coming from the West Indies, many of these newcomers were not Christians and did not speak English. Immigration therefore threatened Britain's Christian national identity. What is striking is that almost no one made this argument in public.

Part of the reason was surely the declining purchase of the idea, as discussed above, that Britain was a Christian nation. But it is doubtful that this was the decisive factor, as politicians continued to put the idea to occasional, rhetorical use in subsequent decades. The key was growing sensitivity to racial prejudice. For a long time, Britons were not called “racist” in public discourse. In the early 1950s, the term was associated most frequently in the Times with South Africa.Footnote ¹³⁰ From the early 1960s, the paper turned its attention to the racial conflict in the southern United States.Footnote ¹³¹ But it was rare for Britain to be implicated until the discussions over the Race Relations Bill in 1965. Nevertheless, after Hitler, apartheid, anti-colonial activism, and the civil rights movement, there was growing awareness of the wrongs of racial prejudice and discrimination. To be accused of these in public was shameful by 1960, as the Commons debates over the 1962 legislation would make clear.Footnote ¹³² So even though many people still doubted whether non-whites could be truly British, it was becoming more difficult to say that in print or in parliament.Footnote ¹³³ If the growing number of non-Christian migrants in the late 1950s and early 1960s had been white, it would have been easier to argue against their coming based on the country's Christian heritage. That they were not white meant that complaining about their religion would have invited the charge of racism.

Almost no public figures were willing to court that charge. One who was, however, was Sir Cyril Osborne, a Conservative MP who had been calling for immigration controls throughout the 1950s. Osborne was a stockbroker and an occasional loose cannon on the Conservative backbenches. He was almost pushed out of the party in 1962 for his criticism of the party leadership.Footnote ¹³⁴ One of his political opponents said he was a “self-styled Victorian”; he called himself a “crank.”Footnote ¹³⁵ In February 1961, he had said in the Daily Mail, “This is a white man's country and I want it to remain so.”Footnote ¹³⁶ He was also prepared to say that he feared non-white immigration to the United Kingdom for religious reasons. He wrote an article for the Church of England Newspaper that asked what the Christian attitude to immigration should be, then gave all his standard arguments for control with no distinctively biblical or theological reflection at all.Footnote ¹³⁷ But he was disturbed by the implications of immigration for the religious make-up of Britain. In a debate on immigration in August 1961, Osborne told the house about a Congregational church in Smethwick that had been turned into a Sikh temple. He quoted the local Anglican vicar's reflection, as reported in the Times, that “Christian England [was] going into reverse,” and then expressed his own concern:

Another MP interrupted Osborne with a cry of “Nonsense,” but Osborne did not sit down. He continued: “I am very concerned about this. If I could speak to my friends in the churches, I would say that the sooner they bring back their foreign missions and concentrate on saving their home bases, the better it will be for the Christian religion in this country.” At this point, the record notes that people began laughing.Footnote ¹³⁹ Later in the debate, one of his fellow Conservatives said his plea was “a little like Hitler's.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The shadow of the Holocaust was another reason why paternalism and notions of European superiority were in trouble.

Another advocate of immigration control with religious concerns was Lord Elton. Elton had been president of the Empire Youth Sunday movement, and a consistent advocate of the importance of the Commonwealth and of Christianity for global politics.Footnote ¹⁴¹ His tone had been patrician and confident in the 1940s, but by the early 1960s he was worried about where Britain was headed. In 1965, he published The Unarmed Invasion: A Survey of Afro-Asian Immigration, which argued for a halt in non-white immigration.Footnote ¹⁴² He gave numerous reasons, including the squalor of their dwellings, the fraud of their tax returns, and the risk of their gonorrhea.Footnote ¹⁴³ Most important, however, was that they were too different, and part of the problem was how religiously different they were. Elton was clear that he was more worried about immigrants from South Asia than those from the West Indies. The former were “mentally and spiritually remote from us in a sense in which the West Indians have long ceased to be.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ “The West Indians at least wish for integration,” he wrote. “Unlike the Asians, they besiege social workers for advice. Moreover they speak our language, they share many of our traditions and most of them are Christians.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Christianity was part of what it meant to be English, an important part; so foreign religions threatened the nation's health. Indeed, if the newcomers would only adopt English beliefs and behaviors, all would be well: “If the bulk of the present Asian community could be converted to Christianity and monogamy, and to an active interest in (let us say) Cup-ties, Women's Institutes and democratic politics, that would indeed be ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished.’”Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Elton's argument can be faulted at numerous points. He did not, for example, recognize the injustices in the housing market that made poor living conditions almost unavoidable for many immigrants.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Two things are important here. One, he made an argument against continued immigration in which England's Christian identity was central. The book was published by Geoffrey Bles, a Christian whose press produced some of the work of C. S. Lewis and Jacques Maritain. In Elton's vision, Christianity was fused with a cultural definition of Englishness, but the Christian dimension was not merely a cultural artefact, as suggested by his use of the idea of conversion. Two, he expressed the worry that he would be accused of ethnic prejudice.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ As a peer of the realm, his political position was safe. But he lamented that candidates for the House of Commons did not feel able to discuss immigration openly for fear that they might be called racist.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

When it came to the debates over the government's bill in 1961, no one made the argument that immigration should be halted because it threatened Christian England, not even Osborne. The opposition labelled him as a devout Christian during the debate, but that was in an attempt to shame him for what they believed was a deeply un-Christian position.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ R. A. Butler, the Home Secretary, introduced the bill, saying that he did so with regret but that it was necessary in order to control the population of a small island that at the time offered an open welcome to hundreds of millions of citizens of other Commonwealth countries. The Labour opposition, led by Hugh Gaitskell, seized on the fact that the Republic of Ireland was not covered by the bill, because it was not part of the Commonwealth and because of the difficulty of controlling the border with Ulster. This meant that the Irish would be allowed to continue to enter Britain unhindered, and Gaitskell used this to argue that the bill was racially motivated and introducing a color bar into Britain. Technically this was not true, because immigrants from Canada and Australia were affected by its provisions as well as those coming from Jamaica or Pakistan. But few believed that people from the old members of the Commonwealth would not receive preferential treatment when it came to deciding who would get the places available under the new system, many of which were reserved for skilled workers.Footnote ¹⁵¹

In his contribution to the debates, Osborne argued that color was not the issue. The problem was the high standards of living in Britain that attracted “the coloured people because of their immense poverty.” He was heckled relentlessly, however, and compared to the British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.Footnote ¹⁵² Harold Gurden, one of the few Conservatives openly in favor of controlling immigration, defended Osborne later in the debate, saying that it was “incredibly dirty politics . . . to accuse those who favour restriction . . . of being actuated by colour prejudice.”Footnote ¹⁵³

Labour MPs tore into the Conservatives. Gaitskell suggested that the legislation was similar to South African apartheid, picturing the government there “rubbing their hands” with glee. “We had better stop throwing stones at the Southern States,” he added.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Even a Conservative MP said that the bill was “really a form of apartheid.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Labour members taunted the Conservatives that they had lost their enthusiasm for empire now that it was unprofitable. James MacColl, MP for Widnes, said,

At the bill's third reading, Michael Foot suggested that “now that the Commonwealth is ceasing to have a colour bar and now that it is formed almost entirely, and soon entirely, of self-governing countries, now that it has become a civilised institution, it begins to lose its fascination for hon. Members opposite and they go whoring after other gods.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Labour used the debates over immigration legislation to suggest that the Conservatives' imperial paternalism had been a sham.

Labour MPs also skewered the Conservatives by saying that their bill was un-Christian. Denis Howell said that “in a Christian country . . . it is not the job of political leadership to decide its first priority on the basis of electoral advantage.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ “I think that the present situation creates a challenge,” argued James MacColl, “which in a Christian country should be taken up in a Christian way, by welcoming people who are coming into the area and bringing together all members of the community in one body.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Labour members enjoyed the chance to attack from moral and religious high ground that the Conservatives had often assumed was theirs.

Neither Butler, Osborne, nor anyone else claimed that the bill should be passed in the interest of preserving a white, Christian society. Had they done so, not only would they have sounded like Malan and Verwoerd, the South African prime ministers, but they would have given the lie to their claim that the bill was not a color bar. For most of those they wanted to keep out were, of course, both colored and non-Christian. In the context of the debates over immigration legislation, therefore, it became clear that post-war immigration and growing awareness of the problems associated with white supremacy globally had made it very hard to talk about Britain as a Christian country.

The decline in paternalism caused by Britain's diminished power and decolonization, the increased publicity given to white African usage of the terminology of Christian nationhood and Christian civilization, and debates over the control of South Asian and West Indian immigration to England: these three developments associated with England's new, postcolonial existence explain why the language of Christian Britain became much more difficult to use after 1955 and therefore much less prevalent. Had talk of Christian Britain sagged only in the mid-to-late 1960s, it would be possible to attribute it largely to declining church attendance, the attack on the establishment associated with the satire boom and Harold Wilson, or Roy Jenkins's social legislation. In the long run, these were all surely significant factors, but the changes associated with the end of empire appear to have been decisive.

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The language of Christian England did not disappear. MPs continued to speak of the country as Christian, but typically these references can be understood better as a rhetorical ploy than an attempt to describe society or construct a political philosophy. “The age of paternalism is over,” said Cyril Osborne, and resurrecting it would prove impossible.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The decline of Britain's Christian national identity thus helps explain changes taking place in the Conservative party, in which the party gave up the idea that those at the top had a responsibility to those at the bottom in favor of an emphasis on personal responsibility and a fear that too much public help could inhibit individual enterprise.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Margaret Thatcher's address to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1988 exemplified the change.Footnote ¹⁶² Thatcher called Christianity “a fundamental part of our national heritage” and invoked the idea of loving our neighbors. But first it was necessary to create the wealth that made generosity possible. Then it was important not to “delegate the exercise of mercy and generosity to others. The politicians and other secular powers should strive by their measures to bring out the good in people and to fight down the bad: but they can't create the one or abolish the other. . . . Intervention by the State must never become so great that it effectively removes personal responsibility.” In closing, she referred to the hymn “I vow to thee my country,” emphasizing the line that speaks of God's kingdom growing “soul by soul,” “not group by group, or party by party.” This vision, which echoed the populist Methodism of Thatcher's childhood, was very different from that held by Stanley Baldwin or even Harold Macmillan, both of whom were part of a Conservative and Anglican tradition that saw Britain as a Christian community characterized by mutual obligations.Footnote ¹⁶³ This older tradition had struggled to retain its plausibility in a country that few now called Christian, which allowed Thatcher to steer the Conservative party towards a more individualistic social philosophy. The decline of the Christian element of British identity is thus an important part of the story of political change since 1960.

In the press, whose editors had to think about a broader audience than those who spoke in Parliament, there was much less talk of a Christian nation. That language had been in decline from the mid-1950s.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The consecration of Coventry Cathedral in 1962 provided an opportunity to rehearse again the verities of Christian civilization, and Christmas and Easter still saw Christianity in print.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ But the language was different. The extended biblical texts had disappeared, as had the language of providence and most of the serious reflection on the Christian beliefs behind the festivals. In their place came photos of models, a “cute Easter chick” in the Derby Evening Telegraph in 1972, while in 1970 the Western Mail asked “How About This for a Christmas Stocking?” next to a picture of a woman wearing only tights.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ As early as 1960, the Spectator reflected on an article by a monk who said that Christians should lead “crucified lives,” saying that this was better than the “sugary sentiment of Christmas.” But it ended with a shudder at the thought that Christians might want to share their faith with others, and the article came in an issue that gave advice on coping with Christmas hangovers.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The tenor of the paper had changed within a decade: reverent, orthodox entries had won the Spectator's Christmas poetry competition just a few years earlier.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ What was true for the Spectator was also true for the daily newspapers. Rich Christian content was disappearing fast from the editorial pages.

References to Christian nationhood were now most likely to be found in one of three forms. One was in the language of conservative cultural critics such as Mary Whitehouse, whose campaigns to preserve traditional moral standards on television resonated with many but were ruthlessly mocked in the public sphere. Whitehouse wanted to roll back the liberalizing legislation of the 1960s and align the country's statute books with its historic Christian faith.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Few public figures were willing to stand at her side. Second, British fascists continued to use the idea of Christian Britain to justify their hostility to South Asian communities and later to Muslims in particular.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Finally, references to Christian Britain and Christian England became expressions of nostalgia. At Epiphany 1963, an article in the Times said the West was

Macmillan's comments at Archbishop Tenison's school in 1969, quoted at the beginning of this article, contained both lament for the decline of Britain's Christian culture and a call to hold onto what was left. The head of religious broadcasting at the BBC, speaking about the replacement of a Christian program by one that featured folk songs, could say: “Twenty-five years ago, one could assume that most of the programme's listeners would be at least nominally Christians. In 1965 this cannot be assumed.”Footnote ¹⁷² The Times's Christmas leading article in 1967 suggested a different source for the world's salvation: “If Christmas is ever to mean real peace on earth the main hope must rest not with politicians and diplomats but with the scientists, sociologists and psychiatrists, the people who study the behaviour patterns of animals and humans, tribes, and advanced societies.”Footnote ¹⁷³ As the paper had put it earlier in the month, there was now only “a weak sense in which this is still a Christian nation.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴

The history of the Empire Youth Sunday movement illustrates some of the changes well. Later known as Commonwealth Youth Sunday, this movement began at the time of George VI's coronation in 1937, when young people were invited to imitate their sovereign and dedicate their lives to God and to service in ceremonies at Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ This became an annual event that spread throughout the country and the Commonwealth, with marching youth organizations and a Christian service forming the staples of the event. It was the most blatant expression of the links between England, Christianity, and empire. During the war, the organizers wrote of “the Great Crusade which the civilised world has undertaken against the forces of darkness,” a war whose purpose was to defend Christendom.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ In 1945, thousands gathered at Roker Park Football Ground, Sunderland, and two thousand gathered in Cape Town. In 1946, 80 percent of English parishes took part. In 1953, the preacher at the Saint Paul's Cathedral service spoke of the providence that had delivered the British people again and again through the centuries.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ By 1955, fifty-three British territories observed the day; five thousand youth gathered in Perth, Australia, alone.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ The queen's message in 1959 spoke of hundreds of thousands taking part.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Yet for many years, the organizers paid little attention to the fact that many people in the Commonwealth were not Christians.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ There was a standard Christian order of service for the event. The Commonwealth Youth Sunday Prayer embraced both the language of multiracialism and that of British exceptionalism under divine providence.Footnote ¹⁸¹

However, the last Commonwealth Youth Sunday took place in 1964. The people in many English parishes had lost enthusiasm, as had the newly independent states of Africa and Asia. The committee therefore decided to end to the movement. Among the reasons they gave was declining observance at home and abroad. But they also noted that the Commonwealth had “a great majority of non-Christians,” which made the celebration anomalous. Thus the organizers made the decision that there would be no more Commonwealth Youth Sundays, doing so “with great regret.”Footnote ¹⁸² Their sadness and the history of their movement reflected wider trends in English society. The conjunction of England, the world, civilization, and Christianity, which had made sense in 1945, was no longer plausible less than twenty years later. It was a remarkable—and a remarkably fast—change.

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The argument of this article has been that to understand the declining importance of Christianity to England's national identity one must look at the international contexts of the decline in British power and the rise of immigration to England. These contexts were not the only reason for the change, but they were crucial. As in many other fields of history, the study of the secularization of England benefits from seeing England as part of a global story.

How does the decline in the Christian dimension of British identity relate to secularization more broadly? In particular, how might it relate to the sharp decline in church attendance witnessed in the 1960s? This is a different question from the one considered in this article and one that merits further study. But several comments are in order. It is noteworthy that the decline in the confident usage of the language of Christian Britain was underway by the late 1950s, before the rapid fall of churchgoing in the 1960s. This suggests that Britain's diminishing international standing may well have been one factor in people's decisions to do something else on Sundays. Indeed, perhaps the case was similar to that described by Jim Tomlinson, who has argued that the end of empire brought a sense of decline that led people to fret about the economy even when it was not that bad.Footnote ¹⁸³ The fear that Britain was in decline took root in the late 1950s, at the same time that the language of Christian Britain began to disappear.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ It is probable that this general sense of decline generated concern about the religious health of the nation in ways that contributed to declining religious practice. This was part of a broader picture of declining confidence in Britain, what Peter Mandler has identified as a crisis of national character and identity.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

The argument made here stands alongside Callum Brown's claim that changing ideas about female identity caused a sharp decline in church attendance in the 1960s. The link proposed here between Britain's changing international relations and religious practice does, however, have one advantage over Brown's focus on femininity in that it helps explain the divergent spiritual trajectories of England (and Europe more broadly) and the United States after the Second World War in two ways. First, people's ideas of what it meant to be a woman were changing in the United States at the same time as they were changing in Europe, yet church attendance in America held up. However, so did that nation's global power and prestige, unlike that of the countries of Europe. Second, England and Europe more broadly were affected by non-Christian immigration in a way that the United States was not. The majority of immigrants to the United States since the Second World War have been Christians.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Both these observations suggest the benefits of transnational study of religious change. In particular, connections between religious commitment and national power, pride, and confidence require further study in debates about the decline of Christian piety in Europe after the Second World War.

British identity had changed: no longer aligned with the New Testament, where the focus is on mission to the whole world, it was more in alignment with the Old Testament, where the local is what matters and outsiders are a source of anxiety.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ The decline of Britain's power, empire and, therefore, confidence, were central to this story. Along the way, many lost their faith. Not all: some churches still flourished, especially evangelical and Pentecostal ones and those led by immigrants from the West Indies and, later, Africa. Christian Britain atrophied; it did not die. The future may bring rejuvenation. It is unlikely, however, given the importance of now settled communities of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs that Christianity will be as closely tied to the nation's identity as it once was. The leaders of today's thriving churches can no longer make what had once been a weighty appeal to a shared cultural consensus that the country was a Christian one.