The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945-2000 9781442661561

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction ‚Even the hippies were only very slowly going secular’:1 Dechristianization and the Culture of Individualism in North America and Western Europe
1. Gender, Christianity, and the Rise of No Religion: The Heritage of the Sixties in Britain
2. Mothers and Daughters: Negotiating the Discourse on the ‚Good Woman’ in 1950s and 1960s Britain
3. Women, Religion, and the Turn to Feminism: Experiences of Women’s Liberation Activists in Britain in the Seventies
4. Saving Marriage: A Comparison of Religion and Marriage Promotion in the United States and Britain
5. Religious-Right Activism in Canada and the United States: Are We Headed in the Same Direction?
6. The Transformation of Catholic- Evangelical Relations in the United States: 1950-2000
7. Sex and Subculture: American Catholicism since 1945
8. Without making a noise‘:1 The Dumont Commission and the Drama of Quebec’s Dechristianization, 1968-1971
9. Making Témoins du Christ for the Twentieth Century: The European Origins of Religious Education in Quebec, 1930-1970
10. ‚The truly educated person will know his heritage‘: Shifting Conceptions of Religious Education in the Ontario Public School System, 1940-1970
11. Families beyond Patriarchy: Visions of Gender Equality and Childrearing among German Catholics in an Age of Revolution
12. The ‚New Curriculum‘ Controversy and the Religious Crisis of the United Church of Canada, 1952-1965
13. ‚Belief crucified upon a rooftop antenna‘:1 Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew, and Dechristianization
14. A Different Path? National Catholicism, Laicization, and Dechristianization in Spain, 1939-1975
15. Dechristianization and the Changing Religious Landscape in Europe and North America since 1950: Comparative, Transatlantic, and Global Perspectives
16. Echoes and Fragments: Popular Christianity, British Nostalgia, and Post-Independence India
17. Bone Idol? British Catholics and Devotion to St Thérèse of Lisieux
18. Reflections and New Perspectives
Contributors
Index

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THE SIXTIES AND BEYOND Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000

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The Sixties and Beyond Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000

EDITED BY NANCY CHRISTIE AND MICHAEL GAUVREAU

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2013 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4475-5

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication The sixties and beyond : dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000 / edited by Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4475-5 1. Christianity – 20th century. 2. Church history – 20th century. I. Christie, Nancy, 1958– II. Gauvreau, Michael, 1956– BR481.S59 2013

270.8⬘25

C2013-900359-2

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: ‘Even the hippies were only very slowly going secular’: Dechristianization and the Culture of Individualism in North America and Western Europe 3 nancy christie and michael gauvreau 1 Gender, Christianity, and the Rise of No Religion: The Heritage of the Sixties in Britain 39 callum g. brown 2 Mothers and Daughters: Negotiating the Discourse on the ‘Good Woman’ in 1950s and 1960s Britain 60 lynn abrams 3 Women, Religion, and the Turn to Feminism: Experiences of Women’s Liberation Activists in Britain in the Seventies 84 sarah f. browne 4 Saving Marriage: A Comparison of Religion and Marriage Promotion in the United States and Britain 98 melanie heath 5 Religious-Right Activism in Canada and the United States: Are We Headed in the Same Direction? 123 tina fetner

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6 The Transformation of Catholic-Evangelical Relations in the United States: 1950–2000 144 patrick allitt 7 Sex and Subculture: American Catholicism since 1945 157 leslie woodcock tentler 8 ‘Without making a noise’: The Dumont Commission and the Drama of Quebec’s Dechristianization, 1968–1971 186 michael gauvreau 9 Making Témoins du Christ for the Twentieth Century: The European Origins of Religious Education in Quebec, 1930–1970 217 brigitte caulier 10 ’The truly educated person will know his heritage’: Shifting Conceptions of Religious Education in the Ontario Public School System, 1940–1970 245 heather laing 11 Families beyond Patriarchy: Visions of Gender Equality and Childrearing among German Catholics in an Age of Revolution 270 till van rahden 12 The ‘New Curriculum’ Controversy and the Religious Crisis of the United Church of Canada, 1952–1965 294 kevin n. flatt 13 ’Belief crucified upon a rooftop antenna’: Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew, and Dechristianization 321 nancy christie 14 A Different Path? National Catholicism, Laicization, and Dechristianization in Spain, 1939–1975 351 antonio cazorla-sanchez 15 Dechristianization and the Changing Religious Landscape in Europe and North America since 1950: Comparative, Transatlantic, and Global Perspectives 367 patrick pasture

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16 Echoes and Fragments: Popular Christianity, British Nostalgia, and Post-Independence India 403 stephen heathorn 17 Bone Idol? British Catholics and Devotion to St Thérèse of Lisieux 429 alana harris 18 Reflections and New Perspectives hugh mcleod Contributors Index 473

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Acknowledgments

In bringing together a dynamic array of international scholars around the theme of twentieth-century religious change, we have incurred a number of debts. The idea for this volume originated in a conference held in October 2009 under the joint auspices of McMaster University and the University of Western Ontario. We would particularly like to thank Suzanne Crosta, Dean of Humanities at McMaster University, for her initial interest in and tangible support for the project. Mo Elbestawi, Vice-President Research and International Affairs, and Ilene BuschVishniac, Vice-President Academic, McMaster University, contributed significantly towards making the conference a truly international event. The L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History, in the person of its Director, Dr Viv Nelles, provided effective support for our conference. We also appreciate the support and encouragement received from Margaret Kellow, Chair of the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario. We acknowledge the assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Aid to Workshops and Conferences program for financial support. At the University of Toronto Press, our editor, Len Husband, was from the beginning enthusiastic about a book of essays on the subject of dechristianization, and encouraged us throughout the publishing process. In working with Len on a number of projects, we have come to value his overriding personal commitment to the highest-quality scholarly books, and his absolute respect for the perspectives of his authors. As the book moved towards publication, Frances Mundy efficiently organized the production process, and James Leahy ensured the highest standard of copy-editing. In particular, we would like to thank Marilla McCargar for compiling a superb index.

x Acknowledgments

Finally, we would like to express our appreciation to all the scholars who participated in the conference and on this volume, for their engagement with the theme and their commitment to a high standard of intellectual discussion.

THE SIXTIES AND BEYOND Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000

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Introduction ‘Even the hippies were only very slowly going secular’:1 Dechristianization and the Culture of Individualism in North America and Western Europe nancy christie and michael gauvreau The secularization thesis which posited a long-term and inexorable process of religious decline in modernizing societies has, over the past decade, been challenged and revised by a number of recent historians, most notably by Callum Brown and Hugh McLeod, whose work, while differing significantly with regard to the causes of the decline of Christianity, has opened a new interpretive window to the importance of the 1960s. Brown and McLeod also differ as to how one defines the sixties: Brown has identified the period between 1958 and 1963 as the critical turning point in the cultural and social hegemony of religion, as the juncture at which most Britons would no longer perceive their nation and their personal identities to be Christian.2 McLeod, on the other hand, has suggested a more capacious chronology defined by the ‘long sixties,’ bookended by 1958 and 1974. Where Brown has emphasized the crucial importance of rapid changes in the attitude of women towards what they perceived as a morally constrictive church culture, McLeod has considered a wider range of actors, and he, like Grace Davie, have emphasized the need to study not only broader cultural and social changes – the focus of Brown’s seminal reinterpretation – but the internal dynamics of church institutional life, viewing them not as outside the ‘world’ but as integral to social change itself.3 Although Brown’s narrative of rapid gendered religious transformation in the early sixties has wider implications for both Europe and North America, his evidence is largely drawn from the British Isles, whereas McLeod adopts a more international perspective, in attempting to discern the commonalities between European and North American religious trends in the postwar world.4 In attempting to explain why the sixties, broadly defined, resulted

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in a catastrophic exodus from the institutional churches, scholars have considered a number of variables: changes in attitudes among youth to sexuality and morality, the woman’s emancipation movement, the impact of radical politics, the wider criticism of authority structures across society, the waning of group and ethno-political identities, and postwar affluence, with its emphasis upon consumer choice and personal satisfaction.5 The central question addressed by this volume is to what degree all of these factors resonate equally in various national and social contexts. Can historians adequately find an overarching explanation or set of causal factors which might explain religious decline on both sides of the Atlantic, or must historians focus on a less macro-historical approach, to emphasize medium-range questions, which allow for significant differences between the societies and provide scholars with tools which might allow them to prioritize the importance of different causes at work? If, as Hugh McLeod has rightly suggested, the combined impacts of the civil rights movement in the United States, the Second Vatican Council, and popular theological discussion such as that surrounding the publication of Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God constituted a ‘New Reformation,’6 why did this not lead to a general revitalization of religion as its precursor had in the sixteenth century? More importantly, did these liberalizing currents have an equal impact both within various European countries and in North America? Or did they combine with pre-existing cultural and social predispositions within each country, which ensured a different cultural purchase and subsequent trajectory within these societies? While publications such as those by Robinson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Reinhold Niebuhr had a great impact upon the public discussion of religion in Britain and Europe, their impact was distinctly muted in both Canada and the United States, where institutional structures remained more fully in the grip of mass religious cultures and consequently theology retained a more orthodox cast.7 McLeod is very sensitive to the nuanced differences between rates of churchgoing. In 1960, he shows that the most robust rates of church attendance, between 30 and 50 per cent, were found in Northern Ireland, the United States, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and Australia, and that France, West Germany, Austria, and Scotland varied between 20 and 35 per cent, and England and Wales drew a mere 10 to 20 per cent of Sunday attendance.8 Did the emergence of alternative models of society and individual conduct which were unleashed, as Brown concludes, with such force after 1958 affect countries with robust churchgoing traditions less than those like

Introduction 5

England where institutional erosion had occurred in previous decades? In certain countries, most notably the United States, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands, the continued cultural authority of religious institutions may have mitigated the impact of political radicalism and fundamental changes in attitudes to morality, which had a tremendous impact in Britain, as Callum Brown has well demonstrated in this volume, and in these countries ‘religious crisis’ may have been postponed until the 1970s or 1980s. If the emergence of a permissive society was the central catalyst for secularization and a precipitous decline in church affiliation, it emerged earliest in the United States, notably during the late 1940s,9 with little direct impact upon levels of religious belief or churchgoing. Why, in the United States, did postwar affluence, the rise of a possessive individualist ethos, and the impact of the marketplace, with its stress on personal choice, not lead directly to a plummeting in personal identification with religious organizations as it did in various European countries such as Germany and Britain? What other factors were at work? Was it that American churches had historically internalized notions of individualism and free choice, as Nathan O. Hatch has argued?10 In the United States and Canada, religious pluralism had always been a source of religious revitalization, but in Britain and Europe, with firmer statist religious traditions, the emergence of a more pluralistic religious landscape between 1958 and 1974, as McLeod makes clear, had a distinctly detrimental effect upon Anglicanism, the central ‘pillar’ – to use a term most associated with the Low Countries – of England as a Christian nation.11 Larger cultural and social changes which had an international resonance have to be balanced with the peculiar aspects of national religious traditions in order to explain both the periodization and the causes of religious decline in terms of both institutional and personal identities. Moreover, this volume breaks with the now conventional emphasis upon the 1950s as a conservative foil for the ‘radical sixties,’ by focusing upon significant elements of liberalization in terms of social values during that decade, which foregrounded their public articulation in the sixties. Certainly the notion of ‘the religious crisis of the sixties’ was paramount among intellectuals in all Western societies, many of whom participated in the elaboration of what we would now call the secularization thesis. Most wrote from a perspective critical of the institutional churches, but this may merely have represented an acute phase of a type of dechristianization in which there was a growing disjuncture

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between elites and popular notions of what constituted real religious experience.12 This was a phenomenon whose roots lay deeper in the cultural and social matrix of the immediate postwar period and its participants, and although they saw themselves as left-leaning liberals, their critique of mass culture and the alienation attendant upon modern culture actually marked them as cultural conservatives. Historians need also to be attentive to the possibility that this may have been merely the discourse of intellectuals and may not have necessarily reflected deeper transformations in societal values on a mass scale.13 And here the shadow of the Cold War further complicates the existing narrative. For the political and social ideals championed in the global ideological struggle were in tension with the rise of a distinctive postwar individualism in which the ability of more people to develop their own unique personality through conscious self-development – a power available arguably only to the leisure class and bohemians at the beginning of the twentieth century – was simultaneously trumpeted and lamented by social and political elites, particularly when that individualism led people away from socially disciplining institutions like the church. Many of the articles in this volume posit that the churches themselves may have been dynamic agents of change. Church institutions may well have continued more or less to articulate a conservative moral message, but many of them were also key producers of ideas of democracy and individualism, and promoted an ideal of ecumenism which highlighted the idea of the religious marketplace. However, the contributors to this volume do not argue that this was a success story for the churches; rather, many churches adopted strategies to mediate the impact of new cultural mores which were not in the end effective in recasting their institutional authority. Here the United States may once again be exceptional, for there the focus of evangelical outreach which had as its chief aim the enlistment of new church members was immensely successful in creating a flourishing spectrum of churches and voluntary organizations, especially those on the religious right. As this volume’s contribution by Tina Fetner, comparing the relative strengths of the new religious right in the United States and Canada, so clearly demonstrates, institutional organization does matter in terms of both historical and sociological explanation.14 In the United States, modernizing one’s institutional apparatus while at the same time preserving a traditionalist message was immensely effective in emboldening both the public and private power of the religious right. In contrast, as the article by Leslie Tentler demonstrates, the Roman Catholic Church’s

Introduction 7

hierarchical structure remained static, but its decision with Vatican II to drastically alter its rituals and patterns of pastoral outreach generally had a negative impact on popular adherence. But the negative outcome of Vatican II was uneven: church attendance actually rose in Italy during the 1980s,15 a fact which reminds us that not all European countries experienced postwar affluence and cultural change in the same measure; more importantly, the examples of Italy and Spain demonstrate the strong link between church and politics,16 both on the conservative and radical ends of the spectrum, illustrating that if religion could cleave to other significant group identities – namely nation, political party, or ethnicity, as in Poland and Ireland – its purchase on popular adherence was all the greater. As the contribution in this volume by Stephen Heathorn makes clear, not only was death and its commemoration one of the most important aspects of religiosity often neglected by historians and sociologists alike, but the key factor in the abandonment of Christian language among former soldiers and officials of the British Raj was the change in the constituent elements in their notion of group memory rather than a decline in religiosity itself. It demonstrates that religious belief may not in and of itself have been a critical factor in the decline of institutional Christianity. This leads historians to focus on changes within those areas of culture and society which were not explicitly religious in character. These were, notably, a growing popular suspicion of conventional systems of social regulation, an emerging sensibility which accorded a pejorative connotation to notions of social conformity and group loyalty, the declension in a range of institutions as templates of civic identity, and a growing critique of social hierarchy and authority. These constituted an assemblage of postwar cultural and social mores which were being promulgated by and within the authority structures themselves both in Western Europe and North America, which sought, in the wake of the Second World War, to enshrine notions of democracy and individualism. Once unleashed, however, these new notions of freedom, choice, and personal happiness had unforeseen consequences for organized religion. Conventionally, historians in Britain, Canada, and the United States have viewed the fifties as a period defined by a general ‘return to normalcy’ in which traditional gender roles were confirmed by an intense public discourse elevating domesticity and the nuclear family and a world subsumed by a broader affluence which fostered public apathy, political complacency, and a retreat into the privacy of the home.17 In terms of religious institutions, Callum Brown has argued that the

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period between 1945 and 1963 constituted an era in which ‘a harsh and vindictive state apparatus’ sought to limit a variety of personal pleasures and that state policies were likewise sustained by ‘the hegemony of discursive Christianity,’ which defended itself behind a barrier of moral Puritanism which resulted in a set of rigidly policed traditional gender boundaries.18 The heart of the complacency narrative is grounded in a perspective which views a distinct rupture between the culture of the sixties and that of the unrelenting conservative and conformist postwar era in which the principal agent of change lies in the radical sexual and political values espoused by those coming of age in the early sixties. There is much to commend this point of view, for as Brown amply demonstrates, the dominant Christian discourse, especially on questions of sexuality and female identity, was very conservative and puritanical. During the past decade many historians have begun to question this narrative of unrelieved conservative conformity, and have pointed out that beneath the veneer of conservative discourse, which they agree was intense, there was considerable liberalization in terms of both social configurations and personal values: married women were entering the workforce in increasing numbers; gender roles were being subtly revised as the rise of the companionate ideal was shifting marriage and the family in a more egalitarian direction; prior to the development of the pill in 1960 premarital sex was on the rise as were rates of illegitimacy both in Britain and the United States; and notions of permissiveness both in terms of childrearing and the medicalization of ‘sinful’ behaviours, together with the rise of rock ‘n’ roll, signalled a sea change in Western values which in many respects remained hidden beneath still powerful authority structures, including the churches, which espoused conventional views in part to staunch the flow of permissive practices.19 If we accept the parameters of this new narrative, it displaces the agency of change away from baby boom youth to their parents, many of whom were born prior to the Second World War, and it is this generation who were the critical actors in not socializing their children according to the canons of the still hegemonic Christian discourse. Change thus emerged from below, and as Steve Bruce, Hugh McLeod, Mark Ruff, Stephen Brooke, and Patrick Pasture have all observed from a variety of national contexts, the war was responsible for breaking down older structures of sociability (of which the church was central), increased mobility, and accelerated the production of new suburban neighbourhoods in which older systems of social regulations and com-

Introduction 9

munity control had been eviscerated.20 In the United States, the notion of a ‘subversive consensus’ has been advanced by Alan Petigny, who has shown that in various cultural sites such as popular magazines, music, psychology, childrearing, and religion, liberal values had become so well integrated into mainstream culture that even those who appeared to espouse conservative moral prescriptions had to pay homage to new ideals of individual choice, personal pleasure, and moral relativity in order to gain a hearing. However, as Petigny argues, new democratic approaches to cultural knowledge which had emerged during the Second World War had so deeply penetrated the wider American cultural sensibility that youth subversiveness had become part and parcel of ‘conformity.’21 In terms of religion, in the United States, both Protestant and Catholic churches had thoroughly integrated the new popular psychology, with its emphasis on individual self-fulfilment, which undermined older theologies based on fear and guilt.22 On a more prosaic level, the war, as Clive Field’s evidence illustrates, greatly interrupted patterns of churchgoing because of the demands of war work, the displacement of children, and the destruction of churches, many of which were not rebuilt to serve the growing postwar population.23 And as historians on both sides of the Atlantic have argued, a sense of ennui with power structures had begun in the fifties, as evidenced by the flatness in terms of new religious vocations in Quebec and in terms of popular piety, which has prompted Eileen Barker to conclude that beneath the outward respect accorded churches represented by the robust levels of Sunday school attendance and churchgoing in the immediate postwar period, there was considerable personal indifference especially among men, who, as a result of their war experience, now preferred to participate in religious life through the discursive realm of radio and television rather than through the institutional church.24 The picture of the fifties which emerges from a range of revisionist work is that it was a decade defined by much greater levels of social tension and cultural conflict than has hitherto been assumed. As Simon Green has noted, the term ‘Establishment’ was coined in 1959 and reflects the cultural sensibility of the 1950s when even a conservative society like Britain was becoming aware of multi-ethnic immigration, had experienced the liberalization of drink and gaming laws, and had a Conservative government that commissioned the Wolfenden Report to recommend the reform of criminal laws against homosexuality.25 And while for the most part the public face of religion was one of unremitting puritanism, in certain quarters ideas of sexual pleasure and the

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emergence of notions of moral relativism,26 especially regarding issues of divorce and homosexuality, had made considerable headway during the fifties, even if, as Bruce contends, they did not reach their full fruition until the 1960s.27 Although many of these liberalizing tendencies were encased in a message of conservative stasis, they nevertheless reflected debate rather than consensus within religious organizations. Certainly many religious groups, and especially the hidebound Anglican hierarchy, were intent on reimposing an interwar moral consensus, which often brought clerics and laity into open conflict; their inflexibility in terms of morality and sexual sin reveals a recognition of the need to shore up traditionalist positions in the face of distinct subterranean social change. As Pat Thane has said of the immediate postwar era, it was a more complex period than the simple articulation of traditional moral codes;28 rather, the fifties can be seen as a period in which social values had altered significantly, even they had not become coordinated in systems of public social ferment and mobilization as was so evident in the 1960s. Indeed, as Christie’s article in this volume demonstrates, much of what later became an attack on the mainline churches in Canada as hidebound institutions built upon a sociological perspective which evolved in the United States during the fifties as part of a liberal critique of mass culture and bore little direct relationship to the actual workings of the church establishments. Another widespread phenomenon of the immediate postwar era which had a decisive long-term impact on the vitality of church attendance on both sides of the Atlantic was the breakdown of denominational boundaries29 brought about by an increase in religiously mixed marriages (a phenomenon viewed warily since the early twentieth century by clerics who well understood their negative impact on church membership), the breakdown of ethnic subcultures, particularly in the United States, combined with a movement among church leaders in many countries to create a more forceful united front among various Christian denominations against communism by espousing a more ecumenical approach to both doctrine, ritual, and church governance. As Mark Ruff has concluded regarding West Germany, many Catholic leaders welcomed the collapse of their long-standing religious subculture because they were now thoroughly integrated into the political and economic governing structures and sought closer collaboration rather than competition with their Protestant counterparts.30 In Canada during the fifties, the trend among religious leaders and religious faculty in Canadian universities was to espouse an ecumenical outreach to Roman

Introduction 11

Catholicism and Judaism, and its impact upon Protestantism was that missionizing and evangelical tenets became much more muted,31 thus debilitating many Protestant churches who could no longer rely upon new converts to increase church membership. As Wilhem Damberg and Patrick Pasture have noted of Belgium, this movement towards intra-church collaboration also entailed a loss of traditional references to a belief in hell, the devil, and angels within Catholicism in order to make the church less offensive to Protestants, who now were viewed as political allies, but this may well have had a deleterious effect upon more traditional churchgoers.32 While, as Patrick Allitt has argued in his contribution to this volume, ecumenism also led to the weakening of anti-Catholicism in mainstream American culture in the sixties, it also led to a stronger identification with politics – a feature of many postwar societies. This in turn helped promote the view of secularization as a goal within the churches themselves, in which ideals of absolute truth gave way to notions of moral relativity and led also to a dilution of doctrine.33 For some time many churches had been sustained by a notion of the church against the world, which acknowledged a large sphere of the secular and a smaller cultural space for the institutional churches. However, when by the later fifties there was a growing backlash against the dominance of neo-orthodoxy in Protestantism, and neo-Thomism in Catholicism,34 the ‘world’ had come to be the dynamic player in the new social Christianity, all of which contributed to the intellectual authority of the secularization thesis among clergymen and social scientists in the sixties. As Wade Clark Roof has observed of the United States, the postwar buoyancy in church attendance occluded denominational adherence,35 but with the postwar referencing not of one’s denomination but of ‘religion’ or ‘Christianity’ in general, critique no longer fixated on the particularities of religion so much as on the whole authority structure of religious belief and practice within Western societies. Laypeople within any church have always felt free to criticize their local clergymen, internal church governance, or the particularities of theology, but by the 1950s, as churches came to resemble one another more and more, where in the past one would search out a new local church, parishioners who disliked their local clergymen now simply dropped out of the church altogether. And if we follow the line of argument of several historians, the people in the pews had much to complain about in the 1950s, as seminaries and colleges increasingly instructed clergymen in more intellectualized forms of theology which tended to alienate ordinary believers

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who wanted a more experiential religious message, emphasizing either evangelicalism or devotional Catholicism. All of this generated deepseated conflicts between clergy and laity, which had at their root a sense that the church was an empty organizational apparatus or simply a set of moral strictures which no longer provided a sense of comfort to the parishioner who sought continuity and ritual alongside a desire for a more modern church.36 On the surface this intensifying alliance between church and politics – seen in Germany, Italy, France, and Belgium, through the creation of Christian Democratic parties – appeared to increase the authority of Catholicism. Similarly, in the United States, the increasing symbolic association in the 1950s between God and country reflected in the pledge of allegiance of ‘one nation under God’(1953) and the making of ‘In God We Trust’ the national motto (1956) amplified the cultural presence of the churches, but by the sixties, the anti-communistic imperatives which underlay this conjunction between God and America contributed to an increasing sense that ‘religion’ was part of the economic and political establishment, thus bearing little relation to the piety of ordinary Americans. The career of Billy Graham, an international sensation as an evangelist, whose career peaked in the 1950s, is illustrative of the pitfalls of the alliance between church and politics. During the fifties he was deftly able to bring evangelicals and liberals together under the rubric of what Callum Brown has termed ‘crusade Christianity,’37 but by the late 1960s, his personal anti-communism led him to a overly intimate relationship with Richard Nixon, probably one of the most partisan American presidents in recent memory, which undermined the national and international reputation of mainstream evangelicals by rendering religion merely a subset of party politics. Perhaps the best example of how the intersection of religion and politics did not yield long-term dividends is that of West Germany: in the immediate aftermath of the war the Catholic Church utilized its conservative ethos regarding sexual morality as a means to distance itself from its earlier entanglements with Nazism, but by the 1960s, the tables had turned, since as left-wing politics became identified with currents of sexual liberalization an ideological realignment developed which linked sexual repression with Nazism, ending with the churches even more forcefully implicated in the Nazi past.38 In Italy and Spain, the Catholic Church during the fifties and sixties enjoyed a very large presence in public life, largely because of its strong affiliation with the state, but there as elsewhere this connec-

Introduction

13

tion established the optic that ‘religion’ was simply a synonym for the political conservative.39 Yet there is clear evidence, as adduced in the paper of Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez in this volume, that Catholic youth movements and associations were vital sites of liberal and modernizing tendencies within the repressive regime of Francisco Franco’s Spain. In many national jurisdictions, defining oneself as a liberal no longer required having any affinity with the churchgoing public; indeed, to demonstrate one’s progressive credentials meant associating with liberal humanists, agnostics, or even atheists.40 Thus the intense identification of the churches with politics in postwar Germany, Britain, the United States, and even Canada was a double-edged sword:41 it increased the cultural authority of the churches in the short term, but in the long term it resulted in polarizing religious constituencies so that whereas before the church was inclusive and community was defined by religiosity, now the churches were split along lines of the political left and right, defined by ‘secular’ rather than religious issues. If, as Callum Brown has argued, the ‘bifurcation into extremes of conservatives and liberals’42 was the dominant trend within postwar Christianity, then surely its crucial impact was to render theology largely irrelevant to religious identity, which came to be replaced by political party identities,43 a theme pursued by the papers in this volume by Patrick Allitt, Tina Fetner, and Melanie Heath, all of whom show in different ways the process whereby denominational identities became subsumed by secular political ideologies. Despite the differing constitutional arrangements of church and state in both Europe and North America prior to 1945, the interface between religion and the political order had been episodic and oriented to particular issues of morality and education. In the early twentieth century the church and the state occupied separate spheres of policy priorities. The period between 1945 and 1960 saw the increased polarization between right and left over issues of sexual morality, gender identities, and body ethics in which morality became an arena of the political and forced the churches to relinquish sole ownership of one of its chief pillars. Certainly, it can be argued that the Christian Right in the United States (a designation including considerable numbers of Protestant evangelicals and some Roman Catholics) has continued to be a player and has effectively situated itself at the forefront of issues regarding abortion, homosexuality, and the preservation of the family; however, even here, as Melanie Heath shows, these are issues generated by the state, to which the churches merely respond, largely in a

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defensive manner. Even in less polarized jurisdictions such as Canada, Britain, France, and Germany, where laws regarding the politics of the body have been liberalized, the churches since the late 1960s have not been accorded the status of a lobby group with any legitimacy and thus remained sidelined and irrelevant to the polity. In Canada, for example, there was a slow process of decline in the public voice of the churches: the wartime discussions surrounding the creation of a social security state marked the first time in which the mainline Protestant denominations had not been consulted, and the Quebec Catholic hierarchy were consulted only because the federal Liberal Party feared the loss of political influence in this critical constituency.44 However, the abortion law reforms of 1969 marked the final instance where a government deemed it necessary to consult the churches before legislating. Studies of secularization have generally focused on broad social changes such as the impact of industrialization, the formation of specific labour regimes, the change in gender identities, and post-Enlightenment intellectual movements, which highlight rationality and a decline of the miraculous. What is frequently forgotten, but is alluded to by Callum Brown, Hugh McLeod, and Grace Davie,45 is the critical importance of changes in the religious socialization of children and youth. Historically there has been a very close interdependence between the church and the family. Certainly it is better known that churches were chiefly responsible for upholding ideals of patriarchy, heterosexuality, gender roles, and the priority of the family as a site of social discipline in which the social and power relations of the family were meant to mirror those of the church and that the family was seen as a principal institution to police sin and moral delinquency.46 This symbiosis of church and family, though frequently renegotiated and often resisted by certain social groups since early modern times, persisted more or less intact until the end of the Second World War, when new ideals of gender equality within companionate marriage, more individualistic attitudes towards the behaviour of children and youth, combined with greater numbers of married women in the workforce, and the permeation of the broader political agenda (to fight communism) during the Cold War that democracy must pervade all human relationships, gave greater priority to the private sphere as the source of civic values. Many historians have seen this as a conservative movement, but within this traditional political message arose new and quite radical notions of sexual pleasure, psychological notions of familial relations, new attitudes to leisure, and increased value attached to individual choice. The

Introduction

15

churches were not entirely opposed to these developments,47 but their own campaigns to exalt the role of youth as the bearers of new ideals of individualism and democratic behaviour had unforeseen consequences in the longer term. Once the ideal of democracy and its corollary, individual self-fulfilment (which ultimately came to mean sexual fulfilment), were introduced throughout various cultures through a multiplicity of cultural sites including youth movements, the churches, the mass media, and the social sciences, and in politics itself, these helped hasten the breakdown of those older group identities which McLeod has identified as crucial to the more general decline of the institutional church. However, this transformation also critically altered the conventional hierarchy of generations which had historically assured the transmission of religious knowledge and the social reproduction of Christians. There is evidence from within family correspondence that although the ability of parents to replicate their religious ideals was beginning to break down perhaps as early as the late nineteenth century,48 the broader cultural power of notions of individual choice only became paramount by the end of the Second World War. As Hugh McLeod makes evident, by the 1950s in Britain, in the midst of a conservative Christian moral discourse, parents were allowing teenagers (and the coining of that term is a very important component of this overall process)49 to decide for themselves whether to follow their parents’ example of going to church regularly.50 In Canada, the clergy within the largest Protestant denomination, the United Church of Canada, made similar recommendations to youth in confirmation classes during the 1960s. Some of the choices of youth may have involved a complete rejection of the Christian morality of their parents and of the church, as Callum Brown’s article in this volume argues, but as his earlier work51 and that of Lynn Abrams in this volume also suggests, the social reproduction of religious values which led to such a drastic declension in churchgoing in the sixties, may well have begun with the parents who did not discuss religion or have any intense religious commitment themselves. However as Abrams make clear, the long-term symbiosis between church and family meant that when children rejected the values of their parents, they automatically also rejected the church.52 Some of these changes in parenting, of course, may also have developed because of the increase in mixed Protestant and Catholic marriages that was such a feature of postwar life. However, the breakdown in socialization may largely have stemmed from changing attitudes among mothers as to what was crucial to making a

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happy child, which now focused on emotional and psychological satisfaction rather than obedience and morality. In Britain this had started with child-centred parenting among middle-class families in the late nineteenth century. What was new in the postwar era was the spread of this ethic to the mass of society. The context of this was the widespread acceptance of the companionate marriage ideal. The 1940s and 1950s saw a raft of proposals for reforming marriage in a way that stressed gender mutuality and more sexual equality within marriage; significantly this marriage reform was often championed by Christians such as the British National Marriage Guidance Council (today it goes by the name RELATE) and by advocates like Eustace Chesser, Leslie Weatherhead, Helena Wright, Barbara Cartland, Mary Macaulay, and Marie Stopes.53 The work of Michael Snape on men during the Second World War demonstrates that soldiers had already themselves become socialized into a non-institutional type of diffusive Christianity through listening to the radio, which contributed to the fostering of a ‘pragmatic and widespread non-denominationalism’ and stressed that Christianity ‘was above all else a religion of good works and practical service.’54 What impact did these male experiences of religion have in the new suburbs, where going to church involved having the (mostly) middleclass male head of the household drive family members to church? Was there a new gender regime in place where the male religiosity (pace Callum Brown) may have dictated family patterns of religious identification? Indeed, there was a considerable quantity of religious discourse in postwar West Germany and in Britain, which exalted male domesticity as the central hallmark of the new democratic culture.55 Where in previous generations the churches assumed that the Sunday schools were working hand in hand with familial socialization of children, what had changed by the 1960s, as Paul Post has discerned for the Netherlands, was a complete ‘collapse of home liturgy,’ the only prayers being perfunctory ones before meals.56 These same parents were, as Brown so well demonstrates for Britain, those most anxious to send their children to Sunday school (although one should be cautious about what these numbers may tell us as part of the bulge in the 1950s may simply be a result of the postwar baby boom), but despite robust attendance there were clear changes occurring beneath the surface with regard to how parents understood religious socialization. Many parents who now relied upon psychological experts believed that religious values should not be forced upon children; but once parents placed less emphasis upon the concept of discipline as an end in itself, the social

Introduction

17

disciplining role of the church was viewed with growing disfavour. And even among those parents who still believed that children needed a moral value system, they preferred to displace the teaching of religion from the churches to the state to ensure that the non-denominational Christianity of goods works and a vague morality unconnected to specific forms of doctrine would be taught. As Heather Laing’s contribution to this volume demonstrates, by the late 1940s the church and state had formed an alliance to teach a watered-down religious sensibility, which had a great impact on the general decline in religious knowledge and language in the wider culture and resulted in further displacing the family as the partner of the church. More importantly, it further imbricated the church in a set of educational priorities increasingly set by the political order, even though this was not the intent of the mainline churches themselves. Kevin Flatt’s contribution in this volume also shows that this statist movement may also have had a deleterious effect upon the Sunday schools within the United Church of Canada, which had by 1963 shifted decisively away from evangelicalism towards a concept of child-based religion as a series of Bible stories which were not necessarily divinely inspired. These kinds of movements within the churches themselves may explain why the World Values Survey of the early 1990s found in a host of countries a decline in belief in a personal god and a dramatically high proportion of respondents who simply equated religion with moral teaching with little reference to actual belief.57 A similar phenomenon occurred in Britain, where the 1944 Education Act, which mandated compulsory religious teaching in primary and secondary schools, may have done its work all too well, for while in the short time it won the continued mass support of parents who welcomed this state initiative as a crucial adjunct to reaffirming moral values, it had a devastating effect upon the Sunday schools,58 which, historically had been a cash cow for the churches, especially in terms of missionary outreach. In the 1990s Britain was one of the countries with a relatively high proportion of people – 47 per cent – who stated that religion was important only for teaching moral principles but that these need not be of divine inspiration. Interestingly, in every country which did not have state-controlled religious education – namely Poland, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, all of which are also Roman Catholic – people tended to see God as a direct personal force in their lives and were possessed of much greater religious knowledge.59 If, as Steve Bruce argues, the failure to socialize and recruit children and youth was critical to the general unchurching of various Western

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societies, it is important, as Brown and McLeod have done, to focus upon adolescents and teenagers, but with the caveat that youth need not be rebellious or radicalized in order to have chosen to no longer attend church. Brown is one of the few historians of religion who fully acknowledges that churchgoing need not involve high levels of belief, and that there were many other reasons why people attended church: sociability, cultural conformity, and access to philanthropy. Interestingly, broader changes in youth sociability are not always highlighted in arguments regarding the 1960s, largely because the stereotype of the ‘radical sixties’ still predominated in both popular and scholarly myth making. While the large cultural disjunctures of the sixties along generational lines should not be ignored, historians should also be attentive to changes that were no less dramatic in their impact but did not involve resistance to authority structures. For example, the introduction of television, though cited by many historians of religion as a factor in declining church involvement, particularly among the elderly,60 has not been explored in terms of the fundamental changes it brought as a locus of family togetherness or as a form of leisure.61 Nor have historians adequately pursued the question of the degree to which television replaced the Sunday school as a means of child care on Sunday morning. Historically, the churches were seen as a place for sociability, and in particular the Sunday school and youth clubs were strategically created by church leaders in order to make the church available to families from cradle to grave.62 Such clubs may have previously encouraged couples to marry within the church where they met, but after the Second World War, as youth had higher wages and greater access to employment, they tended to live apart from their families and could meet at alternative sites unregulated by the moral strictures of family and church. Not only would this have encouraged greater premarital sexual experimentation, but it also would have broken the chain of generational transmission of religious commitment to a particular church. In addition the car culture of the fifties would have allowed not only youth, but families, greater access to leisure enjoyment on Sundays; indeed, clergymen commented upon this at length after the Second World War, lamenting that families no longer came to the evening service on Sunday, preferring a drive in the country.63 More devastating was the more general emergence of leisure as the site for personal fulfilment and pleasure for the postwar generations, which made the obligation of going to church seem to be a form of work, an attitude alluded to by several of the Dutch respondents interviewed by Peter Van Rooden.64 No less impor-

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tant was the increased tendency among women to turn to magazines, which could be accessed in private, for advice rather than to either parents, church leaders, or peers. These subtle but important subterranean alterations in concepts of sociability and leisure, over the long term, may have played a very important role in the decline of church attendance, even though they did not involve any decisive moment of loss of faith. Here is one explanation for Hugh McLeod’s notion that people simply floated away,65 for as one Dutch woman stated it, ‘Trying to believe slowly ebbed away.’66 Callum Brown’s most significant contribution to the understanding of religious decline has been to introduce gender as a key factor, viewing women as the crucial vector of cultural change during the 1960s.67 It is indisputable that large numbers of women exited from organized religion from 1958 onwards in Britain, but what has been at issue among historians is whether women’s growing restiveness with the puritanical sexual morality of the mainstream churches was the most critical factor. Brown’s case as to why the sexual revolution is critical to explaining women’s questioning of the church’s teachings is that, as he so powerfully argues, the mainstream churches in Britain became themselves obsessed with issues of sexuality and in fact, ‘were getting tied in knots’ over the issue.68 Piety and domesticity, claims Brown, were so tightly interwoven that any change in women’s roles would create a cataclysmic disjuncture that would necessitate a large female exodus from the churches.69 Women were thus at the cutting edge of a wider youth revolt and were prominent in challenging all establishment authorities. McLeod has challenged Brown’s interpretation, not least because he sees a wide variety of explanations to account for religious decline aside from the sexual revolution, which he contends is too monocausal and does not address other issues relating to the lives of women, namely the rise of second-wave feminism. It is certainly true that women who wished to break with the sexual conventions as laid down by both their parents and the churches may well have been forced to leave an institution because they could no longer abide by the rules. This, however, does not imply that these women lacked a continuing belief in Christian tenets, but simply that they could no longer conform to the moral requirements of the institution. That emancipated women might baulk at the teachings of the institutional church, but that they retained vestiges of religious knowledge, is born out by the work of Sarah Browne in this volume, who finds considerable religious symbols and language in the writings of second-wave feminists during the 1970s.

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As the case of Quebec demonstrates, most Catholic women remained faithful even in the wake of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae of 1968, which disallowed the use of the Pill, but many believed that they could no longer participate in an institution where in good conscience they could not take communion.70 Here, the process of liberalization undertaken by the Second Vatican Council, in emphasizing to an inordinate degree the issue of individual conscience, actually resulted in driving many faithful women away from religious practice. Even though the Quebec bishops attempted to soften the impact of the Papal Encyclical this did not staunch the outflow of women both married and single, old and young. In Ireland stricter ordinances concerning birth control actually kept women in church, which raises the question as to whether women left simply over such moral issues or if other factors, such as the fact that women could be ordained in a variety of religious denominations, compelled women to leave an institution which they now deemed to be too patriarchal and undemocratic. Issues such as prohibitions against female ordination have generally been given less attention in the debate over the role of the sixties and dechristianization.71 Here second-wave feminism was key.72 In Britain Catholicism also enjoyed a period of growth until 1975, which calls for a further nuance of Brown’s argument, for these statistics on Catholic expansion not only in Britain, but in Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands, raise the question as to whether there were other issues concerning the lives of women that were more compelling. For example, levels of married women in the workforce were distinctly lower in Italy, Spain, and Ireland until the 1980s, when in fact church attendance levels did begin to drop steadily, whereas in the United States, Canada, and Britain, levels of married women working increased from the late 1940s onwards. Certainly one could argue that the Puritanism of British Anglicanism in and of itself created unique circumstances which alienated female parishioners, for there were other factors such as the vast expansion of female higher education, which, while characteristic of North America after 1945, did not play an important role in Britain until the 1960s. Thus in the North American example, the sexual revolution must be viewed in a wider context of women’s greater participation in the workforce and increased access to higher education, which not only expanded female horizons, took them away from home and introduced them to new and non-religious intellectual milieus. The fact of higher rates of workforce participation by married women can by itself carry considerable interpretive weight: as working wives were increasingly forced to bear the

Introduction

21

burden of the double shift, working for pay and at home, this left little time for leisure activities with either their husband or children, which now had to be shifted to Sundays, thus edging out any claims that organized religion had on her time.73 This might also account for why parents preferred that state schools teach religion as this added no extra constraint upon their weekly time management. What this evidence demonstrates is that many of the women flooding out of the churches may not have been largely single women participating in the new permissiveness of youth culture, but married women who no longer had the time for church activities. That feminism alone cannot explain shifts in female church affiliation is attested to by the example of American evangelical women: as Sally Gallagher has shown the levels of full- and part-time employment among married evangelical women is strikingly similar to patterns among mainline and liberal Protestant counterparts. Rather than decamping from religious institutions, these women in fact remain wedded to the ideal of the ‘natural’ conjunction between church and family. While claiming in public to adhere to the church’s patriarchal discourse, in terms of actual social practice, the gender roles within their households moved significantly in an egalitarian direction once they entered the workforce in larger numbers. Here discourse did not mirror social practice or personally held cultural values.74 There is a large degree of truth to Hugh McLeod’s observation that the churches were affected by a broader anti-organization and antiauthoritarian ethos which so characterized postwar societies that sought to enshrine notions of democracy, egalitarianism, and individual freedom in their polities, especially those who during the Cold War saw this as a strategy to combat communism. Labour unions and political parties saw a similar decline in membership during the 1950s and 1960s, but in terms of religion this general phenomenon of a suspicion that organizations would induce political apathy and cultural conformity and suppress individual creativity was compounded by the inability of mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism to adapt to the immense changes in postwar culture. Jeffrey Cox has rightly observed that conformity forms one of the most important drawing cards for the churches, just as it does in other areas of group affiliation, but at the same time, he reminds historians of the critical importance played by ‘ecclesiastical entrepreneurship.’75 While it is true that, historically, people sought comfort in attending a particular church, historians, especially those writing about countries with strong statist or pillarist

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church traditions, often neglect to recognize the degree to which church organizations often had to labour with great difficulty and at great financial cost to get and keep people in the pews. As the notion of social conformity became a negative force in the 1950s and 1960s, churches which had not invested a great deal in membership expansion and outreach began to fail miserably, as there were no mechanisms to attract or interest new members. In Belgium and the Netherlands, the notion of the pillar actually enhanced external conformity to religion until the end of the sixties in Belgium and into the 1980s in the Netherlands, but once this system of traditional rituals failed, there was very little to sustain church adherence, and in fact conformity had now come to mean staying away from ‘authoritarian’ institutions.76 This lack of structural innovation within church denominations was not confined to statist models. In Canada, as the work of Kevin Flatt in this volume makes clear, the decision to eviscerate evangelicalism from the Sunday school curriculum during the early 1960s, had a devastating impact on the United Church: in the first instance it drove conservatives into the arms of more charismatic sects such as Pentecostalism, and in the long term it meant that the United Church had very little means by which to attract new members once these had left. Pentecostalism and the moral majority movement in the United States both illustrate that it was not simply the liberal denominations which were modernist or relevant,77 but that the churches which survived were not immediately related to their social message, but to their organizational strategies, a point affirmed by Tina Fetner in this volume. She shows that evangelical organizations were less dense in Canada compared with the rich infrastructure in the United States and that it is this density of interconnections more than any other factors which explains the dynamic cultural force of the religious right in the United States.78 While the analysis of aggregate church statistics provides a wide-angle view of religious decline, there is a great need for more local studies, such as that by Mary-Ann Shantz, whose study of the western Canadian city of Calgary compares Anglicanism and the Christian Missionary Alliance to show that Anglicans preferred traditional strategies of religious socialization which relied upon the family as a unified unit, while the Alliance, although on the surface a more ‘conservative’ religious body, was better able to deploy a language of dramatic conversionism which highlighted the individuality of children and youth, which situated it more effectively within the dominant postwar cultural ethos of individualism. What she makes clear is that evangelism itself was not a remedy to the implosion of

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church attendance, but that the more individualistic one’s message the more it resonated, especially among youth.79 As the work of Flatt, Schafer, and Schantz illustrate, historians should not automatically assume that it was the liberals who were decamping into the arms of secular humanism; rather, too much relevance and tinkering with ritual and doctrine, symptomatic in the rapid introduction of the reforms of Vatican II, had the effect of driving out orthodox church members. Indeed, one of the critical mistakes made by many mainstream religious bodies was that by pursuing what amounted to conflicting strategies in an effort to address what they saw as the juggernaut of secularization, they alienated the core constituency of churchgoers who preferred the standard rituals and devotions. The turn towards a liturgy of love within the Roman Catholic Church may have appeared to be a means to keep the church current, but since this message rested within a persisting structure of church hierarchy80 dominated by men, ultimately it served to alienate both liberals and conservatives. As Peter Van Rooden has said of the impact of Vatican II in the Netherlands, those who called for reform then chided the church for the absurdity of group confession and folk masses. Thus a large portion of churchgoers faded away not out of a lack of belief but because the church was no longer seen as comfortable or familiar.81 From the perspective of some, the campaign for many mainstream denominations to appear relevant by enlisting the churches in secular social and political causes made the churches appear to be on the defensive and, as Grace Davie has concluded, rendered ‘the sacred vulnerable.’82 As the above discussion makes clear, historians should not assume necessarily that those leaving organized religion were those who had stopped believing; a great proportion of those who rejected the institutional church did so because its rituals had changed, or they disliked particular local clergymen, or their personal lives made religious participation either more difficult or irrelevant to daily life. There is a general tendency among historians to view the realm of diffusive Christianity as a residual category of real religion, namely that which occurs in the institutional church, whereas it can just as easily be argued that the realm of religious belief outside formal liturgies and doctrines was historically the most pervasive form of religious practice, and what was novel of the Western world was the great success of what Callum Brown has termed the ‘salvation machine’ between 1800 to 1950. While it must be recognized that ceasing to go to church can have a deleterious effect upon belief in any society, the crucial change following the

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Second World War was the absence of social reproduction of religious values within the family. In terms of belief, the sixties was not necessarily a decade of crisis. For example, women in Canada may have rejected the patriarchy of church governance and as a result stopped going to church, but in terms of those who adhered to orthodox notions of Christian belief – namely the divinity of Christ and the doctrines of resurrection, crucifixion, and atonement – in 1993 66 per cent of Canadians surveyed indentified themselves as Christian believers.83 In a survey from 2006 there is virtually no statistical difference in religious belief between men and women, with 87 per cent of men and 89 per cent of women indicating belief in a personal God.84 By contrast, in Britain in the year 2000, while 93 per cent of respondents described themselves as ‘spiritual,’ there was less of an immediate connection with orthodox Christian belief.85 But as Patrick Pasture argues in his contribution to this volume, we should not discount alternative forms of spirituality as simply a diminution or a second-rate form of Christianity, since syncretism had always been a key element of popular religion, and it is only the clerical elite and intellectuals who have disparaged it through espousing the notion of pure forms of Christian truth. Moreover, as Peter Van Rooden’s recent work in Dutch oral history illustrates, the rejection of formal religious authority was not merely a characteristic of youthful rebellion, for many of his respondents were middle-aged women who had left church to embrace Eastern religions.86 Historians know all too little of the actual inner spiritual lives of religious people in the past and have largely measured levels of ‘piety’ in terms of conformity to the precepts of organized religion. This in turn has led to false dichotomies between the premodern and modern, and modern and postmodern eras. Perhaps ultramodernity, as Yves Lambert has maintained, can be defined in terms of individual spirituality, a rejection of external controls, religion à la carte, the expansion of evangelical charismatic currents, and an emphasis on this-worldly salvation – a notion which had been promulgated by churches interested in social Christianity. Historians of Dutch and French religion have pointed to the immense rise in religious pilgrimages to argue, as does Alana Harris in this volume, that despite treating religion in a fairly episodic way, parishioners continue nevertheless to see themselves as integrated into a Catholic culture.87 As her work and that of Stephen Heathorn in this volume shows, one of the most compelling reasons why people affiliated themselves with churches and believed in a higher power was because of fear of illness and death. Certainly clerical elites well under-

Introduction

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stood this for, from the early modern period and up to the late 1950s, the theology of fear remained a potent element especially in Sunday schools and Catholic catechisms in order to persuade the young into early conversion and a lifelong commitment to their churches. The importance of death to religiosity would also explain why churchgoers are often older and female, since many women would have already lost a spouse. Certainly the research of Michael Snape on soldiers in the Second World War in the United States, Britain, and Canada shows how fear of death fostered an intense piety, but one that did not automatically lead to church attendance.88 As Heathorn’s contribution to this volume suggests, what has emerged since the 1960s is a new kind of civil religion where religious beliefs shade into concepts of memory as a means to provide continuity between the worlds of the living and the dead.89 Jaak Billiet and Karel Dobbelaere maintain that the belief in life after death remains well anchored in the Western world but more significantly have shown that even in eastern bloc countries in which state policies under communism actually succeeded in dechristianizing large segments of the population, religious funerals remain very popular to this day.90 It is certainly not inconsequential for explanations of religious decline that the end of the Second World War saw the emergence in several Western countries of a universal welfare state including health and hospital care, the development of antibiotics in the fifties, and the mass inoculation of children against a wider set of childhood diseases, including polio, combined with greater affluence, all of which served to push the theology of fear, and thus churchgoing, to the margins. As the rise of diffusive religion indicates, perhaps the most potent explanation for the difficulties of organized Christianity in the postwar era on both sides of the Atlantic was the growing centrality of precepts of individualism, involving a broader rejection of external authorities including churches among many other institutions, and an emphasis on choice, in which the terrain of the personal remained a paramount cultural objective of an ever larger proportion of people, both male and female. Historians generally think of the challenging of authority to be a feature of youth culture of the sixties, which in large part it was, but what is important for the overall narrative of dechristianization is that this spirit of individualism which embodied this short phase of youth radicalism had a much longer trajectory both backward into the past and forward into the 1970s and beyond. Probably one of the most

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prominent features of the modern world is the enshrining of the individual, the personal, and the private whereby the concept of authority flows from within the self. Thus churches which exalted the communal and had statist polities have fared relatively poorly in this changed climate, whereas those with an emphasis on individual conversionism, namely Pentecostals and a range of American evangelical sects, continue to enjoy relatively robust growth.91 The fortunes of specific denominations have been dictated less by a failure of belief systems than by factors other than faith itself – namely shifts in ritual practice and organizational outreach, unforeseen consequences of political alliances, and most importantly, changes in family structures and attitudes to daily life have had a catastrophic effect upon the intergenerational transmission of religious knowledge. Where the period from 1945 to 1970 saw a precipitous decline in church attendance, as part of a broader cultural questioning of authority, the era from 1970 to the 1980s, particularly in Western Europe, marks a distinct decline of religious belief. The elucidation of whether there exists a causal connection between these two phenomena in addition to more finely tuned comparisons between the religious paths of Western Europe and North America will provide an exciting terrain of endeavour for scholars of religion during the coming decades.

NOTES We are especially grateful to Stephen Heathorn, Hugh McLeod, and Till Van Rahden for their suggestions and comments upon an earlier version of the Introduction. 1 Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow: Inside History (New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 23–4. 2 Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London and New York: Routledge, 2009; first edition, 2000), 170–92. 3 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 19. 4 Hugh McLeod, ‘Dechristianisation and Rechristianisation: The Case of Great Britain,’ Kirchliche Zeitgeschicliche 11, no. 1 (1998): 21–33. Since the publication of McLeod’s The Religious Crisis of the 1960s in 2006 and the

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second edition of Brown’s The Death of Christian Britain in 2009, there has been a spirited debate between these two scholars as to whether accelerated religious decline should be identified as more characteristic of the ‘early sixties’ or ‘later sixties,’ and, according to Brown, whether a ‘culturalist’ approach, stressing as the dynamic factor the decisive choices made by young single women, or longer-term ‘intellectualist’ factors best explains this development. See Hugh McLeod, ‘The 1960s,’ in Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman-Jones, eds., Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 254–74; Callum G. Brown, ‘Gendering Secularisation, Locating Women in the Transformation of British Christianity in the 1960s,’ in Katznelson and Stedman-Jones, eds., Religion and the Political Imagination, 275–94. For ‘culturalist’ vs. ‘intellectualist’ approaches to the religious chronology of the 1960s, see Brown’s lengthy review of McLeod’s work, ‘What Was the Religious Crisis of the 1960s,’ Journal of Religious History 34, no. 4 (December 2010): 468–79; Brown, ‘Sex, Religion and the Single Woman c. 1950–75: The Importance of a “Short” Sexual Revolution to the English Religious Crisis of the 1960s,’ TwentiethCentury British History (Online Advanced Access, 1 December 2010): 1–27. The most thoroughgoing ‘intellectualist re-reading of twentieth-century British religious history has been provided by S.J.D. Green, whose recent The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change c. 1920– 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 303–16, relentlessly assails Brown’s chronology, in particular. According to Green, beneath the relatively stable demographic figures of church membership that prevailed between 1900 and 1950, there occurred major shifts in ‘the relationship of membership to adherence and authority’ that significantly diminished the presence of the British Protestant churches in particular. One of the most significant elements of this religious decline was the loss of the public sense that Britain constituted a ‘Protestant nation’ founded upon ‘puritan’ social values. This, Green suggests, had been irretrievably weakened by 1940 and had largely disappeared by 1960. 5 McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s; Patrick Pasture, ‘Christendom and the Legacy of the Sixties: Between the Secular City and the Age of Aquarius,’ Revue d’histoire écclesiastique 99, no. 1 (2004): 82–117; Patrick Pasture and Leo Kenis, ‘The Transformation of Christian Churches in Western Europe: An Introduction,’ in Leo Kenis, Jaak Billiet, and Patrick Pasture, eds., The Transformation of the Christian Churches in Western Europe, 1945– 2000 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010), 7–19; Loek Halman and Veerke Draulans, ‘How Secular Is Europe?’ British Journal of Sociology 57, no. 2 (2006): 263–5. For an interpretation that focuses largely on changing

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6 7

8 9

10 11

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Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau social mores, see Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2006). McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the Sixties, 83–101. In this volume the article by Nancy Christie on Pierre Berton shows that both the negative and positive respondents to Berton continued to view Canada as a Christian nation. More interestingly, the public discussion of the now famous Harry Crowe affair, which involved the firing of a professor of history at United College in Winnipeg, revolved around the notion of academic freedom, and there continues to be little awareness that the real point at issue was that Crowe had described Christianity as a ‘corrosive force.’ On the notion of academic freedom during this period, see Catherine Anne Gidney, A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2004), 93. Canada may also not fit Callum Brown’s paradigm of youth revolt against sexual conventions. In a recent review of Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow, Graydon Carter ruefully observed that Canada in the sixties was a society ‘where even post-marital sex was gently frowned upon’ and that ‘the sexual revolution was something that happened to someone else, somewhere else, most probably in that enchanted far away Gomorrah called the United States.’ See Graydon Carter, ‘That Summer in Italy,’ New York Times Book Review, 23 May 2010, 1. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 51. For a flawed but perceptive revisionist assessment of postwar America, see Alan Petigny, The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Hugh McLeod, ‘The Present Crisis in Historical Context,’ in Kenis et al., eds., The Transformation of the Christian Churches in Western Europe, 32; Kenis and Pasture, ‘Introduction,’ in ibid., 17; Jon Butler, ‘The American Exception? Secularisation and Religion in the United States, 1945–2000,’ in ibid., 160–1. Mark Freeman, ‘’Britain’s Spiritual Life: How Can It Be Deepened?’ Seebohm Rowntree, Russell Lavers, and the “Crisis of Belief,” ca. 1946–54,’ Journal of Religious History 29, no. 1 (February 2005): 25–42; Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005); Nancy Christie, ‘“Look Out for Leviathan”: The Search for a Conservative Modernist Consensus,’ in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, eds., Cultures of Citizenship in Post-War Canada, 1940–1955 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Uni-

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18 19

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versity Press, 2003), 63–94; Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 17. On this theme, see also the Christie article in this volume. See the essays in Bob Moore and Henk von Nierop, eds., Twentieth-Century Mass Society in Britain and the Netherlands (Oxford: Berg, 2006). For further discussion of this theme, see Tina Fetner and Carrie B. Sanders, ‘The Pro-Family Movement in Canada and the United States: Institutional Histories and Barriers to Diffusion,’ in David Rayside and Clyde Wilcox, eds., Faith, Politics, and Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 87–100. Karel Dobbelaere and Jaak Billiet, ‘Late 20th-Century Trends in Catholic Religiousness: Belgium Compared with Western and Central European Nations,’ in Kenis et al., eds., The Transformation of the Christian Churches in Western Europe, 115. See John F. Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy: Religion, Society and Politics since 1861 (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 118–19. In Italy, the Christian Democratic party exerted a de facto hegemony in government between 1948 and 1984, in which for many the Italian state became an arm of the Roman Catholic Church. See the article by Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez in this volume for an analysis of the Spanish situation in which the Catholic Church both was imbricated in Franco’s authoritarian regime and served as a crucible of oppositional ideologies to his government between 1950 and the mid-1970s. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Family and Schooling in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, 200–1, 211–12. For this new revisionist interpretation, see Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Jessica Weiss, To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Leslie Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004); Dagmar Herzog, ‘Desperately Seeking Normality: Sex and Marriage in the Wake of the War,’ in Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 161–92; Hugh McLeod, The Religious

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21 22

23

24

Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau Crisis of the 1960s, 57. Many revisionist historians have emphasized that gender relations were being revised in the fifties, especially with regard to the role of men in both the workplace and the family. See Steve Bruce, ‘Secularisation in the UK and USA,’ in Callum Brown and Michael Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World: Essays in Honour of Hugh McLeod (Farnham UK: Ashgate, 2010), 210; McLeod, ‘The Present Crisis in Historical Context,’ in Kenis et al., eds., The Tranformation of the Christian Churches in Western Europe, 33; Wilhelm Damberg and Patrick Pasture, ‘Restoration and Erosion of Pillarised Catholicism in Western Europe,’ in ibid., 60; Stephen Brooke, ‘Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s,’ Journal of Social History 34, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 773–95; Mark Ruff, The Wayward Flock: Catholic Youth in Postwar West Germany, 1945–1965 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Ruff, ‘Catholic Elites, Gender and Unintended Consequences in the 1950s: Toward a Reinterpretation of the Role of Conservatives in the Federal Republic,’ in Frank Biess, Mark Roseman, and Hanna Schissler, eds., Conflict, Catastrophe and Continuity: Essays on Modern German History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), 254–7. Ruff has concluded that the decline in churchgoing in Germany began in the 1950s. See Mark Edward Ruff, ‘A Religious Vacuum? The Post-Catholic Milieu in the Federal Republic of Germany,’ in Michael Geyer and Lucian Hölscher, eds., The Presence of God in Modern Society: Transcendence and Religious Community in Germany (Walstum Verlag, 2007), 351–79. Petigny, The Permissive Society, 52, 21, 53–63, 179, 187–8. R. Scott Appleby, ‘Decline or Relocation? The Catholic Presence in Church and Society, 1950–2000,’ in Leslie Woodcock Tentler, ed., The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, Ireland, and Quebec (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 208–35. Clive D. Field, ‘Puzzled People Revisited: Religious Believing and Belonging in Wartime Britain, 1939–45,’ Twentieth-Century British History 19, no. 4 (2008): 457–9. Field argues that even during wartime religious views were interconnected with a range of other views. Eileen Barker, ‘The Post-War Generation and Establishment Religion in England,’ in Wade Clark Roof, Jackson W. Carroll, David A Roozen, eds., The Post-War Generation and Establishment Religion: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 12; Kevin J. Christiano, ‘The Trajectory of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century Quebec,’ in Tentler, ed., The Church Confronts Modernity, 27–9; Michael Snape, God and the British Soldier: Religion and the British Army in the First and Second World Wars (New York and London: Routledge, 2005); Michael Snape, ‘War, Religion and Revival:

Introduction

25 26

27

28 29

30 31

31

The United States, British and Canadian Armies during the Second World War,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 135–58. S.J.D. Green, ‘Was There an English Religious Revival in the 1950s?’ Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society 7, no. 9 (2006): 523. For Britain, see the intriguing new work by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Based upon a wide-ranging series of interviews with men and women whose experience of marriage spanned the interwar and postwar years, the authors argue, concerning the 1950s, that there was a growing idea of marriage as a type of ‘teamwork’ especially in childrearing, joint leisure, and household management (42). More significantly, the authors challenge what they term ‘master-narratives’ that move from an era of repressed to open sexuality (48–9). A key finding, which serves to nuance Brown’s assumption of a ‘short’ sexual revolution between 1958 and 1963, is that there was a ‘slow thaw’ in ideas of sexuality after 1940, with increasing emphasis among couples regarding mutual sexual pleasure. However, the authors admit that this development may have created tensions and dissatisfactions between couples (42–3), which possibly could have led to a wide-ranging cultural discourse of sexual liberation in the 1960s. Bruce, ‘Secularisation in the UK and USA,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 217; Stephen Brooke, ‘Bodies, Sexuality and the “Modernization” of the British Working Classes, 1920s to 1960s,’ International Labor and Working Class History 69 (Spring 2006): 104–22; Nancy Christie, ‘Sacred Sex: The United Church and the Privatisation of the Family in Post-war Canada,’ in Nancy Christie, ed., Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 348–76; Michael Gauvreau, ‘The Emergence of Personalist Feminism: Catholicism and the MarriagePreparation Movement in Quebec, 1940–1966,’ in ibid., 319–47. Pat Thane, ‘Family Life and ‘Normality’ in Postwar British Culture,’ in Bessel and Schuman, eds., Life after Death, 193–210. On this theme, see Appleby, ‘Decline or Relocation?’ in Tentler, ed., The Church Confronts Modernity, 214; Bruce, ‘Secularisation in the UK and the USA,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 210; Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, 202–3; Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion, 51–2. Ruff, ‘A Religious Vacuum?’ in Geyer and Hölscher, eds., The Presence of God, 353. Gidney, A Long Eclipse, 126–32. This is not to argue that anti-Catholicism

32

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33

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35 36

37

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Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau disappeared from the Canadian cultural scene but that it found new, more subtle outlets. Damberg and Pasture, ‘Restoration and Erosion of Pillarised Catholicism in Western Europe,’ in Kenis et al., eds., The Transformation of the Christian Churches in Western Europe, 72. Patrick Pasture, ‘Christendom and the Legacy of the Sixties,’ 93; James C. Kennedy, ‘Recent Dutch Religious History and the Limits of Secularization,’ in Erik Sangers ed., The Dutch and Their Gods: Secularization and Transformation of Religion in the Netherlands since 1950 (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren 2005), 30–2. On the shift towards moral relativity in the United Church of Canada because of its embrace of neo-orthodoxy, see Christie, ‘Sacred Sex,’ in Christie ed., Households of Faith, 365–6. For critiques of these interwar theologies, especially in the North American context, see Gary J. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity 1950–2005 (Westminster: John Knox Press, 2006), 269–324, 395–450; Florian Michel, La pensée catholique en Amérique du Nord: réseaux intellectuels et échanges entre l’Europe, le Canada, et les États-Unis, années 1920–1960 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2010). Wade Clark Roof, ‘Conclusion,’ in Roof et al., eds., The Postwar Generation, 253. On the conflicting messages of the postwar churches, see Peter Van Rooden, ‘The Strange Death of Dutch Christendom,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 175–96; Leslie Tentler and Michael Gauvreau in this volume. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, 197. On Graham, see also Alana Harris, ‘“Disturbing the Complacency of Religion”? The Evangelical Crusades of Dr. Billy Graham and Father Patrick Peyton in Britain, 1951–54,’ Twentieth Century British History 18, no. 4 (2007): 481–513. Dagmar Herzog, ‘Memory, Morality and the Sexual Liberalization of West Germany,’ in Biess et al., eds., Conflict, Catastrophe and Continuity, 280–89; Matthew D. Hockenor, ‘The German Protestant Debate on Politics and Theology after the Second World War,’ in Dianne Kirby, ed., Religion and the Cold War (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 37–49. Jos Becker, ‘Church Membership Investigated 1950–2002,’ in Sengers, ed., The Dutch and Their Gods, 67. On this theme more generally, see Dagmar Herzog, ‘The Death of God in West Germany: Between Secularization, Postfascism, and the Rise of Liberation Theology,’ in Geyer and Hölscher, eds., The Presence of God in Modern Society, 431–66. On the way in which the liberals in Canada co-opted the evangelical right, which forestalled a greater polarization like that in

Introduction

41

42 43

44

45

46

47

48

33

the United States, see George Egerton, ‘Trudeau, God and the Canadian Constitution: Religion, Human Rights and Government Authority in the Making of the 1982 Constitution,’ in David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die, eds., Rethinking Church, State and Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 94–6. Ruff, ‘Catholic Elites, Gender, and Unintended Consequences in the 1950s,’ in Biess et al., eds., Conflict, Catastrophe and Continuity, 253–4; Hugh McLeod, ‘Introduction,’ in Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustdorf, eds., The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1; Dianne Kirby, ‘Religion and the Cold War – An Introduction,’ in Kirby, ed., Religion and the Cold War, 3–4; John Pollard, ‘The Vatican, Italy and the Cold War,’ in ibid., 103–17; George Egerton, ‘Between War and Peace: Politics, Religion and Human Rights in Early Cold War Canada, 1945–50,’ in ibid., 163–76; Matthew Grimley, Citizenship, Community, and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 2–3. Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 229. On the larger theme of the ‘unholy alliance’ between churches and political institutions, see Lucian Hölscher, ‘Europe in the Age of Secularisation,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 197–204. On the politics of wartime social security, see Nancy Christie, Engendering the State: Family, Work and Welfare in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). These changes were not simply dictated by the state, as the churches themselves had begun to draw away from ‘the world’ at the beginning of the war. See Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, stresses the continued importance of Sunday school during the fifties. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 47–8, 203. Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, 29. Two volumes which foreground religion and social discipline in Canada are Christie, ed., Households of Faith; Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, eds., Mapping the Margins: The Family and Social Discipline in Canada, 1700–1975 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004). See Brigitte Caulier in this volume, who shows how even in traditionalist Roman Catholic religious circles there was a definite shift during the 1940s and 1950s away from memorization of the catechism towards individual interpretation and experience. Nancy Christie, ‘’Proper Government and Discipline: Family Religion and

34

49

50 51

52

53

54 55 56

Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau Masculine Authority in Nineteeth-Century Canada,’ in John Arnold and Sean Brady, eds., Masculinities in History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Despite a discourse on patriarchal control in family life flowing from the churches, familial evidence from the Buchanan family, who were commercial liberals, shows they had great difficulty in urging their children to attend church. Historians need to explore the breakdown in notions of Providence in succeeding generations to explain the decrease in adherence to religious tenets. Hannah Lane shows high levels of individual choice in the nineteenth century as well. See Hannah Lane, ‘Tribalism, Proselytism and Pluralism: Protestants, Family, and Denominational Identity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century St. Stephen, New Brunswick,’ in Christie, ed., Households of Faith, 103–37. On the concept of the teenager in the 1950s in Canada, see Michael Gauvreau, ‘The Protracted Birth of the Canadian “Teenager”: Work, Citizenship and the Canadian Youth Commission, 1943–55,’ in Christie and Gauvreau, eds., Cultures of Citizenship in Postwar Canada, 201–38. The ‘modern’ ideal of the teenager was being fostered by the churches, the government, and the YMCA. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 31. Callum G. Brown, ‘Women and Religion in Britain: The Autobiographical View of the Fifties and Sixties,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 165–9. Brown shows that of his sample 169 mothers had no personal religious belief, which suggests that lack of socialization along with youth rebellion against church moral strictures were at work to explain declining church attendance in the sixties. For a similar process at work in the Netherlands, see Van Rooden, ‘The Strange Death of Dutch Christendom,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 185. Angus McLaren, Twentieth Century Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press), esp. chapter 3; M.E. Melody and Linda M. Peterson, Teaching America about Sex: Marriage Guides and Sex Manuals from the Late Victorians to Dr. Ruth (New York: NYU Press, 1999); Marcus Collins, Modern Love: Personal Relationships in Twentieth Century Britain (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 90–133. Snape, God and the British Soldier, 243–4. Herzog, ‘Desperately Seeking Normality,’ in Bessel and Schuman, eds., Life after Death, 161–92; Brooke, ‘Gender and Working Class Identity,’ 773–95. Paul Post, ‘Ritual-Liturgical Movements: A Panoramic View of Ritual Repertoires in Dutch Catholicism after 1950/1960,’ in Sangers, ed., The Dutch and Their Gods, 80.

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57 Mattei Dogan, ‘Accelerated Decline of Religious Beliefs in Europe,’ Comparative Sociology 1, no. 2 (2002): 135–6. 58 For the 1944 Education Acts in Britain, see Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, 203–4; Green, ‘Was There an English Religious Revival?’ 530–1; Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 59 Dogan, ‘Accelerated Decline of Religious Beliefs,’ 136–7. 60 Post, ‘Ritual-Liturgical Movements,’ in Sengers, ed., The Dutch and Their Gods, 81; Pasture and Kenis, ‘Introduction,’ in Kenis et al., eds., The Transformation of the Christian Churches in Western Europe, 12. 61 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 62 On this theme, see Nancy Christie, ‘Young Men and the Creation of Civic Christianity in Urban Methodist Churches, 1880–1914,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 17, no. 1 (2006): 79–106. 63 Christie and Gauvreau, Full-Orbed Christianity, 352n1. 64 Van Rooden, ‘The Strange Death of Dutch Christendom,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 187. 65 McLeod, conclusion in this volume. 66 Van Rooden, ‘The Strange Death of Dutch Christendom,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 187. 67 This important theme has been developed in two broadly synthetic volumes: Brown, The Death of Christian Britain; Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain. 68 Brown, Religion and Society, 251. 69 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 200. 70 Quebec Catholicism after the 1960s provides a significant paradox that is highly interesting to historians of transatlantic secularization. On the one hand, there was a marked (some would say catastrophic) decline in weekly church attendance from about 85 per cent in 1965 to 42 per cent a decade later, a decline that has persisted into the twenty-first century, with Quebec displaying the lowest levels of church attendance in North America. As well, the number of religious marriages declined precipitously, though interestingly, so did all marriages, with many couples opting for less institutionally sanctioned arrangements. However, levels of private belief remain high and relatively stable, with 60 per cent of Quebec respondents reporting praying at least once a month. More surprisingly, in 2001, 83.5 per cent of Quebec people claimed that their affiliation was Roman Catholic. This has led a number of observers to point to the paradox of the strength of a ‘cultural Catholicism’ within an overall setting of declining

36

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Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau measurements of institutional involvement. For an analysis, see E.-Martin Meunier, Jean-François Laniel, and Jean-Christophe Demers, ‘Permanence et recomposition de la “religion culturelle”: Aperçu socio-historique du catholicisme québécois (1970–2006),’ in Robert Mager and Serge Cantin, eds., Modernité et religion au Québec: Où en sommes-nous? (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010), 79–128. Ann-Marie Korte, ‘The Affirmation of Women’s Religious Leadership: A “Modern” Issue?’ in Kenis et al., eds., The Transformation of the Christian Churches in Western Europe, 194–205. For Quebec, see Diane Gervais, ‘Morale catholique et détresse conjugale au Québec: La réponse du service de régulation des naissances Séréna, 1955–1970,’ Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 55, no. 2 (Automne 2001): 185–215; Gervais, ‘Les couples aux marges du permis-defendu. Morale conjugale et compromis pastoral à Montréal dans les années 1960,’ Études d’histoire religieuse 70 (2004): 23–38. For national differences in the Catholic reception of the encyclical, see Tentler, ‘Introduction,’ in Tentler, ed., The Church Confronts Modernity, 17; Appleby, ‘Decline or Relocation?,’ in ibid., 217. Karel Dobblaere, ‘The Surviving Dominant Catholic Church in Belgium: A Consequence of Its Popular Religious Practices?’ in Roof et al., eds., The Postwar Generation, 184. Sally K. Gallagher, Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1973), 134, 177. We thank Melanie Heath for suggesting this important book. On the way in which new social values are promulgated within traditionalist institutions in the United States, see Petigny, The Permissive Society, 136–55. Jeffrey Cox, ‘Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation: A Progress Report,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 21–3. Like Cox, Hugh McLeod maintains that it is extremely important to view the churches as part and parcel of the wider social world, as integral to modernity, so that historians do not fall into the secularist trap of simply viewing them in conflict with it. See McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 176. On this point, see Dobbelaere, ‘The Surviving Dominant Catholic Church in Belgium,’ in Roof et al., eds., The Postwar Generation, 190. Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion, 121–5. For a similar argument in the context of Britain, see Nancy A. Schafer, ‘Exporting a U.S. Gospel of Health and Wealth: An American Evangelist in Europe,’ in Hans Krabbendam and Derek Rubin, eds., Religion in America: European-American Perspectives (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004), 275.

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79 Mary-Ann Schantz, ‘Centring the Suburb, Focussing on the Family: Calgary’s Anglican and Alliance Churches, 1945–1969,’ Histoire Sociale/Social History 42, no. 84 (Nov. 2009): 423–46. 80 Ruff, ‘Catholic Elites, Gender and Unintended Consequences,’ in Biess et al., eds., Conflict, Catastrophe and Continuity, 260; Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy, 146; Alana Harris, ‘“The Prayer in the Syntax”? The Roman Missal, the Book of Common Prayer, and Changes in Liturgical Languages, 1945–1980,’ in Jane Garnett, Mathew Grimley, Alana Harris, William Whyte, and Sarah Williams, eds., Redefining Christian Britain: Post1945 Perspectives (London: SCM Press, 2006), 37–8; Barker, ‘The Postwar Generation and Establishment Religion in Britain,’ in Roof et al., eds., The Postwar Generation, 14. It could be also that as clergy aged and the profession no longer attracted the best and the brightest that religious services did indeed appear boring. This was the contention of Pierre Berton, whose work is discussed in this volume by Nancy Christie. 81 Van Rooden, ‘The Strange Death of Dutch Christendom,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 189. 82 Davie, Religion in Britain Since 1945, 35; Jose Casanova, ‘Immigration and the New Religious Pluralism: A European/United States Comparison,’ in Thomas Banchoff, ed., The New Religious Pluralism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 63; Green, ‘Was There an English Religious Revival?,’ 538. 83 G.A. Rawlyk, Is Jesus Your Personal Saviour? In Search of Canadian Evangelicalism in the 1990s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 62–3. 84 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, Christian Churches and Their Peoples: A Social History of Religion in Canada, 1840–1965 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). In 1996 only 25 per cent of Canadians attended church regularly, but fully 85 per cent believed in a personal God. See David Lyon, ‘Introduction,’ in Lyon and Van Die, eds., Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity, 6. Canada would therefore fit Grace Davie’s concept of believing without belonging. See Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945. 85 Anton Van Harskamp, ‘Simply Astounding: Ongoing Secularization in the Netherlands,’ in Sengers, ed., The Dutch and their Gods, 50. By contrast, James Kennedy argues that while decline in churchgoing has made religion less ethical in its emphasis, personal religion has become more spiritual and more individualistic. See Kennedy, ‘Recent Dutch Religious History,’ in Ibid., 38. 86 Van Rooden, ‘The Strange Death of Dutch Christendom,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 188.

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87 Yves Lambert, ‘New Christianity, Indifference and Diffused Spirituality,’ in McLeod and Ustdorf, eds., The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 74–6; Jean-Paul Willaime, ‘Religious and Secular France between Northern and Southern Europe,’ Social Compass 45, no. 1 (1998): 155–74; Paul Post, ‘Ritual-Liturgical Movements,’ in Sengers, ed., The Dutch and Their Gods, 83, 86–7. 88 Michael Snape, ‘War, Religion and Revival,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 136–57. 89 On a similar theme, see Jean-Paul Willaime, ‘Religious and Secular France,’ 169; Linda Woodhead,’Implicit Understandings of Religion in Sociological Study and in the Work of Hugh McLeod,’ in Brown and Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, 35. 90 Dobbelaere and Billiet, ‘Late 20th Century Trends in Catholic Religiousness,’ in Kenis et al., eds., The Transformation of the Christian Churches in Western Europe, 118; Daniele Hervieu-Leger, ‘The Case of French Catholicism,’ in Roof et al., eds., The Postwar Generation, 161; Thomas Kselman, ‘The Dechristianization of Death in Modern France,’ in McLeod and Ustdorf, eds., The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 158. 91 In an observation that serves to reinforce this conclusion, Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman-Jones have noted that in the European context, while the 1960s may have been a decade of fundamental religious change, in no European state has there been a complete separation of church and state. Europeans may display low levels of church attendance and reject the notion that the church should decide their values, but their behaviour and significant components of their public identities remain Christian. See Katznelson and Stedman-Jones, ‘Secularization, Religion, and the Roots of Innovation in the Political Sphere,’ in Katznelson and Stedman-Jones, eds., Religion and the Political Imagination, 17.

1 Gender, Christianity, and the Rise of No Religion: The Heritage of the Sixties in Britain callum g. brown

Between 1950 and 1975, leading British social investigators were convinced of the possibility that sex and religion were linked. They investigated the connections between the two to an extent, and with a degree of detail, unmatched before or since. For example, in 1954 Eustace Chesser, a psychiatrist from Edinburgh, studied the relationship between level of church attendance on the one hand and female orgasm and female sexual satisfaction on the other (see figure 1.1). Using over 900 female responses on sex from a larger survey of more than 2,000 women in England, he seemed to show that there was a positive linkage between orgasm and family churchgoing, and an even more pronounced relationship between a woman’s overall sexual satisfaction from intercourse in marriage and the level of family churchgoing. For Chesser, this backed up other data that showed that happiness in marriage was higher where both husband and wife attended church frequently or occasionally. The statistical technique of correlation (which Chesser did not use) backs up his argument; this shows that the link in his survey data between churchgoing and orgasm produces a positive correlation coefficient of 0.7372, which is a strong relationship; but this relationship becomes extremely strong between churchgoing and sexual satisfaction, achieving a correlation coefficient of 0.9850. However this connection might be explained, and however significant it might be, the fact that Chesser investigated this is indicative of a significant trend at mid-century within social investigation. Concern with the changing nature of religion and morality in British life was being investigated through recourse to the expanding exploration of the sexual life of the people. Chesser’s study in the mid-1950s was distinctive for the extent to

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Percentage achieving orgasm/satisfaction in each church attendance category

Figure 1.1 English women’s church attendance, frequency of orgasm, and degree of sexual satisfaction, 1954

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20 10 0 Regularly Occasionally Wife occasionally, husband never

Never

Church attendance Married women who reported 'a lot' of satisfaction from intercourse (n = 972) Women who always or frequently experienced orgasm (n = 997) Constructed from data in Eustace Chesser, The Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships of the English Woman (London: Hutchinson's Medical Publications, 1956), p. 280.

which he put women centre stage in the study of British social life, habits, and morality. He recognized that it was women, rather more than men, whose lives were changing in mid-century, and whose routine gender rules of life had been under the greatest pressure through war and the breakdown of ‘previously accepted norms.’1 Yet, in many ways, his study was focusing on what was failing to change in England of the mid-1950s. He was concerned with poor-quality parenting, corporal punishment, emotional suppression, sexual ignorance, inequality of knowledge and power between men and women within marriage, and men gaining more sexual satisfaction than women. For instance, he found in surveying 2,155 women in marriages where birth control measures (including safe-period and withdrawal) were practised that women controlled the precautions in only 19.8 per cent of cases.2 To

The Heritage of the Sixties in Britain

41

explain this, Chesser turned to religion. He wrote: ‘Religion remains the chief external authority for an explicit moral code of behaviour, especially in regard to sex and marriage. The influence of religion was therefore considered to be one of our primary subjects of study.’3 Chesser was exploring an unequal world for women and men, and one in which the Christian religion gave succour to the inequality. But the nature and consequences of this connection between sex and religion was about to be changed very radically between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s – a period now commonly referred to as ‘the long 1960s.’ Two things occurred: firstly the gender revolution, and secondly the death of hegemonic Christian culture. The fact that these two epochal turning points occurred in the same short period was no coincidence. They were intimately and causally connected and have continued to evolve in parallel in the half-century since. Over fifty years, gender change in all its manifestations (which includes the gendered implications of the sexual revolution) has had a direct causal relationship with dechristianization. Other countries experienced parts or all of this change as well, to varying degrees. But Britain supplies some great evidence, both statistical and qualitative, with which to explore gender and secularization. It is important to describe the nature of the two great changes. By the gender revolution I mean a change in the composition of genders as discursive formations, promoted in large measure by a change in life experiences and desires of women. This meant particularly that the way in which femininity was constructed in British society changed very quickly and very radically. From the dominance of a family-based respectability, with marriage, children, and domesticity as the greatest collective desire and most widely accepted destiny for a woman’s life, female educational and career chances exploded from the 1960s, accompanied by a liberalization of behaviour, dress, and morality. Starting with young single women, there was an overturning of idealizations of chaste and virgin behaviour, of domesticity and subordination to men, and of low-paid jobs for the working-class woman and no-paid voluntary jobs for the middle-class woman. In a more or less spontaneous popular revolt, engineered mainly not by ideology, political movement, or manifesto, women demanded full equality in education, work, promotion, and pay, full opportunities in leisure and sport, and control over their own bodies and over knowledge of sex; with the arrival of the oral contraceptive pill, they for the first time were handed the day-to-day knowledge of fertility and the technology to control and

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activate that knowledge. Accompanying this was a tremendous growth in women’s knowledge of their bodies and of sex, to the point where young women were very quickly far better informed than young men. Manuals about the body, reproduction, and sex became dominated by a female readership, and women’s magazines were by the early 1970s the venue for advancing public understanding and appreciation of the mechanics and the joys of sexual activity. From being a man’s domain, sex became a woman’s area of knowledge. Women’s sexual activity rose dramatically, in what Hera Cook has described as an astonishing rate of growth in the late 1960s and early 1970s.4 The religious revolution of the 1960s was no less dramatic. As many have chronicled for different parts of the world, the levels of churchgoing, religious rites of passage, state enforcement of religious pillars and segregation, state enforcement of religious-based laws, and the extent of religious domination of morality and popular culture were slashed in most of Europe and in some places beyond. Hugh McLeod, in the most sophisticated and wide-ranging review, has called what happened a ‘rupture’ in religious history as great as that of the Reformation and ‘the final crisis of Christendom.’5 He makes the point very nicely towards the end of his book that in 1914, despite massive declines in churchgoing in much of Europe, ‘religion continued to provide a “common language,” which was to some degree shared by all but the most convinced and committed unbelievers.’6 And it might be added that those committed unbelievers who expressed their belief in blasphemy were still, in the 1920s in Britain, subject to imprisonment.7 This Christian culture of a common language, enforced as much by family and community custom as by law, fell apart in the 1960s and 1970s. What happened was a shock. These two revolutions struck with what seemed to contemporaries to be amazing suddenness and surprise. Adam Hastings in his review of the history of English Christianity makes the point that this sense of shock arose in large measure because, though there had been some minor slide in religious statistics in the interwar period between 1919 and 1939, the churches seemed to have performed relatively well in the 1940s and 1950s. This gave Christian culture confidence in the 1950s. In society too, he suggested, if there had been some liberation of mores in the 1920s and 1930s, this was followed by a surge towards social conservatism in the 1950s.8 The ratchet of puritanism was notched upwards in the fifties. Billy Graham’s massive evangelical crusades in London in 1954 and in Glasgow in 1955 seemed to match the activities of the state, in which censorship of books, thea-

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tre, and films was strong if not even hardening and exported to commonwealth countries like South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. The observance of the Christian sabbath was still imposed with vigour; in England new laws regulating Sunday work and pleasures had been introduced in the early 1930s, mostly in relation to shop opening and theatre and the cinema, while in Scotland the absence of legislation did not stop local authorities from crushing attempts at Sunday sport and recreation or stopping the running of Sunday ferries in the west Highlands, nor the police from routinely prosecuting Sunday football by enforcing bylaws against street games – but only on Sundays.9 This heritage lingered long. The Argentinean footballer Ossie Ardilles recalled that, when coming to play for Tottenham Hotspur in 1979, he had despaired how nothing happened in England on a Sunday.10 With Christian-based laws still in force and enforced, the religious power was still deeply influential in the 1950s. Religion and the Sexual Revolution This puritan culture reached its zenith in the 1950s. In no decade was sexual correctness more socially imposed and more legally enforced. The pursuit of homosexuals was relentless, through police entrapment operations against ‘cottaging’ – which in the UK means a gay pick-up in a public lavatory. But just as targeted were young women. Pregnant single women were shepherded into church homes for the unmarried mother, or tumbled into shotgun weddings – in either event, families sought desperately to suppress the public shame. Pregnancy ended single women’s careers and got them chucked out of universities. Illegal abortions were commonplace up until the decriminalization of terminations in 1967. In London in 1965, architecture student Janet Street-Porter got pregnant and feared immediate ejection from her course of study; she describes in candid detail having an abortion for £25 on the edge of a woman’s kitchen table.11 Her autobiography is one of a number from the period that conveys the journey from the fifties into the sixties as a combination of religious rebellion, rebellion against parents, sexual revolution, and women’s liberation. Yet it is important to note how strong Puritanism lingered. Sexual intercourse outside of wedlock was widely considered wrong – even by the young. In 1964, an English study by Michael Schofield showed that only 40 per cent of older teenage boys and 22 per cent of girls were in favour of sex ‘with your fiancé’ before marriage. On the proposition that ‘sexual intercourse before marriage

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is wrong,’ 35 per cent of boys and 61 per cent of girls agreed.12 And the reasons came back to religion, especially for single women and girls. The 1964 Schofield study showed that 45 per cent of girls and 22 per cent of boys who had not had sexual intercourse (i.e., were virgins) refrained from this act for moral and religious reasons; the next most common reason given was fear of pregnancy (24 per cent of boys and 17 per cent of girls).13 So, while religious restraint was markedly stronger for girls than for boys, fear of pregnancy was stronger for boys. This power of religion over sex lives was even stronger a decade earlier. Eustace Chesser in his 1954 study showed a high inverse association between strength of religious background and sexual experience before marriage. For example, 52 per cent of married women with a weak religious background (in terms of the strength of parents’ religious feelings and church attendance, parental religious teaching, childhood churchgoing, and Sunday-school attendance) had had premarital sexual intercourse compared with only 33 per cent of those with a strong religious background. Even more striking, 38 per cent of single women with weak religious background had experienced sexual intercourse compared with only 18 per cent of those with a strong religious background. The results show that there was a strong trend among both married and single women for the degree of sexual experience to be inversely related to the strength of religious background. A correlation that I conducted on these figures gives strong correlation coefficients for married women of –0.89, and for single women of –0.94.14 At the same time as this wide disparity in sexual activity between women with strong and weak religious backgrounds, evidence is clear as to the great growth in premarital sexual activity that was taking place during the sixties. At the heart of this change was the transformation in the sexual life of the single woman. This was most dramatic among teenage girls. In 1964, a survey revealed that the level of sexual activity among sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls was low; only 15 per cent claimed to have had sexual intercourse. But in a similar survey in 1974– 5, this figure leapt from 15 to 58 per cent (with an equivalent modest rise from 40 to 52 per cent among boys).15 This gender disparity is most striking. Even if we allow for the diminishing power of ‘respectability’ in the 1970s compared with the 1960s to stifle a spinster’s admission of sexual experience, it affirms the extent to which the sexual revolution was one led by the single girl and woman. An instrumental part in this was played by religious change. A total of five social surveys conducted between 1951 and 1972 each showed very strong associations between

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levels of religiosity and levels of knowledge of and approval of premarital sex.16 The relationship was especially strong for women. It was their sex lives that changed the most, and it was their views on the link between religion and sex life that underwent the most dramatic transformation. The gender revolution was not just about sex. It may not even have been primarily about sex. But it included sex. And sex and secularization were central elements of the rise of what was termed ‘the permissive society’ in the 1960s.17 Unbelief and Gender This made so called ‘second-wave feminism’ of the 1970s so very, very different from so-called first-wave feminism of the 1890s and 1900s. There was a liberation of the female body in experience and discourse involved among the sixties’ generation in Britain that was entirely novel in the social breadth of its occurrence. The 1960s was the decade when discursive Christianity18 ended its governing rule, when the hegemonic culture of Christendom lost its control over most people in mainland Britain,19 when Christianity stopped being in Hugh McLeod’s terms the common language of the people. How this collapse in discursive Christianity occurred is poorly understood. It was composed of various elements, not all of which became evident straightaway in the sixties. Let me take two examples. First, there was the beginning of a dramatic rise of religious unbelief. This is a topic which so far has been poorly researched in terms of popular culture, though there have been notable treatments of intellectual and legal cases.20 But the significant rise in the number of people confessing ‘no religion’ in the Western world clearly started in the 1960s – though this is unfortunately not easy to demonstrate for Britain because of the paucity of data.21 It seems that those disclaiming a religious affiliation in mid-century were disproportionately supporters of organized rationalism and humanism. Britain in the 1960s and early 1970s saw the beginning of a transition from old-style organized religion-styled rationalism to the birth of modern humanist organizations – the British Humanist Association (BHA) in 1967 and Scottish regional groups in 1972. It is difficult to assess the rise of organized humanism in terms of social influence; the numbers have always been small – the Rationalist Press Association, one of the oldest groups, never exceeded 5,000 at that time, while even today the BHA has a membership of around 10,000, and even smaller numbers in the National Secular

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Society, while the Humanist Society of Scotland has just under 5,000 members. But it is not so much the membership of organized freethinking and humanism that is relevant. To appreciate how much has changed, it is important to recall just how intolerant of humanism Britain was in the 1950s – and especially of women humanists. Humanism as a philosophical position was treated in British culture as more acceptable if it was promoted by men, almost as if it were seen as a proper part of men’s philosophical and intellectual functions. In 1955, Margaret Knight, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Aberdeen, gave two talks on BBC radio’s ‘Third Programme’ (or station) entitled ‘Morals without Religion.’ The first talk was followed within days with a massive eruption of complaint. She was besieged in the Langham Hotel outside the BBC by the press, was vilified in virtually every newspaper, and was pursued for weeks. She received 1,153 letters and the BBC a further 1,500. The Sunday Graphic headlined an interview, obtained as far as she later commented under some subterfuge, ‘The Unholy Mrs Knight,’ reporting: Don’t let this woman fool you. She looks – doesn’t she? – just like a typical housewife: cool, comfortable, harmless. But Mrs Margaret Knight is a menace. A dangerous woman. Make no mistake about that … It is a mistake, she says, to impose Christian convictions on children as a basis of moral training. Don’t give them that old stuff about Jesus. That’s her line. Be modern; bring them up as scientific humanists. Which is a cosy way of saying faithless atheists … Let’s have no more of her twaddle. She’s due to dish up a second basinful on Wednesday. The BBC should pour it down the sink.22

The hullabaloo focused on the BBC’s role in a Christian country, and on the airwaves being given over to a woman. When the BBC caved in to the clamour for a Christian response, they brought in a liberal former missionary to debate, not atheism, but the moral training of children – the discussion being ‘kept on the level of two women talking about childfree upbringing.’23 The episode was a fillip to organized humanist recruitment in Britain, especially in Scotland, but it demonstrated the extent to which the media of Britain saw themselves as the defenders of Christianity and moral rectitude. It was to be from the 1960s that, slowly, there was a growth in the acceptance of new-style humanist ethics and ideas, largely not as a

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result of organized humanist propaganda but as the result of a rising humanist sentiment in favour of a range of human rights – including freedom of religion and freedom from religion; racial, gender, disabilities, and sexualities equality; contraception and abortion rights; and latterly assisted suicide (which is now favoured by 74 per cent of British people for those with terminal illness).24 One of the ways in which humanist sentiment has been spreading since the late 1980s is through the massive growth of a culture of humanist weddings, funerals, and baby-naming ceremonies. This has been led in Scotland, where in 2005 humanist weddings were legally recognized; by 2008 there were 1,026 humanist weddings, accounting for 7.49 per cent of all so-called ‘religious’ weddings, exceeding all churches except the Church of Scotland with 7,007 and the Roman Catholic Church with 1,873.25 At the rate of change currently being shown, humanist weddings should exceed Church of Scotland ones in around 2016, and humanists will be the largest provider of weddings outside of the state. The same is happening in funerals. At the moment only localized statistics seem to have been collected; as a case study, at the Perth Crematorium in central Scotland in 2008, humanists accounted for 7.7 per cent of funerals, more than any other provider except the Church of Scotland, whose proportion has fallen from 85 per cent in 2006 to 71 per cent in 2009.26 Behind these changes has also been a significant gender shift in unbelief. In mid-century, in those countries that recorded such information at official censuses, those professing ‘no religion’ were overwhelmingly male, but this moved closer to parity by the early twenty-first century. The proportion of women professing ‘no religion’ rose in Canada, from 31 per cent in 1951 to 45 per cent in 2001, in the United States from 26 per cent in 1957 to 39 per cent in 2001, and in Ireland from 36 per cent in 1961 to 41 per cent in 2002.27 The transition also applied in Australia, where, in 1976, 42 per cent of no religionists were female; in 2006 it was 47 per cent.28 There seems little reason to doubt that this growing acceptability for women to hold to no religion extended to Britain, where in 2001 they numbered 48 per cent of that category in Scotland.29 These small examples provide glimpses of the way in which attitudes to religious unbelief radically changed in the last fifty years of the twentieth century. Not only was it becoming more acceptable to openly express disbelief in a god,30 an afterlife, and other features usually characteristic of religious faith, but it was also become more acceptable to disavow belonging to a religion. Nowhere was this new willingness more clear than among young women.

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Both oral testimony and autobiography expose thoughtful and textured stories of women’s changing lives in the middle and latter decades of the twentieth century. Interestingly, some women’s autobiographical accounts of feminist awakening in the sixties make scant reference to religion.31 However, similar accounts dealing with the origins of proto-feminist consciousness in the 1950s tend to talk far more about it, and usually in extremely negative ways.32 That change in treatment may in itself be indicative of the impact of feminist change upon the religious life of young women in the postwar years. More particularly, this change addresses one important feature – the linking of religious and feminist aspects to the emerging tension in the mother-daughter relationship, a tension which is such a prominent characteristic of many memoirs of these years. Women growing up in the fifties and sixties were coming of age at a moment of profound change in sexual and religious matters, and it emerged in a difficult family context. Routes to feminism invariably involved some encounter with religion, usually confrontational and rebellious, and often involving sexual liberation in some guise or other. The degree of confrontation with religion varied; sometimes it was only a cultural confrontation with a parent, rather than directly with a church or belief as such. The British broadcaster Jenni Murray went as a student to Hull University in the late 1960s, and she had made plain on her application that ‘I was pretty much a heathen, northern working class and smoked like a chimney.’ When she arrived in the city and went to her accommodation, she celebrated her deliverance from her mother’s version of femininity when she ‘hitched up my skirt to make it even shorter’ and decorated her room with a poster displaying a woman having an orgasm. Once securing contraception, Murray reflected, ‘we generally had a ball.’33 Murray made clear that the stimulus to this change from her mother’s version of femininity emanated from readings in Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) and in Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), and that it was the ‘women’s movement that changed everything for my generation.’34 This confluence of sexuality, feminism, and a-religious lifestyle recurs frequently in women’s written memories of the late sixties and seventies. At the same time as actor Sheila Hancock became a feminist around 1970, she shed her Christianity in favour of ‘a new humanist approach’ which ‘demanded I relinquish hope of divine intervention and do it myself.’ She acknowledges that with this new world view came an element of sexual liberation: ‘I loved the idea of promiscuity

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but was hopeless at doing it.’35 Another actor, Julie Walters, knew that she was contravening her mother’s conception of female respectability when, in 1969, she went on the contraceptive pill, had sexual intercourse outside of marriage, and cohabited with a man. ‘My mother might not have been religious but she was of the same generation as [Christian campaigner] Mary Whitehouse [and] when it came to sex before marriage she virtually shared the same views as this woman.’36 Though arts commentator Joan Bakewell had sexual experience at university in the fifties, long before she was awakened by sixties feminist literature, her autobiography portrays a developing experience which, by the cultural revolution of the mid- to late 1960s, combined feminist ideology, sexual liberation, and her own career development as one of the first prominent female commentators on British television. Religion was a pivotal issue in these women’s liberation. Whether coming from working- or middle-class backgrounds, young women carved out a new social construction of their gender in the long 1960s. The complexity of the life stories generated by women in the 1960s makes generalizing very difficult, and no single story may be regarded as ‘typical.’ Still, two things are worth emphasizing. First, women’s lives were changing with a rapidity and intensity not experienced before – even in war time. Second, the testimonies or autobiographers reveal the interlocking nature of rebellion – over clothes, rejection of church and religion, over sex, and over career destinies – and how those rebellions were often each focused in a rebellion within the home and against the expectations of parents. The Religious Crisis The seriousness of what happened to Christianity in the sixties was recognized at the time – certainly by the end of the long sixties. At the time, there was plenty of serious reflection on the magnitude of the contemporary cultural change affecting religion and civil institutions generally. The statistical evidence from the churches’ own membership lists indicates the sharpest decline starting in the mid-1960s, and for most denominations being sustained until the end of the century. Levels of church baptism, religious solemnization of marriage, Sunday-school enrolment, and church attendance for virtually all Christian denominations in Britain fell. Popular religiosity entered a steep slide in all quantifiable indicators from which, with the exception of only a few partial and temporary indicators, there has been no remission.

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Secularization is becoming more generally recognized as a gendered process.37 The way in which the crisis that exploded from the 1960s was gendered is slowly becoming exposed.38 This section seeks to expand on the evidence that the manner of Christian change in Britain since the long 1960s has been significantly gendered. In Scotland between 1984 and 2002, there was a net loss of 168,560 churchgoers over fifteen years of age, of whom 129,040 (or 77 per cent) were female.39 In England, the evidence is more confused. Between 1979 and 2005, the proportion of women in the Christian churchgoing population in England as a whole rose from 55 to 57 per cent (while the proportion of women in the population was largely static); the biggest increase was in the 45–64 age group, where the percentage rose from 55 to 58 per cent. However, there were significant regional variations; in Greater London, with a population of 7.5 million in 2005, the proportion of churchgoers who were female fell very significantly during 1979–2005 from 57 to 52 per cent. Moreover, as table 1.1 demonstrates, the highest levels of male participation in 2005 were among the growing and least declining denominations: New Churches were 50 per cent male, Pentecostal churches 49 per cent, Independent churches 48 per cent, and the Roman Catholic Church 45 per cent. Meanwhile, the lowest male participation was in the most crisis-ridden denominations: the United Reformed Church was only 35 per cent male, the Methodist Church 36 per cent, and the Church of England 41 per cent.40 So, churches with a higher proportion of growing congregations between 1979 and 2005 tended to have higher proportions of males among churchgoers. The correlations which appear in the table are very high, and very significant; the correlation coefficient between proportion of male churchgoers in 2005 and the proportion of congregations declining rapidly over the preceding 26 years was –0.87, and a similar correlation using the proportion of all congregations declining over that period increased the coefficient to 0.88. This indicates a very strong relationship between these variables. What is also interesting is that London, experiencing growth in male participation, is the most secularized part of Great Britain, and the part where the high-growth churches, notably the Pentecostal churches, are the most vigorous and important parts of organized Christianity. In a further twist, there is evidence from England that during postwar church growth in the period 1948–60 the role of women was extraordinarily important. In those years, female confirmations in the Church of England rose from 33.6 to 40.9 per 1,000 population (a rise

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Table 1.1 Gender of churchgoers and church decline in England, 1979–2005 Proportion of churchgoers male, 2005 (%) New Churches 50 Pentecostal churches 49 Independent churches 48 Roman Catholic Church 45 Church of England 41 Methodist Church 36 United Reformed Church 35 Correlations: Proportion of churchgoers male : proportion of congregations declining

Proportion of congregations declining rapidly, 1979–2005 (%)

Proportion of congregations declining, 1979–2005 (%)

18.1 11.2 19.9 16.7 19.9 27.2 31.9

39.6 32.9 41.8 55.9 46.9 60.6 64.3

–0.87

–0.88

Source: Data from or calculated from P. Brierley, ed., UKCH Religious Trends No. 6 2006/2007: Analysis of the 2005 English Church Census (London: Christian Research, 2007), 5.3, 5.8, 12.3, 12.47. Correlations were conducted by the present author.

of 28 per cent). By contrast, male confirmations were static at 27.3 and 27.6 per cent, showing no meaningful growth at all. This suggests that young women were very responsive in the 1950s to the last strong blast of the traditional discourse on femininity and piety that characterized this period.41 But, though from 1960 to 1974 female confirmations fell marginally slower than men’s (a drop of 52 per cent compared with 56 per cent), the male figures showed a continuous decline since at least 1934 (of 61 per cent) while female decline only started in 1960–2.42 A haemorrhage of male recruitment had existed for thirty years prior to the 1960s, while women’s recruitment actually grew; the result was an ever-increasing imbalance down to 1960 towards a ‘woman’s church’ in the Church of England. When decline started, however, it was the change in female recruitment that was important, since there was no change to male recruitment.43 The implication is that the wider collapse of Church of England recruitment, churchgoing, and church membership in the early 1960s was triggered by the sudden appearance in 1960–2 of suddenly slowing female recruitment, and not by the thirtyyear-long and more gradual decline in male recruitment. These data on confirmations join the evidence on churchgoing in starting to construct a consolidated picture that in Britain at least gender is closely involved in secularization. But the connection is complex and, perhaps, even contains elements that may appear on first sight to

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be contradictory. First, the proportion of churchgoers may be becoming less dominated by women. Second, church decline appears to be associated with churches in which the proportion of men is low. How do we reconcile these two trends? A Gender Model of Secularization I want to conclude with some implications in constructing a model that elaborates the role of gender in the secularization of Britain since the 1960s. First, the reconstruction of women’s gender in the long 1960s – a process, led by young women, of overturning the hegemony of pious femininity – lies at the heart of mounting female alienation from Christian belief, the churches, and religion in general in the period between 1975 and 2010. The crisis of religious connection evolved as a strongly female one, passing from mother to daughter (though it of course had consequences upon male religious connection – of which more in a moment). This argument is consolidated when one looks at the gendered nature of demographic change since the 1960s. A series of specific changes in demographic behaviour has accompanied dechristianization in Britain. Each of the following have occurred: a major decline in the marriage rate, a very large decline in the proportion of the marriages that took place that were solemnized by religious rites, and a very significant rise in the proportion of births occurring to unmarried mothers.44 In the 1960s, the rise in the number of divorces was one of the issues that was most controversial, and the rate continued to rise from the 1960s to the 1980s, but in the 1990s the rate stabilized as there was a major decline in the numbers of married people. These demographic changes were ones in which women were the central decision makers and were most directly affected. The consequence is that religion and demography were most intimately connected through women’s, not men’s, lives.45 Second, the impact of the reconstruction of women’s gender led to Christian feminism and the rising claims of women within the churches to equality of treatment and to places of authority (as ministers, elders, and priests, and latterly in the Anglican tradition as bishops). It led to gender politics being central to the governance and development of Christian faith in many liberal and mainstream churches, though with more complex ramifications in evangelical and conservative churches.46 Third, the numbers of women active in British Christianity as church

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members or attendees fell. Compared with the longer history of declining male participation, this fall was a new phenomenon for women in the 1960s. The evidence is that the decline occurred mainly through non-recruitment of females during their teenage years, though the loss of adult females still needs to be gauged properly. Fourth, as churches declined, a widespread and complex backlash developed within conservative Christianity. Increasing militancy became evident in the greater profile of conservative Christians within both predominantly conservative churches and within broader churches (like the Church of England and the Church of Scotland), building up slowly in the 1980s but more vigorously in the 1990s and 2000s. Particular issues became the hallmark of conservative Christian concern: opposition to homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and blasphemy, as well as female ordination for some (though not all) conservative Christians. This phenomenon was characterized by stronger male participation than was customary in Christianity as a whole in Britain, and was associated with British Christianity itself becoming more militant. This was reflected in the greater proportion of men in conservative churches – the ones most prone to militant attitude and action – than in liberal and mainstream ones. These churches were also growing the most or the most resistant to decline. Christianity’s Victorian reputation as the ‘Ladies’ Religion’ was finally fading.47 Fifth, with the fall in female participation outstripping the fall in male participation, organized Christianity in Britain from the 1960s became increasingly geared to a new muscular Christianity – aggressively anti-secular, militant in its rhetoric (and for some in its actions). This new character has become the hallmark of success and growth in the Christian sector of religion, whether Protestant or Catholic. Indeed, in a strange twist of religious history, British Christianity has now become alienated from the pious femininity which typified it (and much of world Christianity) for two centuries. The quiet respectability, the passivity, and the domesticity which gave feminized Christianity its strength from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries has lost its appeal. Despite the growing importance of women as ministers and pastors in Protestantism, a ladies’ religion no longer has a wide cultural appeal. The rules have changed, notably for women’s bodies, and it is hard to sustain the relevance of the old feminine virtues. This is why the issue of women and sex is so important. The sexual revolution undermined the cultural virtues for which Christianity stood –

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sexual correctness. Once that morality had been shunned in the 1960s and 1970s by young women, there was no longer a hegemonic ‘place’ for Christianity to reside in British popular culture (or in British law). At the same time, though, as we saw earlier, by 2000 it had become respectable for women to profess no religion in a way that was not available to them in mid-century. Sixth, this then explains the conundrum – the declining proportion of churchgoers who are women, but church decline afflicting churches in which the proportion of men is lowest. This reconciliation of contradiction is the most difficult to demonstrate empirically, but still is important. In the midst of decline, Christianity’s success in Britain is now associated with masculine strength, not the former cultural ‘superiority’ of women’s domestic enthronement. It is a bullish determination in the face of secular inevitabilities that being religious in white British society demands. And that is a male ‘thing,’ not female. Despite the victories of Christian feminism, it is women’s cultural place in British Christianity that has emerged from the sixties as the most vulnerable. For, women remain in the early twenty-first century most numerically preponderant in the most declining denominations. And so the evidence slowly emerges of a significant pattern to secularization. We have the first consolidated evidence that the gender imbalance in the worshippers who attend Christian church on Sundays – an imbalance stretching back at least four hundred years48 – is starting to narrow appreciably. It may be that secularization turns out to be a highly feminine thing. This is important because the churches and historians have tended to look upon men as the more secular, and thus the more prone to secularization. But, there may be a case now for arguing that in the special circumstances of rapid church decline, it is women who leave the church faster or show lower inclination to be recruited. Idealized Christian piety might be returning to an early modern masculine nature. Concomitantly, non-belief has become an acceptable cultural position in modern society, and one to which women may at last adhere. Conclusion Adrian Hastings saw the crisis that Christianity endured in the sixties as not separate from the world: ‘It was not even a specifically religious crisis, it was rather one of the total culture,’ affecting many secular insti-

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tutions in a way comparable to its effect on the churches. It was transformed from, he says, a conservative modernization after the Second World War, ‘an attempt to recreate a fairly traditional world,’ to something more radical. Hastings notes that the ‘prosperity, optimism, and sense of release of the fifties was mostly of a pretty conservative and controlled type’ producing a ‘placid contentment’ that was followed by a ‘secular hopefulness of the early sixties.’ And he concludes: ‘The crisis of 1960s religion was a crisis of “secularization.”’49 The Hastings’s model is one to which we should pay heed. If secularization is accepted as a total cultural phenomenon, two aspects need to be brought into close proximity. First is the rise of unbelief as a major social phenomenon, and the willingness of women to be associated with it. Second, though there is no single paradigm to describe the nature of what they experienced, key changes in women’s sex lives, fertility control, marriage, and careers involved in a variety of ways rejection of traditional church and Christian values. Britain demonstrates that Christendom collapsed because most women opted to live their lives in new demographic ways, and because many of them constructed their life without religion.

NOTES 1 Eustace Chesser, The Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships of the English Woman (London: Hutchison, 1956), 3. 2 Ibid., 456. 3 Ibid., 7. 4 The range of changes summarized here can be discerned from Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception 1800–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 5 The first two terms are widely used. The third comes from Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800– 2000 (London: Routledge, 2001). The fourth and fifth come from Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1, 256. 6 Ibid., 264. 7 John Gott was sentenced to nine months’ hard labour for blasphemy at the Old Bailey in 1921; see David Nash, Blasphemy in Modern Britain 1789 to the Present (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 190.

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8 Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity 1920–1985 (London: Collins, 1986), 580–6. 9 In England and Wales, there was a clutch of legislation tightly regulating sabbath life, including the Sunday Entertainments Act 1932 (which allowed cinemas, musical entertainments, museums, galleries, etc. to open, with a slice of profits going to charity, only after any objections had been decided by a poll of local electors), and other measures closing theatres and butchers on Sundays. For Scotland, see Callum G. Brown, ‘Spectacle, Restraint and the Twentieth-Century Sabbath Wars: The “Everyday” Scottish Sunday,’ in Lynn Abrams and Callum G. Brown, eds., A History of Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 153–80. 10 The Guardian Premier League Season Guide 2009–10, 14 August 2009. 11 Janet Street-Porter, Baggage: My Childhood (London: Headline, 2004), 209, 221. 12 Michael Schofield, The Sexual Behaviour of Young People (London: Pelican, 1965), 131. 13 Schofield, Sexual Behaviour, 129–30. 14 To conduct these correlations and regressions, I attributed the figures 1 to 5 in place of Chesser’s A to E to signify rising level of ‘strength of religious background.’ Source of data as at table 1.1. 15 The data for these two years came from two different projects, but the data were re-analysed to make them compatible. Jane Lewis and Kathleen Kiernan, ‘The Boundaries between Marriage, Nonmarriage, and Parenthood: Changes in Behavior and Policy in Postwar Britain,’ Journal of Family History 21 (1996): 372–87 at 373–4. 16 The five were Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (New York: Criterion, 1955); Chesser, Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships; Schofield, Sexual Behaviour of Young People; Geoffrey Gorer, Sex and Marriage in England Today: A Study of the Views and Experience of the Under-45s (London: Nelson, 1971); and Michael Schofield, The Sexual Behaviour of Young Adults: A Follow-up Study to The Sexual Behaviour of Young People (London: Allen Lane, 1973). 17 On the links between the two, see Tim Newburn, Permission and Regulation: Law and Morals in Post-war Britain (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. 173. 18 ‘Discursive Christianity’ was a term I coined in 2000; Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 12–15. 19 Northern Ireland and the Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland are notable exceptions to this statement. But for the rest of Britain, the sixties witnessed the demise of Christendom. 20 See especially the excellent studies by David Nash, Blasphemy in Modern

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22 23 24 25

26 27

28

29 30

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Britain, and Blasphemy in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Government censuses in other countries show that the proportion of the population claiming ‘no religion’ rose markedly: in Canada for instance from 0.4 per cent in 1961 to 4.3 per cent in 1971. Statistics Canada Table 0750016 CANSIM (database), http://cansim2.statcan.gc.ca/cgi-wein/cnsmcgi. exe?Lang=E&CNSM-Fi=CII/CII_1-eng.htm (accessed 13 November 2009). Sunday Graphic, 9 January 1955, 1a. Margaret Knight, Morals without Religion and Other Essays (London: Dennis Dobson, 1955), 25. The Times, 25 July 2009. Registrar General Scotland, Vital Events Reference Tables 2008, Table 7.7, Marriages by denomination, http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/statistics/ publications-and-data/vital-events/vital-events-reference-tables-2008/ section-7-marriages.html. Data from Perth crematorium; provided to my postgraduate student, Edward Small. Religion data from Statistics Canada Table 075-0016 CANSIM (database), http://cansim2.statcan.gc.ca/cgi-wein/cnsmcgi.exe?Lang=E&CNSMFi=CII/CII_1-eng.htm (accessed 13 November 2009) (fee paid CAN$63); 1981–91: Census 91: Religions in Canada: The Nation (Statistics Canada, Ottawa, 1993), Table 3; 2001: 2001 Census, Summary Tables, www.statcan. gc.ca, Population by Religion (accessed 13 November 2009); population totals from www40.statcan.gc.ca/101/cst01/demo03-eng.htm (accessed 14 November 2009); Current Population Report, Series P-20-079 (1957), cited in Statistical Abstract of the United States 1968, Population, table 49, page 41; and B.A. Kosmin, E. Mayer, and A. Keysar, American Religious Identification Survey 2001 (City University of New York), http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris.pdf (accessed 19 November 2009), Exhibit 13, p. 35. Ireland: http://www.cso.ie/statistics/popnclassbyreligionandnationality2006.htm (accessed 27 November 2009). Commonwealth of Australia, Census of Population and Housing 1976: Summary Tables, p. 3; Religious Affiliation by Sex 2006, http://www.censusdata. abs.gov.au (accessed 6 December 2009). Census 2001, Tables UV17, and KS07, http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/ (accessed 25 November 2009). Actually, the proportions of the British people expressing belief in a god have varied remarkably little between the 1940s and 2001, and there has been almost no movement in the proportion (usually around 50 per cent) who between 1939 and 2003 believed in a life after death. What was chang-

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31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38

39 40

41 42 43 44

45

Callum G. Brown ing was the willingness to express this. Callum G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow: Longman, 2006), 28–9. Such as those in Sara Maitland ed., Very Heaven: Looking Back at the 1960s (London: Virago, 1988) Such as those in Liz Heron ed., Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties (London: Virago, 1985). Jenni Murray, Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter (London: Bantam, 2008), 133–4, 139. Ibid., 214–15. Shirley Conran’s Superwoman (1975) had a similar impact. Sheila Hancock, The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 153–4, 249–50. Julie Walters, That’s Another Story: The Autobiography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008), 124–5. Ironically, Walters went on to play Whitehouse in a BBC television docudrama, Filth (2008). See notably Kristin Aune, Sonya Sharma, and Giselle Vincett, eds., Women and Religion in the West: Challenging Secularization (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), especially the chapters by Marler, Aune, and Woodhead. C.G. Brown, ‘Secularisation, the Growth of Militancy and the Spiritual Revolution: Religious Change and Gender Power in Britain 1901–2001,’ Historical Research 80, no. 209 (August 2007): 393–418. Calculated from data in table 4.4, Peter Brierley, Turning the Tide: The Challenge Ahead (London: Christian Research, 2003), 53. Peter Brierley, ed., UKCH Religious Trends No. 6 2006/2007: Analyses of the 2005 English Church Census (London: Christian Research, 2007), 5.8, 12.3, 12.47. C.G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain; Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2009), 170–5, 227. McLeod, Religious Crisis, 40. R. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers: Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 129. See Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 167; Brown, Religion and Society, 32. The marriage rate in England and Wales reached a postwar high of 17.3 marrying persons per 1,000 people in 1972, and then fell almost continuously to an all-time low of 9.5 in 2001; data from http://www.statistics. gov.uk/STATBASE/xsdownload.asp?vlnk=4103 (accessed 13 November 2009). The case for this argument requires much more space than is available here. See Callum G. Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s (London: Boydell, 2012).

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46 Jenny Daggers, The British Christian Women’s Movement: A Rehabilitation of Eve (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 47 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 93. 48 Clive D. Field, ‘Adam and Eve: Gender in the English Free Church Constituency,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44 (1993): 63–79. 49 Hastings, English Christianity, 580, 585.

2 Mothers and Daughters: Negotiating the Discourse on the ‘Good Woman’ in 1950s and 1960s Britain lynn abrams

Women, one way or the other, are central to the debates about the fate of the Christian churches in the West. They were numerically preponderant in congregations and among church members in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Christian religiosity itself had a strong feminine quality, piety was primarily something located in the domestic sphere, and women were identified as the moral core of the family and society.1 But women have also been posited as the group largely responsible for the decline of Christianity in the West in the period since the Second World War, and it is the place of religion in personal identity formation that is seen by some as the key to explaining the feminizing of the secularization process. In the 1960s Western women found new ways to be women (women’s role, it is argued, changed from ‘home-making to self-making’) as religion was no longer the only or core element of ideal femininity or respectable womanhood.2 Religion now competed with alternative sources of identity for women to be found in the workplace, in education, and in the feminist movement. As femininity ceased to be constituted by piety, many women walked away from the churches and thus away from the moral and social injunctions promulgated by Christian culture. Whether or not one wholly accepts this characterization of women’s relationship with the Christian churches – and many are at pains to stress women’s continuing engagement with religion on a number of levels since the 1960s – it seems undeniable that dechristianization is gendered, and that women’s experiences require further detailed examination beyond the counting of church members or the analysis of discursive constructions of femininity. In this chapter it is taken as read that women were significant in the story of Christian decline in

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Britain in the postwar decades (to whatever extent), but the approach adopted here is twofold. Firstly the chapter focuses on the subjective, or the representation of personal experience through the prism of the oral history interview, with women whose formative years were spent in the 1950s and 1960s. Secondly, the chapter locates women’s narratives in the context of the widely acknowledged cultural and social change of the postwar decades, encompassing the move to personal empowerment or individualism and the rejection of old values of ‘respectability’ and self-sacrifice (of which religion was a part and in which it was complicit).3 By combining the material history of women with representations of the self through life-story narration, it is possible to begin to see how the women at the centre of the debate about secularization in Britain negotiated their way through a period characterized by cultural conflict and a clash of values. The women at the heart of this story belong to two generations: the generation born in the war years and immediately afterwards whom I term the ‘daughters,’ and the generation of women whose lives had been shaped by religious discourses on respectable womanhood and whose opportunities had been constrained by the war – the ‘mothers.’ Women and Secularization ‘The residue of Christian female piety, which by the late 1940s and 50s had been deposited in the extremely vigorous representation of the respectable wife, mother and young girl, was washed away in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. British women secularised the construction of their own identity.’4 For Callum Brown women are crucial to the new secularization narrative for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By privileging ‘discursive Christianity’ Brown shows how piety in Britain became feminized in the nineteenth century and remained so until and including the 1950s. It is in the 1960s, according to this interpretation, when everything changed for women and hence for religion. The notion of what constituted the personal irrevocably altered women’s relationship with the churches and, more importantly, what they represented. For Brown women’s drift away from the churches was a consequence of the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ constituted by the increase in premarital sex, the rise in the number of sexual partners before marriage, the availability of reliable and female-centred contraception, and the rise of the feminist movement. ‘The reconstruction of female identity within work, sexual relations and new recreational

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opportunities from the late 1960s,’ argues Brown, ‘put not just feminism but female identity in collision with the Christian construction of femininity.’5 In more recent work focusing on women’s autobiographical narratives Brown goes further, arguing that women who grew up during the 1950s and 1960s are articulate on the journey from (religioninspired) moral conservatism and its influence on women’s lives, to the liberation of the 1960s and the virtual disappearance of religion as a dominant discursive force. Women who lived through the feminist decades, taking advantage of the new opportunities in areas as diverse as fashion, work, and sex, tell life stories characterized by a journey from religious-inspired oppression to a sense of independent selfhood devoid of the self-sacrificing, guilt-inducing rhetoric employed by earlier generations.6 Hugh McLeod, on the other hand, while accepting the new secularization narrative which posits the 1960s as an important turning point, argues for a more gradual shift in women’s identification with religion during the 1950s and 60s, and is far less certain of the distinct contribution of women as a group to the decline of the Christian churches in the postwar era. Notably McLeod is sceptical of there being a direct link between women who became feminists and their rejection of Christianity.7 Indeed, McLeod regards women as participating in the same cultural changes as men at this time and suggests that the desire of both men and women for greater personal autonomy had similar effects on churchgoing. Furthermore, he is wary of making a link between the churches’ teachings on sex and other moral issues on the one hand, and alienation from organized religion on the other. Both Brown and McLeod are trying to find concrete and measurable ways of explaining the relationship between women and religion, between feminism and religion, and between sexual activity and religion on a large scale. One of the problems of both of these approaches which take religion as the starting point is the tendency to focus on the relationship between sexual activity and religion and to assume that this relationship must be a direct or causal one. It is suggested that embrace of the practices that constituted the sexual revolution – certainly only one of the manifestations of the 60s cultural revolution – implied a rejection of religion or that women’s turn away from organized religion in the 1960s was a consequence of their rejection of what the churches stood for, especially in moral terms. It is easy to make this link, especially if one focuses on the published writings of some of those who were key figures in the feminist movement in the 1970s who have been

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eloquent on the necessary rejection of religion as a precursor of feminist consciousness. Sheila Rowbotham, for example, one of the key figures in the British women’s movement , explicitly links her own feminist journey with a rejection of what religion stood for. In part this process was a journey away from her mother’s generation. ‘Determined not to follow the patterns set by our mothers in being women, we wanted to relate differently to men but there were no received assumptions about how this might be.’8 She concludes: ‘Finding ourselves being women in new ways, many of us were precipitated into conceiving alternative means of becoming women.’9 Religion, in Rowbotham’s account, represents and is represented by contained sexuality; becoming a new woman was the path away from that world. In her contribution to this volume Sarah Browne discusses in detail the extent to which rejection of religion played a role in women’s involvement in the women’s liberation movement and feminist action in the 1970s. The centrality of women to the secularization debate contrasts with the scant attention given to the place and meaning of religion in women’s lives by historians of women in twentieth-century Britain. In this literature the Christian religion is perceived of as neither a structural force in women’s lives nor a significant discursive or moral presence.10 In place of the church it is the state that occupies an influential position in accounts of postwar women’s lives, firstly in the form of the new welfare system predicated upon female dependence upon men and other forms of state intervention in the family and the work of mothering, and secondly as an enabling and reforming force with the means to enact legislative change affecting women’s lives for the better, notably the 1967 Abortion Act and the 1969 Divorce Reform Act.11 Indeed the Church of England is treated as an arm of the state in matters concerning personal morality, and there is little consideration of a religious discourse on womanhood or femininity that might exist outside or beyond the contours of state involvement in social affairs.12 It seems that religion – such a significant theme for historians of women in the nineteenth century – has dropped off the radar of women’s and feminist historians in both political and personal terms. The story of women’s advance into the public sphere – their search for individual self-fulfilment through education, paid work, and a feminist consciousness – has no place for religion. Conversely, the relationship between women and religion in the modern world is a topic of lively discussion among Christian feminists and feminists working within religious studies, theology, and the

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sociology of religion.13 It is here that we find the most critical engagement with the debate about the significance of women’s religiosity to the secularization paradigm. In this literature there is a general concurrence with the argument that secularization is strongly related to women’s role in society; in Woodhead’s words, as women participated in the workforce in similar numbers to men they ‘became subject to the same disenchanting forces that men had encountered at the start of industrialisation.’ She supports the view that institutional religious decline is to some extent linked to women’s rejection of church-based faith.14 For Woodhead it was women’s adoption in the 1960s and 70s of the ‘late-modern project of the self’ – a process which saw women of the postwar generation embracing ‘individual self worth, entitlement, selfpropulsion and independence’ – which set women free from the leading reins of organized religion.15 But feminist scholars within this tradition have also been at pains to document women’s continuing religiosity in terms of women being the majority of religious adherents, the increasing numbers of female clergy, and the involvement of women in ‘subjective-life spiritualities’ of various kinds.16 In particular these scholars have argued that women remain trapped in a bind between a ‘stalled gender equality’ and the ongoing late modern project of selfhood. In this narrative, alternative spiritual practices serve the purpose of allowing these women to engage with the self in a context where they may still be subordinating their individuality in caring and self-sacrificial family work.17 Underpinning this literature is a feminist rethinking of the religious, an attempt to gender the study of religion by rejecting the religious narratives that take the male experience as normative. In particular, research on women and alternative spiritual movements posits an alternative reading of dechristianization, arguing that the evidence challenges ‘the gendered, dualistic and Christocentric construction of secularisation theories.’18 Common to all of these contributions to the debate about women and the decline of Christian culture is a call for more detailed and nuanced research. This chapter aims to meet that call by drawing on a series of interviews with white British women born between 1939 and 1948 – the generation which, demographically speaking, is at the centre of the debate about secularization in Britain.19 All the respondents were brought up, educated, and spent their formative years in various parts of the British Isles (with one exception who spent her earliest years in India). The majority were born into the middle classes and all had pursued professional or semi-professional careers for at least part of

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their working lives. For them, the postwar decades were a formative time, when they were moving away from home, breaking with family ties, and making lives for themselves through education, work, and personal relationships. The interviews followed a life-course format and the agenda conveyed by the information provided to respondents contained the hypothesis that the postwar era was characterized by a shift from the moral conservatism of the late 1940s and 50s towards the emancipatory discourses of the late 1960s and early 70s, and that these women were the standard bearers of that change. Thus in telling me their stories my respondents had this framework in mind. However, their narratives are wide ranging, dealing with family background, education, religious and moral upbringing, family relationships, personal (including sexual) relationships, and career development. The result is a series of multi-layered narratives in which religion is just one element among many that contribute to informing life decisions, and we can begin to judge with more subtlety the place of religion (or religious-based morality) in the lives of this generation of women. Oral history does not, of course, provide a clear, unadulterated picture of the past. The interview is theorized by practitioners as a communicative event which demands that we find ways of comprehending not just what is said, but also how it is said, why it is said, and what it means. It involves a three-way conversation: the interviewee with him/herself (the internal or subjective dialogue), with the interviewer, and with culture or discourse. This latter dialogue consists firstly of the process by which the subject, the interviewee, constructs a version of the self drawing upon discursive formulations or recognizable public identities available to him or her, and secondly the subjectivities present in the oral history interview which facilitate the construction of a memory story.20 In Penny Summerfield’s words, ‘it is thus necessary to encompass within oral history analysis and interpretation, not only the voice that speaks for itself, but also the voices that speak to it.’21 In this set of encounters I wanted to see how my respondents represented their selves in retrospect – how did the woman speaking to me in 2009–10 narrate the self she was some forty years earlier? As Caroline Steedman writes in her semi-autobiographical study of womanhood in twentieth-century Britain, ‘Personal interpretations of past time – the stories that people tell themselves in order to explain how they got to the place they currently inhabit – are often in deep and ambiguous conflict with the official interpretive devices of a culture.’22 Putting the personal interpretation at the heart of the investigation complicates the

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story – in this case the story of secularization – by adding veneers of experience mediated through the intervening years and shaped by discourses of present and past times. Contradictory Discourses The 1950s and 60s in Britain experienced a combination of conservative discourses on womanhood and a social reality incorporating greater freedoms and opportunities. The pivotal moment for the postwar generation was the mid- to late 1960s when two central but contradictory discourses which had been at the heart of postwar reconstruction came into conflict in the lives of this generation of young women. On the one hand was the ‘conservative’ discourse of social duty – a hangover from the pre-war era which particularly impinged on women and which was circulated by the churches and Sunday schools, and organizations like the Girl Guides, and imposed on the working classes by health visitors and social workers. This was a discourse of respectability, self-sacrifice or self-abnegation, and service (inflected by social class), which told girls and women that freedom and choice came with a condition – to be a good girl or a good woman. In effect this meant conforming to dominant notions of what good womanhood should be: respectable, self-effacing, modest, and willing to care for and serve others: fathers, husbands, children, dependents. Of course the discourse of respectability worked in different ways for working- and middle-class girls and women. Beverley Skeggs, in her analysis of how discourses of respectability have historically defined working-class women’s presentation of self, writes: All women are given responsibility for the human race. Their task is enormous and open to scrutiny. If they fail they are likely to induce revolution. The message is quite plain: if women refuse to take responsibility for social order they can be blamed for its disruption. This is all done in the name of virtue. Virtuous women protect the nation, non-virtuous women are subversive … this … brings together the discourses of hygiene, sexuality (through virtue) and morality, alongside the responsibility for the maintenance of social order. It also shows how women were viewed as potentially dangerous if not regulated through their own civilising self regulation.23

Respectability, then, was something to be internalized, displayed, and performed by good women. It was about presenting the right face

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to the world. And implicit in the discourse of respectability or good womanhood were religious injunctions to correct moral behaviour. The centrality of respectability in religious discourse on femininity has been extensively discussed, but by the postwar period the performance of respectability had become somewhat, although not entirely, unhinged from formal religious practices. Attending church services, being inducted into church membership, and so on was, well into the 1950s, a composite element of respectable social behaviour, at least for the respondents’ parents’ generation, though even for this cohort there is some sense that religion was already less of a belief system and more of a social convention. Among the middle classes, churchgoing was often regarded as ‘the done thing.’ The father of one interviewee, Deborah, was a member of the parochial church council, and she said, ‘We went to church if my parents liked the vicar.’24 Another respondent, Diana, in answer to the question, ‘Were your parents religious?’ replied: ‘We went to church but they weren’t religious.’25 In the case of another two of my interviewees, Suzanna and Caroline, it was their mothers who carried the torch for organized religion. They were religious in a more intellectual sense – both read widely on religious or theological matters and ‘assiduously went to church.’ Among the postwar generation of women though, it is much clearer that religion was no longer something one did to show one’s respectability, and individuals demonstrated a wide range of material and intellectual responses to this situation which ironically required more thought than if they had merely regarded churchgoing as ‘the done thing.’ At one extreme Deborah decided she was an atheist at a young age. ‘I said I absolutely said I had no belief and I felt it was wrong for me to be confirmed but again it was part of the, part of the village thing wasn’t it, you know … my parents had standing.’26 And notwithstanding the fact that she had a big church wedding, Deborah defines herself in opposition to a religious view of the world that she sees as represented by her mother. At the other end of the spectrum is Suzanna, who described herself as enjoying the rituals of religion while at boarding school (something also recalled by Caroline) and who regarded the principles of the New Testament as providing ‘good values to live by’ but whose experiences of life – premarital sexual relationships, unwanted pregnancy, psychotherapy – led her to develop a moral system to live by which was not in thrall to the respectability test set by her mother or any religion.27 By the late 1950s a discourse of opportunity and of self-advancement

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began to offer some women a way to remodel the female life and thus escape the fate of their mothers. It was a message imparted especially strongly in girls’ schools and colleges, in the new non-selective comprehensive schools established after the war, and in the expanding teaching-training sector which absorbed 26,000 women in 1965 in comparison with only 10,000 men.28 These institutions were often staffed by inspirational women, many of whom had forged careers in education in the immediate postwar years and many of whom were unmarried. Moreover, not only did the expansion of university education in the 1950s and 60s benefit women in numerical terms as the number of female students rose, but the opening of a number of new institutions with more liberal and experimental curricula and teaching approaches meant that the girls who attended them encountered an atmosphere which facilitated the nimble-footed skip away from the world of their mothers.29 In the realm of paid work, too, despite the continued gender segregation of the labour market, there were jobs for young, educated, single women, not only in teaching and nursing but in a range of occupations from journalism to the civil service. The scene was set for a generational shift as women born in the 1940s found themselves in an environment which encouraged achievement and self-development through education and work, opportunities which had, to various degrees, been denied their mothers through a combination of the war, social and legal conventions (for instance, the marriage bar which forced women to resign upon marriage which operated since the 1930s in the civil service, the teaching profession, and the BBC and was only outlawed by sex-discrimination legislation in the 1970s), and dominant expectations of good womanhood. Two Generations In examining the relationship between women, gender, and religion in the postwar decades we have to complicate and nuance the argument (and the chronology) which positions women as the key social group implicated in the decline of Christian culture. Women are certainly key actors, but there are two generations of women in play here, as Caroline, in her very reflective and honest response to a simple question from me about moral values, illustrates: My mother really was a more powerful influence in my life than anything the church said or was. She had been to the same boarding school, got a

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place at Oxford, but war had broken out and she had gone back to join her parents in south India on the outbreak of war and had married at 19 and had always bitterly regretted the loss of her university education. And this actually turned her into a not terribly happy person and I sometimes felt I was in the front line in terms of – I mean she really minded that I had freedoms that she hadn’t had because she’d married so young and been catapulted into Calcutta … she was envious of my freedom, certainly in the sixties, and so you know when I, you know, I did embrace that sense of freedom … it wasn’t with a sense of ‘oh dear what would the church say about anything I’m doing,’ it was my mother. I would feel [long hesitation]. I remember once going to church in [a small town in Scotland] wearing red stockings as a teenager and getting a completely out of proportion row about this, and how ashamed every single person in the congregation would be of me, and even at 16 or whatever I was, you know I realized this wasn’t about the red stockings at all, it was about her. And similarly later on with having boyfriends and so on, these were things she – I mean she only once ever openly said ‘oh I really do envy you the chance of doing that’ but any, any sort of sense of guilt or not behaving in a way I’d been brought up to behave if it ever overtook me was because I felt either her disapproval or her envy.30

Caroline’s description of her sometimes fraught relationship with her mother is indicative of something that was happening on a much larger scale. There was a generation of mothers like Caroline’s who envied their daughters for their ability to step nimbly and apparently effortlessly away from the binding tapes of ‘good womanhood’ and respectability, and a postwar generation of women for whom their mothers represented a set of constraining values and attitudes which had little relevance in the new times. The postwar generation – the daughters – were beginning to develop that sense of independent selfhood so characteristic of the late modern West and which has been described as predicated upon access to fulfilling and/or well-paid work, financial independence, time and space for oneself, and a sense of ownership of one’s body, all things that conflicted with traditional Christian discourse on ideal womanhood.31 The journeys taken by the postwar generation of women took them away from their mothers’ generation and from the values that had constrained their mothers’ opportunities. It was this leitmotif that dominated the daughters’ narratives. Given the chance to forge a life different from that of their mothers, these women grabbed the opportu-

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nities offered to them, enabling them to live a new kind of life, in some cases living the life that their mothers envied but could not quite come to terms with. But the journey often involved considerable tensions and conflicts between the generational standpoints, and it is in these conflicts (articulated by the daughters) that we can begin to see the clash of values that occurred in the 1960s. This clash does have something to do with religion, but it also has a lot to do with ideas about respectability, about duty, about how one presented oneself as a woman in the social world. Sarah Browne in her chapter in this volume on the narratives of feminist activists describes them embracing feminism because it ‘challenged the dominant “moral litmus test.”’ This is an apt descriptor too of the journey taken by women who did not embrace feminism in an activist sense, but whose life decisions forced them to make moral choices. The choices they made encompassed a construction of a self which was in conflict with established ways of doing things; it was a self that prioritized individual choice, the fulfilment of potential and the pursuance of self-development in a range of spheres from dress to sexuality, in place of the self-sacrifice, self-denial, and stunting of individual choice and self-expression experienced by the mothers’ generation. In their life-story narratives my respondents described moments in their lives when these two constructions of womanhood came into conflict. Women born into both the middle and affluent working classes began to pursue personal and work lives that pushed at and sometimes crossed the boundaries of what constituted the good woman, especially in the eyes of their mothers. The case of Suzanna, born in 1948, presents a clear instance of the tensions that arose across the generations that were commonly experienced by the respondents in my sample. Suzanna spoke articulately, movingly, and candidly about her teens and early twenties as she negotiated her way as a fairly privileged daughter of university-educated army parents, from a private boarding school for girls to one of Britain’s new universities in the 1960s, and thereafter to a career in teaching. In the course of her story Suzanna identified a number of epiphanal moments which exemplify her journey away from her mother’s expectations and values towards an independent selfhood, encompassing all the elements identified earlier as necessary for the successful achievement of that condition. In the following extract Suzanna tells a story about her arrival at university in 1966 which nicely encapsulates the first stage in the process by which she came to define the woman she wanted to be (as opposed to the woman her mother thought she should be):

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I suppose I’ve always rebelled all my life and one of my rebellions when we lived in army encampments was that I made friends with the wrong children and I remember being told off for playing with children of other ranks because I got on well with them and I enjoyed playing with them but I was told I wasn’t allowed to and that was a problem for me. When I went to [university] I remember standing in the queue to register and two things happened. One, people asked me my name and I said it was Suzanna and they would say yes but what do people call you? and I decided that Suzanna obviously wasn’t acceptable so I said Susie and for most of the 70s until I met my husband I was called Susie … So that was the first thing, and the second thing was people said where did you go to school? And I said [elite private school] and then they would go and talk to somebody else [laughs] so sort of like the third person who asked me I said I went to school in [southern town] and that was fine. Q: So you kind of recreated yourself I recreated myself and that was, you know I had a wonderful time.

The following year, after a summer romance, before which she had described herself as a ‘complete innocent’ in sexual matters, Suzanna discovered she was pregnant. The university doctor told her that she could have an abortion – this was 1967, shortly after legalization of abortion in the same year. My parents were desperate for me to have an abortion as long as it was legal and that was what they … Q: So you did tell them Well my doctor told me I had to tell them, no I didn’t have to tell them, no I didn’t have to tell them. My friends thought I should tell them. I think it was probably a mistake telling them. My father, er my mother said that if I had the baby my father would have to leave the army, it would ruin his career and she’d never be able to hold her head up again etc. etc. so there was a certain amount of pressure to have an abortion. … But I had very supportive friends at [university]. I completely ignored my mother’s desire not to tell anyone. But you know she was a hard woman because there was a great friend of mine who’s still a friend of mine … and he offered to come to N. with me and – I mean he was just a friend – and he offered to come and just be there and I wrote, for some reason, I mean god, I suppose I was just very young and I wrote to my mother and said you know this and my mother said ‘have you got no pride?’ She didn’t

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Lynn Abrams use the word pride, she used the word amour propre. And she obviously thought this was something I had to do on my own and so I did you know and again you know you think why should I and why did I believe that I had to do what she said? But I think for all that I was rebellious I was also quite orthodox or something, that you had to do what you were told. And I suspect that I kind of thought well I’ve done this dreadful thing I’ve got to do what I’m told.

Suzanna went through with the abortion in a National Health Service hospital, and although what she was doing was perfectly legal she was still subject to moral judgment from those trusted to care for her: And I remember the matron standing at the foot of either my bed or the other girl’s bed and talking about morality. And in my view, you see, going back to sort of Christianity, I was completely moral, because I’d only ever slept with this boy whom I was in love with and to me that was completely moral because the Bible doesn’t actually talk about the necessity of being married or as far as I’m aware anyway. So I don’t think that I was immoral, I thought she was [laughs] but I was not in a tough enough position to say so.32

The new freedoms pursued by Suzanna’s generation were not unconditional. Their lives were lived in the shadow of their mothers’ generation, who held to a different set of values which were as much about the public face of respectability as they were about the internalization of a belief system or the practice of a certain type of behaviour. Suzanna’s mother was desperate to keep her daughter’s pregnancy and abortion a secret. She was concerned for her own social standing, her own claim to be a ‘good woman,’ whereas Suzanna had already redefined her identity and her moral values away from her mother as part of the process of benefiting from the opportunity that a university education offered her. Mothers The life experiences of the women interviewed were materially different from those of their mothers, whether they belonged to the working or the middle classes. It would be no exaggeration to say that this prewar generation of women were trapped by a combination of expectations, discursive constructions of what a woman’s role in life should be, and legal constraints. Religion then was not the only or even the most important factor limiting women’s opportunities, though it was impli-

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cated in social convention and practice. Suzanna’s mother is a prime example. The daughter of a post-office worker in a northern town, she received a good education at a prestigious girls’ day school and went to Cambridge University to study English in 1936, where she met her future husband, also a Cambridge student. They both graduated in 1939 and got engaged, whereupon her new husband joined the army and was sent to India for five years. Suzanna’s mother stayed on at Cambridge for a while as a tutor. On his first leave in May 1945 her father returned to the UK, married Suzanna’s mother, and promptly returned to India. Suzanna’s brother was born in 1946. Thereafter Suzanna’s mother became an army wife, spending a lot of time on her own with three young children. Suzanna described her as a ‘very frustrated person,’ clever and thwarted in an academic career by marriage and motherhood, though she eventually became a published author. Her most successful novel tellingly is set in Cambridge, the location of Suzanna’s mother’s happiest and most fulfilling times.33 For this woman then, a privileged education and the possibility of an academic career and selffulfilment through a satisfying job had been sacrificed to the demands of family life. Caroline’s mother, a daughter of the Raj, had been awarded a place at Oxford but was sent back to India on the outbreak of war and married soon after at the age of nineteen. She remained there, having two children – both of whom were sent ‘home’ to be educated in 1948 – until 1953, when she returned to Scotland. As we saw in Caroline’s testimony earlier in this chapter, Caroline described her mother as unhappy, envious of her daughter’s freedoms and opportunities. Caroline’s mother finally did find an outlet for her intellect and energy; she was one of the first students to register at one of Britain’s new universities in the 1960s and she became quite a well-known historian and writer. Once again the war acted as a brake on opportunities and it was only when her children had left home that she was able to achieve that independent selfhood that was being taken for granted by her daughter’s generation. Deborah, who was born in 1949, described her mother as a housewife, a woman married to a London solicitor living a comfortable middle-class life in the south of England. She trained as a dental nurse but gave up work upon marriage in 1946 after a wartime during which she looked after her invalid father and possibly experienced some of the liberties of wartime by going out with American GIs. Deborah portrayed her mother as epitomizing the ideals of the respectable wife who lived in the big house in the village: going to church, dressing for dinner, and encouraging her daughter to join the Young Conservatives:

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Drink had always been a bone of contention in her parents’ marriage, and Deborah mused on the fact that divorce had not been an option for her mother with no private means to fall back on (unlike Deborah herself who left her husband). But in the late 1970s her mother’s world came crashing down around her when Deborah’s father ‘ran out of money,’ put their big family home up for sale, and put a deposit on a new house – ‘a box’ – without telling his wife; in Deborah’s words, this ‘absolutely shocked her to the core.’ These were three women whose ‘morality’ was invested in the way one presented oneself to the world. Suzanna’s mother’s phrase, amour propre or self-respect, sums up this widespread attitude: a good woman knew how to be and act in public, a way of performing womanhood that the churches had traditionally influenced. Religion was present in their lives in varying degrees but it was not regarded as a template for behaviour. The women of this generation were more constrained by the expectations of social class and the necessity of publicly conforming to the notion of the good girl/woman – by dressing for dinner, by attending church, by being perceived by others to be a good wife and mother, by fulfilling social and familial expectations. They recognized this and knew that they were unhappy and unfulfilled because of it. They were very aware that this self-respect, the insistence on being a good woman, had held back their own ambitions (this was also the generation whose ‘liberation’ had been deferred by the war), and they were not so blind as to think that they could impose an outmoded set of values on their daughters. So they encouraged their daughters in their education and careers but experienced conflicts with them over the latter’s embrace of the new opportunities, whether this be over trivial things such as red stockings or mini-skirts (which were very obvious and uncompromising symbols of a break from their mothers’ generation) or the more important things such as sex. Daughters In contrast to their mothers’ generation, whose attainment of an

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‘authentic, expressive selfhood’ was postponed or deferred, if not altogether subsumed, by duty to families and the nation, their daughters were positively encouraged to attain self-worth and individual fulfilment.35 All of my interviewees benefited from a good education which acted as a springboard for lives lived with choices and independence. All spoke of inspirational female teachers who had ambitions for their girls, who encouraged them to continue to college or university. Angela, who came from a long line of female primary schoolteachers and who described herself as quite a bookish child, explained how she came to apply to university in the late 1950s: We had an extraordinarily vigorous intellectual headmistress who’d – she been a social scientist and … she’d worked in the East End [of London] as well as a social worker and had then become a headmistress and was a very committed Christian again of a very flexible and intelligent kind, so she just assumed that you would do the best that you could possibly do, and it was a curious system. I think because all our expectations were quite modest, because this was – well I went to university in 1958 – it was quite close to the end of the war and people didn’t quite know what was open to them and when we got our A-level results we all had an individual interview with the headmistress with a parent so my mother came along trembling and this wonderful woman Miss Gunnery said ‘Well you’ll go to University Angela won’t you?’ and none of us had thought of that, I thought I would train as a teacher like the rest of the family did, and we didn’t know, we both of us said ‘well the likes of us don’t go to university’ and she said ‘Oh yes you do, yes, you could do that.’36

Similarly, Deborah described the headmistress at her girls’ school as ‘an amazing woman’ who was largely responsible for Deborah attending university: ‘She said “I don’t want you staying around here, I want you to take yourself off and experience a different sort of life” and I think she could probably see something in me I didn’t see – she had amazing confidence – I was head girl – she had amazing confidence in me, you know.’37 The daughters also spoke of the new educational structures – the new comprehensive schools, the new universities, which were regarded as more democratic, less hidebound than the traditional grammar schools and Oxbridge. And this generation went to university in the late 1950s and 1960s (none of my interviewees went to Oxbridge) coinciding with a period of social change and the beginning of greater freedoms.

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Caroline, who had spent her teenage years at a girls’ boarding school, summed up this sense of freedom: That was the beginning of the good times … the minute I got to Edinburgh [1962], boy oh boy, it was just absolutely wonderful, I mean the sense of freedom, the realization that you could choose your own friends and your own clothes, clothes were terribly important at that stage … all my friends’ mothers chose our clothes until we were about sixteen.38

She immediately cut her hair, spent her small allowance on fashionable clothes, and recalled: ‘I suddenly at university felt I was pretty, popular and did no work at all.’ We have already seen how Suzanna literally recreated herself when she arrived at her new university in a northern town in 1966. She said the university was a ‘wonderful place, I mean it was full of I don’t know it was very releasing … I mean you know I’d given myself a new identity, I’d shed my private school, I could be friends with whoever was there’ – and like my other respondents, she began to dress as she pleased. This was a sudden change to young women’s practice. Teenagers in the 1950s and early 60s dressed like their parents. Margery, who was a student in Glasgow in the early 1960s, recalled dressing rather primly and remembered the male students wearing suits and ties. Caroline – she of the red stockings – recalled wearing second-hand cast-offs of middle-aged women (tweed suits) that had been cut down to fit. Elise, who left a small rural town for Glasgow School of Art in 1959, was eloquent on the city style of the students she encountered on her first visit: When I went for my interview I nearly died of fright because everybody looked so… I mean coming from C. … everybody looked so incredibly knowing and gorgeous and the first person I saw was a boy walking down the steps in an ochre coloured corduroy suit and I thought this is phenomenal! My goodness, everybody - the boys wore denims. I’d never seen a pair of jeans I think, and you cannot imagine! I was in a pleated skirt and twinset I suppose and flat shoes, and all the boys wore desert boots, a bit like Ugg boots, sort of goldeny things you got from Millets or Army & Navy stores, and they were all … half had beards and the rest had long hair – oh fantastic! And the girls had long hair and they were all, oh, beautiful.39

By the mid-1960s many girls were making their own clothes, shopping in trendy boutiques and beginning, literally, to fashion an identity for

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themselves. Elise soon abandoned the twinsets: ‘I wore black jeans and very large jerseys, preferably black and black polo neck – the Juliet Greco look.’ But the negotiation of a course away from the good woman discourse of their mothers’ generation was not easy for these women, and all were articulate about that clash of values and how it manifested itself. Women who had grasped the opportunities on offer to them, like Margaret, who left a new girls’ comprehensive school in Yorkshire for a women’s physical education college on the south coast in order to train to be a teacher, were shocked to find themselves in a world that still set great store by respectability and self-control, the way one presented oneself to the world. At a time when Suzanna, Caroline, and Deborah were experimenting with mini-skirts and enjoying mixed-sex parties, Margaret was forced to get written permission to ‘entertain a man’ in the college residences and to wear a uniform that harked back to the nineteenth century which consisted of skirts on the knee and a red cloak, when she ventured outside the college. As Margaret herself acknowledged, ‘The hemlines on a fashion point of view were creeping up … and it was all flower power and everything else but it totally passed us by.’40 And yet this was a women’s college which produced very well-trained, athletic, high-achieving women – many of whom played sports at a county or national level and who were expected to go on to successful professional careers. For this generation of women in the mid-1960s university was a release (particularly for those who had been educated at single-sex schools), a place to discover oneself – but not notably in sexual terms. Suzanna and Deborah made a point of emphasizing the sexual ignorance of students. Deborah described how her classmates at Leicester University in 1967 were given a sex education talk, and Suzanna said she was ‘a complete innocent’ when she arrived at her new university. Suzanna, Caroline, and Deborah emphasized the mixed-group friendships they developed, the socializing, parties, and absence of rules. Angela, who went to Birmingham University in 1958, likewise focused on a social life spent in the drama society and going to the theatre. It was not the sexual revolution, or at least not solely, that distanced this generation from the moral values of the churches. Rather it was something more than this, a walking away from a particular construction of femininity which ceded control of the body to others and which placed good womanhood in a circumscribed sphere – the home. Historians have written about the gradual disappearance of domesticity as a theme in discourses on femininity in women’s magazines in

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the 1960s – a change which began to envisage sixties women (that is, the women of the postwar generation) as independent and autonomous, a far cry from the home-based respectability of the previous decade.41 But it was not only further and higher education that offered women an apparent escape from the world of their mothers. Two of my interviewees went abroad to work, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the British government’s overseas aid program in the post-imperial era. Diana had trained to be an agricultural secretary and in 1966 applied to VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) to be a teacher of English. But they only wanted teachers of domestic science. So, as a skilled shorthand typist, she shifted her attentions to the British aid program and ended up in Zambia for two years as a secretary. As she describes it, this was not regarded as especially adventurous; or if it was, it was a relatively safe adventure. The government organized flights and accommodation and there was a secure job when one arrived. Similarly, Elizabeth, who had trained to be a nurse, went to Borneo in 1967 with the Ministry of Overseas Development. She later worked in the Solomon Islands and the Sudan. Like Diana she recalled this episode in her life with equanimity; it was a chance to do something different, to develop her career and see another culture. She certainly did not express in the interview that working overseas was regarded by her as a chance to chart a new course in her life or to break with the values of her mother’s generation (although merely in taking this step she was of course doing so – Elizabeth’s mother was a farmer’s wife).42 Both Diana and Elizabeth spoke of their time overseas as eye-opening and great fun – Diana recalled that living in a hostel full of single people meant that she ‘didn’t have a night in for two and a half years.’43 What these testimonies suggest is women taking advantage of the opportunities made available to them and – importantly – mixing with a wide variety of people, many of whom did not hold the same values. The middle-class women who went to university found themselves in a milieu which proffered choice, which treated women as individuals who would go on to have careers, and which allowed them to be themselves (or to reinvent or discover themselves). Inevitably this led to some working out of what might be described as a new kind of morality, a morality different from that espoused by their mothers. The reader will recall Suzanna’s justification of the morality of her sleeping with her boyfriend – ‘I was completely moral, because I’d only ever slept with this boy whom I was in love with and to me that was completely moral.’ Later on she elaborated:

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But my attitude to sex has always been, I think you call it serial monogamy so I’ve been in a serially monogamous relationship with my husband since we met, but prior to that I had a number of relationships, but it was always one after the other and therefore to my way of thinking, you know my mother did accuse me of being promiscuous and I didn’t see that that was promiscuous, that wasn’t my definition of promiscuity.44

But for most, the mere fact that they were allowed the freedoms denied to their mothers resulted in a moral shift being undertaken by a generation. So there was a cultural change that these women lived – they grew up with it and it did not necessarily involve a conscious rejection of one thing – religion or the morality that went along with a certain kind of religious thinking – and an embrace of something else, emancipation. What about Religion? It is certainly the case that for the postwar generation of women the religious narrative as a way to make sense of a life was no longer relevant. Or rather, they acknowledged that there was such a narrative – one that would have been framed by issues of respectability, outward presentation, social convention, and the face one presents to the public – but that it belonged to their mothers’ generation. When the daughters were asked questions about religion their answers referred to their parents’ and sometimes their grandparents’ generation and their own girlhoods. Thereafter their narratives took a different direction as did their lives. The postwar generation of women – at least those who benefited from improvements in education and a widening of opportunities in all spheres – skipped nimbly away from their mothers, who placed conditions on their daughters’ freedoms just as conditions had been placed on theirs. All my respondents composed their narrative lives in terms of individualism, personal achievement, and the advancement of women. This is perhaps not surprising. In the present secular climate of twenty-first-century Britain and in the context of a culture that values and celebrates particularly women’s achievement of expressive selfhood, the story of the achieving and independent woman is a comfortable one to tell.45 The stories told in these personal narratives of the 1950s and 60s are not about the conflict between religious values and the sexual revolution. They are about everyday shifts in behaviour and thinking, engineered by the expansion of women’s horizons (among both working

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and middle classes) and the widespread assumption by this postwar generation that as a woman you could have a career, personal satisfaction, and marriage and a family. There was not necessarily a conflict between self-fulfilment and respectability, between individual achievement and caring for others. It was for this generation to work out for itself the principles by which they would live their lives, uncoupled from an outmoded construct of femininity which positioned the good woman as dependent, self-sacrificing, and not in control of her own body. These women lived lives that their mothers would like to have lived, and there is some evidence that, but for the war, some would have done just that. The daughters were pursuing lives deferred by their mothers and in the process threw off the constraints imposed by the model of the good woman, which in turn was regarded by the churches and some social commentators as a rejection of Christian values. It may well have been that, but for the women themselves it was articulated (and experienced) as a rejection of the hypocrisy and thwarted ambitions of their mothers’ generation. The dechristianization narrative undoubtedly must include women’s experiences. But this chapter has suggested that what appears to be a turning point in the 1960s was a long time in coming. The postwar generation who came of age in the 1960s were beneficiaries of a fortunate confluence of circumstances which enabled them to grasp opportunities their mothers’ would have been only too pleased to have themselves. By the 1950s and 60s religious discourses on femininity had been reduced to a series of platitudes about how to be a good girl and the rituals of religious practice which could be undertaken merely to present the correct face to the world. For the generation of mothers, whose lives still largely revolved around family and home, however much they resented it, the language of respectability still made sense as it bolstered a life they had been forced to accept. But for their daughters, for whom domesticity was merely one element of a life of self-fulfilment, religion ceased to provide a framework for the way one chose to live a life.

NOTES 1 Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2009), 58–87, 156–61, 175–80. Callum G. Brown, ‘Gendering Secularisation: Locating Women in the

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3

4 5 6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13

14

15 16

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Transformation of British Christianity in the 1960s,’ in G. Stedman Jones and I. Katznelson, eds., Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 275–94. P. Marler, ‘Religious Change in the West: Watch the Women,’ in K. Aune, S. Sharma, and G. Vincett, eds., Women and Religion in the West: Challenging Secularisation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 23–56, here 47–9. On the discourse on the place of piety in women’s lives and on the discourse of service and self-sacrifice see Lynn Abrams, The Making of Modern Woman: Europe 1789–1918 (Harlow: Longman, 2002), 34–40 and 50–3. Brown, Death, 191–2. Ibid., 179. C.G. Brown, ‘Women and Religion in Britain: The Autobiographical View of the Fifties and Sixties,’ in C.G. Brown and M. Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 159-73. H. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 161–6. S. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (London: Penguin, 2000), 10. S. Rowbotham, Threads through Time: Writings on History and Autobiography (London: Penguin, 1999), 4. For instance, see I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ed., Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow: Pearson, 2001); S. Bruley, Women in Britain since 1900 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). See also S. Morgan, ‘Rethinking Religion in Gender History: Historiographical and Methodological Reflections,’ in U. King and T. Beattie, eds., Gender, Religion and Diversity: Cross-cultural Perspectives (London: Continuum, 2005), 113–24 although she only discusses the nineteenth century. J. Lewis, Women in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 11–39, 92–104. Ibid., 50ff. See, for instance, J. Daggers, The British Christian Women’s Movement: A Rehabilitation of Eve (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2002); King and Beattie eds., Gender, Religion and Diversity; Aune, Sharma, and Vincett, eds., Women and Religion in the West. L. Woodhead, ‘“Because I’m Worth It”: Religion and Women’s Changing Lives in the West,’ in Aune, Sharma, and Vincett eds., Women and Religion in the West, 147; and see Marler, ‘Religious Change in the West,’ 23–56. Woodhead, ‘“Because I’m Worth It,”’ 148. See P. Heelas and L. Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

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17 Woodhead, ‘“Because I’m Worth It,”’ 156–9. 18 G. Vincett, S. Sharma, and K. Aune, ‘Introduction: Women, Religion and Secularisation: One Size Does Not Fit All,’ in Aune, Sharma, and Vincett, eds., Women and Religion in the West, 13–14. 19 The interviews were conducted by the author during 2009–10 with women identified through personal contacts and others who responded to an article in a local newsletter. Interviews were conducted using a semi-formal life-history approach. Some respondents have been given pseudonyms and some identifying information has been anonymized. Interviews and transcripts currently with the author. 20 See L. Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010). 21 P. Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 15. 22 C. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Virago,1986), 6. 23 B. Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (London: Sage,1997), 42. 24 Interview with Deborah. 25 Interview with Diana. 26 Interview with Deborah. 27 Interview with Suzanna. 28 C. Dyhouse, ‘Education,’ in Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ed., Women in Twentieth-Century Britain, 126–7. 29 On the expansion of the universities and the consequences for gender relations therein, see C. Dyhouse, Students: A Gendered History (London: Routledge, 2006). 30 Interview with Caroline . 31 Woodhead, ‘“Because I’m Worth It,”’ 149. 32 Interview with Suzanna. 33 H. Foley, A Handful of Time (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1961). 34 Interview with Deborah. 35 The term ‘authentic, expressive selfhood’ was coined by Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and it is used here by Woodhead, ‘“Because I’m Worth It.”’ 36 Interview with Angela. 37 Interview with Deborah. 38 Interview with Caroline. 39 Interview with Elise. 40 Interview with Margaret.

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41 C. White, The Women’s Periodical Press in Britain 1946–1976 (London: HMSO, 1977); A. McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). 42 Interview with Elizabeth. 43 Interview with Diana. 44 Interview with Suzanna. 45 On the theory of composure as it has been elaborated by oral historians see Abrams, Oral History Theory, 66–74.

3 Women, Religion, and the Turn to Feminism: Experiences of Women’s Liberation Activists in Britain in the Seventies sarah f. browne

The Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) has been recognized as ‘one of the most important social movements of the post-war period.’1 Yet, there has been little ‘scholarly’ historical research conducted on the impact of this movement in Britain. Participant accounts and autobiographies dominate the writings on the British movement. Although these personal accounts are highly valuable, the subject lacks a historical perspective. Women’s liberation groups emerged in many towns and cities throughout the USA, Canada, and Western Europe. In Britain local campaigns were focused on seven demands. These were equal pay, equal education and opportunity, twenty-four-hour nurseries, free contraception and abortion on demand, financial and legal independence, an end to all discrimination against lesbians, and freedom from intimidation by threat or use of violence.2 More recently a new generation of researchers has emerged who have begun to investigate the different groups and campaigns of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. These have included studies of radical/revolutionary feminism, consciousness-raising, and local women’s liberation workshops.3 As the WLM in Britain lacks a historical perspective, insufficient is known about the membership of this important social movement. Who was attracted to seventies feminism, and their reasons why, form important themes in any investigation of the WLM given that it was a decentralized movement which was anti-hierarchical and aimed to allow every member a say in how campaigns were run. Approaching the movement from the viewpoint of the grass-roots members will, therefore, enhance our understanding of how the WLM developed and operated. Oral history interviews and the analysis of autobiographies have been very important in looking at individual motivations for feminist

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activism. From this research key themes emerged including the influence of a variety of different political campaigns such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, student politics, and the labour movement. Moreover, ‘personal’ experiences were also incredibly influential – for example, childhood and adolescent experiences like religion. Although the links between religion and the burgeoning women’s movement of the 1970s in Britain have not been explored in depth by feminist academics, religious and cultural historians have debated the issue. On the one hand cultural historian Callum Brown has argued that the ‘routes to feminism invariably involved some encounter with religion’ and that single women were of central importance to the wider secularization of Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.4 On the other hand, Hugh McLeod has questioned this interpretation, pointing out that criticism of religion was not a strong feature of women’s liberation literature, and ‘there is no evidence that involvement in the women’s movement had been the cause of [women’s] rejection of Christianity – this seems to have happened before they became feminists.’5 This chapter will consider this debate by looking at the role of religion in the creation and development of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain. It will analyse autobiographical texts, women’s liberation publications, and oral history interviews. It will argue that while McLeod is correct to assert that some women rejected Christianity before joining the WLM, it is evident that there were others who also left the church because of their feminist activism. The question of when feminists renounced religion is, therefore, far more complex. Nevertheless, what is clear is that religion and feminism in this period are interlinked in a number of different ways and that religion had both a direct and indirect impact on the emergence of the WLM. It was clearly an important factor in some women’s turn to ‘feminism,’ and more widely it was also a key component in the formulation and development of women’s liberation politics. A Moral Litmus Test: Feminist Discussions of Religion Hugh McLeod described how ‘critiques of Christianity and Judaism as legitimators of patriarchy were … standard themes of “second wave” feminism,’ concluding, however, that ‘criticism of religion was less prominent in the literature of the British movement than many other themes.’6 This is difficult to quantify given that many women’s liberation newsletters were produced locally and are still largely lying in the cupboards of activists’ homes. But it is the case that large, national news-

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letters and published collections of the WLM did not entirely focus on religion or the role of the church. A survey of the most influential British women’s liberation magazine, Spare Rib, for the 1970s illustrates this point well. There were only six mentions of religion in articles or letters to the magazine in this decade. These articles discussed issues such as the role of religion in the creation and maintenance of a patriarchal state, what gender God was, and female spirituality.7 Although there are few mentions of religion in this publication, it is evident when interviewing grass-roots members and reading activists’ autobiographies that many women were inspired by feminism because it challenged the dominant ‘moral litmus test,’ which they felt defined women in the 1950s and 1960s. As Roussou has detailed, women have acted in many societies ‘as an expression of ‘our way of life’ or ‘the way of life of the nation.’8 Women in Britain in the 1950s and into the 1960s were expected to be virtuous and respectable, and this image sharply contrasted with their own desires and ambitions. As Jane Lewis has argued: ‘the women becoming feminists at the end of the 1960s were registering the discrepancy between the rosy world of equal expectations engendered by the college education that so many more women obtained during the late 1960s, and the reality of early marriage and children that followed.’9 As will be shown, girls growing up in the 1950s were determined to lead a different life than that of their mothers. As Brown has argued, even before the arrival of seventies feminism the discourse on femininity was radically changing.10 Individual Experiences of Religion and Feminism The girls coming of age in the 1960s, therefore, had to adapt to transforming cultural circumstances, and the WLM was one manifestation of this change. Many descriptions of the WLM’s members focus on short-term factors which led a woman towards feminism. These include the introduction of the Pill and radical political engagement, but what of the longer-term influences?11 As I was interviewing those who became feminists in the 1970s and analysing the published autobiographies of activists, it became clear that girlhood experiences, particularly the role of religion, were of critical importance, leading to their later politicization. Hugh McLeod correctly identified that Catholicism was the main focus for feminist activists. Descriptions of a convent school education were prevalent throughout many autobiographies and feminist litera-

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ture. In Spare Rib influential feminist writer Michele Roberts recounted her experiences as a young girl in the article ‘Hung Up on the Crucifix.’ In this she pointed out that it was her mother’s duty to ensure that her children were ‘given a sound grounding in religion’ and to teach them ‘to need and accept authority.’12 In doing so she sent Michele and her sisters to a local convent school. Roberts vividly described the two images of women that she felt were open to her: the saint or whore. She also described being in thrall to the message that girls were ‘better dead than in bed.’ The most important woman in her education was the Virgin Mary. She described how ‘the Virgin Mary in me triumphed as I dreamt of the most glamorous celestial wedding ever, a death to the corrupt world of human sexuality, a marriage with the denial of self: chastity to ensure a good seat in heaven.’13 A further important factor in ensuring this good seat in heaven was ‘to inspire men and rescue them from their bestial selves.’14 As Callum Brown has argued religion constructed women as the ‘determining agents of the religious condition of fathers, husbands and sons,’15 and for Roberts this was clearly the case. Roberts further explored this theme in her recently published autobiography, Paper Houses. She described her youthful self as being ‘intensely religious’ and how the nuns at her school would spend their time ‘pasting slips of white paper, like tiny underpants, over the genitals of nudes in the art books.’16 There is a strong sense throughout Roberts’s narratives that ‘religious-sexual guilt was strong for girls’ in convent schools.17 Unlike her article in Spare Rib, Roberts’s autobiography explores her abandonment of religion. She begins: ‘Turbulent times were beginning. Women were thinking of new possible ways to live their lives.’ For Roberts the moment came when she was reading Paradise Lost and Beowulf, and it suddenly occurred to her that nuns were not allowed to stay up all night reading. ‘Very well, then,’ she said to herself, ‘don’t be a nun. That was that. Whew. I got on with reading voraciously and enjoying myself.’18 Although Catholicism tends to dominate narratives of feminist experiences of religion, other religions are also explored. Sheila Rowbotham has written about her experiences of Methodism. She attended a Methodist missionary course in Canterbury, where ‘they sang Jesus songs to a guitar and sought converts. Conversion was overwhelming.’ She admitted that she ‘tussled with Christianity’ before finally realizing that it was not for her.19 Influential feminist theorist Ann Oakley also described her early experiences of religion. She remembered going to school at the age of four and saying ‘our prayers with our eyes oddly

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raised to the skies of Chiswick, and I lived in fear that I wouldn’t get anything right.’20 Early experiences like these were also recalled by some women I interviewed for doctoral research. The most vivid account was produced by Pauline Robinson, a woman who would later go on to join the Dundee women’s liberation group and the National Abortion Campaign. She grew up in a family who regularly attended their local Church of England. Like many girls of her generation, she attended church three times a day on Sundays. She recounted: When I was a tiny wee child I knew about loving Jesus and going to heaven. My dad and mum told me that when I was tiny I talked really early … And I would go round and tug people’s clothes and look up at them and say ‘you do love Jesus, don’t you?21

She described herself as being a strong convert to religion, acting almost like an early missionary.22 Her religious upbringing had a long-lasting and sustained impact on Pauline. She portrayed her life as a ‘personal campaign of my own, to challenge my own beliefs and religion,’ and her involvement with feminism was very important in this regard.23 Hugh McLeod has argued that ‘there is no evidence that involvement in the women’s movement had been the cause of their rejection of Christianity – this seems to have happened before they became feminists.’24 And in many cases there does appear to have been a lapse of some years between their rejection of religion and their conversion to feminism. But this does not completely disprove a connection, given that feminism could have been the outcome of a long journey of renouncing religion. After abandoning Catholicism in the late sixties, Michele Roberts attended the first British Women’s Liberation Conference in Oxford in 1971. She recalled realizing that ‘I’d been a feminist ever since I was ten years old and began resenting my brother for doing no housework or chores at home, resenting horrible Father O’Dwyer ranting on against the permissive society.’25 Indeed, negative religious experiences led other women to accept feminism. For example, Pauline Robinson continued her narrative by describing how when she started to attend college she quickly distanced herself from religion and the church. She described trying ‘ever so hard to give my heart to Jesus but nothing happened.’26 Of course, women not only accepted feminism as a rebellion against their religious upbringing but also because they found continuities. Denise Riley wondered: ‘And where did the idea of “love” come from,

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or “justice”? Perhaps from religious instruction, I don’t know.’27 She was not the only feminist to make such a link. For example, founder member of St Andrews women’s liberation group, Paula Jennings had attended a convent school and her mother was a devout Catholic. Paula argued that: I think feminism drew a lot of women from very – strong religious backgrounds. Jewish women, Catholic women, came across quite a few exnuns in women’s liberation. Yes, on the one hand we had a lot to rebel against and on the other hand, we had a kind of framework for – analysis.28

A religious ‘framework for analysis’ led Paula to credit Catholicism in helping lead her to feminism. She believed it had instilled ideas of justice and service, some of which were to be important features of her feminism.29 Michele Roberts also argued that ‘even though you’ve rejected Catholicism its attitudes remain, insidiously shaping the way you view yourself and the world,’ and because of this she still received ideas as if they were ‘papal decrees’ with little inclination to question or doubt.30 Other interviewees exploring religious identities included Ellen Galford of the Glasgow women’s liberation group, who believed that her Jewish identity was built upon a ‘sense that society, the status quo is not where we want to be. And that change, justice, things can be better, things can be better and fairer.’31 As David Bouchier has observed for those women who had grown up feeling the world needed to be transformed, the emergence of the WLM was welcomed and ‘many of the autobiographical accounts sound almost like religious conversion experiences; for thousands of isolated women the movement came literally as salvation.’ Hugh McLeod described the WLM in a similar way, arguing that for those who joined the movement it became ‘a new faith.’32 The testimonies of feminist activists confirm these interpretations. Roberts described how she ‘experienced a conversion moment, to which I capitulated with all the ardour of my ex-Catholic soul.’33 There was also a strong sense of a ‘conversion’ narrative in some of the oral testimonies collected for this research. Callum Brown has described how, in a religious context, from the eighteenth century onwards conversion symbolized ‘individual freedom.’34 By the twentieth century the influence of this narrative could be found in autobiographies and obituaries in which the life course was often described as sinful early years, fol-

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lowed by ‘moral fulfilment,’ concluding with some sort of redemption. In a similar vein, interviewees for this research often constructed their life stories with an emphasis on an early ignorance of equality issues, followed by an initial discovery of feminism, ending with their full ‘conversion’ to the aims of the WLM. For example, Pauline Robinson described the moment she discovered feminism as a point after which she ‘never looked back. Suddenly everything fell into place or that’s how it feels now, from this distance. I suddenly realized why I was angry, why I’ve hated injustice, why I’ve champed at the bit.’35 Pauline evoked a strong sense of redemption, transforming the way she viewed her life. In another interview this narrative was even clearer. Responding to a question about women’s liberation culture and campaigning in St Andrews, activists Anne Jackson (AJ) and Paula Jennings (PJ) said: AJ: That’s the first women’s liberation meeting, I ever went to … And – it was a bit like walking into a wonderful new religion or something. Where suddenly there’s a roomful of people speaking in tongues that you can understand. That suddenly a great chorus of voices saying things that completely make sense. That nobody’s ever actually said. PJ: That is so well put, Anne. That’s exactly, that’s exactly [it]. AJ: It was amazing. PJ: Just that sense of, yeah, I’ve been – thinking, feeling these things without actually articulating them to myself. And we were all just helping each other to articulate what – we’d been feeling all along about injustice. AJ: Yeah. PJ: Speaking in tongues. AJ: Heady times. Heady times. And it did feel like we could change everything. I felt as though we could change everything.36

What is striking about the interviews collected for this research is that although religion was only one of many complex reasons for involvement in the WLM, it was clearly an important factor in determining some women’s turn to feminism. Callum Brown has argued that religious discourse, from the nineteenth century onwards, had become increasingly feminized, with an emphasis on women’s essential piety.37 By the 1960s, however, this gender balance had been disrupted by the emerging sexual revolution and the rise of feminism, leading to women leaving churches in high numbers and more broadly to the wider secularization of Britain.38 Given this historical context, it should be of no surprise that women from strict religious backgrounds were attracted to feminism.

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Moreover, women’s liberation activities such as consciousness-raising (CR) groups were similar in many ways to the religious concept of bearing testimony in evangelical Christianity. The processes of the WLM would, therefore, be familiar to some women from religious backgrounds. Indeed many of the transcripts actually included religious metaphors, with women using phrases such as ‘spreading the message’ and ‘speaking in tongues.’39 Within the feminist movement activists found like-minded women who were all determined to transform the world according to their beliefs and arguments. Irrespective of their religious backgrounds, therefore, the WLM can clearly be seen as being informed by religious practice. This is true of other social and political movements. Sara Evans has shown how most women who participated in the early years of the civil rights movement came to it first through the church. As she described, ‘religious conviction had nourished their own rebellion and provided the vocabulary to describe their mission and their vision.’40 Furthermore, the role of religion has been an important theme in histories of socialism, socialist figures, and the labour movement. For example, Tristram Hunt in his recently published biography of Friedrich Engels argues: ‘It is a cliché of nineteenthcentury intellectual historiography that the road to socialism was paved by secularism. From Robert Owen to Beatrice Webb to Annie Bessant, the disavowal of Christianity was a familiar rite of passage for those whose spiritual journey would culminate with the new religion of humanity. But its obviousness does not invalidate its truth.’41 Mary Davis also pointed to the importance of the ‘moral tenets of the Christian gospel’ in inspiring ‘socialist pioneers’ in Britain and that ‘much of the language and practice of socialism was borrowed from religion.’42 Indeed, this has also been a prominent theme in earlier episodes of women’s movement history. For example, Sue Morgan argued that in the case of first-wave feminism and the suffrage movement, ‘religion proved a powerful influence upon feminist epistemological horizons,’ and Megan Smitley concurred, demonstrating that in the Scottish context, a religious identity was incredibly important in the development of ‘first-wave’ feminism.43 Christian Feminism There are strong links, therefore, between religion and the growth of feminism. This can be seen most clearly in a small number of women who tried to retain links with the church while also being a feminist. The

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influence of Christian feminism has been little discussed in accounts of the WLM. An important exception is Hugh McLeod, who draws attention to the influence of Christian feminism and of feminist theologian Mary Daly and her text The Church and the Second Sex.44 As Catherine Ebenezer pointed out in one letter to Spare Rib in 1977, ‘Christian feminists are fairly thin on the ground but they do exist.’45 Interviews conducted for my doctoral thesis included one Christian feminist who went on to renounce religion in the later seventies in favour of feminism. Jennifer Kerr joined a local women’s liberation group and a Bible studies group. But on reflection she asked, ‘What was I thinking?’46 She called herself a Christian feminist and explored the compatibility of these twin identities in Nessie, a radical and revolutionary feminist newsletter for Scotland. Although she recognized that the church was male-defined and male supremacist, she still hoped there was a way in which to integrate feminist ideals into religious practice.47 She admitted in this article that she was thinking through many of the issues and she welcomed comments and questions from other women.48 This article appeared to strike a chord with other radical and revolutionary feminists in Scotland. The woman who was typing up Jennifer’s article for inclusion in the newsletter was the first to comment, describing how she had stayed up until 3.30 a.m. in order to compose her reply, admitting that she ‘got a lot out of the article.’49 She described how she had had seventeen years of a Catholic upbringing and had spent eight years in a Catholic school. She argued that the church underpinned patriarchy because ‘men were and are materially benefitting from wimmin [sic] believing all those wommin [sic] hating prick worshipping myths in the Bible.’ She denied Jennifer’s hope of having a non-patriarchal Christianity as, in her view, religion was ‘rigged’ to ultimately benefit men.50 In the autumn of 1979, the issue of Christian feminism was raised in Nessie once again. This time a feminist activist writing under the pseudonym ‘Little Weed’ detailed her thoughts on Jennifer Kerr’s original article. She wrote how the article had taken her ‘back to thi [sic] time wen [sic] I was getting out of Christianity … not wanting to throw off something I believed for years, which had been such a big prop – really frightening – yet being more and more conscious of how anti-wimmin thu [sic] churches are.’51 The ‘moral litmus test’ and the church’s beliefs on sexuality emerged once more. Little Weed argued that ‘wimmin are inventing ways of loving and we don’t need theologians to co-opt em [sic] by calling em chastity! And if thair [sic] is such a thing as “wimmin’s spirituality” let’s keep it and use it FOR WIMMIN.’52 Indeed, like

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many other women of her feminist generation, she described feeling guilty and inadequate as a Christian in contrast to the freedom of her secular identity.53 Conclusion Although McLeod is correct to point out that religion was not a prominent feature in feminist discussions in the seventies, it is evident that religion did inform feminism in a number of different ways. As there is little historical ‘scholarly’ work on the WLM in Britain, insufficient is known about its roots, but it is clear that religion was an important aspect of this movement. Of course the direct influence of religion varied according to different women. For some women the journey from religious follower to feminist activist was a difficult one. This was especially true for Catholics and girls educated in convent schools. For others, however, although they abandoned the church and their religious upbringing, they felt that the ideals of justice and service, which had been features of their religious lessons, were important aspects of their feminism and helped lead them to feminist politics. Indeed, some women attempted to combine their feminist and religious identities in the form of Christian feminism, and for the wider movement there was clearly an integration of some religious elements into feminist practice. The WLM is not alone in being able to trace its roots back to religious practice. For example, it has been shown that the civil rights and labour movements both echoed religious doctrine and practice. Likewise, for many women feminism was a ‘new faith,’ and their accounts display a conversion narrative as women sought to carve out a new role for themselves within both their personal and public lives. Of course, not all women cited the abandonment of religion as key in raising their feminist consciousness. Of more importance for feminist activists was the ‘moral litmus test’ prevalent in wider society. As Gerald Parsons has argued, ‘the sexual revolution of the 1960s,’ of which the WLM was one part, ‘was a crucial factor in transforming attitudes and lifestyles [as it facilitated the] rejection of a traditional and conventional Christian sexual morality.’54 For many girls growing up in the 1950s, church attendance and strong morals were ‘emblematic of respectability.’55 In challenging these notions the WLM clearly contributed to the wider questioning of religious values. In creating visions of their feminist utopia, many activists dreamed of a new society in which religious ideals and principles would be abandoned. Whether or

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not they saw a religious identity as an important part of the creation of their feminist self, therefore, it is evident that activists wanted far more equality and freedom for women, and they saw churches as a key part of the patriarchal state which was preventing the creation of a more egalitarian society. It can be seen, therefore, that religion, in a number of different ways, was an important factor in the creation and operation of the WLM.

NOTES 1 Drude Dahlerup, ‘Introduction,’ in D. Dahlerup, ed., The New Women’s Movement: Feminism and Political Power in Europe and the USA (London: Sage, 1986), 1. 2 Michelene Wandor, The Body Politic: Women’s Liberation in Britain, 1969– 1972 (London: Stage 1 Online, 1972), 2; Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women’s Liberation (London: Picador, 1982), 26. 3 Eve Setch, ‘The Face of Metropolitan Feminism: The London Women’s Liberation Workshop, 1969–79,’ Twentieth Century British History 13, no. 2 (2002): 171–90; Jeska Rees, ‘“Are You a Lesbian?”: Challenges in Recording and Analysing the Women’s Liberation Movement in England,’ History Workshop Journal 69 (Spring 2010): 177–87; Jeska Rees, ‘A Look Back at Anger: The Women’s Liberation Movement in 1978,’ Women’s History Review 19, no. 3 (2010): 337–56; Sarah Browne, ‘“A Veritable Hotbed of Feminism”: Women’s Liberation in St Andrews, Scotland c. 1968–c. 1979,’ Twentieth Century British History 23, no. 1 (2012): 100–23. 4 Callum G. Brown, ‘Women and Religion in Britain: The Autobiographical View of the Fifties and Sixties,’ in Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World c.1750–c.2000 (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 276. 5 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 182. 6 Ibid., 176–7. 7 Spare Rib, July 1972, 15; Spare Rib, December 1972, 17; Spare Rib, September 1977, 38; and Spare Rib, January 1982, 8. 8 Maria Roussou, ‘War in Cyprus: Patriarchy and the Penelope Myth’ in Rosemary Ridd and Helen Callaway, eds., Women and Political Conflict: Portraits of Struggle in Times of Crisis (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 43.

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9 Jane Lewis, ‘From Equality to Liberation: Contextualising the Emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement,’ in Bart Moore-Gilbert and John Seed, eds., Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s (London: Routledge, 1992), 112. 10 Callum G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow: Longman, 2006), 5. 11 Historians and commentators who have looked at the short historical context include McLeod, Religious Crisis, 175; Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism (London: Virago, 1987), 75; and Coote and Campbell, Sweet Freedom, 12–13. Coote and Campbell do briefly refer to the ‘fetishized femininity’ of the 1950s. 12 Michele Roberts, ‘Hung Up on the Crucifix,’ Spare Rib January 1977, 10. 13 Ibid., 11. 14 Ibid., 12. 15 Callum G. Brown, ‘The Unconverted and the Conversion: Gender Relations and the Salvation Narrative in Britain 1800–1960,’ in Jan Bremmer, Wout J. Van Bekkum, and Arie L. Molenduk, eds., Paradigms, Poetics and Politics of Conversion (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 185. 16 Michele Roberts, Paper Houses – A Memoir of the 70s and Beyond (London: Virago, 2007), 3. 17 Brown, ‘Women and Religion,’ 271. 18 Roberts, Paper Houses, 3, 11. 19 Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Revolt in Roundhay,’ in Liz Heron, ed., Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties (London: Virago, 1985), 202–4; 206. 20 Ann Oakley, Taking It Like a Woman (London: Flamingo, 1992), 8. 21 Transcript of interview with Pauline Robinson (PR*), 5 December 2006, 11. Please note an asterisk indicates that an interviewee has requested anonymization and the use of a pseudonym. A hyphen indicates where a hesitation has been deleted and an ellipsis denotes where a section of the transcript was not included because it did not add to the quotation. 22 Transcript PR*, 11. 23 Ibid. 24 McLeod, Religious Crisis, 182. 25 Roberts, Paper Houses, 33. 26 Transcript PR*, 12. 27 Denise Riley, ‘Waiting,’ in Heron, ed., Truth, Dare or Promise, 244. 28 Transcript of interview with Paula Jennings (PJ), 15 October 2007, 7. 29 Transcript PJ, 7. 30 Spare Rib, January 1977, 12. 31 Transcript of interview with Ellen Galford (EG), 2 April 2007, 3.

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32 David Bouchier, The Feminist Challenge: The Movement For Women’s Liberation in Britain and the United States (London: Macmillan, 1983), 60; McLeod, Religious Crisis, 177. McLeod and Gerald Parsons deny a ‘conversion’ experience. McLeod, Religious Crisis, 182; Gerald Parsons, ‘How the Times They Are a Changing: Exploring the Context of Religious Transformation in Britain in the 1960s,’ in John Wolffe, ed., Religion in History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 183. See also Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2009), 227. 33 Roberts, Paper Houses, 34. 34 Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, 37; Brown, Religion and Society, 42. 35 Transcript PR*, 3. 36 Transcript of interview with Anne Jackson (AJ) and Paula Jennings (PJ), 27 August 2007, 17–18. 37 Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, 59. . 38 Ibid., 176; Brown, Religion and Society, 14. 39 For example, transcript AJ and PJ, 17. 40 Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1980), 35, 58. 41 Tristram Hunt, The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (London: Penguin, 2009), 41. 42 Mary Davis, Comrade or Brother? A History of the British Labour Movement (London: Pluto, 2009), 131. 43 Sue Morgan, ‘Faith, Sex and Purity: The Religio-Feminist Theory of Ellice Hopkins,’ Women’s History Review 9, no. 1 (2000): 14. Megan Smitley, The Feminine Public Sphere: Middle-Class Women and Civic Life in Scotland, c. 1879–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 44 McLeod, Religious Crisis, 178. 45 Catherine Ebenezer, ‘Christian Feminism’ letter in Spare Rib, February 1977, 4. 46 Transcript of interview with Jennifer Kerr (JK), 1 May 2007, 14. 47 Jennifer Kerr, ‘Can Thair Be a Christian Feminism?’ Nessie: A Radical and Revolutionary Feminist Newsletter from Scotland 2 (July 1979): 15. 48 Ibid., 16. 49 Insubordinate Claws, ‘Typist’s Comments,’ Nessie: A Radical and Revolutionary Feminist Newsletter from Scotland 2 (July 1979): 17. 50 Ibid. The spelling in the articles from Nessie was deliberate. Many women who wrote for this particular newsletter attempted to challenge gendered language and avoided using words which included ‘he,’ ‘his,’ ‘him,’ etc. 51 Little Weed, ‘Can Thair Be Christian Feminism – Some More Thoughts …

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on Feminist Christianity for That Matter?’ Nessie: A Radical and Revolutionary Newsletter from Scotland 3 (September 1979): 14. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 15. Parsons, ‘The Times,’ 176. Michael Snape, God and the British Soldier: Religion and the British Army in First and Second World Wars (Oxon: Routledge, 2005), 20.

4 Saving Marriage: A Comparison of Religion and Marriage Promotion in the United States and Britain melanie heath

Morality and marriage. Not too long ago the two went together, as the lyrics intone, ‘like a horse and carriage.’ But, of course, these words sung by Frank Sinatra in 1955 (and reintroduced as the theme song of the dystopian sitcom Married with Children) speak not of marriage and morality but of love and marriage, championing the most significant shift in family life of the past century in Euro-American societies. Once an institution mainly concerned with wealth, power, and property, marriage today is based more on the companionate ideal of love, sexual compatibility, and friendship.1 The shift that loosened marriage from external moral constraints has meant a growing individualization of partnering and parenting decisions in the second half of the twentieth century. As Beck and Beck-Gernsheim explain: ‘Biographies are removed from the traditional precepts and certainties, free from external control and general moral laws, becoming open and dependent on decision-making, and are assigned as a task for each individual.’2 During the late 1990s in the United States, a movement took shape with the explicit goal of turning the tide on family change. Religiousright proponents joined forces with social scientists, policy makers, and politicians to inaugurate a self-proclaimed ‘marriage movement,’ a hybrid of political-religious groups that seek to promote marriage and fatherhood in public policy and law, and to renew a ‘marriage culture’ in society.3 In Britain, a parallel campaign to promote marriage also took root under Blair’s government, and similar to American politics its stated concern was decelerating transformations in family life, such as reducing rates of divorce, decreasing the prevalence of cohabitation and single parenting, and reviving the overall significance of marriage. Both of these developments engage a history of ‘pro-family’ politics in the two countries but with very different consequences and effects.

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In this paper, I compare the emergence and growth of marriage promotion in Britain and the United States to answer two questions: What is the relationship of religion and morality in state policies to promote marriage for these two countries? And how does the emergence of these movements speak to the ongoing process of dechristianization in EuroAmerican societies? I begin with a brief theoretical and historical introduction to the social context for studying family politics in these two countries, and then move into an analysis of the marriage movement in the United States, its counterpart in Britain, and the transnational exchange between these two. Finally, I conclude with considerations of the social consequences of these movements on what was once considered to be a ‘natural’ relationship between moral concerns, dominant Christian belief, and state policy in Euro-American societies. Theorizing Religion and the History of Family Politics Scholars have marked the 1960s as the pivotal decade in which the seeds of radical family transformation, germinating for years, finally took root. The past half-century has brought momentous transformation to marriage, making it more fragile and optional. In the United States, the divorce rate more than doubled over a twenty-year period from the mid-1960s, levelling off somewhat at the point where almost half of all marriages are estimated to dissolve. In the early 1980s, one out of six births occurred outside marriage, a much higher ratio than two decades earlier. By the twenty-first century, this figure had grown to one out of three. Roughly one in twenty U.S. families is cohabiting, and nearly a quarter of families are headed by single parents. Similar and higher figures are found in the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, and the Nordic countries.4 A necessary condition of family transformation was the pervasive decline of religion across Western Europe and North America. For much of Western Europe, the 1960s prompted the beginning of a general collapse of religious culture, and matters of sex, sexuality, and gender equality were at the forefront of debate. While this decade experienced a decline in Christendom overall, by its end a major divergence in the path of religion occurred, with rates of Christian religiosity stabilizing in the United States, and European and Canadian rates continuing to fall.5 Responding to the significant transformations of intimacy, sex, gender, and family, America stands alone in the numerical and political strength of its activists, public officials, and religious leaders who fight

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for conservative ‘family values.’ The rise of the American religious right occurred in the late 1970s, bringing together a movement of evangelicals and other conservative Christians who based their activism on guarding family values from the onslaught of the secular world. Family-values supporters seek to confine sexuality to the married, heterosexual couple and embrace conservative gender roles based on male headship and female submission, even as evangelical couples follow trends toward greater egalitarianism of the broader society.6 Religiousright resistance to the protest movements from the 1960s and 1970s – women’s liberation, civil rights and Black Power, anti-war activism, gay liberation – coalesced into opposing movement organizations.7 Proponents joined with New Right conservatives in the 1970s who believed that neither economic nor foreign policy issues were sufficient to ensure success.8 This block mobilized around social issues and were highly active in the anti-feminist movement that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment, the anti-abortion movement with its limited success of restricting abortion (e.g., Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003), and the anti-gay/lesbian movement that helped pass the federal Defense of Marriage Act. While the fortunes of the religious right have waxed and waned, in recent years the evangelical vote has gained importance, compelling Republican candidates to shape their platforms to address religious-right concerns.9 While the meteoric rise of the American religious right remains unparalleled, Britain has nurtured a weaker version in its own Conservative Party. Contemporary historians and sociologists point to the interconnections of British and U.S. conservatism as a durable legacy of the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s. Both parties shared a common cause to reassert a vision of economics based on free enterprise, low taxes, and deregulation, while also seeking to arrest Soviet progress and reposition NATO as the dominant player in international affairs. Similarly, Britain witnessed a rise in groups favouring family values that influenced its Conservative Party in the early and mid-1980s, including the Family and Youth Concern (formerly known as the Responsible Society), Christian Action, Research and Education (CARE) (formerly the Festival of Light), the Parliamentary Conservative Party, the Conservative Family Campaign, and the National Campaign for the Family. As in the United States, these groups have sought to influence legislation to restrict abortion and to fight against lesbian and gay rights; however, unlike the United States, these groups were never able to constitute a religious-right block within the Conservative Party agenda.10

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In the 1990s both countries experienced a shift in their family politics. Whereas pro-morality family rhetoric had previously matched the interests of conservative politics in each country, there arose a new centrist, neoliberal focus on family rhetoric of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Seeking to quell increased anxieties over public spending on welfare and the social ‘dysfunction’ of single-mother families, both leaders set into motion policies and laws that prioritized preservation of the heterosexual family on the political agenda. Former president Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) into law in 1996, ending over sixty years of federal welfare benefits to poor families. Also known as Welfare Reform, the law specifically designated marriage promotion in addition to job preparation and work as a sanctioned use of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). The Blair government set out specifications for marriage promotion in the Home Office Green Paper Supporting Families, published in November 1998. These included establishing a National Family and Parenting Institute to offer advice to parents and writing a manual to spell out the rights and responsibilities for couples planning to marry. Couples wishing to divorce would be required to attend meetings to determine whether the marriage could be saved. The Green Paper also outlined strategies to reduce teen pregnancy and to enable lone mothers to secure employment. Relying on social science research, these new family politics present ‘objective facts’ about the benefits of the heterosexual, two-parent, married family for raising children, seeking distance from the more overt ideological arguments of the family-values movement. However, as Andrew Cherlin elucidates, survey data on the negative effects on children of growing up with a single parent, while perhaps uncovering some difficulties that can arise from family structure, do not demonstrate causation, nor are they able to attend to selection factors such as genetic predispositions.11 In addition to the social scientific perspective is a moral view of marriage. ‘Pro-family’ politics embraced by conservative Christians longs for a mythic past of a family culture rooted in Christian morality and naturalism.12 In this context, marriage-promotion ideology offers an ideal nexus for merging religious and secular epistemologies of family and culture. Marriage promotion emerges in a period of what scholars have understood to be an expanding secularism in Euro-American societies. Sociologists and historians have critiqued the secularization thesis for assuming a homogeneous decline of religion in the face of modernity

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that will ultimately culminate in a religionless society.13 While disagreeing about the progression of secularization, few however would argue against the thesis that there has been a fundamental change in the interactions of society and religion from past and present, or that the process of secularization in Europe and the United States has differed fundamentally. In Europe, secularization is much more complex. Dahrendorf argues that historically the European social system evolved such that one institutional system was superimposed on another and each had a hand in the other.14 Institutions including church, state, education, welfare, and the law were intertwined in a way that their splintering sent a significant shock to the overall system, including religion. In contrast, the United States, from its earliest years, has been more or less a pluralistic society, and church and state were constitutionally separated. Moreover, free market, laissez faire economics organized the role of the state in relation to the entire social system.15 Religiosity has had a very different progression in the United States and Britain. In regard to secularization, Callum Brown argues that the 1960s heralded the death of Christian Britain, attributing the process of dechristianization with the unravelling of Christianity’s authority over the rules to regulate sex, family, and moral principles.16 While some of the same processes have occurred in the United States, it is often viewed as exceptional for its more pervasive religiosity. As Christian Smith elucidates, modern American evangelicalism is thriving, and its ‘vitality is not a product of its protected isolation from, but of its vigorous engagement with pluralistic modernity.’ For Smith, evangelicalism is vibrant in America because it offers ‘satisfying morally orienting collective identities which provide adherents meaning and belonging.’ His explanation of evangelicalism’s growth in a competitive marketplace of religions identifies the perhaps exceptional character of American religion and its relationship to the market imperative of advanced capitalism.17 One might assert that America is leading the way in promoting ideals of self-determination, free choice, and personal responsibility that mesh with the individualism of American evangelicalism. The emergence of marriage-promotion politics in these two countries advances the question of the role of religion and morality in governance. What are the social consequences of government efforts to save marriage, and what is the impact of these on the ongoing dechristianization of Euro-American societies? The divergent political and social systems, as well as the differing contexts of secularism, might lead one to wonder why marriage promotion would emerge in Britain. Indeed,

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Britain’s marriage-promotion policies appear to be unmatched among other European nations. One possible explanation is the exceptional family demographics of the United Kingdom, which deviate from the European norm. Coleman and Chandola analysed demographic and socio-economic data on European and other industrialized countries from the Second World War until the late 1990s to find that the United Kingdom occupies a deviant position among European countries in regard to fertility and marital dissolution, mirroring more closely the patterns of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Nordic countries.18 However, turning to demography can only provide a partial explanation since marriage promotion has gained no traction in Canada or Nordic countries, whereas it has in other countries such as Australia and New Zealand. To study marriage promotion in these two countries, I draw on several data sources – official position statements, government reports, policies, and news coverage, entries from the American movement listserv (Smart Marriages), and reports from marriage-promotion proponents. This study also draws on previous research from an ethnography of marriage promotion that I conducted in Oklahoma in 2004. In 1999, Oklahoma’s governor was the first to employ the marriage-promotion provisions of the welfare reform law to pioneer the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative by committing $10 million from its federal TANF block grant.19 Research on British marriage promotion focuses on the sources from the internet, which offer a well-rounded picture of the state of marriage promotion in Britain. The American Marriage Movement The American marriage movement brings together a coalition of evangelical Christian organizations, family demographers and scholars, fathers’ rights groups, politicians, and other family-values advocates mobilizing for a national campaign to promote lifelong heterosexual marriage. The movement emerged out of at least four distinct sources. First, it drew on players and resources from the family-values politics of the religious right in earlier decades. Second, it grew out of and overlapped with the responsible-fatherhood movement of the mid-1990s, which had ties to the evangelical Promise Keepers.20 Third, it gained traction from the welfare reform law, which explicitly contained language about promoting marriage as a solution to poverty. Finally, Diane Sollee, a former executive with the American Association for Marriage

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and Family Therapy, resigned from that organization in 1996 to found the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education (CMFCE). She believed, somewhat controversially, that laypersons with limited training could help married couples with what she called marriage education (as opposed to marriage therapy conducted by trained therapists). The Coalition is one of the key organizations within the marriage movement and sponsors the Smart Marriages conference, an annual gathering of movement leaders and marriage education practitioners. CMFCE’s first Smart Marriages conference was in 1997 and drew about 400 attendees. Since then attendance has risen steadily to draw a couple thousand participants a year. In 2000, the movement issued a report, The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles, a document co-sponsored by CMFCE, the Institute for American Values, and the Religion, Culture and Family Project at the University of Chicago. The statement had 114 signatories, including Don Eberly of the Civil Society Project, Patrick Fagan of the Heritage Foundation, Maggie Gallagher and David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values, Wade Horn of the National Fatherhood Initiative (who became Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, Department of Health and Human Services), Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of the Marriage Project, and Ronald Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action. Sociologists signing the statement included William Doherty, Amitai Etzioni, Norval Glenn, Alan Hawkins, Steven Nock, David Popenoe, and Linda Waite. The report speaks of a ‘contemporary marriage crisis,’ pointing to the high divorce rate, rising out-of-wedlock births, and the growth of unmarried cohabitation. Leaders depicted the diversity of the marriage movement as transcending ideological and political divisions as a way to distance the campaign from the views of the religious right. The statement describes its members: We are teachers and scholars, marriage counselors and marriage educators. We are judges, divorce lawyers, and legal reformers. We are clinicians, service providers, policy analysts, social workers, women’s leaders, religious leaders, and advocates for responsible fatherhood. We are people of faith, asking God’s blessing in the great task before us. We are agnostics and humanists, committed to moral and spiritual progress. We are women and men, liberals and conservatives, of different races and ethnic groups. We come together to pursue a common goal. We come together for a marriage movement.21

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While this description includes ‘people of faith,’ the statement also includes ‘agnostics and humanists, committed to moral and spiritual progress.’ In the United States, the religious right speaks with vitriol of ‘secular humanism,’ which its leaders depict as promoting an ethically relative world view where no absolute moral code exists.22 By attributing the embrace of spiritualism and morality to humanists, the statement walks a tightrope that seeks inclusivity – i.e., ‘We are women and men, liberals and conservatives, of different races and ethnic groups’ – while also providing assurance to conservative religious members that this inclusivity sets a boundary to incorporate only those who believe in moral and spiritual progress in terms of preserving heterosexual marriage. The statement offers the following reasons for why this diverse group of people come together: to announce that the divorce and unwed childbearing revolutions have failed, to value freedom and a free society, to affirm that marriage is not a ‘special interest’ – i.e., marriage benefits every member of a society – and to energize the movement to renew the marriage vow and the marriage vision. In its citation of the goal of cherishing freedom and a free society, the statement points to one of the movement’s most important ideological propositions. Advancing the idea of marriage as essential to a ‘free’ civil society, the marriage movement claims its desire to stop the decline of marriage and to halt the spread of social inequality. Behind this proposition is the idea that unwed childbearing and divorce are causing inequality. The statement asserts: ‘As society retreats from supporting marriage publicly, those who succeed in achieving this aspiration [marriage] are increasingly likely to be the already highly advantaged: better educated, more affluent, and white.’23 Since the 1960s, conservative forces against welfare in the United States have focused on the improper behaviour of black women and men as a means to exclude unwed mothers from aid, and later to cut benefits or abolish welfare altogether. One contemporary figure is Charles Murray. In Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, Murray, who served as a former fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, argued vigorously for the end of welfare because it encourages unwed motherhood among poor (black) women.24 Losing Ground has been credited for spawning a movement that ultimately led to welfare reform in the United States. In the case of the marriage movement, rather than focus on the ‘bad’ behaviour of those receiving welfare, it offers a goal that appears more palatable: the government should promote marriage to help disadvantaged Americans achieve their dream of getting married.

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Policy institutes and think tanks in the United States present what they view to be social scientific facts to demarcate a clear boundary in favour of the benefits of marriage. In a 2002 document, the Institute for American Values spells out Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-Six Conclusions from the Social Sciences. A sampling includes: ‘Marriage is a virtually universal human institution; Marriage has important biosocial consequences for adults and children; Marriage reduces poverty and material hardship for disadvantaged women and their children.’25 This packaging has helped the marriage movement avoid entanglements in broader debates over other contentious issues like same-sex marriage. Instead, the movement has expanded exponentially, with its growth closely tied to funding of marriage initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels.26 At the federal level, the Bush administration created a Healthy Marriage Initiative within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2002. Bush then signed into law the Deficit Reduction Act in 2005, which reauthorized welfare reform and sanctioned an appropriation of up to $150 million per year from 2006 to 2010 to promote healthy marriages and responsible fatherhood.27 These funds are in addition to $100 million within existing programs that have already been diverted into marriage promotion, including $6.1 million from the Child Support Enforcement Program, $9 million from the Refugee Resettlement Program, $14 million from the Child Welfare Program, and $40 million from the Social and Economic Development Strategies Program focusing on Native Americans.28 By 2004 every state in the union had undertaken at least one activity or made at least one policy change designed to promote marriage.29 Following the lead of Oklahoma, a state that designated $10 million of its TANF block grant for marriage promotion, three states – Ohio, Utah, and Texas – have dedicated 1 per cent of their funds to statewide initiatives (Texas allocated $16 million for fiscal year 2008–9), and ten other states have also committed substantial amounts. While presenting a secular justification to promote marriage, a strong component of the marriage movement involves faith-based programs like Marriage Savers, a non-profit organization based near Washington that works with local congregations to promote Community Marriage Policies and Covenants requiring engaged couples to attend four months of premarital counselling. Its goal is to bring down the rate of couples living together outside of marriage and to save troubled marriages. Faith-based and church marriage programs have received grants from the federal government for marriage education and promotion.

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Out of more than 200 programs funded since 2004, forty went to churches or faith-based organizations.30 Many more of these funded organizations embrace a Christian philosophy or have Christian directors and staff. The Northwest Marriage Institute, for example, is not explicitly faith-based, but its founder and director is Bob Whiddon, Jr, a former Church of Christ minister. In 2006, a group sued the federal government over grant money that went to the institute, saying it received federal money ($97,750) to unconstitutionally promote a ‘fundamentalist’ Christian agenda. The Associated Press reported that the institute’s website quoted several Bible verses, including ‘one that urges wives to win over their husbands with a “quiet spirit.”’31 The lawsuit was dismissed only after the institute dropped the explicitly religious aspects of their marriage counselling. In Pennsylvania, officials agreed to bar all public funding of religious activities as part of a settlement in a 2005 lawsuit charging the unconstitutionality of funding The Firm Foundation, a religion-based rehabilitation program active in the Bradford County jail. Yet another ruling against the InnerChange Freedom Initiative at Newton Correctional Facility in Iowa ‘found that the publicly funded religious program at Newton transgresses the First Amendment ban on government support for religion.’32 In my ethnography of Oklahoma’s statewide marriage initiative, I found that the state worked with conservative Christian leaders and churches to promote marriage. Jerry Regier, then cabinet secretary for Health and Human Services, was a key player in the formation of the marriage initiative. He has long been involved in conservative Christian politics, founding and serving as the first president of the Family Research Council in 1983, a conservative Christian think tank in Washington, DC. Regier organized a strategic plan for a multi-sector approach to marriage promotion and involved conservative Christian organizations and churches as key players in its planning and implementation. The executive director of the Oklahoma Family Policy Council, a non-profit organization that is a central clearinghouse for anti-gay and lesbian campaigns in Oklahoma, was a representative of ‘family and faith’ on the initial steering committee, and three of its six representatives were from conservative Christian churches or organizations. One goal was to hold religious leaders responsible to disseminate the message of lifelong commitment. To achieve their objective, the steering committee introduced the Oklahoma Marriage Covenant, a contract asking pastors to make a commitment to set aside a ‘preparation period’ of four to six months before performing a wedding, to require

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four to six marital preparation classes, and to encourage mentoring of the newly married. The wording derives from the conservative Christian national Covenant Marriage Movement that bills itself as ‘a movement of God to provide an avenue through which His people can boldly stand alongside thousands of other couples and congregations to affirm God’s design for marriage as a covenant relationship.’ It reads: I believe that marriage is a covenant intended by God to be a lifelong relationship between a man and a woman. I promise to God, to my family, and my community to encourage couples to remain steadfast in unconditional love, reconciliation, and sexual purity, while purposefully growing in their covenant marriage relationship.33

Over 1,200 pastors are listed as signatories on the initiative’s website. In Oklahoma, government efforts to promote marriage blur together religious, legal, economic, and social dimensions of its implementation. The Oklahoma Marriage Initiative (OMI) trains state employees, community leaders, and other volunteers to offer marriage education workshops throughout the state. The workshops use the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP), a research-based curriculum created by Howard Markman and Scott Stanley that teaches communication skills, conflict management, and problem solving. The initiative also trains volunteers to offer a Christian version of the PREP curriculum in settings that are not state funded. In thinking about the mix of church and state in the running of the marriage initiative, a DHS supervisor offered the following assessment: There are several things kind of mixed up in this whole batch. Part of it is the whole move to faith-based initiatives. Now, to some degree, and in a lot of people’s thinking, that’s very separate. We’ve got lines of demarcation. But, in OMI, things kind of float through that have a faith-based orientation, even with our TANF sessions [for welfare recipients].

Specifically religious directives on marriage that get such governmental imprimatur have raised concerns over unwarranted and unconstitutional intrusion in intimate family life and over the consequences for the unmarried, divorced, and for same-sex couples.34 Given the interactions between state and church in the promotion of marriage, there appears to be a goal for many in the marriage movement to reintroduce a Christian understanding of marriage and family

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values in government and public policy. The philosophy of marriage promotion has energized many conservative Christian groups and leaders to seek government funds and to initiate or expand services to promote a Christian ideal of married life (the nuclear, married, heterosexual family with its biological children). At the same time, the marriage movement has turned to social scientific evidence as the main strategy to argue its case for the need to promote marriage in a less politicized manner.35 Social scientific findings concerning the benefits of marriage on happiness and health are more compatible with postmodern understandings of marriage as moving towards a ‘pure relationship’ of love and intimacy theorized by scholars such as Anthony Giddens.36 From this light, marriage promotion with its rhetorical packaging of social science data, even in the face of efforts to expand a moral purpose of marriage as a sacred union between one man and one woman, does not appear able to reverse the weakening dominance of Christian principles in American politics and society. While America remains a country with high religiosity in favour of Christian beliefs, there is substantial resistance to imposing Christian morality through public policy, such as that witnessed by bans against prayer in public schools. The growth of a movement that packages a pro-family agenda in a mantle of social science further suggests the declining power of religious-right campaigns with an explicitly moral agenda. This trend is even more pronounced in the case of Britain. Marriage Promotion in Britain The British campaign for marriage promotion differs markedly from the growth of the marriage movement in the United States. Much of the early debate over marriage and divorce at the turn of the twenty-first century in Britain centred on the Family Law Act 1996, which would have liberalized divorce by allowing couples to terminate a marriage without the need to cite a fault-based reason – i.e., a system of ‘no-fault’ divorce similar to that in the United States. One goal of the American marriage movement has been to reform the no-fault provisions in all fifty states. The Reform Divorce campaign was initiated by Michael McManus, co-founder of Marriage Savers, who claims: ‘The major reason why America has the world’s highest divorce rate is that one spouse can unilaterally divorce another.’37 He mobilized to fight for two reforms: first, to replace no-fault divorce with mutual consent in cases where there is no allegation of abuse or adultery; second, to replace sole

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custody with joint custody in which both parents would have access to children about a third of the week. Covenant marriage laws passed in Louisiana, Missouri, and Arizona offer a marriage option where couples can choose to enter into a more restricted form of marriage, but there is evidence from these states that only a very small percentage of couples currently select this option.38 In contrast to the debate in the United States, the Family Law Act in Britain was moving in the opposite direction with the goal of easing acrimony between divorcing couples by dropping the need to assign blame. The law also sought to end ‘quickie’ divorces with a cooling-off period of between twelve and eighteen months. Critics of the reform charged that doing away with fault would increase the divorce rate, already one of the highest in Europe. To quell dissent, a key concession was made that eventually led the Lord Chancellor to scrap the reforms. Divorcing couples would be required to attend a compulsory information meeting to ‘identify “saveable marriages” and steer couples who were uncertain to counseling.’39 In test pilots, the government found that only 10 per cent of couples who took part participated in the meetings that would be mandatory under the new law. The scrapping of reform was a victory for those in Britain who fought against no-fault divorce. However, implementing policies that would promote marriage, instead of simply deterring divorce, has been a much slower process. Ultimately embracing the philosophy of marriage promotion, New Labour delineated its own diluted version of pro-family politics. This approach was codified in the 1998 Green Paper Supporting Families, which states: Marriage does provide a strong foundation for stability for the care of children. It also sets out rights and responsibilities for all concerned. It remains the choice of the majority of people in Britain. For all these reasons, it makes sense for the Government to do what it can to strengthen marriage.40

Similar to the United States, the government signalled its moral and political malaise about the decline of marriage in language that asserts the need to promote it through government policy. However, whereas in the United States government action was taken to initiate a Healthy Marriage Initiative, there has been no similar move in Britain. Likewise, Britain has no self-identified ‘marriage movement’ that has

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set down a statement of principles, nor does it have a yearly conference that brings together thousands of marriage promoters to strategize on how to renew a marriage culture. In 2001, Harry and Kate Benson, founders of the Bristol Community Family Trust – a charity organization to fight family ‘breakdown’ – attended the Smart Marriages conference in Orlando, Florida. Diane Sollee was ecstatic to receive Harry Benson’s observations and posted them to the listserv. Benson notes: ‘In the UK we would be well advised to keep our eyes on this fledgling U.S. “marriage movement,”’ and he calls for the UK to draw together ‘our own version of Smartmarriages [sic] to create a similarly broad coalition amongst those of us willing to do something to get “marriage” back to the core of the public and private agenda.’41 This aspiration appears to have fallen flat due to the very different political and religious context in Britain, which lacks a strong religious-right base and grass-roots enthusiasm for marriage education. Britain, however, did take the lead in initiating the National Marriage Week in 1996. The Smart Marriages website states that Marriage Week was started in the UK, as the brainchild of Richard Kane, and that it was launched in America, as ‘Marriage Week USA,’ in 2002 by Brent Barlow and Diane Sollee.42 As is usual of the navel-gazing preoccupation of the U.S., the website says little else of its indebtedness to the British innovation. By 2000, when the Smart Marriages listserv was just getting underway, Britain’s National Marriage Week was in its fourth year. The listserv provided the press release announcing that ‘hosts of celebrities and religious figures are all “flying the flag” in support for marriage’ and documented four ‘pivotal sectors within British society’ that need to help improve marriage: Commerce – ’establish marriage friendly policies’; Church – ’to run “marriage surgeries” which involve mediation and help save the “saveable marriage”’; Government – ’open up fresh debate about the value and importance of marriage education for children of all ages’; and Wedding Industry – ’companies are being challenged to think about supporting existing services which provide pre and post-marriage support.’43 The language of this announcement suggests that the British campaign not only was moving ahead but had organized a sophisticated rhetoric to package marriage promotion in creating ‘healthier’ marriages, a strategy that the United States would apply after the Bush administration launched its Healthy Marriage Initiative in 2002. Churches in Britain were jumping on board as well. A 1999 news release titled ‘British Religious Leaders Learn How to Cut the Divorce

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Rate’ announced the meeting of British Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Seventh Day Adventist religious leaders with Michael McManus, the president of Marriage Savers, ‘to learn how the American organization has helped push down the divorce rates of two dozen American cities by as much as 35 percent.’44 Nick Gulliford, who works with a program that uses psychometric inventories to assess relationships, had suggested to the Lord Chancellor’s Department that implementing Community Marriage Policies in the UK similar to those in the U.S. would be a good strategy to promote marriages.45 It wasn’t until 2003, however, that a news release announced the signing of ‘one of Britain’s first ever community marriage policies.’46 The Marriage Preparation Scheme was launched at the Bath Register Office as eleven clergy signed the policy to decrease the number of ‘marriage breakdowns’ in the UK through isometric testing techniques. The plan was to ask couples who give notice of marriage at the Register Office if they are interested in participating. After this initial announcement, however, there was no further information on the Bath Register website or on the internet concerning the Marriage Preparation Scheme. Another effort of collaboration between church and state was covered in an article from The Times, which stated: ‘The Church of England is exploring the possibility of collaborating with the Government in distributing information packs to couples who are planning to marry.’47 In 2001, the British government did just that, teaming up with the Church of England and One Plus One, a marriage and relationship organization, to issue Married Life: A Rough Guide for Couples Today. Published as a seventy-two-page glossy magazine, the guide provides advice on a wide range of topics, including childrearing, communication, infidelity, and how health and marriage are linked. More than 250,000 copies were printed to offer free in government offices. With its focus on health, such as data showing married people are less likely to get cancer, the pamphlet garners social scientific explanations for the importance of marriage, similar to strategies of the United States. On a more moralizing note, however, former prime minister Tony Blair announced in 1999 the introduction of a curriculum to instruct students aged between seven and sixteen about the value of the twoparent, married family. Blair is quoted as saying that Britain needs ‘a new sense of moral purpose for today’s young generation,’ and it is ‘morally wrong’ for government not to teach children and youth about the importance of marriage and the negative outcomes of teenage pregnancy.48 News coverage in the Christian Science Monitor summarized the

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position of the critics, who charged that promoting marriage risks stigmatizing the one-third of British children born to unwed parents, that it is ‘moral preaching,’ and that marriage is increasingly ‘irrelevant’ in today’s world. The article then defended marriage promotion with the words of Diane Sollee of the American CMFCE, who countered: ‘It’s wrong not to give [children] information about the benefits of certain family forms over others.’ The article goes on to discuss the introduction of a mandatory marriage skills curriculum in Florida in 1998. In this instance, American media used the opportunity of the introduction of a British marriage curriculum to defend expanding marriage promotion among children in the United States. This kind of transatlantic exchange helped to solidify the case for marriage promotion in both countries. For the American marriage movement, there has been less need to look across borders to find support. The religious right already laid the groundwork for marriagepromotion policies with the pervasiveness of its family-values rhetoric, and the movement’s reliance on social scientific research as a dominant explanatory factor has been more palatable, garnering support from individuals not identified with the religious right. For the British, the American model and its research findings have played a much stronger role for those who seek to build a case for marriage promotion. In 2003, the Bush administration visited London and created a stir when Wade Horn, former assistant secretary for Children and Families, gave a speech about the state of marriage promotion in Britain, claiming that the marriage debate in that country was about roughly where America was eight years ago. He projected a similar trajectory for Britain to embrace marriage promotion ‘without shame.’49 Conservative journalist Melanie Phillips published a short book based on three articles she wrote for the Sunday Times which argue for the need to fashion British marriage promotion on America’s model. She states that what happens in the United States ‘is of great importance for Britain because significant social and cultural trends have a habit of eventually crossing the Atlantic to influence the development of British society.’50 She argues that marriage promotion has helped to stop ‘family breakdown’ in America: Unlike Britain where these trends are increasing, in America they have stopped and are even beginning modestly to go the other way. Rates of divorce, single parenthood, teenage pregnancy, are all now turning down. And the most likely explanation is that unlike Britain where talk of mar-

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riage and family values is condemned as extreme, America has counted the cost of family collapse and decided that it is simply too high a price to pay.51

She nods approvingly at the role played by religious activism in the United States, and especially former president Bush’s faith-based initiative that she saw as having the potential to reshape the Republican Party to become the new redeemer of the poor. In singing the praises of the American marriage movement, Phillips asserts: ‘In America, the most successful faith-based projects work because they try to change individual behaviour, an approach which the sentimental, non-judgmental British might find hard to stomach.’52 Phillips attributes the different political and social contexts of Britain as reason for the slow growth of marriage promotion in that country. The national character of family and welfare law in Britain makes experimentation with marriage promotion more difficult compared with the United States, with its federal and states rights structure, such as the case of Oklahoma, which has a statewide marriage initiative and discretionary welfare money to fund marriage promotion. Phillips points to the reliance of the British academy on state funding, which she believes suppresses the ‘diversity of views’ that have helped to fuel debates in America over the past twenty years. Most importantly, Britain is a less religious society than the United States. Phillips claims that the churches in Britain are part of the problem, having ‘absorbed the statist mindset so thoroughly that they often merely replicate the moral equivocations of secular society.’53 For Phillips, the Church of England has surrendered itself to the moral relativism of British society. This latter statement may be exaggerated; nonetheless, Phillips offers a good assessment of the reasons marriage promotion is less vigorous in Britain than in the United States. The strength of the religious right under the former Bush administration and its creation and expansion of the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative have energized the American marriage movement. The Obama administration appears set to continue to fund federal marriage promotion and has retained Bush’s faith-based initiative under a new name. The movement has grown as well in state and local solutions to fund marriage programs. In Britain, there is more controversy than is the case in the United States over rhetoric that moralizes against and stigmatizes families that do not fit the model of the married, nuclear, two-parent family. More recently, marriage promotion, once loosely embraced by New Labour, has moved more squarely into the arena of the Conservative Party. In

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2006, the Bristol Community Family Trust issued a report to the Tories as part of a larger report ‘on social justice and poverty entitled “Breakdown Britain.”’54 This twist on the idea of social justice derives from American marriage-promotion advocate Wade Horn, who equates social justice to marriage promotion: ‘A truly just society cannot let the powerful social and economic advantages of a good marriage become just another middle-class entitlement.’55 The report proposed that marriage should be ‘at the heart of efforts to tackle the complex web of family breakdown and poverty afflicting a “growing underclass” in Britain.’56 Back in 1989, American conservative Charles Murray introduced the term ‘British underclass’ to characterize the social problems of ‘illegitimacy,’ marriage, and the British family.57 Marriage has become a key theme in the speeches of David Cameron, who rose as the leader of the Conservative Party in 2005. He is quoted as saying at the party’s main conference in 2007, ‘There’s something special about marriage. It’s not about religion. It’s not about morality. It’s about commitment. When you stand up there, in front of your friends and your family, in front of the world, whether it’s in a church or anywhere else, what you’re doing really means something.’58 The embrace of marriage promotion by the Conservative Party focuses on promoting marriage through tax breaks, and, similar to the American movement, appears to be distancing itself from a more overt moral agenda. In 2008, American Diane Sollee exclaimed on the Smart Marriages listserv her wish that ‘we could be more like the Europeans’ in response to an announcement that the British Conservatives would prioritize new tax breaks for married couples in a Conservative government, aligning it with the rest of the European tax system.59 The marriage movement in the United States has railed against the ‘marriage penalty,’ the higher taxes required from some married couples who are making approximately the same taxable income and file one tax return. The focus for both Britain and the United States has centred on promoting marriage as key to economic stability and healthy relationships, a far cry from the overt moralizing agenda of the religious right. Thus, the transatlantic exchange concerning marriage promotion between Britain and the United States continues to develop. Britain with its more secular society benefits most from the less overtly religious factions of the American marriage movement that have concentrated on the goal of promoting marriage to strengthen the economy. With its reliance on social scientific research, marriage promotion in the United States has presented a less controversial agenda that seeks ‘social justice’ for those who desire the benefits of marriage, even as it

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invigorates religious conservatives on the ground. There is less debate in the American context of stigmatizing lone parents, cohabiting couples, and the unmarried due to the way Americans have framed marriage promotion as concerned with poverty and justice. In Britain, there is a move towards this kind of rhetoric, but it appears to have less resonance. Whereas both Republicans and centrist Democrats in the United States embrace marriage-promotion rhetoric, this is not true in Britain. Gordon Brown, for example, ordered ministers of the government not to argue about whether marriage is better or worse.60 What can the emergence of marriage promotion tell us about the processes of dechristianization that are taking place in Euro-American societies? Promoting marriage has encouraged faith-based activities that are funded through government resources. On the one hand, such efforts might be assessed as moral and religious backlash to sweeping transformations in family, gender, and sexuality of the past halfcentury. On closer examination, the picture appears more complex. In both the American and British cases, government officials, state leaders, and religious actors seek to promote marriage-promotion policies that merge social science research and Christian morality. Britain has looked to the United States as a model, but its overall weaker religiosity has meant less success in joining social science and religious justifications for marriage promotion. Even in the United States, where modern American evangelicalism is flourishing, the capacity for Christian principles and practices to motivate public policy is still limited by the perceived need to separate church and state, even while movements like marriage promotion push the boundaries with on-the-ground practices that have introduced Christian principles into state-run marriage programs. Ultimately, the focus of the federal marriage initiative in the United States rests on social science and not religion, as is the case in Britain. Thus, the resiliency of the American marriage movement and its weaker British version do nothing to reverse the persistent decline of Christian morality as a central organizing principle of social and political governance, and the growth of these movements in both countries points to the ways that the loosened knot that once tied marriage and morality together cannot be easily redone.

NOTES 1 Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How

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Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005). For an extended analysis of the misconceptions about American family life in the past two centuries see Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: America’s Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992). Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, The Normal Chaos of Love (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 5. For analysis of the emergence of the marriage movement in the United States, see Scott Coltrane, ‘“Marketing the Marriage Solution”: Misplaced Simplicity in the Politics of Fatherhood,’ Sociological Perspectives 44 (2001): 387–418; Judith Stacey, ‘Family Values Forever,’ The Nation, 9 July 2001. For analysis of what is broadly called marriage promotion that advocates a ‘marriage cure’ to lift poor women out of poverty see Melanie Heath, One Marriage under God: The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Melanie Heath, ‘State of Our Unions: Marriage Promotion and the Contested Power of Heterosexuality,’ Gender and Society 23 (2009): 27–48. For a summary of these demographic changes, see Andrew Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Julie DaVanzo and M. Omar Rahman, ‘American Families: Trends and Correlates,’ Population Index 59 (1993): 350–86. Statistics on out-of-wedlock birth rates can be found at U.S. Census Bureau Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2002 (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2001). Studies that provide a cross-national comparative analysis include Kathleen Kiernan, ‘The State of European Unions: An Analysis of Partnership Formation and Dissolution,’ in Miroslav Macura and Gijs Beets, eds., Dynamics of Fertility and Partnership in Europe: Insights and Lessons from Comparative Research (New York and Geneva: United Nations, 2002), 57–76; Andrew Cherlin, ‘The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage,’ Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (2004): 848–61. For a comprehensive study that situates these changes in the context of the politics of same-sex marriage, see Kathleen E. Hull, Same-Sex Marriage: The Cultural Politics of Love and Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Callum Brown and Hugh McLeod offer two competing historical perspectives on the dechristianization thesis. Brown argues that the disintegration of Christian culture happened abruptly in the 1960s and ties its catastrophic demise to the sexual revolution. Hugh McLeod also focuses on the importance of the 1960s to dechristianization. However, whereas Brown’s account of religious decline is monocausal, attributing the turning point to transformations in female sexual norms, McLeod presents a multicausal thesis, arguing that declining religious affiliation results from the

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Melanie Heath coincidence of a number of long- and short-term phenomena. For Brown’s argument, see Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001); ‘The Secularisation Decade: What the 1960s Have Done to the Study of Religious History,’ in Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds., The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 29-46; Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow: Pearson, 2006). For McLeod’s argument, see Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Sally K. Gallagher, Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Marie R. Griffith, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Melanie Heath, ‘Soft-Boiled Masculinity: Renegotiating Gender and Racial Ideologies in the Promise Keepers Movement,’ Gender and Society 17 (2003): 423–44. Tina Fetner, How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Sociologist Rebecca Klatch examined the divisions among women of the New Right in the 1980s. One constituency of women supported part of the feminist vision and the other embraced social conservative values. Thus, there was an uneasy alliance between these different factions. Rebecca E. Klatch, Women of the New Right (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). John C. Green, Mark J. Rozell, and Clyde Wilcox, ‘The March Goes On: The Christian Right and the 2004 Values Campaign,’ in John C. Green, Mark J. Rozell, and Clyde Wilcox, eds., The Values Campaign? The Christian Right and the 2004 Elections (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007), 3–10. See Martin Durham, Sex and Politics. The Family and Morality in the Thatcher Years (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991); Durham, ‘Abortion, Gay Rights and Politics in Britain and America: A Comparison,’ Parliamentary Affairs 58 (2005): 89–103; Lorraine Fox Harding, ‘“Family Values” and Conservative Government Policy: 1979–1997,’ in Gill Jagger and Caroline Wright, eds., Changing Family Values: Difference, Diversity and the Decline of Male Order (London: Routledge, 1999), 119–35. Judith Stacey details what she calls ‘virtual social science’ in Judith Stacey, In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). Andrew Cherlin is a demographer who has done extensive research on the relationship between family structure and childhood outcomes. For a balanced analysis of the ways social scien-

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tists report their findings on family transformation, see Andrew J. Cherlin, ‘Going to Extremes: Family Structure, Children’s Well-Being, and Social Science,’ Demography 36 (1999): 421–8. See also Judith Stacey, ‘Virtual Social Science and the Politics of Family Values in the United States,’ in Gill Jagger and Caroline Wright, eds., Changing Family Values: Difference, Diversity and the Decline of Male Order (London: Routledge, 1999), 185– 205. Mary Caputi, A Kinder, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). William H. Swatos, Jr, and Kevin J. Christiano, ‘Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept,’ Sociology of Religion 60 (1999): 209–28. Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1959). Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Kevin J. Christiano, Religious Diversity and Social Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Walter H. Conser and Sumner B. Twiss, eds., Religious Diversity and American Religious History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Roger Finke, ‘Religious Deregulation,’ Journal of Church and State 32 (1990): 609–26; Roger Finke, and Rodney Stark, ‘Religious Economies and Sacred Canopies,’ American Sociological Review 53 (1998): 41–9. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain. Christian Smith, with Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David Sikkink, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1998), 89, 118. David Coleman and Tarani Chandola, ‘Britain’s Place in Europe’s Population,’ in Susan McRae, ed., Changing Britain: Population and Household Change in the 1990s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 37–67. Heath, One Marriage under God. See Coltrane, ‘Marketing the Marriage Solution’; Anna Gavanas, Fatherhood Politics in the United States: Masculinity, Sexuality, Race and Marriage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Barbara M. Hobson, Making Men into Fathers: Men, Masculinities, and the Social Politics of Fatherhood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Wade F. Horn, David Blankenhorn, and Mitchell B. Pearlstein, The Fatherhood Movement: A Call to Action (Lanham: Lexington Books, 1999). Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, Institute for American Values, and Religion, Culture, and Family Project, The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles (New York: Institute for American Values, 2000), 3.

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22 David A. Noebel, J.F. Baldwin, and Kevin Bywater, Clergy in the Classroom: The Religion of Secular Humanism (Manitou Springs: Summit Press, 1995). 23 Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, Institute for American Values, and Religion, Culture, and Family Project, The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles, 3. 24 Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 25 Institute for American Values, Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-Six Conclusions from the Social Sciences (New York: Institute for American Values, 2002). 26 See Sean E. Brotherson and William C. Duncan, ‘Rebinding the Ties That Bind: Government Efforts to Preserve and Promote Marriage,’ Family Relations 53 (2004): 459–68. 27 Paula Roberts, Update on the Marriage and Fatherhood Provisions of the 2006 Federal Budget and the 2007 Budget Proposal (Center for Law and Social Policy, 2006), http://www.clasp.org/publications/marriage_fatherhood_ budget2006.pdf (accessed 30 September 2009). 28 Sarah Olson, ‘Marriage Promotion, Reproductive Injustice, and the War against Poor Women of Color,’ Dollars and Sense (January/February 2005), http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2005/0105olson.html (accessed 7 May 2012). 29 Theodora Ooms, Stacey Bouchet, and Mary Parke, Beyond Marriage Licenses: Efforts in States to Strengthen Marriages and Two-Parent Families (Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy, 2004). 30 Administration for Children and Family, ‘Regional Map of ACF Healthy Marriage Grants,’ http://www.acf.hhs.gov/healthymarriage/funding/ index.html (accessed 20 September 2009). 31 Katharine Houreld, ‘US Lawsuit Says Federal Grants to Christian Marriage Center are Unconstitutional,’ 13 September 2006, http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-17626559_ITM (accessed 11 February 2010). 32 Bill Berkowitz, ‘Lawsuits Could Sink Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative,’ IPS – Inter Press Service, 26 April 2007. 33 Covenant Marriage Movement, ‘Twenty Four Groups Join Forces to Launch Covenant Marriage Movement,’ 12 May 1999, http://lists101.his. com/piper mail/smartmarriages/1999-May/002144.html (accessed 21 October 2008). 34 For a discussion of how marriage promotion blurs the line between church and state, see Coltrane, ‘Marketing the Marriage Solution’; Nancy D. Polikoff, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).

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35 W. Bradford Wilcox, Sacred Vows, Public Purposes: Religion, the Marriage Movement, and Public Policy (Washington, DC: The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2002). 36 A survey of the ways that marriage is correlated to health and happiness is found in Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially (New York: Broadway Books, 2000). The theorization of the ‘pure relationship’ can be found in Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 49–64. 37 Michael McManus, ‘Reform Divorce,’ http://www.smartmarriages.com/ reform.divorce.html (accessed 1 July 2009). 38 Brotherson and Duncan, ‘Rebinding the Ties That Bind.’ 39 Joshua Rozenberg, ‘Labour to Scrap Tory “No Fault” Divorces,’ Telegraph 17 January 2001, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/1318219/Labour-toscrap-Tory-no-fault-divorces.html (accessed 1 September 2009). 40 Great Britain, Home Office, Supporting Families: A Consultation Document (London: Stationery Office, 1998). 41 ‘Smart Marriages Perspective from Harry Benson, UK,’ http://lists101. his.com/pipermail/smartmarriages/2001-July/000700.html (accessed 15 September 2009). 42 ‘Marriage Week USA,’ http://www.smartmarriages.com/marriage.week. html (accessed 1 September 2009). 43 ‘British Marriage Week,’ http://lists101.his.com/pipermail/smartmarriages/2000-February/000052.html (accessed 15 September 2009). 44 ‘British Leaders Learn to Cut the Divorce Rate,’ http://lists101.his.com/ pipermail/smartmarriages/1999-August/002262.html (accessed 15 September 2009). 45 ‘Research and Policy Ideas From England,’ http://lists101.his.com/pipermail/smartmarriages/1999-April/002115.html (accessed 15 September 2009). 46 ‘Helping to Prepare for Marriage,’ http://www.bathnes.gov.uk/press_ releases/g-m-releases/helping-to-prepare-for-marriage.htm (accessed 1 September 2009). 47 ‘UK Marriage Support to Be Increased,’ http://lists101.his.com/pipermail/ smartmarriages/1999-November/002370.html (accessed 1 September 2009). 48 Marilyn Gardner, ‘Praising Marriage in the Classroom,’ Christian Science Monitor 22 September 1999, http://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0922/p13s2. html (accessed 28 September 2009).

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49 ‘If You Are a Man, Get a Wife,’ http://lists101.his.com/pipermail/ smartmarriages/2003-December/001737.html (accessed 15 September 2009). 50 Melanie Phillips, America’s Social Revolution (London: Civitas, 2001), 1. 51 Ibid., 6. 52 Ibid., 19. 53 Ibid., 70. 54 ‘Fractured Families – Major Study in the UK Links,’ http://lists101.his. com/pipermail/smartmarriages/2006-December/003220.html (accessed 1 September 2009). 55 Wade Horn, ‘Closing the Marriage Gap,’ Crisis: Politics, Culture and the Church 21 (2003): 33–7. 56 Simon McGee, ‘Marriage “Key to a Better Society,”’ Yorkshire Post Today, 13 December 2006. 57 Ruth Lister, ‘Introduction: In Search of the Underclass,’ in Ruth Lister, ed., Charles Murray and the Underclass: The Developing Debate (London: Third Impression, 1996), 1–18. 58 Martin Shipton, ‘Marriage Key to a Better Britain, Says Cameron,’ Western Mail, 5 March 2007. 59 ‘If We Could Be More Like the Europeans,’ http://lists101.his.com/pipermail/smartmarriages/2008-August/003799.html (accessed 1 September 2009). 60 ‘UK Focus on Marriage,’ http://lists101.his.com/pipermail/ smartmarriages/2007-July/003462.html (accessed 1 September 2009).

5 Religious-Right Activism in Canada and the United States: Are We Headed in the Same Direction? tina fetner

The United States and Canada have gone down different paths when it comes to embracing the social change endorsed by the conservative social movement known as the religious right. In the United States, this movement has seen great influence in politics, education, culture, and law, and it has inserted a religious frame into political discourse in a country where one of the founding principles is a separation of church and state. As a result of the activism of the religious right, Americans have less access to abortion, limits on adoption and foster care by lesbians and gay men, restrictions on access to birth control, and constraints on the sexual education curriculum that exceed controls in Canada, Australia, or parts of Western Europe. The movement is highly integrated with the Republican Party.1 Some pundits see the religious right in Canada as bubbling just under the surface of party politics, about to burst forth any moment.2 However, the Canadian religious right is significantly different from the American movement, unable to gain a great deal of political influence recently or likely to do so in the near future. The movements in these nations are remarkably similar. They share a common set of policy goals, issue frames, and collective identity. They also have some of the same organizations, with U.S. social movement organizations opening Canadian chapters and vice versa. In terms of organizational strength, however, they differ greatly. The institutional supports of the religious right in Canada and the United States are markedly dissimilar, with the American movement relying on an extensive and densely networked set of organizations, and the Canadian movement relying on a set of organizations that are smaller, with fewer resources and weaker network ties. For Canada, this means more difficulty in reaching constitu-

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ents, in mobilizing action, and in communicating their claims. Given the similarities of these two neighbouring states, and the similarities of the two religious-right movements within them, how can we account for this difference in outcomes of the two movements? Social movement theory directs scholarly attention primarily in two directions to investigate movement outcomes: resource mobilization and political contexts.3 Some scholars suggest that the role of the social movement is to mediate between these two forces.4 In the closely related field of political sociology, a historical institutionalist perspective maintains that social change is path-dependent. Policies in one time period are a product in large part of institutional arrangements in an earlier era.5 While U.S./Canada comparisons have a long history of scholarship in sociology,6 recent work has focused specifically on social movement activity in these two nations, using a historical institutionalist perspective to examine, for example, the impact of political institutions on the capacity for social change in each nation.7 Smith argues convincingly that the political institutions in Canada are less welcoming of socially conservative activism than those of the United States. While the parliamentary system in Canada makes room for ideological diversity by including multiple political parties, controversies within parties are for the most part suppressed, especially when policy votes are taken. In contrast, the United States’ two-party political system creates points of entry for activists wishing to influence party politics. Another major explanation for Canadian-American contrasts in political influence is the need to accommodate Quebec into the federal political structure. This resulted in socially liberal policies and institutionalized support of Catholic education. Rather than elaborate on the role of political structures in Canada and the United States, however, this chapter focuses on the differences in the strengths of the social movements attempting to influence those polities. In this chapter, I build upon this work in social movements, comparative analysis, and historical institutionalism to bring new insights to the question of differences in outcomes for the religious-right movements in the United States and Canada. Specifically, I examine the very different capacities for resource mobilization in these two neighbouring movements due to differences in institutional supports. Using secondary historical sources, I examine the institution-building work done by the evangelical Christian communities in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that, even though evangelical communities in the United States and Canada hold similar religious beliefs and share common cultural

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practices, the development of these communities in large measure parted ways in the mid-twentieth century. Decades later, when the religious right emerged in each country, this historical divergence – especially differences in institution building – made an impact on the capacity for each movement to mobilize resources. As a result, I demonstrate that the institutional infrastructures built before social movements emerge can affect not only activism but also movement outcomes. Social Movements and Historical Institutionalism Social movements theory has much to say about movement outcomes.8 Many studies confirm the core focus of social movements theory – the aspects of activism that matter most to policy change fall under two umbrella concepts: political contexts and movement resources. Public opinion is a key part of the political context, as are the opportunities for political challenges. For example, centralized governments have fewer access points than federalized governments, and courts and bureaucracies may provide alternative points of entry as well. These structural elements of the political context vary little over time, but the sympathies of those holding offices, sitting on the bench, and running agencies do change, often in a cyclic pattern.9 Movement resources is a broad concept that includes money, volunteers, organizations, networks, and actions. Organizational strength has been a particularly long-standing focus of studies on social movements’ impact on policy change.10 This body of work demonstrates that while social movements do not have the power to make whatever policy changes they like, the resources of a social movement – perhaps most importantly the size, strength, and connectedness of its organizations – can influence polities to implement social change. One line of thinking in social movements theory, the political mediation model, states this most clearly.11 This perspective positions social movements in between public opinion on the one hand and political contexts on the other, seeing them as mediating desires for social change through contested politics. Movements frame claims into specific policy challenges and bring the attention of both public and political audiences to social issues. Even when movements are not able to attain the policies they prefer, they can sometimes effect a related policy change.12 Although social movements cannot determine policy change on their own, the size and strength of movement organizations can be important to policy outcomes, and social movement leaders spend great effort in developing and growing move-

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ment resources. However, most studies of social movements take only a snapshot of movement resources at one point in time, rather than see organizational development and growth as a process akin to a longterm investment in social change. In the field of political sociology, however, much more attention is given to longitudinal aspects of social change. In particular, historical institutionalist perspectives on social change point scholars to the pathdependent nature of institutional arrangements in politics and argue that the policy choices made in one era significantly affect the policy options in the next.13 While historical institutionalism has been applied in compelling ways to many forms of policy change from welfare14 to lesbian and gay rights,15 it has been applied almost exclusively to political institutions of state apparatuses, rather than to social movements themselves. Nonetheless, the insights of historical institutionalism can be applied to organizational development of social movements – that is, one might expect social movement growth to depend upon the institutional arrangements from which movements emerge and upon which movements build their organizations and networks. In this analysis, I take these insights from historical institutionalism to consider the historic process of building an institutional infrastructure for social movements. Following Andrews,16 I define an institutional infrastructure as the set of organizations and networks (and the related norms, identities, and cultural products that emerge from those organizations) that support movement activity. Building on this approach, I will examine the early histories of this infrastructure to emphasize that these institutions need not be produced by or internal to social movement organizations – indeed, they are likely to have multiple functions and exist separately from movements. However, institutional infrastructures can support social movement resource mobilization, strategy and planning, and communication among leaders and constituents. Institutional infrastructures can also facilitate common movement activities such as collective identity deployment and issue framing. Classic studies in social movements have demonstrated the utility of institutions that are external to, but at the same time productive of, social movements, such as the role of the black church in the U.S. civil rights movement.17 The institutional infrastructures that support religious-right activism in Canada and the United States are composed of denominations, churches, and para-church organizations. By examining the history of institution building by conservative, evangelical Christian communi-

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ties in the United States in Canada in the era before the emergence of the religious right, I demonstrate that there was a major divergence in the paths of these two communities that created much different institutional infrastructures from which each movement later emerged: one weak and one strong. I then argue that these disparities in infrastructural strength affected the movements’ ability to mobilize and to grow strong movement organizations, which in turn affected the political outcomes of these movements. Case, Data, and Methods The religious-right social movements in both Canada and the United States are historically embedded in conservative, evangelical Christian communities. This is not to say that all evangelical Christians are in the religious right or to equate the social movement with the evangelical Christian community. Indeed, the evangelical Christian community has been shown to be politically and socially diverse.18 That said, the religious right was born out of the conservative, evangelical Christian community, and the movement draws its constituents primarily from this community.19 The movement emerged from this community, and it relies upon the institutions built by evangelicals. These include churches and para-church organizations such as missionary groups, youth groups, and media institutions that include print, television, film, music, and internet communications. This chapter examines historical differences in community development by U.S. and Canadian evangelical Christians. In particular, I focus on three aspects of mid-century evangelical community development: (1) evangelical theologies, especially related to modernity and the endtimes prophecy; (2) the relationship between evangelicals and Protestant denominations; and (3) institution-building projects in evangelical communities in Canada and the United States. The historical period of interest here is the mid-twentieth century, especially 1920–50. This period was chosen as a moment of rapid growth in evangelicalism in both countries. I use a large body of secondary historical sources, including case studies written by historians, sociologists, and religious studies experts from both Canada and the United States, to lay out the historical record of community development in both of these countries. Fortunately, the historical record on the development and spread of evangelical Christianity in Canada and the United States has been well documented and

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preserved by these scholars. With these historical data, I demonstrate not only that Canada’s evangelical communities have different political concerns and a different history of political engagement than their American evangelical neighbours, but also that the institution-building projects of conservative, evangelical Christians in the United States were unmatched in Canada (or elsewhere, for that matter). Mid-Century Evangelical Christianity in Canada and the United States The meaning of ‘evangelical’ is distinctly different in the United States than in Canada. In the United States, the group now understood to be conservative, evangelical Christians first described themselves as ‘fundamentalists.’20 Fundamentalists in the United States drove the processes of withdrawal described below, while another group, the neo-evangelicals, sought to establish connections among this community. It is this group in the United States that established the term evangelical to describe this community, and that terminology remains. In Canada, however, the term evangelical has not been used to replace the concept fundamentalist. There, the term does not have the same connotation of conservatism and anti-modern ideologies. In fact, the large majority of self-identified evangelicals in Canada are theologically and politically liberal.21 Protestant denominations understood to be ‘mainline’ in the United States – a term that places them in opposition to fundamentalist or evangelical groups, such as Presbyterians and Methodists – use the term evangelical to describe themselves in Canada. Thus, it is important to emphasize the distinction between the conservative, evangelical Christians in Canada – a group that largely shares the socially conservative agenda of the Religious right in the United States – from other evangelical Christians, who tend to oppose this agenda. The twentieth century was a time of rapid growth of evangelical Christianity, especially in the United States, but also in Canada. In the United States, this growth was marked by a unique combination of factionalism and disintegration of denominational ties, on the one hand, and fear of modernity and science, on the other. This combination led to a period of evangelical Christian withdrawal from the modern world. In Canada, although evangelicalism was in a similar growth spurt, the overall character of evangelicalism was different from that of the United States, even though there was a substantial amount of immigration

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from the United States to Canada, and some of the growth in Canadian evangelicalism is the result of Americans moving north.22 Canadians had markedly less anti-modern ideology in their evangelical churches. For this and other reasons, Canadian evangelicals experienced less factionalism and less movement away from existing denominations. As discussed below, the 1925 establishment of the United Church of Canada alleviated much of the internal conflict that the United States underwent over this time. Anti-modernism In the United States, fundamentalists had intense fear of modernity, to a degree greater than those in other parts of the world.23 Fundamentalist preachers warned of the dangers of turning against the literal word of the Bible, and they were distressed at the progress of scientific discovery in the industrial era. When the ‘facts’ uncovered by science came into conflict with the ‘truths’ of the Bible, these fundamentalists felt that scientific information was an attack on their way of life and their knowledge base. As Protestant denominations began to reconcile their teachings with new discoveries, they amended their emphasis on literal interpretations of the Bible, seeing instead a historical document that did not need to be scientifically accurate. American fundamentalists took this as a sign that the church was moving in the wrong direction, jeopardizing the salvation of its followers. Although fundamentalists had many theological disputes with one another, there have been a few important beliefs shared among this group. U.S. fundamentalist Christians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries maintained a literal interpretation of the Bible and emphasized the prophetic nature of the Bible. In particular, many fundamentalists fostered a belief in premillennial dispensationalism, or rapture. This belief holds that the Bible contains predictions about the end times, a series of events on earth that provoke God to return to earth, punish sinners, and save the souls of the faithful, followed by a thousand-year reign of God on earth, in which those not saved in rapture suffer greatly. Premillennial belief is tied to anti-modernism by biblical literalism. This belief system depends upon the literal truth of prophetic passages in the Bible, and thus, contradictions to the Bible were, and continue to be, perceived as a great threat to fundamentalist/ evangelical beliefs. In the twentieth century, there have been many clashes between

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modernity and biblical literalism, not the least of which has been the scientific theory of evolution.24 The 1925 Scopes trial that challenged a Tennessee law that prohibited evolution from being taught in public schools is the clearest example of the battle between science and biblical literalism in determining the content of school curriculum.25 Fundamentalists felt attacked for their beliefs in other realms, too, such as by the invasion of popular music and film, with its focus on sexuality, materialism, and individuality. In Canada, although there were groups who believed in rapture and biblical literalism, fears of modernity did not disrupt Protestant denominations very much. Anti-modern concerns, combined with economic strife experienced by many in the Great Depression, caused some to criticize and even to reject mainline Protestantism.26 However, these critics were in a much smaller minority in Canada than in the United States. In general, Canadian evangelicals felt that modernity was not a central concern and did not find scientific discovery or popular culture to be a major threat to their beliefs. Rather than claim that evangelical Canadians would have disagreed with their U.S. counterpart on issues of biblical literalism, religious historians in Canada argue that this was simply more peripheral to Canadian evangelical worship.27 Many other Canadian Protestants held disdain for the extreme claims and behaviour of conservative evangelicals, preferring what they would consider a more moderate approach to religion. In addition, some Canadian evangelicals may have also had a distaste for the style of worship of American evangelicals.28 This difference may be best highlighted by an example of one exception to this rule in Canada, a conservative evangelical preacher who had strong anti-modern concerns: Thomas Todhunter (T.T.) Shields. Like American evangelicals, Shields advised his followers to avoid ‘worldly amusements’ and feared that Protestant denominations were leading their congregations down the path of damnation. When Shields failed to convince church leaders to change direction, he established the Toronto Baptist Seminary, which became one of the leading voices for conservative evangelical Christians in Canada. Unlike American preachers who attracted large followings, T.T. Shields’s legacy is rife with conflict, as moderate evangelical leaders refused to go along with his anti-modern vision for transforming Canadian evangelical institutions. Although he did attract a number of followers and successfully preached for forty-five years, he was considered an extremist among Canadian evangelicals.29 In Canada, although there were a number of

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Canadian evangelicals who feared modernism, there was not a systemic fundamentalist-modernist divide, ‘and evangelicals did not polarize or encapsulate to such an extent’ as in the United States.30 Role of Protestant Denominations U.S. fundamentalists’ fear of modernity formed the basis of their withdrawal from Protestant denominations and from the secular world more generally. This withdrawal was much greater in the United States than anywhere else in the world, including Canada, and it set the stage for a major project of institution building, as I discuss below. Although conservative Protestant church denominations first tried to lobby for change within their denominations, they were ultimately unsuccessful. Unable to reconcile their differences with what would come to be known as mainline Protestant denominations, fundamentalists broke away from many of the major denominations within the Protestant church, including Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Methodist. As fundamentalists formed their own churches, they fell into further theological disputes with each other. Thus, the fundamentalist break with Protestantism was not characterized by a single schism between anti-modernist fundamentalists and mainline denominations. Rather, fundamentalist churches fractured and segmented into many disparate groups, some of which retained denominational affiliations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, but many others of which broke all ties with other churches. In fact, theological schisms among fundamentalists were so common in the United States that conservative, evangelical Christianity in this period has been characterized by religious historians as a series of neighbourhood churches that are each run independently, with a theological doctrine determined by its pastor.31 In this, the era of travelling revivals, many Americans were attracted to fundamentalist Christian worship, regardless of denominational affiliation.32 In Canada, the tensions of modernity and economic distress were channelled in a much different direction. Despite the efforts of separatists such as T.T Shields, discussed above, to promote a major withdrawal from Protestant denominations and secular culture, Canadians largely maintained their affiliation with existing denominations. This may have been facilitated by the Canadian denominations’ extraordinary efforts to promote cohesion and inclusion among their constituents. In Canada, the story of evangelicalism is closely tied with the establishment of the United Church of Canada (UCC) in 1925. Lead-

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ers in the Presbyterian Church, the largest Protestant denomination in Canada, worked for years with Methodists leaders as well as the Congregational Union of Ontario and Quebec, and the Association of Local Union Churches (an amalgamation of these denominations that served the sparsely populated prairies in the west) to form the United Church of Canada.33 The UCC carved out a role for the church in modern society and crafted a positive liberal vision of worship that included a clear mission, all while connecting people from different denominational stances through inclusion and compromise. This vision included commitments to social service, poverty relief, and women’s aid, but particularly relevant to this analysis is the church’s embrace of science and especially its commitment to the merging of science and social service, evident in its commitment to fund several academic schools of social work throughout Canada.34 The United Church of Canada was liberal both politically and theologically but for the most part downplayed more controversial topics, creating a space for biblical literalists to worship alongside modernists.35 Its ecumenical make-up can be interpreted as a demonstration of the tolerance for diversity and the distaste for extremes present in Canadian Protestantism during this era.36 Although the UCC was firmly liberal, it also considered itself evangelical, seeing its social service role as central to its evangelical mission. While not all denominations voted to affiliate themselves with the UCC, it did succeed in attracting the lion’s share of Protestant followers. Its vision of evangelical Christianity as socially and politically engaged appealed to a large number of followers, staving off a massive withdrawal of conservatives. In doing so, it defined evangelicalism in a strikingly different way from conservative evangelicals of the United States. Still, several small sets of Canadian conservatives did split off at this time, regionally concentrated in the prairies and in the eastern provinces. These conservatives did build a few churches and para-church organizations, as I discuss below. Building Evangelical Communities The state of fundamentalist Christianity in the United States as attracting a massive following, yet totally factionalized and disconnected from each other and from the secular world, set the stage for a grandiose project of institution building in the 1940s and beyond. It was at this point that a group of reformers who called themselves ‘neo-

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evangelicals’ – later known simply as evangelicals – sought to establish deeper connections among the highly fragmented fundamentalist community while preserving its commitment to withdrawal from the secular world.37 The neo-evangelicals created a vision of a common Christian table, minimizing theological disputes and emphasizing common ground. In bringing together like-minded conservative, evangelical Christians, this group established the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1947. This organization established a network to which evangelical churches and denominations alike could belong, facilitating communication among conservative evangelicals and fostering a collective Christian identity. In doing so, this organization facilitated the evangelical mission by making it easier to do outreach in communities and to organize missionary travel. The NAE has grown dramatically since its inception, creating an umbrella for evangelical Christians that provides many of the functions of a denomination, without establishing restrictions on theologies. This combination of theological freedom and organizational support appealed to a broad number of evangelical groups, and the NAE claims that its organization serves the congregations of 4.5 million evangelicals.38 The NAE was only the beginning of the project of institution building that conservative evangelicals embarked upon in the 1940s. They built organizations to sustain evangelical communities as a connected, Christian people, but also to foster the ongoing withdrawal of that people from the secular world. In order to allow evangelicals to exist separate from secular schools, media, and culture, evangelicals built para-church organizations that provided these functions for Christian communities. Para-church organizations are religious institutions not tied to any denomination but that provide religious materials or services. In the United States, the scope of these evangelical para-church organizations became vast, providing services and information on a for-profit basis to far more people than any denominational organization does.39 These organizations include educational institutions, such as Bible institutes, liberal arts colleges, and summer Bible camps for children and young adults.40 They also include youth ministries, which provide after-school evangelical education, summer activities, and Sunday school events. There are a large number of para-church missionary agencies that organize international travel. They also include a large number of Christian media outlets, which have been particularly useful means of communication for activism for the U.S. religious-right move-

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ment. Precise estimates of the number, size, and scope of para-church organizations in the United States are difficult to come by.41 However, evidence of the longevity, size, and largesse of these institutions can be found easily in U.S. culture, as many of these institutions remain active and strong today. Media institutions have been particularly important in developing a collective identity, creating and enriching community ties, and mobilizing grass-roots activism within the U.S. religious right. In the United States, conservative evangelical Christian media are large in scale, resource rich, and extremely easy for conservative Christian activists to access. This is largely due to the efforts of evangelical Christians in the early days of radio and television. For example, one of the early actions of the National Association of Evangelicals was to establish an official radio arm in 1944, the National Religious Broadcasters. As of 1983, the National Religious Broadcasters had over 900 radio station members. Richard Ostling claims that daily and weekly radio shows are ‘probably still the backbone of evangelical broadcasting, complemented by largely or wholly religious radio stations.’42 Christian radio stations are still broadcast widely throughout the United States. Later, this organization expanded to include television as well, and the success of U.S. televangelists is unparalleled in Canada or elsewhere around the globe. In the early 1980s, viewership of religious television broadcasts was estimated to range from 13 to 61 million.43 In addition, the fundraising capacity of Christian radio and television has been vast. For example, Pat Robertson’s media organization, the Christian Broadcasting Network, earned $230 million in 1986.44 To put that in context, the entire U.S. Democratic Party raised $98 million for its 1984 presidential campaign. Another successful example of a para-church organization established in this period is the Campus Crusade for Christ. Established in 1951 by Bill Bright on the University of California, Los Angeles, campus, this organization has attracted millions of young adults, expanding into a national, and then international, organization. With annual revenues in the United States exceeding $500 million and a staff of over 25,000, this organization has reached out to millions of young adults.45 Campus Crusade not only provides social supports for young adults, but also connects with activism through its missionary work, leadership training, and direct activism on various social issues. Similar evangelical Christian youth organizations, such as the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and Youth for Christ, were also founded in this era. Para-church organizations provide services to a wide array of

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evangelical Christians, regardless of the theology of their particular congregation. By emphasizing the commonalities among evangelical Christians in general, these para-church institutions have been vital in creating and sustaining a broadly defined Christian identity that is distinct from mainline Protestantism. These organizations supported and connected U.S. evangelicals and supported the growth of this community, which outpaced that of Canadian evangelicals.46 More important to our argument, these institutions only grew throughout the second half of the twentieth century and became an important infrastructure for U.S. religious-right activists. In Canada, the pattern of institution building did not follow the same path as in the United States. With conservative, evangelical Christians much fewer in number and more dispersed geographically, the institutions they built were far fewer and smaller in scope. The bulk of evangelical growth was by more moderate and liberal evangelicals, who remained more closely tied to their denominations, especially the UCC and the Anglican church. Thus, the landscape of conservative, evangelical Christian para-church organizations is a sparse and spotty collection of Bible institutes, radio programs, publishing houses, and youth ministries. However, the number and size of these institutions were dwarfed by their American neighbours. For example, the Campus Crusade for Christ, mentioned above, has ministries on over one thousand university campuses as of 2007, when the Canadian chapter of this same organization had fifteen.47 Similarly, Youth for Christ, an organization created to minister to teenagers that was founded by Rev. Billy Graham in the 1940s, reports annual revenues of $64 million in the United States with organizations in over 1,300 schools and another 200 in urban centres, while the Canadian group reports less than $1 million in total income supporting 27 chapters across the country.48 Even when taking into account that the United States has a population about ten times that of Canada, these organizations are much larger in the United States. These examples can be repeated many times over; although the two countries have similar conservative, evangelical Christian organizations, they are similar in name only, with vast differences in resources, especially membership and income. Other organizations that originated in Canada, such as T.T. Shields’s Toronto Baptist Seminary and the Baptist Missionary Council in British Columbia, have done well enough to carry on as organizations through the decades but have not attracted the mass support of U.S. organizations. Overall, the institution-building efforts of conservative, evangelical

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Christians in Canada were fewer in number, smaller in scope, and less coordinated and networked than those in the United States. One important example of disparities in institution building is evangelical Christian media. Unlike the United States, where Christian radio and later television flourished, the Canadian policy context has been relatively hostile to independent broadcasters, especially religious broadcasters, and continues to limit religious content currently.49 Thus, as conservative evangelical Christian entrepreneurs in the United States created a vast expanse of radio and television stations, networks, and conglomerate media empires, evangelical Christian broadcasting in Canada was very limited throughout the middle of the twentieth century through the 1990s, when the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission issued a statement on religious broadcasting,50 loosening some controls over religious content. This policy shift opened the doors to Christian broadcasters such as Crossroads Christian Communication, and religious television stations CJIL in Edmonton, Alberta, and CITS in Hamilton, Ontario, to produce religious broadcasts. However, the content of religious programs, and especially their funding appeals, continue to be limited by the Canadian federal government. Once again, in Canada what may seem equivalent on the surface – there are evangelical television and radio shows – is markedly different in terms of institutional strength and, in this case, revenue generation. Conservative, evangelical Christian media in the United States consist of multiple, multi-million-dollar media empires. Canadian evangelical broadcasts are successful and enduring, but have no similar capacity to generate revenues. The differences in the patterns of development of evangelical Christian communities in the United States and Canada over the middle of the twentieth century have made a lasting impact on the abilities of social movement organizations in the religious right to implement a set of strategies. In particular, the para-church organizations that evangelicals built in each country during this period laid out an institutional infrastructure upon which each movement was built, although decades had passed between these historical events. The para-church organizations that conservative evangelicals built in the United States were more numerous and more densely networked, and had more fluid paths of communication than Canadian evangelicals. Because Canadian evangelicals did not separate so distinctly from Protestant denominations, indeed did not share the anti-modernist ideals of U.S. evangelicals, they did not build separate structures.

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This difference in the character of institution-building projects by evangelicals affected the abilities of activists in recent days in several ways. First, the audience for socially conservative Christian messages is smaller in Canada than the United States,51 and yet the larger proportion of evangelical Christians in the U.S. population is insufficient to explain the differences between the movements. Rather, the organizational development in the United States led to larger, more lasting institutions that supported the religious-right movement later in the century. Building an Institutional Infrastructure As the conservative evangelical Christian community in the United States withdrew from the secular world and sought connections with each other, the massive institution-building project that they pursued was an end in itself. These church and para-church organizations allowed conservative evangelicals to live according to their shared principles, communicate with each other easily, and parent their children as they saw fit. The subculture created by these institutions, supported especially by the independent Christian media, must have surpassed the visions of its 1940s neo-evangelical founders. Similarly, the evangelical community in Canada developed in ways that served the needs of many in that community: less divisive, more closely tied to existing denominations, more accepting of science, and more concerned with secular politics, serving the needs of that community, but not by building the same set of institutions as their evangelical neighbours in the United States. Social movements theory knows much about the institutional supports that facilitate activism. The resource mobilization model built by McCarthy and Zald and shaped by them and many others makes clear that social movements derive great benefits from organizational and other structural supports.52 Using these dual case studies of similar movements with sizeable disparities in institutional supports, I use the concept institutional infrastructure to capture the idea that 1) all social movements have some amount of institutional support upon which they rely, and 2) the size, strength, and capacity of these institutional supports can vary substantially.53 The benefits that institutional infrastructures offer social movements are many. For example, these case studies demonstrate that the strong, dense network of institutions built by U.S. evangelicals has

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supported the religious right’s activism in a number of ways. First and foremost, the organizations built by neo-evangelicals have generated substantial resources that have been directed toward social movement activity. The capacity for revenue generation that many of these institutions have demonstrated has been a key source of strength for the social movement. The cohesive, densely networked institutions of the conservative, evangelical Christian community in the United States facilitated the development of a collective, Christian identity that has been affiliated with particular policy positions in the political sphere.54 Moreover, the strong institutional infrastructure of the U.S. religious right has facilitated the development of a separate, internally focused community with a separate subculture that extends even to spheres of knowledge and separate ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ (for example, regarding evolution, sex education, and homosexuality) that differ substantively from the knowledge of the dominant culture. This separate knowledge base has sustained this social movement substantially by informing policy change goals, mobilizing supporters, and changing the terms of political debate. In addition, the dense networks of the institutional infrastructure that supports the American religious right facilitate the communication of activists and constituents alike, lowering the costs of political action and allowing for timely responses to political events. The weaker, less densely connected institutional infrastructure of the Canadian religious right facilitates its activism and mobilizes its supporters to a much lesser degree. These historic cases demonstrate that institution building need not be a social movement project. Indeed, the paths toward institutional infrastructures that support these two cases parted ways decades before either movement emerged. In Canada, evangelical Christians were on the whole more interested in engaging with political sphere and with science to address social problems. This political engagement, however, was accompanied by a more friendly relationship with existing denominations, less fear of modernity, and a relationship with secular institutions of education, media, and so on. Thus, the more politically active movement in Canada built fewer institutions to support their community. When the religious right emerged as a movement and sought political change, then, they had a weak infrastructure to support their work, relative to the Americans. Key differences in the institutional infrastructures of the U.S. and Canadian religious-right movements include size, measured in numbers of institutions, size of memberships, and/or revenues of organi-

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zations. In addition, the central organizations established early on to facilitate communication among U.S. conservative evangelicals, such as the National Association of Evangelicals and the National Religious Broadcasters, created the conditions upon which dense network ties were established. This is another source of disparity between the United States and Canada. In the United States, the institutions established early served as important investments, generating revenue and facilitating the growth and expansion of the institutions themselves. The Canadian organizations are not nearly as rich, nor as well connected with each other or with political insiders. The institutions of the conservative evangelical Christian community in the United States – perhaps especially the media outlets – have facilitated the collective identity that supports religious-right activism. To a far greater degree than in Canada, conservatives have been able to take ownership of the term ‘Christian’ to apply to a specific set of political and spiritual positions that belies a great deal of diversity. In Canada, a conservative Christian identity is present, but it is far more contested, even drowned out by the larger proportion of moderate and liberal Christians there. These institutional infrastructures have been a source of strength for the U.S. movement but not for its Canadian counterpart. This case demonstrates that the institutional infrastructures upon which movements are built can have a profound impact on a movement’s size, strength, and even policy success. This is the case whether that infrastructure is internal or external to the movement itself. This pair of cases beg the question of what is the threshold of institutional support required for movement success, measured by policy change or otherwise. These are not the cases to answer this question, however, as the political institutions toward which these movements are oriented also differ substantially.55 Although the present study does not establish conclusively that disparities in institutional infrastructure have been the primary cause of the differences in success between the religious-right movements in these nations, it does fill in an important piece of the analytical puzzle of why the religious right has managed to be so successful in the United States, yet largely unable to gain political traction in neighbouring Canada. Although many connections between religious-right organizations have been made across this border, and many resources have been shared, the Canadian movement remains small, its claims largely ignored by elected officials, if not in word then clearly in deed. The U.S. religious right has gained traction through its capacity to mobilize its

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massive resources efficiently, and this traction has not been achieved by the Canadian movement, which is more engaged in the common struggles of social movements: building and maintaining the interest of their constituencies, seeking elite audiences, and mobilizing protest. This study suggests that one difference between the positions of these two similar movements is the strength of the institutional infrastructure upon which each movement rests.

NOTES 1 Clyde Wilcox, God’s Warriors: The Christian Right in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 2 One recent example is Marci McDonald, The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2010). 3 For an overview of the field, see Marco G. Giugni, ‘Was It Worth the Effort? The Outcomes and Consequences of Social Movements,’ Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 371–93. 4 For example, Edwin Amenta, Neal Caren, and Sheera Joy Olasky, ‘Age for Leisure? Political Mediation and the Impact of the Pension Movement on US Old-Age Policy,’ American Sociological Review 70 (2005): 516–38. 5 Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol, ‘Historical Institutionalism in Contemporary Political Science,’ in Ira Katznelson and Helen Milner, eds., The State of the Discipline (New York: Norton, 2002), 693–721. 6 Seymour Martin Lipset’s work defines this field. See ‘Canada and the United States: A Comparative View,’ Canadian Review of Sociology 1 (1964): 173–85; ‘Historical Traditions and National Characteristics: A Comparative Analysis of Canada and the United States,’ Canadian Journal of Sociology 11 (1986): 113–55; Continental Divide (New York: Routledge, 1990). 7 Miriam Smith, ‘Social Movements and Judicial Empowerment: Courts, Public Policy, and Lesbian and Gay Organizing in Canada,’ Politics and Society 33 (2005): 327–53; Political Institutions and Lesbian and Gay Rights in the United States and Canada (London: Routledge, 2008). 8 Giugni, ‘Was It Worth the Effort?’ 9 Sidney Tarrow, Struggling to Reform: Social Movements and Policy Change during Cycles of Protest (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 10 See, for example, William Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1990 [1975]); Elizabeth S. Clemens and Debra Minkoff, ‘Beyond the Iron Law: Rethinking the Place of Organizations in Social Movement Research,’ in David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hans-

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15 16 17 18

19 20 21

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23 24 25 26 27

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peter Kriesi, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 155–70. Amenta, Caren, and Olasky, ‘Age for Leisure?’ See Edwin Amenta, Bold Relief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol, ‘Historical Institutionalism in Contemporary Political Science,’ in Katznelson and Milner, eds., The State of the Discipline, 693–721. For example, Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Miriam Smith, Political Institutions and Lesbian and Gay Rights. Kenneth T. Andrews, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984). Christian Smith (with Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David Sikkink), American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Tina Fetner, How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Christian Smith et al., American Evangelicalism. Reginald Bibby, ‘Ethos versus Ethics: Canada, the U.S., and Homosexuality,’ paper presented at the Pacific Sociological Association annual meeting, San Francisco, CA, 2004. Robert K. Burkinshaw, Pilgrims in Lotus Land: Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1995), 318. Christian Smith et al., American Evangelicalism. Eugenie C. Scott, ‘Antievolution and Creationism in the United States,’ Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 263–89. Scopes v. State, 152 Tenn. 424, 278 S.W. 57. John G. Stackhouse, Jr, Canadian Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction to Its Character (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996); see also Stackhouse, Jr, Canadian Evangelicalism. George A. Rawlyk, ‘A.L. McCrimmon, H.P. Whidden, T.T. Shields, Christian Higher Education, and McMaster University,’ in George A. Rawlyk,

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34 35 36 37 38

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ed., Canadian Baptists and Christian Higher Education (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1988), 31–62. Stackhouse, Jr, Canadian Evangelicalism. Sam Reimer, Evangelicals and the Continental Divide: The Conservative Protestant Subculture in Canada and the United States (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 27. See Joel A. Carpenter, ‘From Fundamentalism to the New Evangelical Coalition,’ in George Marsden, ed., Evangelicalism and Modern America (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1984), 3–16; George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991); and Wilcox, God’s Warriors. For a full discussion of religious revivals, see Michael P. Young, Bearing Witness against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Robert A. Wright, ‘The Canadian Protestant Tradition 1914–1945’ in George A. Rawlyk, ed., The Canadian Protestant Experience 1760–1990 (Burlington: Welch, 1990), 139–97. Christie and Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity. See Kevin N. Flatt in chapter 12 of this book for a discussion of the United Church of Canada later making its liberal theology more explicit. Reimer, Evangelicals and the Continental Divide. Joel A. Carpenter, ‘From Fundamentalism to the New Evangelical Coalition,’ in Marsden, ed., Evangelicalism and Modern America, 3–16.. National Association of Evangelicals, ‘History of the NAE’ (not dated) http://www.nae.net/index.cfm?FUSEACTION=nae.history (accessed 9 July 2008). Carpenter, ‘From Fundamentalism to the New Evangelical Coalition’; George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Richard N. Ostling, ‘Evangelical Publishing and Broadcasting,’ in Marsden, ed., Evangelicalism and Modern America, 46–55. Joel A. Carpenter, ‘Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism, 1929–1942,’ in Larry Eskridge and Mark A. Noll, eds., More Money, More Ministry: Money and Evangelicals in Recent North American History (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 259–73. Sharon L. Miller, ‘Financing Parachurch Organizations,’ in Mark Chaves and Sharon L. Miller, eds., Financing American Religion (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1999), 119–30. Ostling, ‘Evangelical Publishing and Broadcasting,’ 48. Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 35–8.

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44 Duane M. Oldfield, The Right and the Righteous: The Christian Right Confronts the Republican Party (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 99. 45 Campus Crusade for Christ, ‘Annual Report 2007,’ http://www.ccci.org/ about-us/donor-relations/annual-report/annual-report.pdf (accessed 9 July 2008). 46 Reimer, Evangelicals and the Continental Divide. 47 Campus Crusade for Christ, ‘About Us,’ http://campuscrusadeforchrist. com/about-us/facts-and-statistics (accessed 8 January 2010); Power to Change, ‘About Us,’ http://powertochange.com/organization/about (accessed 8 January 2010). 48 Youth for Christ website, retrieved from the Internet on January 8, 2010 from http://www.yfc.net (accessed 8 January 2010); Youth for Christ Canada, http://www.yfccanada.com (accessed 8 January 2010). 49 For a full discussion of Canadian broadcasting policy, see Robert Armstrong, Broadcasting Policy in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 50 Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, ‘Public Notice CRTC 1993–78,’ http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/1993/pb93-78. htm, 1993 (accessed 8 February 2011). 51 Reginald Bibby, Fragmented Gods: The Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Irwin, 1987). 52 John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, ‘Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,’ American Journal of Sociology 82 (1977): 1212–41; Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest; Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, ‘Introduction: Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Framing Processes,’ in Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, eds., Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Mario Diani, ‘Networks and Participation,’ in Snow, Soule, and Kriesi, eds., Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 339–58. 53 Andrews, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle. 54 For further discussion of Christian identity, see Fetner, How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism. 55 For example, see Miriam Smith, Political Institutions and Lesbian and Gay Rights.

6 The Transformation of CatholicEvangelical Relations in the United States: 1950–2000 patrick allitt

Anti-Catholicism was a powerful force throughout most of American history but now it has almost entirely disappeared. It motivated colonists’ angry opposition to the Quebec Act just before the Revolution. It fuelled anti-Irish riots and convent burnings in Philadelphia and New York during the Jacksonian era, and it contributed to the immigrant restriction movement of the early twentieth century. After 1960, however, it began to disappear from public life while principles of mutual religious respect and cooperation rapidly gained ground. By the early twenty-first century no Protestants in public life claimed to be motivated by opposition to, or fear of, the Catholic Church, and no Catholics denounced their fellow Americans because they were Protestants. Large-scale Hispanic immigration caused acute controversy but no one said that they opposed it because of the immigrants’ Catholicism. Why did anti-Catholicism decline, and why, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s did some Protestants and Catholics begin to cooperate on a variety of religious, political, and humanitarian projects? Who were they, and why do their grandparents’ objections now seem insignificant? The answers to these questions can be found in the changing character of American religion, its increasing politicization, and the decline of white ethnic groups’ links to particular churches. Anti-Catholicism, during its long persistence in American history, was sometimes a matter of hooded Klansmen, nativist mobs, lurid atrocity tales like Maria Monk, and denunciations of the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, but at other times it had a highbrow air. The last articulate anti-Catholic writer of any significance was Paul Blanshard, author of American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949). The New Republic gave it a respectful review, the Book of the Month Club recommended it, and it

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became a best-seller in 1949 and 1950. Blanshard declared that he had no objection to ordinary Catholics but that their leadership constituted a sinister authoritarian organization in the heart of American democracy. In a later book, exploiting Cold-War-era fears, he compared the Catholic hierarchy to the Communist hierarchy, arguing that each was a tyrannical threat to the freedom of the world.1 His arguments were not entirely without merit. The Vatican was hierarchical and undemocratic, it did take the view that ‘error has no rights,’ and it did not blush to describe Protestants as heretics. Its view of the American situation was that Catholics should shelter behind the First Amendment’s offer of freedom of religion, but that this was not an ideal situation. If and when Catholics became the dominant group, they should aspire to legislate on behalf of their own church and against all others. The reality on the ground, however, differed sharply from the theory, a point Blanshard soft-pedalled. Leonard Feeney, a Boston Jesuit who showed too much zeal for the official position, was quietly removed from his ministry to Harvard University’s Catholic students in 1949. So was Hugh Halton, who showed comparable zeal at Princeton a few years later.2 The Feeney and Halton brand of principled Catholic intolerance was particularly unwelcome to American leaders in the context of the Cold War. A Protestant-Catholic and a Christian-Jewish convergence had begun during the Second World War when for the first time the phrase ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ came into widespread use. It implied that the shared characteristics of Judaism and Christianity were more important than the points of difference, and that Christians and Jews should together fight against the Nazi menace, putting aside their old disputes. As the historian Mark Silk shows, the phrase was readily adapted to the Cold War, which followed hard on the heels of the Second World War. Soviet Communism was officially atheist and could easily be depicted as the same kind of totalitarian menace as Nazism. By 1950, indeed, the adversary was often described as ‘godless Communism,’ with the implication that America was, collectively, its godly antagonist.3 Under those circumstances, the fragmentation of American religious life seemed almost indefensible. If the forces of godliness were to fight effectively against Communism, ought they not to be united? The late 1940s and the 1950s, which witnessed a nation-wide religious revival, also saw efforts to promote Christian unity. Some denominations that had been divided since the nineteenth century managed to reunite in the fifties and sixties, and an ecumenical Protestant movement, the

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National Council of Churches, held its founding convention, at Cleveland, in 1950. John D. Rockefeller, Jr, argued that a united Protestant church would see ‘all denominational emphasis set aside’ and would ‘pronounce ordinance, ritual, creed, all nonessential for admission into the kingdom of God.’4 Even so, when John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960 he still aroused widespread Protestant fears. Two militant Protestant organizations (Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and the National Council of Citizens for Religious Freedom) repeated Blanshard’s main arguments and warned that American policy on vital questions might now be made more in the Vatican than in Washington. Prominent Protestant leaders like Norman Vincent Peale and Episcopal Bishop James Pike lent their names to the cause. Kennedy’s speech to a group of evangelical ministers in Houston shortly before the election was designed to deflect these critics. His victory in the November election and his willingness to maintain a high degree of church-state separation contributed to the decline of such criticisms as they had made. In particular, he accepted the verdict of the Supreme Court in three influential church-state cases, whose effect was a ban on prayer and the reading of the Ten Commandments in public schools. When Kennedy died in 1963 he took on the aura not of a Catholic martyr but of a national one.5 Equally important in contributing to the decline of American antiCatholicism was the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), whose decrees accepted the principle of religious freedom, urged interfaith cooperation, and described Protestants not in the old vocabulary of heresy but rather as ‘the separated brethren.’ Catholics who had previously been forbidden to visit Protestant churches were now encouraged to do so, and to open their own doors to visitors of other faiths.6 Shifts in population as well as these political and ecclesiastical shifts also contributed to the decline in anti-Catholicism. Post–Second World War suburbanization had, by the 1960s, made many areas of the United States less ethnically and religiously homogeneous than ever before. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews alike who had begun their lives in the ethnic and religious ghettos of Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and New York were migrating to the suburbs and becoming neighbours. Even Catholics who were punctilious about their faith must have found it difficult to believe that their otherwise blameless Protestant neighbours were destined for eternal damnation. Those Protestant neighbours, brought up perhaps with tales of the Catholic Church as

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the Whore of Babylon, must have found it equally difficult to believe that their neighbours and friends – so similar in matters of lawnmowers, barbecues, and Little League – were really so alien or so threatening.7 These were the years in which Will Herberg wrote that America was a ‘triple melting pot,’ whose Protestants, Catholics, and Jews tended to marry within the religious group but across ethnic lines. In the early 1950s it was an accurate assessment. The succeeding decades, however, would bear witness to a steady increase of inter-religious marriage, such that by the year 2000 the triple melting pot was more a memory rather than a reality. They were also the years in which the virtues of tolerance, civility, and pluralism came to be emphasized in school and college curricula. Anyone who teaches college today will be familiar with contemporary students’ extreme reluctance (Catholics very much included) to argue on behalf of their own religion and against anyone else’s. They view their own reticence not as a matter of ‘indifferentism’ but as a question of simple good manners.8 If the circumstances of everyday life after mid-century brought large numbers of Catholics and Protestants together, so did shared political concerns. Priests and nuns played a prominent role in the great civil rights demonstrations of the early 1960s in Alabama and Mississippi, joining such evangelical ministers as Martin Luther King, Jr, and Ralph Abernathy. Their presence gave a new credibility to the movement in the eyes of middle-class white voters while attracting television cameras and the national media. On the other hand, a different set of Catholics sometimes made common cause with non-Catholic white neighbours as they struggled to prevent desegregation.9 Civil rights was the first of many political movements with strong religious overtones to generate alliances of Protestants and Catholics. The pro-family movement or New Christian Right of the 1970s was another, which showed that conservatives from both sides of the old religious divide were as likely to ally across religious lines as were liberals. Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell and theologians like Francis Schaeffer argued that traditional society was under threat from the new philosophy of secular humanism. It was, they believed, part of a broad liberal assault on tradition, the family, and the religious basis of society. Among the leaders of the Moral Majority – the New Christian Right’s political group that campaigned for Ronald Reagan – were not only Protestants like Falwell but also such Catholics as Paul Weyrich (1942– 2008). They agreed that the political activism of homosexuals should be opposed and were united in their opposition to gay marriage.10

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No issue generated more heat among these religious conservatives, however, than abortion. An abortion reform movement had begun in the United States during the 1960s, and it won a striking victory with the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which overturned laws in all fifty states and declared the existence of a constitutionally guaranteed right to an abortion. The decision horrified Catholics from nearly all points on the political compass, whose church had long taught that abortion was the killing of a human life. At first the antiabortion movement was an almost exclusively Catholic concern. James McFadden, a Catholic, founded the Human Life Review in 1975, and his early contributors were nearly all Catholics. The issue was taken up in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the New Christian Right, however – Schaeffer, Falwell, and later President Reagan all came to agree that abortion was a grievous affront to the American tradition of respect for life. Randall Terry, the leader of Operation Rescue, which was the most widely publicized anti-abortion group of the 1980s, was himself an evangelical minister, but he was careful to cultivate Catholic members too.11 The most dedicated anti-abortion activist was perhaps Joan Andrews, who suffered over 100 arrests for her role in pro-life ‘actions,’ in which she demonstrated and tried to destroy abortion machines at clinics. Refusing to promise judges that she would not return to the scene of these actions if released, she ultimately drew a five-year prison sentence in a maximum-security prison in Florida (1986). Andrews was a Catholic, but, strikingly, the movement that campaigned for her release, ultimately successfully, was led by an evangelical Atlanta businessman, Peter Lennox.12 While anti-abortion politics brought together evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics in the 1980s, the Sanctuary movement brought together liberal Catholics and liberal Protestants. Its members were appalled at American foreign policy in Latin America, where the Reagan government aided an El Salvadoran regime that used ‘death squads’ to exterminate its opponents. They tried to help refugees fleeing from civil war there and in Nicaragua and Guatemala. While the border patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service tried to arrest and repatriate border-crossers, denying their pleas for refugee status, the Sanctuary movement helped smuggle them in, move them to safe areas away from the border, get them work, and accommodate them in churches. Protestant leaders like the Tucson activists Jim Corbett and John Fife (Quaker and Presbyterian) collaborated with such

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Catholic leaders as the Catholic Bishop Rembert Weakland in the movement, sometimes risking imprisonment for their actions.13 Sanctuary leaders, Protestant and Catholic, had been influenced by liberation theology, which became influential in American divinity schools in the 1970s and 1980s. Liberation theology originated in Latin America, where Leonardo Boff, Gustavo Gutierrez, and other Catholic writers argued that God stood always with the poor and the oppressed and against the rich and powerful. Christianity, as they reinterpreted it, expressed a ‘preferential option for the poor’ and should be based not in traditional churches, which were linked to the local power structure, but in radicalized ‘base communities.’ Inside the United States an African-American variant of liberation theology developed, as did one dedicated explicitly to black women, ‘Womanist’ theology. Liberationist writers’ starting point was neither church tradition nor biblical interpretation but rather, the existential experience of the poor themselves. Advocates of such a theological position were unlikely to dwell on old distinctions between Protestant and Catholic. Liberation theology was, to be sure, a theological trend flourishing more in liberal than in evangelical seminaries, but growing numbers of seminaries strove to educate diverse student bodies, whose effect was also to break down old boundaries.14 Evangelicals entered politics in the 1970s and early 1980s but not always as conservatives. President Jimmy Carter himself was an outspoken born-again Christian but paid tribute to the influence of neoorthodox writers like Reinhold Niebuhr rather than evangelicals like Schaeffer. Further to the left was the Sojourners group, led by Jim Wallis (b. 1948), for whom Christ’s teaching spoke much more clearly in the idiom of left than right. Wallis, a veteran of the civil rights movement and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), agreed that religious voices ought to be heard in political debate and deplored the fact that the New Christian Right ‘has been an important factor in making our political debate even more divisive, polarized, and less sensitive to the poor and dispossessed.’ He was eager to collaborate with Catholics on all projects related to social justice and singled out Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, ‘Catholic priests who have been fighting against nuclear weapons for decades and have spent years in jail for their often lonely protests.’15 The civil rights movement, the New Christian Right, and the Sanctuary movement all bore witness to active cooperation by evangelicals and Catholics on behalf of shared objectives. By the 1980s political

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agreement on certain objectives more than outweighed traditional suspicions. The Protestant and Catholic left allied against the Protestant and Catholic right in a process that the religious sociologist Robert Wuthnow referred to as ‘the restructuring of American Religion,’ in a book by the same name.16 At the same time the religious dimensions of the Cold War were intensified by the election of Karol Wojtyla, a Polish cardinal, as Pope John Paul II in 1978. The travail of Poland’s Catholics, made newsworthy by the Solidarity movement, which linked Polish nationalism, trade unionism, and Christian faith, won the sympathetic attention of many American evangelicals. Billy Graham, the most famous evangelical Christian in the United States, made two of his ‘crusades’ to preach in Poland and in 1981 met the pope himself. It is difficult to believe that Graham’s zealous evangelical predecessors, Billy Sunday, Dwight Moody, or Charles Grandison Finney, would ever have gone to the Vatican, and even more difficult to imagine them writing the words Graham wrote after a conversation with the pope: ‘We shook hands warmly. I found him extremely cordial and very interested in our ministry, especially in his homeland. After only a few minutes I felt as if we had known each other for many years … We recalled together Jesus’ words in John 10:14, 16. “I am the good shepherd.”’17 Few writers contributed more to the Protestant-Catholic rapprochement at an intellectual level than Richard John Neuhaus (1936–2009). Canadian by birth and son of a pastor, he had trained for the Lutheran ministry and, in the early 1960s, served in a poor, largely AfricanAmerican parish in the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn. A zealous supporter of the civil rights movement, he was an equally zealous opponent of the American role in the Vietnam war. In 1970 he and his fellow Lutheran Peter Berger, an influential sociologist, published Movement and Revolution, a rebuke to America’s role in Southeast Asia and its repression of dissent at home. In the 1970s they also collaborated on a pair of books that foreshadowed the idea of ‘faith-based initiatives,’ of the kind that would become popular in the second Bush administration: To Empower People (1977) and Christian Faith and Public Policy (1977). By then Neuhaus was turning, politically, to the right and coming to deplore what he regarded as the liberal churches’ sympathy for leftist regimes. He had befriended Michael Novak, a leading Catholic neoconservative and another ex-leftist. They each contributed to the journal This World, launched in 1982 with funding from the American Enterprise Institute and designed to promote interfaith studies on politics and religion.18

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In 1984 Neuhaus published the book that made him nationally famous, The Naked Public Square. It endorsed and amplified much of the New Christian Right’s analysis of society, though without demonizing ‘secular humanism.’ Public life, he argued, now stripped of its religious traditions and restraints by the Supreme Court’s unwise and unhistorical interpretation of the First Amendment, has become vulnerable to messianic secular ideologies. Religion, not just as private devotion but as a central element in the making of public policy, must be restored, though with the understanding that practitioners of each religion should respect one another, and that politics is of proximate rather than ultimate concern. ‘Our question cannot be the old one of whether religion and politics should be mixed. They inescapably do mix, like it or not. The question is whether we can devise forms for that interaction which can revive rather than destroy the liberal democracy that is required by a society that would be pluralistic and free.’ He followed up with The Catholic Moment (1990), arguing that of all the churches, none was better equipped to face the crisis of secularization than the Catholic. Its long experience, its vast accumulated traditions, and its careful teachings on all important questions of morality, politics, and society, gave it a special authority. Perhaps never before had a Lutheran written such a glowing account of the strengths of the Catholic Church. No wonder Neuhaus soon diminished the cognitive dissonance by converting to Catholicism. As a lifelong celibate he was free to train for the priesthood and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1991.19 At the same time as his conversion and re-ordination, Neuhaus founded First Things, an explicitly ecumenical journal of religion and politics. Its articles and editorials, and his own lengthy contributions to every number, emphasized the importance of restoring a religious element to politics to avoid the terrifying dangers of political idolatry. Picking up on the theme of The Naked Public Square, an opening editorial declared: While religion informs, enriches, and provides a moral foundation for public life, the chief purpose of religion is not to serve public life. Here we discover a necessary paradox. Religion that is captive to public life is of little public use. Indeed, such captivity produces politicized religion and religionized politics, and the result, as we know from bitter historical experience, is tragedy for both religion and public life … Authentic religion keeps the political enterprise humble by reminding it that it is not the first thing. By directing us to the ultimate, religion defines the limits of the penultimate.

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First Things also emphasized interfaith cooperation, but not of a kind that might attenuate church teaching. In Neuhaus’s view, a doctrinally watered-down version of ecumenism, or ‘lowest-common-denominator’ Christianity, was unacceptable. Principled religious disagreement was consonant, he argued, with consensus on practical matters.20 Among his collaborators was Charles Colson (b. 1931), who had been imprisoned for his role in the Watergate scandal in 1974, experienced a profound conversion, and become a leading evangelical minister and publicist. Colson ran Prison Fellowship for Christian inmates, campaigned for prison reform, wrote a regular column for the evangelical journal Christianity Today, and in 1993 won the $1 million Templeton Prize for progress in religion. In March 1994 he and Neuhaus collaborated on an ecumenical statement, ‘Evangelicals and Catholics Together,’ arguing that a common mission was possible despite doctrinal differences. The statement was endorsed by numerous evangelical leaders such as Pat Robertson, by Catholic theologians, by scholars, and by several bishops, including Cardinal John O’Connor of New York. Catholic opposition to the statement was relatively restrained, whereas many evangelicals reacted angrily, denouncing Colson and withdrawing financial support from Prison Fellowship; one critic even described the statement as ‘the most devastating blow against the gospel in the past 1000 years.’ These reactions were a salutary reminder that the Catholic-evangelical convergence was limited mainly to more politically attuned evangelicals. R.C. Sproul, a Pennsylvania evangelical theologian who had been influential in Colson’s religious education, insisted that Catholics’ rejection of the Protestant principle of sola fide made it a false religion.21 As I have suggested throughout this brief survey, changes in American society were bringing together members of groups who had previously eyed one another suspiciously and from a distance. But as the ECT furore suggests, this was a process more advanced among elites. Academia was important among sites of reconciliation. Catholics and evangelicals had both, over the course of the twentieth century, built colleges and universities of their own to ensure that their children would be educated in a congenial and faith-reinforcing environment. By the 1950s, however, many of the brightest Catholics were becoming uncomfortably aware that the intellectual quality of their colleges was extremely low. Loyalty to Church teaching rather than intellectual adventurousness marked most Catholic scholarship, making it derivative, defensive, and second rate. John Tracy Ellis’s 1955 article on this

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theme, ‘American Catholics and the Intellectual Life,’ set off a collective heart-searching among Catholic scholars. In the ensuing decades Catholic colleges began to assert their independence from the institutional church, while the best Catholic scholars began to regard their various academic disciplines as the appropriate peer group. Catholic historians, in other words, would now write to the standards of the American Historical Association, accepting the principle of peer review and trying to avoid Catholic special pleading. Catholic historiography (for example) improved commensurately, making Philip Gleason, Jay P. Dolan, and Robert Orsi authors whose work could (and should) be read with profit by all American historians.22 The process began to repeat itself, after an interval, among American evangelical scholars. Publication of George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture (1980) marked the debut of a superb historian who was also an evangelical Christian. He urged American historians not to discount faith and the working of God in history as real phenomena, but he also urged his fellow evangelicals to take to heart the need for facing unpleasant historical truths and the indispensable character of sheer hard empirical research. Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll soon joined Marsden as scholars whose historical writing was far too good to be pigeonholed as ‘merely’ evangelical. Noll himself (a signatory of ECT) then published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994), a scorching attack on his fellow evangelicals’ anti-intellectualism. ‘Even in its more progressive and culturally upscale subgroups,’ wrote Noll, ‘evangelicalism has little intellectual muscle.’ It possessed ‘not a single research university nor a single periodical devoted to in-depth interaction with modern culture.’ This was a dismaying falling away from a rich intellectual lineage dating back to Calvin, the Mathers, and Jonathan Edwards. Noll’s book, and Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1998), had the same effect among at least some evangelicals that Ellis’s article had had among Catholics, provoking them to take more seriously the life of the mind if they wanted to participate in American intellectual life.23 In the foregoing pages I have merely sketched out a few areas of Catholicevangelical rapprochement, each one of which could be investigated in much more depth. It would be misleading to imply that the overall trend of the last half-century had been toward inter-religious harmony in America, though it is surely true that inter-religious bigotry and principled hatreds have declined sharply. This is itself an important mat-

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ter. Just as it is reasonable to suppose that racist attitudes persist, even though they are no longer avowed openly in public life, so it is reasonable to suppose that religious intolerance persists. If the holders of such views hesitate to declare them, however, they fall out of public currency. Self-censorship is the first step toward the extinction of old prejudices. Every one of the trends I have noted provoked antagonism as well as assent. Some Catholics withdrew after Vatican II into positions of ultraorthodoxy, just as some evangelicals resolved not to make the kinds of compromises accepted by Falwell, Colson, and Wallis. ‘Evangelicals and Catholics Together’ drew sharp rebukes as well as scattered support. The rapprochement, in other words, was limited. Moreover, it took place in an atmosphere where the perceived decline of religion altogether, especially the decline of religion in public life, was a source of perpetual concern. The convergence could itself be interpreted as a sign of weakness or a temporary reaction to the perception of emergency conditions. The United States, however, is still highly distinctive religiously. In a comparative study of dechristianization it is the exception that challenges the rule.

NOTES 1 Paul Blanshard, American Freedom and Catholic Power (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949); Blanshard, Communism, Democracy, and Catholic Power (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951); Barbara Welter, ‘From Maria Monk to Paul Blanshard,’ in Robert Bellah and Frederick Greenspan, eds., Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America (New York: Crossroads, 1987), 43–59. 2 Catherine Goddard Clark, The Loyolas and the Cabots (Boston: Ravensgate, 1950). See also Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 70–87; Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950–1985 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 47–8. 3 Silk, Spiritual Politics, 40–53. 4 Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), quotation from p. 80. 5 Lawrence Fuchs, John F. Kennedy and American Catholicism (New York: Meredith, 1967); Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals, 84–9. 6 Charles R. Morris, American Catholic (New York: Random House/New York Times Books, 1997), 323–34.

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7 Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955). 8 The best study of the rise of inter-religious civility is John Murray Cuddihy, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (New York: Seabury, 1978). Conrad Cherry aptly summarized the argument in this way for Theology Today: ‘[The religion of civility] blunts the sharp, intolerant, offensive edges of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism by turning them into three equally religious ways of maintaining civil “taste.” Inoffensive civility makes it inappropriate for Jews publicly to proclaim their chosen-ness, for Catholics to confess aloud that “outside the Church there is no salvation,” for Protestants to argue for the uniqueness of Christological revelation. “Good taste” allows such intolerant convictions to be held, if at all, in secret.’ http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/apr1979/v36-1-bookreview13. htm. 9 Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 447–8; John McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 10 On the creation of the Moral Majority, see Walter Capps, The New Religious Right: Piety, Patriotism, and Politics (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994); Patrick Allitt, Religion in America since 1945: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 150–5. 11 Bernard Nathanson, ‘Operation Rescue: Domestic Terrorism or Legitimate Civil Rights Protest?’ Hastings Center Report 19 (Nov.-Dec. 1989): 28–32. Dallas Blanchard, The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Rise of the American Right: From Polite to Fiery Protest (New York: Twayne, 1994). 12 James Risen and Judy Thomas, Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War (New York: Basic, 1999). Allitt, Religion in America, 163. 13 Hilary Cunningham, God and Caesar at the Rio Grande: Sanctuary and the Politics of Religion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 14 For an introduction to liberation theology and its many branches, see Christopher Rowland, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 15 Jim Wallis, ‘Who Speaks for God: An Alternative to the Religious Right,’ Sojourners (March-April 1995): 7. Wallis, ‘Forty Five Predictions for the New Millennium,’ Sojourners (January/February 2000): 7. 16 Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 17 Billy Graham, Just As I Am (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco/Zondervan, 1997), 488–9.

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18 Richard Neuhaus and Peter Berger, Movement and Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970); Neuhaus and Berger, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1977); Neuhaus, Christian Faith and Public Policy (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1977). 19 Richard Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 1984), quotation from p. 9; Neuhaus, The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World (New York: HarperCollins, 1990). For an autobiographical sketch, see his Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth (New York: Basic, 2006), chapter 2, ‘Becoming the Catholic I Was.’ 20 ‘Editorial: Putting First Things First,’ First Things 1 (March 1990), http:// www.firstthings.com/article/2007/09/001-editorial-putting-first-thingsfirst-9. 21 The statement itself, ‘The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium,’ and commentaries can be found in Colson and Neuhaus, eds., Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1995). See also Charles Colson, Life Sentence (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1979); and Jonathan Aitken, Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 381–5. 22 John Tracy Ellis ‘American Catholics and the Intellectual Life,’ Thought 30 (Spring 1955): 351–88. 23 Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 1994), 3–4.

7 Sex and Subculture: American Catholicism since 1945 leslie woodcock tentler

My subject is change in American Catholicism from 1945 to the present, although I will focus primarily on the years before 1980. The story opens on a seemingly triumphal note: by nearly every measure, Catholicism in the late 1940s and 50s was flourishing in the United States, notwithstanding the urban milieu of most American Catholics and their long exposure to pluralism. The modal American Catholic in the mid-1950s probably attended church more regularly and certainly received the sacraments more frequently than her immigrant forebears had done. But the story thereafter is one of decline, beginning in earnest in the late 1960s – decline not just in religious practice, clerical recruitment, and doctrinal literacy but in Catholic identity and communal institutions as well. There is nothing singular about this downward trajectory: with minor differences in timing, it has played out in locales as varied as Quebec, the Netherlands, Bavaria, and even Ireland. As elsewhere in the Catholic world, tensions over sex and gender appear to have played a significant causal role. Nonetheless, I would not tell the American Catholic story in quite the same terms Callum Brown has employed in narrating the death of Christian Britain.1 American Catholics certainly experienced the later 1960s as a time of rupture – as something wholly new. And just about everyone knew, at least viscerally, that sex (and hence gender) had a lot to do with it. But the American Catholic sixties – and indeed, I suspect, the Catholic sixties elsewhere – can only be understood in the context of a much longer history, with due attention paid to factors internal to the tradition. American Catholic flourishing was a subcultural phenomenon. The political structures and social dynamics of the multi-ethnic United States encouraged both the building up of an

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institutionally separate Catholic world, the origins of which date to the mid-nineteenth century, and its eventual demise. By the 1950s, that demise was well underway, psychologically if not yet institutionally, fuelled in equal measure by Catholic upward mobility and the cultural integration wrought nationally by global depression and war. Younger American Catholics in the 1950s, for all their disciplined religiosity, had at least one foot in the largely secular world of American individualism. The various shocks of the 1960s, mediated for a great many Catholics by the debate over contraception, brought the waning Catholic subculture to its wholly predictable end. Nor can the present-day United States be accurately described as dechristianized, no matter how plausible the adjective might seem for Great Britain or France. The great majority of our immigrants in recent decades have been at least nominally Christian, and, like earlier waves of immigrants, these latest arrivals show signs of being more actively religious in the United States than they were in their homelands. Churchgoing nationally has certainly declined since the 1960s, particularly among Catholics. But Americans continue to attend church at significantly higher rates than prevail in Canada, Great Britain, or Europe. Most Americans, moreover, still lay claim to a religious identity, although specifically denominational identities among the Protestant majority are much weaker than they used to be. Religious identities are also far more fluid than they were in the 1950s, with very large numbers of Americans moving from one denomination or even faith to another, some of them on a regular basis. A recent survey reports that fully one-third of Americans raised as Catholics no longer identify as such. It is largely because of immigration that Catholics still make up about a quarter of the U.S. population.2 On the level of individual belief and practice, then, the United States is undoubtedly a more secular place than it was in the 1950s, notwithstanding the vitality of many new immigrant churches and mosques. Certainly it is more unabashedly pluralistic. But the nation’s public culture, for all its rules of religious neutrality, resonates with religious talk, most of it avowedly Christian. Certain Catholic bishops today are far more aggressive in their public political conduct than their pre-1960s predecessors would dare to have been. Presumably they are responding in part to the challenge posed by an upsurge in evangelical political activism – a phenomenon that dates largely from the 1970s. The evangelical upsurge has had an impact too on the nation’s popular culture, as a cursory survey of American bumper stickers will attest.

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Even Catholic symbols have found their way into fashion and popular entertainment.3 Having said this, I must concede that the extent and pace of change in American Catholicism, especially between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, was little short of stupendous. A term like ‘rupture’ has its attractions, if only to convey emotion. Consider the American Catholic reality of the mid-1950s, when practice probably reached its zenith in terms of discipline and vitality. (Catholic numbers are key to the decade’s remarkable statistics of religiosity.) According to several national studies, about 75 per cent of American Catholics in the mid-1950s attended church at least weekly – a lower figure than prevailed in contemporary Quebec or the Irish Republic but higher than that of the stilldevout Netherlands. A 1958 study in my heavily Catholic home town of Detroit arrived at a figure of 77 per cent, which squares neatly with childhood memories of multiple Sunday masses in densely crowded churches.4 As these numbers suggest, the American church in the 1950s had not lost the working class, which still made up a significant portion of the nation’s Catholic population. Working-class Catholics were indeed less likely than middle-class Catholics to be regularly present at Mass, according to the aforementioned Detroit study. But their rate of attendance was still impressive, with 74 per cent claiming to attend Mass weekly. (The figure for middle-class Catholics was 82 per cent.)5 And while gender was certainly a salient factor in church attendance, the American church had done an impressive job of hanging on to its men. Developments earlier in the twentieth century were key in this regard: a trend toward extended schooling for working-class youth, which dates from the 1920s, and a concomitant increase in the numbers of Catholic secondary schools meant that male adolescents could be thoroughly socialized to exacting standards of religious practice. (Daily Mass and monthly confession were a regular feature of Catholic schooling in the decades prior to the Second Vatican Council.) Adult males were encouraged to membership in parish Holy Name Societies, the earliest of which date from about 1910. As members of these societies, men were expected to receive communion at special monthly Masses, from which women were rather ostentatiously barred.6 Monthly reception of communion, in the halcyon decades before Vatican II, meant monthly recourse to confession – the two sacraments being, for nearly all Catholics, inextricably linked. Thus frequent confession was another notable characteristic of the postwar American

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Catholic scene. Most adult Catholic men, even in the 1950s, did not confess on a monthly basis; four times a year is more plausible as a hypothetical average. Young Catholics, however, at least those in Catholic schools and colleges, probably did approach a monthly norm, as did a great many women. A devout and heavily female minority, including my Irish-American grandmother, confessed weekly – the standard consistently touted in period sermons and Catholic periodicals.7 Contrast this behaviour to that of immigrant Catholics, who loomed large in the American Catholic population from the 1850s until immigration restriction in the 1920s. They frequently went to confession and communion only once or twice a year. As early as the 1890s, the clergy were working to change their behaviour, albeit with initially limited results. But by the time of the First World War, the campaign for monthly confession had made significant inroads among younger, native-born Catholics.8 (Pius X’s endorsement of frequent communion and his 1910 lowering of the age at first communion were critical in this regard.)9 In terms of the frequency with which they confessed and received the Eucharist, American Catholics in the forty years before the Council were actually more devout than the immigrant generations. The psychological consequences of more frequent confession are not entirely easy to gauge. Perhaps for some Catholics a once-dreaded sacramental encounter simply became routinized. But I suspect that frequent confession resulted for many in both heightened scrupulosity with regard to sin and enhanced deference to a clerically defined morality. That morality, at least for purposes of confession, centred primarily on sex. How could it have been otherwise in a moral tradition where every sexual lapse, no matter how minor, was objectively grave or ‘mortal’? Even sexual fantasies – ‘impure thoughts,’ in pre-conciliar parlance – were matter for confession. So, needless to say, were masturbation and the use of contraceptives in any circumstances whatsoever. Since the absolute ban on contraception had been preached and taught to Catholics with escalating intensity since the early 1930s, Catholics by the 1950s lived under a regime of draconian sexual discipline. Coupled with the still-intense eschatological orientation of the tradition – hell was preached to Catholics long after the concept had been quietly retired in the mainline Protestant denominations – that regime might reasonably be expected to have produced massive resentment and, quite possibly, a superfluity of deeply troubled personalities. And yet the 1950s were, to nearly all appearances, a golden time for American Catholicism. Despite their mass movement after 1945 to the

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nation’s burgeoning suburbs, Catholics remained deeply committed to the building and support of Catholic institutions. The number of children in Catholic high schools nationally grew by 60 per cent over the course of the 1950s, while the numbers in elementary schools increased even more dramatically.10 The fifteen years after 1945 also saw vigorous growth in Catholic higher education, with numerous colleges being founded or significantly expanded. Catholic hospitals, social service providers, and recreational associations were proliferating and expanding too, underwritten – as were all Catholic institutions in this most voluntary of worlds – by the contributions of the faithful. American Catholics were upwardly mobile in the immediate postwar decades to an extent exceeded only by Jews in a previous generation.11 (Whatever the psychic wounds inflicted by their tradition, these do not seem to have imperiled Catholic functioning in the world.) But those same Catholics were apparently eager, notwithstanding their rising levels of education, to replicate the Catholic ghetto in their new suburban precincts. Religious vocations tell a similar story. American seminaries were filled to bursting in the 1950s, when Catholic seminaries were opened or expanded at a rate never before experienced in the United States.12 The numbers of women religious also continued to rise, in striking contrast to the situation in Quebec, where their ranks grew not at all between 1945 and 1960.13 Lay Catholics seemed genuinely to admire the priests who served in their parishes;14 overt anti-clericalism was rare in American Catholicism prior to the mid-1960s, partly because the nation’s priests had historically come from the same class origins as their parishioners. Indeed, in the 1950s, it was frequently said that the youngest American priests were of particularly high quality – not intellectuals, to be sure, but well-trained, zealous, and admirably pastoral. If their numbers were not quite equal to the demands of the rapidly growing Catholic population, this was mostly attributed to the unusually low birth rates that had prevailed during the Depression, when the ordinandi of the 1950s had come into the world. As late as 1963, Andrew Greeley – normally the most prescient of observers – was predicting a ‘coming surplus of priests,’ for which the nation’s bishops would be wise to plan creatively.15 Greeley’s optimism, I suspect, grew directly out of his experience of Catholic communal vitality. Born and raised in Chicago – ‘world’s greatest archdiocese,’ as the locals still like to say – Greeley was well placed to appreciate the vigorous sociability of parish life, the breadth

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and energy of Catholic organizational life, and the seemingly deep commitment of young Catholics to their inherited tradition. He would also have been aware that rates of Catholic exogamy, at least in heavily Catholic locales like Chicago, were relatively low and stable.16 Greeley was even then an advocate of reform: middle-class, suburban Catholics – including their seminarian sons – were a ‘new breed,’ in his telling, who required new modes of church leadership and new pastoral strategies.17 But like most of his reform-minded contemporaries, Greeley believed that the church in its American incarnation was well equipped to negotiate social change. The parish of the future, Greeley confidently predicted, would be manned by a bevy of clerical specialists – men well up to the task of ministering to a highly educated laity. In retrospect, those years look more troubled – or at least more complicated – than Greeley’s optimism would suggest. The jam-packed seminaries of the 1950s did not in fact produce record-breaking ordination classes; attrition was apparently a growing problem in the nation’s seminaries in that decade, including – and this was something new – attrition during the final years of formation.18 Devotions appear to have waned in popularity in many dioceses in the 1950s, at least among younger Catholics, who seemed less eager than their parents to revel in Catholic liturgical otherness.19 Eucharistic Holy Hours at downtown stadiums, which attracted big crowds in the late 1940s, were phased out in a number of dioceses in the early 1960s, because the crowds were now embarrassingly thin. Parish missions drew fewer and fewer people, too, and more complaints were heard with regard to graphic preaching on eternal punishment.20 Even attendance at Mass seems to have declined toward the end of the 1950s, although statistics in this regard are not entirely reliable. Some 71 per cent of American Catholics nationally claimed to attend Mass weekly in 1961, down from 75 per cent just a few years earlier – a modest decline but likely a significant one, coming as it did before the Council.21 Conformity to Catholic teaching on contraception declined as well. In 1955, only about 30 per cent of Catholic wives in their child-bearing years would admit, in the context of a reputable national study, to ever having used a forbidden means of birth control; that figure had risen to 38 per cent by 1960.22 The ‘non-conformists’ in both studies were, perhaps surprisingly, less educated on average than those who remained obedient. (Demographic precedent would lead one to expect just the opposite.) They were also older – a finding that may help to explain the apparent simultaneous decline in attendance at Mass. Several local sta-

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tistical studies confirmed what priests in the 1950s frequently admitted to one another: that married Catholics in their thirties and early forties were less likely to receive the sacraments regularly than single Catholics or those in older or younger age groups.23 The reason, all observers agreed, was birth control: after three or four children, hitherto obedient Catholic couples not infrequently opted for contraception. Dreading painful encounters in the confessional, they frequently chose to confess only once or twice a year – typically at the Easter season, when traffic in ‘the box’ was heavy and priests were too rushed to question penitents closely.24 It would not be surprising if such behaviour eventually led a few of these probably once-devout Catholics to attend Sunday Mass less frequently. That conformity to church teaching remained high among young, highly educated Catholics and that this same population was characterized by very high rates of religious observance may have helped to mask the troubling indicators just mentioned. It was not long, however, before precisely this Catholic demographic moved toward open rebellion on the issue of contraception. College-educated wives were the sub-group in the Catholic population whose contraceptive behaviour changed most dramatically between 1960 and 1965, by which time 53 per cent of the Catholic women queried for a national study were either using a means of birth control prohibited by their church or had done so in the past.25 College-educated Catholics, including a surprising number of women, were also emerging by 1965 as articulate public critics of their church’s stand on contraception – a development that was unprecedented. Whatever lay Catholics might have said privately about the rigorous sexual discipline imposed by their celibate clergy, they had never before challenged an aspect of that discipline publicly, much less in the context of theological argumentation. The latter is a most important point. Catholics were moved to rebellion on the issue of contraception not by secular values of sexual liberation but precisely by values received from their church. Catholic teaching on marriage had begun a slow but significant evolution in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, as a handful of theologians strove, in the words of John T. Noonan, to ‘make love central to the moral meaning of conjugal coitus.’26 By the 1950s, that evolution was affecting pastoral practice in the United States. Most American dioceses then, impelled by period anxieties about family instability, were embarking on ambitious programs of premarital education. There was generous clerical support as well for lay-led groups like Cana Conference and the Chris-

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tian Family Movement, which sought both to strengthen marriage and to promote a more egalitarian ethos with regard to it. In the context of programs and groups like these, young Catholics were exposed to a positive theology of marriage – which was, they were told, as genuine a route to holiness as consecrated virginity – and especially of marital sex. Sex in marriage was a form of prayer and a literal means of grace. It ought to be loving, spontaneous, and – presumably, given the analogy – frequent. Their parents, by contrast, had routinely been warned that too much sex in marriage was spiritually coarsening.27 One could argue that the priests of the 1950s were simply responding to changes in their society’s mainstream values – changes that might well be read as the product of secularization. Middle-brow American culture in the 1950s was suffused by a peculiarly optimistic neo-Freudianism. That sexual fulfilment was essential to (and achievable in) marriage, that sexual repression was bad for psychic health, that female frigidity was a personal and even a societal tragedy – these were articles of faith. How else to explain the Chicago priests, influential in the field of family life ministry, who worried among themselves that young Catholics suffered disproportionately from sexual inhibitions?28 Or the Paulist who regularly decried, in his many retreats for the married, the sad ‘statistical’ fact ‘that 50 percent of women do not experience full satisfaction in the marriage act’?29 Men like these could not have existed even twenty years earlier. In that sense they were obvious products of their rapidly changing society. Typical of American Catholics, they were responding to a deep cultural shift roughly one generation behind their mainline Protestant counterparts. Even advanced Catholic thinking on marriage, however, remained essentially countercultural in the postwar years, for it was rooted in a tradition that shared almost none of the assumptions driving contemporary Western thinking about sex. For Catholics, marital intercourse retained a sacral significance which placed it off limits to human intervention and transcended merely human notions of need or happiness. Sex was never permissible outside the context of an indissoluble – and, needless to say, heterosexual – marriage. Nor was it licit under any circumstances for spouses to have recourse to what Catholics called ‘artificial’ contraceptives. True, American priests by the 1950s were generally willing to recommend ‘rhythm’ to penitents troubled by excess fertility, as priests in a previous generation had sometimes been reluctant to do. (A physiologically plausible version of the rhythm method, which restricts intercourse to the putatively sterile days of a woman’s men-

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strual cycle, was first popularized in the early 1930s.) But as legions of Catholic couples could have told them, rhythm was not necessarily a reliable means of family planning. It was certainly a frustrating one, given that it typically demanded close to two weeks of sexual abstinence a month.30 Did the Catholic laity share the seemingly naive assumptions of their sexually inexperienced clergy? I think most of them did. A good many Catholics, to be sure, disagreed with the absolute ban on contraception. A 1952 survey done for the Catholic Digest found that 51 per cent of those polled did not regard marital birth control as inherently sinful, while almost as many disapproved of the Catholic prohibition on remarriage after divorce. (The Digest’s priest-editor declined to publish the offending data, although he did forward the figures to every American bishop.)31 But most Catholics were wholehearted proponents of lifelong, fruitful, child-centred marriage, along with the gender roles that vision of marriage implied. This was particularly true of the welleducated. A Catholic college education was strongly predictive of preference for a numerous family, according to a study published in 1963.32 A Catholic college education was also an excellent predictor, as late as 1965, of behavioural conformity to church teaching on contraception.33 Rising levels of affluence and education, in short, did not immediately result for American Catholics in an ethos of expressive individualism. Their encounter with the 1960s was mediated by distinctly religious assumptions about the web of obligations that defines the self. And yet the debate over birth control left in its wake a very different kind of church – one where individual conscience was widely believed to trump institutional authority and the claims of tradition. Change in Catholic behaviour accelerated dramatically after 1968, when Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the teaching on contraception in Humanae Vitae. Fully 78 per cent of Catholic wives aged twenty to twenty-four had turned to forbidden modes of contraception by 1970, by which time demographers were predicting – accurately, as it happened – that Catholic contraceptive practice would soon be indistinguishable from that of other Americans.34 Few of these contracepting Catholics were staying away from communion in consequence, although such behaviour had been quite common in the mid-1960s.35 Nor were they suffering agonies in the confessional, where birth control had only recently been a source of contention. Penitents seldom consulted the clergy about birth control after Humanae Vitae, either in the confessional or outside of it.36 And fewer and fewer Catholics were regularly confessing their

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sins. Priests were commenting on a diminishing number of penitents as early as 1966, but the most precipitous decline appears to have come in the wake of the encyclical. By the mid-1970s, the sacrament was widely conceded to be in a state of collapse. In 1975, almost 40 per cent of Catholics in a national poll said they seldom or never went to confession, although annual reception of the sacrament had not ceased to be a canonical requirement. Only 17 per cent of those polled still confessed every month.37 Young Catholics seem to have experienced a particularly steep decline in the practice of confession.38 They were also key to the decline in weekly Mass attendance that accelerated after the late 1960s. That decline, as we know, had probably begun at the end of the 1950s. But it was relatively slow in its early years: 65 per cent of American Catholics claimed to attend Mass every Sunday in 1969, a 10-point drop since 1955. The figure was down to 54 per cent by 1976; it subsequently fell to 44 per cent in 1987, 39 per cent in 1999, and hovers around 35 per cent today.39 A sophisticated study co-authored by Andrew Greeley did find that weekly Mass attendance had stabilized between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, which is clearly at variance with the figures just quoted.40 But a later Greeley publication conceded that the trajectory has been downward in more recent decades.41 As for the young, no one doubts that they have been least likely to attend church regularly in every decade since the 1950s. Young Catholics in recent decades have also been far more likely than their parents and grandparents to marry non-Catholics, rates of religious intermarriage for American Catholics having risen steadily since the late 1960s, as has the closely related likelihood of Catholics being married outside the church – to wit, by other than a priest.42 And they are far less likely than youth in the 1940s and 50s to opt for the priesthood or vowed religious life. Today’s priest shortage has less to do with the unprecedented number of men who left the active priesthood in the wake of Vatican II – as many as 10 per cent of priests in the United States resigned between 1966 and 1975, most of them after 196843 – than with a simultaneous plunge in the numbers of seminarians. Those numbers have not recovered, being lower today – despite dramatic growth in the Catholic population – than they were in 1970; about 20 per cent of today’s seminarians, moreover, are foreign-born.44 As for women religious, they are all too clearly a dying breed. Without their near-free services as teachers and school administrators, American Catholics have been less and less able to sustain their once-fabled

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network of separate schools. Catholic school enrolments today are less than half of what they were in the mid-1960s, despite the much larger size of the present-day Catholic population. Equally revealing are changes in Catholic values with regard to sex. Between 1963 and 1974, the percentage of Catholics who believed that premarital sex was always wrong declined from 74 to 35. (The poll in question did not address the variable of age, but one can safely assume that a significantly lower figure prevailed among the young.) Just 16 per cent of those polled in 1974 thought contraception was always sinful.45 Priests’ attitudes, too, showed dramatic liberalization. Asked in 1972 whether masturbation was a mortal sin, most priests queried replied that it was at most a venial (or minor) sin. Age was a critical factor: a majority of priests under forty-five viewed masturbation as a stage in normal adolescent development, which is to say as not even venially sinful. A slight majority of priests over fifty-five, by contrast, still regarded it as a mortal sin. Only 13 per cent of those polled in 1972 were prepared to deny absolution to unrepentant users of contraception should they encounter them in confession, which suggests that even older priests were tempering their views when it came to pastoral practice.46 But if the fact of change among Catholics in these years is easily documented, can the same be said for the causal role of the struggle over contraception? A great deal happened in the 1960s. Catholics, like other Americans, were deeply divided among themselves over the war in Vietnam and almost as deeply divided by the revolution in race relations. Their numerous offspring were frequently seduced by a hypersexualized popular culture, in the context of which a dust-up over marital birth control seems positively quaint. And then there was the Second Vatican Council. Reform of the liturgy alone was sufficient to teach the most indifferent Catholic that his allegedly changeless church had a history. Old certainties were bound to suffer, perhaps especially in view of the still-rising educational level of the Catholic population, growing numbers of whom were now attending secular colleges and universities. Nonetheless, I would insist on the peculiar salience of the debate over contraception for change in American Catholicism. Church authority for a great many Catholics in the pre-conciliar decades was experienced primarily in terms of the church’s policing of sex. That alone gave the struggle over birth control a subversive dimension: it was about power as well as sex, about ‘who decides’ in the realm of moral teaching and

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on what grounds. Contraception was also an issue that touched the lives of the great majority of adult Catholics in an intimate and urgent way. There was nothing theoretical about this dispute, in the context of which a generation of American Catholics wrestled its way to moral autonomy. The debate over birth control formed a kind of bridge for American Catholics in the 1960s, by means of which they gained full access to the country’s regnant ethos of expressive individualism. At the same time, that debate was conducted in distinctively Catholic terms and based on distinctively Catholic assumptions, which tempered the enthusiasm with which many Catholics initially embraced postmodernity. But with the simultaneous collapse of the Catholic institutional subculture, distinctively Catholic perspectives on sex, marriage, and political life grew dramatically weaker in succeeding generations. The debate over birth control also did substantial damage to the clergy. Given the large size of most parishes, American priests had their most extensive personal contact with the laity in confession, which is to say – save for children and the old – in the context of sexual discipline. Most priests did not relish the repressive aspects of their job, having been taught in seminary that compassion was a confessor’s cardinal virtue. But they were deeply and unquestioningly committed to their church’s teaching on sex, which every priest struggled to embody in his own celibate life. They were confident of their competence and authority in the realm of sex, too, despite their sexual inexperience: a majority of priests polled in 1960 regarded the hearing of confessions as the aspect of priesthood for which they had been most adequately prepared.47 Nor did priests regard their celibate status as a problem in the context of family life ministry, which flourished so mightily in the 1950s. Some were even trained as marriage counsellors – a telling and exclusively postwar development. The public debate over birth control, which took nearly every priest by surprise, destroyed for all but the most obdurate their sense of competence as arbiters of sexual morality. The subsequent collapse of confession robbed even the obdurate of a valued and highly distinctive role. In the plaintive words of a young priest from Syracuse, writing in 1968: ‘Is confession, as some supposedly knowledgeable theologians predict, on the way out? If so, where do I fit in as a priest? How am I valuable to people?’48 And because the debate over birth control caused many priests to question the assumptions on which Catholic sexual teaching rested, it gave rise in short order to a public debate on mandatory clerical celibacy. The resentments roused by that debate, which was

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vigorously under way by 1967, were widely believed to have fuelled the unprecedented wave of resignations from the active priesthood that began in earnest at about the same time. Those resignations, in turn, intensified doubts among men who remained about the nature, purpose, and social significance of the priestly life. Other developments, to be sure, contributed to the dramatic erosion in priestly morale so evident by the later 1960s. Liturgical reform, for example, had the wholly unintended effect of demystifying the priest’s role in the Mass. The net effect of the various reforms was a Mass that was essentially ‘horizontal’ – or perhaps ‘communal’ would be a better word, since that is what the liturgical reformers were striving for. The priest now functioned more as a presider than an exclusive conduit of the sacred, sharing the liturgical stage not just with lay lectors and Eucharistic ministers – the latter a development of the 1970s – but with a congregation whose active participation was integral to the new rite. Even the youngest priests found the transition difficult.49 But because of its immediate effect on priests’ sense of personal efficacy, the birth control crisis did particularly insidious damage. ‘The Catholic priest, the social guardian of the traditional morality, becomes increasingly uncertain,’ as a priest-professor summed things up in 1968. ‘His own professional training in this area of sexuality seems increasingly inadequate and irrelevant.’50 The Catholic debate over contraception went public in the United States somewhat later than it did in Europe. It dates to 1963, and even then was confined for a time to a handful of prominent dissenters. One does find occasional letters to Catholic periodicals as early as the mid-1950s in which readers complained that the teaching on contraception was inhumanly difficult. But these letters, typically despairing rather than angry, almost never challenged the teaching on theological grounds. Nor did they ignite much public response, although the number of such letters grew significantly in the very early 1960s. A want of appropriate venues was part of the problem. Only a handful of Catholic periodicals then were under lay control, and these were supporting the teaching editorially as late as 1962. The laity, however, were more fundamentally inhibited by a lack of confidence. Many doubted the legitimacy of public dissent on a teaching that had long been presented as infallibly defined.51 The secular media picked up the story in 1963, mostly because of Dr John Rock, a Boston infertility specialist and co-developer of the anovular pill. Rock entered the birth control wars in that same year when

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he published The Time Has Come, a passionate challenge to his church’s teaching on contraception. According to Rock, the anovular pill – first marketed in the United States in 1960 – could not be condemned by the same logic that Catholic teaching applied to barrier methods of contraception. The Pill should be understood instead as facilitating a woman’s natural rhythm of sterility and fertility. Just as ovulation was suppressed by natural hormonal secretions during pregnancy to protect the developing fetus, so couples who judged it necessary to delay a new pregnancy for the good of their existing children might employ the Pill to this end.52 Whatever one thinks of Rock’s acuity as a moral theologian, his scientific credentials were beyond challenge. And because he gave prominent place in his book to period anxieties about global overpopulation, he reminded his Catholic audience of the church’s moral vulnerability on this supremely difficult question. The publicity surrounding Rock’s book apparently encouraged an upsurge of dissenting talk. ‘Discussions among both the clergy and the laity turn often to birth control now,’ the New York Times told its readers in August 1963, ‘as increasing numbers of Catholics discover that the issue, which they have looked upon as a matter of faith and morals beyond their right to question, actually falls within their province to examine.’53 Presumably because of the altered climate, Jubilee magazine – lay-edited but hitherto unfailingly orthodox – ran two articles in its December 1963 issue that challenged the teaching on theological as well as experiential grounds. Soliciting letters in response to the articles from its small but generally devout readership, the editors were quickly inundated by several hundred. The vast majority were critical of the teaching. The next several issues of the magazine were largely devoted to these letters, which were marked by a surprisingly high level of theological sophistication. The natural law argument most frequently deployed as the teaching’s justification was simply inadequate, many of the writers agreed. Others pointed to the seeming illogic of permitting one means of fertility control – the allegedly natural rhythm method – while prohibiting all others, especially when the permissible method was not only undependable but subversive of marital harmony. If control of fertility was sometimes licit, why not permit a couple to choose the non-abortive means most conducive to their happiness? Although most had once regarded rhythm as a proudly Catholic mode of spiritual discipline, some were prepared now to call it immoral, given its frequently deleterious consequences. ‘As with the old position toward heretics,’ a

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suburban mother of four concluded, ‘in the present controversy on contraceptives the Catholic position has overlooked the rights and integrity of the human personality as well as the integrity of family life.’54 The Jubilee letters, which had an impact belied by that magazine’s small circulation, unleashed a flood of public dissent among Catholics. It was the rare Catholic periodical by 1965 that did not include regular discussion of the problem of birth control, for so it was now regarded. Secular media coverage intensified as well. So did the temperature of the debate, with Catholic essayists and letter writers more and more inclined to angry denunciations of church authority. The anger was partly generated by a seeming lack of responsiveness in the church’s upper reaches, the topic of birth control having been removed by papal edict from the purview of the Council and buried in an advisory committee whose conclusions remained secret until 1967. But the anger had also, and crucially, to do with the inability of many devout Catholics to decide for themselves on the matter of contraception. The Jubilee letter writers, for example, had mostly concluded that the teaching was wrong, even morally mischievous. Very few of them, however, were ignoring it at the time they wrote their letters. ‘Completely out of obedience to the Church, I follow her teachings,’ as a harried mother of six explained, ‘but there are times when I feel like a victim of religious tyranny and times when I have many doubts about my faith.’55 Seemingly unable to act on their convictions, it was hardly surprising that such Catholics should project their frustrations and attendant resentment onto church authority. Bishops and certainly the pope were distant authority figures, seldom or never encountered by lay Catholics. Priests were another matter. The anger reflected in the debate over birth control quickly surfaced in the confessional, taxing the ingenuity of confessors and ultimately challenging their status as moral arbiters. As theologians increasingly opined that the teaching was doubtful and penitents began to argue back, growing numbers of priests began to absolve their contracepting penitents without further comment, no longer demanding the supposedly requisite ‘firm purpose of amendment.’ But what to do when a penitent wanted explicit permission to use a forbidden means of contraception, as growing numbers apparently did? Few priests even in the mid-1960s believed they were authorized to give it. The most popular solution to the problem, at least among those many priests with personal doubts about the teaching, was to tell the penitent in question to follow her conscience. The only problem with this otherwise neat

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solution was the passive role it accorded the confessor. It did not help that some lay critics – and indeed some priests, as well – were claiming by this time that a celibate clergy could never be experts on marriage or sex.56 The debate over birth control and its attendant angers also fuelled the debate over mandatory celibacy – another means by which priestly morale was insidiously undermined. The public debate over mandatory celibacy emerged in the United States shortly after the debate over birth control; frank speaking on the part of the laity seems to have encouraged the same among priests. As with birth control, the simple fact of public speaking was what mattered most. Celibacy had previously been surrounded by silence; even in the nation’s seminaries, ‘no explanation or motivational talk was ever given on celibacy,’ as Father Howard Bleichner recalled. ‘Such talks would have assumed the church’s position needed justification and bolstering, or even worse, that it could change.’57 The American debate over celibacy was polarized in its early years. A great many priests – quite possibly a majority – opposed any modification in the discipline or were dubious about the wisdom of such a step.58 But with the issuance of Sacerdotalis Caelibatus in June 1967, where Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the obligation to clerical celibacy, the issue assumed a new resonance, becoming a vehicle for a host of clerical grievances. Not every priest wished to marry. But a great many seemed to feel that the pope and bishops were indifferent to the manifold difficulties of the priestly vocation at a time of unsettling change.59 ‘Many kinds of distress over the state of the priesthood are expressed in terms of dissatisfaction with celibacy,’ as a contributor to a 1971 symposium on celibacy acknowledged.60 The debate over celibacy was also suffused by the same romanticized view of marriage that fuelled the debate over contraception. Indeed, the gospel of sacralized sex made it increasingly difficult to defend compulsory celibacy on any grounds remotely persuasive to the young. If sexual communion and spousal love were the means to holiness for the vast majority of humankind and the springs of psychic health and maturity, what moral meaning was attached to involuntary celibacy? Was marriage not the pre-eminent model of self-giving – of truly other-centred love? That so many of the men who left the active priesthood, in the mid-1960s and after, did so to marry simply intensified the problem. Silence and shame had shrouded earlier instances of priests leaving – a phenomenon that in the American context was relatively rare. But the men who left in wake of the Council were frequently

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hailed, at least by many of their younger confrères, as men of courage and wholeness. Those who remained were increasingly caught, in the words of one of their contemporaries, ‘between integrity to the demands of their institution and integrity to the newly validated self, a self whose actualization is seen not as the enemy of the spiritual but as its potential, even necessary ally.’61 Sacerdotalis Caelibatus was followed by Humanae Vitae, which appeared at the end of July 1968. The latter encyclical, in which Pope Paul reaffirmed the prohibition on contraception, albeit in markedly pastoral language, received by far the more negative response. Secular media coverage was almost entirely hostile. ‘Reactions around the world … are just as sharp as they were at the time of the Syllabus of Errors,’ as Bernard Häring observed.62 Many in the Catholic media were critical too, some of them bitterly so. (It did not help, from the Catholic perspective, that the pope had rejected the liberalizing recommendations of his own birth control commission.) Even Catholic theologians were willing to go public with their dismay. It seemed, and not only in the United States, that the encyclical was being actively rejected by many Catholics. ‘The Pope’s word is but one of the words to be heard,’ as Michael Novak put it, when he was still in his incarnation as a radical lay activist. ‘It is not, on its own merits, a very perceptive or illuminating word. We have heard that word before, in fact, and have measured its inadequacy.’63 The tumult over Humanae Vitae was short-lived, at least in terms of its public dimension. Within a year of the encyclical’s appearance, the debate over contraception had largely vanished from view. Lay Catholics continued to make increasing use of contraceptives, most frequently the Pill, while their preference for larger families – a distinctive Catholic characteristic as late as 1968 – plummeted toward the American norm. Gallup polls done in 1968 and 1974 measured declines of 30 per cent among Catholics who regarded four or more children as ideal.64 As already mentioned, Catholics mostly stopped mentioning birth control in confession, if they went to confession at all. In this aspect of their moral lives, the laity had clearly claimed not just the right to decide for themselves but the right to do so with minimal input from their church. Most priests were probably relieved by this last-mentioned development. Roughly half of American priests disagreed with the contents of the encyclical, according to a poll done in 1969.65 For men like these, the role of confessor suddenly became much harder to negotiate. With the pope having spoken, one could no longer argue – at least on traditional

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Catholic grounds – that the teaching on contraception was doubtful. Public dissent from the encyclical was even more problematic. Not a single American bishop in charge of a diocese expressed public disagreement with any aspect of Humanae Vitae. Even priests who supported the encyclical were not often eager to try to impose its logic on an increasingly prickly laity. Better for all concerned to keep silent, save on those increasingly rare occasions when one’s advice was sought. Silence on contraception, not surprisingly, nearly always meant silence on sexual topics in general. ‘It is likely to be a very long time before the Church recaptures any kind of credibility as a teacher of sexual morality,’ Andrew Greeley asserted in 1972, when he spoke for many of his clerical confrères.66 After the late 1960s, sex hardly ever featured in sermons, even of the mission variety. Catechetical work directed toward adolescents declined dramatically, as fewer and fewer participated in Catholic youth organizations or were enrolled in Catholic secondary schools. Premarital instruction, increasingly the job of lay professionals, mostly skated around the subject of contraception, while moral theologians largely ignored it.67 And hell disappeared, not by ecclesiastical fiat but simply by its so seldom being mentioned or taught.68 Without that element of palpable fear, all manner of Catholic hard teaching was in serious jeopardy. The moral autonomy achieved by the laity in the realm of contraception soon extended to a much wider range of issues. That lay Catholics heard so little about sex from the clergy, save for occasional iterations of disputed prohibitions, almost ensured that this would happen. Dramatic changes in American sexual mores played a role as well. As divorce rates rose and non-marital sex moved into the social mainstream, even Catholics whose own conduct was unimpeachable were increasingly confronted by difficult moral choices. What to think – or do – when a daughter was living with her boyfriend? Or when one’s sister, having ended a deeply unhappy marriage, wanted to marry again? How to respond to the ‘coming out’ of a homosexual nephew? Or when a friend who had learned of genetic abnormalities in the course of fetal testing chose to have an abortion? In cases like these, the old language of mortal sin no longer seemed adequate to growing numbers of Catholics. As with the problem of contraception, correct moral judgment increasingly looked to depend on adjusting principles to the particulars of individual circumstances. Four successive polls, done in 1987, 1992, 1999, and 2005, allow us to see the dominant trend in lay thinking on issues of sexual morality

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over the past thirty years. A national sample of Catholic respondents was asked identical questions in each poll about five disputed aspects of Catholic moral teaching: contraception, non-marital sex, remarriage after divorce, homosexuality, and the advocacy of free choice with regard to abortion. Who held the ultimate authority in such matters, respondents were asked – the hierarchy, the individual, or should decisions be arrived at by means of collaboration between the two? In each of the polls, the respondents were most apt to say that the individual alone should decide when it came to birth control. Only among the oldest respondents, for whom the matter was presumably academic, did less than a majority choose this option in any of the polls. But by 1999, near-majorities were endorsing the individual as the proper locus of moral authority with regard to the other issues, too. The oldest respondents showed the most dramatic trend in this direction, particularly on the matter of remarriage after divorce and – rather surprisingly – homosexuality. Relatively few of the respondents in 1999 endorsed church leaders alone as the proper locus of authority with regard to decision making on any of the issues in question. The 2005 poll did not show a continued trend toward the valorization of individual decision making, the numbers being quite similar to those in 1999. But the 2005 results could hardly have been cheering to the guardians of orthodoxy. As in the previous polls, age was a critical variable: the younger the respondent, the more likely she was to endorse individual decision making – with the interesting exception, in 2005, of remarriage after divorce, where the young showed a greater conservatism than the middle-aged. (Their own experience of parental divorce probably does much to explain this.) In every poll, the younger the respondent the less likely he was to attend church regularly or say that his Catholic faith was of high importance. And in every age group, women were more likely than men to say that individual conscience was the proper locus of moral decision making – a trend first evident in 1992 and one that grew stronger in each successive poll. If women are still the more devout sex, as these polls suggest, they can no longer be counted on to model a submissive Catholicism for the rising generation.69 Moral autonomy for the laity has had both positive and negative effects on American Catholicism. The growing detachment of the young is not a healthy indicator. A recent study of young adult Catholics – a term that was generously defined as persons between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine – found that even in a sample that came disproportionately from observant families of origin, weekly Mass attend-

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ance was reported by only 31 per cent.70 (The investigators thought that the actual figure was probably about 10 percentage points lower.) Fully 64 per cent of those polled agreed that one could be a ‘good Catholic’ without going to Mass. Roughly the same number agreed that individuals should arrive at religious truth on their own, independent of a church or synagogue. Not many in the study evinced much anger at the church – a bemused form of distancing seemed to be the regnant mode. The vast majority still self-identified as Catholics, even some who were regularly attending a non-Catholic church, often in the company of a non-Catholic spouse.71 But in their lack of commitment to the institutional church, younger Catholics in the American context of religious voluntarism represent an obvious long-term problem. ‘Salvation is free but religion costs money,’ as a priest-acquaintance likes to say. At the same time, contemporary American Catholicism is surprisingly rich in human capital. If vocations to the priesthood and consecrated life have dwindled to a trickle, there are numerous takers for demanding but poorly remunerated jobs as lay parish ministers. There are actually more lay ministers than priests at work in American parishes today. Most professional lay ministers are over forty, so we cannot assume that younger Catholics will embrace this role with similar enthusiasm. Perhaps more important, the great majority – roughly four out of five – of these lay church professionals are women, at least some of whom might opt for ordination were that canonically possible.72 They also tend to be liberal in their ecclesiology – true heirs to the moral autonomy that has become their birthright.73 One might well wonder how effectively the younger clergy – fewer in number but theologically more conservative than their predecessors74 – will cooperate with the women on whom the success of their own ministry will ultimately depend. Failure on their part would be devastating, not just for the health of parish life but for continued recruitment to the forms of lay ministry on which the future of Catholic institutional vitality would seem to rest. Even deeply committed Catholics, moreover, have had their loyalty severely tested of late. I have reference to the clerical sex abuse scandals that received such wide publicity in the United States just a few years back. Such scandals are not, alas, peculiar to the United States. But the scandals here have been remarkably prolific: it is estimated that about 4 per cent of American priests over the past half-century have been credibly accused of sexually abusing minors.75 Monetary damages stemming from this plague of abuse is now well in excess of $2 billion,

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with several dioceses having already declared bankruptcy.76 The consequences for the various ministries of the church – its remaining schools and hospitals, its multifarious social services – have been immense. The impact on Catholic morale – that of the clergy as well as the laity – has been even more devastating. Can this crisis be linked in any way to the larger crisis in sexual teaching that this paper has addressed? One intriguing clue is the very high rate of abuse documented among men ordained in the 1970s, when the incidence of clerical sexual abuse appears to have peaked. Although about 70 per cent of the credibly accused abusers were ordained prior to 1970, the small cohort ordained in the 1970s had by far the highest percentage of men so accused – fully 10 per cent for the class of 1970, with the figure remaining almost as high for the rest of the decade.77 Poor screening of candidates for the seminary in the later 1960s and the 1970s has been cited as a cause. In the context of a greatly diminished seminary applicant pool, poor screening might well have resulted in the admission and eventual ordination of some psychologically marginal men.78 But why did that applicant pool collapse? Precisely because of the crisis of meaning among the clergy and the concomitant delegitimization of religious celibacy. As we have seen, a good deal of sexual confusion reigned among Catholics in the wake of Humanae Vitae. With the church discredited as an authority on sexual morality and silence on sexual matters prevailing among many of the clergy, it was probably harder than ever before for priests to live chastely. Most American priests were aware by 1970 that many of their confrères were involved in sexual liaisons, the vast majority – I hasten to add – with adult women or men.79 The response was generally to avert their eyes. Is it surprising, in the circumstances, that the sexual abuse of minors by certain members of the clergy also became more common? The years since 1980 have apparently seen a significantly diminished incidence of such abuse by American priests and presumably of other violations of celibacy. But the priestly profession today is clearly in trouble. Summing up his experience as vocations director for a midwestern diocese, Father Norman Rotert noted especially the reluctance of Catholic mothers to encourage vocations among their sons: ‘The paternalistic attitudes [of the hierarchy], the increasing consciousness of women, the lack of appreciation for the value of celibacy, the large percentage of gay priests, the pedophilia crisis, all have so impacted our vocation recruitment efforts that I see no possibility of salvaging the priesthood as I know it today.’80

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Father Rotert called for a candid Catholic conversation to address this litany of problems, all of which have to do with sex, gender, and authority. Such has never taken place. Faced with a serious and rapidly worsening priest shortage, the American bishops have steadfastly hewed to the papal line on mandatory celibacy and women’s ordination, the latter a topic that Catholics have actually been forbidden to discuss. Here we have the strongest connection to the birth control wars of the 1960s, and not only because Pope Paul VI tried fruitlessly in that decade to prohibit Catholic debate on this topic, too. With regard to the future of priesthood, as with the problem of sex, the bishops are simply refusing to listen to anyone but the Vatican establishment. In an intensely democratic culture, that strategy has resulted in a profound loss of credibility for what used to be called the ‘teaching Church.’ One might plausibly see the ‘Catholic 1960s,’ then, as very long indeed, coming to full and rather dispiriting fruition only at the dawn of the twenty-first century. American Catholic numbers – Mass attendance, lay voluntarism – may be better than those in much of Europe. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the church is losing far too many of the younger adults on whom its future rests. Those young adults, interestingly, come disproportionately from immigrant families: Hispanics constitute 45 per cent of American Catholics between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine.81 But despite their ethnic tie to Catholicism – something that has historically resulted in high levels of religious loyalty and practice in the American context – young Hispanic Catholics seem not to differ significantly from their ‘Anglo’ contemporaries on matters religious. Only a minority attend Mass regularly, and even these tend to hold decidedly latitudinarian views on church authority.82 Very few younger Catholics, not surprisingly, evince much interest in organized efforts to reform the church. The admirable ‘Voice of the Faithful’ – a vigorous lay organization called into being by the sex abuse crisis – is composed almost entirely of Catholics in late middle age and beyond.83 Catholicism will not disappear from the American landscape. But it is likely to be a much diminished presence, along the lines of the nation’s mainline Protestant denominations. If present trends continue, the Catholic Church in the United States will have neither the ordained leadership nor the financial resources necessary to exert the religious and social influence it once enjoyed. Or perhaps the American Catholic future will be largely sectarian. The devout minority among today’s young Catholics – and such does exist – may form the nucleus of a small,

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militantly orthodox institution. Back to subculture, in other words, but this time in miniature. In this instance too, the church’s influence would be much diminished. But present trends may not continue; essential reform might even come from the top. The very long sixties would then prove to be less a time of rupture than of traumatic transition. Enough, however – no prudent historian ventures into prophecy.

NOTES 1 Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2009). 2 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, February 2008, http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=279. 3 See Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 251–2, for brief but suggestive comments. 4 William V. D’Antonio et al., American Catholics: Gender, Generation, and Commitment (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2001), 52. 5 Gerhard Lenski, The Religious Factor (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 49. 6 I trace these developments in my Seasons of Grace: A History of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 203–11. 7 James M. O’Toole, ‘In the Court of Conscience: American Catholics and Confession, 1900–1976,’ in O’Toole, ed., Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 134–5. 8 Tentler, Seasons of Grace, 166–73. 9 Frequent communion – weekly, even daily – was endorsed by papal decree in 1905; the 1910 instruction lowered the age at first communion to about seven. American Catholic children had hitherto received first communion in early adolescence – for many, just prior to school-leaving. A lowered age at first communion meant that children in Catholic schools could be trained from almost the outset of their school careers to the frequent reception of both sacraments. 10 Statistics from the Official Catholic Directory, quoted in David J. O’Brien, The Renewal of American Catholicism (New York: Paulist Press, 1972), 139. 11 Andrew M. Greeley, The American Catholic: A Social Portrait (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 56–7. 12 There were 388 Catholic seminaries in the United States in 1950 and 525 a decade later. In this same period, the number of seminarians grew

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from approximately 26,000 to almost 40,000. O’Brien, Renewal of American Catholicism, 139. Melanie M. Morey and John J. Piderit, SJ, Catholic Higher Education: A Culture in Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 263–4; on Quebec, see Kevin J. Christiano, ‘The Trajectory of Catholicism in TwentiethCentury Quebec: Institutional Religion and Elite Politics during an Era of Change,’ in Leslie Woodcock Tentler, ed., The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, Ireland and Quebec (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 28–9. See, for example, the 1960 survey data in Joseph Fichter, SJ, Priest and People (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 52–3. A.M.G., ‘The Coming Surplus of Priests,’ undated but almost certainly 1963. Archives of the Archdiocese of Chicago, Catholic Action Federation Papers, box 2, folder 48. Although the author of this unpublished document is not otherwise identified, I am quite sure it was Greeley, whose initials are in fact ‘A.M.G.’ Greeley was an active member of the group for which the document was written, and it is written in his characteristically brisk, colloquial style. James D. Davidson, Catholics in Motion: The Church in American Society (Liguori, MO: Liguori/Triumph, 2005), 155–61. In the Archdiocese of Detroit, which I have studied closely, Catholic rates of religious intermarriage changed hardly at all between 1930 and 1960. Tentler, Seasons of Grace, 476. See, for example, Andrew M. Greeley, The Church and the Suburbs (New York: Paulist Press, 1963). Cornelius Cuyler, SS, ‘Perseverance Trends in the Seminary,’ National Catholic Education Association Bulletin 63, no. 1 (August 1966), documents a nationwide rise in seminary attrition. The pattern is clear as well in three major dioceses that I have studied closely: Detroit, Brooklyn, and Chicago. One also finds references to the problem in period clerical publications. See, for example, Richard Claver, OSC, ‘Why Do Seminarians Leave the Seminary?’ The Homiletic and Pastoral Review 62, no. 1 (October 1961): 37–46. Andrew M. Greeley, ‘Popular Devotions: Friend or Foe?’ Worship 33 (October 1959): 569–73; Timothy Kelly, ‘Suburbanization and the Decline of Catholic Public Ritual in Pittsburgh,’ Journal of Social History 28 (Winter 1994): 311–39; Timothy Kelly and Joseph Kelly, ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Gender Roles, and the Decline of Devotional Catholicism,’ Journal of Social History 32 (Fall 1998): 5–26; Tentler, Seasons of Grace, 408–13. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 238–9. D’Antonio et al., American Catholics, 52.

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22 Charles F. Westoff and Norman B. Ryder, The Contraceptive Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 25; Norman B. Ryder and Charles F. Westoff, Reproduction in the United States: 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 186. 23 George A. Kelly, ‘Catholics and the Practice of the Faith’ (PhD dissertation, School of Social Science, The Catholic University of America, 1946), 58–9, 61–3; Joseph H. Fichter, SJ, Social Relations in the Urban Parish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 83, 87–8; Joseph Schuyler, SJ, Northern Parish: A Sociological and Pastoral Study (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1960), 190. 24 Catholics are canonically required to receive communion in the Easter season and also to confess annually. Those requirements have not changed, although many Catholics today almost never go to confession. 25 Raymond H. Potvin, Charles F. Westoff, and Norman B. Ryder, ‘Factors Affecting Catholic Wives’ Conformity to Their Church Magisterium’s Position on Birth Control,’ Journal of Marriage and the Family 30, no. 2 (May 1968): 263–72. 26 John T. Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment of the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 495. 27 Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 189–98. 28 Walter Imbiorski, ed., The Basic Cana Manual (Chicago: Cana Conference of Chicago, 1963, reprint of 1957 edition), 67, 69. 29 Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 192–7; quote from 196. 30 On the American history of the rhythm method, see Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 104–22, 174–89, 215–16, 221–5. 31 Suppression of the data is revealed in a letter from Fr. Paul Brussard to Archbishop John O’Hara, CSC, 31 March 1953. Archives of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Cardinal John O’Hara papers, 90.150. Results from the poll, minus the offending data, were published in the Catholic Digest beginning in November 1952 and continuing until May 1954. 32 Charles F. Westoff, Robert G. Potter, and Philip G. Sagi, The Third Child: A Study in the Prediction of Fertility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 99. 33 Westoff and Ryder, Contraceptive Revolution, 25. 34 Charles F. Westoff and Larry Bumpass, ‘The Revolution in Birth Control Practices of U.S. Roman Catholics,’ Science, 5 January 1973, 41–2. 35 Hazel F. Firstman et al., ‘Beyond Birth Control,’ draft report of a study sponsored by the Marriage and Family Research Project, under the auspices of the St Thomas More Marriage and Family Clinics of Los Angeles,

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undated and unpaginated. Copy in the Archives of the University of Notre Dame, Patricia Crowley papers – SPCBPC, box 8, folder 6 documents the ‘staying away from communion’ behaviour as late as 1967, at least among devout Catholics. Those Catholics who attend church have since the late 1960s been more likely than ever before to receive communion regularly. A survey of U.S. priests, done ten months after the issuance of Humanae Vitae, found only 14 per cent being ‘frequently’ consulted by the laity on the morality of birth control. The study defined ‘frequently’ as ‘several people each week.’ See ‘Catholic Parish Priests and Birth Control: A Comparative Study of Opinion in Columbia, the United States, and the Netherlands,’ Studies in Family Planning (New York: Population Council, June 1971), 32. No author given, although the various research collaborators are named in the introduction. My own interviews with diocesan priests, done mainly in 1998 and 1999, brought uniform testimony as to the infrequency of such consultation. O’Toole, ‘In the Court of Conscience,’ 168–71. Ibid., 170 D’Antonio et al., American Catholics, 52–3. Michael Hout and Andrew M. Greeley, ‘The Center Doesn’t Hold: Church Attendance in the United States, 1940–1984,’ American Sociological Review 52, no. 3 (June 1987): 335–6. Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 40. Dean R. Hoge et al., Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 43. Anthony J. Blasi with Joseph F. Zimmermann, Transition from Vowed to Lay Ministry in American Catholicism, Roman Catholic Studies 20 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), 6–7. Howard R. Bleichner, The View from the Altar: Reflections on the Rapidly Changing Catholic Priesthood (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2004), 40; on foreign-born seminarians, see Mary L. Gauthier, ed., Catholic Ministry Formation Enrollments: Statistical Overview for 2001–2002 (Washington, DC: CARA, Georgetown University, March 2002), 2. Greeley, Catholic Revolution, 39. Ibid., 36–7. Fichter, Priest and People, 186. Joseph M. Champlin, ‘Sex and Confession,’ part one, Pastoral Life 16, no. 5 (May 1968): 687. For an insightful analysis, see Robert P. Imbelli, ‘The Priest in America Today: A Reflection on Priestly Ministry,’ in Michael Glazier, ed., Where We

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54 55 56 57 58

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Are: American Catholics in the 1980s (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1985), 115–16. David P. O’Neill, The Priest in Crisis: A Study in Role Change (Dayton, OH: Pflaum Press, 1968), 9. Seminarians into the early 1960s were routinely taught that Pius XI had spoken infallibly in Casti Connubii, his 1930 encyclical on marriage. John Rock, The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposals to End the Battle over Birth Control (New York: Knopf, 1963), 159–78 and passim. George Barrett, ‘Catholics and Birth Control: Growing Debate,’ New York Times, 5 August 1963, 1:3–6, 12:1–8. Three subsequent articles by Barrett on the same topic appeared on 6, 7, and 8 August. ‘Mother of Four, West Islip, NY’ to the editor, Jubilee, June 1964, 30. ‘Mother of Six, East Coast’ to the editor, Jubilee, June 1964, 23. Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 239–47. Bleichner, View from the Altar, 36. Every seminary memoir I have read confirms Bleichner’s observation. A 1966 study by the Jesuit Joseph Fichter found 62 per cent of the priests polled in favour of mandatory celibacy. Those figures are higher than the ones found in subsequent studies, mainly because his sample excluded pastors and monsignors. Along with other authorities, Fichter found that the youngest priests were by far the most likely to oppose mandatory celibacy. Fichter, America’s Forgotten Priests: What They Are Saying (Harper and Row, 1968), 164–5. It is clear from an abundance of evidence that many priests moved toward greater liberality on the issue in the late 1960s. A National Federation of Priests’ Councils study done in 1971 found 56 per cent of those polled in favour, with a number of respondents indicating that they had changed their position in the past two years. A Gallup poll found a majority of Catholic laity favouring optional celibacy in 1971. My reading in the records of various priests’ organizations from the 1960s and 70s is what leads to this conclusion. Celibacy seems to have gained real traction as an issue among these groups only after the 1967 encyclical. See Fr. Raymond Goedert [Association of Chicago Priests] to Fr. Warren J. McCarthy, 18 December 1967: ‘You will recall that celibacy ranked rather low [as an issue] on our survey last year, but recent developments such as the encyclical and the Bishops’ statement seem to have increased, rather than decreased, the amount of discussion.’ Archives of the University of Notre Dame, Association of Chicago Priests papers, CACP, box 3, folder: ‘Role of the Priest (Standing Committee).’ ‘A Report on the Condition of Priestly Ministry and Celibacy in the United States Made to the Canon Law Society of America,’ by a symposium on

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65 66 67 68

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The Future Discipline of Priestly Celibacy, Cathedral College, Douglaston, NY, 19–22 August 1971. Archives of the University of Notre Dame, Association of Chicago Priests papers, CACP 2, folder 15. Raymond Hedin, Married to the Church (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 117. Hedin left the seminary in 1966; his classmates were ordained in 1970. Bernard Häring, ‘The Encyclical Crisis,’ in Daniel Callahan, ed., The Catholic Case for Contraception (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 77. Michael Novak, ‘Frequent, Even Daily, Communion,’ in Callahan, ed., Catholic Case for Contraception, 93. Wilfrid Scanlon, ‘Orthodoxy? Anomie? Or Pluralism? An Empirical Sociological Analysis of Attitudes of the Catholic Laity in the Archdiocese of Boston toward Contraception’ (PhD dissertation, Boston University, 1975), 78. Andrew M. Greeley, The Catholic Priest in the United States: Sociological Investigations (Washington, DC: U.S. Catholic Conference, 1972), 106. Andrew Greeley, ‘Is Catholic Sexual Teaching Coming Apart?’ The Critic 30, no. 4 (March-April 1972): 33. Richard A. McCormick, S.J., ‘The Silence since Humanae Vitae,’ America 129, no. 2 (21 July 1973): 30–3. On this essential but under-researched topic, see Martin E. Marty, ‘Hell Disappeared: No One Noticed,’ Harvard Theological Review 78, nos. 3–4 (1985): 381–98, and especially David Lodge’s Souls and Bodies, a 1981 novel dealing with English Catholics. D’Antonio et al., American Catholics Today, 97–8, 100. Hoge et al., Young Adult Catholics, 49–50. Everyone in the sample had been confirmed in adolescence, the sample being drawn from parish confirmation lists; the respondents were also more likely than the modal U.S. Catholic in their age group to have attended a Catholic school and participated in a Catholic youth organization. Ibid., 45–6, 54, 61. Paul Wilkes, ‘A Prediction Fulfilled,’ America 194, no. 7 (27 February 2006): 12–14, summarizes the data from three successive studies of lay parish ministers in the U.S. See James R. Davidson et al., Lay Ministers and Their Spiritual Practices (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2003). One should also note the large population of so-called ‘permanent deacons’ in the United States, who also play an important role in many parishes. Dean R. Hoge and Jacqueline E. Wenger, Evolving Visions of the Priesthood: Changes from Vatican II to the Turn of the New Century (Collegeville, MN:

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Liturgical Press, 2003), especially chapter 2. For a perceptive personal perspective, see Paul Stanosz, ‘The Other Health Crisis: Why Priests Are Coping Poorly,’ Commonweal 134, no. 20 (23 November 2007): 15–17. A Report on the Crisis in the Catholic Church in the United States, Prepared by the National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People, which is available on the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, http://www.uscb.org/ocyp/reports.shtml. ‘Costs for Clergy Sex Abuse at $2.6 Billion,’ National Catholic Reporter Online, 14 March 2009, http://ncronline.org/news/accountability/costsclergy-sex-abuse-26-billion. Ibid. The argument received its widest publicity in The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States: A Research Study Conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which is available on the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, http://www.uscb.org/ocyp/reports.shtml. See Thomas Rausch, SJ, Priesthood Today: An Appraisal (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 66–7, for a brief but candid discussion. Quoted in Donald V. Cozzens, The Changing Face of the Priesthood (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 135. Fr. Rotert was speaking in 1995, prior to the second (and more serious) wave of sex abuse scandals. Pew Forum, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Hoge et al., Young Adult Catholics, 51–4. William D’Antonio and Anthony Pogorelc, Voices of the Faithful: Loyal Catholics Striving for Change (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2007), 75–6.

8 ‘Without making a noise’:1 The Dumont Commission and the Drama of Quebec’s Dechristianization, 1968–1971 michael gauvreau

To believe recent opinion surveys, Quebec at the dawn of the twentyfirst century constitutes North America’s most highly dechristianized society. On controversial public issues involving ‘family values’ such as divorce, marriage versus cohabitation, abortion, and euthanasia, francophone Quebeckers differ significantly from their Anglo-Canadian counterparts. Quebec has the highest rate of divorce and the highest rate of cohabitation among Canadian provinces, and in 2002 more than half of all births were to never-married mothers. More significantly, between 1971 and 1991, marriage rates plunged by 49 per cent as compared to 18 per cent in the rest of Canada. Recent polls reveal that overwhelming majorities (77 per cent) approve of euthanasia, 80 per cent state that abortion is a personal choice, as compared with 52 per cent in the rest of Canada.2 Weekly church attendance for Roman Catholics in 2009 stood at 9 per cent, a catastrophic decline in five decades from figures that in 1957 stood at 88 per cent, and even as late as 1975 could muster a respectable 42 per cent.3 The story of francophone Quebec can seemingly be summarized as a complete demographic and cultural rupture between a ‘Christendom’4 in which there existed wellstructured systems of Catholic identity fostered by family and reinforced by a public system of confessional education. These sustained nearly unanimous levels of religious practice and adherence. This abruptly shifted to a set of institutional arrangements where Catholicism has been largely eviscerated from the social landscape. However, for the historian, the task lies at the level not merely of describing this utter collapse of what was North America’s most strongly anchored local ‘Christendom,’ but of accounting for Quebec’s divergence from the pattern of English-speaking and Hispanic North

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America, where, despite overall decline in patterns of religious attendance since the 1960s, there has been more recent religious stabilization among immigrant Catholics and even religious revitalization and growth among evangelicals. This process has led to a series of more or less intense ‘culture wars’ around the intersection of religious values and public ideologies. In advancing an explanation, this paper dissents from long-term explanations derived from the ‘orthodox’ secularization thesis such as working-class alienation from the church, the conflict with secularist ideologies, urbanization and industrialization, the growth of cultural pluralism, and the displacement of Catholicism from its social roles by the expansion of the state. It also, in the case of Quebec, casts doubt on the centrality of factors such as the sexual revolution of the 1960s in decisively altering the public and private authority of the churches,5 since a number of North American societies also experienced this moment of cultural revolution without the extreme characteristics of dechristianization displayed by Quebec. Rather, I wish to argue for a more ‘internalist’ and even ‘intellectualist’ perspective on the collapse of Catholic Christendom in francophone Quebec that emphasizes conflicts between ultimately incompatible institutional logics within the apparently ‘unanimous’ facade of that society’s religious culture. Here, the work of Lucian Hölscher is especially illuminating. His dynamic of religious change operates around a concept of successive paradigms of discourse and practice through which, since early modern times, generations of European clergy and faithful attempted to posit answers to the questions ‘Who is a good Christian?’ and ‘What constitutes the church?’6 However, this paper offers a refinement to his framework, asking the question ‘What would happen to a Catholic society if the religious paradigms, which he regards as succeeding one another rather painlessly, actually persisted and overlapped?’ Would this not cause the parts of the ‘salvation machine’ so well characterized by Callum Brown to actually grind against one another, overheat, and finally implode? Turning from this metaphor, what this paper actually advances is that particularly from the 1930s onwards, the landscape of Quebec Catholicism was internally characterized not by ideological unanimity but by the rapid overlapping and increasingly ill-disguised conflict of at least four answers to Hölscher’s questions. Because Quebec Catholicism, unlike its European and Anglo-North American counterparts, lacked credible ideological enemies within the society, these competing Catholic self-definitions tended to turn their animosities against one another. The struggle

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between these Catholic strategies for dealing with social and cultural modernity entered an acute phase during the era that corresponds to the ‘Long Sixties’7 in the history of the Western world. Between 1956 and 1971, ‘dechristianization’ in Quebec meant the removal of the designation ‘Christian’ from large swaths of the Catholic population. This decision, on the part of partisans, both clerical and lay, rested upon a new and particularly aggressive form of convergence between reform of Catholic faith and religious practice and acute feelings of insecurity in the face of the values of English-speaking North America. It was motivated by the fear that older religious logics did not foster a high level of religious faith and commitment and, for the future, could not ensure the dynamic interaction of Catholic faith and specifically francophone cultural values. The focus of this paper is the Commission d’étude sur les laïcs et l’Église, created by the Assembly of Quebec Bishops in 1968, but more widely known by the name of its president, the sociologist-theologian Fernand Dumont. On the one hand, the Dumont Commission was a Catholic adaptation of an element of Quebec’s British heritage, the Royal Commission, to the task of a wide-ranging public consultation on the past heritage, present health, and future prospects of Quebec Catholicism.8 The commissioners heard over 800 briefs, the preparation of which enlisted the energies of at least 15,000 people. For the historian, there is no better record of the final paroxysm of the clash between competing institutional logics within Quebec Catholicism as they confronted the ‘high modernity’ of the cultural shocks of the 1960s, and of the death throes of the laboriously constructed ‘Christendom’ that had so marked the history of this particular North American society. Quebec Catholicism 1820–1956: A Tale of Four Paradigms The impressive statistics of demographic growth and conformity to clerical prescription on the part of Quebec Catholics, which were attained by the late 1880s and survived with apparently little change down to the mid-1960s, might induce observers to regard Roman Catholicism there as a highly integrated, nearly monolithic whole. However, closer observation indicates the overlapping and jostling of at least four religious paradigms within the same institution occasioned by the church’s attempts to mediate modernity. The first, which I would describe as a local variant of the ‘salvation machine’ widespread among both Catholics and Protestants in the Western world, began around 1820 with new,

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more inclusive attitudes among the clergy regarding access to ritual and sacramental practice, which were successfully translated to the faithful by the late 1880s. These resulted in some of the highest levels among North Atlantic societies of weekly church attendance and participation in confession and eucharist. At the same time, clerical recruitment, particularly after 1870, outstripped population growth itself, enabling the Catholic Church of Quebec to effectively provide religious services to an expanding population in both rural and urban areas.9 The church successfully adapted this institutional logic of expansion and clerical modelling of the religious life of its faithful – in which the notion of being a ‘good Christian’ became coextensive with the ‘liberal’ values of self-improvement through a quantitative participation in the sacraments and membership in parish temperance and devotional associations – to the rapid urbanization and industrialization that characterized the experience of francophone Quebec between 1900 and 1940.10 Indeed, in contrast to a number of its European counterparts, Quebec Catholicism, like North American Protestantism, maintained its robust shape in a postwar era of suburbanization, creating new parishes and building new churches between 1950 and 1965 with almost clockwork regularity as Quebec francophones migrated to the expanding suburbs of Montreal and Quebec City.11 Indeed, despite experiencing a gradual decline in clerical vocations after 1940, there was nothing in the social makeup of Quebec in the early 1960s that irrevocably presaged an end to the continued working of the ‘salvation machine.’ Predating the first paradigm, but growing alongside it, was a second set of institutional discourses and practices. This was the logic of civic order and citizenship, which nineteenth-century Catholicism inherited from its early modern beginnings as a French colonial society. If anything, the political transition to British rule actually benefited the church: through a series of contingent events, Catholicism, in an age of revolution, parlayed its unwavering support for the British government into an unparalleled stature as a public authority by 1850, in full control of its own internal self-government, of a publicly funded confessional educational system at primary, secondary, and university levels, and of a network of hospitals and social services. In Quebec, by the late nineteenth century, Western models of liberal citizenship were refracted through a ‘liberal-tory’ partnership between church and state in which the Catholic Church subtly transformed its self-perception as the spiritual guardian of a rather static ‘public order,’ based on the early modern equation between membership in the church and state citizenship to

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advance a more activist self-definition as ‘educator’ and ‘healer’ in the sense of direct involvement and management.12 More pragmatically, the expansion of public education and social services between 1880 and 1960 meant secure employment for the expanding army of clerical effectives, both male and female (50,000 in 1960!), and the popularity of these careers among both men and women, especially in the first five decades of the twentieth century, ensured high levels of recruitment into the service of the church. Despite the growing propensity of the church to seek the financial assistance of the state to cope with the demographic expansion and urban transformations of the period after 1914, the confessional structure of Quebec education and social services was largely intact in 1960. Even the election of a reformist Liberal government in that year, committed to expanding the capacity of the state, did not ostensibly disturb Catholicism’s role as a public authority, as the leaders of both church and state spoke of a renewed partnership, a clearer definition of roles, and more importantly insisted upon a continued presence of the church and of clerical expertise in the project of creating modern educational and social welfare bureaucracies.13 The third and fourth paradigms of Quebec Catholicism were the direct consequence of local institutional adaptations of papal attempts to posit a response of the universal church to the social and cultural consequences of industrial capitalism. Significantly for the future, both had as their centrepieces the formation of a class of intellectuals responsible for interpreting the interface between Catholicism and society. While the authorities in the Quebec church initially responded in a halting manner to the social teachings of the papal encyclical Rerum novarum of 1891, it was apparent by 1930 that in Quebec, Catholic social teaching, based on the opposition to socialism and secularist ideologies by tempering capitalism with corporatism, was the vehicle through which the church mediated currents of ‘progressivism’ and ‘new liberalism’ then animating the North Atlantic world. Through direct involvement in the discussion of the ‘social question,’ the creation of Catholic confessional trade unions, and the elaboration of a ‘doctrinal sociology,’ the church not only legitimated its expertise in the management of social institutions, but also proclaimed its control of modern social knowledge – the disciplines of political economy, sociology, and social work – which could mitigate the ills of capitalism and restore social harmony.14 The weakness of socialist ideologies in this particular part of North America ensured that the church would have few intellectual challengers in its efforts to interpret industrial modernity. This new selfdefinition of the ‘church as social reformer’ was, in Quebec, coupled

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with an equally significant development, the assertion of the church as ‘guardian of the nation.’ Here, the constitution of a new class of both lay and clerical intellectuals was dedicated to the fusion of the ‘social question’ with the ‘national question’ in which the fostering of social harmony through the achievement of corporatism – an alternative to an unreformed capitalism now identified as an attribute of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ civilization – would undergird the spiritual superiority of the values of Catholic francophone civilization in North America.15 Finally, the quarter-century following the Great Depression witnessed the emergence of a fourth type of religious logic in Quebec society. Initially a reworking of the church’s interest in solving the ills of industrial society, this tendency was given currency in Quebec by the proclamation of the papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno in 1931 and the subsequent creation of specialized, gender-specific Catholic Action movements among students, young workers, and rural youth. Ostensibly formed out of a desire of international Catholicism to oppose the secularist ideologies of Marxism, fascism, and liberal capitalism, these movements, when imported to Quebec, found few internal enemies in a society where Catholicism occupied so much public space. The movements’ mystique of a conquering, heroic, youthful spirituality was thus directed not to countering the enemies of Christianity, but to elaborating a gulf between a ‘modern,’ ‘authentic’ spirituality, and a ‘traditional’ type of Catholicism identified with the elder generation, ‘bourgeois’ values, ‘routine’ religion, and spiritual conformity, which would ultimately cause the decay and weakening of French and Catholic values in the face of an Anglo-Saxon, North American civilization viewed as increasingly alien and hostile.16 By arrogating a new type of spiritual supremacy to young laypeople, Catholic Action encapsulated two currents, both of which were fuelled by an implicit anticlericalism that profoundly destabilized each of the three previous religious paradigms. The first, more populist in its overtones, was more ‘feminist’ in its orientation and led to a lay-centred discourse on questions of marriage, reproduction, childrearing, and family relations, issues upon which a celibate clergy could not legitimately claim professional expertise.17 The shift from the ‘social question’ revolving around the relations of labour and capital to the politics of the family and the body carved out a new relationship between Catholicism and modernity, also fractured authority within systems of Catholic discourse, and for the first time questioned the ability of the Quebec clergy to interpret what, in fact, constituted the moral bases of Catholicism. The second current was more intellectualist and ‘masculinist’ in its

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implications and built upon the cult of youthful religious heroism that had grown up in the 1930s. Centring on the internal life of the church, its lay exponents by the early 1950s had concluded that the very existence of both the ‘salvation machine,’ and the institutional structures of education and social assistance that sustained its workings, were deeply flawed and were in fact antagonistic to both ‘authentic’ spirituality and the survival of the francophone nation. Quebec Catholicism, they feared, was in crisis, because the church, led by a phalanx of clerical ‘capitalists’ – the home-grown variant of that North American bugaboo, the ‘organization man’ – pandered to the needs of a conformist, ‘feminized’ mass of unthinking, routine churchgoers. The clergy, in the eyes of this new group of reformist Catholics, were more interested in maintaining the privileged relationship between confessional institutions and the state – which involved them in an unholy alliance with the conservative regime of Maurice Duplessis. But more significantly, the ‘traditional’ Catholicism that they represented had become an expression of the consumerist, materialist values of Anglo-Saxon North America because it valued the quantity of sacramental outputs over the fostering of a viable, ‘authentic’ evangelical type of piety that would appeal to rational, modern men. Here was a nightmare scenario in which the very religious success of the first two religious paradigms was coextensive with the dechristianization of the masses. Further, the corporatism of the industrial era and the church’s control of social knowledge defended by an earlier generation of Catholic intellectuals was derided in the postwar period as a ‘reactionary’ ideology that inhibited dialogue between Catholicism and rising currents of reformist liberalism and social democracy.18 In the space of a decade, three major institutional logics of Catholicism found themselves assailed by a self-conscious group of male lay intellectuals who feared that without urgent and extensive reform, the older Catholic paradigms, now denounced as hopelessly anti-modern and obsolete, would drive leaders of the worlds of politics, journalism, academia, and labour unions – read the male leaders of society – away from the church and would ultimately lead to secularization and the loss of a dynamic spiritual relationship between church and nation.19 Quebec’s Religious ‘Crisis’ and the Rise of Fernand Dumont, 1956–1966 During the decade following 1956, the new intellectualist paradigm

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articulated a discourse of ‘religious crisis,’ discerning a growing conflict between two religious mentalities that expressed, in the words of Claude Ryan, the national secretary of Catholic Action, the ‘spiritual drama’ of Quebec. They divided the ‘older’ and ‘younger’ generations, ascribing to the first a mentality of ‘sociological Catholicism,’20 the dismissive term that encompassed routine adherence to parish life, participation in the sacraments, and religious practice exhibited by the masses of faithful Catholics. It was the product of the unthinking forces of ‘folk religion,’ history and habit, in which Quebec was the North American expression of both religious and cultural backwardness, constituted around a monolithic Catholic society. This mentality was the product of lingering peasant superstition and the calculations of the collusion between a clerical elite and reactionary elements among the middle classes, who collaborated in the colonialist subjugation of Quebec by keeping the people in a state of religious infantilism tied to ‘individualist’ models of piety and religious practice. Increasingly, however, this form of religion was challenged by a rising generation who yearned for a more ‘adult’ type of spirituality founded upon a more evangelistic style of personalist Catholicism that fostered a greater communitarian ethos and was conducive to social activism.21 Religious commentators, especially among the new group of lay intellectuals, contended that although Catholicism was omnipresent in many areas of Quebec life, it was totally absent from the daily lives of many Christians, who were living in a state of ‘practical agnosticism.’22 Given the prevalence and growing acerbity of this discourse, it was not surprising that by 1956, a number of Catholic intellectuals spoke openly about ‘parties’ in the church, characterized by the political labels of ‘left’ and ‘right.’23 What was significant about the climate of the late 1950s was that a growing number of educators and social commentators began to apply the metaphor of ‘spiritual crisis’ to an analysis of the entire institutional interface between Catholicism and Quebec society, particularly in the areas of primary and secondary education, where a number of critics came to identify clerical presence and leadership in these key areas with the poverty of the French language. In the final analysis, they traced these ills to the ubiquitous presence of ‘sociological Catholicism,’ which they regarded as the very antithesis of human values.24 More tellingly, between the mid-1950s and the mid1960s, the generational critique of the intellectuals penetrated elements of the higher clergy to the point where we can discern a widespread loss of confidence in the two paradigms of the ‘salvation machine’

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and the ‘church as educator,’ the twin pillars of Quebec’s distinctive Christendom. In 1956, Mgr Emilien Frenette, the bishop of St-Jérôme, launched the first of the grandes missions inspired by contact with postwar French Catholicism and a religious sociology preoccupied with the ‘dechristianization’ of many areas of urban France. While recognizing that in most Quebec parishes religious practice was still ‘massive’ and ‘solidly rooted,’ the promoters of the grande mission discerned among the faithful ‘a lack of knowledge of basic Christian values, and in contrast to a true evangelical spirit, a growing materialism in behaviour.’25 The problem with the old religious logic of extensive growth, according to its critics, was that it assumed that religious practice was acquired almost by osmosis through the ‘natural’ associations of family and parish. It therefore lacked an ‘anxiety for evangelization’ and aimed not at a thorough understanding of the faith but at the consolidation of Christian institutions.26 Although special missions were nothing new in Quebec, the basic assumption underlying these earlier manifestations was that the population was a basically Christian one whose faith needed a periodic reanimation, and the focus was particularly upon rooting out moral failings such as intemperance and lack of regular sacramental practice. However, underlying the grande mission was the idea that ‘Christendom’ was crumbling in the face of ‘universal currents of dechristianization’27 and that the prior Christian faith of the masses could not be taken as a given. Ordinary believers, mired in ‘sociological Catholicism,’ were in fact not Christians at all, and the objective of the new pastoral plan was not revival of dormant faith, or the awakening of backsliders, but urgent and thorough ‘rechristianization’ according to the canons of the new personalist Catholicism. This strategy was based upon careful study of the human space by ‘committees of sociology’ assisted by nine social science experts from Université Laval, whose findings revealed the weakness of traditional parish structures and the lack of contact between conventional parish associations and the religious life of the masses.28 The aim was to provoke a ‘crisis of conscience’ at the level of the community, to ensure the primacy of Christian existence over all institutional forms and expressions, and especially to guarantee that the faith of ordinary believers would be anchored upon an ‘authentic’ Christian faith in which there was a precise fit between a clear theological understanding of Catholic doctrine and the human relationships of everyday life.29 For the purposes of our analysis, the other significant element of the

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St-Jérôme mission was Bishop Frenette’s decision to employ a team of sociologists headed by the young Fernand Dumont of Laval University to study the social structures and mentalities of the human milieux of the diocese. This was hardly an ideologically neutral choice. Dumont, a veteran of Catholic Action student groups in the late 1940s, deliberately fashioned himself retrospectively into the incarnation of the ‘spiritual drama’ being played out between the new aggressive, ‘authentic,’ masculine spirituality and the routine, conformist, feminized faith of the elder generation, claiming that these two tendencies were evident in the contrasting styles of piety evinced by his father and his mother.30 In addition to the personalist spirituality encountered in the Catholic Action movements, the second key element in Dumont’s intellectual arsenal was provided by his exposure while in France in the early 1950s to the religious sociology of Gabriel LeBras, whose researches, informed by the ‘orthodox’ theory of secularization and founded on the contrasting religious mentalities of cities and countryside, advanced a bleak vision of working-class paganization. However, rather than lamenting this dechristianization, LeBras welcomed it because it enabled Catholicism to establish a crucial distinction between vital religious faith – identified with heroic, missionary, activist minorities – and routine religious practice, meaning the conventional religion of the parish mired in the formalism and residue of folkloric, ‘magical’ elements incompatible with the rational outlook of urban, global society.31 Inspired by the growing spirit of reform within the Quebec church during the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Dumont worked to create a cadre of clergy and laity who would share the new ‘spirituality of crisis’ and work to purify Catholicism by awakening a new understanding of the implications of dogma, which would result in a faith more adapted to new urban realities. Two convictions were central to the dialectic posited by these modernist Catholics: first, the belief that two forms of religious experience were locked in conflict; and second, the view that there had never been any authentic Christianity practised by ordinary Quebec people, confirmed by LeBras’s researches. According to Dumont, the religion historically supplied by the Quebec Catholic Church sought to forge the cohesion of a ‘Christian people’ through representations of the sacred that had been ‘spontaneously secreted by social settings close to nature and rural traditions.’ This was now inappropriate to modern Quebec because it rested upon a moral code anchored on conformity, culpability, and fear, which ultimately mired the church in a refusal of reality

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and an unwillingness to confront the social consequences of industrialism. Worse, the older type of religion had sought to forge an overly close correspondence between the folk beliefs of the natural human order and the religious community, with the result that Catholicism in Quebec resembled ‘a dog’s breakfast of pseudo-beliefs that are in reality superstitions barely disguised by a coat of Christian veneer.’32 By the early 1960s, this ‘modernist’ Catholicism had secured an institutional base among both clergy and laity in the universities, and in the periodicals Communauté chrétienne (devoted to theology and religious life) and Maintenant (a reformist journal of opinion), both funded by the Dominican Order.33 There, Dumont published articles imperatively calling for an urgent ‘demythicization’ of Catholicism, which in turn opened a radical gulf between the old religion of the parish and an authentic spirituality, and the need for a new public culture in Quebec, anchored upon a convergence between modernist Christianity and democratic socialism. This, he hoped, would safeguard communitarian values in the face of North America’s ambient Anglo-Saxon individualist materialism.34 The years between 1960 and 1966 were heady ones for the promoters of this modernist spirituality. Without a lengthy struggle, they had apparently ‘captured’ the institutional levers of the ‘church as educator’ paradigm and seemed poised to graft onto it the logic of aggressive evangelization as the centrepiece of a new strategy of rechristianization. A sense of partnership governed reform in public education and social services, based upon a renewed alliance of church and state in which the state would now undertake direct management and financing, and the church could turn more effectively to the task of evangelization. Many believed that a great deal had been accomplished by placing the public authority and the institutional presence of the church – the essential preconditions of ‘Christendom’ – on a more enduring consensus founded on democratic public opinion rather than the clandestine collusion of elites.35 Developments in international Catholicism – the great reforms of the Second Vatican Council – conferred moral legitimacy upon the partisans of the ‘new Christendom.’36 It was no wonder that, to a number of leading Catholics like Claude Ryan, now one of Quebec’s leading public intellectuals, that Quebec Catholicism appeared to be immune to the ironclad sociological logic of dechristianization.37 The continuing stability and high rates of popular adherence to Catholic practice (still in excess of 80 per cent in 1965) in a highly urbanized society appeared to allow modernist Catholics the opportu-

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nity, once in command of the levers of authority in the public education system, to graft the new canons of an ‘authentic’ spirituality onto the masses of children and adolescents now frequenting primary and high schools through improved structures of religious education. What was occurring, in the hopeful words of Claude Ryan, was ‘a great endeavor to create in North America a genuine democratic Christian-inspired and French-speaking community.’38 The Dumont Commission: ‘A proliferation of mini-sociologists’39 Until 1966, while Quebec Catholicism certainly generated a discourse of ‘spiritual crisis,’ it would have been difficult for observers to predict, from that society’s previous history, the massive defections from Catholic practice and the erosion of public authority that would signal the end of this local type of ‘Christendom.’ Indeed, during the early 1960s, Catholic intellectuals believed that while their society was experiencing ‘secularization,’ this had two largely positive meanings. The first was the culmination of a process of clear demarcation between temporal and spiritual spheres which Christianity itself had inaugurated40 and which, in the Quebec context, would free the church from the tasks of direct institutional management to concentrate on an evangelistic role in modern society. Second, secularization created a salutary religious anxiety and confrontation among those Catholics who were most committed, a process that could only regenerate faith from the inside and enable the church to overcome the threats of indifference, agnosticism, and dechristianization.41 Then, as Father Leclerc, the fictional priest in film director Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions pithily declared, ‘At a precise moment, during the year 1966 in fact, the churches suddenly emptied in a matter of months. A strange phenomenon that no one has ever been able to explain.’42 Statistics seem to bear out this impression. In 1965, Sunday Mass attendance stood at an overwhelming 85 per cent among Quebec Catholics, but by 1970, this had tumbled to 65 per cent, the beginnings of a four-decade freefall.43 Quite abruptly, the optimism of the first half of the decade was succeeded by a far more bleak assessment of the religious situation. ‘Christendom,’ declared Father Pierre Hurtubise, ‘is well and truly dying if not dead,’44 a statement that reflected the sense of many commentators that Catholic institutions, which in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century had honeycombed Quebec society, had either entered a precipitous decline or were rapidly losing their explicitly religious

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character as they now strove to include a significant cohort of nonpractising Catholics.45 In the sphere of public education, the church had invested massive pastoral resources to ensure the success of its effort to shake the society out of its torpor of ‘sociological Catholicism,’ and the reforms of the early 1960s had appeared to safeguard the church’s presence and reaffirmed the necessity for visible religious institutions. On the surface, the Catholic Church seemingly worked from a position of strength in its quest to graft the new evangelistic paradigm that its elites had called for as the new synthesis of religion and modernity. However, in 1966, the Conseil supérieur d’éducation, the government agency charged with supervising confessionality in the public educational system, decreed that while all establishments dispensing Catholic teaching must assure pastoral services, and include specific Catholic religious and moral teaching instruction in weekly timetable periods, to be provided by chaplains, this was now hedged about by numerous concessions to pluralism.46 First, religious education, although ‘compulsory,’ was no longer a graded subject, and new regulations allowed students to absent themselves in the name of freedom of conscience. This, in the eyes of reformist Catholic elites, was a positive achievement, because it enabled the articulation of a ‘renovated confessionality’ anchored on ‘a personal decision’ rather than ‘a sociological belonging to the Catholic religion.’47 However, there was an awareness that the church’s educational mission could no longer rely upon a ‘homogeneous Christendom’ to reinforce its precepts, and that older adolescents already exhibited worrisome signs of ‘disengagement’ from traditional religious practice that might force the church to abandon the maintenance of confessional structures and accept to perform its functions in a pluralistic, multi-confessional setting.48 According to Normand Wener, the main sociological researcher attached to the Dumont Commission, pastoral activity in primary and secondary schools was ‘the arena where the principal challenges facing the Church are crystallized.’ These he enumerated as: encounters with the modern world through children and youth, those who best reflected its values; the questioning of the validity of the Christian message; the engagement in institutions going through a process of secularization; ideological pluralism; tensions between older and newer lifestyles and Christian action. ‘Pastoral action in the schools, he concluded, ‘reveals a mutating Church, rich in promise but failing in many of its traditional projects.’49 However, it was evident by 1970 that the optimistic possibilities of a new ‘democratic Christendom’ that would rapidly transform and

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redeem traditional Catholicism, to be accomplished by the alliance between modernist Catholicism and the values of youth, had collapsed in a welter of confusion and recrimination. Even in the largely rural diocese of Nicolet, where levels of religious practice remained high, observers noted that ‘students don’t want to avail themselves of religious instruction, they are disgusted with religion because its demands are too shifting, testimony is too rare, the courses are not interesting, distractions too numerous, and motivation is non-existent.’50 Worse still, the pastoral and religious education services themselves had not acquired a way of interfacing with either parents or students. Priests and religious working in the schools had lost the sense of distinction between catechism and social animation, and many lay teachers were either ‘unbelievers’ or non-practising Catholics.51 This rendered confessional religious instruction a rather farcical enterprise – there were even reports that in some schools, catechism courses had become courses on ‘sexology’52 – one that left many students ‘confused and lost.’53 Thus, Catholics in the latter half of the decade were suddenly confronted with the nightmare scenario described by Claude Ryan: the collapse of democratic public consensus undergirding Catholic education in a school environment in which a growing number of younger teachers were not Christians and half the upper-year students were hostile to the church.54 The necessity of ‘including’ unbelievers and non-practising Catholics within an ostensibly ‘confessional’ school system compelled the church, in the name of respect for the values of democratic pluralism, to temper the emphasis on Christian doctrine, and this seriously impaired the process of religious socialization, or inter-generational transmission of religious values. It was a part of the aggressive ideology of Catholic reformism that the church could in no way rely upon parents and family: after all, upper clergy and Catholic lay elites had, since at least the 1950s, been engaged in an ongoing project of subverting the older generation’s religion as a ‘sociological Catholicism’ at odds with aggressive evangelization and social engagement.55 The developments of the later 1960s occasioned a more intense form of anguish among Catholic elites in Quebec. Throughout the great social transformations between 1840 and 1950, the church had been the critical site for both the production and mediation of modern values. As stated by the Dominican Bernard Lambert, theological adviser to Cardinal Maurice Roy, ‘the Church has ceased to be in the avant-garde regarding solutions for the world. More seriously, it gives the impression of incoherence and confusion.’56 The Quebec church, according to

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this theologian, was impaled on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, it could not identify purely with the maintenance of tradition, with a ‘disappearing “way of life.”’ However, Lambert was critical of the fact that the church had taken an overly optimistic and uncritical view of the secularization project and was in danger of forgetting that a secular society could only be conceived and maintained by those for whom ‘Christianity remains a living and personal reality.’ ‘We have a permanent need,’ he concluded, ‘for Christianity as a definitive myth of the human condition that will enable us to decode the myths that we give ourselves.’57 One wonders what ordinary believers would have made of Lambert’s equation of Christianity with ‘myth.’ Fernand Dumont, already the chair-designate of a commission to study the relationship between clergy and laity, discerned what he termed ‘a certain tiredness among Christians,’ a new environment in which the old debates of the previous three decades regarding clericalism and modes of Christian presence in the world had seemingly lost their purchase on the public mind, whose central questions now involved contesting the alienations of consumer society. The church, in his estimation, had failed to realize that the central issue facing human society was no longer that of economics and technology, but of culture and the elucidation of new collective values.58 What was most perplexing was that this loss of authority was not the result of confrontation between Christianity and secularist ideologies, but a symptom of a ‘pastoral’ incoherence and a confused public opinion in which both the institutional presence of the church and the discourse of renewal and evangelization had become quite simply ‘irrelevant’. Not even the church hierarchy of pope, bishops, and priests could speak in the name of a community consensus of Christians.59 What key Catholic spokesmen realized by 1968 was that they were in the presence of a new and far more insidious form of ‘secularization’ which simply bypassed the institutional church to found its cultural legitimacy upon the new synthesis of Christianity and the values of democratic pluralism in which the sovereignty of the individual conscience superseded any external or doctrinal authority.60 International cultural movements, through the increasingly pervasive agency of television, transmitted these ideas in a way that relativized and thus subverted the authority of elites. This was achieved not through direct confrontation, but through a broadening public awareness of social and cultural diversity.61 According to this scenario, a large group of Christians, both clergy and laity, had in the name of freedom of conscience,

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begun to make their own choices among the teachings of the church but still held to a vague concept of the authority of papal teachings. For its detractors, this type of confusion was in the process of derailing the ‘salvation machine,’ and they could point to the worrisome decline in clerical vocations and the defection of the faithful from large parish communities. Here, in the encounter between a rampant individualism and Catholicism’s struggle for internal reform, lay what for reformist Catholic elites was the central dilemma of the 1960s. Through concessions to individual conscience and an over-preoccupation with liturgical reforms, the Quebec Catholic Church was unable to formulate a global ‘projet de société,’ by which was meant a precise political and pastoral theology. Failure to do so would mean that Catholics would lose the ability to speak to and confront the ‘secularism of North America.’ In such a society, Christianity would become ‘anonymous and implicit’ and would surrender its historic connection with the destiny of the Quebec nation.62 It was against this background that the Assembly of Quebec Bishops decided to institute a wide-ranging inquiry into the relations between clergy and laity. The immediate impetus was the decision made by the bishops between 1964 and 1966 to end official sponsorship of Catholic Action movements, one of the primary modes of interface between Catholicism and Quebec society. This was motivated by two considerations: first, a number of the youth movements were developing intellectual and institutional links to more radical, quasi-Marxist student and labour groups; and second, many Catholic activists no longer concurred in the project of creating parallel religious structures to civil society, which was frequently denounced as a ‘Catholic ghetto.’63 However, this left the church with vastly reduced institutional means of transmitting its social teachings to the wider Quebec society: catechism in the confessional public school system and the ritual and liturgical life of the parish. This decision lent credence to those critics who deplored the growing ‘internalist’ and ‘individualist’ implications of Catholicism’s posture in the late 1960s. The vehicle of a commission of inquiry was the ideal means to sound opinion within the church with the aim to developing new contacts between the church and modern ideologies from which a new, consensual religious vision of society might be generated. The public hearings opened in an atmosphere of escalating social and political violence. The noisy protests that accompanied the abortive language legislation introduced by the weak conservative government

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of the Union Nationale, the student occupation of universities and senior colleges (the CEGEPs) in the fall of 1969, and the renewal of terrorist bombings by the Front de Libération du Québec convinced many Quebec intellectuals that their society was on the high road to anarchy, which only a renewed sense of common purpose and tasks could effectively avert.64 Like its political counterpart, the great Royal Commission of Inquiry on Health and Social Welfare, the Dumont Commission took as its mandate the elaboration of a collective project: the elucidation of consensual values, on the religious level, that would rescue Quebec from the cycle of ‘contestation’65 and the abyss of violence. Despite the claim of extensive consultation of practising men and women Catholics of all ages,66 it is difficult to escape the impression that the Dumont Commission had a predetermined and closed agenda. Claude Ryan, the commission’s vice-chair and one of Quebec’s leading public intellectuals, candidly declared that those individuals and organizations involved in the process would be perplexed that their efforts were not reflected in the final report. This was, he informed them, because most of their interventions were too fixated on internal matters ‘and articulated the concerns typical of dissatisfied consumers,’ and he dismissed them as not being ‘responsible actors.’67 The personnel of the committee were all well-known former lay Catholic activists and senior clergy thoroughly committed to the logic of ‘spiritual crisis’ and aggressive evangelization.68 Although the church since 1966 had clearly suffered a large defection in terms of numbers of faithful and troubling losses of clerical vocations, the figure of 65 per cent attendance still represented a majority of Quebec’s population and held out hope that with some reforms and a clearer social vision, the Catholic Church might aspire to articulate a new type of ‘Christendom,’ the expression of a reinvigorated public consensus around common Christian values. As explained by Fernand Dumont during the public hearings, faith was actually in very good condition, but the breakdown of Quebec’s former religious unanimity centred on the church as an institution. The aim was thus not to eviscerate the idea of Christendom, but to in effect ‘surpass’ its ancient forms. It was the earthly task of Christians not to flee into a transcendence disconnected from human reality, but to strip off ‘provisional forms of incarnation to discover their authentic sources, and then to engage in re-concretizing these’ in human social structures and ideologies. For Dumont, the hopeful sign of a renewed Christendom lay in the ‘remarkable parallelism between the crisis of the church and the crisis in human collectivities’69 that would provoke

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new forms of thinking and social engagement. Dumont did not call for a return to the ‘former collusion of politics and faith,’ but asked that the church take a stand against the ‘pseudo-values’ of mass civilization in the name of justice, charity, and benevolence.70 However, a closer look at the commission’s thinking reveals the prevalence of the same trope of ‘spiritual drama’ – the ineluctable conflict between the priorities of evangelization and the ‘sociological Catholicism’ of the older religious mentality. A number of background studies echoed Dumont’s dismissal of much parish life as ‘vain folklore’ in noting that secularization offered new possibilities for the church to finally rid itself of ‘traditional and instinctive forms of the sacred’ expressed in the ‘paganism’ of old-time rural Christianity.71 As stated by Mme Hervé Rémillard, most parish faithful still ‘take secondary symbols for the essential. They think that they are committed Christians if they perform their evening prayers, wear a medal, carry a rosary, and do their Easter duty.’ This type of believer was intolerant of change ‘because all their religion’ was based upon symbols rather than on a clear understanding or experience of faith. ‘When any of these elements,’ she concluded, ‘goes by the wayside (like eating meat on Friday) there is nothing left for them upon which to anchor their religion.’72 Because the institutional church continued to perpetuate a scale of values that were traditional, closed, immutable, and frequently obsolete – the antithesis of secular society’s democracy, pluralism, and relativism – the church’s constituency was being reduced to the elderly and to women and children, and had little to offer ‘dynamic adult males.’73 The generational paradigm of ‘aggressive evangelization’ and the corresponding negative view of older forms of Catholic religious practice dominated both the public hearings and the commission’s conclusions. Signalling the urgent need for the ‘re-evangelization of the Christian people,’ the Synod of the Diocese of Rimouski, at the eastern edge of Quebec where Sunday Mass attendance was still in excess of 80 per cent, declared that ‘it is difficult to develop a culture of religious anxiety among the Christian people’ and thus ‘impossible to get them to propose orientations and dynamic solutions.’74 Those like Father Réal Proulx had harsh words to say about the ordinary round of parish life consisting of the Mass and confession, declaring that most faithful and clergy worked within a framework where religious practice still worked within a ‘recent religious past where obligation and the law of fear take precedence over the evangelical values.’75 More telling was the brief submitted by the executive of the Association of Priests of

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Montreal, who deployed the gendered language of incompatible religious mentalities that had evolved in the postwar period. They accused Quebec Catholicism of ‘emasculating the Gospel and adopting pagan castoffs. We have evacuated the appeal to life and have replaced it by the historical memory of Jesus, symbolized by the manger and statues. We have grafted a pagan heart composed of submission, resignation, blind obedience, fear, and ritual to be performed onto the Gospel.’76 What was perhaps the central failing of the much-derided ‘sociological Catholicism’ was its tendency to create an extreme gap between religion and ‘life,’ which had enabled believers to simply compartmentalize their lives and to view Catholicism as an undemanding series of religious exercises that did not need to penetrate either private conduct or public actions.77 To the advocates of ‘aggressive evangelization,’ it was the persistence of this ‘semi-pagan’ form of Christianity that explained the exodus from the Quebec church. Changes to the liturgy and sacramental obligations following 1965, designed to make the church more welcoming and inclusive, had disoriented and troubled many faithful, who looked upon these secondary elements as essential to Catholic identity. ‘While we knew,’ stated one study group addressing the Dumont Commission, ‘that these were all simply accessory, we have the feeling that there is nothing left to hold onto and that we are at sea without a boat. There have been many things taken away and we have forgotten to fill the void.’78 Not surprisingly, the language of evangelization as ‘radical rupture’ dominated the final report of the Dumont Commission. As early as 1963, Dumont had affirmed the priority of conversion and the need for the preacher – the representative of the new, heroic, personalist spirituality – to constantly juxtapose the Word of the Gospels against the sterility of ‘stereotypical and conventional appeals to Christian truth’ that were typical of the parish Sunday sermon, which merely sought to arouse a ‘Pavlovian’ reflex among the faithful. In this way, the church could transcend the ‘propaganda’ that underlay the ‘totalitarian’ order of the old parish synthesis of family and community and anchor a new structure of human values that would more truly express the ‘spiritual unanimity’ of an authentic communalism.79 In this key respect, throughout the 1960s, Dumont stood among a number of vocal Catholic reformers who prioritized the new missionary paradigm above the imperatives of education and the institutional reorganization of the church. It should be reiterated, however, that they spoke and wrote from the implicit perspective that the Catholicism of the older generation was not an

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authentic Christianity. According to Father Jacques Grand’Maison, the leading theological voice among the Catholic modernist faction, Quebec was suffering from a disjuncture between ‘faith’ and ‘religion.’ ‘In daily life,’ he stated, ‘the mass of Christians are still at the level of preevangelization. Faith never intervenes practically in human relations. Many have retained the religious habits of their forefathers without holding onto their faith.’80 It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the process of ‘consultation’ was merely the opportunity, sanctioned by the church hierarchy, for the public airing of the new religious logic of evangelization and its imposition on a reluctant mass of Catholic faithful with a strong allegiance to old-style religious practices and conventional views of religious authority. Conservative voices addressing the public sessions were few and far between, and we encounter them mostly in the recital of the pejorative discourse of the modernists who dominated the proceedings. What is evident from their scattered testimonies before the Dumont Commission is that their religious certainty, centring not on the heroic communitarian spirituality of the Catholic modernist intellectuals, but on the traditional liturgy and sacraments, was severely shaken both by the innovations of Vatican II and by certain local practices which, in a number of parishes, had gone to great lengths to interest young people in the church by incorporating selected aspects of 1960s youth culture into the ritual. One devout Catholic, Mme Richer of Granby, denounced this as ‘irreverence towards the Church. Lack of respect for the Blessed Sacrament. These women and girls in miniskirts who serve mass, read the Epistle and take up the collection. Soon they will even be giving Holy Communion. Scandal. Scandal.’81 What was missing in these letters was any sense of allegiance to the church hierarchy and the clergy, whom conservatives regarded as the principal betrayers of Catholic traditions. ‘If being a Catholic,’ stated Pierre Dermine, ‘means holding that Revelation, Tradition, and Magisterium are inseparable,’ the commission was a serious disappointment, and it was high time that priests began to recall the faithful to the immutable elements of doctrine.82 Conservative Catholics, it was clear, regarded the commission as part of the project of secularization itself, a device by which intellectuals like Claude Ryan and Fernand Dumont could ‘sanction the diminution of the influence of the Church and the role of religious practice’ while still hoping for the ‘emergence of a renewed, purified, communitarian faith without the old moral constraints.’ However, this was not a faith that held forth any attractions for ordinary

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Catholics, but one that ‘veers towards intellectualism, a religion that is simply dissolved in sociology.’83 Of much greater concern to the Dumont Commission was a product of the convergence between the communitarian personalism so characteristic of modernist Catholics and the anti-authoritarian climate of the 1960s, which denounced Catholicism as a kind of ‘structuromania.’84 What so troubled the members of the commission was the almost complete absence of the communitarian concept of the church from any public testimony – those coming forward referred acerbically to the church as an ‘Establishment’ to be overthrown or discarded, and deplored the fact that in Quebec, the church simply meant the hierarchy.85 What was especially worrisome to the modernist elites sponsoring the Dumont Commission was that these attitudes were most widespread among adolescents and young adults, whom they counted upon to incarnate the new communitarian ethos of evangelism and social engagement. Those close to Dumont and the senior clergy traced this anti-institutional sentiment to the preoccupation with internal matters of liturgy and catechism, which turned the church away from ‘the Christian orientation of secular society,’ which had accelerated a disaffection of the more committed Catholic believers from the parish community. These individuals sought spiritual friendship and solace in smaller, private faith communities – termed ‘communautés de base’ – constituting a kind of ‘underground Church’ whose connection with the official church was extremely tenuous.86 However, this direction, argued Dumont, entailed a separation of Christian faith from the institutional church that he and his fellow personalists had never intended and would, if given further encouragement, simply disconnect Catholics from the wider society by exalting private friendship over civic culture.87 The equation of the church with small fellowship groups was, in the final analysis, dangerous because it would eviscerate any imperative of public action and influence from modern Catholicism and would turn the church into an irrelevant religious sect. Indeed, the major achievement of Dumont and his fellow commissioners was that they were able to define, with very little opposition, the parameters of the problem: the components of the ‘religious crisis’ lived by Quebec Catholics in the latter half of the 1960s. Religious practice, stated the final report, ‘was abandoned with little drama, it is like throwing off old clothes that never really fit.’88 This underscored the modernist view of the superficiality of the conformist ‘sociological Catholicism’ of the masses. Here was the argument that Christian faith

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was never deeply rooted in popular conviction and was simply dependent upon the extensive institutional confessionality of Quebec society. Indeed, the silent departure of thousands of practising Catholics constituted the most troubling sign of Quebec Catholicism’s spiritual anemia. This ultimately reflected the ‘poverty of explicit witness’ evinced by both clergy and laity, which they identified as the cause of the church’s inability to engage with the realities of human existence. The commission’s report appealed for a ‘liberation of the word’ that would evoke the call of Vatican II for a ‘second conversion.’89 This, in the estimation of these modernist Catholics, must take precedence over all other pastoral and structural reforms in a society where ‘“Christian’”security’ underwrote privilege and social selfishness. ‘This people,’ concluded the report in the confrontational language of aggressive evangelization, ‘must be radically summoned in the name of the terrible exigencies of faith,’90 which alone could reform the structures and restore vitality to the institution as it sought to infuse Christian values into a Quebec society engaged in a massive social, political, and cultural transformation. The Dumont Commission thus marked an important continuity with the ongoing project of modernist clergy and laity to radically transform the criteria of meaning surrounding the category of Christian ‘belonging.’ In another important respect, its understanding of the Catholic Church and its role was firmly within the ambit of a ‘reformed’ or ‘democratic’ Christendom, not surprising given that most of the commissioners were products of the world of Catholic Action. However, the elaboration of a modern Christendom in Quebec could not take the form of the stable, homogeneous order envisioned by the old ultramontane clerico-nationalism,91 but would have to rest upon the possibility of a synthesis between a dynamic, personalist Catholicism and the communitarian possibilities of ideologies such as democratic socialism. ‘We will not recreate social cohesion in Quebec,’ wrote Dumont, ‘by a return to the past or by a new religion.’ Catholicism must accept the diversity of lifestyles and social and ideological options, and seek to infuse spiritual values into a social consensus ‘that will be defined at the level of politics.’92 There is nothing that so dramatically situates the Dumont Commission within the framework of Catholic elitism than the priority of the political. In articulating the outlines of a convergence between a new public identity for the Catholic Church and the fraternal imperatives of a new nationalism, the commissioners urged the church to take its place in the building of a collectivity and to effectively reclaim its older role as the religious expression of the Quebec

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nation. Weaving together Vatican II’s collectivist ideal of the church as the ‘people of God’ – expressed in the contemporary liturgical reforms, and harking back to the theocratic nationalism of ancient Israel – the commissioners deduced that the church must consciously act as the fraternal expression of the communitarian values that underpinned Quebec’s national identity as a historically distinct people. Although they eschewed deducing precise socio-political doctrines from the Gospel, Dumont and his associates emphatically rejected the notion that Catholicism’s purpose was that of other-worldly, spiritual consolation: its role was political, critical, and prophetic.93 In spite of the generally positive reception of the commission’s report, it was the inability of the commissioners to see beyond the confines of a refurbished Christian social and cultural order – the program of the Catholic Action paradigm that had struggled for ideological supremacy in Quebec since the 1930s – that was most problematic. As noted by Gérard Marier, ‘it would be impossible to use the work of the commission to revitalize the church in Quebec because it reflects the moribund Church.’94 The project of using the religious logic of aggressive evangelization to re-found a Christian order in Quebec was hardly consensual, because it involved the marginalization or destruction of other forms of religious ‘belonging’ that had sustained both Catholicism and the private and public identities of francophone Quebeckers since colonial times. The Dumont Commission thus stands as a significant, though double-edged, cultural moment in late 1960s Quebec: its researches provide compelling accounts of individuals and an entire society in the throes of extreme religious change, and it functions as the culmination of an intellectual and cultural offensive that was the principal catalyst for the dechristianization of Quebec.

NOTES 1 Commission d’étude sur les laïcs et l’Église, L’Église du Québec: Un héritage, un projet (Montreal: Fides, 1971), 20: ‘sans bruit.’ 2 The figures are drawn from Kevin J. Christiano, ‘The Trajectory of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century Quebec,’ in Leslie Woodcock Tentler, ed., The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, Ireland, and Quebec (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 37; Konrad Yakabuski, ‘Religion without Religion: Neither Practicing nor Believing, but Catholic Even So,’ Globe and Mail, 15 August 2009, A17.

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3 Christiano, ‘The Trajectory of Catholicism,’ 30–1; Yakabuski, ‘Religion without Religion,’ A17. 4 I am especially indebted to recent works by Hugh McLeod for problematizing the notion of ‘Christendom’ as a key to understanding twentiethcentury secularization. See Hugh McLeod, ed., The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6–59. 5 For this interpretation, see Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 170–98. For a recent critique, see Hugh McLeod, ‘The Religious Crisis of the 1960s,’ Journal of Modern European History 3, no. 2 (2005): 205–30. 6 Lucian Hölscher, ‘Secularization and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century: An Interpretative Model,’ in Hugh McLeod, ed., European Religion in the Age of Great Cities, 1830–1930 (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 261–86. 7 For the concept of the ‘Long Sixties,’ see Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States c. 1958–c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 8 The use of the ‘Royal Commission’ model by the Quebec Catholic hierarchy was both innovative and distinctive within both the North American and European context. For its role within the administrative practice of the Quebec church, see Gilles Routhier, ‘Governance of the Catholic Church in Quebec: An Expression of the Distinct Society?’ in Michael Gauvreau and Ollivier Hubert, eds., The Churches and Social Order in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 291–314. 9 For a more detailed description of this process, see René Hardy, Contrôle social et mutation de la culture religieuse au Québec, 1830–1930 (Montreal: Boréal, 1999). 10 Christine Hudon, Prêtres et fidèles dans le diocèse de Saint-Hyacinthe, 1820– 1875 (Sillery: Septentrion, 1996); Lucia Ferretti, Entre voisins: La société paroissiale en milieu urbain: Saint-Pierre-Apôtre de Montréal, 1848–1930 (Montreal: Boréal, 1992); Jean Hamelin et Nicole Gagnon, Histoire du catholicisme québécois: Le XXe siècle, vol. 1: 1900–1940 (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1984); Jean Hamelin et Nicole Gagnon, Histoire du catholicisme québécois: Le XXe siècle, vol. 2: 1940–1980 (Montreal: Boréal, 1984). 11 Gilles Routhier, ‘La paroisse québécoise: évolutions récentes et révisions actuelles,’ in Serge Courville and Normand Séguin, eds., La paroisse (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001), 46–59; contrast with

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Callum Brown, ‘The Mechanism of Religious Growth in Urban Societies,’ in McLeod, ed., European Religion in the Age of Great Cities, 237–60, who judges the churches in Britain as failing to effectively cope with postwar suburbanization. See Brigitte Caulier, ‘Developing Christians, Catholics, and Citizens: Quebec Churches and School Religion from the Turn of the Twentieth Century to 1960,’ in Gauvreau and Hubert, eds., The Churches and Social Order, 175–94. The discourses and expectations of both clerical and political leaders are described and analysed by Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 131–8, 247–306. Jean-Philippe Warren, L’engagement sociologique: la tradition sociologique au Québec francophone (1886–1955) (Montreal: Boréal, 2003). For the existence of this new class of intellectuals and their relation to Catholic social teaching, see Pascale Ryan, Penser la nation: La Ligue d’Action nationale, 1917–1960 (Montreal: Leméac, 2006). For an analysis of the spiritual values fostered by the Catholic Action movements, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 14–33. For the Catholic Action movements more generally, see Louise Bienvenue, Quand la jeunesse entre en scène: L’Action catholique avant la Révolution tranquille (Montreal: Boréal, 2002). See Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 77–119, 175–226; Denyse Baillargeon, ‘“We admire modern parents”: The École des Parents du Québec and the Postwar Quebec Family, 1940–1959,’ in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, eds., Cultures of Citizenship in Post-war Canada, 1940–1955 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 239–70. For the anti-Duplessis critique of this younger group of reformist Catholic intellectuals, see Michael D. Behiels, Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution: Liberalism versus Neo-Nationalism, 1945–1960 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985); and for the implication of a number of key churchmen in anti-labour attitudes after 1949, see the recent study by Suzanne Clavette, Gérard Dion: Artisan de la Révolution tranquille (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2008). The components of these ideas, which were a variant on the concerns articulated by a wide range of public intellectuals in postwar North America, are treated in Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 34–76. Archives de l’Université de Montréal [AUM], Fonds Action Catholique Canadienne [ACC], P16/B6, 3,18, Claude Ryan, ‘La rencontre de deux mondes,’ lecture delivered 20 February 1955, for the Corporation des Escholiers Griffonneurs: ‘notre catholicisme est sociologique.’

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21 Ibid. It should be understood that in the context of Catholicism, ‘evangelistic’ meant a return to the sources of Christianity in the Bible and the church fathers, and a more educated form of spiritual life that would appeal to a more urbanized population. 22 See, for this analysis, Jean Francoeur, ‘Témoins d’une crise?’ Vie étudiante 22, no. 5 (March 1956); Maurice Blain, ‘Lettre à des chrétiens divisés,’ Cité libre, March 1954, 20; Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montréal [BAnQM], Fonds Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique, P65, art. 3, Maurice Lafond, CSC, ‘Cours sur l’Action Catholique,’ 1961; AUM, Fonds ACC, P16/J6,1, Commission Nationale Cinéma-Radio-TV, ‘Le problème de la télévision,’ 20 April 1956; Ryan, ‘Rencontre de deux mondes.’ 23 This was brought into the open by Robert Rumilly, a conservative commentator, who in 1956 wrote L’infiltration gauchiste au Canada français (Montreal, n.p., 1956). For the subsequent divisions between ‘left’ and ‘right’ nationalists, see Xavier Gélinas, La droite intellectuelle québécoise et la Révolution tranquille (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2007). 24 For an analysis, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 71–5. 25 Mgr Paul-Émile Charbonneau and M. l’abbé Maurice Matte, La Mission du diocèse de Saint-Jérôme: une expérience canadienne de mission générale (Montreal and Paris: Fides, 1960), 13: ‘pratique religieuse reste massive ou nettement majoritaire’; ‘une certaine méconnaissance des valeurs typiquement chrétiennes, un matérialisme de comportement à l’encontre du véritable esprit évangélique.’ The St-Jérôme mission was followed by similar endeavours in the dioceses of Montreal and St Jean in 1960, Chicoutimi, and St Anne-de-la-Pocatière in 1962, and Quebec City in 1963. See Routhier, ‘Governance of the Catholic Church in Quebec,’ 300. 26 Mgr Paul-Émile Charbonneau, ‘Le renouveau pastoral,’ Relations, February 1966, 42–4. 27 Charbonneau and Matte, La Mission du diocèse de Saint-Jérôme, 14. 28 Ibid., 28–31. 29 Charbonneau, ‘Le renouveau pastoral,’ 44. 30 See Dumont’s memoirs, Récit d’une émigration (Montreal: Boréal, 1997), 27, 36–7, 47–8. 31 See Gabriel LeBras, Études de sociologie religieuse, vol. 2: De la morphologie à la typologie (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1956), 400, 559–60, 481, 586, 641. 32 Fernand Dumont, ‘L’authenticité de l’expérience chrétienne dans la société d’aujourd’hui,’ Communauté chrétienne [CC] 5, no. 29 (1966): 382. 33 For Maintenant, which had a circulation of 50,000, see David Seljak, ‘Catholicism’s “Quiet Revolution”: Maintenant and the New Public

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Catholicism in Quebec after 1960,’ in Marguerite Van Die, ed., Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 257–74. See, for example, Fernand Dumont, ‘Jésus et la condition humaine,’ CC 7, nos. 38–9 (1968): 177–93; ‘Morale et moralisme,’ CC 2, no. 13 (1964); ‘II. Pour sortir du ghetto: une anthropologie nouvelle,’ Maintenant (February 1966); ‘Chrétien et socialiste,’ Maintenant (autumn 1965). Ryan, ‘Le rapport Parent et les diversités de religion et de langue’ [editorial], Le Devoir [LD], 25 April 1963; ‘Une ambiguïté du bill 60’ [editorial], LD, 9 August 1963. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 93–101. While the causative effects of Vatican II can be debated in terms of international developments, the argument of this paper is that profound changes were already underway in Quebec. It should be pointed out that the central conviction underlying the projects of reform and social service was that Quebec would remain a Catholic society. Proponents of this view such as Claude Ryan pointed to a rival current of American sociology which equated urban lifestyles with greater religious vitality. See BAnQM, Fonds Claude-Ryan (P558), 1995-001-12/366, ‘L’influence du facteur religieux dans la vie urbaine d’aujourd’hui,’ Laïcat et Mission 13, December 1961; and, for the discourse of religious and government officials regarding the reforms of public education, Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 247–306. BAnQM, Fonds Claude-Ryan (P558), 1995-001-12/347, ‘Quebec: Revolution or Renaissance,’ address delivered at Lakehead University, February 1964. BAnQQ, Fonds Action Sociale Catholique, P428, s2, ‘La parole est aux lecteurs,’ 1968, A. Larouche, Le Mouvement social chrétien, ‘Quand le chat sort du sac!’ BAnQM, Fonds Claude-Ryan (P558), 1995-12-001/348, Claude Ryan, ‘Le chrétien et la sécularisation progressive du monde profane,’ Journée d’Études Sacerdotales, Sherbrooke, 13 mai 1965. AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21B1, Julien Harvey, s.j., ‘Laïc chrétien et sécularisation,’ March 1970. Yakabuski, ‘Religion without Religion.’ Christiano, ‘The Trajectory of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century Quebec,’ 30–1. AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21/A12, Pierre Hurtubise, o.m.i., ‘Rôle et statut du laïc dans l’Église au Canada Français,’ 1970; Ibid., Germain Lesage, o.m.i., ‘La pensée pastorale des évêques Canadiens-Français, 1830–1962,’ 2e partie, Université Saint-Paul, Ottawa, n.d.

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45 AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21/C1,9, Jocelyne Bernier, ‘Le Service de Préparation au Mariage de Montréal, Inc.,’ February 1970. 46 AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21/C1,27, Normand Wener, ‘La Pastorale scolaire au secondaire,’ November 1970. 47 Ibid. 48 AUM, Fonds ACC, P16/P5,10 Fédération des Collèges Classiques, ‘L’école catholique – 2e rapport,’ 3 May 1966. 49 AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21/C1,27, Normand Wener, ‘La Pastorale scolaire au secondaire,’ November 1970. 50 AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21/G5,7, ‘Rapport de la deuxième partie des discussions … par des couples du monde rural de la région de Drummondville,’ 22 January 1970. 51 AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21/G9,8 (Diocèse de Saint-Jérôme), ‘Mémoire de l’Office catéchétique,’ 4 April 1970; Ibid., P21/G9,14 ‘Mémoire d’un groupe d’étudiants du secondaire V – Saint-Jérôme,’ April 1970; Ibid., P21/G17,8 (Diocèse de Rimouski), ‘Commission éducation de la foi adulte,’ May 1970; Ibid., P21/G1,36 (Diocèse de Québec), ‘Rapport présenté à la Commission Dumont par des membres de l’Équipe de réflexion chrétienne du Centre Pilote Laval,’ 18 June 1970. 52 AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21/G19, 1 (Diocèse de Chicoutimi), ‘Mémoire présenté par un groupe d’étudiants du secondaire,’ May 1970. 53 AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21/G16,9 (Diocèse d’Amos), ‘Mémoire de Ghislaine Racette, étudiante au Sec. V au Centre des études supérieures d’Amos, 18 ans.’ 54 Claude Ryan, ‘L’avenir des “institutions chrétiennes”’ [editorial], LD, 7 April 1966. 55 For this overt campaign against the authority of the older generation, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 120–74. 56 BAnQM, Fonds Jeunesse Ouvrière Catholique (P104), art. 15, Bernard Lambert, o.p., ‘Allons-nous vers une crise dans l’Église du Québec,’ LD, 18 May 1968. 57 Bernard Lambert, o.p., ‘Une Église inquiète dans un Québec tourmenté,’ LD, 15 April 1969. 58 Fernand Dumont, ‘Les chrétiens et les défis de l’histoire,’ CC 8, no. 43 (1969): 5–24. 59 BAnQM, Fonds Claude-Ryan (P558), 1995-12-001/351, Claude Ryan, ‘Le chrétien et la construction de la cité’ communication au colloque organisé par le département d’action sociale de la C.C.C., 22–4 December 1968, Montreal; Lambert, ‘Allons-nous vers une crise?’ 60 Claude Ryan, Une société stable (Montreal: Editions Heritage, 1978), 347–8.

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61 AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21/B1, Julien Harvey, s.j., ‘Laïc chrétien et sécularisation,’ 1970. For the definition of the interlocking notions of international cultural exchange, the impact of television, and the definition of democracy as multiculturalism as key to the cultural climate of the 1960s, see Marwick, The Sixties, 17–20. 62 Lambert, ‘Allons-nous vers une crise?’ 63 For the motivating factors behind this decision, see Gauvreau, Catholic Origins, 343. 64 See Léon Dion, ‘L’anarchie est-elle inévitable?’ CC 7, no. 49 (January-February 1970), 52–3. Note also the gathering held in November 1970 presided by Claude Castonguay, minister of Health and Social Services in the new Liberal government. The high-powered panel included Fernand Dumont, Pierre Harvey, Vincent Harvey, Guy Rocher, Claude Ryan, Charles Taylor, Raymond Laliberté, Jean Gérin-Lajoie, and Judith Jasmin. See BAnQM, Fonds Judith-Jasmin, P143, bobine 853, ‘Réunion 1970,’ circulaire 30 novembre 1970. 65 Province de Québec, Commission d’enquête sur la santé et le bien-être social, vol. 1 (Quebec, 1966), 41. 66 For the commission’s own sense of the background of the participants, see Normand Wener et Jacques Champagne, Croyants du Canada Français – II: des opinions et des attentes. Commission d’étude sur les laïcs et l’Église, Quatrième annexe au rapport (Montreal: Fides, 1972), 11–13. 67 Claude Ryan, ‘La commission Dumont vue de l’intérieur’ [editorial], LD, 18 December 1971. 68 The members of the Dumont Commission included Fernand Dumont (chair), director of the Institut supérieur des Sciences humaines de l’Université Laval; Claude Ryan (vice-chair), managing editor of Le Devoir and former national secretary of Catholic Action; Hélène Chénier (vicechair), secretary-general of the Alliance des Professeurs de Montréal; Mgr Paul-Émile Charbonneau, bishop of Hull; Janine Dallaire, student, Université de Montréal; Anne-Marie Frenette, ex-director of the Jeunesse Ouvrière Catholique; Father Jacques Grand’Maison, professor in the faculty of theology, Université de Montréal; Jean-Paul Hétu, director of the Service de l’Éducation, Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux; Father Jean-Marie Lafontaine, vicar-general of the Archdiocese of Montreal; JeanMarie Poitras, president of l’Alliance Laurentienne insurance company; Rolande Vigneault, ex-director of the Jeunesse Catholique Rurale; Jacques Champagne (commission secretary), ex-director of Catholic Action. Signifi-

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cantly, both Bishop Charbonneau and Father Grand’Maison had been key figures, along with Dumont, in the St-Jérôme grande mission. Fernand Dumont, ‘L’église: histoire, tradition, projet,’ CC 9, nos. 50–1 (1970): 128, 133, 144–5. Ibid., 145–6. AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21/B1, Julien Harvey, s.j., ‘Laïc chrétien et sécularisation.’ AUM, P21/G2,4 (Diocèse de Sherbrooke), Mme Hervé Rémillard, ‘Rapport de 2 réunions tenues au Presbytère Sacré-Coeur de McMasterville’; Ibid., P21/C1,16, Pierre Ménard, ‘La Catéchèse des Adultes (Groupes Adultes et Foi),’ April 1970. AUM, P21/G9,6 ‘Mémoire de M. Henri-Paul Bordeleau,’ 4 April 1970. AUM, P21/G17,8 (Diocèse de Rimouski), ‘Synode du Diocèse de Rimouski, Commission éducation de la foi des adultes,’ May 1970. AUM, P21/G2, 9 (Diocèse de Sherbrooke), Réal Proulx, ptre, ‘Mémoire présenté … Tracy,’ 24 January 1970. AUM, P21/G4, 20 (Diocèse de Montréal), Exécutif de l’Association des prêtres de Montréal, ‘Mémoire,’ 1970. See AUM, P21/G1, 23 (Diocèse de Québec), ‘Direction diocésaine de la pastorale scolaire, écoles secondaires publiques, 1969–1970,’ 27 February 1969; Ibid., P21/G4, 29 (Diocèse de Montréal), ‘Mémoire présenté par un groupe de laïcs engagés dans la vie religieuse,’ April 1970. AUM, P21/G5,8 (Diocèse de Nicolet), ‘Rapport d’un comité d’étude en marge de la Commission sur les Laïcs et l’Eglise,’ 28 March 1970. Fernand Dumont, ‘Une antinomie: propagande et proclamation de la Parole de Dieu,’ CC 2, no. 7 (1963): 22, 27–8. Jacques Grand’Maison, ‘L’Église du Québec en état de concile. – III. Les provocations missionaires du mouvement de sécularisation.’ See also Colette Moreux, ‘Le Dieu de la québécoise,’ Maintenant (February 1967): 67. AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21/G2, 20 (Diocèse de Saint-Hyacinthe), Mme Richer, Granby, lettre à Me Jean Massey, 18 February 1970; Ibid., P21/G2,19, Soeur Thérèse de Jean Crucifié, lettre à Me Jean Massey, n.d.; Ibid., P21/G2,17, Dame Jeanne Morin, ‘Lettre adressée à la Commission.’ Pierre Dermine, ‘Une séance à la commission Dumont,’ LD, May 1970. AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21/G4,32 (Diocèse de Montréal), ‘Mémoire présenté … par l’Association des Parents Catholiques du Québec, section de Montréal,’ 18 April 1970.

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84 AUM, Fonds Commission Dumont, P21/G1,2 (Diocèse de Québec), ‘Mémoire de la Jeunesse Indépendante Catholique,’ January 1970. 85 See, for example, AUM, P21/G1,12 (Diocèse de Québec), ‘Mémoire présenté à la Commission d’étude,’ 17 January 1970; Ibid., P21/G1,19, ‘Mémoire d’un groupe d’étudiants, professeurs et aumôniers de Collèges, CEGEP et Écoles Normales de Québec,’ 9 March 1970; Ibid., P21/G4,28 (Diocèse de Montréal), ‘Participation des laïcs dans l’Église,’ rapport soumis par le groupe des “18–25,”’ 21 March 1970; Ibid., P21/G5,6 (Diocèse de Nicolet), Secteur Victoriaville, February 1970; Commission Dumont, L’Église du Québec: Un héritage, un projet, 27. 86 Lambert, ‘Allons-nous vers une crise?’ 87 Fernand Dumont, ‘Le silence de l’Église du Québec,’ Relations, December 1969, 348–50. 88 Commission Dumont, L’Église du Québec: Un héritage, un projet, 19. 89 Ibid., 197, 111–12. 90 Ibid., 112. 91 Ibid., 43–4. 92 Fernand Dumont, ‘Ce qui fait défaut et ce qui manque encore au Québec: un modèle de développement qui lui appartienne en propre,’ in Claude Ryan, ed., Le Québec qui se fait (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1971), 171. 93 L’Église du Québec: Un héritage, un projet, 136–7, 224, 129–30, 96–7. 94 Gérard Marier, ‘Lettre ouverte aux membres de la Commission Dumont, “Les laïcs et l’Église”: la fin d’un héritage,’ LD, 30 January 1971.

9 Making Témoins du Christ for the Twentieth Century: The European Origins of Religious Education in Quebec, 1930–1970 brigitte caulier

Introduction For several years I have studied the evolution of the religious education of Catholic children and adolescents in Quebec, particularly in the period following the establishment of a public school system in the second half of the nineteenth century. This system was operated on a dual Catholic/Protestant confessional basis, which aimed to protect the respective cultures of anglophones and francophones. In the Catholic sector, schools gradually took responsibility for all religious education of children, progressively moving it from the parish to the school. And this configuration of the school system offers an opportunity for understanding the process of secularization underway in Quebec society. Indeed, I have been able to identify the initiatives, taken before the re-emergence of a provincial Ministry of Education in 1964, by the churches as well as within the field of education and by the decision makers within the Catholic and Protestant Education Committees and the Department of Public Instruction. Details related to the publication of catechisms, the characteristics of their authors and of those who sought to reform how they were taught, the analysis and development of religious education programs, and the creation of university institutions specializing in the training of religious educators after 1955 reveal the concerns, the projects of reform, and the obstacles in play with regard to a message which was distant and unclear. A desire to find another language and other methods for encouraging children to discover faith, or to express it, was manifested through an experiential method of religious education which was anchored in and justified by reforms in the field of education.

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This method was linked to a renewal of religious education in Europe, beginning in the first half of the twentieth century,1 and it spread as some 500 Canadian students received European training in the teaching of religion between the 1950s and the mid-1970s. My paper will discuss what was at stake in these changes by reconstituting the experiences of those students from Quebec and Canada who attended European institutions. I will also describe the first initiatives for reform within the Catholic schools of Quebec. Finally, I will reflect on the European influence on religious education in Quebec. The Missing Link? Intermediaries in Religious Education Rethinking Religious Modernity in Quebec Over the last decade, a new generation of researchers has focused its attention on religious modernity in Quebec, on secularization, and on rethinking the Quiet Revolution. If the Catholic Church has long been considered the conservative force against which reformers had to fight, more recent studies investigated the contributions to modernization made by Catholics, including intellectuals, politicians, and leaders of Catholic Action movements. This approach has been widely presented through the works of É.-Martin Meunier and Jean-Philippe Warren,2 who were trained in Weberian sociology. They have sought to identify the influence of personalism on how these individuals’ views were expressed.3 Expanding on intellectual biographies in the style of Fernand Dumont and Gérard Pelletier, the analysis of journals like Cité libre, and the study of senior bureaucrats responsible for overseeing reforms,4 their studies show how modernity was at work within the church itself. They have reintroduced faith as an important element of the interpretation. This significant internal dissent within the church was fed by various groups, including Catholic Action movements, the Jeunesse étudiante catholique, and the Jeunesse ouvrière, whose emergence has been studied by Louise Bienvenue5 and by Lucie Piché with a focus on women’s experiences6 and using a socio-historical approach. Michael Gauvreau7 has evaluated the Catholic origins of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec by way of a thorough historical analysis of sources related to Catholic Action, the Cité Libre scene, discourse on sexuality and the family, and the relations between church and state in the context of educational reform. He underscores the alienation of women and highlights the influence of personalist philosophy. He argues that the

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reformist and conservative currents of the church in Quebec shared an elitist interpretation of the religious practices of the population. For the same period, the numerous publications of theologian Gilles Routhier dealing with the Second Vatican Council have made it possible to identify the positions taken by different groups within the church and to measure the extent to which the Council was receptive to these ideas.8 The Mediators of the Language of Faith One year ago, I began a prosopological study of Quebec and Canadian students of religious education who had trained in Europe.9 My interest in reconstituting their careers lies in the dual evolution of Quebec society (modernity, secularization and Quiet Revolution) and of the Catholic Church in Quebec (Second Vatican Council). Recent studies have emphasized links between and confusion among reformists within the church and the state, often the same individuals, particularly in the field of education. Several prominent leaders have been identified, but little is known about those intermediaries who were responsible for the actual transmission of reformist ideas in fields such as religion and education. In my opinion, the empirical study of this group represents a crucial test of theses currently being debated (Meunier, Warren, Gauvreau). If, since at least the 1930s, experts in the field of education had called for reforms in teaching methods, including religious education programs, they had to remain patient until such time as the church in Quebec and in Canada was equipped with more efficient teaching methods. At the end of the 1950s, an urgent need for reform in the teaching of religion brought about a new development in the training of those who would be responsible for religious education in Canada. Faced with an abundance of research and the existence of new training centres created in Europe following the Second World War, religious authorities in Quebec drew on the most promising elements in the field of religious education and sought to benefit from European experiences. Two main international institutions, both of which had university affiliations, welcomed Canadian students: the Superior Catechetical Institute of the Catholic Institute of Paris, founded in 1950 and later renamed the Superior Catechetical Pastoral Institute (ISPC), and the Lumen Vitae International Institute, which was opened in 1957 in Brussels. Some Canadians also attended the Pastoral Institute of Religious Studies (IPER), part of the Catholic University of Lyon (since 1968-70) and linked to the Faculty of Theology, which had emerged

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from the school of professional religious educators founded on the initiative of Joseph Colomb in 1947. There was also the Institute of Religious Pedagogy of Strasbourg, which emerged from two new institutions created in 1962: the Centre for Religious Pedagogy of the Faculty of Catholic Theology of Strasbourg and the Institute of Catechetical Pastoral Care, also founded by Joseph Colomb. An abundance of available material has meant that, in reconstructing the students’ experiences, I have had to limit my analysis to the institutions based in Paris and Brussels. Students of religious education who were sent to Europe were exposed to an anthropological approach whose starting point was the lived experience of the child, and which encouraged a process of progressive revelation as recommended by Joseph Colomb.10 These students were trained in a milieu which was at the very heart of Catholic renewal and the reception of the Second Vatican Council. If the students did not explicitly insist on a personalist approach, they participated in the refocusing of education on the human individual and developed a new discourse on God which would influence the new generation, represented by children and adolescents. The vocabulary of words and images experienced both advances and retreats, and sometimes even sparked crises, as the controversies surrounding the reception of new versions of the catechism, whether before or after publication, can attest. Historians’ Discretion Unfortunately, changes in the way religious knowledge was transmitted and religious rituals were taught – I will avoid speaking in terms of the transmission of faith – have not been very well studied from a historical perspective. Naturally, theologians and academic experts in religious education have made this area of research their own. They have oriented themselves towards an analysis of practice, of the content and type of message being transmitted, with a special interest in new proposals better suited to contemporary conditions. Consequently, their work has been closely associated with the disciplines of sociology, psychology, and education, as the social sciences provide a better understanding of the terrain and help evaluate the effectiveness of new proposals. By contrast, historians have kept their distance from this field of inquiry. A few major projects, such as studies of the production of catechisms, were undertaken in the 1980s from the general

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perspective of the history of the book and involved collaborations between historians and theologians.11 As pastoral difficulties have increased, interest has shifted to educational and theological questions. Furthermore, from the perspective of the history of religion in Quebec, the confessional nature of the school system has remained the focus of research, more so than the actual content of the religious education programs offered to students. The issue would help focus the criticisms levelled by pioneers in the field, who were often actors in or heirs to the Quiet Revolution, while the debate surrounding confessional schooling in a context of religious pluralism has underlain the interpretations of more recent studies. However, a much broader historical perspective is necessary if we are to fully understand the process of secularization in Quebec. And in taking such a perspective, paying close attention to those actors in the field of education who had direct contact with children, can provide particularly interesting insights. The New School Critiques the Catechism From the sixteenth century onward, the structuring of religious knowledge within the Catholic Church passed through the catechism. In Quebec, the catechism approved by religious authorities and used during the first half of the twentieth century maintained the scholastic model of the traditional catechism, with its closed sets of questions and answers which reflected the hierarchical relationships between teacher and student, between priest and child. It was criticized for using a vocabulary which was too theological, abstruse, and poorly adapted to the age of the children being taught. Nevertheless, this form of teaching, which also served as a model for the first school textbooks, had a proven track record. Gilbert Adler has spoken in terms of a lost paradigm.12 But the book in question corresponded to a civilization which was dissolving in the face of a system of public education which emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. It nevertheless persisted for another century, right up until the 1960s, before disappearing. The desire for educational reform began to undermine the well-used practice of rote learning which had made it possible to unite the worlds of the illiterate and literate. The active methods which began emerging at the end of the nineteenth century encouraged a reflection on the teaching of the catechism. The works of European thinkers were attentively read in the religious communities of Quebec, and these communities were extensively

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involved in the public and private sectors of the school system, which was defined by its confessional nature. The secular clergy also had an important presence among teaching faculty at all levels, including normal schools and universities. Church representatives could intervene in different capacities and draw on previously recognized teaching experiences to advance the cause of educational reform in the field of religious education. One of the key figures of this movement in the first part of the twentieth century was both a voice for reform and a figure of authority who could grant legitimacy to new initiatives: Mgr FrançoisXavier Ross (1869–1945). ‘Comprehension before Learning’ For many years, Ross was the principal of the Rimouski Normal School and, in 1916, wrote the textbook Pédagogie théorique et pratique. The latter was used in all of Quebec’s teachers’ colleges for a period of more than thirty years.13 By placing the psychological development of the child in the forefront, Ross’s approach marked an important step in the development of the field of education in Quebec. The innovation was significant not so much because of what was being taught but because of the methods through which knowledge was being transmitted: ‘Although he maintained conformity with Catholic philosophy and educational doctrines, Mgr Ross’s book represented progress when compared to the one it replaced … It was the introduction of child psychology which allowed Mgr Ross to open up an important breach in the framework which had hitherto defined knowledge in the field of education.’14 His method involved starting with the children themselves, understanding the latter by studying their context and not by imposing the authority of new knowledge. ‘When teaching, the teacher must arouse the interest of the children, calling on their senses, maintaining their attention, channelling their learning from the concrete to the abstract and from the simple to the complex, coordinating acquired knowledge by regularly drawing on methods of analysis and synthesis.’15 Teachers in training used his textbook and were exposed to one of the most innovative programs of the first part of the twentieth century, that of 1923, in which the new bishop proposed a ‘school for life.’ In doing so, he warned against the cult of memory, a warning which encompassed the teaching of the catechism: ‘Comprehension before learning. A formulation, in and of itself, does not penetrate the spirit; and in the case of religious education, it cannot reach the soul: a formulation

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alone will never be capable of saving a soul.’16 Thus, memorization became a key point of debate, because it corresponded to an ecclesiastical vision which was crumbling. It formed the basis of a relationship of authority which placed the layperson in a posture of obedience and passivity. A two-pronged project motivated religious educators: drawing children toward an attitude of responsible Christians whose acts reflected their beliefs, both learned and expressed; and encouraging them to express their faith through social and religious commitment, as advocated by the Catholic Action movement. Mgr Ross was particularly attached to the first proposition.17 As the Bishop of Gaspé since 1922, a de facto member of the Catholic Committee, and the leader of several of its subcommittees, he could promote his ideas and support teachers who shared them. A reformer in the Catholic tradition, like many of those who led the first Quiet Revolution,18 Mgr Ross actively supported individual initiatives, like those of Sr Saint-Ladislas, who integrated projects developed in Europe and who created interest for those experiments which sought to audibly express the Christian message within societies which were moving away from it. Another Method for Teaching the Petits du Royaume For in spite of everything, Quebec in the 1930s witnessed many initiatives which sought to modernize teaching methods and improve teachers’ skills.19 Several teaching communities made it a priority, like the Brothers of the Christian Schools and the Clerics of Saint Viator.20 If church authorities were incapable of agreeing on reforms to the catechism, educational experts described methods for assimilating the book and even for getting around it, methods which bore witness to a resolutely existential orientation to the question of religious education. The work of Sr Saint-Ladislas is an example which became officially recognized and broadly distributed through the religion program introduced in 1948. A member of the Sisters of the Assomption de la Très Sainte Vierge de Nicolet, Marguerite Gauthier, who adopted the religious name Sr Saint-Ladislas (1897–1949), took advantage of her teaching experience and used the schools administered by her community as laboratories where she tested her reforms to the catechism. If the Sisters of the Assumption began in central Quebec, they also founded convents on the margins of francophone settlement in regions such as the Ottawa

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Valley as well as in the United States, where they accompanied FrenchCanadian migrants seeking work in the industries of New England. Sr Saint-Ladislas was the first woman to enter the masculine world of catechism reform. She did so protected by a slew of diplomas which guaranteed her legitimacy, including a licence in education from the University of Montreal (1934) and a doctorate.21 She trained novices in religious education and, in the process, experimented with new methods. Beginning in 1938, she put together a series of volumes titled Aux Petits du Royaume. These teachers’ guides were approved by the Catholic Education Committee. They placed a great importance on concentric teaching. Beginning with the students and their surroundings, the lesson plan put aside the order of the questions as they appeared in the catechism in favour of a more coherent message and the presentation of a synthesis organized around a central idea. This stressed a loving relationship with God. Aux Petits du Royaume: essai pratique de méthodologie catéchistique provided complete lesson plans which were developed around notions of anticipated truths, achieved truths, and lived truths. Using examples drawn from the children’s experiences and anecdotes which came up during discussion, teachers were to lead their classes to the central content of the lesson. Teachers were often encouraged to make use of an outline developed progressively in the form of a table. Very precise instructions on the vocabulary and even the tone of voice to be used, as well as pre-formulated questions, guided the teacher. It is easy to imagine many teachers repeating these lessons verbatim, and recorded accounts indicate that this tool was a relief for many as they faced the challenge of teaching a very delicate subject. Sr Saint-Ladislas had sought out ‘a more lively program of religious instruction, one which was free of all formality and, as a result, more likely to inspire a voluntary adherence on the part of the children.’22 The collection had the advantage of ‘directing’ the subject matter and thereby carefully guiding the work of teachers with a text approved by religious authorities. Thus, the theological content was validated. From the introduction of the active method there also flowed the production of teaching materials for the students. The insufficiencies of the official catechism and the disappointing results of its teaching led to other textbooks being put in the hands of schoolchildren. Sr Saint-Ladislas produced a set of workbooks, the Cahiers d’enfant du bon bon Dieu, to complement her method (1939). Designed for students in grades 1–6, these booklets included many

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drawings, encouraged personal expression on the part of the children, and suggested they practise silent prayer. Each workbook was tested in the classroom before publication. The impact of the images, the level of vocabulary, and the relevance of anecdotes were confirmed and the workbooks modified accordingly. Keeping the children in mind also meant referring to their French-Canadian culture. In 1945, Sr Saint-Ladislas became an associate member of the subcommittee of the Commission of Programs and Textbooks, created with the objective of producing a program of study for all seven years of elementary religion classes.23 Few corrections were made to her work, and she continued to draw on the methods proposed in Aux Petits du Royaume. The religion section of the new program was released in 1947. The lessons were organized around five main themes: ‘1. There is a God. I am a child of God. God speaks to me through the Church. 2. I must know my Father in Heaven. 3. I must love Him and serve Him. 4. I need His help to know Him, love Him, and serve Him. 5. After death, I will be happy with Him, or miserable without Him, for eternity.’24 This was the ‘program for a Christian life.’ The general teaching instructions reveal the Christ-centric orientation of the method. The children first had to become witnesses for Christ, to be inspired by his example in a personal and voluntary process. An existentially demanding course of religious education takes a form which demands the commitment of the teacher and, in return, that of the student: ‘In brief, the role of the teacher of religion is to offer the student a Christian mentality, Christian habits, and Christian activities; it is a matter of making the student a living copy of Jesus Christ, associated with his religion and his apostolate.’25 The teacher was given a challenge: ‘To achieve his goals, the teacher must: instruct, convince, mobilize.’ It was no longer an argument of authority, but the irresistible nature of the model: Christ, through his love, would convince and even convert the child: To become a real norm and life practice, the truth must be accepted as such by the children: they must be directed by love. This will occur only if the teacher presents the doctrine of the gospel as a splendid life ideal which responds to the strongest desires of the children, in the person of Jesus Christ, a teacher infinitely better and wise, a reliable guide, an attractive and dynamic model.26

Seduction had replaced fear in the presentation of the message. The

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objective of this teaching program was less a matter of conforming to moral norms than the need for the love of one’s neighbour to prevail. He [the teacher] will present life not so much as a great sacrifice but as a beautiful and joyous adventure: an adventure where one becomes capable of giving oneself to others for the love of the good Lord; the virtue of the effort, less as a difficult and painful sacrifice than as a good opportunity to please the good Lord, as well as one’s neighbour, to make them happy!27

Sr Saint-Ladislas made this one of the points of the law of adaptation to fundamental human nature: the desire for happiness. She thereby linked adaptation with the ‘specific mentality of her students.’ Teachers were to build their lesson plan by beginning with the areas of interest of the child. They needed not only to know the broad strokes of the child’s development, but also to integrate the sociocultural context of the children into their class. ‘The planting of the mustard seed can and must become part of the process: it could become the seeds of the maple tree … We would not speak of electricity to the young settler who knows only the light of the oil or gas lamp.’28 The teacher must also adapt ‘to the supernatural life of regenerated souls,’ while not hesitating to instruct them in the mysteries and to show them the example of Jesus. The second law of the method was that of the unification of the instructional content around a single goal: ‘help discover, love, and serve God, the Father! Ensure for human beings divine life, eternal happiness.’29 A single truth would be revealed by the lesson, in order to facilitate learning. This process had as its corollary the progressive nature of learning. ‘It is therefore a completely indispensable condition of success that the order of the steps to be taken be respected, according to the intellectual and emotional development of the students and the order of the truths to be taught according to the logic of the doctrine.’30 Progression was found ‘in the knowledge gained, in emotional maturity, in the revealing of the doctrine’: ‘To provide an appropriate understanding of mortal sin, by inspiring a supernatural fear of it, one must teach the students about the infinite goodness of God, the value of sanctifying grace.’31 This was the sole, yet truly significant, example used to illustrate the logic of the doctrine. One needed to move away from a religion of fear and from the obligations inspired by it. The new program instructed teachers in how to prepare the catechism lesson and its ‘general functioning,’ which was a first for religious education. This functioning included four phases: 1) Observation

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based on concrete examples; 2) Reflection through discussion to enrich the method using additional examples provided by the teacher or the students, the Gospels, drawings, all of which help with the next step; 3) Transposing – ‘the student will thus be able to achieve a loving understanding of the things being taught’;32 4) The expression which ultimately followed was devoted to the assimilation of ‘supernatural truth.’ A prayer, a resolution, or an exercise would close the lesson. They allowed the teacher to confirm the success of their teaching and could take various forms such as drawing, modelling, acting or reading, exercises, or creative writing. Sr Saint-Ladislas sought to have the students express themselves. She was not a fan of true-or-false tests. She called for students to sing, to recite readings, and to break from the routine by holding catechism parties. Religious history and Liturgy were mobilized to present a living Christ, with a new theology being introduced in the process: a resurrected Jesus, living in the middle of our twentieth century, acting in our midst, through us, in us. By what unfortunate complications, by what reversal, as total as it is disastrous, have we been able to make religious education an abstract subject without warmth when, more than any other, it has made available the most lively methods, when it may have even demanded such methods, as the only ones which correspond to its content?33

The memorization of the catechism was therefore only secondary and appeared only at the very end of the learning process. The program rejected the memorization of the definitions of words appearing in the prayers. The teacher was called upon to present prayer as a ‘conversation with the Good Lord’ instead of insisting on proper pronunciation.34 The program in experiential catechesis relied on the familial metaphor of the love of God. There were links between the affirmations of the program and the approach of the Catholic Action movement titled ‘Voir, Juger, Agir’ (See, Judge, Act) such as the importance of a personal emotional connection which was meant to be established between the child and God.35 It was a matter of training the actors, who would be militant Christians in Quebec society rather than passive Catholics. Sr SaintLadislas worked to re-engage parents in the learning process through the workbooks, and she deplored their indifference in the matter. Throughout this period, Sr Saint-Ladislas was active in a network of religious education reformers. Although she kept her distance from

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Charles-Eugène Roy, a canonist theologian who had also argued in favour of the inductive method,36 she was close to Mgr Ross, and he promoted her works. She was familiar with the European literature and found inspiration in the work of Marie Fargues, as well as that of Françoise Derkenne. She corresponded with the Religieuses des Écoles chrétiennes de Vorselaar (Herentals), who had copies of her works. A close comparison with the writings of Marie Fargues, in particular, would be a worthy undertaking, as well as with the Belgian works.37 The circulation of ideas and the sharing of concepts among authors were common and widespread during the first half of the twentieth century.38 Salvation through Europe? Thus, Quebec witnessed the same debates as other Western societies over how best to transmit the religious message and deliver religious education. This was the case even if the strong presence of the Catholic establishment in the school system left the church in a reasonably comfortable position. Indeed, the confessional nature of the school system might appear to be behind the ability of the bishops to resist changes to the catechism. Yet developments in Europe show how initiatives on the part of the high clergy were simultaneous on both sides of the Atlantic. The dioceses and the seminaries appear to have been more timid; and it was not really until the mid-1950s that the institutional structure of the teaching of the catechism was seriously discussed. Even if the decree Provido Sane, issued by the Roman Curia in 1935, made it obligatory for all prelates to establish offices in their dioceses responsible for religious education, another ten years would pass before the first such office appeared in the Diocese of Joliette. A key actor oversaw its development: Gérard-Marie Coderre, who was also an ardent defender of the works of Sr Saint-Ladislas. Mgr Gérard-Marie Coderre: The Trailblazer In 1952, the bishops of Quebec put Coderre in charge of the Provincial Catechetical Office, an institution responsible for encouraging the renewal of religious instruction through the development of new textbooks and through improvements in the training of teachers. He instigated inter-institutional exchanges with European centres. He also acted as president of the Episcopal Commission on Religious Instruc-

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tion. At the time, he had served as co-adjutor bishop of Saint-Jean-deQuébec since September 1951 and became a bishop in February 1955. An urgent need was identified to establish an introductory Bible and catechism class. It was a matter of accelerating the pace of reform to prevent the difficult religious situation present in European countries from reproducing itself in Quebec, but the responses developed in Europe were the ones that were adopted. Thus, the opening of a public secondary school system in Quebec led to the borrowing of a series of proven textbooks. Mgr Coderre favoured a French-language collection published under the direction of the Jesuit Father Georges Delcuve, founder of the Lumen Vitae Centre in Belgium. Témoins du Christ would be ‘appropriated’ as part of its Canadian printing:39 ‘At the urging of His Excellency Monseigneur Coderre, president of the Episcopal Commission on Religious Education, the bishops have approved the collection “Témoins du Christ” as the official textbook for secondary school students.’40 The development of a secondary school program, at a time when private classical colleges had hitherto monopolized the education of adolescents, required an official tool which would reflect the will, always present, of a single text.41 This was the justification that was offered by the Catholic Committee:42 The textbooks which will be used in the proposed program are those drawn from the series Témoins du Christ, prepared by the Belgian Jesuits. This series has been chosen for the following reasons: 1 The coverage of the doctrine is reliable and complete; 2 The material is presented in a progressive, lively, attractive, positive, and very dynamic manner; 3 It would be easy to develop a Canadian edition adapted to our reality; 4 A close examination of the content of the series reveals a welcome continuity with the grade 7 religion program. In fact, in each year of the secondary program, one finds a further development of one of the subjects briefly addressed at the end of the elementary program.

Aside from a rigorous treatment of Catholic dogma, the collection covered a series of subjects already included in the secondary school program, as underscored by the secretary of the Department of Public Instruction: ‘The new textbook Témoins du Christ is the only resource to be used for the study of the catechism, the Gospels, apologetics, Scripture, Church history, philosophy, family education, and civics.’43 Fur-

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thermore, the method which supported the series was that developed by the Catholic Action movement: ‘Voir, juger, agir.’ Mgr Coderre’s relations with the Lumen Vitae Centre and its director, Père Delcuve, involved not only negotiating for the use of the textbooks but also contributing to the international profile of the Belgian training centre. Organized around the theme ‘Religious education for our time,’ the international Anvers congress organized by the Lumen Vitae Centre, which was held 1–12 August 1956, brought together 450 participants from 32 countries, including 17 Canadians. Mgr Coderre committed to referring Canadian candidates to Father Delcuve for the latter’s project of an Intrernational Catechetical Year, which would begin the following year. An extensive written correspondence between these two leaders allowed the Jesuit priest to test his new project and to share his concerns with regard the the material challenges which presented themselves over the course of the project.44 Mgr Coderre made sure that Canadians would be invited to teach in Brussels.45 The Bishop of Saint-Jean created a system for the training in Europe of future catechism teachers and introduced European professors to Quebec. He sent each of his collaborators to pursue their studies first in France, at the Institut supérieur de pastorale catéchétique (ISPC), which had quickly opened its doors to foreign students after having begun as a training centre essentially for French teachers; and then in Belgium, following the first International Catechetical Year, held in 1957, as part of the Lumen Vitae International Catechetical and Pastoral Institute. That same year, the Provincial Catechetical Office expanded its objectives by placing Mgr Coderre in charge of all ‘facilitation, promotion, and organization of religious education in the province of Quebec.’ The Office coordinated courses with different authorities involved with the religion courses: the Department of Public Instruction for male teaching orders; the Faculty of Arts for the classical colleges sector; and the universities, in particular the University of Montreal, which in 1955 founded the Superior Institute of Religious Sciences. Mr. Coudreau of the ISPC and Father Van Caster of the Lumen Vitae Centre, among others, were invited to Quebec and attracted large crowds; sessions were held for clergy active at the parish level. The extent to which the institutions were influenced by the reforms in religious education was also reflected in the institutional interactions which took place within the confessional school system. ‘The OCQ works in close collaboration with the religious subcommittees of the Department of Public Instruction in order to facilitate

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their work and make them more efficient.’46 Mgr Coderre was president of the subcommittee on religion, and several members of the Office sat on the committee. Its meetings were even held in the same rooms as those used by the Office. ‘The activities of the subcommittee on religion were in large part the result of the work of the Provincial Office which allowed the committee to benefit from its secretarial services for organizing meetings, writing reports, reviewing documents on the agenda.’47 The permanent members of the Office naturally participated in the work of the subcommittee, as a letter from the members of the Episcopal Committee on Religious Instruction demonstrates: In the month of January, the Provincial Catechetical Office will welcome a new permanent member in the person of the Reverend Father Gaétan, of the Brothers of St Gabriel. This man of the cloth has good experience in the field of education; he has also served as a teacher at his community’s junior seminary. Last year, he studied at the Lumen Vitae Centre in the teaching of religion. Brother Gaétan will be principally responsible for the publication of aids for the teaching of the catechism aimed at teachers of religion in elementary schools. We believe that he will be able to provide precious assistance to the subcommittee on religion in this area. We ask you for the authorization to accept him as a member of this subcommittee.48

Just before the writing of a new program for elementary schools began, the bishop clearly outlined his selection criteria for new members to the Superintendent of Public Education: ‘If you accept a new proposal, I would ask you for the possibility of adding new members to our team. They would be chosen among former students of the university-level programs in religious education in Brussels and Paris. If you agree, after consultation with the bishops, next December I will send you the names of the potential candidates.’49 The subcommittee renewed its membership according to his criteria as evidenced by the presence of Auxiliatrices in October 1963. Sr St Claude, who was back from the Lumen Vitae Centre, replaced Sr Marie-Luc, who was leaving for two years of study in Europe. The provincial Office sensitized and encouraged the initiatives of church authorities by creating positions within the province’s dioceses responsible for religious education and by developing training for catechism teachers. It developed the new programs and textbooks of the 1960s. The organization’s central role in facilitating the renewal of religious education explains its key role in the European policy of training

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future teachers and developers of religious education in Quebec. Furthermore, in Paris as in Brussels, a community spirit developed which extended upon their return into a very tight and welcoming network within Quebec: ‘At Christmastime, Mgr Coderre gathered together in Saint Jean all of the graduates of Lumen Vitae and of the Institut de Paris. It was a veritable little class reunion.’50 Using European Methods to Overcome Resistance? Quebec has always been open to religious initiatives from Europe; its contacts with Belgium and France can be explained in large part in terms of a common language. The two bishops whose careers are described above had clearly expressed nationalist sentiments with regard to the defence of the French language or the choice of Témoins du Christ, instead of an American collection, in the case of Mgr Coderre. However, for Coderre, as with many defenders of religious education, the quality of training offered in Europe reinforced the legitimacy of their actions in Quebec, since strong opposition remained among church officials, as well as among the lower clergy, to a reform of the official catechism. By placing graduates in key positions upon their return to Canada, a common vision developed and imposed its authority over local training of religious educators and the development of teaching tools. The project of the Lumen Vitae International Catechetical and Pastoral Institute promoted a deeper understanding of catechetical methods and of the context in which the Christian message needed to be grounded. During a reflection on the relevance of the name of the Institute and its impact in English, these fundamental orientations were reiterated: This title – and certain implicit options it assumes – is less appropriate to a pluralist world, the Institute being named, no doubt first of all to promote evangelism, but also to attract interest in religion (even among non-believers) and to promote an ‘open’ humanism (compared with the exploratory ‘mission’ of the Quebec government whose representatives we have welcomed) … our contemporaries – especially youth – demand that attention to Man be paid alongside attention to God.51

The links between the project and the Catholic Action movement became significant in the home country of Cardinal Joseph Cardjin. Since the first edition of the International Catechetical Year (1957–8),

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the programs were primarily addressed to members of the clergy, with degrees in theology, or to candidates – men and women – with equivalent training. Teaching experience and involvement in the Catholic Action movement improved a candidate’s chances of being admitted. Over a quarter of the Quebec students whose program of study I am following arrived in Brussels with experience as Catholic Action chaplains, particularly with the Jeunesse étudiante catholique (JEC); in teaching establishments; or even at the diocesan level, as was the case with one brother of Saint-Gabriel, who had directed the JEC of the Montreal Diocese in 1937–8. The youngest among them had participated in the Jeunesse étudiante during their studies. Specialized Catholic Action represented the pastoral soil in which the itinerary of Quebec students who completed their training in Europe took root. At the beginning of the academic year in October 1958, the papal nuncio to Belgium and Luxembourg, Mgr Forni, called on the students of Lumen Vitae ‘to better know the message of Christ to be subsequently able to deeply educate authentic Christians.’52 This authenticity would soon be judged against involvement in society, much less than regular Sunday worship.53 The Institute in Brussels sought male and female candidates who had proved their dynamism through their accomplishments and their intellectual qualities through their studies so as to ensure that they would find their way into positions where they would influence religious education in their home country. A document from the 1960s suggests that the desired result was achieved. It shows that, for Canada alone, the Institute produced eighteen directors of religious education and sixty directors of pastoral care or catechetical institutes or centres (the figures were six and twenty-five for the United States). University training centres in Quebec based their operations on those of their European counterparts in order to gain legitimacy and justify their existence. Norbert Fournier, the organizer of the teaching program in catechetical pastoral theology at the Superior Institute of Religious Sciences at the University of Montreal, and Jacques Laforest, the cofounder of the Institute of Catechesis at Laval University in Quebec City, received their diplomas in Paris, in 1954, and at the Lumen Vitae International Institute, in 1958, respectively. This teaching community was depended upon to harmonize the two university programs. A letter by Father Jean Larchevêque, SJ, reprinted in the Journal des Anciens no. 2 (Fall 1960), mentions the establishment of a coordinating committee between the two universi-

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ties. Alumni invited their European teachers – like Fathers Van Caster, Ranwez, and Godin, SJ – to give courses. Professeur Paul Hitz was hired by Laval University. In the plan of the director of Lumen Vitae, the new institutes established at Quebec universities were meant to adsorb the demand for training created by the reform of the catechism in the mid-1960s. However, Europe continued to attract students to such an extent that by the mid-1960s, Father Delcuve had to refuse some of the toonumerous applications from Canadians which threatened to unbalance the international composition of the cohorts. An age limit of forty was put in place to control the influx of Canadians. The director wanted to focus on the recruitment of future directors of catechism programs and turned down applications from secondary school teachers by stressing the importance of acculturation.54 Take, for example, this rejection letter forwarded to the Provincial of the Servite Order: Several members of the Council agree that Father … could find the training opportunities he seeks at one of the Canadian institutes. We greatly appreciate these institutes. One of them is led by a former student of the Lumen Vitae. In some respects, notably that of adaptation to the Canadian context, they are superior to the Lumen Vitae International Institute.55

He also sought to make room for students from developing countries: ‘However, we find ourselves with a great number of applications. Out of a hundred available places, we have given about twenty to Canadians. The Council decided that it must grant the last available places to much poorer countries.’56 This two-pronged argument was used by Mgr Coderre as early as 1962: We receive a large number of applications from Canada. With two institutes being established in Canada, it appears to us that, out of respect for these institutes and out of concern for poorer countries, we must ensure that there is a better distribution of available places. This in no way diminishes our interest in Canada and our bond with all those who are doing magnificent work toward the renewal of religious education in the country.57

Faced with the pressure from Canadian applicants, which worried the director, the latter sought to recruit a Canadian professor to adapt the Institute’s teaching to the culture of Canada. The Provincial of the Jesuit Order who was approached for the position could only point out

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his own difficulties with recruitment and the shortage of staff for the colleges.58 Father Delcuve compared his work with the Canadians to that which he had undertaken with South American students to whom he had been able to provide with professors from their own continent. Conciliar decisions supported his interest in the Third World and the recruitment of students from there. If he was disappointed in not being able to provide courses adapted to Canadian culture in his programs, he was even more disappointed in the negative response from the Canadian bishops to his request for financial support for the development and expansion of the Institute. This infatuation, which made Canadians the largest group of foreign students up until the middle of the 1970s, when they were unseated by the South Americans, also reflects the need to separate themselves from a too-rigid church hierarchy at home. For the pioneers, it was also an opportunity to discover an alternative theology. They were further motivated by the challenge of modernizing their church in order to make it more legitimate in the eyes of the population. At a personal level, they lived their experience as an opportunity for pause and reflection in the course of their spiritual development. ‘This was a new beginning’ for these young representatives of the church and it was in this spirit, filled with hope and optimism, that they returned to North America. From Quebec to Canada and the United States This detailed introduction to the religious education reforms undertaken in Quebec might make it appear an isolated and very localized case within the North American context. It was nothing of the sort. European training, especially at the Lumen Vitae International Institute, was open to English-speaking Canadian students and to Americans. Father Delcuve was in contact with several Canadian bishops including Mgr Emmett Carter, Bishop of London and later of Toronto, who had earlier been very active in the education of English-speaking Catholics in Quebec. They corresponded, met in person, and Mgr Carter wrote for the journal Lumen Vitae. The latter raised his concerns related to the catechism with Father Delcuve. He insisted that English-speaking Canadians be well represented in Brussels. In London, he founded the Divine Word International Centre. Former students reported to Father Delcuve on the advances made by the new catechism in Ontario, including the creation of new teaching programs and materials, as well as the train-

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ing of instructors. An Ursuline Sister described the organization of the reform: conferences, internships with teachers at all levels, clergy, and parents. This general mobilization played out as it had in Quebec and the other Canadian provinces in the Maritimes and the West:59 I am to attend a three-day High School Catechetics workshop in Toronto from Aug. 31st. to Sept. 2nd. and Fr. van Caster’s Course from Sept. 7th. to 18th. so you can see I am not eating my bread in idleness! We are looking forward very much to meeting one of our ‘Lumen Vitae’ professors again.60

Attached was a clipping from a 1965 issue of The Canadian Register (Kingston, Ontario), which mentioned the recruitment of former students from Europe by school boards: ‘Father John O’Flaherty, London diocesan director of religious education, announced that five catechists have been hired by Catholic school boards in Windsor, Sarnia, and London. The catechists will act as religious consultants for teachers presently teaching religion in these areas.’ Four of the sisters had been trained at Lumen Vitae and the fifth at Strasbourg. The director for the diocese had just welcomed the group from Brussels. In the same province in 1971, Francis Reed, in addition to his functions as director of the Office of Catechesis in Sault Sainte Marie, oversaw all of the officials responsible for religious education in Ontario.61 In Europe, a true common catechetical culture was created, reinforced by a very rich student community. This helps explain how the series Viens vers le Père, which replaced the Quebec catechism of 1951, also became the catechism for all Catholic children across Canada and the United States. The original writing team, which produced the first three volumes, corresponding to grades 1–3 - Viens vers le Père, Célébrons ses merveilles, and Rassemblés dans l’amour – brought together three diocesan directors of training in the teaching of religion: Jean-Paul Bérubé of Rimouski, Marcel Caron of Sainte-Anne de La Pocatière, and Réginald Marsolais of Joliette. The first of the three had attended the Second International Catechetical Year in 1958–9, while Marcel Caron had preceded him at the opening of this training centre in Brussels. The third had graduated from the ISPC in 1955. Not feeling that they had the necessary expertise in education to write new catechism, they decided to associate themselves with a nun involved in the training of religious educators.62 Based on an article published in the journal Lumen Vitae, they chose Sr Marie-de-la-Visitation (Françoise Darcy), a sister of the

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Auxiliatrices du Purgatoire in France who had attended the Hautclair Centre where internships at the Lumen Vitae Centre were organized. Opportunely present in Montreal, she joined the team and played a key role. Perfectly bilingual, she had been educated in England and had made contacts in English Canada and the United States. The Quebec Catechetical Office proposed the new collection to their English-speaking counterparts. In the course of negotiations, and faced with a reticence to make use of a francophone collection, Françoise Darcy presented the program and found an ally in Francis Abbas of Sydney, Nova Scotia, an official trained in Brussels (1964–5), who tipped the scales in favour of the project. A team of translators was established. Françoise Darcy, who taught at the University of Montreal and at Fordham University, travelled throughout the United States to familiarize parents and teachers with the new religious education program based on the collection from Quebec. She was introduced by Father Kevin Lynch, president of the Paulist Press, the publishing house which took charge of the training workshops. At Fordham, she worked with Father Vincent Novack, SJ, who had been trained in Brussels during the Second International Catechetical Year, and who had just founded, with two colleagues, the Graduate Institute of Religious Education, in 1964. The linkages become increasingly complex as each member of the team responsible for the new Quebec catechism is studied individually. Take the example of Paul Tremblay, a graduate of the Lumen Vitae Centre (1961–2), who returned to his home diocese of Chicoutimi as director and coordinator for the teaching of religion at the primary level. He would also serve as director of the Diocesean Catechetical Office before becoming the director of the Provincial Catechetical Office. He was part of the second team responsible for Viens vers le Père, and his experience would lead to his promotion to the position of Associate Minister for Catholic Faith within the Department of Education. The introduction of an English-language program at the Brussels Institute broadened recruitment in North America, and it was a common culture of religious education which challenged and overcame linguistic barriers. It should not be assumed that the result was a common response of the new catechism which would transcend cultures. Everything remained to be proven, but it nevertheless remained a common project, a language and a vision of Christian life which oriented the pastoral perspectives of students. Furthermore, for many, they were living, through contact with clergy who were involved, the effervescence of the Second Vatican Council.

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Conclusion The database which I am constructing will permit, in a few months’ time, the precise reconstruction of this Quebec religious education network, and I hope that through collaborations it will be possible to identify the links established across North America. In this paper, I have tried to show the importance of the education sector in the development of a new religious education program, stimulated by psycho-educational research and the reform of academic programs. The forerunners of teachers in training and their involvement with specialized Catholic Action as chaplains facilitated the assimilation of the values which spread from the Second Vatican Council (1962–5). It has been possible to show how the religious education movement had set the stage for this aggiornamento and helped with the reception of the Council. In the first part of the twentieth century, the European religious education movement, which adopted the inductive method, developed by the active school, inspired influential educational experts in Quebec. These experts were in step with and even in direct contact with the reformers. They worked for the transfer of the methods, for their introduction in the school system, and, to a lesser extent, for the training of secular clergy. There was little temporal distance with the reform of the catechism in France, where it was also blocked by supporters of the traditional catechism based on questions and answers.63 The training of the future Quebec representatives of European religious education allowed them to directly participate in the religious effervescence of the postwar years. These international studies marked the rupture they made with the old order of things. The first interviews evoked the older discourse of the ‘grande noirceur’ of religious education which was opposed to the ‘révélation’ of the new model of religious education. The enthusiasm of the first cohorts was widely shared and explains the rush of registrations described in the exchange of correspondence between the program directors. The prestige of European training was a tool for promoting the new methods in religious education. However, and this is an avenue which needs to be further explored, there are certain indications that there was possibly a lack of adaptation of these European models to the Quebec context. The criticisms levelled at the collection Témoins du Christ, as well as the annoyance with regard to a feeling of superiority on the part of students who had studied in Paris and Brussels upon their return to Canada, provide some clues.

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Nevertheless, it must be remembered that this movement in religious education developed in a context of conservative resistance, and that Mgr Coderre was called to Rome when Viens vers le Père was published. He suggested that he would surrender his pectoral cross if the collection were withdrawn. However, the archives and personal accounts overwhelmingly reflect a collective climate of optimism and a will to pursue new initiatives among these cohorts of students. While freeing themselves from a restrictive yolk, they sought to remake the world and their church. With confidence in human beings, they believed they could reconcile the latter with their society. But society would not follow them. And the decline in religious practice which followed, in the 1970s, underscored the discrepancy between the hoped-for results and the waning legitimacy of the church. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Catholic ecclesiastical circles, whether or not their thinking was expressed within categories framed by a diagnosis of secularization, considered the search for alternative methods and words to present the essential elements of faith, religious practice, and morality to children a necessary task. For the historian, the observation of Catholic efforts to reform catechism, and the church’s elaboration of new methods to teach religion to children and young people, offer an important vantage point by which to assess the anxieties of religious leaders over a growing lack of involvement by parents in the religious education of their children. In this way, we can understand what was at stake in the debate between defenders of the status quo and those who sought to make the Catholic message more relevant. The latter group believed that catechetical reform would encourage a more effective interiorization of the church’s precepts, which would counteract declining religious practice. In studying these attempts to reform religious education, we posit that these efforts constituted one of the major barriers against secularization.

NOTES I would like to warmly thank Mr Steven Watt, who translated this text. 1 Mary Coke, Le mouvement catéchétique: De Jules Ferry à Vatican II (Paris: Centurion, 1988). 2 É.-Martin Meunier and Jean-Philippe Warren, Sortir de la ‘Grande noirceur’: L’horizon ‘personnaliste’ de la Révolution tranquille (Sillery: Septentrion, 2002).

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3 É.-Martin Meunier, Le pari personnaliste: Modernité et catholicisme au XXe siècle (Montreal: Fides, 2007). 4 Jean Gould, ‘Des bons pères aux experts,’ Société, Le chaînon manquant 20/21 (Summer 1999): 111–88. 5 Louise Bienvenue, Quand la jeunesse entre en scène (Montreal: Boréal, 2003). 6 Lucie Piché, Femmes et changement social au Québec: L’apport de la Jeunesse ouvrière catholique féminine, 1931–1966 (Quebec City: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2003). 7 Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931– 1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). 8 Gilles Routhier, ed., Vatican II au Canada: Enracinement et réception (Montreal: Fides, 2001); Vatican II. Herméneutique et réception (Montreal: Fides, 2006). 9 The project of which this paper forms a part is financed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. I wish to thank Father Benoît Malvaux, the director who granted me access to the archives of the Lumen Vitae Institute for my research, as well as Fathers Paul Tihon, André Fossion, and Albert Lorent. The digitization of the documentation was made possible thanks to the generous collaboration of Denis Choinière in July 2008. The work of digitization has continued this year along with the classification of the archives with the help of Marie-Ève Poulain, a student in Archival Studies at Laval University. In May 2009, I was able to consult the files of the students who had attended the ISPC thanks to the gracious authorization of its director, François Moog, and with the collaboration of Joël Molinario. 10 Joseph Colomb was denounced by Rome in 1957. See Gilbert Adler and Gérard Vogeleisen, Un siècle de catéchèse en France 1893–1980: Histoire, déplacements, enjeux (Paris: Éditions Beauchesne, 1981); Jean-Dominique Durand, ‘La crise du catéchisme français de 1957,’ in Raymond Brodeur and Brigitte Caulier, eds., Enseigner le catéchisme: Autorités et institutions, XVIe– XXe siècles (Sainte-Foy/Paris: Les Presses de l’Université Laval/Cerf, 1997), 361–77; Joël Molinario, 1957: ‘L’affaire du catéchisme progressif’: Une analyse théologique (doctoral thesis in theology, Institut catholique de Paris, 2008). 11 Pierre Colin, Élisabeth Germain, Jean Joncheray, and Marc Venard, eds., Aux origines du catéchisme en France ([Paris], Desclée, 1989); Raymond Brodeur, ed., with Brigitte Caulier et al., Les catéchismes au Québec (1702–1963) (Quebec City/Paris: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, CNRS, 1990). 12 Gilbert Adler, ‘Le paradigme perdu!’ in Raymond Brodeur and Brigitte Caulier, eds., Enseigner le catéchisme: Autorités et institutions, XVIe–XXe siècles (Sainte-Foy/Paris: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, Cerf, 1997).

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13 Brigitte Caulier, ‘Catechism and Pedagogy: The Influence of the Emerging School System on the Teaching of Religion in Quebec, 1888–1924,’ Religious Education in History. Confessionnal and Inter-Confessional Experiences (Umea, Sweden: Kulturens frontlinjer. Skrifter fran forskningsprogrammet Kulturgräns norr, 2003), 53–71. Marcel Lajeunesse, ‘Un manuel de pédagogie marquant au Québec de la première moitié du XXe siècle. La pédagogie théorique et pratique de Mgr Ross,’ in Monique Lebrun, ed., Le manuel scolaire d’ici et d’ailleurs, d’hier à demain (Quebec City: Les Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2007) CD-ROM, 11 p. 14 M’Hammed Mellouki, Savoir enseignant et idéologie réformiste: La formation des maîtres (1930–1964) (Quebec City: IQRC, 1989), 70. 15 Ibid., 72. 16 ‘Programme de 1923. Appendice A. Programme d’études pour les écoles primaires élémentaires catholiques. Section 1. Organisation pédagogique des écoles. XVI. La culture de la mémoire,’ in Michel Allard and Lefebvre Bernard, eds., Les programmes d’études catholiques francophones du Québec. Des origines à aujourd’hui (Montreal: Les Éditions LOGIQUES, 1998), 335 (my emphasis). 17 My works on modern European Holy Virgin Congregations for laymen, which were immersed in the Reform of Catholicism, incite me to put in perspective the novelty of personalism currently being rediscovered by researchers. The human being and the individual also constituted a focus of pastoral work. The internalization of the process and the acting out of personal conversion through action were at the heart of this reform of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries which also influenced the American continent through religious communities like the Society of Jesus. See Brigitte Caulier, ‘Les confréries de dévotion et l’éducation de la foi,’ La Société canadienne d’histoire de l’Église catholique, Sessions d’étude 56 (1989): 97–112; ‘Bâtir l’Amérique des dévots. Les confréries de dévotion montréalaises depuis le Régime français,’ Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 46, no. 1 (Summer 1992): 45–66. 18 Fernand Dumont, ‘Les années 30: la première Révolution tranquille,’ in Fernand Dumont, Jean Hamelin, and Jean-Paul Montminy, eds., Idéologies au Canada français, 1930–1939 (Quebec City: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1978), 1–20. 19 Mélanie Lanouette, Faire vivre ou faire connaître: Les défis de l’enseignement religieux en contexte de renouveau pédagogique, 1936–1946 (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2002), 19ff. 20 The CSV published a methodological guide, Notre Père du ciel, at the end of the 1940s.

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21 Completed in 1945 with the title of Catéchisme et vie chrétienne, this thesis was actually a collection of articles she had published between September 1943 and March 1944 in the journal Enseignement primaire, with the aim of introducing teachers to her method. 22 As cited in Brodeur, ed., Les catéchismes au Québec, 291. 23 J. Gauthier, ‘Une production catéchistique pour le Québec des années 1930–1950. Marguerite Gauthier (Sœur Saint-Ladislas, a.s.v.)’ (PhD thesis, Université Laval, Quebec, 1996), 83. 24 Programme d’études des écoles primaires élémentaires 1948, Approved by the Catholic Committee of the Council of Public Instruction, 7 May 1948, 67. 25 Ibid., 28. 26 Ibid., 29. 27 Ibid., 34. 28 Ibid., 35. 29 Ibid., 36. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 37 32 Ibid., 40. 33 Ibid., 189. 34 See Adler and Vogeleisen, Un siècle de catéchèse en France, 220: a turn from ‘foi-connaissance’ to ‘foi-confiance.’ 35 This important approach to teaching reinforces the findings of Michael Gauvreau in Les origines catholiques de la Révolution tranquille (Montreal: Fides, 2008). 36 Author of the Petit catéchisme selon la méthode inductive (Quebec City: L’Action Catholique, 1933). 37 Patricia Quaghebeur, ‘L’influence du père Pope et de la Croisade Eucharistique sur l’éducation religieuse de la jeunesse en Flandre/Belgique (1920–1945),’ in Mélanie Lanouette, ed., Du ‘par coeur’ au coeur. Formation religieuse catholique et renouveau pédagogique en Europe et en Amérique du Nord au XXe siècle. Actes du colloque de Louvain-La-Neuve, 27 avril 2007 (LouvainLa-Neuve, UCL Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2009), 56-86. The outlines are very similar. 38 Adler and Vogeleisen, Un siècle de catéchèse en France, 157. 39 Raymond Brodeur, ed., Les catéchismes au Québec, 305. 40 Archives de l’Office catéchistique provincial [AOCP; later Office catéchistique du Québec, OCQ], Dossier historique-Enseignement religieux, Norbert Fournier, CSV, ‘Où en est notre mouvement catéchétique?’ [1964–5], 2. At the time, N. Fournier was responsible for catechetical pastoral care at the Institute of Religious Sciences at the University of Montreal.

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41 Raymond Brodeur and Brigitte Caulier, ‘L’enseignement religieux de Rome au Québec: des enjeux européens pour un espace québécois (XVIIe–XXe siècles),’ in Serge Courville and Normand Séguin, eds., Espace et culture/ Space and Culture (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1995), 145–54. 42 Minutes of the Catholic Committee of the Council of Public Instruction, meeting of 7 May 1952. 43 Archives nationales du Québec à Québec [ANQQ], Fonds du ministère de l’Éducation (E-13), 7C36-3603A, art. 125, dossier 955-52, Letter of 24 October 1952 from Department Secretary, B.-O. Filteau, to Mr Nadeau, Director of Educational Services. 44 Archives de l’Institut international Lumen vitae [AIILV] Letters from Father Delcuve to Mgr Coderre, 22 January 1957–13 October 1958. 45 AIILV, Letter from Mgr Coderre to Père Delcuve, 18 May 1957. 46 AOCP, folder: Corporation de l’OCQ [1969] (copy): III- La direction et l’administration de l’Office Catéchistique Provincial, 2. 47 AOCP, Dossier historique-Enseignement religieux. Mémoire sur le centre provincial de catéchisme adressé à tous les Évêques de la Province civile de Québec [Mgr Coderre] 1 June 1961, 3. 48 AOCP, Letter from GM Coderre, Lionel Audet, Auxiliary Bishop of Quebec, Charles-Omer Garant, Aux. Bishop of Quebec, Marius Paré, Aux. Bishop of Chicoutimi to the Superintendent, 8 December 1958. 49 ANQQ, E13/85-04-003, art. 125, #955-52, loc. 7C36-3603A, Letter from Mgr Coderre to Superintendent, 27 October 1961. 50 AIILV, Letter from Jacques Laforest to P. Delcuve, 25 January 1961 and Journal des anciens, 1957–1961, n. 3- Easter 1961, 28. 51 AIILV, Consultation. Project for a partial change in the name of the International Institute, reverse [1965]. 52 AIILV, Notes of Jean Laperrière OMI, 2–3. Draft copy of the Journal ‘Lumen Vitae,’ October 1958–February 1959 [n. 1], 20. Le P. L’Archevêque, SJ, took the initiative to create this journal, which still exists today under the title Courrier de Lumen Vitae. 53 In part, this change in points of reference reflected an elitism which was opposed to traditional religious practice, as highlighted by Michael Gauvreau in his description of the role of Catholic Action in the origins of the Quiet Revolution. But it was also a recognition of the active role of laypeople in the life of the Catholic Church. 54 AIILV, Letter from P. Delcuve to Fournier, 13 February 1964. Upon their discharge, the Canadian authorities identified the most significant weaknesses in the training of religious education teachers at the secondary

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Brigitte Caulier level. (Report on the activities of the National Catechetical Office for the year 1966–7. Document forwarded to P. Delcuve as a contribution to the 10th anniversary of the Institute.) AIILV, Letter from P. Delcuve to R.P. Alexis M. Brault, OSM, 28 February 1964. AIILV, Letter from P. Delcuve, 28 May 1964. AIILV, Letter from P. Delcuve to Mgr Coderre, 7 March 1962. AIILV, Letter from P. Jean d’Auteuil Richard, SJ, to P. Delcuve, 22 May 1962. Former students directed or worked at catechistic offices in Ottawa, SaultSainte-Marie, Hamilton, Sudbury, Edmonston, Halifax, Windsor, Winnipeg, Gravelbourg etc. AIILV, Letter from Mother M. Martin, OSU, to P. Delcuve, 29 August 1965, 2. AIILV, Letter to P. Delcuve, 17 February 1971. The following information was collected by Brigitte Caulier and Robert Hurley from Françoise Darcy-Bérubé and Jean-Paul Bérubé on 7–8 June 2007. Jacques Audinet, ‘Par-delà la pédagogie religieuse. Enjeux des changements de méthode,’ Transmettre la foi. La catéchèse dans l’Église. Les quatre fleuves 11 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1980), 131–48.

10 ‘The truly educated person will know his heritage’: Shifting Conceptions of Religious Education in the Ontario Public School System, 1940–1970 heather laing

Canada’s shift from a predominantly Christian culture to a secular one has not been simple, nor has movement been entirely in one direction. Historians of religion, seeking to label the times and places of the important catalysts of this change, must repeatedly meet with situations and people which do not fit easily into the smooth ‘secularization thesis.’ Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, historians like Ramsay Cook and David Marshall argued that Canada’s key period of secularization was around the turn of the twentieth century and that the churches themselves were complicit in their own downfall.1 In response, Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau have suggested that this characterization of the Canadian churches was short-sighted and ignored the evangelical influence and ingenuity in the social work of the early to mid-twentieth century.2 Taking the cue from British historians Hugh McLeod and Callum Brown,3 contemporary debate, as demonstrated by this volume, centres on the 1960s as the key period of ‘dechristianization’ in Canadian culture.4 The story of religious education in Ontario public schools lends itself well to this discussion because, at first glance, it would seem to provide an example of increased Christianity in an arena which had been largely free from direct religious presence. Until the Second World War, religious education was generally provided to public school students by clergymen after school hours. However, in 1944 Ontario Conservative Premier George Drew introduced new regulations requiring that religious (Christian) education be given two half-hour periods per week, and that it be taught by the classroom teacher. Thus, technically, Ontario’s public schools became more Christian in this era; the program remained in the Ontario curriculum until 1990.

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Upon a closer look, however, the 1944 Programme for Religious Education foreshadowed what few historians will dispute: that the 1960s was an important decade of dechristianization. In the public arena during the 1940s, the program enjoyed support. Yet, many of the Protestant churches initially reacted with cautious approval – and rightly so, for the government’s hasty assumption of religious education ultimately weakened church authority in that area. Some conservative evangelical churches were quick to disapprove of the program yet ironically were among its staunchest defenders when push came to shove in the 1960s.5 As Gary Miedema has pointed out, the declining influence of the mainline Protestant churches in the 1960s left an open door for evangelical churches that had formerly been relegated to the sidelines of Canadian religion.6 Thus, the story of ‘dechristianization’ in the 1960s may not be a simple tale of secularization but rather of a shifting conception of the place of religion within Canadian society. This chapter will focus on the Royal Commission on Education (or Hope Commission, reporting in 1950) and the Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools of the Province of Ontario (or Mackay Committee, reporting in 1969), two groups whose work bore directly on religious education in the schools. Specifically, I will argue that shifts in discourse between Hope and Mackay are illustrative of shifting conceptions of Christianity, and more specifically of publicly funded Christian education. In the 1940s, the establishment of religious education was discursively related to concerns about democratic citizenship, though other factors were certainly present.7 By the 1960s, the cultural winds had turned dramatically and religious education was much more frequently characterized as part of the educational/cultural/national heritage: a subject for which future value was based in the past. Cultural conservatism, so powerful in the 1940s, had lost its grasp, and a religiously liberal discourse had taken hold. Indeed, that the program was introduced at all might be attributed to a convergence of favourable conservative forces. In the end, the establishment of religious education was a significant step towards a dechristianized public space. Some components of this argument are simply reiterations of what others have already found. The main difference is the placement of this topic within the context of current debates about dechristianization in the 1960s. Besides the documentary evidence found in the Hope and Mackay briefs are a number of important primary and secondary sources. W.D.E. Matthews chronicles the long history of religious education in Ontario, putting it in the context of British and American

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histories of the same. E.R. McLean’s work is more interesting, historically, because he writes about the Inter-Church Committee on Religious Education (a group which traces its origins to the 1920s; hereafter the ICC) as a member himself.8 McLean’s work has been invaluable in allowing us to gain the church perspective on changes in religious education. More recently, works by R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar, Martin Sable, and Michael Perry have added to the historical discussion surrounding religious education in Ontario. Gidney and Millar’s article ‘The Christian Recessional in Ontario’s Public Schools’ provides a good basic overview of the demise of religious education from a regulatory standpoint.9 Perry’s dissertation also focuses on religious education, but from the perspective of religious studies.10 Finally, Sable’s research on the Jewish perspective on the 1944 program fleshes out the context of the Drew era, with particular attention to Drew himself.11 In the years immediately following the war, the Hope Commission (or RCE, hereafter) sought ‘to review the existing system of elementary and secondary education and to recommend any changes that would better equip the province’s young people for the modern world.’12 The commission reported in 1950, and regarding religious education they were favourable.13 Sixteen years later, the Ontario government called a new committee to look specifically at the religious education program in the province. After three years, the Mackay Committee suggested that religion had outlived its usefulness in Ontario schools. They recommended a complete replacement of the current course with a more neutral moral education program.14 In spite of their suggestions, the struggle over religious education continued for another two decades. This chapter begins with an overview of the history of religious education up until the changes of 1944, followed by a description of the new regulations and the responses of the RCE and Mackay Committee. The bulk of the chapter consists of analyses of briefs to the two groups. The concluding discussion will address the responses of the Protestant churches to the program, as the topic relates to dechristianization in the 1960s. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Christianity had been an explicit component of the purpose and content of public education.15 Regulations regarding opening exercises (which consisted of the Lord’s Prayer, a verse of Scripture, and sometimes a hymn) underwent fairly minor adjustments after the 1816 Common School Act. However, religious instruction itself had a more varied past. The School Act of 1846 gave clergymen the right to enter schools to teach religious education –

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a right which had been interpreted to mean during school hours. In the late 1850s, however, these visits were limited to times outside of school hours, so ‘Under such a handicap it is not surprising that religious instruction seems to have become more and more sporadic.’16 The Consolidated Common School Act for Upper Canada, compiled during the reign of Egerton Ryerson, in 1859, ensured that such education would be non-denominational.17 In the early 1870s, Ryerson attempted to make ‘Christian morals’ a required subject, but withdrew the subject within a few years. However, discussion surrounding religious education did not disappear, as there was some controversy over the introduction of the ‘Ross Bible’ in the mid-1880s.18 Notwithstanding continual attempts to the contrary, compulsory religious education in the public school was essentially restricted to the daily opening exercises until 1944.19 Yet, we must not harbour the impression that public schools were irreligious prior to 1944, for religious undertones were certainly present. In the 1941 Programme of Studies for Grades I to VI, teachers were instructed that ‘the schools of Ontario exist for the purpose of preparing children to live in a democratic society which bases its way of life upon the Christian ideal.’20 As a result, they were encouraged to include ‘the fundamental truths of Christianity and their bearing on human life and thought’ wherever they deemed it practical in the curriculum.21 Of course, these were merely recommendations, and it is impossible to know how widely these principles were applied. Preliminary research into nineteenth-century education journals indicates that the measure of Christianity in the schools was insufficient for many observers.22 Historians themselves are not agreed on the degree to which pre-1944 Ontario schools can be labelled ‘Christian.’23 We can only infer that from the perspective of the ICC, Drew’s government, and Ontario voters, additional religious instruction was desirable by the mid-1940s. Pressure to introduce religious education into the curriculum rose after the First World War. In the realms of education, there was ‘an uneasy feeling that many traditional social norms were threatened’ in those years.24 It was in this conservative atmosphere that the ICC began its work. Given declining Sunday school attendance, it is not surprising that the Protestant churches were eager ‘to find a cheap and effective way to reach Ontario’s children with their message.’25 In addition to the work of the ICC, evidence suggests that the number of individual clergymen taking it upon themselves to instruct public school students

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‘increased rapidly’ after the war began.26 Schools and boards, in some cases, were also taking it upon themselves to boost religious instruction. They subverted existing regulations by simply changing the hour at which school began on certain days, and having religion taught during that time.27 According to Stamp, by 1940–1, 10 per cent of Ontario schools had begun to teach religious education.28 External bodies like the Ontario Educational Association were also calling for religious instruction in the public schools.29 In sum, the Protestant churches were striving for more influence in the public schools during the interwar period, mainly through the vehicle of the ICC. However, to some extent, they were also responding to an increased demand for religious instruction. For its most enthusiastic champions, the new regulations were merely the logical extension of previous practices. According to the Hope Commission, which came down firmly in favour of religious education, the new program did not compromise the ‘non-sectarian and undenominational’ quality of religious education, nor did it undermine ‘religious freedom.’30 Indeed, the Commission suggested that ‘the regulations of 1944 respecting religious education provided fewer departures from established practice than is commonly supposed.’31 Likewise, McLean writes that the 1944 program carries on the ‘underlying principle’ of religious education in Ontario: that is, ‘corporate compulsion with individual and area freedom.’32 In other words, while the program normalized religious education in the public school, students, teachers and boards had the option to request exemptions. For the detractors, the new regulations seemed like a significant departure from previous practice. Where religious education had formerly been taught outside of school hours, it now belonged inside the regular school day, gaining two half-hour periods per week. Where its teachers had formerly been clergy who had the right to teach only those of their own denomination in the hours before or after school, regular classroom teachers now usually took on the task of presenting the tenets of Christianity in a non-sectarian form to all students. Curriculum for the new program was assembled hastily33 and rooted in the British Cambridgeshire Syllabus of Religious Teaching for Schools.34 The boundaries of Christian education in the public schools, though guided by the ICC, were now ultimately set by the provincial government: religious exercises and courses were heavily prescribed, as demonstrated by the 1949 Programme’s list of approved prayers, hymns, and Bible readings.35 Therefore, the RCE was only partially correct: Christianity

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had always had a place in Ontario’s public schools, but its presence had never been as centrally orchestrated as it became in 1944. Much had changed. Two characteristics of the new program are noteworthy. First, it placed a heavy burden on classroom teachers. The 1949 publication of the Regulations and Programme for Religious Education laid out the central characteristics of the 1944 changes. The teaching of Christian principles was no longer tacit, but overt: ‘Teaching of the Bible [must be] as thorough and serious as that which the teacher gives to Social Studies or Science.’36 Teachers were reminded to treat religious education with ‘reverence’ and to take ‘responsibility … for the spiritual growth of the child’ as much as ‘for the intellectual and physical.’37 However, spiritual growth was to be taught in a ‘non-sectarian’ fashion.38 Teachers were admonished to present stories which were ageappropriate and paraphrased (but not too loosely)39 and to encourage a love for the Bible.40 The new program set the bar high for classroom teachers – Christian or not. Second, the program presented a state-centralized version of Christianity to students. Opening exercises were to include the Lord’s Prayer ‘or other prayers approved for use in schools.’41 Lists of permitted Scripture readings were provided, and ‘issues of a controversial or sectarian nature [were to] be avoided.’42 The list of Bible verses was compiled by the ICC to line up better with the 1944 program,43 meaning that church representatives were participants in the refinement of the new program. Yet, ultimate control remained with the state. McLean illustrates the role of the churches well: ‘The part played by the InterChurch Committee has been in support of the policies of the Department of Education as they relate to religion in the public schools. It has always been ready with advice and co-operation if occasion offered. It has never played the part of a persistent group trying to win concessions from a stubborn and unwilling body.’44 In a way, the members of the ICC were consultants: employed by the government when needed, but always at the government’s request. The relationship was not one of equal partners. Evidence suggests that the 1944 regulations initially met with public approval. In 1945, the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec nodded that ‘despite the protests of one or two groups the programme has met with acceptance and favourable comment.’45 The Report of the RCE affirms that religious education was given ‘general acceptance’ but admits that ‘strong objections were raised’ by some groups.46 This evi-

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dence is certainly consistent with what other historians have suggested about this decade.47 The strongest evidence is found in the political record: George Drew introduced the regulations with a minority government. After being challenged by the opposition in a non-confidence vote, Drew was re-elected with a resounding majority – mainly on the platform of religious education.48 In the time of war, Ontario voters stood behind Drew’s socially conservative policies. However, minority dissent did not disappear, and Perry notes that by the 1960s, many boards had ‘quietly’ dropped the program.49 The Mackay Committee confirmed that ‘since the [program] was introduced, it has increasingly fallen into disuse.’50 It was the culmination of criticism, plus a desire to investigate various levels of education, which resulted in the invocation of the Mackay Committee by the Ontario government in early 1966.51 The decision to re-evaluate religious education was part of a pattern of investigation which included the more widely known Hall-Dennis committee. The Mackay Committee was created in order that it might investigate possibilities for moral education according to the ‘requirements of the present day.’52 Over the course of the following three years, the Mackay Committee listened to public feedback in the form of briefs, letters, and presentations. In their report, they recognized the ongoing importance of ‘religious faith … in the life of the people of this province.’53 However, they suggested that such faith belonged more to the home and church than to the school environment54 and set out the groundwork for a program of moral and ethical development. The government chose not to implement the changes suggested by the Mackay Committee, but schools often did so on their own.55 The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms made way for real change, and in 1990, Memorandum 112 ‘prohibited religious instruction in schools even when the course was optional and even when religious coercion wasn’t a factor.’56 In less than fifty years, the pendulum had made a full swing: from government-led promotion of Christian religion, to complete restriction of any religious instruction. The previous section has introduced, in a general way, the context of religious education discourse in the 1940s and 1960s. We will now turn to the briefs sent to each commission in order to unpack the layers of language and illustrate both the continuity and complexity of each cultural discourse. The RCE received 258 briefs regarding various aspects of education at the time: of these, twenty-five dealt explicitly with religious education. In contrast, the Mackay Committee received

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141 briefs, all on the topic of religious education.57 The sources obviously have limitations. However, at the least, these briefs (presented by organizations, churches, and private individuals, to name a few) provide a glimpse over the landscape of opinions on religious education in these two decades. First, we will examine the discursive patterns which are continuous between the two sets of briefs: concerns about morality, juvenile delinquency, and the separation of church and state. The bulk of what follows will be devoted to the significant changes in language which, I argue, are concurrent with the changes in the cultural place of Christianity. In the conservative 1940s, concern about democratic citizenship reigned, and religious education was frequently shrouded in this language. By the 1960s, Christian education was more often assigned the label of heritage. It would be false to suggest that all of these themes did not overlap at some point. Hints of Christianity-asheritage appear in the 1940s, just as remnants of Christianity-supportsdemocracy can be found in the 1960s. My observations about the 1940s in particular would be much more limited if not for the fact that they coincide with the findings of numerous other historians, as mentioned previously. That said, I will briefly review common themes, then move on to what I have argued are the unique discursive traits of each era. It should not be surprising that certain concerns were very consistent across the decades. For instance, there was a feeling among the defenders of religious education that the program was providing a moral balance against the decline of the home. In the late 1940s, the Ontario Federation of Home and School Associations argued that ‘the failure of many parents to fulfill their obligations for the spiritual training of their children in the home or in the Church, makes imperative that the school make provision for this training.’58 Likewise, writing to the Mackay Committee, one individual argued that ‘Bible teaching is the proper and perfect balance’ to ‘criminal tendencies.’59 Defence of the program on these grounds was common, but not everyone saw it in the same light. The concern for moral fortitude was consistent; however critics often argued that the place of moral training was the home or church – not the public school. Writing to the RCE, the Association for Religious Liberty cried that ‘the State is usurping the priestly function of the Church and trespasses on the exclusive right of the Home and the Church to administer religious teaching in accordance with Freedom of Conscience.’60 Likewise, the Canadian Jewish Congress argued for the right of the home and church or synagogue to administer religious training.61 They submitted: ‘When religion, organized or not, solicits

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state-aid or seeks a hand in state affairs, it is weakened by so doing, and it invites the decline of spiritual sanctity.’62 This claim was surprisingly prescient, considering what we know about the 1960s. However, perhaps because of the social conservatism of the time, the warning went unheeded. Discourse surrounding the proper boundaries of church, state, and home responsibilities continued in the 1960s. Jewish communities continued to criticize the Programme on the same grounds, with one group arguing that they did not wish ‘to obstruct the role of religion in our society but rather to restore it to those institutions where it properly belongs.’63 A school principal from Sudbury argued that ‘this programme accepts absolutely the responsibility of the school for religious training – a dubious assumption indeed.’64 Letters from parents and churches make similar points. On the other hand, the belief that the home is the proper ground for religious training did not preclude the assumption that the public school should retain a role. In their brief to the Mackay Committee, the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada demanded that ‘the tax-supported school has no right to undo the work of the church and home.’65 They understood the state-controlled school as the embodiment of the will of the parents (whom they believed to be mainly Christian) in a way somewhat reminiscent of what Christie found in the 1940s: that is, a sense that the state and the people were ultimately the same.66 We can make two observations based on the consistency of these discourses. First, concerns about morality and juvenile delinquency reflect a belief about the role of the public school: that is, the public school must produce governable citizens. This supposition is consistent with Michel Foucault’s theory of ‘governmentality’ as summarized by Bruce Curtis: ‘We need to think of government as the “conduct of conduct,” that is in terms of all attempts wherever situated by some to structure the conduct of others.’67 Certainly, the establishment of the school system falls within the category of governance,68 and since at least the 1870s ‘the underlying aim [of the schools] was the prevention of deviant behaviour and crime.’69 Gidney and Millar suggest that the 1944 program was established partly to increase religious education, and partly in ‘response to … the perception of moral decline in a time of national crisis.’70 Second, we may note that discourses about the proper roles of church and state are, at heart, really discussions about democracy: particularly about how an education system works in a democracy and what

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democratic rights are held by parents, schools, and the state. The difference between the Hope and Mackay briefs is that ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic citizenship’ were blatantly discussed in the former and only latently, sporadically present in the latter. Among groups and individuals making use of the discourse of democracy in the 1940s, there is, perhaps not surprisingly, little agreement about what the term means. Can a democracy, at once, be characterized by the rule of the majority and protection of minorities? Some writers hailed religious education in schools as a bastion of democracy. One group queried: ‘Is the democratic way of life safe without religion? Can respect for human personality and faith in man, which are the ultimate bases of democracy, survive apart from faith in God?’71 For such groups, the democratic ideal was impossible without Christian foundations. The Canadian Jewish Congress also advocated the importance of religion to democracy, ‘because it teaches the dignity of all human beings created in the image of God, and the inalienability of the basic rights of every individual.’ However, not surprisingly, they did not support Christian education in public schools, suggesting instead that religion belongs to the home, and to the church or synagogue.72 Thus, even for those in agreement about the necessary relationship between religion and democracy, there was little agreement about religious education as it were. Groups which opposed the new program of religious education also founded their opinions on the importance of democracy, albeit on a different conception of the term. The Association for Religious Liberty argued that any religious instruction in public schools ‘violates the democratic right of each man to worship in his own way, free from fear, discrimination, oppression or social pressure.’ Like the Jewish Congress, this group viewed religion as essentially private – belonging to the home and church. They advocated a return to the system as it was before 1944.73 Likewise, the Ontario Committee of the LaborProgressive Party argued that even though only a minority opposed the 1944 changes, ‘that should be sufficient to indicate to all thoroughgoing democrats the actual and potential harm the new directives cause.’ They charged that ‘the present system of religious instruction in schools is harmful to the growth of democracy and national unity.’74 Was the issue at hand democracy or religious education? Were the two ideas inextricably combined? Or were these groups merely using the relevant language of the day? Most likely, it was both. The multi-faceted use of the word democracy illustrates what Gauvreau and Christie have argued about the postwar era. They suggest

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that on the surface, there appeared to be widespread consensus, but in reality that consensus was being strained and contested by different groups.75 One major difference of opinion lay in the political nature of democracy: understood by some as the rule of the majority (over the minority) and by others as a place of protection for minorities. The Church of England submitted that it was the former, arguing that ‘however loud may be the protests of certain minority groups, there are large majority groups which believe that religion has an essential and proper place in any true Educational System.’76 Likewise, Judge G.W. Morley of the Inter-Church Committee (writing independently) dismissed the concerns of Jews and other minority groups, claiming, ‘We, for the most part, call ourselves Christians, and are adherents of the Christian faith, and thank God, we live in a Christian country.’ If this is true, he asks, ‘then why should we listen to the arguments put forth by atheists and “free thinkers[?].”’77 Reverend T.F. Summerhayes also suggested that Jews and others must submit to the rule of the majority.78 Not surprisingly, all of these who stood by this conception of democracy heartily approved of the program. The idea that the ‘majority rules’ was also prevalent among defenders of the religious education program in the 1960s. Closely related to these competing concepts of democracy (and equally timely) were different ideas about citizenship and its connection to Christianity or to religious education in general. As with democracy, the content and purpose of citizenship was highly contested in the 1940s, even among groups of people who were discussing the same matter. For the ICC, the connection between good citizenship and Christianity is basic and vital: ‘There is a growing recognition on the part of educational authorities that it is impossible to teach any one satisfactorily his duty towards his neighbor apart from his duty towards God, upon which this relationship ultimately rests.’79 For the ICC, citizenship was something to be taught – a concept which invoked responsibilities. Likewise, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers viewed citizenship as an act in which young people would eventually be expected to ‘participate.’ However, they disagreed with the assumed relationship between religious belief and good citizenship, by viewing the content of citizenship as largely political.80 Not surprisingly, the Association for Religious Liberty agreed, touting that religious freedom (that is, ‘the democratic right of each man to worship in his own way’) was a crucial mark of democratic citizenship. Their politically conservative view of citizenship advocated a return to the old method

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of religious instruction (after school hours) and a non-religious moral instruction in public schools.81 Using even stronger language than the ICC, the Board of Christian Education for the United Church of Canada gave full approval for religious education in public schools. Like the ICC, the Board argued that the crucial content of citizenship was Christian – if, in fact, Canada wished to remain ‘a Christian State.’ They pointed out that ‘where there is no provision in public education for religious teaching, this great body of children and youth are growing up in almost complete ignorance of the Christian tradition, and are in every sense likely to become in effect pagan citizens of the State.’82 Citizenship, apparently, was still possible without Christianity – but it was certainly undesirable. An Anglican clergyman, Rev. T.F. Summerhayes of Toronto, made a much more practical argument, suggesting that Christianity teaches the sort of virtues that a state would want in its citizens. Summerhayes stood by a theory which claims that ‘belief in God through Jesus Christ produces men who give outstanding service to the State in civil and military affairs.’83 His argument illustrates a pattern which is worth noting in light of debates about dechristianization: these briefs rarely advocated the religious education program for the sake of Christianity (or Christ). The merits of belief were almost always presented in conjunction with the furtherance of democracy, or national traditions, or prevention of juvenile delinquency. Granted, this may have something to do with concern for relevance to the Commission more than personal and corporate beliefs about Christianity; without further evidence, it is difficult to judge. Based on these documents (and many briefs to the Mackay Committee), it appears that Christianity was often touted for its ability to create good, moral citizens. The themes of democratic citizenship certainly survived until the 1960s but by then were subsumed by the more prevalent discourse of Christianity-as-heritage. Competing concepts of democracy (as an ideology favouring protection of majority or protection of minority rights) were quite prevalent, but the framework of the discussion had shifted. In essence, the conservative cultural discourse of the 1940s had focused on the responsibilities of good citizenship – Christian education was constructed as a vehicle for those lessons. By the 1960s, a new discourse prevailed. In general, those favouring religious education invoked the majority’s right to protect its Christian heritage; those opposed claimed the right to an education which recognized the plurality of religions and moralities. Socially conservative forces enjoyed favourable conditions

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in the 1940s, but by the years of the Mackay Committee, the winds of change were blowing. I will not expound on these competing conceptions of democracy further save to emphasize that they were present. Instead, the following section will illustrate the various ways in which heritage was understood – mainly by those defending the program, but also by those opposed. ‘Christian heritage’ was either a strength or a weakness, a past to be embraced or rejected, a term pregnant with meaning, nostalgia, and an often false social memory. In terms of cultural discourse, I will argue that this emphasis on heritage is significant. Indeed, even for many of its staunchest defenders, the value of religious education was located in the past.84 For defenders of the program (there were many), Christianity was seen as part of a cultural and national heritage to be passed on. Of the briefs studied,85 nearly one-half explicitly mentioned cultural/national heritage as a reason to hold onto the program; only one admitted the cultural value of religion ‘in its broadest sense’ but disapproved of the program.86 As this linguistic connection of Christianity-to-heritage was quite frequent, I will simply provide a few illustrative examples. The first brief was presented by the Inter-Church Committee on Public Education (formerly, on Religious Education in the Schools) and received several nods from other churches and church organizations, so is certainly worth mentioning. The overall thrust of the brief is quite religiously liberal, but they still expressed a ‘deep dissatisfaction with any attempt to substitute a common morality in the school system for an appreciation of the religious heritage which has helped to shape our society.’87 The sense that something was owed to the past was prevalent among the program’s defenders. Dr Emlyn Davies (a teacher of the Bible and comparative religion at Upper Canada College) suggested that one of the main purposes of education is that it ‘initiates us all into the heritage of our society.’ He goes on to suggest that ‘the truly educated person will know his heritage and will endeavour to preserve it and to augment its value.’88 The Department of Theology at the University of Windsor suggested religion is ‘an integral part of the treasure of our heritage’ and thus part of a full education.89 A similar point was made by the Religious Education Section of the Ontario Educational Association.90 Another group of faculty pointed to the Bible as an important source of our social and moral heritage, and argued that ‘to pretend otherwise, and reduce education to intellectual development in a moral vacuum is to deny children their rightful heritage.’91 The

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Etobicoke Ministerial Association cautioned society not to be ashamed of its heritage.92 Due to the pervasiveness of this discourse, the above should serve as examples of the way in which religion was frequently defended. The type of heritage on which there is less agreement, however, is what I have labelled ‘educational’ heritage: in other words, the way in which religion has been incorporated in the Ontario system of education up until the 1960s. The social memory of Ontario’s educational heritage is much more contested, though less frequently mentioned among the briefs. Those using the discourse of religious education as cultural or national heritage are commenting prescriptively. Our Judaeo-Christian heritage, they argue, should directly affect the content of what is taught in schools. Those noting Ontario’s educational heritage have gone one step further by suggesting that because a pattern of including Christianity in the curriculum (or not including it) had been set, action should take place based on a reaction to that precedent. The interesting aspect of this discussion is the diversity of answers to a question that we might assume is fairly straightforward: was Christian education a significant part of the curriculum prior to 1944? As mentioned earlier in this paper, there is no clear response to what appears to be a simple question – even among historians. The answer, in fact, seems to be based heavily on the needs of the group or individual answering it, proving what John Tosh has suggested about social memory: ‘Social groupings … require a picture of the past which serves to explain or justify the present, often at the cost of historical accuracy.’93 Whether we call Ontario’s early educational system Christian (if that is even a useful label) or not remains to be determined. What follows are some of the varying opinions on the religious education program in the 1960s, based on perceptions of its past. For some of those advocating the retention of the 1944 program, a glance toward Ontario’s past was all the justification they needed: in their eyes, religion and education had always gone together. After all, Egerton Ryerson himself had committed the system to ‘Christian principles,’ realizing ‘that education of the mind and spirit could not be separated.’94 The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada claimed that ‘prior to and at Confederation, all schools were Christian.’ In fact, based on the ‘Manuals,’ they were ‘of the opinion that there was no more indoctrination after 1944, than before.’95 Indeed, based on the manuals, one would certainly have the impression that the schools were religious – after all, Gidney and Millar provide a similar assessment using that

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material. For those who defended the program based on educational heritage, there was an assumption that ‘education in Ontario has never been separated from religion.’96 Others claimed an entirely different heritage, suggesting that there was significant historical precedent for the separation of church and state.97 In contrast to the program’s defenders, detractors like the Jewish Community Council of Ottawa argued that religious education ‘is not a part of the Ontario educational tradition. It had no place in Ontario’s schools in the latter part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century when the population which attended the public schools was predominantly of one religious complexion.’98 The Ethical Education Association agreed, pointing out: ‘Strangely enough, Ontario’s public schools were more progressive in this respect during the last century when the population was relatively homogeneous than they are in the wake of today’s heterogeneity.’99 As suggested earlier, one’s opinion on this subject is based almost entirely on one’s point of view. When we look at the teachers’ manuals, it is easy to see that the Christian influence was pervasive – in those documents. What is not clear is the extent to which what was written there was reflected in the classrooms. For those who argue that the schools were more ‘progressive’ in the nineteenth century, their claim is also true to a degree. There was no compulsory Christian education before 1944, and a great deal more local control. Clergymen could come and teach students of their own denomination after hours, at the parents’ request. So, from that perspective, it was a much more malleable system than the one instituted in 1944. Either way, Ontario’s educational heritage was imagined, to some extent, to the best advantage of both sides. The purpose of the preceding section was to demonstrate the significant discursive shift between the 1940s and 1960s. In the earlier period, when the controversial program was introduced, public discourse was favourable: creating democratic citizens was in fashion, and religious education in the public schools was an appropriate solution, it seemed. When the memory of the war had faded, and the ‘long sixties’ had begun, religious education was called into question. Public discourse, though still retaining hints of the 1940s, circled around new educational ideas and conceptions of rights, and placed Christianity in the realm of heritage. Before concluding, we will turn briefly to the Protestant churches’ reactions to these events. They were participants in this discourse, but their position was unique, for whether they realized it or

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not, the changes were affecting (and reflecting) their altered position in Ontario public life. Briefs to the Hope Commission and Mackay Committee provide some evidence of church support for the program. Initial reaction to the 1944 program (contained in briefs to the RCE) was generally favourable. It is noteworthy that the only ecclesiastical representations therein (besides the ICC) are from the Anglican and United Churches, and two independent leaders from the same – all in favour of the program. However, contained in the ‘Memoranda’ of the Commission (outside of the main body of briefs), is a Statement on Religious Education (to the RCE) by the Ministerial Association of Dresden, composed of at least twenty-seven clergymen of various denominations, asserting that ‘Religious Instruction in the Public Schools is contrary to the Word of God and to the subordinate standards of our churches.’100 Not all were willing to concede to government-led centralization of religious education. Of eighty-six briefs to the Mackay Committee, twenty-six are from churches or church organizations (not including individuals representing churches). Of those, twenty-two advocate the continuation of the program, in some form, during the late 1960s.101 However, it should be noted that those responding demonstrated a wide spectrum of knowledge about the program itself. Granted, some based their opinion on direct experience (generally, in providing clergymen to teach grades seven and eight). Others displayed a complete lack of understanding: for instance, by recommending just the sort of program that already existed. Yet others recommended increased religious education and recognition of the plurality of contemporary society, but did not acknowledge the inherent difficulty of this combination. The Inter-Church Committee played a significant role in the refinement of the 1944 religious education curriculum and acted as a support to the government between the 1940s and the 1960s. As mentioned earlier, several churches affirmed the ICC brief in their own letters to the Mackay Committee. McLean’s somewhat autobiographical account of the ICC’s work provides an interesting glimpse into their thoughts on the 1944 program throughout its short success, while their briefs to the RCE and Mackay Committee flesh out their position. While having been ardent advocates of increased religious presence in public schools since the 1920s, the ICC was not an enthusiastic supporter of the 1944 regulations initially. Their reaction to the program’s inauguration indicates the lack of control they had over the situation. McLean notes: ‘It is no secret that the policy of the Minister came as something

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of a surprise to the Inter-Church Committee and was received with something less than rejoicing.’102 McLean also provides the complete text of a memorandum sent to the Department of Education in April 1944, which expressed a list of concerns about materials, teacher training, and the program’s divisive potential. The memorandum offered the ICC’s ‘readiness to cooperate’ on the belief that ‘both the Minister and ourselves are desirous of obtaining the same ultimate results and have largely the same goal in mind.’103 Their response to Drew’s actions is not one of eager applause for a co-crafted program, although they did have an important role in the creation of the new teachers’ manuals to accompany the new program.104 By the time of the Hope Commission, initial concerns had cooled somewhat, and the ICC recommended ‘continued cooperation between the Department of Education and the Churches.’105 That sense of cooperation between church and state bodies shifted in the 1960s, according to Mark Noll. In his article, ‘What Happened to Christian Canada?’ he argues that the Christian churches had played a ‘critical’ role in the creation of the Canadian nation by serving as a ‘forc[e] of cohesion.’106 In Noll’s opinion, when the rising tide of liberalism washed away the former ‘conservative-communal social order’ (in which the churches had played a significant role), Christianity was no longer a national necessity. Most importantly, and consistent with what other scholars have suggested, Noll argues that ‘it was critical that Canada’s most important churches themselves advocated, promoted, and facilitated rupture with hereditary patterns of religious life.’107 This claim is supported by the ICC’s brief to the Mackay Committee. While they express some concern that our ‘religious heritage’ may be tossed aside, their recommendations are a complicated jumble of ideals. They advocate ‘the development of a public educational system in which even the smallest minority can find the freedom to preserve its integrity and make its contribution.’108 They suggest that ‘religious instruction’ may be conceived as a time in which children can explore their questions about life, though ‘this does not suggest that all religions are equally true.’109 While apparently regretful about giving up religious education (particularly as they have aided in its development for decades), they admit that a pluralistic society needs a course more suited to its needs.110 And, while they remind the Committee of the importance of the Bible, they suggest that the new curriculum might embrace ‘truths and beliefs gathered from any source which will bear upon the moral and spiritual growth of the pupil.’111

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Most significantly, the Inter-Church Committee was quite willing to see the influence they once enjoyed reassigned. While noting that ‘the Church historically has had a privileged position in public education in Ontario,’ they concede that ‘in light of changing patterns of community life, the Church is seeking new ways for continuing this partnership without dominating or inhibiting other faiths and other interests.’112 They express concern that religious education might fall through the cracks, and state that: ‘As the Churches acknowledge that they no longer have the control they once had in education, so we are concerned that education shall be seen to be a public rather than merely governmental enterprise.’113 In the end, while the churches’ role may have shifted, the ICC expressed hope that the will of the (presumably Christian) majority should be borne out in the public school curriculum. This paper has argued that shifts in language surrounding religious education in the schools indicate a cultural change of mood towards the public presence of religion. The 1944 Programme of Religious Education substantially altered the balance of power between the churches and the state; however, as Mark Noll points out, the churches themselves ‘facilitated’ and assented to a new balance in the 1960s. That Christianity was discursively relegated to our cultural heritage by this time is not surprising, but it does not indicate the disappearance of Christianity. The 1960s may have witnessed a great decline in the cultural authority of the mainstream churches, but they also saw the spectacular rise of others, like the Pentecostal churches.114 The Christianity-as-heritage discourse indicates a significant cultural shift towards a dechristianized public space – but not necessarily a dechristianized public.

NOTES Funding for this research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and McMaster University. The author wishes to thank Michael Gauvreau, Nancy Christie, and the other contributors for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. Tom Laing’s support was invaluable. Soli Deo Gloria. 1 Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985); A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era

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(Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979); David Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). Making arguments based on similar platforms, see Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada 1914–28 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971); Phyllis D. Airhart, Serving the Present Age: Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992); John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in Nineteenth-Century Ontario, Ontario Historical Studies Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); Lynne Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth Century Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989); Marguerite Van Die, An Evangelical Mind: Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989). 2 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900-1940 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). See also Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). 3 Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Toronto: Pearson Longman, 2006); Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2001); Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2007). 4 In addition to the essays in this volume, see also Kevin Flatt, ‘The Survival and Decline of the Evangelical Identity of the United Church of Canada, 1930–1971’ (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2008); Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005); Nancy Christie, ‘Sacred Sex: The United Church and the Privatization of the Family in Post-war Canada,’ in Nancy Christie, ed., Households of Faith (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002): 348–76; Mark Noll, ‘What Happened to Christian Canada?’ Church History 75, no. 2 (2006): 245–73; Gary R. Miedema, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2005).

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5 This pattern will be explored in greater depth in my dissertation. 6 Miedema, For Canada’s Sake, 190. 7 For instance, during the 1940s, religious participation increased. See Noll, ‘What Happened to Christian Canada?’ 255–6. 8 W.D. Edison Matthews, ‘The History of the Religious Factor in Ontario Elementary Education’ (unpublished PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1950); E.R. McLean, Religion in Ontario Schools: Based on the Minutes of The Inter-Church Committee on Religious Education in Schools 1922–1965 (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965). 9 R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar, ‘The Christian Recessional in Ontario’s Public Schools,’ in Marguerite Van Die, ed., Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 10 Michael L. Perry, ‘The Historical and Theological Bases of the Christian Religious Education Program in Ontario Public Schools’ (unpublished PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 2000). 11 Martin Sable, ‘George Drew and the Rabbis: Religious Education in Ontario’s Public Schools,’ Canadian Jewish Studies 6 (1998): 25–53. See also Shmuel Shamai, ‘Jewish Resistance to Christianity in the Ontario Public Education System,’ Historical Studies in Education 9, no. 2 (1997): 251–5; Robert M. Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 1876–1976, Ontario Historical Studies Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), chapter 8; Lois Sweet, God in the Classroom: The Controversial Issue of Religion in Canada’s Schools (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997). 12 R.D. Gidney, From Hope to Harris: The Reshaping of Ontario’s Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 23. 13 Report of the Royal Commission on Education in Ontario, 1950 (Toronto: Baptist Johnston, 1950) [hereafter Report of the RCE], 27–8, 36, 123–9, 166. 14 Religious Information and Moral Development: The Report of the Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools of the Province of Ontario, 1969 (Mackay Committee, Ontario Department of Education, 1969) [hereafter, Religious Information and Moral Development]. 15 For a basic overview of the history of religious education prior to 1944, see Matthews, ‘The History of the Religious Factor in Ontario Elementary Education,’ chapters 3–5. 16 McLean, Religion in Ontario Schools, 13. 17 Report of the RCE, 123. 18 Ibid., 28. 19 The history of the opening exercises will not be covered here, though it illuminates a fascinating connection between Sunday school education and

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21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

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public education. See, for example, McLean, Religion in Ontario Schools, chapter 2. Government of Ontario, Programme of Studies for Grades I to VI of the Public and Separate Schools, 1941 (Minister of Education) [hereafter, Programme, 1941], 5. Such admonitions are common throughout the school acts. Programme, 1941, 7. Preliminary study has been made of the Canada Educational Monthly, 1879–85. Gidney and Millar, for instance, characterize public schools as having Christian undertones right up until Christianity was officially removed. See Gidney and Millar, ‘The Christian Recessional,’ 275. Perry, on the other hand, suggests that nineteenth-century Ontarians may not have been as religious as we supposed. See Perry, ‘Historical and Theological Bases,’ chapter 1. Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 98. Sable, ‘George Drew and the Rabbis,’ 30; see also Perry, ‘Historical and Theological Bases,’ 149–50. Department of Education, ‘The Teaching of Religious Education in the Public Schools of Ontario: Being a Statement of the Present Policy of the Department of Education,’ Briefs to the Royal Commission on Education (bound volumes), vol. 2 (brief no. 44), 1. McLean, Religion in Ontario Schools, 14–15. Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 178. McLean, Religion in Ontario Schools, 16. Report of the RCE, 124. Report of the RCE, 125. McLean, Religion in Ontario Schools, 3. See McLean, Religion in Ontario Schools, chapter 4. Government of Ontario, Minister of Education, Regulations and Programme for Religious Education in the Public Schools, 1949 [hereafter, Regulations, 1949]: Acknowledgements. See Regulations 1949, Section III, for example. Regulations 1949, 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 10 Ibid., 13. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 5. McLean, Religion in Ontario Schools, 8.

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44 Ibid., 72–3. 45 Canadian Baptist Archives, McMaster University, The Baptist Yearbook of 1944–45, 184. 46 Report of the RCE, 125. 47 For example, on the underlying conservatism of social welfare policy during the 1940s, see Nancy Christie, Engendering the State: Family, Work, and Welfare in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); on anti-modernist rhetoric among the intellectual elite in that era, see Philip Massolin, Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and Modernity, 1939–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 48 Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 181–2. 49 Perry, ‘Historical and Theological Bases,’ 210. 50 Religious Education and Moral Development, 75. 51 See Gidney and Millar, ‘The Christian Recessional,’ 283. In mirror image, Britain did the same regarding its program of religious education in the 1960s (Religious Education and Moral Development, 16–17). 52 Religious Education and Moral Development, vii. 53 Ibid., xv. 54 Ibid., 25. 55 Sweet, God in the Classroom, 32. 56 Ibid., 34. 57 This paper is based on a study of eighty-six of these briefs. My dissertation will address these and additional sources in greater depth. 58 Ontario Federation of Home and School Associations, ‘Recommendations on Education,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 5 (135), 3. 59 Archives of Ontario, Ontario Government Record Series, Records of the Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools of the Province of Ontario (hereafter, Mackay Commission), RG2 170, Box 10, brief no. 8, Mr Allan Lyle, III. 60 Association for Religious Liberty, ‘Religious Education in the Ontario Schools,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 2 (45), foreword. 61 Canadian Jewish Congress, Central Division, ‘Religious Education in Ontario Schools,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 2 (46), 1. 62 Canadian Jewish Congress, Central Division, ‘Religious Education in Ontario Schools,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 2 (46), 6. 63 AO, Mackay Commission, RG2 170, Box 9, brief 48, Jewish Community Council of Ottawa, 7. 64 AO, Mackay Commission, RG 2 170, Box 9, brief 37, Mr A.F. Treff, 1. 65 AO, Mackay Commission, RG 2 170, Box 9, brief 56, The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, 5.

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66 Christie, Engendering the State, 267. 67 Bruce Curtis, ‘After “Canada”: Liberalisms, Social Theory, and Historical Analysis,’ in Jean-François Constant and Michel Ducharme, eds., Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 193. 68 See Bruce Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836–1871 (London, ON: Althouse Press, 1988). 69 Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 10. 70 Gidney and Millar, ‘The Christian Recessional,’ 280. 71 Inter-Church Committee on Weekday Religious Education, ‘The Place of Religion in Public Education,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 1 (28), 4. 72 Canadian Jewish Congress, Central Division, ‘Religious Education in Ontario Schools,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 2 (46), 1. 73 Association for Religious Liberty, ‘Religious Education in the Ontario Schools,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 2 (45), foreword, 1. 74 Ontario Committee of the Labour-Progressive Party, ‘Recommendations on Education,’ vol. 8 (175), 4–5. 75 Michael Gauvreau and Nancy Christie, Cultures of Citizenship in Post-War Canada, 1940–1955 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), Introduction, and other essays contained therein. 76 Church of England in the Ecclesiastical Province of Ontario, Briefs to the RCE, vol. 3 (77), 1. 77 Judge G.W. Morley, ‘The Urgent Necessity of Teaching Christianity (the Bible) in our Schools,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 4 (103), 2. 78 Rev. T.F. Summerhayes, ‘Religious and Moral Instruction in the State Schools in Ontario,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 5 (119), 5. 79 Inter-Church Committee on Weekday Religious Education, ‘The Place of Religion in Public Education,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 1 (28), 4. 80 United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, C.I.O. District Five Council, ‘Suggestions and Recommendations on Education,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 2 (43), 1. 81 The Association for Religious Liberty, ‘Religious Education in the Ontario Schools,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 2 (45), 1, 11. 82 The Board of Christian Education, United Church of Canada, ‘Religion and Public Education,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 2 (64), 3. 83 Rev. T.F. Summerhayes, ‘Religious and Moral Instruction in the State Schools in Ontario, Briefs to the RCE, vol. 5 (119), 2, 6. 84 Because I have focused on cultural themes, this paper has not examined other educational and theological emphases, for instance, on religion as a component of a ‘whole’ education.

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85 That is, 86 of 141 briefs. 86 AO, Mackay Commission, RG2 170, Box 9, brief 79, Residents’ Committee on Defense of Public Education, Northwestern Ontario. 87 AO, Mackay Commission, RG 2 170, Box 10, brief 1, The Ontario InterChurch Committee on Public Education, 2. 88 AO, Mackay Commission, RG 2 170, Box 9, brief 18, Dr Emlyn Davies, 4. 89 AO, Mackay Commission, RG2 170, Box 9, brief 21, The Department of Theology at the University of Windsor, foreword. 90 AO, Mackay Commission, RG 2 170, Box 9, brief 25, The Religious Education Section of the Ontario Educational Association, 4. 91 AO, Mackay Commission, RG2 170, Box 9, brief 54, A Group of Faculty of the Eastern Ontario Institute of Technology, 1. 92 AO, Mackay Commission, RG2 170, Box 9, brief 72, Etobicoke Ministerial Association, 2. 93 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, rev. 3rd ed. (Toronto: Longman, 2002), 3. 94 AO, Mackay Commission, RG2 170, Box 9, brief 22, The East Ontario Conference of the Free Methodist Church in Canada, 2. 95 AO, Mackay Commission, RG2 170, Box 9, brief 56, Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, 3. 96 AO, Mackay Commission, RG2 170, Box 9, brief 20, The Bible Club Movement, Incorporated, 2. 97 AO, Mackay Commission, RG2 170, Box 9, brief 49, The First Unitarian Congregation of Ottawa, 2. 98 AO, Mackay Commission, RG2 170, Box 9, brief 48, The Jewish Community Council of Ottawa, 2. 99 AO, Mackay Commission, RG2 170, Box 9, brief 57, The Ethical Education Association, 3. 100 ‘Statement on Religious Education,’ The Ministerial Association of Dresden, Ontario, Memoranda of the Ontario Royal Commission on Education, 1945. 101 Those approving are AO, Mackay Commission, RG2 170, Box 10, briefs 7, 10, 14, 15, 16; Box 9, 22, 24, 33, 34, 39, 42, 43, 46, 51, 56, 63, 64, 65, 71, 72, 80, 81. Those disapproving are Box 10, brief 17; Box 9, briefs 49, 59, 67. 102 McLean, Religion in Ontario Schools, 23. 103 Ibid., 28. 104 Ibid., 8. 105 Inter-Church Committee on Weekday Religious Education, ‘The Place of Religion in Public Education,’ Briefs to the RCE, vol. 1 (28), 4. 106 Noll, ‘What Happened to Christian Canada?’ 254.

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107 Ibid., 272. This theme is also crucial in Gauvreau’s The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, and Christie’s ‘Sacred Sex: The United Church and the Privatization of the Family in Post-war Canada.’ 108 AO, Mackay Commission, RG2 170, Box 10, brief 1, The Ontario InterChurch Committee on Public Education, 2. 109 Ibid, 5. 110 Ibid, 13. 111 Ibid, 13. 112 Ibid, 2. 113 Ibid, 12–13. 114 Miedema, For Canada’s Sake, 183.

11 Families beyond Patriarchy: Visions of Gender Equality and Childrearing among German Catholics in an Age of Revolution till van rahden

Both historical scholarship and popular narratives tend to distinguish sharply between the 1960s, especially ‘1968,’ and the Adenauer years in West Germany (1949–63). To today’s conservatives and liberal conservatives the 1950s appear as a golden age of healthy morality and orderly gender relations, at the centre of which stood, to quote the Constitutional Court Justice Udo di Fabio, ‘a harmonious family, children, success in professional life, social recognition and private happiness.’1 Leftists or left liberals argue instead that the 1950s saw the last gasp of Wilhelminian ideas of the authoritarian state that were tied up to the full-fledged restoration of a patriarchal conception of the family.2 Although diametrically opposed, both interpretations share the view that this golden age of the bourgeois family or this patriarchal regime of the authoritarian state came to an end in ‘1968,’ a year of protest in the Western European democracies, be it as a result of a fundamental crisis of liberal civility or in the course of the final triumph of true democracy.3 No matter how convincing this juxtaposition and the concept of a ‘second founding’ of the Federal Republic may seem, I would like to present a different interpretation. In contrast to much recent scholarship, I will explore less the differences than the similarities between the years of revolutionary upheaval of the late 1960s and the 1950s, a time that continues to be dismissed as ‘a civilization of refrigerators’ (Louis Aragon). My starting point is the observation that the history of the Federal Republic until well into the 1970s (and perhaps until today) was not simply a history of a democracy, but more specifically a history of a democracy in the shadow of genocide and total war. My aim here is to draw attention to the fact that the renaissance of a democratic

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society and the implementation of democracy as a way of life in postwar West Germany was far from self-evident and highly unlikely. In addition I want to point to the high degree to which contemporaries were aware that the early Federal Republic was a ‘young and bumbling democracy’ which had to establish itself ‘among the wreckage of Hitler’s, Eichmann’s and Globke’s state’ – as Karl Markus Michel the editor of Kursbuch put it in February 1966.4 Such hidden continuities between the 1950s and the 1960s become particularly apparent when scholarly interest is directed toward the ways in which contemporaries envisioned the relationship between the private sphere and political life. In both decades, many, if not most, West Germans were convinced that the search for democracy as a way of life, that the quest for a better polity, was destined to fail unless citizens embraced new forms of childrearing and began to cherish radically different conceptions of daily life. The obsessive intensity with which the public in both decades argued over which style of education would be in keeping with the spirit of the time suggests that quarrels about what constituted a genuinely democratic form of childrearing were also controversies over which conception of authority was compatible with the idea of democracy. At the centre of such disputes then was the fundamental tension between the inherent egalitarianism of democracy and the necessarily hierarchical conception of authority. Between the 1950s and the early 1970s quarrels over the role of education and childrearing revolved around the question of how to resolve or at least live with this tension. What remained the common denominator during the quarter-century was the conviction that the search for a democratic polity would fail unless Germans succeeded in developing new forms of childrearing. The question of whether and how authority and democracy could be conjoined figured prominently in West Germany’s political culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Within these debates the father soon occupied an emblematic status, as Heide Fehrenbach and Robert Moeller have noted.5 It is, of course, tempting to interpret the West German obsession with ‘authority’ as indicative of a lack of democratic thinking and as a fixation on authoritative government that was not overcome until the anti-authoritarian moment of 1968.6 Yet such a reading of West German political culture fails to take into account that the meaning of authority was already changing between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s. Around 1950, a hierarchical conception of authority based on tra-

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dition and the spirit of order and obedience still prevailed, but in the mid-1950s, it began to give way to an idea of authority based on trust embedded in egalitarian social relationships. Thus, the 1963 edition of the Evangelisches Soziallexikon (Evangelical Social Encyclopedia) warned against confusing authority and power. ‘Authority lives from the trust it can be given.’ This trust, the encyclopedia continued, should not be ‘blindly bestowed,’ but required ‘critical vigilance,’ which ‘true authority depends on.’ Such an understanding of authority was consistent with ‘the idea of partnership.’ Partnership, in fact, was the ‘prerequisite of all authority and not just its (dialectical) supplement.’7 A central precondition for partnership, in turn, was ‘the partners’ maturity’ (literally their Mündigkeit), their ‘equality,’ and the requirement that ‘both individuals and groups break away from a patriarchal-authoritarian order.’8 Since the mid-1950s and within the context of mainstream and often very conservative Catholic papers, strictly hierarchical notions of patriarchy began to be called into question. In March 1956, Monika: Zeitschrift für katholische Mütter und Frauen urged its readers to ‘rediscover the father.’ The monthly opined that the figure of the father should be ‘the supporting pillar of the family as well as the foundation of human society.’ If such a pronouncement had given rise to an unequivocal celebration of patriarchal hierarchy among mainstream Catholics in the Weimar Republic, the argument now segued into a much more qualified, perhaps even ambivalent defence of paternal authority. The secret to a ‘forward-looking’ (zeitgemäße) form of fatherhood was ‘creativity’: ‘Neither caprice nor privilege [Herrentum] shall wield the sceptre. Authority and love belong together like body and soul … Authority without love gives rise to resistance, revolution, inferiority complexes, hate and bitterness, and mental crippling. Love alone is able to free obedience from humiliation and bitterness and to create the kind of spiritual openness and sensitivity that integrate into the communal life without effort.’ The authority of family fathers no longer was as ‘self-evident as in the past,’ Monika noted in November 1956. The ‘spirit of the age’ had been radically transformed in the previous thirty to fifty years. ‘Democracy as a Way of Life’ (‘Demokratie als Lebensform’) finds its expression in all forms of communities, where ever humans live together, including the family. The ways and methods in which we parents were raised cannot be applied to the education of our children today without further ado, because all those authorities are shattered which were founded on antiquated institutions and opinions, and which did not correspond with natural relationships and needs.’9

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A decade later even conservative family experts no longer held the idea of obedience in high esteem. In 1965, the Kirchenzeitung of Aachen warned readers not to confuse authority ‘with the right of the mightier or with military commanders, who could force their subordinates to perform the most undignified actions.’ As so many people at this time had had ‘bad experiences with the abuse of authority,’ a new kind of authority was urgently needed, one no longer based on ‘power and fear’ but on ‘love and trust.’10 In the early 1950s, family experts had already begun to argue that neither authoritarian fathers nor a militaristic model of masculinity were compatible with the idea of democracy. Reconceptualizing paternal authority, in fact, was a central concern in a society forced to confront the legacy of National Socialism and authoritarian militarism. Although from today’s perspective such interpretations of Nazism seem overly simplistic, they indicate how intensely and earnestly the public of the early Federal Republic discussed the origins of dictatorship and genocide.11 Fathers could not acquire ‘the courage to raise children’ by relying on an authority that was ‘merely formal,’ exhorted a pastor from Detmold, in the Protestant monthly Kirche und Mann in September 1959. All complaints about the ‘youth of today’ and all longing for ‘the good old times’ could not disguise the fact that many fathers in the new republic were ‘the heirs of an evil past’ who had ‘helped to shape it.’ The path to a modern form of paternal authority and childrearing ‘for a meaningful future’ would remain closed if one attempted ‘to embellish his personal past and that of his people with lies and evasions.’ Rather, the courage to raise children required the courage to tell the truth: ‘the truth in all things, including the past.’12 Similar ideas revealing the extent to which the Federal Republic stood in the shadow of genocide and the war of extermination circulated in Catholic publications. In January 1952, Der Männerseelsorger, for example, published an article entitled ‘Democracy Begins in the Family.’ Its author, a Catholic priest, argued that ‘the father should not make autocratic decisions according to the Führerprinzip.’ Now that West Germans lived in a democratic society, the ‘patriarchal family’ was ‘no longer in keeping with the times.’ Instead, ‘the spirit of good democracy’ should make itself felt ‘in every modern family.’13 In November 1952, the leading Catholic monthly Mann in der Zeit, with a circulation of 400,000, advised fathers not to be ‘icy-militaristic’ (eiskaltmilitärisch) with their sons and daughters. Paternal authority could not be won by making one’s children ‘stand to attention’ (Strammstehen) or

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by ordering them around in ‘a sergeant-major’s voice’ (Kasernenhofton). Although a certain distance between fathers and sons should be preserved, filial deference should ‘result from true respect and deep love’ rather than pseudo-militaristic obedience.14 In the same year, Karl Borgmann, editor of the magazine Caritas and a key figure in the Catholic laicization movement, argued that many Christians continued to support an ideal of the family that was ‘modelled on bygone conceptions of the state, in which citizens were governed from above and thus sentenced to enforced inactivity.’ In the January 1952 issue of the Catholic monthly Frau und Mutter, which boasted more than half a million subscribers at the time, Borgmann emphasized that for children to learn to ‘experience freedom and to live by’ this ideal early on, the family should not take its cues from the ideal of ‘absolute monarchy’ or, worse, ‘dictatorship.’ Whoever defended patriarchal forms of childrearing pretended not to know that those responsible for Nazi crimes had come from ‘“orderly” families and not from the margins of society.’ Fathers who had raised their children with ‘authoritarian … and violent methods’ had been the midwives of the Nazi dictatorship. Those who kept treating their children ‘wrongfully’ had to be aware that these children would themselves ‘turn into oppressors’ as adults, Borgmann cautioned. ‘Some henchmen of the concentration camps came evidently from so-called “orderly” families.’15 To make sense of the anti-authoritarian dreams of redemption of the late 1960s, one should not lose sight of the fact that by the late 1950s and early 1960s even conservatives began to advocate new kinds of paternal authority rather than a return to hierarchical patriarchalism. Even though this new model of a gentler, more loving fatherhood stayed within the framework of patriarchal gender relations, these gender relations were less hierarchical and authoritarian than the Christian conceptions of patriarchy of the interwar years.16 Catholic and Protestant family experts actively promoted a new kind of paternal authority based on trust and love, as well as a new model of the family in which fathers were expected to play an active role in raising not only their older children, but also their infants and toddlers. But public debates about ‘democratic fatherhood’ represented more than that: it became the locus for determining the relationship between authority and democracy in the new republic. The longing for a gentler, more loving kind of fatherhood thus reveals a telling aspect of the West German quest for democracy. Immediately after the war, many observers complained that ‘democracy’ was merely an empty phrase used to cover

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up the moral failings of the time. But in the 1950s, this guiding concept was filled with life and meaning. The dream of new forms of paternal authority decisively contributed to citizens’ ability to leave National Socialism and militarism behind and discard the ideal of masculinity embodied by the heroic working soldier associated with them. Embracing the idea of ‘democratic fatherhood,’ West Germans found their way into a democratic polity and learned to feel at home in their ‘liberal republic.’ From the early 1950s to the late 1970s, then, both high- and middlebrow intellectuals from very different political and cultural milieux invoked the biological metaphor of ‘germ cell’ in order to capture the critical role of the private realm for the establishment and survival of democracy as a way of life. Over the course of three decades the basic premise predominated: The basis of the political, the beginning and the end of politics, was neither enmity nor competition, nor the idea of peace or of the common weal, but rather the private realm. It is against the background of these far-reaching similarities between the 1950s and the 1960s that we can begin to reassess the nature of the caesura of 1968. Until well into the 1960s the belief predominated that the idea of authority did not necessarily contradict the idea of democracy and freedom. The prevailing consensus was that a genuinely democratic idea of authority was not just desirable, but also possible, as long as it was no longer based on the spirit of order and obedience, but of trust and voluntary consent. The anti-authoritarian moment of 1968 in contrast gave rise to the idea that the tension between authority and democracy needed to be resolved once and for all. Since 1968 the belief became increasingly popular that a genuinely democratic form of childrearing presupposed the struggle against any form of authority, that a democratic polity was only possible within an anti-authoritarian society. Closely related was a second aspect why ‘1968’ constituted a seemingly radical, yet ephemeral rupture, namely the question of what role the family should play in this context. Until the mid-1960s the family was regarded as a key site in which fathers and mothers, sons and daughters could and should practise democracy as a way of life.17 For many, a more egalitarian family seemed like a central way station on the path of redemption that led from National Socialism, genocide, and the war of annihilation to democracy. The promise of salvation that the catch phrase of the ‘democratic family’ seemed to offer in the 1950s and early 1960s rang hollow by 1968. A growing number of critics of

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the family no longer viewed it as a site to practise democracy but as a nursery for repression and an obstacle in the search for a democratic polity. As the family no longer seemed part of the solution, but part of the problem and the ‘germ cell’ for an authoritarian character structure, the more pressing question became which institutions could take its place. It is in this context that we can best understand the boundless psychological and political energies which the Sixty-Eighters – those progressive individuals who identified with the new spirit of openness and radical democracy – invested into their search for new forms and institutions of childrearing beyond the family, namely the shop-front daycares (Kinderladen). With this in mind, we can now turn to an analysis of the anti-authoritarian dreams of redemption of the late 1960s – visions of a world without authority and most importantly without the family.18 No matter how multifaceted the criticism of the family was, few in 1968 doubted that the family was the source of numerous political, social, and cultural ills. Whereas in the late 1950s and early 1960s many had viewed the family as a beacon of hope in the search for democracy, it was now viewed as a ‘patient’ at best and as a source of evil at worst.19 Criticism of the family as repressive was not, of course, confined to West Germany at the time. At once typical and influential was David Cooper’s 1970 book The Death of the Family, soon translated into Italian, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, French, and German. Cooper was a close collaborator of R.D. Laing and a co-founder of the anti-psychiatry movement who had made a name for himself as organizer of the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in July 1967 and enjoyed a reputation as ‘one of the most brilliant and poetic … gadflies on the … maiming effects of the conventional family.’ In his book he called for the destruction of the family as part of a larger struggle to ‘annihilate the power structures of the feudal-bourgeois state.’20 Much like R.D. Laing, who viewed families as ‘the slaughterhouses of our children,’ Cooper aimed to expose the ‘family as an ideological conditioning device (the nonhuman phrasing is deliberate and necessary) in any exploitative society – slave society, feudal society, capitalist society – from its most primitive phase to the neo-colonizing societies in the first world today.’21 Laing’s and Cooper’s view of the family as a site of repression, violence, and, possibly, terror fell on fertile ground in early 1970s West Germany (the German translation of The Death of the Family sold close to 20,000 copies in 1972 and 1973). In fact, similar ideas had begun to cir-

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culate among German critics of the family since the late 1960s, although Heide Berndt, a collaborator at Alexander Mitscherlich’s Sigmund Freud-Institute in Frankfurt, had warned in 1969 against the erroneous belief that the ‘abolishment of the family’ was ‘an important step toward the liberation of humanity.’ Along with many others, however, she viewed the family as that ‘psychological agency in society which produces individual neuroses and thereby plays a major part in the reproduction of societal unreason.’22 Any talk of a partnership between men and women that had been at the heart of the guiding principle of the ‘democratic family’ during the Adenauer years now seemed particularly questionable. In the same issue of the journal Kursbuch the Münster sociologist Karin Schrader-Klebert emphasized that such ‘new ideologies’ of the egalitarian family were ‘anything but negations of patriarchal violence,’ but ‘their total internalization.’23 Shop-front daycares were central to anti-authoritarian utopias of childrearing. Both in the hotbeds of revolution in Berlin and Frankfurt and in many other German cities, Kinderladen were regarded as an appealing counter-model to the nuclear family, a patriarchal gender regime, and repressive forms of education. In April 1969 a group of parents met in the Socialist Club in Bremen to discuss the possibility of ‘education without repression.’24 With financial support from the state government they founded the Bremer Kinder-Centrum in March 1970 based on the idea of anti-authoritarian education, whose aim was to ‘dismantle repression.’ The curiosity of the local press was as considerable as the parents’ loquaciousness, and the first Kinderladen in Bremen held monthly press conferences to promote forms of education beyond the family. It soon became apparent that the anti-authoritarian Kinderladen movement entertained a wide range of ideas of what should form the basis of an education without repression. The first press conference of the Bremer Kinder-Centrum in March 1970 revolved around the question of why the Easter bunny and Easter eggs needed to be understood ‘in the context of the repression’ that ‘parents subject their children to before holidays.’ Received wisdom portrayed the Easter bunny as someone who ‘delivered eggs.’ In light of this ‘lie about the function of the rabbit,’ it was necessary to ‘completely reject’ the Easter bunny. Preparations for the Easter festivities were ‘part and parcel of authoritarian education’ because children were ‘led to believe that they would receive presents as long as they were “well-behaved,”’ in other words, as long as they ‘allowed themselves to be oppressed.’ Anyone who

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wanted to raise children without repression should renounce the Easter bunny. Some parents toyed with the idea of ‘hiding the Easter eggs on some other day than Easter Sunday,’ such as a few days before Easter, in order to ‘reduce the children’s expectations.’ At the end of a lengthy discussion, however, members of the Kinder-Centrum came to realize that the ‘desire for such a remedy was based on one’s own memories of a seemingly nice childhood.’25 Within scholarly conversations over how best to interpret the ‘religious crisis’ of the 1960s, the controversy over the Easter bunny is remarkable on several accounts.26 The Kinderladen movement grew out of a culture that was deeply infused with Christian traditions and symbols and is, perhaps, understood against the background of the farreaching ‘rechristianization’ of the 1950s. Yet whereas the advocates of anti-authoritarian education viewed the Easter bunny as a symbol of repressive childrearing, the holiday itself seems to have been considered a secular event, no matter how central Easter was to the Christian calendar. Such amnesia about the degree to which festive rituals continued to be shaped by Protestant and Catholic traditions was hardly confined to the anti-authoritarian movement. In March 1970, the leading West German women’s and family journal Brigitte published a lengthy road map for a perfect Easter weekend. The essay contained detailed discussions of seating arrangements and the best way to decorate the table, yet failed to mention any religious activities, such as prayers or church attendance.27 How Catholics responded to the years of the revolutionary upheaval and the fantasies of anti-authoritarian redemption of the late 1960s and early 1970s is perhaps best understood against the background of this paradox. While West German culture in ‘1968’ was much more homogeneously Christian and much less religiously heterogeneous than in Germany today, at the time few people were aware of the degree to which their daily lives and routines continued to be shaped by Christian traditions and rituals. During the revolutionary moment of the late 1960s, Catholic family experts from different milieux and backgrounds, whether conservative or progressive, held that patriarchy had outlived itself and advocated more egalitarian relations between mothers and fathers, as well as parents and children. Explicit celebrations of paternal supremacy, a patriarchy ordained by God that still held some currency among conservative Catholics in the early 1950s, had lost their appeal by the late 1960s. Even the flagship journal of conservative Catholics, Rheinischer

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Merkur, gave room to proponents of egalitarian gender relations. One of the most prolific Catholic writers on education, Franz Pöggeler, advocated the ‘emancipation of the family’ in April 1971. In future families, he opined, fathers would have to play a more active role in domestic life as an increasing number of mothers pursued professional careers. ‘Almost every social role between men and women is exchangeable, and emancipation is only possible by enabling this change of role freely and without any noteworthy obstacle,’ the president of the German Catholic Parents’ Association (Katholische Elternschaft Deutschlands) noted. ‘If the companionship of men and women is to be combined with equality,’ married men would have ‘to enjoy the same legal entitlements to take a household day [Haushaltstag] as women.’ As a result, fathers would (and should) take on a more active role in family routines and rituals. The myriad Catholic organizations involved in parental education (Elternbildung) that were offering popular courses on how to care for infants and children needed to ‘address fathers more than up to now.’28 By the late 1960s the notion that patriarchy was no longer in keeping with the times had become common currency among the Catholic laity. In 1969, Rudolf Rüberg reflected on how Catholic parents should best respond to the dramatic transformation of gender relations they were experiencing. The idea of ‘companionship’ was key. ‘As a consequence of fundamental social changes,’ the associate director of the Katholisches Zentralinstitut für Ehe- und Familienfragen argued, egalitarian gender relations and the notion of ‘partnership’ had replaced traditional forms of family life ‘that we have come to know as “Patriarchalism.”’ In no country was this more true than in postwar Germany: ‘As a result … of a not yet fully mastered past’ (a somewhat vague description of the cataclysmic age of man-made mass death that was Nazi Germany), ‘men had been forced to renunciate their patriarchal throne’ in an era in which women had become ‘equal partners.’29 Catholic lay organizations and groups close to the two Christian Democratic parties responded similarly to such shifts. The Bamberg Principles, which the Christian Social Workers’ Union (Christlich-Soziale Arbeitnehmerschaft) passed in April 1968, contained a lengthy analysis of the family and gender relations. ‘Societal changes are reflected in the transition from patriarchal conception to the organizing principle of brotherliness,’ these principles asserted (rehashing ideas that were similar to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Catholic social thought). Such ‘brotherly collaboration’ was ‘about partnership,

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not submission of mindless levelling.’ In the future, ‘all communities, from the family to the state and global institutions, would have to be based on such ideas of partnership.’ The Bamberg Principles of the Workers’ Union, a sub-organization of the Christian Social Union, left no doubt that ‘brotherliness’ was incompatible with the idea of patriarchy. ‘In days gone by, fatherliness [Väterlichkeit] served as the most important model of public order.’ All this had changed: ‘In the (mass-) society shaped by industrialism, the system of brotherliness, that is to say democracy, self-government, partnership, and (workers’) participation [Mitbestimmung], takes the place of fatherliness as an organizing principle.’30 The Bamberg Principles echoed a central idea that proponents of more egalitarian relations between children and parents, especially fathers, shared from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, namely that new conceptions of paternal authority and of the family were critical to the search for democracy as a way of life. In the early 1970s the sociologist, psychologist, and therapist Ulrich Beer published a lengthy series of articles in the conservative Catholic journal Christliche Familie, entitled ‘Why Teenagers Need Authority’ (Jugend braucht Autorität). On the one hand genuine authority, according to Beer, was modelled on democratic ideas; on the other hand, the fate of democracy depended on such conceptions of authority. ‘Only in a democracy is authority even possible,’ Beer, who later would become famous as Germany’s first TV psychologist, claimed: ‘Democracy is characterized by temporary leadership for a limited time. It builds on trust and acceptance, criticism, and discussion.’ ‘Freedom is the breath of fresh air’ democratic polities thrive on; ‘partnership is the principle they depend on.’ In light of such insights, democracy and authority are co-constitutive: ‘All of these designations of democracy,’ Beer asserted, could equally ‘be used for authority; one only would have to exchange the two terms.’ Genuine authority, or ‘democratic authority,’ he concluded, presumes a ‘capacity that is often not associated with the idea of authority: that is the capacity of solidarity.’31 Another prolific Catholic expert on the family, Ruth Dirx, argued that ‘Democracy Begins on the Playground.’ In an article published under the same title in the February 1968 issue of Woman and Mother: A Monthly for Catholic Women in Families and Work (Frau und Mutter. Monatsschrift für die katholische Frau in Familie und Beruf) she noted how central well-known children’s games, such as Round Dance, Tag, and Hide and Seek, were to the making and survival of a democratic polity.

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Dirx, who had made a name for herself as author of the Elternbuch of the left-leaning Büchergilde of 1960 (as well as numerous novels celebrating American natives as models for democratic citizens) opined that ‘long before democracy was established, children practised democracy as a way of life’ (demokratische Formen des Zusammenlebens). When engaged in such games, children ‘felt free and secure at the same time, as the democratic rules of the game represent a just order.’ Such arguments drew on Rousseauian conceptions of the noble savage and the innocent child and thereby aimed to undermine any remaining appeal of the idea of the Tyrant Child (which according to some scholars dominated twentieth-century German ideas about childrearing).32 In fact, Dirx was convinced that ‘games with democratic rules contain the opportunity to positively shape concepts of morality and of manners.’33 Catholic youth journals also celebrated the spirit of anti-authoritarian subversion. In March 1971 the leading Catholic teenage magazine Top, Hallo embraced the ‘winding up of parents’ as long as it was ‘funny.’ ‘Children,’ the journal argued, ‘shouldn’t accept every bellowing adult as a figure of authority.’34 The next issue went even further in its praise of the ‘subversive humour’ so characteristic of certain strands of the anti-authoritarian movement. It lauded the Swedish play What’s Eating Ulla? (Worüber regt sich Ulla auf?) by Clas Engström as a masterful, albeit provocative, illustration of what democracy as a way of life was all about. ‘The children besiege the bathroom and thereby make family democracy happen.’ The journal reported: ‘It’s ‘tough’ [ein dicker Hund] that children speak as children really speak, i.e., not like German teachers and mothers would like them to. Democracy is imposed in a comical way: Dad signs the constitution of the family parliament because he needs to use the bathroom, which his children occupy.’ It was a play, Top, Hallo concluded, ‘in which one can sense, behind the laughter, that the ways in which parents and children live together really could be different than it usually is.’35 As in the 1950s, Catholic family experts articulated the nexus between new forms of childrearing and the making of a democracy against the background of memories of violence, dictatorship, and mass murder. Memories of the Nazi past, of course, had changed between the mid1950s and the late 1960s. The dark ghosts of militarism that had been a central component of such memories in the mid- and late 1950s now had slipped out of the picture. The Bundeswehr was perhaps seen as a success story of a genuinely democratic army. The ghosts of Prussian and Nazi militarism were exorcised. In his ruminations on Why Teen-

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agers Need Authority of 1974, Ulrich Beer invited his readers to reflect upon the lessons of the Nazi past for childrearing. ‘Whoever surveys the political history and the history of political pedagogy won’t have any doubt,’ he argued, ‘that the general understanding of the term authority in the past hundred years tended more to the right than the left.’ Yet this had been the result of a misunderstanding. This ‘lop-sided interpretation’ of the concept, which was ‘crucial for the erosion of the idea of authority,’ had culminated ‘in the authoritarianism and finally the totalitarianism of the Hitler dictatorship that, in the concentration of power and violence, left no room for genuine authority.’36 Similar ideas circulated in a genre of religious tracts that is not known for articulating radical, let alone avant-garde ideas, namely the catechism. In response to Vatican II, the Catholic bishops edited a completely revised version in 1969, entitled glauben – leben – handeln (to believe – to live – to act), which provided a striking reinterpretation of the fourth commandment. While parents were responsible for children, it was the duty of mothers and fathers to turn more and more of their responsibilities over to their sons and daughters so that they could become ‘independent.’ And while glauben – leben – handeln left no doubt that children ‘owed’ their father and mother (!) ‘obedience,’ even if children also had rights within the family, the new catechism reminded the laity that blind obedience could sometimes be a crime. Invoking ‘superior orders’ did not minimize responsibility or guilt. Instead, Catholics had the duty to resist any actions that violated the law of nations.37 All this is not to claim that Catholics were fervent supporters of antiauthoritarian childrearing. They were not. At the same time, Catholic family experts left no doubt that the real challenge was to overcome authoritarian and hierarchical conceptions of education based on brute force and repression. In December 1971, Hildegard Bauch, for example, called for ‘Free-Spirited Education in the Family’ (Freierziehung in der Familie) in the popular weekly Weltbild, the Catholic equivalent of magazines like Stern or Bunte, which was edited by the Kirchliche Hauptstelle für Männerseelsorge und Männerarbeit under direct supervision of the German Bishops’ Conference. ‘Free-spirited education’ should not be confused with anti-authoritarian education, not the least because Bauch did not think that the family as such was dead. So what was ‘Freierziehung’ according to Bauch, who was working at a Catholic Centre for Marriage and Family Counseling at the time? ‘Parents should not raise Untertanen,’ she said, referring to the infamous German lackey, mindless and obedient. In light of their ‘greater experience,’ parents,

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however, had ‘the right to implement their will for the best of the child.’ The answer to the question whether ‘anti-authoritarian or authoritarian’ forms of childrearing were called for, was ‘not as complicated as it might appear,’ Bauch concluded. Her answer was: ‘Free-Spirited Education,’ which comprises ‘clear decisions by the educator only if necessary, and as much freedom as possible.’38 By the early 1970s, mainstream Catholic pedagogical experts had developed a nuanced yet forceful critique of authoritarian conceptions of childrearing. What they advocated was often heavily indebted to the anti-authoritarian moment of 1968, although they opted for other labels such as ‘authoritative’ or ‘emancipatory’ education. In an influential and widely cited essay published in the monthly Diakonia: Internationale Zeitschrift für die Praxis der Kirche, Dietmar Mieth and Hubert Bour argued that ‘Christian education’ should be based on a ‘decisive rejection of authoritarian traits in families and schools, the Church and society.’ In that sense, Christian education was at once ‘anti-authoritarian’ and part and parcel of a far-reaching ‘democratization of all spheres of life.’ It differed from the Sixty-Eighters’ fantasies of a world without authority in that it aimed to distinguish carefully between an ‘authoritarian style’ of childrearing embedded in a ‘paternal-authoritarian’ (väterlich-autoritär) idea of education and the possibility of a ‘fraternalsubsidiary’ (brüderlich-subsidiär) conception of authority. Such a conception of ‘authoritative education’ could claim to be ‘emancipatory’ because it was based on a conception of trust that aimed to increase the autonomy (Selbständigkeit) of children, students, and democratic citizens; because it viewed conflict as normal and as a form of mutual recognition; because it left its rationale open to questioning; and because it strengthened and drew on the mature ego-identity of those in positions of authority and those temporarily subject to them. Much like the proponents of anti-authoritarian childrearing, Catholic education aimed, in the words of Mieth and Bour, to strengthen the ‘ability to actively participate’ (Mitbestimmungsfähigkeit), ‘the capacity to think’ (Reflexionsfähigkeit), and the ‘faculty to criticize’ (Kritikfähigkeit).39 Catholic responses to changing gender relations and more egalitarian visions of childrearing at once confirm and complicate our understating of the ‘rechristianization’ of the immediate postwar years and the 1950s as well as the ‘dechristianization’ of the 1960s and early 1970s. Whether one looks at 1950s controversies over the future of the family among the clergy or among the laity, one is struck by how Catholic ideas of the

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‘democratic family’ and of ‘democratic fatherhood’ were often articulated within an explicitly theological and doctrinal framework. All this changed as a result of the religious crisis of the 1960s. By ‘1968,’ the frame of reference even for Catholic family experts had shifted to (popular) psychology, the educational sciences, and sociology. Such a shift from religious to secular arguments may partly explain why Catholic family experts did not reject the anti-authoritarian moment tout court. The striking similarities between fantasies of a ‘democratic family’ of the 1950s and the anti-authoritarian utopias of the late 1960s, however, were more important. West German Catholics welcomed criticism of hierarchical forms of childrearing in 1968 to the degree that they did because such arguments drew on ideas of democratic partnership, a language that Catholics had been involved in developing in the 1950s. The point here is not to claim that the Catholic reformers of the Adenauer years who challenged what they considered patriarchal conceptions of the family represented mainstream German Catholicism.40 Their marginality notwithstanding, these intellectuals, in combination with the increasing laicization of Catholic organizations since the late 1950s, arguably prompted conceptual and intellectual agitation among mainstream Catholics at this time.41 To be sure, such attempts to question patriarchy and to envision more egalitarian gender relations were compromised by persisting systems of gendered economic discrimination and the maternalistic presupposition of welfare reforms. Yet, we must not overlook the fact that these early advocates of gentle fatherhood articulated demands from about 1950 that a later generation of feminists would build upon in the late 1960s. As Geoff Eley has noted, critiques of patriarchy from the early 1950s ‘accumulated languages of rights and capacities that later radicalism could also deploy.’42 Once we acknowledge the striking similarities between the 1950s and the 1960s, it becomes obvious how strange these two decades have become. True, the public in today’s Germany intensely discuss the childlessness of academics, the compatibility of family and work, same-sex marriages, and forms of education that are in keeping with the times. Yet what is at stake in today’s debates is the future of the pension system, the challenge of a global knowledge society, and the issue of gender equality. What has been lost is the belief that the future of the democratic polity depends on a specific style of childrearing, be it within the ‘democratic family’ or within forms of private life beyond the family, such as Kinderladen. If the dreams of the democratic family of the 1950s strike contemporary readers as staid at best, then the revo-

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lutionary alternatives of the late 1960s and early 1970s seem primarily bizarre. A sense of irony was lacking in both. What, if anything, remains? When measured against the ambitious utopias of a redemptive transformation of fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood prevalent in the 1950s and the 1960s, the answer probably is: not much. The recent nostalgia for bourgeois morality and the bourgeois family notwithstanding, it is apparent how diverse conceptions of the family have become.43 Much of this may have less to do with ‘1968’ and more with the women’s movement, which fought for the decriminalization of abortion and a comprehensive reform of divorce law, as well as the rise of the gay and lesbian movement after homosexuality had been decriminalized in 1969.44 The degree to which conceptions of the family had become more encompassing was tangible when then-chancellor Gerhard Schröder coined the campaign slogan that families existed ‘anywhere where children are’ – a broad definition that has been embraced even by the Christian Democrats. This conservative party’s program of 1994 had still stipulated that the ‘best basis for a shared responsibility of a mother and a father for the education of children’ was a ‘marriage’ as a ‘companionship of husband and wife.’ By 2000, the Christian Democrats agreed to a mission statement in family policy according to which a ‘family’ existed ‘anywhere where parents assume responsibility for children and children assume responsibility for parents on a permanent basis’ – a definition that entered the party’s program of December 2007.45 The immediate after-effects of the 1960s’ concrete utopias of a world beyond the family can only be outlined. From what we know today it appears as if the anti-authoritarian dreams of the communes and the Kinderladen along with the utopia of a sexual revolution turned out to be the ‘germ cells’ less of revolution than of a ‘left melancholia,’ which Michael Schneider in 1980 identified as the dominant mood of the late 1970s.46 One of the most interesting challenges when we interpret the history of the late Bonn Republic is the question of whether this ‘left melancholia’ has paved the way for the rise of the very sceptical irony that Richard Rorty believed to be the hallmark of a liberalism that was aware of its ambivalences and darker sides. Yet when we realize how difficult it still is to develop a genuinely historical interpretation of ‘1968’ more than forty years after the event, it will be some time before we are in a position to make sense of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The historians who are young enough to appreciate the strangeness of the late Bonn Republic and to view the Kohl years as a historical phenom-

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enon have probably just entered college. All the more curious we are to see how they will interpret the after-effects of ‘1968.’

NOTES 1 Udo di Fabio, Die Kultur der Freiheit (Munich: C.H. Beck 2005), 142; see also Norbert Bolz, Die Helden der Familie (Munich: Fink, 2006), 44. 2 Christina von Hodenberg and Detlef Siegfried, ‘Reform und Revolte: 1968 und die langen sechziger Jahre in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik,’ in von Hodenburg and Siegfried, eds., Wo ‘1968’ liegt: Reform und Revolte in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 7–14, especially 10. See also Axel Schildt, Ankunft im Westen: Ein Essay zur Erfolgsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999), 90–2; and Robert G. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). In historical narratives that dominate in liberal feuilletons, the Adenauer era appears as a ‘bigoted, fossil society whose structures were as orderly as they were constricting’; see Jochen Buchsteiner, ‘… und kein bißchen bissig. Die Dreißigjährigen gelten als unpolitisch. Zu Recht. Das Erbe ihrer Väter läßt ihnen keine andere Wahl,’ Die Zeit, 21 February 1997, 65–6. As Dagmar Herzog has recently shown, however, the ‘sexual conservatism’ of the Adenauer era is more fruitfully understood as a response to Nazi sexual morality and has little in common with Wilheminian traditions; Herzog, Die Politisierung der Lust: Sexualität in der deutschen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Siedler, 2005), 170. 3 This does not constitute a ‘Sonderweg’ in the West German historiography; see for example the precise dichotomization between the 1950s as an age of ‘rigid social hierarchy; subordination of women and children to men; repressed attitudes to sex; racism; unquestioning respect for authority in the family’ and the ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s in Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3–4. 4 Karl Markus Michel, ‘Muster ohne Wert: Westdeutschland 1965,’ in Die sprachlose Intelligenz, Edition Suhrkamp 270 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 63–124, here: 72; first published in Kursbuch 4 (February 1966): 168. 5 Heide Fehrenbach, ‘Rehabilitating Fatherland: Race and German Remasculinization,’ Signs 24, no. 1 (1998): 107–28; Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Robert Moeller, ‘Heimkehr ins Vaterland: Die Remaskulinis-

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7

8

9

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ierung Westdeutschlands in den fünfziger Jahren,’ Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 60, no. 2 (2001): 403–36. Karl Christian Lammers, ‘Glücksfall Bundesrepublik: New Germany and the 1960s,’ Contemporary European History 17 (2008): 127–34; Nick Thomas, Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy (New York: Berg, 2003), 223; von Hodenberg and Siegfried, ‘Reform und Revolte,’ in von Hodenberg and Siegried, eds., Wo ‘1968’ liegt, 7–14, especially 10; Habbo Knoch, ‘“Mündige Bürger,” oder: Der kurze Frühling einer partizipatorischen Vision. Einführung,’ in Knoch, ed., Bürgersinn mit Weltgefühl: Politische Moral und solidarischer Protest in den sechzigerund siebziger Jahren (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 9–53, especially 16 and 25; Ingrid Gilcher-Holthey, Die 68er-Bewegung: Deutschland – Westeuropa – USA (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001), 127; and Schildt, Ankunft im Westen, 90–2. Cornelius Adalbert von Heyl, ‘Autorität,’ in Evangelisches Soziallexikon, 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Kreuz-Verlag, 1963), 129–31. In general, see Theodor Eschenburg, Über Autorität, Edition Suhrkamp 129 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965); Jens Kertscher, ‘Autorität. Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten im Umgang mit einem belasteten Begriff,’ in Carsten Dutt, ed., Herausforderungen der Begriffsgeschichte (Heidelberg, Winter 2003), 133–47; and Christoph Schönberger, ‘Autorität in der Demokratie,’ Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 4, no. 4 (2010): 41–50. For an indication of how central ideas like ‘cadaver obedience’ and ‘spirit of subordination’ were in dealing with the National Socialist past after the war, see Sean A. Forner, ‘Für eine demokratische Erneuerung Deutschlands: Kommunikationsprozesse und Deutungsmuster engagierter Demokraten nach 1945,’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 33 (2007): 228–57, at 247. Heinz-Dietrich Wendland, ‘Partnerschaft, in evangelischer Sicht,’ Evangelisches Soziallexikon, 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1963), 960–1. This entry, like those on ‘Authority’ and ‘Democracy,’ does not appear in the first edition of the Evangelical Soziallexikon (Stuttgart, 1954). In discussing the first edition, Wendland himself criticized it for failing to deal adequately with questions of democracy: ‘Review of Evangelisches Soziallexikon,’ Zeitwende: Die neue Furche 26 (1955): 563–5. The idea of maturity (Mündigkeit) was an important catchword among the (Protestant) laity at the time; see Heinrich Giesen, Heinz-Horst Schrey, and Hans Jürgen Schultz, eds., Der mündige Christ (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1956), a book that had sold more than 11,000 copies by 1957. J. Busch, ‘Vater: Die menschliche Gesellschaft ist erschüttert bis in ihre tiefsten Fundamente,’ Monika: Zeitschrift für katholische Mütter und Frauen 80, no. 3 (March 1956): 37–40, quotations at 37 and 40: ‘Nicht Laune und Herrentum dürfen das Zepter schwingen. Autorität und Liebe gehören

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zusammen wie Leib und Seele … Autorität ohne Liebe schafft Auflehnung, Revolution, Minderwertigkeitskomplexe, Haß und Verbitterung und geistige Verkrüppelung. Die Liebe allein nimmt den Gehorsam die Verdemütigung und Bitternis fort und schafft jene geistige Offenheit und Feinfühligkeit, die sich mühelos in das Gemeinschaftsleben einschalten und einfügen läßt’ (40). Dr. Sch., ‘Wenn der Vater fehlt,’ Monika: Zeitschrift für katholische Mütter und Frauen 80, no. 11 (November 1956): 166–7, quotation at 166. For similar arguments see Eva Firkel, ‘Vater sein dagegen sehr,’ Monika: Zeitschrift für katholische Mütter und Frauen 81, no. 1 (January 1957): 7; Rolf Raduun, ‘Ich bin Familienvater: Politik am Familientisch,’ Monika: Zeitschrift für katholische Mütter und Frauen 81, no. 10 (October 1957): 147; and Joseph Kuckhoff, ‘Vaterschaft,’ Monika: Zeitschrift für katholische Mütter und Frauen 82, no. 3 (March 1958): 40–1. 10 The Kirchenzeitung concluded that ‘the father’s love and the child’s trust are the fundamental requirements for childrearing. And this is precisely what has become the defining characteristic of a new concept of authority.’ See ‘Vater oder Familienfunktionär,’ Kirchenzeitung 20, no. 26 (Aachen, 1965): 16–19, quotation at 18–19. 11 Scholarship on the politics of memory in the 1950s tends to underestimate the significance of these issues in public debates about the immediate past of the Federal Republic; see, for example, Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), as well as Neil Gregor’s stimulating case study, ‘The Illusion of Remembrance: The Karl Diehl Affair and the Memory of Nazism in Nuremberg 1945–1999,’ Journal of Modern History 75 (2003): 590–633. However, compare Peter Reichel’s pointed thesis that the ‘burden of the National Socialist past’ was already hotly debated in the 1950s. Upon closer examination, the decade lost ‘everything idyllic and introspective, everything false and restorative’; Reichel, Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Deutschland: Die Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Diktatur von 1945 bis heute (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001), 139. Typical of debates in Protestant publications is Friedrich Langenfaß, ‘Dürfen wir die Vergangenheit totschweigen? Der Antisemitismus und seine Früchte,’ Zeitwende 29 (1958): 755–62; Langenfaß, ‘Der Eichmann-Prozeß und Wir,’ Zeitwende: Die neue Furche, 32 (1961): 721–5; as well as the special issues ‘Antisemitismus und Judentum,’ Jungenwacht. Ein Blatt evangelischer Jugend 17, no. 11 (1957) and ‘Der Nationalsozialismus,’ Jungenwacht: Evangelische Schülerzeitschrift 18, nos. 8–9 (1958); and Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 12 Heinrich Bödeker (1911–98), ‘Kein Mut zur Erziehung?’ Kirche und Mann:

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Monatsschrift für Männerarbeit der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland 12, no. 9 (1959): 3–4, quotation at 4. R. Sailer, ‘Demokratie beginnt in der Familie,’ Der Männer-Seelsorger 2, no. 1 (1952): 23–9, quotation at 26. See also Walter Hemsing, ‘Wenn aus Kindern “Leute” werden: “Der Herr Sohn,” das “Fräulein Tochter,”’ Elternhaus, Schule und Gemeinde, 7, no. 9 (1955): 3–4. ‘Ehrfurcht vor dem Vater: Mein Sohn sagt ‘Otto’ zu mir,’ in Mann in der Zeit: Zeitung für Stadt und Land 5, no. 11 (1952). The family was only one site among others within this search for new forms of masculinity; see especially Thomas Kühne, ‘“… aus diesem Krieg werden nicht nur harte Männer heimkehren”: Kriegskameradschaft und Männlichkeit im 20. Jahrhundert,’ in Kühne, ed., Männergeschichte – Geschlechtergeschichte: Männlichkeit im Wandel der Moderne (Frankfurt: Campus, 1996), 174–92; and Kaspar Maase, ‘Entblößte Brust und schwingende Hüfte: Momentaufnahmen von der Jugend der fünfziger Jahre,’ in Kühne, ed., Männergeschichte – Geschlechtergeschichte, 193–217; Maase, ‘Establishing Cultural Democracy: Youth, “Americanization,” and the Irresistible Rise of Popular Culture,’ in Hanna Schissler, ed., The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 428–50; and Svenja Goltermann, ‘Beherrschung der Männlichkeit: Zur Deutung psychischer Leiden bei den Heimkehrern des Zweiten Weltkriegs 1945–1956,’ Feministische Studien 18, no. 2 (2000): 7–19; Goltermann, ‘Im Wahn der Gewalt. Massentod, Opferdiskurs und Psychiatrie 1945–1956,’ in Klaus Naumann, ed., Nachkrieg in Deutschland (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001), 343–63. Karl Borgmann, ‘Völker werden aus Kinderstuben: Um die rechte Ordnung in der Familie,’ Frau und Mutter: Monatsschrift für die katholische Frau in Familie und Beruf 35, no. 1 (1952): 4–5. For circulation statistics, see Die deutsche Presse 1954: Zeitungen und Zeitschriften (Berlin, 1954): 539. Rebecca Heinemann, Familie zwischen Tradition und Emanzipation: Katholische und sozialdemokratische Familienkonzeptionen in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2004). For a lengthier analysis of issues that can only be alluded to in this context, see Till van Rahden, ‘Das Karlsruher “Stichentscheid”-Urteil in der politischen Kultur der frühen Bundesrepublik,’ Zeithistorische Forschungen 2, no. 2 (2005): 160–79; van Rahden, ‘Fatherhood, Rechristianization, and the Search for Democracy in 1950s West Germany,’ in Dirk Schumann, ed., Raising Citizens in the ‘Century of the Child’: Child-Rearing in the United States and German Central Europe in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 141–64. For similar developments among Catholics in Quebec see Denyse Baillargeon, ‘“We admire modern parents”: The École des

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Parents du Québec and the Post-War Quebec family, 1940–1959,’ in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, eds., Cultures of Citizenship in Postwar Canada, 1940–1955 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 239–76; and Michael Gauvreau, ‘The Emergence of Personalist Feminism: Catholicism and the Marriage-Preparation Movement in Quebec, 1940–1966,’ in Nancy Christie, ed., Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2002), 319–47. On the social history of these lifestyles, see Detlef Siegfried and Sven Reichardt, eds., Das alternative Milieu: Antibürgerlicher Lebensstil und linke Politik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Europa 1968–1983 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010). In contrast to the wealth of studies on ‘1968’ generally, scholarship on Kinderladen is surprisingly scarce; for exceptions that prove the rule see Michael Schmidtke, Der Aufbruch der jungen Intelligenz: Die 68er Jahre in der Bundesrepublik und den USA (Frankfurt: Campus, 2003), 162–9; Meike Sophie Baader, ed., ‘Seid realistisch, verlangt das Unmögliche’: Wie 1968 die Pädagogik bewegte (Weinheim: Beltz, 2008). Particularly influential: Horst-Eberhard Richter, Patient Familie. Entstehung, Struktur und Therapie von Konflikten in Ehe und Familie (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1970); Richter, Eltern, Kind und Neurose: Psychoanalyse der kindlichen Rolle (Stuttgart: Klett, 1963), which found a wide audience after 1969 when it was published as a Rowohlt-Paperback edition. See also Jacques Hochmann, ‘Le postulat fusionel,’ Information psychiatrique (September 1969); reprinted in Hochmann, Pour une psychiatrie communautaire (La cité prochaine) (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971), published in German as ‘Die Familie,’ in Hochmann, Thesen zu einer Gemeindepsychiatrie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 154–215. David Cooper, The Death of the Family (New York: Pantheon, 1970; London: Allen Lane, 1971); reprinted as a ‘Pelican Book’ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 148. Translations include: Der Tod der Familie, Das neue Buch 6 (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1972); La morte della famiglia (Turin: Einaudi, 1972); Familiens død (Cophenhagen: Bibliotek Rhodos, 1972); Mort de la famille (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972); Död åt familjen (Stockholm: Aldus/Bonnier, 1971); Einde van het gezin. Boom paperback, 55 (Amsterdam: Boom Meppel, 1972). The quotation on Cooper as a gadfly is from Helen Mayer Hacker, ‘Review of The Death of the Family,’ Journal of Marriage and the Family 34, no. 1 (1972): 187–9, at 187. Ronald D. Laing, The Politics of the Family and Other Essays (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 101, translated into German as Die Politik der Familie (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1974); Cooper, Death of the Family, 5.

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22 Cited in Hilde Berndt, ‘Kommune und Familie,’ Kursbuch 17 (June 1969): 129–46, quoted at 136. Erich Fromm, Studien über Autorität und Familie (Paris: Alcan, 1936), 87. 23 Karin Schrader-Klebert, ‘Die kulturelle Revolution der Frau,’ Kursbuch 17 (June 1969): 1–46, quotation at 25 and 37. For an ironic distance to such hypothesis, see Hazel E. Hazel, ‘Unwissenschaftliche Betrachtungen eines weiblichen Monsters,’ Kursbuch 17 (June 1969): 47–51. 24 Staatsarchiv Bremen, Material Bremer Kinder-Centrum, Bestand 7, 197, no. 5, ‘Pädagogische Konzeptionen’ (Kuckuk, Arbeitspapier, p. 40). I would like to thank Renate Meyer-Braun for calling my attention to these archival holdings. 25 Staatsarchiv Bremen, 7, 197, no. 8, Protokolle BKC, Informationsveranstaltung für die Presse am 16. März 1970 (Kuckuk, Arbeitspapier, pp. 3–4). 26 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For an excellent survey see Mark Edward Ruff, ‘Integrating Religion into the Historical Mainstream: Recent Literature on Religion in the Federal Republic of Germany,’ Central European History 42 (2009): 307–37. 27 ‘Frühstück am Ostersonntag,’ Brigitte, 24 March 1970, 284–6. 28 Rheinischer Merkur, 30 April 1971. 29 Rudolf Rüberg, Eltern in einer neuen Welt (Recklinghausen: Bitter, 1969), 8 and 25. 30 ‘Bamberger Grundsätze,’ Stimme der CSA, ed. Landessekretariat of the Christlich-Soziale Arbeitnehmerschaft 2, no. 3 (1968). I would like to thank Martina Steber for calling my attention to this document. 31 Ulrich Beer, ‘Jugend braucht Autorität,’ Christliche Familie, 19 May 1974, 6. For an example of Beer’s career on German television, see Ulrich Beer, Beers Elternbuch: Der bekannte Fernsehpsychologe berät Eltern u. Erzieher (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1977). 32 Miriam Gebhardt, Die Angst vor dem kindlichen Tyrannen: Eine Geschichte der Erziehung im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: DVA, 2009). 33 Ruth Dirx, ‘Demokratie? Auf dem Spielplatz,’ Frau und Mutter 51 (February 1968): 134–5. 34 ‘Prügel für den Hausbesitzer: Jugendstück “Maximilian Pfeiferling,”’ Top, Hallo. Das Jugendmagazin, March 1971, 20. 35 Dieter Stoll, ‘Elefanten sind noch größer: Schwedisches Familienstück fordert Familiendemokratie,’ Top, Hallo. Das Jugendmagazin, April 1971, 20–1. For Engström’s play see Stoll, Vad bråkar Ulla om: Ett familjedrama för barn, ungdom och vuxna (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1969), translated by Detlef Brennecke as Worüber regt sich Ulla auf? (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969). For

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Till Van Rahden further examples of a spirit of subversion found in the Catholic youth journal see ‘Unter uns: Wie soll ich da noch Lust haben, mit meinen Eltern zu leben?’ Top, Hallo. Das Jugendmagazin, July 1971, 18, and ‘Die 10 Grundrechte des Kindes,’ Top, Hallo. Das Jugendmagazin, March 1972, 21. Beer, ‘Jugend braucht Autorität,’ 6. Glauben, leben, handeln. Arbeitsbuch zur Glaubensunterweisung, edited by the German Bishops’ Conference (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1969), quotations at 237, 239, and 244. Hildegard Bauch, ‘Freierziehung in der Familie,’ Weltbild (December 1971). Bauch had made a name for herself as the editor of the popular book A Close Look at Marriages; Hildegard Bauch, Ehen genau betrachtet. Eine Frau beantwortet Leserbriefe (Munich: Manz-Verlag, 1968). Dietmar Mieth and Hubert Bour, ‘Religiöse Erziehung – autoritäre, antiautoritäre oder autoritative Erziehung?’ Diakonia: Internationale Zeitschrift für die Praxis der Kirche, 4, no. 1 (1973): 61–8. For similar attempts to fruitfully engage the anti-authoritarian moment among other Catholic pedagogical experts (often invoking Mieth and Bour) see Erich Weber, Autorität im Wandel: Autoritäre, antiautoritäre und emanzipatorische Erziehung (Donauwörth: Auer, 1974); Reinhold Ruthe, Pro und contra zur nichtautoritären Erziehung, Claudius-Thesen 2 (Munich: Claudius Verlag, 1972); Bernd Lambert, Antiautoritäre Erziehung. Schriftenreihe: Unterrichtsmodell, no. 32, Sekundarstufe II (Munich: Dt. Katecheten-Verein, 1972); Jakob R. Schmid, Antiautoritäre, autoritäre oder autoritative Erziehung? Eine grundsätzliche Abklärung, 2nd ed. (Bern: Haupt, 1975). Mieth’s and Bour’s juxtaposition between a ‘paternal-authoritarian’ and a ‘fraternal-subsidary’ (brüderlich-subsidiär) idea of education was indebted to Heribert Mühlen, Entsakralisierung: Ein epochales Schlagwort in seiner Bedeutung für die Zukunft der christlichen Kirchen (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1970), 401–8. Mühlen in turn drew on Personalist critiques of patriarchal conceptions of authority from the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the wake of fascism and collaboration, leading Personalists like Jean Lacroix began to advocate a conception of authority based on the spirit of brotherhood that could serve as a building for a democratic society. See Jean Lacroix, Force et faiblesses de la famille, Collection Esprit, ‘La Cité Prochaine’ (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1948), translated as Hat die Familie versagt? Wege zu einer neuen Sinngebung (Offenburg: Dokumente-Verlag, 1952); for context see Rahden, ‘Fatherhood, Rechristianization, and the Search for Democracy,’ in Schumann ed., Raising Citizens, 148–50. Walter Dirks, the editor of the influential journal Frankfurter Hefte, published a piece on the crisis of marriage in early 1951 that echoed many

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of the concerns addressed in Ernst Michel’s book and employed similar language – existentialist, religious, and metaphysical; Dirks, ‘Was die Ehe bedroht. Eine Liste ihrer kritischen Punkte,’ Frankfurter Hefte 6 (1951): 18–28. In late 1952, however, Dirks revisited these issues in an article that was much more down to earth and focused on legal questions; it was also a more fundamental challenge to patriarchal conceptions of marriage and the family; Dirks, ‘Soll er ihr Herr sein? Die Gleichberechtigung der Frau und die Reform des Familienrechts,’ Frankfurter Hefte 7 (1952): 825–37. Hartmann Tyrell, ‘Die Familienrhetorik des Zweiten Vatikanums und die gegenwärtige Deinstitutionalisierung von Ehe und Familie,’ in Franz-Xaver Kaufmann and Arnold Zingerle, eds., Vaticanum II und Modernisierung (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996), 353–73; Wilhelm Damberg, Abschied vom Milieu? Katholizismus im Bistum Münster und in den Niederlanden 1945–1980 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997); Benjamin Ziemann, Katholische Kirche und Sozialwissenschaften 1945–1975 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 313. For a insightful critique of such nostalgia see Werner Plumpe, ‘Stichwort: Neue Bürgerlichkeit? Tragödie und Farce,’ WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6, no. 1 (2009): 101–6. Kristina Schulz, Der lange Atem der Provokation: Die Frauenbewegung in der Bundesrepublik und Frankreich 1968–1976 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2002); Gisela Notz, ‘Die autonomen Frauenbewegungen der Siebziger Jahre. Entstehungsgeschichte – Organisationsformen – politische Konzepte,’ Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 44 (2004): 123–48. CDU, Freiheit und Sicherheit: Grundsätze für Deutschland, Hannover, 3–4 December, 2007, p. 27, http:German Catholics in an Age of Revolutionwww.grundsatzprogramm.cdu.de/doc/071203-beschluss-grundsatzprogramm-6-navigierbar.pdf. Michael Schneider, ‘Transit durchs Reich linker Melancholie: Über den Lyriker Thomas Brasch,’ in Wespennest no. 39 (1980); republished as Den Kopf verkehrt aufgesetzt oder Die melancholische Linke: Aspekte des Kulturzerfalls in den siebziger Jahren, 2nd, extended ed. (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1982).

12 The ‘New Curriculum’ Controversy and the Religious Crisis of the United Church of Canada, 1952–1965 kevin n. flatt

The Canadian summer of 1964 simmered with religious controversy. ‘Wars and rumours of wars’ echoed, sometimes faintly, sometimes loudly, in the pages of the daily newspapers and over the radio waves; strange redefinitions of God as the ‘ground of being’ reached Canada’s shores from across the Atlantic; and everywhere one heard stirrings of doctrinal discontent.1 Of most interest for our purposes was the urgent news, plastered across the headlines of the Toronto Daily Star one July morning, that the much-anticipated new Christian education curriculum of the United Church of Canada – the nation’s largest Protestant denomination – was being called a frontal assault on the Holy Bible.2 This ‘New Curriculum,’ it seemed, called the veracity of everyone’s favourite Bible tales into question: Noah’s ark, the Israelite crossing of the Red Sea, the proverbial contest of David and Goliath, and even the nativity story with its report of a virgin birth were written off by the iconoclastic curriculum as ‘myths.’ The reaction was immediate. Angry preachers from other denominations moved in for the kill, warning their flocks of the curriculum’s poisonous contents. Palpably shaken United Church members began to deluge church headquarters with hundreds of concerned letters. Church officials scrambled to launch multiple damage-control gambits, but the controversy burned on into the winter, with letters on the subject continuing to ‘pour in’ as the spring of 1965 approached.3 Laypeople were evidently surprised by the curriculum and its contents. For some, it was a pleasant surprise, opening up new and promising vistas, but for a substantial, vocal minority of the church’s members, the curriculum was a disappointment, a betrayal, even a catastrophe. The intense dissatisfaction of these members led many of them simply to leave the church, or at least to withdraw their

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children from Sunday school, driving a major drop in enrolment in the mid-1960s. The strange thing about all this was that the New Curriculum contained very little that was actually new. Its contentions about the Bible – which were sensationalized, but not invented, by the newspapers – had been pretty standard stuff in United Church theological colleges since the founding of the denomination in 1925. Some of its core ideas, including several of the controversial ones, had been floating around the halls of mainline Protestant institutions of higher education like ghostly presences since the late nineteenth century. Flabbergasted ministers, caught off-guard by this reaction to material they found rather mundane, protested that there was really nothing controversial here.4 Upon reflection, some suggested that the controversy had revealed a major theological gap between pulpit and pew.5 They were essentially correct in their diagnosis of the situation. This gap reached back many decades, spanning a lengthy period in which the theologically modernist beliefs of church leaders had not been reflected in the public face of the United Church.6 The New Curriculum controversy both reflected this gap and represented a central part of a profound shift in the public existence of the denomination that jettisoned its evangelical past and redefined it as an explicitly ‘liberal,’ non-evangelical church. The effects of this shift were multiplied by the various trends reaching far beyond the United Church that together contributed to the Western religious crisis of the 1960s, and one of the results for the United Church, as for many other denominations, was significant numerical decline.7 Creating the New Curriculum The United Church’s Herculean effort to create a new comprehensive denominational Christian education curriculum from scratch was inspired by the Christian Faith and Life curriculum launched by the United Presbyterian Church in the United States in 1948. Unlike the internationally derived curricula that this denomination (like the United Church) had previously used, the Christian Faith and Life curriculum was a purely denominational curriculum. It was thorough, comprehensive, officially backed by the leadership of the church, and financially successful. Most importantly, the curriculum was popular, and Sunday school enrolment increased in the years after its introduction. Such an example was attractive to the United Church’s Christian education officials, who had grown frustrated with the traditional curricula and were

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casting around for new approaches. Conditions in the church were also favourable: the crises of the Depression and the Second World War were fading into the background, the financial position of the church was improving, and Sunday school enrolment had been growing steadily since its low point in 1943.8 Thus it was that in 1952 the Board of Christian Education received authorization from the church’s General Council to begin the work of developing a comprehensive denominational curriculum for the United Church. The task fell to a curriculum workshop made up of personnel from the Board of Christian Education and the Department of Sunday School Publications, most of them clergy. Although the workshop began with a study of other denominational curricula, it had an unprecedented degree of freedom in creating an entirely new curriculum from the ground up. This freedom suited the workshop members, especially the Sunday school department staff, who wanted to replace the outdated ‘authoritarian’ approach of older curricula with an approach embodying ‘modern’ theological and educational ideas.9 This intention was fraught with significance, since the existing curricula were one of the pillars of the United Church’s evangelical public identity. The curricula in use in the United Church in the 1950s stressed a devotional attitude to the Bible, the memorization of Scripture passages, and themes like individual conversion, spiritual experience, and temperance education, all drawn from the United Church’s evangelical heritage.10 Although curriculum materials could be rather vague about what theological realities (if any) underlay ideas like making a ‘decision for Christ,’ they overwhelmingly conveyed – and helped foster – an evangelical understanding of Christian faith. The fact that Christian education curricula in the United Church as late as the 1950s reinforced these themes was remarkable given that the evangelical theology associated with them had long since been put aside by most church leaders in favour of various neo-orthodox, or more commonly, liberal approaches. By the First World War evangelical conceptions of the authority of the Bible had given way in mainline Protestant theological colleges to modernist views due to the influence of higher criticism.11 When the United Church was formed in 1925 by a merger of Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist churches, the broadly evangelical Basis of Union reflected the framers’ desire to acknowledge the contributing doctrinal characteristics of the three churches, rather than the actual theology of most unionists, which was decidedly liberal.12 An official ‘Statement on Evangelism’ presented by

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the Board of Evangelism and Social Service in 1934 similarly showed that church leaders had divorced their ongoing promotion of evangelism from core evangelical concepts like the substitutionary atonement of Christ because they no longer accepted the latter.13 The operative non-evangelical theology of Bible professors, church administrators, and many ministers, however, was not often on display for average church members. Official statements, such as the Statement of Faith issued in 1940, did not publicize private views – like the suggestion of one theological college principal that Jesus had been a sort of super-organism ‘incarnating’ an evolutionary life force roughly analogous to God – that deviated noticeably from evangelical orthodoxy.14 Nor were church members likely to hear such ideas while sitting in the pews; Michael Gauvreau has traced a disjuncture between what was being taught in church colleges and what was being preached from pulpits going back at least as far as the second decade of the twentieth century.15 This reluctance to disturb the laity with the more unsettling conclusions of modern biblical criticism helps account for the continued evangelical character of Christian education curricula in the 1950s. A manual for ministers-in-training on summer assignment to Canadian churches, for example, specifically instructed the former to avoid troubling children with ‘questions of biblical interpretation’ – referring in particular to instances in which a literal interpretation of a biblical passage might conflict with modern sensibilities.16 This manual was used at least from 1942 to 1962, suggesting that an entire generation of ministers was trained to tiptoe around such issues, at least where children were concerned. As a result, people raised in the United Church Christian education program were given an understanding of the Bible that differed greatly from the higher-critical views learned by their ministers in the colleges. This history of Christian education in the United Church explains why the desire of the New Curriculum workshop to break with the old approach was so significant. When the workshop members outlined the new approach they envisioned by drafting a set of ‘presuppositions’ that would guide the subsequent curriculum development process, it was clear that they wanted to confront the laity with the full force of modernist theology. In particular, they were adamant that the curriculum had to be free of ‘double-talk’ (referring here to the side-stepping of controversial issues through intentionally ambiguous language).17 Clearly, the workshop envisioned a curriculum that would make a clean break with the past by frankly and unabashedly teaching laypeo-

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ple of all ages the modernist views taught in the theological colleges and held by many clergy. But what was the content of this modernist vision? Generally, the workshop members wanted the curriculum to embody a theological viewpoint situated at the intersection of liberalism and moderate neo-orthodoxy.18 More importantly, they wanted a curriculum that would unambiguously reflect ‘modern Biblical scholarship,’ their catch-all term for the higher-critical approach first developed in the nineteenth century. The main discovery of this approach, as they saw it, was the realization that much of the biblical text was in the form of ‘myth’ that conveyed spiritual truth without having any necessary connection to ‘facts.’ Modern scholarship taught, moreover, that the Bible should correctly be seen as a record of humanity’s developing ideas about God, rather than God’s revelation to humanity.19 Because of this, the workshop members took a firm stance against what they termed ‘Biblical literalism.’ Here they had in mind not only a strictly ‘literal’ interpretation of this or that passage, but any view of the Old or New Testament that accepted them as historically (rather than poetically, mythically, or symbolically) reliable. Significantly, workshop members did not think such ‘literalism’ was confined to fundamentalist churches, but were convinced that the United Church itself was rife with it. The existing curricula were not addressing this problem, according to workshop Chair A.J. Cooper, who complained that the traditional approach was ‘raising another generation of literalists in the Church and illiterates without the Church, for the most part.’20 In short, because of their position as insiders attuned to the modernism of the theological colleges and head offices, the workshop members believed that the ordinary people of the United Church needed theological enlightening. The central goal of the New Curriculum would therefore be to disabuse them of their ‘literalist’ view of the Bible. In keeping with their attitude towards the Bible, when it came to God and Jesus, the workshop members rejected the Trinitarianism characteristic of the United Church’s evangelical heritage (and the Basis of Union). Only one of the workshop members held to the traditional view that Jesus was ‘both God and man.’ The rest took various positions that gave the Nazarene a lower status, though Olive Sparling, the secretary of children’s work for the Board of Christian Education, went the furthest by insisting that he must not be worshipped.21 The workshop was divided about the reliability of New Testament accounts of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, although no one expressed ‘similar concern in connection with nativity records’ – a statement that could only mean,

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given the curriculum’s later sceptical attitude towards the virgin birth, that the workshop unanimously rejected that doctrine. Doubt was similarly cast on the idea that Jesus had died to atone for sin (a belief arguably central to all major Christian traditions).22 These and similar views were ultimately reflected in the final curriculum, where they became the centre around which the storm of public controversy swirled. Finally, the workshop members planned to jettison the single element of the older curricula most responsible for their evangelical character – the emphasis on personal conversion. They were willing to retain a generalized emphasis on ‘decisions,’ but never spoke of surrendering one’s life to Christ, or accepting him as Lord and Saviour. Instead D.I. Forsyth admitted that ‘some theory of salvation’ was needed but did not specify what it was; Cooper wrote that the ‘place of decision will be important in every unit of study,’ but left the content or purpose of such decisions to the reader’s conjecture. Ruth Curry, with characteristic directness, maintained that ‘it is not the task of the Christian educator “to make” Christians, or even “to make” church members.’23 Personally converting Sunday school students to Christ, or even raising them as Christians in general, therefore, was not going to be an aim of the New Curriculum. This was a marked departure from the approach of the older curricula, which had explicitly aimed to lead children to ‘accept [Jesus] as Saviour and Lord.’24 Remarkably, when the workshop sent out a final draft of the presuppositions to a wide group of ministers and theology professors for comment, it failed to convey their basic attitude towards the Bible and their central aim of replacing the ‘literalism’ of the laity with the conclusions of ‘modern Biblical scholarship.’25 In fact, some of the church leaders who commented on the draft presuppositions were concerned that they appeared to have avoided the whole issue of biblical interpretation. ‘Most of our people are Bible literalists in thought,’ admonished William Berry, the associate secretary of the Board of Evangelism and Social Service. ‘We must strive to give them a higher and better view.’26 Even after receiving such comments, however, the workshop added only a circumspect reference to the potentially explosive topic of biblical interpretation when they revised the presuppositions. The document now stated that the Bible could reveal God if it was read ‘seriously but not literalistically, in expectancy but not in superstition,’ and that ‘critical Biblical scholarship’ was necessary for the proper understanding of Scripture.27 Thus, while the revised presuppositions did suggest a modernist view of the Bible to a sensitive reader, these rather oblique

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statements were still a far cry from the frank anti-literalism of the early workshop papers. As a result, when the final version of the presuppositions went before the General Council for approval in 1958, the revolutionary ambition of the New Curriculum to combat literalism and bring modernism to the masses was not at all clear and therefore produced no opposition from more conservative members of the council. There was some criticism of the attached draft of the general curriculum plan (this was revised and later received official approval), but the presuppositions themselves were approved. Moreover, due to the workshop’s extensive consultation with professors and church officials, by the time the final plan for the curriculum received a green light from the executive of the General Council in 1959, it had the effective backing of the entire educational and administrative elite of the denomination. A particularly close relationship developed between the emerging curriculum and the church’s theology professors, many of whom later became authors of the curriculum books.28 With the production of the New Curriculum now underway, the Board of Christian Education began a promotional campaign in 1959 that continued until after the introduction of the full curriculum in 1964. This promotion, furthered by means of the denominational newspaper, annual Christian education themes, travelling question-and-answer sessions, and even a ‘curriculum filmstrip,’ stressed three main themes that played a central role in the later controversy.29 First, it framed the New Curriculum as a homegrown, denominational curriculum that embodied the doctrinal positions and character of the United Church. Connected to this was the second theme, that the curriculum had been produced with the help of the church’s officials and professors, a large number of laypeople and ministers, and seven of the church’s official boards, and that it had their enthusiastic support. Third, the promotional campaign stressed the comprehensive intent of the curriculum. Although its use would be voluntary (the decision being left to each congregation), the New Curriculum was intended for the entire membership, adults and children, and would be woven into every educational program of the church. At the same time, the promotion of the curriculum said little about its actual content. The annual Christian education themes stressed uncontroversial concepts like the importance of studying the Bible and the value of a strong personal devotional life.30 Even the newspapers, ever alert to the slightest whiff of controversy, initially produced only

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rather dull articles portraying the curriculum as a wholesome attempt to update teaching methods and enhance the religious understanding of churchgoing adults.31 As a result, most of the church’s ministers and elders had no sense that the curriculum would be controversial; at a question-and-answer session with members of the Saskatchewan Conference, for example, only a small minority of those present asked questions about the content of the curriculum, and several of these commented simply that they did not know much about it. No one asked about controversial content.32 By the summer of 1964, most United Church people probably thought of the New Curriculum as a new and improved version of older curricula that carried the reassuring imprimatur of church officials and embodied the values of the denomination. Few could have predicted the storm that would soon erupt. The Content of the New Curriculum A full examination of the content of the New Curriculum is neither necessary nor possible here, but a brief exposition of what proved to be its more controversial aspects will be helpful in explaining what follows. Although the authors of the curriculum books held to a range of positions on specific theological issues, what they shared, and what lay at the root of their more controversial teachings, was a modernist approach to Scripture. At the root of this approach was the emphatic conviction that the Bible was a fallible document marked by human frailties. In particular, the consensus of natural scientists and the conclusions of biblical scholars working within the paradigm of higher criticism were the twin lenses that the curriculum authors used to assess the reliability of the biblical text. Put simply, where the outcome of expert human reasoning (as determined by the practitioners of these disciplines) conflicted with the claims of Scripture, Scripture was wrong. Nevertheless, one could salvage meaning from the biblical text, despite its alleged errors and inconsistencies, by carefully extracting ‘spiritual’ or metaphorical truth from accounts that were otherwise merely bad science or bad history. By driving a wedge between ‘God’s word’ and the actual ‘words’ of the Bible, the curriculum authors freed themselves to determine the former apart from the confines of the latter.33 The necessary corollary was the rejection of the idea that the Bible was itself God’s revelation to humanity, and therefore infallible in its teachings – a belief held by evangelicals, including many United Church members, and heretofore implied by the treatment of the Bible

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in United Church curricula. The New Curriculum authors, like the curriculum workshop, were firmly united against such ‘literalism’ in all its forms. United Theological College professor J. Arthur Boorman, for example, characterized it as a ‘form of idolatry.’ In fact, he argued, the literalist did not really know the Bible or Christ: ‘The literalist does not want to discover what the Bible really is, how it came to be written, or what it teaches … His encounter with the living Christ is barred by the mistaken self-assurance he finds in his set of beliefs.’34 By describing this view of Scripture as unscholarly, idolatrous, and spiritually dangerous, the New Curriculum books took aim at any residual ‘literalism’ lurking in the United Church and attempted to frame it as ignorant and unchristian. This explicit modernist approach, which served as the uniting theme of the whole curriculum, amply fulfilled the original hopes of the curriculum workshop for their project. Yet it was not the modernist view of Scripture, in the abstract, that attracted the lion’s share of the controversy over the New Curriculum. This distinction belonged rather to the specific teachings of the curriculum about various parts of the Bible – in other words, the application of the modernist approach to concrete examples. The curriculum abounded with examples of authors reinterpreting, altering, or flat-out denying biblical accounts to fit with scientific theories, the claims of higher criticism, or modernist theology in general. The creation account in the early chapters of Genesis, the account of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, and the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus all came under particularly heavy fire. Thus Pine Hill professor J.B. Hardie, Ottawa minister Frank Morgan, and Boorman argued that if one accepted the biblical creation account, one would also have to believe that the earth was flat, that the sky was a hard dome, and that the sun circled the earth, because these views were allegedly part of the primitive cosmology held by the biblical authors.35 In his recounting of ten plagues visited on Egypt by God and the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites, Morgan managed to avoid mentioning God altogether, and attempted to replace the miraculous elements in both stories with naturalistic explanations.36 This was simply one example of the myriad ways in which curriculum authors systematically scrubbed any hint of the supernatural from even the most improbable passages of Scripture. Both Morgan and Emmanuel College professor George Johnston, for example, found a way to write the devil completely out of the story of the temptation of Jesus – no mean feat.37 This revisionist approach extended to other pivotal moments in the

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life of Jesus. Johnston informed kindergarten teachers that ‘scholarly historians’ had learned that ‘we cannot trust the accuracy of the stories’ concerning Jesus’s birth, ‘not even the tradition that Mary was a virgin.’38 Other books questioned whether Jesus had performed genuine miracles, explaining away miracle accounts in the Gospels as allegory or garbled records of merely psychological healings.39 When it came to the resurrection of Jesus, regarded by most Christians as the central miracle of the faith, the curriculum authors were more hesitant to criticize the biblical accounts. Hardie, for example, appeared to accept the texts at face value, and the Junior Teacher’s Guide was likewise willing to allow that a literal resurrection was at least possible. Others doubted the historicity of even this event, however: Johnston frankly stated that ‘Jesus is not very likely to have risen bodily from the grave, that is, with the old body of flesh and blood resuscitated.’40 The curriculum’s questioning of biblical accounts, a logical application of its modernist approach to the Bible, attracted most of the subsequent controversy. But there was another feature of the curriculum that proved controversial: its reluctance, unlike earlier curricula, to stress the importance of personal conversion. Here again, most authors followed the approach of the curriculum workshop by acknowledging the occurrence of ‘decisions’ in the Christian life, without teaching the necessity of a single decision to accept Christ. Hardie, for example, acknowledged a role for ‘personal decision,’ but qualified this by arguing that most church members became Christians through a process of gradual change rather than a conversion experience. Johnston, going further, taught that everyone would ultimately be saved, whether converted or not.41 In short, the perspectives on conversion and salvation espoused in the New Curriculum were notably different from the evangelical view conveyed by earlier curricula. Together with the recurring tendency of the curriculum to contradict biblical accounts, this feature became part of the public controversy that began in the summer of 1964. The New Curriculum Controversy The controversy itself was ignited, oddly enough, by the Baptists. The Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec had a history of cooperating with the United Church in the area of Sunday school publications and had entered into an agreement to make use of the new, cutting-edge Canadian curriculum the church was producing (with some appropriate modifications to deal with denominational differences on issues

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such as baptism). This arrangement broke down under a cloud of acrimony, however, after the Baptists’ 1964 assembly. At this meeting, the delegates – who were just as ignorant of the New Curriculum’s actual contents as their counterparts in the United Church – were alerted to the modernist approach of the curriculum by H.W. Harmon, a concerned delegate to the assembly. Harmon, who had somehow obtained copies of some of the curriculum books, told the shocked assembly that the New Curriculum called the first chapters of Genesis mythical, reinterpreted the biblical plague on the Egyptian firstborn as a children’s disease, and questioned the virgin birth. Urging the assembly to have nothing to do with the New Curriculum, she reportedly told them to ‘Throw it away! Burn it!’42 For the time being the bemused Convention narrowly voted to keep their arrangement, but Harmon’s words had their intended effect, and the following year the Baptists voted overwhelmingly to end the agreement and destroy the materials that had already been printed.43 It only took the newspapers a few days to catch the scent of controversy, however, and Canadians soon found the provocative headline ‘Virgin Birth, Goliath – Are They Just Myths?’ on the front page of the Toronto Daily Star, accompanied by a feature article with the alarming title ‘New Child Text at Odds with Bible.’44 Giving specific examples from the New Curriculum, Star religion reporter Allen Spraggett warned parents, ‘Don’t be surprised if Johnny comes home from Sunday school some day soon and tells you that the whale didn’t swallow Jonah, that Moses didn’t cross the Red Sea, and that what the Bible says about the creation of the world is way off base.’ The same story was picked up and repeated in newspapers and magazines across the country.45 This news coverage had the same effect on the United Church membership at large that Harmon’s passionate outburst had had on the Baptist Convention. Almost immediately, United Church officials began receiving phone calls and letters about the New Curriculum from worried members.46 Additional letters were published in the press. Although a few were positive, even congratulatory, for every one favourable letter received at church headquarters there were three that registered shock, dismay, or opposition.47 Some cancelled their orders of the curriculum, while others said they would refuse to teach it now that they knew what was in it.48 Notably, several letter writers protested that they had been taken completely by surprise by the content of the curriculum (as would be expected given the silence of the promotional campaign about the curriculum’s controversial content). Doug Shaw, a

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United Church elder, spoke for many when he wrote that his wife had even attended a curriculum training workshop, but ‘what we are presently reading in all our daily newspapers, was never brought to light or was never discussed.’49 Letter writers were particularly concerned about the New Curriculum’s views about the virgin birth, miracles, and the reliability of the Bible in general. Some openly considered keeping their children home from Sunday school or resigning their membership in the church.50 To make matters worse for beleaguered United Church officials, a small army of ministers and other commentators from various evangelical denominations began publicly to condemn the curriculum. Within days of the initial Star article, public criticism was coming in from Nazarene, Alliance, Pentecostal, and Baptist pastors.51 It appears that some of these reactions were based solely on the newspaper reports (a point stressed repeatedly by defenders of the curriculum later on), but it was not long before evangelical critics outside the church produced more thorough critiques based on careful study of the curriculum itself. Before the end of the summer, for example, W. Gordon Brown, a professor at Central Baptist Seminary, released a detailed booklet thoroughly criticizing the New Curriculum, complete with specific citations from the curriculum books substantiating his concerns.52 Later in the year, Paul B. Smith and his associate Daniel Edmundson, pastor of the evangelical People’s Church in Toronto, also released a thirty-two-page booklet of criticism supported by copious examples and quotations drawn from the curriculum.53 Not surprisingly, evangelicals focused their most withering criticism on the curriculum’s modernist approach to the Bible and its novel teachings about conversion and salvation: these were the elements of the New Curriculum that most offended evangelical sensibilities. For the same reason, they were also the parts of the New Curriculum that broke most radically with the much more evangelical United Church Christian education curricula of the past. It was therefore no coincidence that the aspects of the curriculum most directly attacked by outside evangelical critics were precisely the aspects of the curriculum that average United Church members found so disturbing. And although some United Church members of evangelical views were put off by the criticism of their church by outsiders, there were others who agreed with the critics.54 Of great significance was a simple phrase in a letter from Robert Cherry of Palmerston, Ontario, to the church’s moderator, J.R. Mutchmor:

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I suppose I am a fundamentalist but – how could Jesus Christ be born of two human parents, and be any more divine at birth, or later than the rest of us? – how can a man who is an ordained minister of the United Church deny what is plainly recorded in the Bible, and how can he repeat the Apostle’s Creed in good conscience? In short, what does any one who thinks in this vein, believe or take a stand on?55

Cherry’s reluctant description of himself as a ‘fundamentalist’ – a term commonly used in United Church circles for evangelicals in general – suggests that he was beginning to identify more with evangelicals outside the denomination than with the United Church itself. At any rate, the criticisms of the curriculum by outside evangelicals exemplified the widening Protestant division between ‘liberals’ and ‘evangelicals’ (or ‘fundamentalists’) that the Toronto Daily Star religion reporter Allen Spraggett had been profiling in a series of articles that year.56 Some of the materials criticizing the New Curriculum made this division explicit; Smith’s booklet, for example, began by contrasting ‘Liberals and Evangelicals.’57 The opposition of evangelical critics outside the United Church therefore reinforced the impression that the emerging controversy over the New Curriculum was a debate between two camps, one ‘evangelical’ and one ‘liberal.’ This bipolar characterization was not simply a construct of the curriculum debate, however, since it reflected a deep, pre-existing division between two fundamentally incompatible Protestant orientations with repercussions far transcending the curriculum issue. What the curriculum debate did accomplish, nonetheless, was an increasingly close identification of the ‘evangelical’ category with various smaller Protestant churches and an increasingly close identification of the ‘liberal’ category with the United Church. The growing characterization of the United Church as a ‘liberal’ denomination was hammered home, in particular, by the nature of the defence of the curriculum mounted by church officials and prominent ministers. The editor-in-chief of the New Curriculum, Peter Gordon White, used the opportunity of the General Council in September to stress once again the official backing of the church leadership for the curriculum. The strongest criticism, he emphasized, was coming from outside groups hostile to the United Church, and since the church had been so widely involved in the curriculum’s production, those who claimed that the curriculum ‘had suddenly been foisted upon them’ were simply ‘not United Church members.’58 White doubtless intended

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to minimize the importance of the critics by framing them as ignorant outsiders with an axe to grind,59 but his strategy seems to have backfired – particularly in the case of those who were genuinely United Church members but had nevertheless been shocked and dismayed at the curriculum’s content. For these people, the unintended but clear message of White’s speech was that they were in fact outsiders in their own denomination and evidently had more in common with the critics from other churches. Reinforcing this impression was the previously scheduled retirement, in the midst of the controversy, of the relatively conservative moderator J.R. Mutchmor (famous for his opposition to liquor interests and obscene literature), and his replacement by E.M. Howse, a selfdescribed ‘unrepentant liberal.’ In an interview with the Toronto Daily Star, Howse bluntly dismissed the critics of the curriculum as ‘fundamentalists’ whose views were equivalent to belief in a flat earth, and praised the curriculum for trying to close the ‘dreadful gap between the accepted conclusions of modern theological scholarship and what is taught in many Sunday schools.’60 This change of leadership was itself full of symbolic significance for those caught up in the controversy, but it was greatly amplified by the fact that Howse’s comments were not an isolated incident, instead forming part of an impressive series of sermons, articles, and letters by the more vocal liberal ministers in the United Church echoing the same themes. These commentators uncompromisingly upheld the New Curriculum’s view of the Bible as the official view of the United Church and called ‘liberalism’ the church’s official theological position. Kingston minister J.A. Davidson, for instance, wrote in the Globe and Mail that ‘the liberal orientation has been dominant in the United Church of Canada since that church came into existence’ and that this position, which he equated with ‘modern critical biblical scholarship,’ was held by ‘an overwhelming majority of the ministers and other leaders in the United Church.’61 Many others agreed with Davidson in pointing out that ‘liberalism’ was not only dominant at the present time, but had been taught in the theological colleges of the church for decades. Minister and Christian education official George Connolly, for example, claimed in a radio broadcast, ‘I have not discovered anything in this Curriculum which I had not been taught when I attended theological college twenty-five years ago.’62 Winnipeg minister William Onions likewise noted that the New Curriculum’s view of the Bible had ‘been taken for granted among ministers and scholars for half a century or

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more.’ In near disbelief he added, ‘It can’t be news to anyone that intelligent Christians long since quit believing that the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, or the crossing of the Red Sea were actual historical events that happened exactly as described in the Bible.’63 The clear consensus of these ministers was that the modernist viewpoint, as represented by the New Curriculum, was the established position of the United Church and had been for a long time. What then did this mean for evangelicals in the United Church who believed in biblical infallibility? The ministers defending the New Curriculum were clear: such views went contrary to the long-established (though formerly unpublicized) position of the United Church, and were not to be tolerated. Indeed, a high view of Scriptural authority was fit to be mocked as ‘slavish adherence to the literal words of the Bible’ or ‘the idolatry of literalism.’64 Frank Morgan, author of one of the curriculum books and then ministering in Kitchener, Ontario, scoffed that believing ‘that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God is just about the same thing as saying that God put the commas in the King James Version.’65 More soberly, others argued that ‘literalist’ views of the Bible were a danger to the very survival of the church because they were unacceptable to ‘modern minds.’66 If the church became tied to literalism, it was doomed. In short, such views – and implicitly, those who held them – were not welcome in the United Church. J.W. Young, a minister in Toronto, framed the issue as a choice between the prejudices of ‘cowards with the religion of the closed mind, hidebound with tradition, fearful of new truth, irrational, intolerant, born in ignorance and swaddled in sentimentality,’ or an ‘open-minded, forward-looking’ faith represented by the New Curriculum.67 In their defence of the curriculum, these ministers had circled the wagons, and evangelicals, whether United Church members or not, were left on the outside. In the end, the controversy meant different things to different groups in the United Church. For the modernists occupying most of the official posts and pulpits in the church, the controversy confirmed that they were right: the New Curriculum had indeed been needed to end the gap between pulpit and pew by teaching the laity a modernist understanding of the faith. As mentioned above, a large number of clergy had blamed either themselves or other clergy for not having transmitted their own modernist understanding to their flocks.68 As has also been shown, the strident criticism of the curriculum encouraged the church’s modernist ministers to close ranks against ‘fundamentalists’ inside and outside the church. The church’s modernist leaders and

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ministers, therefore, had their support for both the New Curriculum and its underlying theology confirmed and strengthened by the controversy. Perhaps most significantly, it encouraged these leaders to publicly air their views, and identify them with the official position of the church, in a way that differed markedly from the quieter approach of previous decades. A second group, evangelicals in the United Church, felt increasingly alienated from their own denomination. Beyond the fact that the church leadership was promoting a curriculum directly opposed to many of their core beliefs, the controversy resulted in many of the church’s ministers explicitly defining the United Church as a ‘liberal’ denomination in which ‘fundamentalists’ were unwelcome. An evangelical United Church minister from Newfoundland wrote that he and his fellow evangelicals were ‘beginning to wonder about our future in the ministry of the United Church’ given that they could not accept the New Curriculum in good conscience. He feared that ‘we will probably be labelled “odd-balls,” “separatists,” and “fundamentalists.” In some ways we are already beginning to feel that a squeeze is being placed on those who differ.’69 In this way, the controversy over the New Curriculum decisively ended the period during which evangelicals could easily feel at home in the United Church. The Aftermath of the Curriculum Christian education officials were not deterred by the controversy; to the contrary, curriculum sales had been better than expected, so the official reaction to the controversy was simply to increase promotional efforts for Year 2. The order catalogue for Year 2 materials trumpeted the claim that congregations using the New Curriculum in Year 1 had found ‘increased enrolment,’ ‘better attendance,’ and ‘growing enthusiasm.’70 Although this report was wrong on at least one count (addressed below), it was calculated to appeal to Sunday school superintendents anxious about the controversy. The Christian education staff were indeed enthusiastic about the progress of their experiment in bringing modernism to the pews; so much so that they decided to make the curriculum even more pervasive than it already was. Thus they reversed their earlier plan and eliminated the old approved curriculum, removing that option for the stubborn 2 per cent of the United Church constituency that was still using it.71 Officials also turned their attention to the task of bringing all midweek programs in line with

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New Curriculum teaching, including pre-existing programs like the Tyro program for junior boys, which was undergoing revisions to its topic materials and teacher handbook to better reflect the New Curriculum approach. Surprisingly, the General Curriculum Committee also looked for ways to introduce New Curriculum themes into programs run jointly with other denominations – even, it appears, in cases where this went against the presumed wishes of those denominations.72 But was the New Curriculum really as successful as Christian education officials seemed to think? Curriculum sales in the run-up to the 1964 launch were certainly brisk, significantly exceeding the sales of older curricula in previous years. By the end of Year 1 over 90 per cent of United Church Sunday schools had ordered at least some New Curriculum materials.73 Given, however, that most church members seem to have been ignorant of the content of the curriculum when they ordered it, and that in any case ordering of curriculum materials was normally carried out by Sunday school superintendents or ministers, these numbers are better interpreted as evidence of a successful marketing campaign than as evidence that the curriculum’s theology was universally accepted. More worrying were the enrolment statistics, which baldly contradicted the rosy picture given in the Year 2 curriculum catalogue. Although there had been small annual decreases in Sunday school enrolment since 1961, this was nothing compared to the free fall that ensued immediately after the introduction of the New Curriculum and persisted into the 1970s. One must be cautious in attributing this decline solely to the New Curriculum; the 1960s witnessed falling Sunday school enrolment in other denominations in Canada and beyond,74 the United Church was experiencing numerical decline in areas other than Sunday school enrolment, and the baby boom that had partly driven the rise in enrolment in the 1950s was now running out of steam. At the same time, however, there are a number of reasons to think that the New Curriculum sharply accelerated what might otherwise have been a gradual decline. Despite the end of the baby boom, the Sunday school–aged population in Canada actually increased between 1961 and 1971, which rules out a purely demographic explanation.75 Even more significant was the unusually large drop in enrolment that coincided exactly with the introduction of the curriculum. Between 1964 and 1965 – in other words, over the first year of the New Curriculum – United Church Sunday school enrolment fell by more than 92,000 people or 13 per cent of the total. This was far and away the largest single

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decrease in the history of the church, six times the size of the previous year’s decline of 15,000.76 Put another way, in that one year enrolment fell enough to wipe out about half of the gains that had been realized over the course of the entire previous decade at the height of the baby boom. The documentary evidence lends credence to the idea that the occurrence of this abnormally large drop in enrolment in the same year as the introduction of the New Curriculum was not a coincidence. Correspondence collected by church officials includes several letters from United Church members who responded to the New Curriculum by withdrawing their children from United Church Sunday schools. One mother, appalled that her eight-year-old son had returned from Sunday school filled with ‘anxious and urgent questioning’ about the veracity of the Bible, wrote that she would ‘certainly waste no time in registering my children in a different Sunday School, one that teaches the truth and sanctity of God’s word.’77 As already noted, some teachers, as well as students, felt they would not be able to continue their participation in United Church Sunday schools if the New Curriculum was taught. Other members upset over the curriculum left the church altogether.78 One of them, minister James R. Holden, concluded, ‘I have not forsaken the church. The church has forsaken me.’79 Regardless of who had forsaken whom, the curriculum and subsequent controversy had accelerated the numerical decline of the church’s Sunday schools and led some members to leave the United Church altogether. Evangelicalism, the United Church, and Decline Seen in perspective, the introduction of the New Curriculum was probably the most significant episode in a long and complex process of jettisoning the United Church’s evangelical past. As we have seen, the final curriculum product taught a modernist view of the Bible and did not teach an evangelical view of conversion, both features that reflected the beliefs church leaders had held for decades but which had rarely been seen in previous curricula. The framers, developers, and authors of the curriculum were committed to teaching the laity a clearly modernist view of the Bible and theology for the first time. The public controversy that raged in 1964 and 1965, furthermore, only served to confirm for church leaders that the laity desperately needed to be relieved of the ‘literalist’ view of the Bible seemingly held by so many of them. The New Curriculum did not merely set out to end the decades-old

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reluctance of United Church clergy to teach modernism to the laity, however; it actually accomplished this goal. Although a number of church officials tried to downplay the controversy and reassure the church of the curriculum’s biblical orthodoxy, there was no avoiding the fact that the New Curriculum was iconoclastic and frankly non-evangelical, as the curriculum materials themselves amply proved. In addition, since the official publicity had so heavily emphasized the thorough involvement of the church’s theological elites in producing the curriculum, there could be no doubt that it represented their views. These indicators were publicly confirmed and amplified by the response of church leaders and many other clergy to the controversy. In sermons, articles, and radio broadcasts the ministers of the United Church stated over and over again their opposition to ‘fundamentalism’ and their own adherence to ‘liberalism’ – even describing ‘liberalism’ as the official position of the church. As a result, the curriculum redefined the relationship between evangelicalism and the United Church. Before the New Curriculum, the relative absence of public statements of modernist beliefs, coupled with the prominent place given to evangelical concepts in Christian education and other ministries of the church, made it quite possible to be an evangelical and not feel out of place as a United Church member. The New Curriculum, however, evicted evangelicalism from the United Church. As we have seen, the framers of the curriculum explicitly and intentionally targeted core doctrines of evangelicalism, especially concerning the Bible, in a way that could not be accepted by evangelicals in the church. The ensuing controversy publicly established that the bulk of United Church leaders and ministers were strenuously opposed to evangelical views, and in some cases actually regarded evangelicalism with undisguised contempt. Conversely, the controversy showed United Church evangelicals that the public proponents of evangelicalism were mostly to be found outside their denomination rather than within it. Finally, the pervasive nature of the New Curriculum made modernism nearly inescapable. For most evangelical families with children, the only way to avoid the New Curriculum was to cut off meaningful involvement with the United Church. The New Curriculum needs to be put in a larger context of rapid change in the public identity of the United Church in the 1960s that went far beyond Christian education programs to reshape nearly every facet of the life of the denomination. This shift, in turn, was part of the wider religious crisis rocking mainline Protestant churches throughout

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the Western world. Thus, the impact of the New Curriculum, though significant, should not be overstated. While there is little doubt that it contributed to the decline in United Church Sunday school enrolment, the larger question of the relationship between the changes of the 1960s and the numerical decline that has since afflicted not only the United Church but other mainline denominations in Canada – and thereby contributed to dechristianization more generally – bears further investigation. How much of the decline can be attributed to the changes in these churches in particular, and how much to larger social forces affecting all churches?80 To what extent did the departure of evangelicals from the United Church and similar churches contribute to the growth of Canada’s smaller evangelical churches, and if so, to what extent did this offset mainline decline?81 Further research is needed to suggest answers to these questions and deepen our understanding of the relationship between the religious crisis of the 1960s, the reconfiguration of Canada’s religious landscape since the Second World War, and the dechristianization of Western societies.

NOTES 1 I am referring, of course, to the attention-grabbing theological trends succinctly described in Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 84–7, which were making themselves felt in Canada as elsewhere in the mid-1960s. 2 United Church Archives, Toronto [UCA], records of the Board of Christian Education [BCE], box 273, file 5, Allen Spraggett, ‘Virgin Birth, Goliath – Are They Just Myths?’ Toronto Daily Star, 4 July 1964, 1. The importance of the ‘New Curriculum’ has often been noted by historians of Canadian religion, though not examined at length. See John G. Stackhouse, Jr, ‘The Protestant Experience in Canada since 1945,’ in George A. Rawlyk, ed., The Canadian Protestant Experience 1760 to 1990 (Burlington, ON: Welch Publishing, 1990), 211–12; John Webster Grant, The Church in the Canadian Era, 2nd ed. (Burlington, ON: Welch Publishing, 1988), 186–7; and Robert K. Burkinshaw, Pilgrims in Lotus Land: Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 255. 3 A.C. Forrest, ‘The Crisis and the New Curriculum, Part 2: Why Does the New Curriculum Continue to Produce Such Controversy?’ United Church Observer, 1 March 1965, 18.

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4 UCA, BCE, box 273, file 1, W.G. Onions, ‘Naturalistic Views “Waste of Time – Let Stories Stand,”’ Winnipeg Free Press, 14 November 1964. 5 UCA, BCE, box 273, file 5, Harvey Moats, ‘Let the Bible Speak!’ Fort Frances Times, Ontario, 5 August 1964; file 22, E.M. Howse, ‘Is What’s Good Enough for Ford Good Enough for Us?’ Toronto Telegram, 31 October 1964; file 7, George Goth, ‘New Curriculum Marks Giant Stride for Church,’ Toronto Telegram, 14 September 1964. 6 The term ‘modernist’ is here used to denote a basic set of assumptions common to both most liberal and neo-orthodox thinkers, namely, that certain traditional core teachings of Christianity need to be rejected or reinterpreted to comport with elements of modern secular thought, particularly where Jesus, the miraculous, and the Bible are concerned. For a more extensive argument about the growing dissonance between the beliefs of United Church leaders and the public practices of the church from the 1930s onward, see Kevin Flatt, ‘The Survival and Decline of the Evangelical Identity of the United Church of Canada, 1930–1971’ (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2008), chaps. 1 and 2. 7 On this crisis, see McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, and Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), chap. 8. For the significance of the decade for Canadian Protestantism, see Gary Miedema, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005); Burkinshaw, Pilgrims in Lotus Land, chap. 9 and pp. 251–60; and more generally, Stackhouse, ‘The Protestant Experience in Canada since 1945,’ in Rawlyk, ed., Canadian Protestant Experience 1760 to 1990, 207–19. 8 William B. Kennedy, ‘Neo-Orthodoxy Goes to Sunday School: The Christian Faith and Life Curriculum,’ Journal of Presbyterian History 76, no. 1 (spring 1998); Forrest, ‘The Crisis and the New Curriculum,’ 17; United Church of Canada, Yearbook, 1980. 9 Forrest, ‘The Crisis and the New Curriculum,’ 17. 10 See Christian education materials such as UCA, BCE, box 13, file 1, Christian Education Handbook (1954); and box 15, file 5, Memory Treasures: Scripture, Hymns, Prayers and Graces for Use as a Language of Worship and as a Guide for Living (Board of Christian Education), 4–6. Similar themes were stressed in Christian education campaigns of the postwar period, notably the Church School Crusade in 1947–8: UCA, BCE, box 15, file 5, My Packet of Literature on the Church School Crusade (The Three E Plan) for Enrichment and Enlargement through Evangelism (Board of Christian Education, likely 1947). 11 Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English

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Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), chap. 6. John Webster Grant, The Canadian Experience of Church Union (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1967), 32–6, 38; see also John Shearman, ‘Changes to the Doctrinal Basis of Union of the United Church of Canada before and since 1925,’ in Canadian Methodist Historical Society Papers, 1999 and 2000 13 (Toronto, 2001), 180–3. ‘The Statement on Evangelism,’ in United Church of Canada, Board of Evangelism and Social Service, Annual Report (1935–6), 38–48. UCA, records of the Commission on Christian Faith, box 1, file 2, A.S. Tuttle to J.R. Mutchmor, 23 October 1939. Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century, 240–1. UCA, BCE, box 15, file 7, ‘Christian Education Manual for the Summer Mission Field,’ (Board of Christian Education, 1942), 11; see also versions for 1945, 1947, and 1961. UCA, BCE, box 198, file 8, Ruth Curry, ‘Educational Presuppositions,’ 3. UCA, BCE, box 198, file 8, W. Blackmore, ‘Theological Presuppositions in Sunday Church School Curriculum Building,’ 1. UCA, BCE, box 198, file 8, Ruth Curry, ‘Theological,’ 7, 10–11; David I. Forsyth, ‘Theological and Educational Presuppositions,’ 4; ‘Some Points of Agreement in Workshop Statements: Theological,’ 3. UCA, BCE, box 198, file 8, Alvin John Cooper, ‘Some Suggestions for a Common Staff Paper,’ 5; see also Ruth Curry, ‘Synthesis,’ 4. UCA, BCE, box 198, file 8, Alvin John Cooper, ‘Theological Presuppositions in Curriculum Development,’ 1; ‘A Synthesis of Theological and Educational Presuppositions,’ 21 June 1955, 1; Olive D. Sparling, ‘Theological Presuppositions for a Church School Curriculum,’ 2; Olive Sparling biographical file, biographical fact sheet. UCA, BCE, box 198, file 8, Curry, ‘Theological,’ 5–6; ‘Some Points of Agreement,’ 3; E.R. McLean, ‘The Presuppositions of the Church School Curriculum,’ 3. UCA, BCE, box 198, file 8, Forsyth, ‘Theological and Educational Presuppositions,’ 3; Cooper, ‘Some Suggestions,’ 9; Curry, ‘Educational Presuppositions,’ 2–3. See, for example, UCA, BCE, box 15, file 1, ‘The Intermediate Department of the Church School,’ 3–4; ‘The Senior Department of the Church School,’ 28. UCA, BCE, box 198, file 10, ‘Presuppositions’ (June 1957). UCA, BCE, box 198, file 10, ‘Report on Reading Test,’ 18. See also the similar comments by J.D.H. Hutchinson, pp. 6–7.

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27 UCA, BCE, box 198, file 9, ‘Presuppositions for the Development of a Curriculum for the Sunday Church Schools of the United Church of Canada’ (Board of Christian Education and Board of Publication, November 1957), 6–8. 28 George Johnston, ‘What Sunday Schools are Going to Teach,’ United Church Observer, 15 June 1959, 21, 24; United Church of Canada, Record of Proceedings, 1958, 74, 77–8; Forrest, ‘The Crisis and the New Curriculum,’ 17. 29 Johnston, ‘What Sunday Schools Are Going to Teach’; Record of Proceedings, 1962, pp. 418–19; UCA, BCE, box 198, file 4, ‘Tentative Suggestions for Interim Staff Paper’ (1961?), section C, 1–3. 30 UCA, BCE, box 198, file 4, ‘Tentative Suggestions,’ section C, 1–2; box 198, file 5, ‘The Message.’ 31 UCA, BCE, box 273, file 6, Douglas J. Wilson, ‘A Revolution in Teaching Methods,’ Montreal Star, 16 June 1962; ‘Study Books on Religion Written to Help Adults,’ Hamilton Spectator, 10 December 1962. 32 UCA, BCE, box 198, file 4, ‘Questions People Asked about New Curriculum.’ Neither the field testing of materials, nor the publication of an advance curriculum book, Donald M. Mathers, The Word and the Way: Personal Christian Faith for Today (Toronto: United Church Publishing House [UCPH], 1962), produced any controversy, despite containing some of the controversial elements of the full curriculum. The likely explanation is that only a small percentage of the church membership was exposed to the more controversial of these materials (such as those for older students). See the figures given in UCA, BCE, box 198, file 6, research department of the Department of Sunday School Publications in cooperation with the Board of Christian Education, ‘A Report on the Testing Program for the New Curriculum,’ (1963 or 1964?), 5, 10; and file 3, Peter Gordon White to A.G. Reynolds, 1 August 1963. 33 This approach permeated the curriculum, but for examples, see Melville M. Boyd and George G. Connolly, The Intermediate Teacher’s Guide (Toronto: UCPH, 1964), 58, 62; John Wilkie et al., The Primary Teacher’s Guide (Toronto: UCPH, 1964), 9; Frank H. Morgan, God Speaks through People: A Student’s Reading Book for Intermediates (Toronto: UCPH, 1964), 18–21; John B. Hardie, The Mighty Acts of God: A Student’s Reading Book for Seniors (Toronto: UCPH, 1964), 7, 15, 18; J.S. Thomson, God and His Purpose (Toronto: UCPH, 1964), 39–41. 34 J. Arthur Boorman et al., Senior Teacher’s Guide, Year 3 (Toronto: UCPH, 1966), 243–4. 35 Hardie, Mighty Acts, 15; Morgan, God Speaks through People, 24–5; Boorman, Senior Teacher’s Guide, 244.

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36 Morgan, God Speaks through People, 49, 58–9, 61-4. See also Hardie, Mighty Acts, 43. 37 Morgan, God Speaks through People, 6, 237; George Johnston et al., The Kindergarten Teacher’s Guide, Year 2 (Toronto: UCPH, 1965), 40. 38 Johnston, The Kindergarten Teacher’s Guide, 13. 39 Kingsley Joblin et al., Senior Teacher’s Guide, Year 2 (Toronto: UCPH, 1965), 140; Robert Dobbie et al., The Junior Teacher’s Guide (Toronto: UCPH, 1965), 36. 40 Johnston, The Kindergarten Teacher’s Guide, 38. 41 Hardie, Mighty Acts, 94; Johnston, The Kindergarten Teacher’s Guide, 38–9. 42 UCA, BCE, box 273, file 5, Spraggett, ‘Virgin Birth,’ 1. See also box 272, file 5, Peter Gordon White, ‘Good News? … Or Bad?’ September 1964, 4. 43 UCA, BCE, box 273, file 14, Jerry Hames, ‘Sunday School Material Brings Baptist-UC Split,’ London Evening Free Press, 9 June 1965; ‘The Baptists Search for $50,000 to Burn,’ Toronto Daily Star, 21 August 1965. 44 UCA, BCE, box 273, file 5, Spraggett, ‘Virgin Birth,’ 1; file 6, Allen Spraggett, ‘New Child Text at Odds with Bible,’ Toronto Daily Star, 4 July 1964. 45 Some of the many examples include UCA, BCE, box 273, file 9, ‘Sunday School Denies Noah Built Ark for Flood,’ St Catherines Standard, Ontario, 8 July 1964; file 22, ‘The Churches: How to Reinterpret the Bible and Bring a New Look to Sunday Schools,’ Maclean’s, 19 September 1964; file 3, Aubrey Wice, ‘They Are Teaching that Christ Was a Fraud,’ Toronto Telegram, 3 October 1964; file 1, Douglas J. Wilson, ‘Trouble Over a Four Letter Word,’ Montreal Star, 10 October 1964. 46 White, ‘Good News?’ 7. 47 One congratulatory example was UCA, BCE, box 273, file 5, ‘True Christian Love,’ letter to the editor, Toronto Daily Star, 31 August 1964. Many positive letters came from ministers, such as box 272, file 6, Gerald M. Hutchinson to Peter Gordon White, 16 October 1964; and Robert Wright to White, 3 November 1964. The nearly 3 to 1 ratio of negative to positive correspondence is based on an analysis of the total correspondence contained in box 272, files 6 and 7, and box 273, files 1, 5, and 6. 48 UCA, BCE, box 272, file 7, Dorothy Wentworth to United Church Publishing House, 14 July 1964; Doreen Gow to United Church Publishing House [received 14 July 1964]; Howard Walker to J.R. Mutchmor, 25 July 1964. 49 UCA, BCE, box 272, file 7, Doug Shaw to Peter Gordon White, 8 July 1964. See similar comments in P.E. McNabb to United Church Publishing House, 20 July 1964; and box 273, file 6, J. Estey, letter to the editor, Toronto Daily Star, 29 July 1964. 50 For example, UCA, BCE, box 272, file 7, Shaw to White; Walker to Mutch-

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Kevin N. Flatt mor; Rosemary Robinson to Mutchmor, 26 July 1964; Robert S. Cherry to Mutchmor, 9 August 1964. UCA, BCE, box 273, file 3, ‘Churches Hit Teaching,’ Vancouver Province, 10 July 1964. UCA, BCE, box 272, file 8, W. Gordon Brown, ‘The New Curriculum in the Light of Scripture,’ (no date, but see box 273, file 21, ‘Brands New Sunday School Curriculum “Unbiblical,”’ Toronto Daily Star, 5 September 1964, 70, which mentions this booklet). UCA, BCE, box 272, file 8, Paul B. Smith and Daniel Edmundson, ‘What’s Wrong with the New Curriculum? Seven Accusations against the New Curriculum of The United Church of Canada’ (Willowdale, ON: The People’s Church, 1964). Milton A. Swaren, letter to the editor, United Church Observer, 15 May 1965, 8; UCA, BCE, box 272, file 7, H.W. Kirk to Peter Gordon White, 10 August 1964. UCA, BCE, box 272, file 7, Robert S. Cherry to J.R. Mutchmor, 9 August 1964. UCA, BCE, box 273, file 22, Allen Spraggett, ‘Christians Today – The Riddle of Their Faith,’ Toronto Daily Star, 8 August 1964. UCA, BCE, box 272, file 8, Smith and Edmundson, What’s Wrong with the New Curriculum? 5. UCA, BCE, box 272, file 5, White, ‘Good News?’ 1–2, 5; box 201, file 2, press release on New Curriculum, Board of Information and Stewardship (no date), 1. The same strategy was pursued by the general secretary of the General Council in an unusual letter to all Ontario ministers, which blamed the controversy on ‘small sectarian groups of ultra-fundamentalist persuasion.’ UCA, BCE, box 272, file 5, E.E. Long to ministers and congregations of the United Church in Ontario, 15 October 1964, 1. UCA, BCE, box 273, file 22, Allen Spraggett, ‘The Highly-Quotable Dr. Howse,’ Toronto Daily Star, 24 October 1964, 57. UCA, BCE, box 201, file 6, J.A. Davidson, ‘Canadians and Their Religion,’ copy of an article which appeared in the Globe and Mail, 18 July 1964, 1, 3. UCA, BCE, box 272, file 2, Connolly, text of radio broadcast, 2–3; George G. Connolly biographical file, archives biographical form. See also BCE, box 272, file 4, Frank E. Ball, ‘What’s All the Fuss about the United Church’s New Curriculum?’ text of a sermon preached at St Paul’s United Church, Cornwall, Ontario, 27 September 1964 and broadcast on radio station CJSS, p. 3; box 273, file 5, Harvey Moats, ‘Let the Bible Speak!’ Fort Frances Times, Ontario, 5 August 1964.

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63 UCA, BCE, box 273, file 1, W.G. Onions, ‘Naturalistic Views.’ 64 UCA, BCE, box 273, file 1, Onions, ‘Naturalistic Views’; box 272, file 4, Ball, ‘What’s All the Fuss,’ 7. 65 UCA, BCE, box 273, file 1, Richard K. Taylor, ‘Here’s What the Fuss Is About,’ Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Ontario, 7 November 1964. 66 UCA, BCE, box 272, file 4, Ball, ‘What’s All the Fuss,’ 4, 6; file 2, Connolly, radio broadcast, 4–6. 67 UCA, BCE, box 272, file 4, J.W. Young, ‘Does the Theory of Evolution Contradict the Bible?’ sermon preached at Glebe Road United Church, Toronto, 22 November 1964, 2. 68 Forrest, ‘The Crisis and the New Curriculum,’ 16, 32. 69 J. Berkley Reynolds, letter to the editor, United Church Observer, 1 April 1965, 4, 6. For a similar perspective from another evangelical minister, see L. Warr, letter to the editor, United Church Observer, 15 September 1965, 9. 70 UCA, BCE, box 198, file 5, ‘Catalogue of New Curriculum Teaching Materials, Year 2,’ 2–3. 71 UCA, BCE, box 198, file 7, minutes of General Curriculum Committee, 15 January 1965, 3. The original plan had been to continue production of the old ‘uniform lessons’ curriculum. See file 8, Cooper, ‘Some Suggestions,’ 1. 72 On Tyro, see UCA, BCE, box 198, file 7, minutes of General Curriculum Committee, 15 January 1965, 7. On the introduction of New Curriculum themes into jointly run programs, see the comments on the Explorer program (run with the Presbyterians and Baptists), pp. 6–7. 73 UCA, BCE, box 198, file 5, ‘Catalogue of New Curriculum Teaching Materials, Year 2,’ 2; file 7, minutes of General Curriculum Committee, 15 January 1965, 2–3; box 200, file 8, ‘New Curriculum Sales Statistics to Dec. 31, 1964.’ 74 See, for example, McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 203–7. 75 Statistics Canada, ‘Table A78-93: Population, by Age and Sex, Census Dates, 1851 to 1976,’ in Historical Statistics of Canada, 2nd edition (1999) [online edition], http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/11-516-XIE/sectiona/A78_93.csv (accessed 17 February 2007). 76 United Church of Canada, Yearbook, 1980. 77 UCA, BCE, box 273, file 11, S. O’Driscoll, letter to the editor, Winnipeg Tribune, Manitoba, 10 July 1965. See also box 272, file 7, Rosemary Robinson to J.R. Mutchmor, 26 July 1964, 3; and Howard Walker to J.R. Mutchmor, 25 July 1964. 78 UCA, BCE, box 272, file 7, Ethel B. Johnston to Sunday School Department, United Church Publishing House, 20 August 1964; Eva F. Dilts to ‘Friends,’ 17 September 1964; Allan A. Down to United Church Publishing House, 6 January 1965, 3; Mildred C. Young to A.C. Forrest, 20 September 1964;

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Georgina Robinson to the Moderator, 14 August 1964; H. Hocken to Peter Gordon White, 7 August 1964. 79 UCA, BCE, box 272, file 7, James R. Holden to E.E. Long, 4 December 1964. 80 For a masterful synthetic overview which attempts to strike a balance between these two factors, see Mark A. Noll, ‘What Happened to Christian Canada?’ Church History 75, no. 2 (June 2006): 245–73. 81 Burkinshaw, Pilgrims in Lotus Land, 255, for example, raises the possibility that the Evangelical Free Church in British Columbia benefited from the defection of United Church members, especially Sunday school teachers.

13 ‘Belief crucified upon a rooftop antenna’:1 Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew, and Dechristianization nancy christie

He [God] smiles on society, and his message is a relaxing one. He does not scold you; he does not demand of you. As the advertisements put it, religion can be fun. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (1956)

These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence, when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when the bland lead the bland. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958)

William H. Whyte and John Kenneth Galbraith, as the above comments demonstrate, were chiefly concerned with the negative impact that postwar affluence would have upon American culture. More importantly, they shared a preoccupation with the dangers which consensual values and conformity among the masses presented to democracy. Although the Canadian-born Galbraith became an important academic insider, combining teaching at Harvard with stints as an American government adviser, and William H. Whyte remained a journalist and editor of Fortune, their books, The Affluent Society and The Organization Man, were huge best-sellers. They saw themselves as social critics and public intellectuals who believed in the need for leadership among exceptional men as a necessary corrective against the destabilizing and corroding effect of the banality of middle-class suburbia. Galbraith and Whyte also shared a more pervasive postwar cultural mood when they criticized postwar collectivism and championed the creative individ-

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ual. Whyte was more preoccupied than Galbraith with the psychological impact that organizational values had upon the middle classes, but as self-proclaimed postwar liberals, they were typical of many thinkers of the 1950s in challenging conformity, conservatism, and structures of authority in the hope that the well-rounded individual man might be elevated above the sterility of postwar affluence. Despite its implied elitist trope, they saw the intellectual, masculine individual as the only hope for recovering the principles of democracy which had declined, they believed, by pandering to the unthinking masses. I cite both Galbraith and Whyte because they were among the many postwar social critics, sociologists, and public intellectuals upon whom Pierre Berton drew when he wrote the intentionally controversial book The Comfortable Pew in 1965. Like the books of Galbraith and Whyte, The Comfortable Pew became a best-seller in Canada, the United States, and Britain, selling over 170,000 copies in Canada alone one year after its publication. Berton’s name, as William Kilbourn has informed us, was mentioned in every church hall in Canada.2 Through his book, magazine articles, and several appearances on television, where he proclaimed himself an agnostic, Berton effectively utilized the modern media to conduct his assault upon the institutional church. The Protestant mainstream may have been his target but he merely used the failures of the church as a vehicle by which he could explore his broader preoccupations and anxieties about postwar Canadian culture, namely the cultural conformity created by affluence and the need for a strong, new male messiah to lead the unthinking masses to embrace his liberal outlook. In this way, Berton constructed himself as a public intellectual and as a liberal humanist social critic of postwar modernity. Berton was handed a copy of Bishop Robinson’s equally controversial book Honest to God when commissioned by the Anglican Church of Canada to write The Comfortable Pew, with the implicit intent that he write a theologically driven critique of church dogma and the clergy. Berton’s preoccupations with the church’s puritanical attitudes, authoritarian structures, and mundane sermons reflected a broader transnational impetus to attack authority structures, a theme explored in great detail by Callum Brown and Hugh McLeod.3 I will argue that The Comfortable Pew is a distinctly North American product, which was reflective not of the culture of the 1960s, but of the obsessions of American cultural leaders of the 1950s, not least because of its central focus upon the banality of middle-class

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culture in an age of affluence. While The Comfortable Pew was often criticized for its simplistic thinking, its moralism, and for its function as a prop for Berton’s own personal ambitions,4 few commentators in Canada failed to admit that it had renewed public interest in and discussion of the mainstream Protestant churches. However, because it was fashioned so self-consciously out of an American liberal discourse of the fifties, The Comfortable Pew must not be read as a testament to a supposed crisis of religion in 1960s Canada, for as so many commentators themselves complained, it reflected little if anything of the real state of religion in Canada in 1965. Many people were particularly irked by the fact that the book was intended as Lenten reading. Some shared the view of W.E Perry of Victoria, British Columbia, that ‘it would have done me as much good to read lady Chatterly’s Lover!’ Many more would have agreed that the book represented a ‘revolution,’ as did Rev. E.G. White of Grand Forks, British Columbia, who declared somewhat hyperbolically that it was the most important document since Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses.5 While it would be somewhat exaggerated to claim that a volume as derivative and riddled with contradictions as The Comfortable Pew could be deemed revolutionary, it was more than simply a controversial book as Canadian historians have maintained.6 Certainly Berton himself came in for both criticism and praise, and was compared, in an overly cavalier manner, with John the Baptist, Tom Paine, George Orwell’s Big Brother, and Satan.7 Spoofs like that of Richard J. Needham’s television personality Humphrey Boodle, which satirized Berton’s overconfidence by portraying him as God speaking to the masses, all too pointedly hit their mark, and this has led scholars to largely dismiss the book. While it is true that there exists a disconnect between Berton’s assault against the churches and what was actually happening within mainstream Protestantism in Canada, Berton’s The Comfortable Pew remains important, despite its superficiality, because it decisively altered the public authority of the church by subordinating the church to the media as the arbiter of the intersection between religion, culture, and politics in modern Canadian society. It is indeed ironic that the very Canadian masses that Berton judged to be passively obedient to the clergy – whom he compared to the door-to-door salesman who so easily duped female consumers – were themselves persuaded to believe the constructed truth about the churches deftly presented by Berton in The Comfortable Pew. In May 1963, Rev. Ernest Harrison, director of the Department of

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Religious Education in the Anglican Church, asked Berton, whom he deemed ‘a first-class writer’ if he could write a ‘realistic’ assessment of the church that would be both positive and negative and which, most importantly, might stimulate a desire ‘for change and reform’ as Lenten reading in the church.8 Other than this broad request for stimulating discussion of church reform, Harrison provided no clear guidelines, although it is evident that by giving Berton a copy of the English Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson’s book Honest to God and a subscription to the Anglican publication The Canadian Churchman, together with later critical comments from Harrison, he foresaw a volume which relied to a much greater extent upon the Bible for its inspiration.9 Clearly, Harrison’s assumption was that Canada was still a Christian country whose culture was largely shaped by Christian tenets, and he could not foresee the strident secularist perspective of Berton even though he had consciously approached an Anglican ‘outsider’ to write the book. Similarly, Michael Creal, a professor in the humanities program at York University, who along with Harrison commissioned The Comfortable Pew, conceived of the volume as a critique of ‘conventional middle class religion’ but which, by exposing the inadequacies of an outdated, clerically dominated institutional apparatus, would return Canadian Protestants to an ‘authentic tradition’ in which individuals could rediscover their spiritual worth.10 Berton in fact made it clear from the outset that he was not ‘terribly familiar with the Anglican church’ for, like the church masses that he was later to criticize, he went to the United Church for the sake of convenience, it being the only church in the town of Kleinburg where he lived. Berton did admit, however, to having ‘some general feelings’11 about the Protestant churches, an interesting turn of phrase, given the fact that he was to so roundly condemn the emotional and feminine quality of the modern church while at the same time publicly constructing himself as a rational (male) intellectual. In admitting to a lack of real knowledge of the Anglican Church and by raising the bogey of his previous outspokenness on the issue of modern sexuality in an article in Maclean’s magazine (which eventually led to his dismissal as editor following a well-orchestrated letter-writing campaign by church women from Saskatchewan) in two well-crafted letters to Harrison, Berton was in fact strategically eliciting permission to talk as freely as he wished about the ‘church in the abstract’ without any firm knowledge and to talk about the church’s puritanical attitudes to sex.12 If Harrison did not reveal any misgivings about commissioning a well-known secular humanist to expose the shortcomings of the Angli-

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can Church, there was a firestorm of protest from the Anglican laity against Berton when his appointment was leaked to the press in January 1964, largely because of his advocacy of premarital sex in Maclean’s.13 While even Berton’s toughest critics were willing to admit that asking a ‘self-professed non-believer’ to comment critically on the church revealed the robust health of the institutional church,14 Anglican laity like Mrs J.F. McKirdy of Valemont, BC, had much greater foresight than Harrison in charging that Berton was ‘drugged with humanism,’ while C.G. West of Toronto described Berton as a muckraking ‘mountebank.’ Even those Anglicans who agreed that the church was not sufficiently self-critical were horrified that The Comfortable Pew was intended to be read during Lent,15 a period of intense introspection about the issue of sin and the atonement. The Anglican Church was not as hidebound as those who commissioned Berton to write The Comfortable Pew assumed. Indeed, as early as April 1963, there was already an article published in The Canadian Churchman, the organ of the Anglican Church, on the theme of the ‘comfortable pew,’16 which suggested, as Berton was later to do, that to be current the Anglican Church must renew its interest in politics, trade unionism, and social welfare. Later that same year, eighteen Anglican bishops met at Huron College, London, Ontario, to discuss the use of television not only as an evangelistic device but also to reflect upon more critical debates concerning the place of religion in modern society,17 a key feature of Berton’s polemic against the ossified Anglican Church. That same year the Anglican Congress sought to renew the ‘real power of the Holy Spirit’ by seeking to break down the ‘formalized religiosity’ which had become overly theological and thus unintelligible to the ordinary parishioner. With a view to making the Anglican Church more inclusive and breaking down class and racial barriers, Arnold Edinborough, a British-born Anglican who had taught at Queen’s University, later became editor of Saturday Night, and was a member along with Rev. Harrison of the Anglican Church’s Board of Religious Education, argued in January 1964 against the sterility of theological ‘pseudo-intellectual concepts’ whose ‘barren rigidities’ served to alienate many church members. In addition, he spoke of the need to recapture the spirit of Christ by criticizing, in a manner anticipating Berton, the people in the pews who had given themselves over to the superficiality of fashionable sociability at the expense of faith in Christ. Perhaps the most powerful indictment against the modern church, and one that more precisely foreshadowed Berton’s controversial vol-

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ume, was that of Robert Fulford, not least because he was the first to criticize the United Church in a popular secular magazine, Maclean’s. Writing as a critical secularist, Fulford and the ministers he interviewed took specific aim at the affluence and material success of the postwar United Church, which by 1964 had, as a result of the baby boom, over one million members and was said to be worth over $60 million. Pursuing themes later elaborated by Berton, Fulford criticized the petty doctrinal differences between Protestant denominations, the obsession of church leaders with Mammon, and their preoccupation with expensive church building (at the expense of serving the poor), and juxtaposed the ‘bland suburban’ church against the simple authenticity of the oldstyle religion of the country church. As Berton was later to conclude, Fulford stated that the United Church had surrended to ‘middle class domesticity’ – with all the anti-female connotations that this phrase conjured up – and thus had become a ‘bogus institution.’18 Fulford’s claim that the church had experienced unprecedented growth but that this growth was at heart unhealthy was a theme frequently explored among American clergymen and public intellectuals during the 1950s, who evoked an older, nineteenth-century liberal Puritanism which saw the challenge for economic survival as the animating principle of morality. In other decades, church leaders would have rejoiced at the intense expansion of the Protestant denominations. For example, between 1947 and 1963 the United Church built 623 new churches.19 More significantly, 46 per cent of Canadians attended church regularly, a level unchanged from the 1890s.20 Indeed, these rates of church attendance were much higher than those in Britain during the same period and slightly more robust than those in the United States.21 The only troubling aspect for Protestant observers was that they feared that Protestantism might in future become a mere island in a vast Roman Catholic sea, as the Catholic faithful grew by 80 per cent between 1951 and 1961.22 Few commentators in Canada feared that the churches were in decline and generally agreed that the church remained central to inculcating moral values and was a key interpreter of public opinion. But herein lay the chief difficulty. In a society which agreed that the churches were instrumental in shaping public values, and in particular, political attitudes, many postwar observers began to intensively scrutinize what values were indeed being taught to parishioners. In short, because postwar public intellectuals, be they religious leaders, journalists, or academics, remained wedded to the notion that religion was

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fundamentally linked to the broader political nation and that it was crucial to sustaining democracy, their critique of the [voting] masses – in particular the newly constructed suburban middle classes, who were assumed to be complacent, conformist, and obsessively attached to the pursuit of wealth and status elevation – focused to a somewhat unhealthy degree upon the cultural messages on offer within the expanding institutional churches. More broadly, as leisure replaced work as the fundamental nexus of cultural values and morality, the church, now redefined as a leisure activity, came under renewed attention from cultural elites. Thus it was the success and not the failure of the churches that most troubled commentators both within and outside the mainstream denominations. It was not dechristianization but rather the spectacular revival of religion during the 1950s which shaped the critique of the institutional churches. By contrast with Britain, where there was a growing tension between church morality and the values of the rest of society, in Canada there was still a general presumption that church values were those of the rest of society, and as such, they had to be rigorously appraised.23 In the United States there emerged a general correlation between material success and faithfulness. In Canada, June Callwood drew similar conclusions, noting that the modern Protestant churches had become centres of superficial religion, defined by affluence, social exclusivity, and the worship of money rather than the brotherhood of man. At one level, Callwood, like many other observers both in the United States and Canada, complained that the easy religion of the fifties was leading to complacency among the masses. What was unique to Canada, however, was that this critique of the ‘stylish success’24 of the churches entailed much more than simply a broader critique of authoritarianism in Canadian society. Beneath their censure of modern religion as a ‘welcome escape from the harsh realities of the market place,’ a numbing ‘false religiosity’25 of sociability and status seeking, critics displayed a deeper concern that religion had become in thrall to group think, but what was more dangerous was that this group think was defined by fundamentalist evangelicalism and right-wing politics. Hence the United Church minister Stewart Crysdale’s fundamental critique of postwar Protestantism was not that it was in decline or that middle-class suburbia was anti-intellectual and banal, but, rather, that ‘critical social values’ had been eviscerated from church teachings. In short, Crysdale and other social critics in Canada were deeply worried that liberal theology,26 and in turn liberal political values, were being

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diminished by the spectacular expansion of American-style conservative evangelicalism. In his 1961 publication The Industrial Struggle and Protestant Ethics in Canada, Crysdale worried over the way in which both ‘conservative’ theology and neo-orthodoxy had contributed to the increasing separation of personal evangelism from social reform, a process which he maintained had begun in 1942 within the Anglican Church.27 Callum Brown has traced the growth of Christian fundamentalism during the 1950s in Britain, which contributed to the intensification of moral conservatism more broadly within the culture. As Brown demonstrates, the shift within British evangelicalism towards fundamentalism was brought about in no small way by the immense popularity of Billy Graham’s mass revival campaigns, which swept twice through Britain in 1946 and again in 1954. Graham was a proponent of a particularly right-wing evangelicalism – both in terms of its theology and its political sensibility – which eschewed social Christianity.28 Graham’s campaigns were closely tracked by both the United and Anglican churches in Canada, and throughout the fifties his every movement was praised. In fact, in one 1954 article the United Church Observer attributed the renewed interest in religion in the Western world to the work of Billy Graham and his Canadian associate Charles Templeton, describing in minute detail how their revival meetings were regularly crowded to overflowing and how they had helped extend church morality in both the private and public lives of the nation such that religion was now believed generally to be synonymous with the notion of the progressive trajectory of history itself.29 A month later the United Church continued to cover Graham’s tour of Britain, and although critical of the ‘artificiality’ of his hand gestures and his brash theology, the writer viewed Graham’s ‘atomic release of spiritual energy’ as a prophylactic against the heady materialism of postwar affluence, stating that Graham’s evangelicalism brought such spiritual happiness to people that they forgot about the malaise of conspicuous consumption.30 Another article conceded that many people feared Graham’s conservative theology and his overly ‘emotional’ evangelism – a clear reference to the anxiety that the United Church was dominated by women – but claimed that his sincerity, his very authenticity, a popular gendered term of the fifties which referred to the well-rounded and secure male individual, had turned the tide of religion both in Britain and in North America.31 For United Church members who remained concerned about the spread of communism and totalitarianism, even strong advocates of the

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continued interconnectedness between evangelism and social Christianity, such as Stanley H. Knowles, a clergyman and CCF MP for North Winnipeg, were bound to support this new brand of evangelism because it protected the ‘individual conscience.’32 Others extolled the virtues of Billy Graham’s brand of evangelism, even though it represented a type of right-wing fundamentalism disconnected from the historic link between evangelism and social Christianity, because they believed that it would squelch the worrisome out-migration of United Church members to the Pentecostal, Alliance, and Baptist ‘gospel halls.’33 Praise for Graham and his conservative brand of evangelism remained unabated within United Church publications until the late 1950s, when, with the declining threat of communism, the appeal of Graham’s conservatism was on the decline. From the late 1950s onward, more and more people within the United Church began to question the fundamentalism of Billy Graham not least because they believed his overly emotional (read feminine) style of mass revivalism was not sufficiently ‘intelligent’ and rational to attract a male membership, and some began to see his mode of persuasion as a form of brainwashing which placed him in the role of a religious ‘despot’ over women.34 After 1958 more and more articles appeared which focused on social issues35 in a vain attempt to reinscribe the link between evangelism and social Christianity and with the aim of making the United Church more relevant to modern society, a view later expounded with great force by Pierre Berton himself. Where the United Church’s Board of Evangelism and Social Service refused to endorse Billy Graham’s 1955 evangelistic crusade, because of its animosity against his biblical literalism, the Anglican Church remained extravagantly supportive of Graham all through the fifties and early sixties. In a 1955 article entitled ‘What Billy Graham Can Mean,’ Evelyn Ward acknowledged that Anglicans generally disliked American evangelists, but that Billy Graham was viewed very favourably by the church, largely because the Anglican Church in Britain had supported him during his British tours.36 Indeed, in 1956 The Canadian Churchman recorded the strong support for Graham by the Bishop of Barking, who saw in Graham’s simple gospel message the seeds of renewal for the Anglican Church,37 particularly among youth.38 Like the United Church, Anglican leaders argued that evangelicalism would help combat the negative aspects of postwar affluence by providing other more spiritual models of security.39 More importantly, evangelicalism was thought to provide a new purpose and so help unite Anglicans in a vastly changing and competitive world.40 Although the

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Anglican Church in Canada was expanding during this period as a result of buoyant levels of immigration from Britain,41 they nevertheless were well aware that other Protestant denominations, most notably the United Church, were growing at a much quicker pace. Intense coverage of Billy Graham’s revival campaigns, most notably his large rally in Maple Leaf Gardens in 1955, gave a new impetus to evangelicalism within the Anglican Church, and indeed, by the end of the fifties, it was apparent that the Anglican Church had begun to reinvent itself as a largely ‘evangelical’ denomination. One 1957 article, entitled ‘Every Member an Evangelist,’ reflected this new identity for the Anglican Church, and later that year an article called ‘Anglican Bishop and Evangelism’ emphasized this new core endorsement of evangelicalism, in which it was said that conversion was now a critical component of the Anglican experience, whereby the authority of the Bible and individual conversion were deemed more important than rituals, sacraments, and church traditions.42 Clearly Billy Graham’s impact was so enormous that the chief role of the church was seen in terms of numerical expansion brought about by ‘one living soul setting another on fire.’43 Although one article criticized Graham’s fundamentalism,44 it favourably endorsed the profound importance of evangelicalism to the growth of modern Anglicanism. Indeed, there appeared to be little challenge to this view until the sixties, when in 1964 an article in The Canadian Churchman sought to redefine evangelicalism not in terms of a ‘low church’ emphasis upon conversion but in more amorphous terms as one’s commitment to Christ.45 While there was little ongoing public debate surrounding this new intensification of evangelicalism within the Anglican Church as reflected in the pages of The Canadian Churchman, there were clearly dissenting voices, many of whom were connected to the Board of Religious Education, who believed that the consensus growing around an inward-looking personal evangelism was becoming so powerful that a bombshell was needed to break down the increasingly hidebound nature of Anglicanism in Canada – hence, the decision in 1963 to appoint a well-known controversialist like Pierre Berton to compose an explicitly critical assessment of contemporary Anglicanism. While Berton rather disingenuously remarked that he was not going to even consider Billy Graham–style evangelicalism because it was so outside the Protestant mainstream, fundamentalist Christianity formed the central straw man of Berton’s diatribe, which at bottom was arguing that evangelicalism was an American cultural import and that liberal

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theology and social Christianity were the defining elements of a Canadian religious sensibility. Controversy and The Comfortable Pew In his correspondence with the church leaders who responded to The Comfortable Pew (Berton was not a populist and rarely wrote back to ordinary clergymen or laity), Berton always stuck close to the terms of his official commission to state that he wrote the book merely ‘to get people taking an interest in the church itself.’46 Several clergymen who had not yet read the book, such as Venerable Cecil Swanson, continued to believe that Berton had written within the Anglican canon established by Bishop Robinson in his ‘courageous’ book Honest to God. For that reason they highly anticipated the publication of The Comfortable Pew in January 1965 and expected that it would receive a sympathetic reception among Canadian Anglicans who were already well acquainted with the ‘new thinking’ within Anglicanism represented by the 1963 Anglican Congress. Swanson informed Berton that he himself often reinterpreted Christ’s gospel in an innovative manner and that to ‘my own amazement … large numbers of the congregation heartily approve of what I try to say.’47 But, as so many ordinary people remarked in their letters to Berton, he was not showing Anglicans how to reinterpret the Bible and there were absolutely no references to the Bible in The Comfortable Pew. It is clear that this was a distinct choice made by Berton, who had his own agenda for writing The Comfortable Pew. As Berton himself had admitted to Ernest Harrison, he was not well acquainted with the Anglican Church, and it is apparent that he agreed to write this ‘critique of organized religion’48 as a vehicle for canvassing some of his own personal anxieties about the ills of postwar Canadian society. However, Berton was also well aware that he could never realistically appear as a theological expert, and so he set about reinventing himself as a knowledgeable expert in terms of modern public sociology.49 Berton was thus anxious to pose as a ‘rational’ and scientific social critic. To quote from the Bible would have undermined Berton’s goal to fashion himself as a member of the cultural avant-garde, as a liberal thinker, and as a cutting-edge public intellectual. When Berton stated that the church will ‘have to increasingly call for help from the outside,’50 what he meant was that the church must look to modern knowledge experts – in this case journalists – to guide them towards a recovery of the truth through a kind of demystifying social

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analysis. Berton was at pains to show that The Comfortable Pew was so much more than a Canadian version of Honest to God, and indeed, he consciously set out to distinguish himself from the clerical intellectuals whom he thought were outmoded by associating himself with the discourse of liberal social science. Berton claimed an association with American public intellectuals by situating The Comfortable Pew within the discourse of American social criticism and by frequently alluding to the work of leading sociologists and social critics such as Robert Lynd, William Whyte, Vance Packard, David Riesman, Theodor Adorno, and Canada’s Marshall McLuhan. Most of the writers whom Berton quoted were not only academics, but also public intellectuals because they wrote for leading ‘opinion journals’51 such as Fortune Magazine and The Partisan Review, and their books had become national best-sellers, such as Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd. Like them, Berton profoundly distrusted the power of the masses – in this case the people in the pews – and believed that if liberal democratic culture was to be preserved against an unthinking political conservatism (represented for Berton by Billy Graham’s American-style evangelicalism) then they must be led by the disinterested intellectual who could stand outside his culture, courageously expose the shams of contemporary society, and be unafraid to court controversy. In short, Berton wanted to illustrate that The Comfortable Pew was a piece of scientific social analysis of modern Canadian life. He achieved this not only by anchoring his discussion in the corpus of relevant works of American sociology but by showing that he stood as a disinterested outsider, a position he achieved by refusing to quote from any clergymen, despite the fact that he had, as Elizabeth Kilbourn has noted, spent endless nights in her living room discussing the meaning of God with leading Anglican clergymen.52 The Comfortable Pew was thus self-consciously crafted as an authentic, dispassionate, and scientific treatise that dealt perceptively with real problems. He presented himself as a public intellectual removed from modern pressures of conformity who was able to speak beyond the pressures of popular culture, which was seen as debased in terms of the social criticism of the fifties.53 More significantly, Berton was able to appear as a spokesman for the avant-garde by taking a liberal position with regard to sexuality.54 In short, Berton made himself into a rebel with a cause, by scornfully criticizing all conventional bastions of cultural authority, most notably the church. His critics well understood the pose Berton was striving for, and so to impugn his authority as a rational public intel-

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lectual Ted Byfield accused him of ‘outbursts of righteous indignation’ and attacked his claim to speak for the avant-garde by focusing on how Berton’s attack upon the prestige of the church was really founded on a ‘sense of nostalgia.’55 Judging from the public response to him, Berton was very successful in selling himself as a creative intellectual scornful of the gullibility of middle-class culture. As one of those supposedly smug and passive (female) suburbanites Berton had lampooned in The Comfortable Pew, Mrs W.A. Powell of Toronto retorted in a letter to The Canadian Churchman that ‘I am so sick of all the Pierre Bertons of this world – all the knowing intellects who so blithely sit back criticizing religion and rationalizing that criticism in their own minds.’56 Even Mrs Powell recognized that Berton’s book was simply the product of his personal reflections and was the antithesis of expert knowledge. Even when it came to choosing the title for his book Berton wished to pose as a creative and innovative thinker, telling the Most Rev. H.H. Clark, the primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, that the novelist Arthur Hailey had given him the title of his book and he had returned the favour, providing the title for one of Hailey’s novels. In point of fact, there had been an article written in 1963 in The Canadian Churchman, on the theme of the ‘comfortable pew,’57 a phrase most probably borrowed in turn from Bishop Robinson, who used the terms uncomfortable and comfortable in his discussion of religious orthodoxy.58 Reinhold Niebuhr also referred to the ‘banal comfort’ of a too-optimistic religion in his neo-orthodox critique of social Christianity, which he saw as too sentimental and worldly.59 More generally, throughout the fifties, the term ‘comfort’ had become a term of derision in the widespread critique of postwar affluence, which focused on the banality and passivity of middle-class mores. When William Whyte, the author of The Organization Man, stated that the younger generation was ‘too comfortable,’ he really meant that they were conformist and not in revolt against convention.60 More particularly, the term comfort had a distinct association in the popular mind with domesticity and, used in this way, had a distinctly gendered complexion, which further linked passivity and political quietude with the female body. It was thus used to great effect by Betty Friedan in her now-famous feminist critique of modernity in which she deployed the term comfort to denote all that was negative about the middle-class household, which she described as a ‘comfortable concentration camp,’61 with its infantilized female inmates. Berton was thus being disingenuous when explaining how he hit upon the title for his book, for as a devotee of the kind of public sociology

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which had taken as its focus the exposure of those uncomfortable truths about middle-class mass culture in an age of affluence, Berton would have been well acquainted with the broader cultural permutations of the term ‘comfortable.’ Indeed, by incorporating it into the title for his book he once again showed his skill in tapping into the psychological touchstones of postwar culture and at the same time situating himself as a critic of the anti-intellectualism of the modern-day religious consumer, with its reflexive associations with passivity, femininity, and self-absorption, key tropes in his masculinist diatribe against the outmoded church. In short, there was no term that better denoted the vacuousness of the postwar con of mass society than the term ‘comfort.’ In Looking for God in the Suburbs, James Hudnut-Beumler argued that in the 1950s culture and religion were synonymous, so that a critique of culture became a critique of religion.62 For Berton, this trajectory was reversed; his critique of the church became a means to unmask the ills of postwar Canadian society. Far from popularizing the thinking of ‘church thinkers over the past decade,’ as Ernest Harrison noted in the preface to the volume, Berton drew upon the prevailing views of American sociology to deliver a devasting lampoon of conformity among the new suburban middle classes in Canada. He quoted extensively from Lewis Mumford on the emptiness of the modern institutional church, in which the marketplace had come to define religion, and from the best-selling work of Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown, which stated that clerical preaching had become outmoded and that with the increasing loss of personal autonomy in the twentieth century, parishioners went to church because authority structures told them to do so.63 Both Berton and United Church spokesmen like Stewart Crysdale tapped into postwar anxieties about the independence of the individual in an era of growing standardization and cultural conformity. To this end, Crysdale quoted from S.I. Hayakawa, the author of Language in Thought and Action, to conclude that the postwar generation sought security by unquestionably following the expectations of their church or social group, and in this way most people held conventional and insipid attitudes to both their society and politics.64 As Berton concluded, this tendency towards conformity which was particularly characteristic of the affluent suburban middle classes had led to a meek acceptance of boring sermons, outmoded rituals, and a set of ‘comfortable and commonplace,’ so that the mainstream Canadian Protestant denominations had become centres of mediocrity and apathy.65 Mirroring the conclusions of William Whyte in The Organization

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Man and Vance Packard in The Status Seekers, Berton assumed that the churches had become dominated by a superficial middle class which saw the church as a status symbol and were content with a church that represented the ‘Christian white power structure.’ Berton was particularly critical of the clergy, who were no longer ‘crusading’ or ‘heroic,’ but were like their parishioners: hypocrites, who spoke of Christian ethics on Sunday but failed to speak on issues of change and reform because they preferred defending ‘the majority feeling’ and a comfortable but non-combative conventionality. Like Packard and Whyte, Berton observed that the higher up the social scale one was, the less committed one was to true Christianity and that there was a gulf between preaching and practice. Paraphrasing Packard, Berton stated that the real gospel of churchgoing is ‘social status’66 and that one shopped for one’s religion as ‘one shops for a well-advertised product’; he compared the preaching of the modern clergyman to the ‘studied insincerity’ of the door-to-door salesman.67 Indeed, as Berton concluded, there was a greater commitment to Christian ethics outside the institutional churches than within. In his view journalists, agnostics, scientists, and social workers were far ahead of modern churchgoers and clergy in terms of intellectual vigour, moral fortitude, and charismatic leadership, because the church was consumed with the marketplace and with raising money. According to Berton, the church must enter the ‘New Age’ and ask penetrating questions regarding modern social problems; it must get ‘with the world’ or else deny the importance of Christ’s suffering on the cross. Seizing once again upon the idea of cultural tension developed by Lewis Mumford, Berton argued that the churches must regain their vigour by being ‘in a state of tension with the society around it.’68 In short, the churches, like their founder, must ‘stir up the people to be uncomfortable.’69 Condemning the church as a cliquish social institution that represented the interests of one particular class – a ubiquitous middle class Berton advocated a religionless Christianity, free from the doctrinal strictures, outmoded views of morality and sin, and status concerns of the ‘religious establishment.’ Here Berton was borrowing explicitly from Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Sören Kierkegaard when he stated that the ‘worship of conformity and respectability’ had led to the creation of two entities: religion and Christianity. ‘Religion, the cult of the establishment,’ wrote Berton, ‘with its denial of Christian radicalism, its alliance with the status quo and its awesome social power, is, indeed, the antithesis of Christianity.’70 Clearly he depended a great

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deal upon Bishop Robinson’s work, especially in his discussion of the gap between ordinary people and the esoteric theology of the ‘medicine men and high priests’ of the modern church.71 He drew rather haphazardly from neo-orthodox thinkers such as Bonhoeffer; like most of Berton’s thinking, his referencing of neo-orthodoxy was riddled with contradictions. In advocating a greater role for social Christianity Berton was in fact arguing against neo-orthodoxy, and in critiquing the outdated puritanism of the modern churches he firmly dissented from Reinhold Niebuhr’s views regarding the reality of original sin.72 Berton did, however, integrate Bonhoeffer’s notion of the need for a more rationalistic religion better suited to the ‘adulthood’ of the world, which informed his caustic remarks regarding the infantile nature of contemporary views of the supernatural, comparing many church doctrines with childish views of Santa Claus and the stork, specifically the notion of a virgin birth.73 References to the work of Robinson – such as his observation that modern man does not need a father figure of God in the clouds74 – were sprinkled liberally throughout The Comfortable Pew to provide some theological authenticity to the work, but the real focus of the book was the problem of how to preserve individuality in a world driven by the psychology of consumption, a state which inevitably led to vacuous thinking, conformity, and political passivity, which in terms of postwar liberal discourse meant political conservatism. In Berton’s narrative, the church appears as an accidental tourist and functions largely as a touchstone for his broader anxieties about modernity and the problems of mass society and its connections to totalitarianism. In this way, The Comfortable Pew owes more to an American cultural sensibility than it does to British Anglican preoccupations about the relevance of religion in a secular world. Berton drew from the work of Theodor Adorno to conclude that the ‘in-group’ mentality engendered by an identification with an ‘authoritarian’ institution like the church was a precursor of ‘totalitarianism.’ Cribbing directly from Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, Berton claimed that those who ‘blindly’ followed their parents’ religion had more prejudices and ‘fascist’ personality than those who revolted against church tradition, in order to make his case for the need to reject ‘official Christianity’ in favour of a higher ‘religiosity’ of social and political reform.75 Adorno in particular focused on how irrational beliefs, such as a belief in the supernatural in religion, created a mindset which led the masses to blindly endorse authoritarianism. This was because Adorno maintained, as did Berton, that religion appealed to

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the childish and the insecure.76 Like Adorno, Berton was suspicious of the gullibility of the masses in the pews who believed all too readily in the Santa Claus version of God. He likewise saw preaching as a form of irrational, authoritarian propaganda which was undermining the development of a rational kind of progressive democracy. At the core of Berton’s diatribe against the churches lay a profound fear that authoritarian institutions – like the military and the churches – were eroding the kind of individualism which was necessary to sustain a vital form of progressive liberal democracy. And like Vance Packard, Berton saw affluence among the middle classes as one of the primary problems of postwar Western societies. And the evil protagonists in Berton’s morality play about the corruption of modern democracy were the clergy – the real ‘hidden persuaders’77 – who inculcated the masses with conservative platitudes by making religion into a drug: ‘a super aspirin.’78 From his reading of David Riesman’s 1950 blockbuster The Lonely Crowd Berton described clergymen as the ‘passive dependent’ type, which closely resembled Riesman’s ‘other-directed’ personality that seeks to conform to the demands of the group. Like Riesman and William Whyte, who both wrote about how to create belongingness in the modern world without losing a sense of individuality,79 Berton spoke on behalf of the ‘inner-directed,’ creative individual. He called for a modern-day prophet, ‘a spiritual genius’ – furnished not by the churches but by modern media – who might begin the revolution towards a more enlightened democracy founded upon the creative insights of the exceptional, authentic individual who had broken out from the bonds of unthinking habit to heroically resist the temptations of the status-conscious, middle-class desire for conformity and comfort.80 In seeing religion as a sedative and institutionalized religion as the tool of a conventional elite dedicated to a stultifying group think, Berton’s The Comfortable Pew was less an analysis of the state of religion in Canada in 1965 than a manifestation of the mindset of a host of American liberal thinkers from the 1950s whose outlook was shaped by a more generalized neo-Marxist analysis of middle-class life and mass culture and which was founded on a fundamental fear that the potential for the autonomous individual had been lost in the cultural flaccidity and conformity engendered by postwar affluence. As much as Berton may have striven to identify himself with the liberal avant-garde, in some respects his search for the well-rounded human in a more authentic Christianity was a nostalgic journey, although his prognostications regarding the

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importance of the individual personality within a revivified democracy spoke directly to the preoccupations and anxieties of American public intellectuals at whose table Berton had supped so greedily. As so many of Berton’s critics pointed out, the burden of his diatribe against the mainstream Protestant denominations focused primarily upon the effete, outmoded clergy, whose narrow focus on doctrine or on overly obscure theological language, had served, according to Berton, to alienate so many from the institutional church. It is clear that Berton blamed the clergy for the demise of the cultural authority of religion in postwar Canada, but what is particularly interesting is the gendered focus of his attack upon the benumbed clergy. If the clergy lacked charisma and succumbed to the demands of the lowest common denominator of modern mass culture, and if they had likewise been engulfed in the culture of consumption, they did so because they were ‘sissies’ rather than the fighting priests of films like Boys’ Town, where Bing Crosby’s muscular Christianity (he taught boxing) and heroism drew working-class lads back to the Catholic Church.81 From Berton’s perspective, religion’s claim of ‘absolute truth,’82 its very authenticity, had been eroded by the effeminate tea-drinking clergy, whose close association with the female-dominated parish had driven them closer to contemporary materialist ideals. In his previous book, The Big Sell, Berton defined the passive, gullible consumer in terms of the domesticated female. In The Comfortable Pew the manliness of the clergy – by which Berton meant the heroic, radical, and creative male individual – was pictured as being emasculated by the dominant female presence – the ‘mass denominator’83 – in the church pews. From Berton’s perspective women were the most conformist because ‘clique interests of girls’84 dominated the church, while the church was too ‘comfortable and commonplace’85 because its clergy gave sermons on happy families rather than the uncomfortable cutting-edge theme of ‘individual rights’ in machine-age capitalism.86 Berton also linked gender and class. Building once again on the work of Adorno, he saw female religion as more superficial and as having a great tendency towards authoritarianism and prejudice, leading him to the conclusion that it was suburban women rather than men who were forcing the poor out of the church.87 Because the idea of going to church out of habit rather than ‘deep conviction’ was associated with shopping, it was also gendered female: ‘This practice of shopping for one’s religion on the basis of its usefulness, as one shops for any well-advertised product, tends to weaken religious faith.’88 More significantly, the

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dominance of the group – in this case a largely female group – ultimately prevented the minister from standing apart ‘from his flock’ so that he soon became ‘an organization man’ and a ‘passive dependent,’ like the female parishioners who functioned as the masses dictating the terms of ‘social conformity,’89 a perspective which again echoed Whyte and Riesman. Berton was not alone in connecting the irrelevant emotional piety of the modern church with a feminized clergy. Arnold Edinborough, the editor of Saturday Night, and Stewart Crysdale of the United Church, both critics of Berton, nevertheless agreed that the modern church was too feminized, and like Berton they called for a more politically engaged social Christianity which would be intellectual and thus masculine in its appeal. Edinborough blamed the clergy’s lack of interest in public affairs and the obscurantism, traditionalism, and mediocrity of their sermons on their effeminacy, for ‘with regard to sex’ the clergyman ‘is much more on the woman’s side than the thinking of men in the congregation.’90 Similarly, Crysdale, who, like Edinborough and Berton, took a ‘radical’ stand on questions such as sex and homosexuality, evoked a more general postwar anxiety that the triumph of therapeutic culture with its implications for authoritarian tendencies they discerned in mass society, and its attendant loss of the autonomous self, was really an issue of male selfhood. Crysdale too demanded that the United Church create ‘A Faith for Real Men’91 by developing distinctly male traits of courage and intellectualism. The negative aspects of modernity, with its tendencies towards conformity, political passivity, and obedience to external authorities, was seen from this perspective as a distinctly feminine condition. If the modern church was to avoid ‘false goals’92 and survive as a powerful cultural force, it had to begin by reaffirming the individualized and autonomous male. Indeed, revolution in terms of both religion and the general culture depended upon the emergence of a new prophet, ‘one man, a spiritual genius.’93 Such a person was distinctly framed as a creative male rebel and authentic Christian who had a greater sense of self that allowed him to break free from the institutional church, which had become the site of female control. In short, Berton’s juxtaposition of hypocritical religion and meaningful Christianity was at its foundation a remarkably gendered construction which identified women with religion’s ‘trappings’ and ‘inelastic morality,’94 and which associated manly autonomous individuals with the historical trajectory of progressive change and a more authentic modernity.

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Because Berton purposely set out to write a controversial book about religion, he received hundreds of letters from ordinary Canadians, but it is striking that only one woman overtly objected to his gendered ideals of the church. Stella Halliday from Grand Forks, Manitoba, wrote to Berton stressing how her son chose to be an altar boy but that his habit of reading the Bible before bed did not make him ‘a sissy or a goody goody’ as he had developed ‘good boyish habits’ as an athlete.95 Interestingly, there were letters from men such as those from Ross Murray from Winnipeg and R.J. Taber from Toronto who adamantly resisted the power of women in the church, which provoked Taber to comment: ‘What apathetic asses were you and I and the rest of us to ALLOW those damned old (female) hypocrite fuddy-duddies in our front church pews.’96 Of the sample of letters I examined, 61 per cent of the respondents were women, a proportion which would have only reinforced Berton’s views regarding the feminized modern church. Given Berton’s propensity to associate female piety with the most mundane aspects of the institutional church, what is striking is that none of the women could be defined as a ‘passive dependent’ type, and most women had a very firm sense of their own religious faith and sometimes disagreed with their clergymen. They insistently objected to Berton’s ideas regarding sexual morality largely because they believed that modern sexual attitudes further confined rather than liberated women. For example, Vera Walsh strenuously objected to Berton’s attitudes to sex, calling his attacks a form of ‘muckraking in Morality,’ because his idea of a sexual revolution was nothing more than a shell game which led to the further exploitation of women and children.97 The most striking characteristic of the fan mail written to Berton after the publication of The Comfortable Pew in January 1965 and his subsequent appearances on CBC television and radio, was that there was no strong pattern to the responses, which indicates that far from being a conformist culture as Berton maintained, postwar Canadian religious culture was intensely variegated and fragmented. Berton received letters from a large number of Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other fundamentalist supporters of Billy Graham, one out-and-out atheist,98 and a handful of cranks who believed in New Age religion and flying saucers.99 What is significant is that there were only a few openly hostile people, notably R.J Newstead from The Pas, Manitoba, who referred to Berton’s book as the ‘uncomfortable Stink,’ and David Friesen, from Winnipeg, who claimed he had been born again at the

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age of twenty-two at the side of the road and who believed he was defending God’s truth against ‘Satan’s Force’: the Liberal Modernists.100 A large number of correspondents informed Berton that they were fundamentalists and supported Billy Graham, but what is particularly interesting about these kinds of letters was that although they firmly disagreed with Berton’s position, they almost all ended up by praising Berton as a prophet. For example, Mrs Doug Scott of Hanover, Ontario, wrote to Pierre (many wrote very personally because they had seen him on television) saying, ‘Do you realize that you are doing something the clergy doesn’t do, that you’re following more Jesus’ footsteps than any establishment in our day, or the clerical, theological leaders thereof? You Hurt for the people, and, man don’t give me Jean-Paul Sartre or liberal humanitarianism, you feel sorry for the great mass of people and point to their spiritual leaders as being, if not responsible for their great burdens, at least oblivious. That’s what Jesus did!’101 While a minority believed Berton was working for Satan – a term little heard in discussions of religion until this period – a vast proportion of correspondents, be they male or female, fundamentalist or liberal modernist, described Berton as a modern-day prophet. Madelaine Vassalo of Detroit, Michigan, described him as a ‘Wholly Spirit’; Mrs Lyle Chappel of Dundas, Ontario, thought Berton evoked Christian love and a concern with real people; Alex Thompson, a Jehovah’s Witness from Orangeville, compared Berton to ‘Christ stirring up the people’; Hattie Stevenson from Vancouver, who described herself as a ‘humble’ church woman, thought Berton was seeking God without knowing it and that in that regard he was much like St Paul; Eileen Delaney of Sainte-Foy, Quebec, stated that Berton could be another St Augustine and that he ‘could be the finest of Christians.’102 What these letters indicate is that even those who vociferously disagreed with his position accepted the notion of doubt but nevertheless saw Canada as a Christian nation where those who explicitly identified themselves as agnostics, as Berton did, were reinterpreted as earnest but misguided seekers of Christ. Thus most of those who saw Berton as a cultural leader and Christian prophet advised him to either change churches, seek conversion, or turn to the Bible for direction. Second, these letters demonstrate that a large number of people were persuaded by Berton’s conclusions that religion in Canada could be saved only if a prophet-like individual would arise to take on the role. And most Canadians thought that Berton himself fit the bill. Indeed, a much larger proportion of correspondents generally accepted his critique. Almost

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all the clergymen who wrote to Berton praised him for reinvigorating the Protestant churches. Indeed, the Rev. Ernest Marshall Howse, the moderator of the United Church, wished that the United Church had commissioned Berton first and recommended his book as prescribed reading for all theological students. A large number of people voiced complaints about the clergy, a trope that was not unique to the sixties. What is significant, though, is that a large proportion of letter writers, regardless of whether they agreed or disagreed with Berton, wrote within a paradigm that accepted the gulf between evangelicalism (fundamentalism) and liberal modernism, a particular theme of Berton’s. Moreover, a large number of correspondents, including those who were firm believers in the validity of Christianity for modern society, tended to agree with Berton that the churches were outmoded and accepted that a ‘reverend agnostic’ like Berton had the authority to criticize the church. Indeed, many were willing to overtly criticize the institutional church because they also accepted Berton’s notion that the institutional church and Christianity were two separate entities. As J.H. Fielding of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, stated, parroting Berton: ‘Religion is a form of Worship but Christianity is a follower of Christ.’103 The view voiced by Daisy Cook from Regina that ‘Pierre Berton and God would be an irresistible combination’ was more common than the conclusion of one unnamed woman who said that she was ‘amazed to hear of your unbelief in God’ and who severely chastised Berton for thinking that he could critique religion: ‘You may criticize human beings but please do not find fault with God.’104 By accepting much of Berton’s perspective on the irrelevance of the institutional church and by envisioning Berton as some kind of modern-day prophet, a large majority of letter writers were unwittingly giving credence to Berton’s central message: that it was the unquestionable right of the media to arbitrate between the church and religious values. Those who saw themselves as professing Christians were unwittingly conferring a new cultural authority on the media at the expense of clerical leadership, largely because Berton was deftly able to tap into a long-standing gap between the religious ideas of the laity and their clergy. No matter how controversial people deemed Berton’s ideas about the growing interconnection between religion and secular humanism, people were just as likely to dismiss Ted Byfield, who debated with Berton on CBC television’s This Hour Has Seven Days on the night of 24 January 1965. Canadians saw Byfield as ineffective and a little laughable because he represented the views of an overly earnest Christian,

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which was no longer seen as tenable in the Canada of the sixties. While it is true that some of Berton’s ideas, in particular his advocacy of premarital sex, may have been well ahead of the attitudes of the majority of Canadians, Berton was able to effectively tap into a cultural sensibility which was at once wary of certain aspects of modernity but which also embraced the concept of the need for a ‘New Age’ of culture that looked to the future rather than to the past. Berton, by situating himself within a broader liberal discourse that critiqued the amorality of middle-class affluence, the power of elites, and the mundane character of postwar mass culture, was able to effectively rework the predictable doubts of parishioners and transform them into a much more fundamental critique of the weakness, and indeed irrelevance, of the institutional church. No matter how often Berton claimed that he wished to make the church more powerful in modern Canadian society, he had placed the church leadership on the defensive. More importantly, by arrogating to himself the qualities of sincerity and authenticity – attributes highly coveted during this period – Berton was able to draw secular humanism, liberal humanitarianism, and Christianity much closer together as forces of human progress and, at the same time, to completely relegate evangelicalism to the outer fringes of intelligent modern society. If, according to Berton’s critique, the modern church was merely a site for middle-class status seeking, then ‘authentic’ spirituality lay among non-churchgoers and agnostics like himself. More significantly, Berton built upon his stature as a well-known national television personality and columnist to sell himself as a disinterested intellectual. Berton was able to fend off accusations that The Comfortable Pew was merely a superficial personal rant narrating his own journey to agnosticism. He made disingenuous claims to scientism and scholarly rigour by clothing his disenchantment with the theological obscurantism and moral puritanism of contemporary church life – what he had originally referred to as his ‘feelings’ towards the church – in a garb of American sociological scholarship from the 1950s.105 Berton was thus able to pose as a Canadian public intellectual through carefully cribbing from the work of the American liberal avant-garde and simultaneously to avoid the taint of being considered merely a muckraking controversialist, even though he was more than willing to see the book in such terms when he wished to back away from any further discussion of the implications of his work. Whether in the guise of an intellectual leader or as someone who only wished to get people talking about the church, Berton’s rodomontade of American

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sociological scholarship gave a weight to his conclusions that enabled him to hoodwink the Canadian public into tacitly giving him permission to make media pundits such as himself the new secular priests of modern Canadian society. What is remarkable about The Comfortable Pew is that while it was indeed superficial and wholly lacking in any real knowledge about the contemporary Protestant mainstream other than Berton’s own experience, its conclusions were persuasive and given credence even by his critics. After 1965, many people accepted the idea that evangelicalism was synonymous with American fundamentalism and thus either irrelevant or hostile to the emerging modernist nationalist consensus in English Canada. In addition, the notion that the churches now formed only a minority voice within Canadian culture came to be accepted. So too did the idea that churches were ineluctably traditionalist, middle-class institutions that led to political conservatism, a position likewise canvassed by Stewart Crysdale even though his statistics demonstrated that postwar Christianity was a largely working-class phenomenon.106 More problematically, Berton’s tirade against the gendered and overly emotional character of personal religion completely eviscerated the historic integration of evangelism and social Christianity. In this way The Comfortable Pew further contributed to the Americanization of Canadian culture – an irony for someone who in his later career was defined as a public intellectual of Canadian nationalism – by creating a gulf between liberal modernism and evangelicalism. Because the controversy over The Comfortable Pew occurred in cultural sites outside the institutional church (and because Christianity occupied more cultural space in Canada), it had a far greater cultural impact than Honest to God. In contrast to the British context, it became a pivotal catalyst in the challenge to established authority that was to occur later in the 1960s. The growing tendency within Canadian media since the 1960s to satirize the royalty, military elites, conventional sexual morality, and the church would have been unthinkable without Berton’s own fortuitous sally.

NOTES 1 Dennis Braithwaite, ‘The Berton Era,’ Globe and Mail, 26 January 1965, 1. 2 William Kilbourn, ed., The Restless Church: A Response to the Comfortable Pew (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), Introduction.

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3 Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow, UK: Pearson Educational, 2006), chapters 5 and 6; Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 60–7. 4 See for example, Arnold Edinborough, ‘Sex, Religion and Pierre Berton,’ Saturday Night, February 1965. 5 Letters to the Editor by Perry and White, ‘Letterbasket,’ Canadian Churchman [henceforth CC], April 1965. 6 Historians of Canadian religion have generally deemed Berton controversial but have not explored in detail the broader cultural context of The Comfortable Pew. See for example, Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1992), 444. The only academic biography of Berton is by A.B. McKillop, Pierre Berton: A Biography (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2008). 7 Kilbourn, ed., The Restless Church, Introduction. 8 McMaster University, Rare Books, Pierre Berton Papers, Box 266, F-10, Rev. Ernest Harrison to Berton, 14 May 1963. 9 Ibid., Harrison to Berton, 20 August 1963; Ernest Harrison, ‘The Immorality of the Bible,’ in Kilbourn, ed., The Restless Church, 31. It appears from Harrison’s comments that Berton was too much of an advocate of neoorthodoxy by viewing the Bible as exposing human hopelessness. 10 Michael Creal, ‘A Declaration,’ in Kilbourn, ed., The Restless Church, 6–7. 11 Berton Papers, Berton to Harrison, 28 May 1963. 12 Berton Papers, Berton to Harrison, 28 May 1963, 9 July 1963. 13 M.A. Stephens, ‘Lenten Book by Pierre Berton,’ CC, January 1964, 7. 14 Ted Byfield, Just Think , Mr Berton (a little harder) (Winnipeg: The Company of the Cross, 1965), Foreword. 15 Letters to the editor, CC, February 1964, 10; ibid., March 1964, 13. 16 John R.G. Ragg, Bethnal Green, England, letter to editor, CC, April 1963. 17 ‘Mass Communications as Evangelistic Tool,’ CC, November 1963; ‘Evangelistic Purpose of Church Broadcasting Program Described,’ CC, December 1963. 18 Robert Fulford, ‘Shakeup in the United Church,’ Maclean’s, May 1964, 12, 13, 42, 44. 19 Stewart Crysdale, The Changing Church in Canada: Beliefs and Attitudes of United Church People (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 11. 20 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, Christian Churches and Their Peoples: A Social History of Religion in Canada, 1840–1965 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 21 On church attendance in Britain and the United States, see Brown, Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 183, 226–7; James Hudnut-Beumler, Looking

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27 28 29

30 31 32 33

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for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945–65 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 41. Crysdale, The Changing Church in Canada, 13. On this theme in Britain, see McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 29. June Callwood, ‘The “In-Group” and the Rest,’ in Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot: A Symposium on the Church and the World (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 19. On this theme, see Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs, 73–7; James Gilbert, Redeeming Culure: American Religion in an Age of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Gilbert explains the rise of ‘rational religion’ in this period. I also think that many commentators were likewise worried that neo-orthodoxy in religion had also displaced liberal theology, and in many cases this is what critics meant when they seized upon the issue of theological intellectualism in the church, a major theme in Berton’s The Comfortable Pew. Stewart Crysdale, The Industrial Struggle and Protestant Ethics in Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1961), 113. Brown, Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 189. ‘Battling for a Cause,’ United Church Observer [hereafter UCO], 15 April 1954, 4. For postwar evangelism within mainstream Canadian Protestantism as represented by the career of Charles Templeton, see Kevin Kee, Revivalists: Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). ‘Graham Blasts the Walls of Jericho,’ UCO, 1 May 1954, 28. W.J. Ronald Tucker, ‘Six Weeks of Billy Graham,’ UCO, 1 June 1954, 32. Stanley H. Knowles, ‘The Church and the Nation,’ UCO, 1 June 1954, 28. Manly F. Miner, ‘Mass Evangelism is Back,’ UCO, 1 February 1958, 18; ‘What Happened to Canadian Methodism?’ UCO, 15 June 1956, 7. Part of the backlash against evangelism was that it became identified with British and Scottish evangelism, whereas the true Methodist tradition was seen to link evangelism and social Christianity. See for example, ‘Import Evangelists,’ UCO, 1 September 1957, 11. There was also a fear that the arrival of so many Scottish pastors was tilting the United Church towards Presbyterianism. ‘What Has the N.E.M. Accomplished?’ UCO, 1 March 1958, 23; ‘Evangelism in Our Time,’ UCO, 15 March, 1958; R.W. Armstrong, ‘I Went to the Jehovah Witness,’ UCO, 15 February 1960, 12. See for example, ‘On Unemployment,’ UCO, 15 March 1959; ‘Mission to the Nation: A Warning,’ UCO, 1 November 1956; ‘Abolish Capital Punishment,’ UCO, 15 April 1956, 7; ‘Annual Meeting of the Board of Evangelism and Social Service,’ UCO, 1 April 1958, 5, 15.

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36 Evelyn Ward, ‘What Billy Graham Can Mean,’ CC, 15 September 1955, 42. 37 ‘Bishop of Barking Opens Anglican Support for Graham,’ CC, 15 September 1955. 38 ‘What Did Billy Graham Do?,’ CC, 5 January 1955. 39 ‘Intensified Evangelism,’ CC, 19 January 1956. 40 Right Rev. K.C. Evans, ‘Evangelism,’ CC, 2 February 1956. 41 F.H. Eva Hasell, ‘The Year of Evangelism,’ CC, 7 February 1957, 62. 42 ‘Every Member an Evangelist,’ CC, 7 February 1957; Geoffrey Allen, ‘Catholic, Evangelical, and Liberal,’ CC, 16 January 1958, 34; Evelyn Ward, ‘This Year of Evangelism,’ CC, 21 March 1956, 100. 43 ‘Anglican Bishop and Evangelism,’ CC, 16 May 1957. 44 ‘Evangelism and Fundamentalism,’ CC, 21 March 1957, 123. 45 ‘Definition Provided for Evangelical,’ CC, 15 November 1964, 3. 46 Berton Papers, Berton to Most Rev. H.H. Clark, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, 12 February 1965. 47 Berton Papers, Ven. Cecil Swanton to Jean and Pierre, 7 January 1965. 48 Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at Christianity and the Religious Establishment in the New Age (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), 1965. 49 On the link between academic sociology and the notion of the public intellectual in the United States, see Neil McLaughlin, ‘Critical Theory Meets America: Riesman, Fromm and the Lonely Crowd,’ The American Sociologist (Spring 2001): 7; Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 146, 152, 185, 223–7; Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 144–5; Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–79 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 2. 50 Berton, The Comfortable Pew, 9. 51 David Paul Haney, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 19. 52 Elizabeth Kilbourn, ‘A Confession,’ in Kilbourn, ed., The Restless Church, 3. 53 On criticism of the masses and popular culture in the fifties, see David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 124. Berton would have seen himself akin to the ‘professional thinker’ who undertook the real work of social criticism outside the academy. 54 On the correlations between liberal sexual values and the avant-garde,

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69 70 71 72 73 74 75

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see Stuart D. Hobbs, The End of the American Avant Garde (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), 77. Byfield, Just Think, Mr. Berton, a Little Harder, 2. ‘Letterbasket,’ CC, March 1965. ‘Letterbasket,’ CC, April 1963, letter by John R.G. Ragg, Bethnal Green, England. John A.T. Robinson, Honest to God (London: SCM, 1963), 141. As quoted in Brown, Richard Hofstadter, 123. William Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 67. Quoted in Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 36. Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs, 86. For one of the best discussions of the work of the Lynds as a study of the typical rather than the deviant, see Sarah E. Iso, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). I thank Melanie Heath for drawing my attention to this splendid book. Stewart Crysdale, The Churches, Where the Action Is (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1966), epigraph, p. 1. Berton, The Comfortable Pew, 14, 19, 30. Ibid., 73; Vance Packard, The Status Seekers (London: Longmans, 1959), 41, 201; Whyte, The Organization Man, 3, 9, 45, 66. Berton, The Comfortable Pew, 74; Pierre Berton, The Big Sell (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963), 8. For a similar view of the clergy as a species of salesman, see G.W.B. Wheeler, ‘Church Should Learn from Advertising,’ which referred to the clergy as ‘hucksters for Christ,’ CC, July/ August 1964, 5. Berton, The Comfortable Pew, 29. See Casey Blake, ‘The Perils of Personality: Lewis Mumford and Politics after Liberalism,’ in T.P. Hughes and A.C. Hughes, eds., Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 300. Berton, The Comfortable Pew, 54, 39, 42. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 110. Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 6, 201. Berton, The Comfortable Pew, 103, 17. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 85. See T.W. Adorno et. al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York:

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Harper and Row, 1950), viii, ix–x. On postwar theories of mass society and the link between apathy and totalitarianism in the works of Adorno and Hannah Arendt, see David Paul Haney, The Americanization of Social Science 69. Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality, 218–19, 727–9, 742. It also appears that Berton’s views on foxhole religion were derived from his reading of Adorno. See Berton, The Comfortable Pew, 22; Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality, 736. This was the name of Vance Packard’s immensely popular 1957 critique of the politically numbing and conformist aspects of postwar affluence. See Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence, 15. Berton, The Comfortable Pew, 103. Whyte, The Organization Man, 36, 45. Berton, The Comfortable Pew, 143, 81; Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, 239–42; Haney, The Americanization of Social Science, 76. On Riesman and Whyte and their influence upon religious thinkers in the United States, see Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs, 90, 96. Berton, The Comfortable Pew, 134, 136–7. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 19 Ibid., 54 Ibid., 77. Adorno concluded that those who followed their mother’s religion were more submissive and ethnocentric. See Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality, 219–20. Much of Berton’s animosity towards women can be traced to the fact that it was the Qu’Appelle Anglican Women’s Auxiliary which was instrumental in having him fired from McLean’s magazine. See The Comfortable Pew, 56. Ibid., 74, 77. Ibid., 81, 77, 73. Arnold Edinborough, ‘The Minister and the Twentieth Century,’ in Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot, 16. On criticism of Edinborough on this point, see William Nicholls, ‘Religion,’ Saturday Night, April 1965, 34; Mrs Melville Buttars, Pickering, Ontario, ‘Ministers Are Sissy?’ Saturday Night, May 1965. It is significant that in the letters written to Berton in response to The Comfortable Pew, no one overtly criticized his portrayal of the clergy. Stewart Crysdale, ‘A Faith for Real Men,’ in Crysdale, Churches, Where the Action Is, 38–9. On the emergence of a particularly masculinist liberal discourse in postwar America, see K.A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York and London: Routledge, 2005).

350 92 93 94 95 96 97

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Nancy Christie Berton, The Comfortable Pew, 139. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 66, 139. Berton Papers, Box 266, Stella Halliday to Berton, 16 February 1965. Berton Papers, Box 266, R.J. Taber to Berton, 29 January 1965, Ross Murray to Berton, 25 January 1965. Berton Papers, Box 266, Vera Walsh to Berton, 31 January 1965; Hattie Stevenson, Vancouver, B.C., to Berton, 14 February 1965. No male correspondents criticized Berton’s sexual mores, and the only man to question his gender attitudes observed that religious institutions were neither male or female. See ibid., Albert Cohoe, Barrie, Ontario, to Berton, 17 February 1965. Berton Papers, Box 266, Effie Jones, Vancouver, to Berton, 25 January 1965. Berton Papers, Box 266, Ida Hallloway to Berton, 25 January 1965. Berton Papers, Box 266, David Friesen to Berton, 24 January 1965; R.J. Newstead to Berton, 15 February 1965. Berton Papers, Box 266, Mrs Doug Scott to Berton, 24 January 1965. Berton Papers, Box 266, Eileen Delaney to Berton, 25 January 1965; Hattie Stevenson to Berton, 14 February 1965; Alex Thompson to Berton, 29 January 1965; Mrs Lyle Chappel to Berton, 17 February 1965; Madelaine Vassalo to Berton, 4 February 1965. Berton Papers, Box 266, J.H. Fielding to Berton, n.d. March 1965; Ann Smith, ‘Mailbag,’ Maclean’s Magazine, 3 April 1965, who said people are beginning to ‘recognize the church doesn’t preach Christianity. It preaches religiosity.’ Berton Papers, Box 266, unsigned to Berton, n.d., 1965. Berton heatedly responded to Arnold Edinborough’s accusation that his book was half-baked by enumerating the recent works of American sociology. See Berton Papers, Berton to Edinborough, 28 January 1965. At other junctures, he was keen to portray himself as a mere controversialist and stated that his book was intended as just propaganda. See his aptly named ‘Dialogue with Myself,’ in Kilbourn, ed., The Restless Church, 177. Crysdale, The Changing Church in Canada, 6, 10.

14 A Different Path? National Catholicism, Laicization, and Dechristianization in Spain, 1939–1975 antonio cazorla-sanchez

The Situation in Numbers In November 2009, El País, Spain’s leading liberal newspaper, carried an article on the situation of parishes in the country.1 Change the name Spain to Quebec, and the similarities would be impressive, perhaps indistinguishable. The conservative head of the Spanish church, Antonio María Cardinal Rouco, the paper said, had just made a dramatic presentation to the Spanish Conference of Bishops (some liberal colleagues were conspicuously absent from the meeting) to confront ‘the religious, social and economic crisis’ that affects Spain, a country, Cardinal Rouco said, ‘affected by a ferocious laicism.’ The church’s own situation, in particular, is very serious. To start with, ten dioceses have no bishop. This is just a short-term problem, El País said, as conservative prelates are in the process of being nominated to fill the vacancies. Far worse and difficult to solve is the problem of the situation of parishes because ‘of the 23,286 existing in Spain, 10,615 have no resident priest.’ Moreover, this situation is expected to further deteriorate as the average age of the parish priest is 63.3 years old, and in some areas of the country, the average age rises to 72.02 years old.2 This means that while technically thousands of Spanish priests should be retired by now, in practice they still keep looking after their parishioners because nobody else will. In Asturias, where the population is widely dispersed in small villages in rural areas, and which in the past used to ‘export’ priests, three out of four parishes have no titular as 250 priests attend to 933 parishes.3 Regardless of the level and supposed ‘ferocity’ of Spanish laicism (by which the church means dechristianization), recent sociological studies

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coincide with many of Cardinal Rouco’s concerns. These studies reveal that, on one hand, Spain is a country in which lay values predominate. On the other hand, religion still plays an important role at least for a significant minority of people. This is supported by a February 2008 study conducted by the country’s official polling institute (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, CIS).4 According to the CIS report, just under 20 per cent of the population is actively and constantly engaged in religious activities, and 27.7 per cent of Spaniards consider themselves practising Catholics. This level of engagement is fairly consistent with the level of Mass attendance (4.7 per cent go to Mass more than once a week, 15.2 per cent once a week, 11.4 per cent once a month, 21.6 per cent once a year, and 46.7 per cent never). At the same time, the study reveals that religion is far from being most people’s ‘very important’ concern: only 19.1 per cent declare this to be the case. This number puts religion far below other ‘very important’ priorities declared by respondents, such as health and family (about 90 per cent of responses), or even friends (47 per cent); religion, in fact, is only ahead of politics (6 per cent). The secondary role of religion is again reinforced when 73 per cent of Spaniards declare that it does not play an important role in their decisions on crucial matters, while 25 per cent said the opposite.5 Furthermore, in 2009, for the first time the number of civil marriages in Spain surpassed those celebrated in a church. In sum, like many of its Western counterparts, early twentieth-firstcentury Spain appears to be a predominantly lay society, but the Catholic hierarchy, in both Spain and the Vatican, have several times spoken of an ongoing dechristianization of Spain. Is this a new or old situation? Have recent historical developments substantially affected the evolution of religious practices in Spain? In what way did the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) and the Franco dictatorship (1939–75) put Spain on a different political path from the rest of Western societies, at least until the restoration of democracy in 1977? To help the reader better understand both the question and the answer, some basic historical background follows. What a Different Postwar Spain May Mean to Religiosity and Laicization At the end of the Spanish Civil War all Spaniards, whatever their political ideas, witnessed the suffering of millions of people during the terrible period that lasted from 1939 to 1945 but which for many lasted much

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longer. Two sinister developments mark this period. First, Francisco Franco’s extremely harsh and ruthless political repression was practised against the vanquished republicans as hundreds of thousands of people were imprisoned. Some 50,000 of them were shot between 1939 and 1945, while hundreds of thousands suffered legal and extralegal persecution. Francoists claimed that it was a normal European government, just another Western Christian regime. But Franco’s repression far surpassed the repression of political enemies (fascists, collaborators, and so forth) that took place, for example, in Catholic France and Italy during and immediately after the liberation of those countries at the end of the Second World War. The total number of people killed in these two countries – which witnessed by far the most significant crimes of this nature in Western Europe between 1943 and 1946 – was about 25,000, roughly half the number of those executed in Spain. The second extraordinary aspect of Francoist policies was starvation. It has been estimated that between 1939 and 1945 – that is, after the Civil War had ended – perhaps 200,000 Spaniards starved to death. It is difficult to find a similar outcome to Franco’s Spain food policy elsewhere in Western Europe, or one that lasted as long, because Spain’s postwar economic crisis lasted well into the 1950s, and for poor Spaniards, much longer. For example, a study published by Catholic Action in 1953, based on data provided by the Seville Socio-Economic Council, concluded that after reviewing the growth of salaries for twentytwo different professions from 1936 to 1953, the purchasing power of agrarian workers’ wages had been cut in half. This implosion of living standards was particularly catastrophic for landless peasants, since it was estimated that up to 15 per cent of them were permanently unemployed. It is not surprising that, due to ‘deficient nutrition,’ the average productivity of a daily wage labourer in 1953 was 20 to 25 per cent lower than it had been during ‘the worst and most anarchic years of the Republic.’ The authors of the report did not forget to include among the causes of this productivity decrease ‘the lack of moral formation and concept of duty’ of these labourers. Could it be that the social and moral scandal of the human catastrophe among landless workers of Andalusia is somehow connected to the fact that in the earliest study ever made on popular Catholicism, in 1966, only 2.6 per cent of them attended Mass?6 Or was it just a mere continuation of the centuries-old ‘apostasy of the masses’ in southern Spain and several big cities with a strong working-class presence?7 The Spanish experience after the war was obviously very different

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from that in the rest of the West, where governments, businesses, and unions cooperated to enjoy and distribute in freedom the fruits of the economic boom which lasted well into the 1970s. This forces us to ask some key questions: How different was the role of the postwar Spanish church from elsewhere in the West? Did the close relationship between the Franco dictatorship and the church change the course towards a lay society in Spain that put the country on a different, lasting path from its Western counterparts? The answer is a qualified no, and this qualification refers mainly to a temporary divergence caused by politics more than to substantial diffrences in the longer term. In other words, while political events changed temporarily the evolution of Spanish society, eventually the social and cultural phenomenon that resulted in dechristianization in other Western societies reached Spain after Franco’s death in 1975 and with roughly similar consequences. The two long postwar decades (1940s and 1950s) in Spain were affected by both civil war and unfavourable socio-political circumstances of dictatorship, hunger, and economic backwardness. These factors affected the debates and shaped attitudes around Catholicism among the population, in particular the meaning of Catholic militancy and society’s perceptions of the church. However, as the country’s economy greatly improved in the 1960s, Spain entered a period of laicization which accelerated during the 1970s. By laicization we understand the separation between church and state, and the support for this process by a growing number of citizens. The watershed of these developments was the approval of the 1978 constitution that formally separated church and state in Spain. Given Spain’s peculiar political circumstances, this process of laicization happened at the same time as a process of dechristianization was set in motion in Spain more or less at the same time as in other Western countries. By dechristianization we understand the abandonment in both the private and public spheres of Christian values and customs. This double process was not much different than similar phenomena that occurred in Quebec or Italy. This has resulted in Spain’s being in a “normal” Western European situation today, as the data provided in the first paragraphs of this chapter show. In the following pages, we will see how Spain’s unique circumstances did not affect the fundamental commonalities of dechristianization that were occurring in the rest of the West, because the underlying social and cultural changes, as well as the timing, were very similar and closely related.

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Uncritical and Unrepentant Roberto Rossellini’s great 1945 film Rome, Open City ends with the tragic and heroic death of Father Pietro Pellegrini, executed by the Nazi-Fascists for helping the anti-Fascist resistance. People, the church, and the rebirth of a free, progressive Italy are pitted against the local Fascists and their German masters. Many things in this movie are fanciful, like the church’s purported anti-Fascism and love for freedom. Certainly this image does not fit the political values of Pius XII, a man who was distressed by the birth of a democratic Italy, or Italy’s Communist Party, which Rossellini’s (a Communist militant) film portrays. Pius XII was more comfortable with Franco’s Spain, a country where the church flourished and was protected by the state.8 However, the Spanish church, in spite of its privileged relationship with the Francoist New State, had a problem: the masses, or more precisely the lack of active militants. And it was a self-created problem. As Father Arboleya – a pre-war critic of the church’s lack of interest in social problems who was marginalized by his peers – had explained in La apostasía de las masas (The Apostasy of the Masses) in 1934, in the middle of the lay Second Republic, the Spanish church, by being too closely associated in the previous decades with the conservative state and with the socio-economic elites, had failed to materialize its own Social-Catholic theoretical credo into the effective creation of true mass organizations. Unlike the churches in France, Italy, Germany, Canada, or the United States, the Spanish church, up to the arrival of the democratic Republic in 1931, did not have to confront a hostile or neutral state and look for popular, genuine support. Catholics and Catholicism were an official, uncompromising majority. Lionized, generously financed by the state, and enjoying unparalleled privileges, the Spanish church did not seek to recruit Catholic militants and to create mass organizations, and when it did, the message and the style were almost inevitably patronizing, reactionary, and often elitist. This is, for example, what happened to the Spanish Catholic Action. The Marquis de Comillas, who had directed the organization from the last decades of the nineteenth century until his death in 1925, was also a shipping and mining tycoon closely associated with the royal dynasty. He and his followers made sure that social matters were approached by the organization with a charitable rather than militant approach.9 The result of the church’s failure to connect with modern social

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and politically independent mass movements was, in many parts of the country, popular indifference and hostility towards the Spanish church. Worse still, what Father Arboleya and most Spaniards could not imagine was the horrible consequences of these anti-Catholic feelings among the masses. The tragedy started when the first shots were fired at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936: during the conflict nearly 8,000 members of the clergy were assassinated.10 They were killed by republican militias and committees, mostly in the summer months of 1936, and their murders were often horrific. Many of these victims were later beatified in the last years of the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. However, it must be said that during and after the war, the church in general (with notable exceptions) failed to preach or to practise forgiveness, while many republican authorities condemned and stopped the repression carried out by their (republican) side. In the midst of the unfolding violence, among Franco’s supporters only the church could have spoken out against repression and murder, but it remained mostly silent. In sum, the church was both a victim and perpetrator of the war.11 During and after the war, the Catholic Church actively cooperated in the regime’s attempts to convince the people to support the dictatorship. Its main effort was originally focused on displaying its newly acquired power in very theatrical and public ways. During the war, after a town had been ‘liberated’ by rebel (Franco’s) troops, one of the church’s first public acts was to initiate a solemn procession through the main streets in order to praise God and to thank the local saint or patron for his intercession on their behalf. Similarly, postwar Spain was full of huge public Masses, pilgrimages, and political-religious demonstrations.12 However, both the church and Franco understood that the problem did not lie in attracting committed Catholics, but in reaching the people who refused to attend these public demonstrations or, if they did attend, had their minds and hearts elsewhere. Knowing that whole sectors of society had rejected Catholicism, at least Catholicism in its role as a powerful associate of the state, both the dictatorship and the church wanted to impose a religiosity whose main feature was a patronizing, demeaning attitude that dictated that the main obligation of ordinary people was to obey authority and believe that it was God who had sent Franco to save their country. This subservient ‘National Catholicism’ also became the main staple of Spain’s school system. But children were only part of the problem. More immediate, and difficult was the issue of the adults who had lived through dif-

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ferent times and had been exposed to different values. It was decided that they were to be brought back to the church through what became known as ‘missions.’ As soon as the numbers of clerics had recovered from the hecatomb of the civil war, and the first waves of new priests and monks from the seminaries were ready, the missions were sent to regions of Spain with low levels of Catholic obedience.13 This meant conquering most working-class areas of the country and the rural communities that had traditionally been indifferent or openly anti-clerical. These missions were planned well ahead of time and carefully orchestrated with the help of the government. Bars, cinemas, and other distractions were closed to the public for the day as local and out-of-town clerics, with the help of lay Catholic militants, organized processions, mass confessions, sermons, and other public forms of piety in the streets of their target town.14 The first wave of missions started in 1949 and lasted until 1953. The second wave started in 1958. Priests, monks, and Catholic activists worked hand in hand with the state, the official unions, and, in particular, the Ministry of the Interior. Missions pretended to be about morals and religion, but the organizers knew that they were also about politics. The patronizing, socially ultra-conservative approach from the pre-war years was now even more intense. For example, in 1961, well into the regime’s tenure (and the free West’s period of material and political splendour), a typical mission was held in the poor mining town of Puertollano (Ciudad Real). Several dozen priests and monks took part, having received careful instructions on how to proceed. They were told to concentrate their efforts neighbourhood by neighbourhood (a brief analysis of the socio-religious outlook of each neighborhood was provided), told what topics to address and what not to address (‘abstain from talking about social matters’ because this is a ‘workers’ town’), given a list of activities (‘in the morning rosary and mass’), and so on.15 Reconquest did not include reassessing the past. One of the outstanding characteristics of Spanish postwar official Catholicism was its lack of reflection on the complexities and root causes of the civil war and the social problems that resulted from Franco’s regime. Significantly, for the first twenty years following the war no true Catholic intellectual or thinker dared to challenge the authoritarian and triumphal discourses of the church hierarchy or of the dictatorship. During that time, Spanish Catholicism had nothing new to say to the world. The Catholic Church’s approach to social problems was harsh and callous, reduced,

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more often than not, to general comments on moral issues, while those who suffered most were routinely blamed for being the main cause of their own plight.16 During most of the dictatorship, the church’s moral message was not about justice, and of course it did not question dictatorial power. The messages from the pulpit were chiefly, if not only, about sex and gender relations, and their main subject was the group considered to be most at risk from potential breaches of morality: women, especially when engaged in such activities as sunbathing, swimming, or, even worse, dancing.17 At the same time, ordinary parish priests also helped to reshape Spanish morals, for example by providing government authorities with lists and addresses of people who failed to act in a proper manner, and acting together to marry, baptize, or give first communion to people living in sin. This cooperation between church and state in imposing orthodox Catholic behaviour had a significant social impact. It made people more conservative in their outward behaviour, and children, especially, attended Mass in larger numbers that their parents did, particularly in the traditionally pagan areas of the country: working-class neighbourhoods in big cities and the south-eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula.18 The Beginning of Change in the Church Like other Europeans during the 1950s and 1960s, Spaniards moved in the millions from countryside to city, and from farming to industry and the tertiary sector. It was a swift change, occurring in just two decades, but just as intense as the changes that took place in the United States between 1880 and 1940 and in Canada from 1900 to 1950.19 In the middle of this extraordinary phenomenon, the postwar church, attached as it was to outdated ritual and a dogmatic understanding of its function, was ill prepared to confront the new social and moral challenges posed by an increasingly urbanized society. It took the church more than two decades to start moving beyond an ultra-simplistic analysis and begin to address modernity. The new attitudes came from a new generation of younger, enlightened Catholic Action thinkers and militants who deemed it necessary to prepare men and women from the middle and upper classes for the new challenges society faced. The role of the modern woman, in particular, was being taken seriously by Catholic Action, which insisted on the need for women to be educated so that they could become worthy companions for their husbands and improve

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the quality of life of their families. In this process, the most strident sexist and misogynist aspects of the moral discourse were being dropped. In contrast to the postwar demand that women remain pious, passive, and simple, mere transmitters of their husband’s will, the new Catholic middle-class woman was expected to be an educated marriage partner. In this fashion, Catholic feminism reached Spain and not much later than it reached, for example, Canada. Debates about equality (or rather inequality) between men and women were of course not new in Spain and in many ways had been as advanced before the civil war as in Canada. A crucial text in this debate, Gina Lombroso’s The Soul of Woman, was published in Spain in 1926, more or less at the same time that it was published in English Canada. The Franco dictatorship, however, put Spanish Catholicism in a most obsolete and limited intellectual paradigm than its Western counterparts. However, this did not mean that the same ideas reached Spain later than in those countries. Another cardinal text of Catholic feminism, Gertrud Van Le Fort’s The Eternal Woman, appeared in Canada in the late 1940s, but the first Spanish edition was on the shelves in 1953.20 This type of reading introduced a number of international debates into Spain, where these utterly orthodox yet modernizing ideas were assumed by militant members of the Spanish Catholic Action and other Catholic institutions. A group which distinguished itself in educating women and advocating for a new Catholic womanhood was the Teresian Institute, which while offering a gender-separated education only for women, firmly advocated for their access to post-secondary education.21 The result is that by the late 1950s these people were reading, discussing, and popularizing a new, modern vision of Catholic family ideals which encouraged female education, or, if preferred, an early version of what we call today women’s empowerment. The theoretical debates became a daily reality, not only for the young women who went to university, but also for more conventional families. As a Catholic Action book for modern Catholic couples clearly expressed in the early 1960s, a wife’s new main functions went beyond the traditional roles of reproductive vessel and servant to her husband, lord, and God. The objectives of marriage were rearranged, and ‘mutual help and love’ between spouses now preceded reproduction as a priority, while taking care of the education of children, ‘the second aim of marriage,’ was not far behind.22 There was now a new demand for her to be more sexually active as well, even if ‘her desires do not match men’s rhythms.’23 Even if these opinions are a far cry from the

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recognition of women’s rights and freedoms as they are understood in post-feminist societies, it is obvious that the asexual, postwar Spanish wife and mother was being replaced by a more intelligent, moderately carnal, ‘modern’ woman. It was also evident that her right to personal fulfilment through education and, perhaps even more important, employment was no longer questioned among the educated Catholic middle class. The evolution of mainstream Catholic thought was not consistent, and this was particularly true on political matters. While the majority of Catholics remained politically conservative and supported the Franco dictatorship, other sectors moved towards open dissent. Small groups, particularly within the redoubtable HOAC (Hermandad Obrera de Acción Católica or Worker’s Catholic Action Brotherhood), the workers’ section of Catholic Action, crossed the line to join these groups in their criticism of the regime and its policies. Founded in 1946, HOAC and the juvenile branch of Catholic Action, the JOC (Juventud Obrera Católica), had, by the early 1950s, become platforms for effective political discourse and Catholic social analysis that served to counteract the regime’s political and ideological monopoly. The authorities harassed and detained their militants, and their publications were often banned. Many Catholics and subversives, particularly Communist trade unionists, were starting to collaborate. The new attitude among some progressive Catholics surprised not only the regime, but also many old left-wing militants. Already in the first strikes of the 1950s, these militants started to find, sometimes in the prison cell where they had been thrown by the police, young people associated with the Catholic HOAC. The meeting between left-wing Marxist militants and militant Catholics led to further changes in the old militancy’s pre–civil war political culture, with the gradual discarding of crude, left-wing, anticlerical, and anti-Catholic attitudes.24 At a more intellectual level, in the early 1960s some of the best minds of the church began to embrace ‘subversive’ ideologies and made it difficult at times to distinguish Catholic enterprises from the initiatives of illegal opposition groups. Significantly, this new approach to social Catholicism began even before the effects of the Second Vatican Council of 1962–5 had been felt. There was a paradox inherent in this because, as the economy improved and the regime appeared to be on more solid ground than ever, it became normal practice in some Catholic circles to discuss social problems, particularly the plight of workers, and to question the political role of the church. In 1964, for example,

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two priests who authored a book using the testimonies of their fellow clerics summed up these sentiments thus: ‘I am not ashamed to say that, like most of my generation, I was wrong when I believed that Spanish workers were little more than a bunch of savages, full of vice and hatred, lazy people who wanted to live without having to work.’ One of these priests, who lived among the working poor and proselytized in the politically troubled Asturias region for fifteen years, explained (or rather ‘revealed’) to the more conservative Catholic elements that miners worked extremely hard and that their complaints were rooted in having been abandoned by their social betters and by the church.25 Laicization and Dechristianization Self-criticism was certainly new, and it helped initiate a venue for more open discussion of the direction of the church. It also created a level of disenchantment that fuelled the crisis of religious vocations that shook the Spanish Catholic Church in the late 1960s and, more acutely, in the 1970s.26 The figure of the worker priest played a fundamental role in this process of rebuilding civil society under Francoism (or, rather, against Francoism), but also in the religious crisis that was to shake the church. This new priestly role had been initiated in France and Belgium in the late 1940s, and its aim was the evangelization of the working masses by priests, who became workers themselves and lived among proletarians. While the success of the church in converting non-practising workers into good Catholics was limited at best, many priests became worker militants in the process, joined the opposition, and quite often became laicized. This was the case of a young Jesuit priest named Luis Anoro. The Company of Jesus had traditionally been seen by militant workers as an ally of the rich and powerful, and as an enemy of freedom. The Jesuits, however, who had been working all over the world, witnessing injustices and corrupt political regimes, underwent a change in the 1960s. That change also reached Spain. In 1968, Luis and many of his colleagues began to move to working-class neighbourhoods and to work in factories to be closer to the experiences of ordinary people. Luis went to live in Saragossa and found a job working for a company that employed 150 men. Middle-class by origin, he learned about workers’ lives and their values while toiling in the factory. He used his education to organize his new co-workers and helped to create the factory union committee; he then took a leading role in more than one labour conflict. Eventually he was fired. Over the next few months he was fired

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twice more from other jobs, partly because the police kept informing his new employers of his history as a troublemaker. Many years later, Luis recounted what he had learned from his experiences as a worker-priest: the reality of physical exhaustion, the meaning of real hardship, the importance of rest and enjoying life, the consequences of doing rather than talking, and the significance of closeness and cooperation among workers. Luis found that he had broken with his past, and he clearly stated that he had found out more about Jesus.27 The experience of Luis Anoro, the Jesuit worker-priest, is emblematic of the global crisis in the Catholic Church in the 1960s – experienced from Spain to the province of Quebec in Canada – a crisis that saw the traditional roles of the priesthood and the sisterhood evolving in new directions. Some were searching for a purer, simpler spirituality, while others, demanding social reforms, demonstrated an increased concern for the poor. A massive decline in the number of people working in religious vocations was reflected in the significantly lower number of young men entering seminaries and in the laicization, and often marriage, of priests. It is striking how many of those priests’ personal itineraries reflect the process and even the timing of the end of the traditional small peasantry of Spain and the transition, both physical and mental, from an agrarian to an urban society. What was new now, and what led many of these young men to abandon the priesthood in order to engage in other activities, was the opening up of intellectual horizons and the new sociocultural expectations developing in the country. This meant, among other things, an affirmation of individuality. It also led to a new theological message asking priests to be engaged in transforming and bettering the material world rather than only preparing souls for the next life. These new horizons and expectations were very similar to those the laity was experiencing in Spain at the same time: a growing affirmation of the desires of the individual coupled with a growing concern about, and urge to identify and act upon, the country’s social and political problems. The new values changed the face and the numbers of Spanish Catholicism quickly and dramatically: 3,000 priests left the ministry between the late 1960s and early 1980s.28 The annual average number of priests leaving between 1966 and 1971 was 400.29 Seminaries also experienced a massive decline of pupils. In 1960, for example, there were 8,021 young men enrolled in seminars; in 1969, after a gentle decline, the figure was 6,605. Suddenly the numbers plummeted: 1970: 4,978; 1973: 2,791; 1976: 1,613. Religious orders also lost a quarter of their

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members between 1969 and 1977: from 24,346 to 18,299. The number of nuns, however, remained fairly stable. Clearly it was the youth who were abandoning the church. In 1968, 53 per cent of those aged 15–25 went to mass every Sunday, while in 1975 only 25.3 per cent attended. The postwar battle waged jointly by the church and the Francoist state to convert the children of the non-practising Spaniards, including the children of the often anti-clerical ‘reds’ or republicans, a battle which had made some progress in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, was now lost. Furthermore, the old division between Catholic and pagan Spain had again become evident. In 1975, the year that Franco died, areas such as the Basque country, Navarre, and northern Castile, were still mostly Catholic, and attendance at Sunday Mass was well over 60 to 70 per cent of the population. But the traditional pagan regions of the country had turned their back on the church, with Sunday Mass attendances well below 30 per cent in Extremadura, Andalusia, Canary Islands, and Catalonia, and below 20 per cent in Southern (New) Castile.30 Overall, Mass attendance had experienced a significant decline in the early 1970s. Sunday Mass attendance in Spain in 1975 was close to 35 per cent. This was only slightly higher than in other Catholic countries such as Holland (31 per cent) or Italy (29 per cent), but still more than in other countries that had experienced a more marked decline in the previous years such as France or mostly Anglican England.31 While Spain’s Catholicism changed forever in the early 1970s, the break between the Francoist regime and the Spanish Catholic Church never fully happened. Until the very end of the dictatorship, the Catholic Church failed to condemn the regime or to fully revise its political position, or even express regret over its role in the tragic events and shameful social policies of the past, even if a significant number of bishops (many of them appointed by Paul VI), clergy, and the laity were by then fully opposed to the dictatorship.32 The bulk of Catholics within the institutions of the church still framed their condemnation of injustice within the boundaries of ‘constructive’ criticism and support for the dictatorship.33 In the previous years Catholicism had changed, as had Spanish society; but all these changes found the church disconcerted and lacking a clear direction. The result was that the church and millions of practising Catholics faced the death of Franco in 1975 and the arrival of democracy in 1977 in a confused and disoriented state, probably more than the rest of Spanish society Politics aside, it is clear that by the end of the Francoist dictatorship Spain had entered the same dynamic of laicization first, soon followed

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by dechristianization, at most only a few years later than other Western countries. The process, as we saw in the initial paragraphs of this chapter, continues today.34 The conclusion is that the common effects of social and cultural change, associated with urbanization, higher educational standards, and the logic of (a late) separation between church and state have eventually proven to be more powerful than the temporary effects of particular political differences. In the long term, the National-Catholic Francoist regime did not change the eventual outcome of Spanish society, which, like many other Western societies, drifted away from Christianity.

NOTES Some segments of this article have been published in Antonio CazorlaSanchez, Fear and Progress: Ordinary Lives in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1975 (Oxford, 2009). I am grateful to Blackwell-Wiley for allowing me to reproduce here some of this book’s content. 1 ‘Casi la mitad de las parroquias carece de cura,’ El País, 24 November 2009, digital edition. 2 Ibid. 3 ‘La iglesia asturiana solo cuenta con un sacerdote por cada cuatro parroquias,’ La Voz de Asturias, 30 November 2009, digital edition. 4 http://www.cis.es/cis/opencm/ES/1_encuestas/estudios/ver. jsp?estudio=9200. 5 For an overview of the connection between politics and social policies, see Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, Fear and Progress: Ordinary Lives in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1975 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 1–94. 6 José Andrés Gallego, La época de Franco (Madrid: Rialp, 1992), 250–1. 7 For the historical meaning of the word in the context of Spanish politics see Maximiliano Arboleya Martínez, La apostasía de las masas (Barcelona: Salvatella, 1934). 8 William J. Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1998 (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America, 2000), 381–411. 9 For a brief biography, see Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, ‘Claudio López Bru,’ in Roy P. Domenico and Mark Y. Hanley, eds., Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Politics (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood, 2006), 2: 340–1. 10 Julio de la Cueva Merino, ‘Religious Persecution, Anticlerical Tradition, and Revolution,’ Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 3 (1998): 355–69.

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11 A study critical of the church’s role under Francoism is Julián Casanova, La Iglesia de Franco (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2001). 12 Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 462–99. 13 In 1925 there were 34,153 secular priests and 11,436 regular male regular clergy in Spain; in 1945 there were 29,234 and 9,632 respectively. In 1961 the numbers had recovered from the war in the case of priests but not for the regular clergy: 33,351 and 20,873, respectively. José Maria Vázquez, Realidades socio-religiosas de España (Madrid: Editora Nacional 1967), 71. 14 1958. Delegación Nacional de Sindicatos. Lista de los pueblos mineroindustriales y ganaderos misionados por la Asesoría Eclesiástica Nacional. AG-P 150. 15 Archivo General de la Administración [AGA] – Sindicatos 4358. Misión General de Puertollano. Folleto informativo dirigido a los Padres Misioneros por el P. Villalobos, Director de la Misión, 1961 16 For example, in the famine-stricken Spain of 1943, Catholic Action in Saragossa organized a conference on charity. A priest there presented a paper explaining his experiences with miners in Asturias before the war. He said he had observed there that the miners enjoyed huge salaries and had no real reason to complain, but that they became revolutionaries because ‘they lacked morality.’ He added that, while their wives and children cried from hunger at home, the miners would complete their shifts and immediately rent taxis to take them to the cities of Oviedo and Gijón, where they stayed at the best hotels and ordered champagne. When asked which champagne, they said ‘the best you have,’ and when asked if they wanted just one bottle, ‘no’ – they replied – ‘two cases.’ Having described the miners sipping French champagne, the good priest then asked the public: ‘What does it matter, gentlemen, a new distribution of wealth, while consciences remain deformed? The solution to economic problems is, before anything else, the solution to moral problems and this is only possible in the name of God and through Christian religious education.’ ‘Very well,’ the public unanimously assented. Acción Católica, Jornadas de Caridad (Zaragoza: Acción Católica, 1943), 60–1. 17 Carlos Salicrú Puigvert, Cuestiones candentes acerca de la moralidad pública (Barcelona: La Hormiga de Oro, 1944). 18 Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 466–99. 19 José Ramón Montero, ‘Iglesia, secularización y comportamiento político en España,’ Reis 34 (1986): 131–59. 20 A study of these two books’ content is Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 179–80, 208–9.

366 Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez 21 Aurora G. Morcillo, True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 70–6, 130–40. 22 Esperanza Luca de Tena, Educación de hijos (Madrid: Acción Católica, 1961), 5–7. 23 Esperanza Luca de Tena, Deberes conyugales (Madrid: Acción Católica 1961), 9–11. 24 Basilia López García, Aproximación a la historia de la HOAC (Madrid: Acción Católica, 1995). 25 Savador Blanco Piñán, Los obreros, ¿son culpables? (Madrid: ZYX, 1964), 10–19. 26 Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 509–26. 27 Taken from a collection of testimonies by worker priests in Angel Castro y Margarita Serrano, La gran desbandada (curas secularlizados) (Madrid: Cuadernos para el Diálogo, 1977). 28 Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 613–14. 29 See Víctor Pérez-Díaz, The Return of Civil Society: The Emergence of Democratic Spain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 161–83. 30 Jesús Domínguez Rojas, ‘La Iglesia española en cifras. Análisis de los datos estadísticos (1960–1980),’ Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 10 (2001): 31–55. 31 Gallego, La época de Franco, 250–1. 32 For an account by an opposition-leaning bishop of the church’s internal divisions and its relationship with the dying Francoist regime, see Alberto Iniesta, Recuerdos de la transición (Madrid: PPC, 2002). 33 AGA-Cultura 560. Ministerio de Información y Turismo. Reservado. Radiografía urgente del Episcopado español actual, 1973. 34 José Orlandis, ‘Consideraciones sobre la evolución estadística de la Iglesia en el último cuarto de siglo,’ Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 12 (2003): 181–97.

15 Dechristianization and the Changing Religious Landscape in Europe and North America since 1950: Comparative, Transatlantic, and Global Perspectives patrick pasture

Introduction When one speaks about dechristianization since the 1960s, one inevitably tends to think about Europe. On a global level, Christianity is in fact the fastest-growing religion, while in the United States the social significance of Christianity also appears to have increased.1 However, to appreciate the importance of the changes that have happened since the Second World War, one should not only look at Christianity but include the whole religious spectrum. Moreover, it becomes less and less possible to assess major social and cultural changes either in Europe or North America without taking into account global developments. The ‘revolution of the sixties’ certainly offers a case in point. Hence I will adopt a transatlantic perspective in order to encompass both Europe and North America (in practice though, Europe will be largely restricted to Western Europe, and North America to the United States), keeping in mind developments on a global scale. Globalization, with regard to religion, often refers to the worldwide expansion of religions. That is, however, only part of it. Globalization also includes the (increasingly immediate) exchange of information, the appropriation and hybridization of globalized commodities, and the creation of interacting networks across the globe, which seem to be disconnected territorially from a country or place of origin today.2 It has become much easier to move from one centre to another, though this does not necessarily prevent the different centres from developing a local connection as well: globalization in the contemporary ‘postmodern’ world − in contrast to modern globalization − does not necessarily imply an evolution towards uniformity.3 This new ‘postmodern’ form

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of globalization is largely the result of technological changes, made possible by radio, (satellite) television − which projects images from far away into one’s living room − and especially the internet, which in some ways at least annihilates distance. Hence, the pop songs and calls for revolution in the 1960s could be heard almost simultaneously in San Francisco, Berlin, and Melbourne. Globalization affected religion in several ways, for example, by breaking up relatively closed worlds and thus provoking sometimes dramatic changes in ‘established’ religious lifestyles, and also by creating numerous new ways of reaching out, of connecting, and of imagining spirituality.4 If we take a closer look at the transatlantic connections in the postwar period, we cannot escape the huge impact the United States had on Western European politics, economics, and culture. Albeit not without tension, the Cold War created a transatlantic political, economic, and sociocultural community.5 But there appears to be one domain in which the American influence seems rather limited, and that is religion: American attempts to ‘evangelize’ Europe largely fell on barren ground. Europe has secularized since at least the 1950s, while the United States remained a deeply religious country in which the impact of religion increased rather than diminished. Social scientists working within the secularization paradigm have tried to reason away this basic dichotomy, arguing that figures of religious participation in the United States are overestimated (which indeed they are), that the religious beliefs of Americans are weak (we will argue something similar), and that what unites Americans is civil religion, either a Durkheimian celebration of American society, or of the self, which is, indeed, surely the case.6 But the difference between the United States and large parts of Europe (southern Europe, Ireland, and Poland are major exceptions) is so obvious to see when leaving the main American university campuses that it is reasonably impossible to ignore. Even if there exist important regional and social differences in the United States as well and the reported figures are inflated, there is little doubt that, overall, Americans participate in religious activities much more than Europeans. Moreover, notwithstanding the separation between state and religion, in the United States God is invoked on virtually all public occasions and publicly attesting atheism is not a viable option for politicians. Perhaps the most revealing thing is that Americans believe that is how things should be − in blatant contrast to most Europeans, especially leading intellectuals and politicians (including Christian democrats), who have today become convinced that ideally religion should be something strictly personal

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and in no way should interfere directly with public life. As the authors of one of the few systematic comparative assessments conclude, ‘in the US religion is seen as a resource (the means by which to resolve secular as well as religious dilemmas); in Europe it is part of the problem.’7 While this volume avoids the contested concept of secularization,8 the term dechristianization raises its own problems. Hence I will refer to the following developments. First is the reduced impact of Christian denominations or churches on society: on social and political organization, as well as on the life of the faithful, as is expressed for example in participation in church rituals and compliance with moral prescripts (as such, the term is quasi identical to most definitions of secularization, albeit explicitly restricted to Christianity and hence at least leaving open what has happened to other religious expressions). Second, the term refers to the evaporation of discursive Christianity (i.e., the pervasion of Christian ‘protocols’ constituting a Christian identity in society, and identifiable and intelligible as such).9 Third, and closely related, is the diminishing, even dying out of belief in key concepts of Christian faith. Sociologists of religion consider the latter as signs of secularization,10 while Yale literary critic Harold Bloom maintains that the United States has become a ‘post-Christian nation,’ as the beliefs and the way religion is practised can no longer be considered Christian in any traditional sense, but Gnostic.11 But what to do if we conclude that belief in key concepts of Christian faith have been abandoned, but organizations and the faithful still consider themselves ‘Christian’?12 That problem arises particularly with regard to some new religious movements that present Afro- or Asian-American hybridizations, such as Santeria or even the Unification Church, but the problem is bigger than that. Historians tend to dismiss such statements as ignoring the historicity and subjective nature of such claims, but I am afraid that the question cannot be set aside that easily. The following assessment is partly inspired by grid-group cultural theory (GG-CT), which creates a framework for comparing cultures by investigating human relations and the interaction between social structures. Cultures, societies, organizations, or individuals are situated on a vertical and on a horizontal axis: referring to grid – that is, the way people relate to each other through a ‘vertical’ structure or hierarchy – and to group, emphasizing the boundaries and interaction between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders.’ GG-CT was originally designed for comparing cultures, but by analysing the changes in their position on both axes we can also use it for assessing changes over time, to identify deeper chro-

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nologies and dynamics. Moreover, as the theory presupposes interconnectivity (implying that everything has an effect on everything else), GG-CT may help in recognizing unexpected connections and pointing out easily overlooked dimensions. Culture-free, it avoids the linearity, normativity, and Eurocentrism of most other theories, especially if they contain an interpretation of ‘modernity’ (even in the case of the ‘multiple modernities’ paradigm).13 European Dechristianization Narrated in GG-CT Terms Social scientists have mainly interpreted the transformation of the religious landscape in the 1960s, foremost in Europe but also in the United States, as secularization, a concept deeply rooted in European cultural and philosophical history. Its particular history explains why Europe became perceived as the norm.14 Europe, it must be admitted, has experienced a most dramatic development since the 1950s that corresponds quite obviously with the expectations of secularization theory. However, that is not quite the case elsewhere, and even in Europe secularization as a heuristic tool fails to identify some major developments in the evolution of the overall religious landscape. Following the GG-CT scheme, both the United States and Europe were characterized by a decline of highly (Europe) or relatively (the United States) structured human relations and hierarchy on the one hand, and a diminishing social cohesion on the other, leading to a situation of collective liminality in which the individual becomes free from ‘traditional’ social constraints and must redefine himself.15 This process is often described as individualization, which is correct insofar as one does not interpret it as implying an evolution towards more rational and conscious behaviour, which is not necessarily the case. Even if one may observe a desire for self-consciousness and self-development, behaviour is of course still largely collective, albeit oriented towards ever-changing peers rather than established traditions. What GG-CT reveals the most with regard to religious changes in the postwar period is the importance of the blurring of the traditional denominational distinctions, even between religious and secular movements − in GG/CT-terms an expression of evaporating group consciousness. First, the differences between the church and denominations decreased, leading on the one hand to an ecumenical rapprochement and, on the other, to the creation of new alignments. The formal ecumenism is just one, and, in my view, only minor, feature of it. The

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rapprochement in outlook and even theology between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism for example goes much further as it comes to the fore in the predilection for the Word of God and the Bible among Catholics, in the more austere rituals, in the architecture and style that the Catholic Church introduced in the wake of the Vatican Council, and in the popularity of the concept of ‘God’s people’ (Hans Küng) among Protestants. It led to a general ‘de-confessionalization,’ a loosening up of the impact of confessional differences, and thus the end of the ‘second confessional age.’16 Even more relevant for the deep social transformation that was happening, however, is the increasing parallelism in world views, discourses, practices, and even public appearances between churches and denominational, even secular movements. The churches took on social issues which aligned them to secular movements, particularly socialist ones, which had at one time been their mortal enemy. Hence socialists and Christians found themselves shoulder to shoulder, if not hand in hand: in the Netherlands for example, socialist and Catholic trade unions joined forces, while the Catholic and Protestant parties also merged. And it was conservatives and employers who also crossed boundaries and actually proved more effective in this kind of operation than advocates of ‘progressive’ alliances, even if these dominated the media.17 The diminishing group consciousness also underpins one of the main dimensions of the religious transformation of mainline churches: the end of the missionary ideal. In the wake of the decolonization process, the mainstream churches abandoned their ideal of conversion, disdainfully called ‘saving souls.’ Missions became seen as a form of imperialism. Hence the stream of devoted missionaries dried up,18 while also no attempt was made to Christianize the millions of migrants who wandered into European society − less than a decade before, Christian missionaries still swarmed out en masse to convert the ‘pagan’ Africans and Asians. These evaporating distinctions provoked a crisis of transcendentalism. While traditional religiosity, certainly in Europe, emphasized the transcendental nature of God, in the United States since the 1960s and Europe since the 1980s God has been situated far more in either the surrounding nature, or in oneself - in other words the sacred has become immanent, even in traditional Catholic countries. This comes to the fore most clearly in New Age movements, to which I return below, but the changed perception of the sacred affects most, if not all, churches and denominations, including Catholicism.19

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While the blurring of boundaries may be the most fundamental feature of the change in the religious landscape, also notable was the questioning of authority and hierarchy in the 1960s.20 When speaking about a crisis of hierarchy with regard to religion, inevitably the moral crisis comes to mind, as many Christians massively ignored and rejected Christian moral prescripts, particularly with regard to premarital sex and birth regulation, epitomized in the Catholic reaction towards the papal encyclical Humanae vitae in 1968. In a broader perspective, most forms of deinstitutionalization can be regarded as expressions of this development as well. The number of vocations declined among men as well as among women,21 clerics lost their sacrosanct status, and many threw off the cowl. This de-clericalization expresses itself also in the ‘democratization’ of the churches, in Catholicism’s offering local episcopacies a greater voice in the church and recognizing the role of the laity. It became particularly visible symbolically in the dress of clergy, who in many countries − not everywhere though and not always to the same extent − abandoned the traditional cassock and the clerical collar. Also God, incidentally, was presented not as the mighty other, but as a close friend, with whom one could communicate anywhere and at any time. The decline of religious participation, or ‘unchurching,’ however, is no doubt the most visible feature of the institutional crisis. Church affiliations in Protestant and pluralistic countries have shown a downward trend and an increase in disaffiliation since the 1950s. Also, participation, which, especially for the Catholic Church, became the key indicator of Christian life in the nineteenth century, has declined almost everywhere since the 1950s and early 1960s, notwithstanding considerable variations in participation levels between different countries and the partial exception of participation in rites of passage. To what extent the decline since the sixties constitutes an acceleration of a long-term trend remains difficult to assert. Callum Brown, with regard to Britain, pointed in particular at the declining attendance of young women, but the data of other countries, as far as they give gender-segregated figures, are not unequivocally conclusive.22 Sociologists have developed tools to measure belief and argued that knowledge of key elements of the Christian faith evaporated, to be replaced by vague, general beliefs without much consistency, a mixture of concepts and ideas picked up from a variety of contexts.23 Particularly in the Scandinavian countries, where church attendance had already been quite low since the nineteenth century, such changes became a sign of secularization or, rather,

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dechristianization.24 For reasons mentioned earlier, such qualifications remain dubious. It is better in this case to speak of an orientation towards more immanent forms of faith, a ‘de-transcendentalization.’ A Spiritual Revolution in the United States Though the overall impression is one of difference, mainline denominations in the United States to some extent actually followed a similar course as in Europe.25 The increased interregional migration, as well as the demographic growth of Catholicism in particular, increased the opportunities of contact with people of different denominations, while the spectacular democratization of higher education undermined the belief in the uniqueness of the mainline denominations. This resulted on the one hand in increased interaction and mixing, while on the other in a diminishing appeal of these denominations.26 Increasingly, affiliation and participation dropped somewhere after 1960. Moreover, as in Europe, the mainline denominations emphasized ecumenism and gave up their missionary ambitions. Evangelicals in contrast, incidentally also those in Europe, did not question their emphasis on conversion and mission but opted for a more inclusive stance, opening their ranks widely.27 The enthusiastic endorsement of ecumenism is only one of the major changes in religious understanding. Out of the movement for black civil liberties arose a strong liberal religious movement that aimed at social progress and political justice. At the same time, but less noticeable to the general public as the media at the time focused on liberal Christians, a realignment took place among fundamentalists. Turning their back on the obscurantism and fragmentation of pre-war fundamentalism, they reorganized and joined forces with other ‘conservatives’ − the evangelical version of ecumenism − and engaged with the world. Growing quietly in the 1950s, fundementalists, religious conservatives, and evangelicals inventively created, against the intellectual establishment, an effective apparatus to mobilize against the ‘pull to the Left’ and the ethical liberation of the 1960s. By the end of the decade, evangelicals dominated the religious backdrop. They played a major role in the transformation of the Christian landscape in which the denominational boundaries evaporated, giving way to an opposition between conservatives and liberals, who would go on to fight a series of ‘culture wars’ that have continued to divide the United States up to the present day.28 Still, the boundaries of the opposing camps were all

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but fixed: by 1970, for example, with the election of born-again Christian Jimmy Carter, evangelicals could no longer exclusively be associated with Republican conservatism. In the ‘Reagan years’ religious conservatives would again begin to gain the upper hand when they succeeded in organizing the ‘moral majority,’ as they did under George W. Bush in the 1990s, when they forged a powerful alliance between different conservative groups.29 The classic dichotomy between evangelical and liberal ‘mainline’ denominations − increasingly perceived as ‘oldline’ − does not cover the whole spectrum of Christian denominations in America.30 According to D.G. Hart, a major strand in American Christianity consists of confessional Protestantism, which stresses otherworldliness and the importance of liturgy and rituals. It had a hard time throughout the twentieth century, especially so since the 1960s, even if its association with ethnic groups has protected it somewhat.31 Furthermore, some major nineteenth-century denominations gradually came to the fore that could not be associated with any of the main ‘camps,’ such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Scientology. In contrast to liberal and confessional denominations, but similar to evangelicals, they continued to expand, investing massively in mission. Moreover, from within the increasingly broad evangelist womb, several religious movements developed that progressively coloured American religious life. Harking back to existing Pentecostal and Holiness traditions, they had in common the emphasis on the belief in the Bible as the word of God and in the power of the Holy Spirit, in healing, and in speaking in tongues. This charismatic renewal affected virtually all denominations, including Lutheranism and Catholicism. Pulling down the walls between denominations, but also redrawing the boundaries between the sacred and the secular and persuasively entering the domain of science, psychotherapy, and medicine, Charismatic Christianity redefined religion even more as a good that was to be ‘purchased’ and consumed.32 When scholars speak of a ‘spiritual awakening’ in America in the 1960s, they only partly refer to the charismatic renewal, but perhaps focus more on the ‘re-enchantment’ that characterized the counterculture. In this spiritual counterculture, forms of ‘secular enchantment’ (Michael Saler), spiritualities, and religions coexisted or (partially) merged, united in a refusal of both institutionalized religion and ‘materialism.’ Evangelicals and charismatics to some extent did join this movement – at least the Jesus People did - in the 1970s, but then they

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rather constituted a ‘counterculture within the counterculture.’ Initially the hippies preferred to search for a different spirituality outside the established denominations. They found it in a variety of places, among others in American Indian traditions, in Western pagan and esoteric practices, including Rosicrucianism, Wicca, theosophy, and anthroposophy, which gave way to numerous new spiritual and spiritualist movements (e.g., the Church of Satan), and also in the new technology and imagination that these generated (such as UFO cults), but above all in South, South-east, and East Asia.33 Asian religions and spiritualities caught the wind in their sails partly as a result of the increased migration from Asia after 1965 − the opening of borders also brought many gurus to America − as well as from an increased ‘demand.’ This demand came largely from the Beats and hippies, but also from those who looked for new physical exercises and alternative psychotherapies aimed at healthier and stronger bodies and minds.34 Asian religions and spiritualities first appeared in the United States in the nineteenth century. The Vedanta Society of New York, for example, was established by Vivekananda in 1896.35 New Hindu-inspired movements were created in the 1960s, such as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in 1965.36 But much Asian spirituality was not perceived as religion in a Western sense. Transcendental meditation (TM), a meditation technique derived from Vedic traditions which had been introduced in India in 1955 and was popularized by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the following years, was never presented as a religion − the Maharishi spoke of ‘a way to god’ − and in the 1970s became completely detached from its Hindu origins. It was (deliberately) introduced as a meditation technique with beneficial effects for mental and physical well-being but never requiring total involvement. Yoga likewise became immensely popular because it claims to offer aid to physical and psychological well-being, self-development, and deeper insight, at most a way of life but nothing more.37 ISKCON and TM became associated with the hippie movement, but neither – like the founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship, Yogananda, before them in the 1930s – emphasized its Hindu origins. Though their involvement went beyond mere curiosity, none of the famous pop artists, actors, or writers who raved over the Maharishi or chanted the Hare Krishna fully ‘converted’ to some form of Hinduism. Still, the interaction and exchange that occurred between such different cultures − which not only affected Westerners but also (and probably far more) the Asian religious scene − remain most remarkable. The founder and prophetic

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leader of one of the typical ‘new’ Asian American fusion religious movements, the Satya Sai Baba movement, never even set foot in the United States.38 The story of Buddhism shows many similarities. It also already had a long history in the United States. The Beat poets in the 1950s and the counterculturalists of the 1960s felt particularly attracted by the individualism, emphasis on intuition, and spontaneity associated with Zen Buddhism as presented by Dr D.T. Suzuki. There also developed a more practice-oriented and disciplined form of Zen Buddhism that would particularly influence the Zen-therapeutic culture in the following decades. In the later 1960s, Theravada Buddhism was promoted by Buddhist monks mainly from Burma, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, who not only set up meditation centres in the United States, but strongly appealed to Americans to travel to Asia. This resulted in the creation of the Buddhist Insight Meditation Center (IMS) by white native-born Americans (Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg) in the mid-1970s. The generation of the 1970s and 80s also fell under the spell of Tibetan Buddhism.39 But as was the case with Hinduism, it was the therapeutic aspects of Buddhism that may have finally had the most significance for Americans.40 The interest in Asian religions and spirituality illustrates the search for an alternative Weltanschauung, but it should be noted that the forms that made headway in the West were the ones that were most strongly ‘modernized’ as a result of the ‘imperial encounter’ (Peter Van der Veer) in the nineteenth century.41 They actually showed remarkable parallels with Christianity, emphasizing their ‘lettered’ character and downplaying at least some possible alienating elements. Moreover, in the United States they were practised in a very ‘American’ way: strongly focused on physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being, equality, and conformity with scientific approaches; well organized and publicized; and consequently operating very effectively in a highly competitive ‘spiritual market.’ Incidentally, this should not obliterate the notion that the success of Asian religions and spiritualities in the West, and particularly in the forms it had, was to a large extent the result of an active Asian mission: it was Asian gurus and masters who formulated a spiritual message tailored to the West and who sent out ‘missionaries,’ deliberately using Western converts in that perspective.42 Zen Buddhism and some Hindu practices corroborated with the American emphasis on physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being that was also a feature of the charismatic renewal among Christians.

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Such an attitude also characterizes another of the major new American religious renewals of the twentieth century, Scientology, which grew out of L. Ron Hubbard’s ‘psycho-therapeutic’ self-help system Dianetics.43 Hence, Scientology almost epitomizes the American approach towards religion, including its commercialized policies of dissemination − also a feature that other new religious movements, including those coming from the East, adopted. In addition, one may observe that not all religious renewals originating in Asia were part of the hippie counterculture. That surely was the case with the Unification Church, a very particular case of a new religious movement originating in the East − in South Korea − but which illustrated the American influence on how to conceive of religion in the East, an issue we return to in the next section.44 Not Quite That Different After All Our first overview of religious developments in the United States and in Europe in the 1960s emphasizes difference. Did the religious renewal of the 1960s remain limited to the United States, which is the impression one gets from the literature? The answer should be a definite no. In Europe the counterculture of the 1960s also included a spiritual dimension.45 In fact the opposite would have been most surprising, as the counterculture was in many ways a profoundly transnational, even truly global movement. Remarkably though, until very recently, this spiritual dimension was hardly mentioned except in studies on the origins of the New Age.46 Notorious is Arthur Marwick’s magnum opus on the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which largely ignores spirituality and religion.47 Likewise, even though one of the leaders of the famous Provos promoted Amsterdam as the ‘magical center of the world,’ the historiography on the 1960s counterculture in the Netherlands completely overlooks its spiritual dimension.48 If one concentrates on the general features, allowing for considerable regional variation within the continent (which existed within the United States as well), this spiritual counterculture was basically similar to the American scene. Perhaps even more than in the United States it could build upon existing traditions. Modern paganism (including Wicca) indeed developed earlier in Britain than in the United States.49 The European counterculture also benefited from a long tradition of spiritual movements such as theosophy, anthroposophy, and Krishnamurti, and of direct colonial contacts with Asia. Some Asian reli-

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gious movements developed only in Europe in the 1960s, but not in the United States, such as the International Zen Association. Europeans had a notable influence on the diffusion of Asian religions, particularly of Buddhism, with Alan Watts in the 1950s, Peggy Kennett in the 1960s, and the founder of Diamond Way Buddhism, Ole Nydahl, in the 1970s and 1980s. After all, the Beatles, icons of the easternization of pop culture − their visits to the Maharishi are legendary − were British. However, in the 1960s, as the call ‘to go to San Francisco’ was heard throughout the world, the United States somewhat surprisingly became a source of spiritual enlightenment and many Asian as well as American teachers in the United States attracted European followers.50 Although between America, Europe, and Asia a truly global interaction existed,51 the impact of Asian spiritualities in Europe remained relatively meagre, at least when compared with California and New York − if one compared with the American midwest, the picture might be quite different. But religious renewals that did not participate in the hippie counterculture did not receive a warm welcome in Europe. That was particularly the case for ‘typically American’ religions such as Scientology and the Latter-Day Saint movement, evangelicals, and fundamentalists, as well as, to a lesser extent, charismatics. As far as the latter participated in the counterculture, as was the case for example with the Jesus People, they were viewed more positively at first than movements that were perceived as belonging to ‘mainstream’ America, as in the case of Billy Graham, for example. In this respect it is useful to remember that evangelicals in the wake of the Cold War in the early 1950s had launched a religious offensive that was aimed at converting Europeans not only to Protestantism, but also to American views on the role of religion in society, among which was a more radical separation between church and state as a condition for religious renewal. In the early 1950s, Graham was welcomed with enthusiasm, attracting thousands in Britain, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Germany. However, his (and others’) preaching did not provoke a huge evangelical awakening, although − perhaps only in hindsight − some evangelicals in Europe, notably in Britain, proclaimed themselves inspired by him. Some European evangelicals paid return visits to the United States and may even have had some influence there. Graham returned to Europe in the 1960s and 70s, but by then his speeches provoked rather negative reactions.52 Nevertheless, in the 1970s things began to change. The International Congress on World Evangelization, which was held in Lausanne,

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Switzerland, in July 1974 at the behest of Graham (and which actually followed a first World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin in 1966), witnessed more than 2,000 evangelicals from over 150 countries agreeing with a manifesto on promoting active worldwide Christian evangelism, which became one of the most influential documents in modern evangelical Christianity. The nascent global evangelical revival did touch Europe through preachers such as Dennis Bennett, Kathryn Kuhlman, David du Plessis, Derek Prince, and the Korean David Yonggi Cho, founder of the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, the largest single megachurch in the world. Visits provoked return visits for learning and inspiration, and lasting connections developed. This resulted mainly in local initiatives, in or around major cities, though they rarely attracted a mass following. The Jesus People especially raised sympathy, also among established churches. That was not the case, however, with every new initiative.53 Within the Catholic world one may refer to the Catholic Charismatic Movement as a relatively successful example of renewal. The Catholic Charismatic Movement originated in California in 1965 − in contrast to other Catholic renewal movements such as Focolare, Communione e Liberazione, and Marriage Encounter (as well as, of course, Opus Dei, created in 1928), which had their roots on the European continent in the 1940s and 50s. It gradually manifested itself as a major renewal within the Catholic Church, though its following should not be overestimated: it was often viewed with suspicion and even contempt by Catholics who remained within the mainstream, including the hierarchy.54 However, in quantitative terms in Europe the religious landscape transformed much more due to the immigration of Muslims from Turkey, North Africa, and South and South-east Asia, and in smaller numbers, other religions (e.g., Sikhs). However, these migrant faiths hardly proselytized beyond the immigrant community. In the case of Hindu and Buddhist immigrant communities one should perhaps distinguish between the typical ‘guest workers,’ mostly semi- or unskilled workers, and more intellectual political refugees such as Vietnamese boat people and Tibetan monks. The latter did sometimes have some influence, though immigrant and convert (to use these terms, conscious though of their problematic nature) Hindu and Buddhist communities remained separated, hardly aware of each other’s presence. In any case, there is no way that the interest in Eastern spirituality in Europe could be provoked by increased migration, as J. Gordon Melton argues with regard to the United States.55

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In conclusion, the 1960s show a complex picture. Some major denominations entered a crisis of existence, losing ground and, in particular, apparently doubting their very own mission: the Catholic Church for example redefined itself in terms of a ‘pilgrim church’ (Lumen gentium, VII), which became interpreted as seeking rather than dwelling − characteristic also for the main Protestant churches in Europe and in the United States.56 Both in Europe and in the United States, old-time certainties indeed vanished and people were increasingly forced to make individual choices as the number of religious and spiritual options increased substantially, not the least because of the strong wind of renewal blowing over America. It has been called a spiritual revolution, and indeed it was, though virtually all renewal movements developed a spirituality that was somehow profoundly immanent, grounded in the self, fundamentally ecumenical − as comes to the fore in the remarkable blending of practices and concepts from the most extreme variety of origins. Not Quite the Same in the 1980s and 1990s There remains debate about when exactly the 1960s began to fade, but in a cultural and religious perspective, the second half of the 1970s certainly shows a change in ‘climate’ or mood. It seems the late seventies constitutes a transition period towards a new cultural climate, which also means important continuities as well. An important and, from the perspective of ‘globalization,’ revealing phenomenon is that on both sides of the Atlantic the spiritual revolution somehow came to an end. The two components that, in my opinion, constituted the heart of the religious revolution of the 1960s both expired, namely the emphasis on engagement and solidarity (James Kennedy), and the search for a spirituality disconnected from the major institutionalized forms of Christianity, which had led to the interest in Eastern, Native American, and Western esoteric traditions. Especially the most exotic new religious movements that had boomed in the 1960s and 70s stopped attracting new members. As a result, ISKCON, for example, turned its back on its history as part of the 1960s counterculture and ‘rediscovered’ its Hindu past, appealing more to Indian migrants rather than white Europeans or Americans.57 Especially since the mass suicide of members of the Peoples Temple at Jonestown in 1978, an ‘anti-cult’ 58 movement manifested itself both in North America and in Europe. In Europe it was the Children of God, an offspring of the Jesus People, that first stirred a reaction. It attained notoriety for its ‘flirty-fishing,’ by

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which women prostituted themselves in order to attract new members (not quite representative for evangelical Christianity, which emphasizes ‘traditional’ family values), and so-called ‘brainwashing’ techniques.59 The anti-cult movement attacked many ‘new’ American religious movements, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Scientologists – which put up particularly strong resistance, especially in Germany60 – as well as Asian movements that focused on ‘brainwashing.’ However, religious and spiritual renewal did not die out completely, and by the 1980s something had happened that is best captured by the encompassing term of ‘New Age.’61 Moreover, there seemed to be a new interest in religious organization, albeit not so much in the traditional mainline churches and denominations. Notwithstanding the reaction against ‘new religious movements’ which branded them as ‘sects’ or ‘cults,’ evangelicals and charismatics continued to prosper and expand in the United States, through megachurches, for example. These partly benefited from a reaction to the unrest that the sixties had created, as they offered certainty.62 But they also appealed to the continuing individualization of society. Three developments seem crucial to me in this respect: first, the increased commodification of religion and spirituality; second − closely related − the emphasis on health and prosperity; and third, the further democratization (actually de-hierarchization) that comes to the fore in the progress of Young Earth Creationism or Intelligent Design. All illustrate a further evolution towards an individual faith, but also towards a monistic, if not Gnostic, form of Christianity.63 These were not new developments, but much in line with the way (Protestant) Christianity has been understood in the United States since at least the first and second Awakening. Still, they constituted a major departure from traditional, ‘European’ ways of believing, which (still) emphasize a transcendental God − though that was effectively changing.64 Remarkably the rise of the evangelicals in the United States had a political extension which was a major departure from the traditional evangelical non-political stance. It was a direct result of the American ‘culture wars’ between conservatives and liberals that was fought much harder in the United States than in Europe (where there was hardly anything resembling a culture war, and religious conservatives remained marginalized), first under the Reagan administration and then again, vigorously − but not exactly in the same way − under George W. Bush, who even began to offer public financing to faithbased social initiatives.65 In Europe, the evolution went in the opposite

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direction with the churches involving themselves less and less with politics and society, and the state withdrawing its support for confessional associations or putting them under extensive public control after the Second World War. Existing formal ties were loosened, and the churches had less and less levies to directly interfere with political decision-making processes.66 However, the churches in Europe had also raised their voices again by the late 1960s and 70s (though they had actually never really stopped) as moral authorities and in a rather ‘prophetic’ way, initially mostly to defend more ‘progressive’ political stances, later for more conservative positions, at least as regards individual ethics.67 Under the papacy of Karol Wojtyła, the Roman Catholic Church became an important (though overstated) player in world politics and in particular in the fight against communism. However, John Paul II never enjoyed the same popularity in Western Europe as among American neoconservatives (or in Poland for that matter), identified as he was with the post-Vatican reaction in the church. To some extent the conservative Christians’ impact may have been growing in Europe in the 1990s too, mainly connected to an emphasis on traditional ‘values’ and sometimes in reaction to a perceived Islamic threat, but nowhere near the extent of what happened in the United States. The increased visibility of the evangelicals and the Christian Right obscures the fact that in the United States, notwithstanding migration and the visible success of charismatics, traditional churchgoing seems to have been under pressure as well, certainly from the 1990s onwards.68 If one looks at the mainline churches, in particular Catholicism, the differences between Europe and the United States appear much less pronounced.69 However, the unremitting decline of traditional religiosity and the lack of institutional renewal results in a very different overall picture in Europe, where Christianity became all but ‘exculturated’ (Danièle Hervieu-Léger). Though admittedly not everywhere – certainly rarely in Italy − the transmission of traditional Christian beliefs and traditions was interrupted and basic references to Christianity became unintelligible and meaningless.70 A similar ‘memory crisis’ incidentally affected nationalists and socialists as well, among whom one can observe the same ignorance and ‘unintelligibility’ of their basic traditions, practices, and references. But perhaps the effect was greater with regard to Christianity, as one can really speak of a dechristianization of (large parts of) Europe, even if the churches still manage to appeal to substantial num-

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bers when marking the major transitions of life: alternatives still seem inappropriate in that context. Nevertheless some elements of renewal can be detected in Europe too. Some religious movements from the United States made inroads in Europe, including Eastern Europe. That was the case for Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and, to some extent, Scientologists and especially Pentecostals and charismatics. Especially noteworthy are the Willow Creek Community Church (which originated in Chicago in the mid1970s), the Vineyard Movement (an offspring of the Jesus People), the Alpha Course, as well as New Wine in Britain in the late 1980s and 1990s, which offered important tools for Christian renewal taken on by followers from different denominations, including Catholics, also on the Continent. These charismatic Christian renewal movements are typically non-denominational and strongly permeated with a sense of marketing, operating mainly within the existing churches.71 It remains hard, though, to qualify their missions in Europe as a major success compared with Asia, Africa, or Latin America.72 The Catholic Charismatic Movement offers a case in point: though in some countries it was supported by the hierarchy and viewed as a possible way of renewing spiritual life in the mainstream, it did not transform the Catholic Church anywhere, and it appears to have already passed its peak.73 This lack of success is partly due to institutional factors, such as the state control of radio and television until the 1990s, but also because of different ‘styles,’ evidence of deeper cultural and psycho-historical differences.74 Illustrative is the fact that the ‘therapeutic culture’ that is a characteristic feature of this American way of believing was not taken on by mainstream Christian churches in Europe, but remained marginal.75 Nevertheless some charismatic renewal movements, especially ‘local’ European ones such as the ecumenical youth movement of Taizé (France), did appeal to particular groups of (young) Christians. New migrants from Latin America, Asia, and especially Africa seem, however, to make a more penetrating difference. They introduced dynamic Pentecostal churches in Europe’s major cities in the 1990s and early 2000s. In contrast to other migrant religions, these Pentecostal churches seem to appeal outside their ethnic communities. They connect to the Pentecostal communities elsewhere, irrespective of nationality or ethnicity, and directly attract white European Christians, effectively competing with traditional mainline churches. They conceive as their mission to win Europe back for Christianity.76 A remarkable development, particularly in Western Europe, is the

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increased interest in values in the 1990s, which seems to indicate that the seekers of the 1960s apparently wanted some stability − what Staf Hellemans calls ‘longing without belonging’77 – which may drive people again towards the mainline churches. In the meantime, one may observe that militancy among the remaining faithful has augmented, and the mainstream denominations or churches tend to become more militant, perhaps also more open for conservative if not reactionary and fundamentalist movements.78 On the basis of the European Values Studies of 1981 and 1999, Yves Lambert concluded that Europe had reached a turning point, as younger generations seemed to rediscover religious life, even if that did not necessarily lead to involvement with the churches but expressed itself in either ‘believing without belonging’ or non-Christian spirituality. The belief in life after death for example began to rise again from 1980. It is too early to conclude that a bottom line has been reached, let alone the start of a reversal initiated. There are signs that the case has been overstated.79 A last development with regard to the ‘Christian’ nature of Europe, one that has come to the fore since the 1990s, is the ‘rediscovery’ of Europe’s Christian past in reaction to the perceived threat of Islam, either emerging from the barely integrated immigrant communities, directly provoked by the rise of Islamism and Islamic terror, or generated by the application for EU membership of Turkey (three unrelated phenomena that nevertheless are linked in the collective imagination). This reaction even led to a most remarkable convergence between confessional conservatives and (often leftist) secularists, epitomized in the rapprochement between Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas, or between Ratzinger as Benedict XVI and the current French President Nicolas Sarkozy, head of the most secular West-European country.80 This, and the recurring debate over the Islamic headscarf, however, mainly illustrate Europe’s incapacity to come to terms with the new religious diversity it is faced with.81 I very much doubt if there is any rechristianization in these reactions. The renewals that we identified do not obscure the fact that another kind of ‘religion,’ if religion it is, won over the West, on both sides of the Atlantic: New Age. New Age is rightly notorious for its eclectic character, with individuals putting together piecemeal elements of beliefs and practices from the most diverse origins, which makes more than one scholar disregard it.82 Moreover, New Age did not create an encompassing network uniting all groups and centres, least of all one that includes other esoteric or ‘new’ religious movements.83 Still, New Age has some

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essential common components, such as a sacralization of the self; a holistic world view that rejects dualism and reductionism; an idea of some sort of evolution towards a ‘new age;’ a recurrent interaction with psychology and psychotherapy; and a monistic, perennial view on religion which argues that there is one common source of wisdom in all religions.84 The original inspiration – on the one hand centennial European esoterism, on the other the 1960s counterculture and its rejection of institutions and the modern capitalist value system – remained visible, even if it was fused with the American health and prosperity culture. By doing so, however, it finally embraced consumerism, retaining from its ‘original’ social critical culture only a vague and non-engaging care for ‘mother earth.’ This allowed it to fuse with mainstream culture in large parts of Western Europe and in some secularized milieux − actually the mainstream very much became New Age − replacing to a considerable extent the discursive Christianity that had characterized the West until then. Since the mid-1990s though, New Age has become less fashionable, as it became associated with consumerism and business, and was seen as a ‘movement’ − which was viewed as a first step into institutionalization. This does not necessarily mean that its emphasis on individual spirituality disappeared. On the contrary, insofar as the emphasis on the self is the result of a reaction against the institutionalization of New Age itself, it is, rather, proof of New Age being able to resist. Still, it may be incapable of transmitting and hence sustaining itself as a religion.85 However, that is not the subject of this chapter. Some Asian religions or spiritual movements that appeared on the Western religious scene underwent a similar evolution, becoming an integral part of the health and happiness industries. While the presence of Eastern religions in Europe and, to a lesser extent in the United States, remained marginal, some practices did become mainstream. That was the case with yoga in the 1970s, TM in the late 1980s, and mindfulness in the 2000s. TM presented itself as a successful ‘mind-body medicine,’ and in its association with the Indian medical doctor Deepak Chopra claimed ‘scientific’ legitimacy. The most illustrious of the charismatic Indian gurus in the 1960s, the advocate of free sex Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, totally changed direction in 1989 after his community in Oregon, Rajneeshpuram, collapsed in scandal. Bhagwan reinvented himself and returned as the Zen Buddhist Osho, and his ashram in Puna, India, became a highly popular meditation ‘resort.’ Osho’s centres around the world offer meditation and stress management to multinational firms. Such a combination is typical for the New Age and constitutes a

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global phenomenon, occurring throughout the world, including Asia. Some non-Western spiritual practices became constituent elements of physio- and psychotherapy, while others remained consigned to the health and body shops, and to meditation and psycho-healing centres. They were inevitably disconnected from any spiritual or religious background (a development, incidentally, that often was initiated in Asia). By so doing, they integrated in Western culture more effectively than the Christian charismatic healing practices that became so important in contemporary American evangelical culture. These Christian healing practices did not manage to obtain scientific credentials, least of all in Europe, notwithstanding the attempts to find evidence of the effectiveness of faith healing, in particular of prayer. Conclusion It is clear that Europe underwent a remarkable process of dechristianization after the Second World War (and the postwar recovery), expressed first in the decline in attendance in Christian churches and in their influence on society; second in the rise of alternative religions and non-institutionalized ‘spiritualities’; and third in a diversification of the religious landscape. The result looks almost like an ‘ex-culturation of Christianity’ (Danièle Hervieu-Léger), though in some countries – such as Ireland, Italy, Poland after 1989 – Christianity continued to flourish and was part of the national identity. Paradoxically, this process was paralleled by a gradual demise of militant secularism, though the latter has surfaced in reaction to the perceived Islamic threat. The Islamic threat led to a rediscovery of the Christian origins of Europe, even among secularists, resulting in a certain rapprochement of the latter and of conservative Christians. While migrants contributed substantially to the diversity and pluralization of the religious and ideological landscape, in itself a major feature of its transformation, they did not have the same significance in Europe as in the United States, as in Europe they tend to remain outsiders for several generations. They certainly hardly proselytized (though this appears to have changed since the 1980s).86 Nevertheless in Europe, as in the United States, a counterculture developed in the 1960s that contained a spiritual dimension, developed into New Age, and offered to some extent a new common spiritual language. Both North America and Europe witnessed an increased religious diversity, which constituted a cultural revolution in Europe far more than in the United States, which had always been characterized by a

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competitive religious market and had developed an ideology of ‘pluralism.’87 Moreover, although it may be true that the United States became ‘the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation’ (Diana Eck), most fragmentation affected Christianity itself, and Christianity retained its dominant position.88 Two factors explain the strength of Christianity in the United States: first, migration, in particular of Catholic Latin Americans, and second, the evangelical and charismatic renewals associated with what Robert Fogel called the Fourth Great Awakening.89 In Europe, on the contrary, Christianity − which notwithstanding theoretical and practical ecumenism also became more diverse − had to give way not only to non-belief and non-institutionalized expressions of religiosity and spirituality, but also to Islam, which awoke ancient fears. Moreover, Europeans had elevated secularism as homogenizing Weltanschauung, which made it particularly difficult to cope with religious diversity and particularly with new, confident, and militant forms of religions that had not (yet?) interiorized the secularist value system, as Protestant and Catholic churches had done.90 Notwithstanding these, and other differences, below the surface in both the United States and Europe a religious landscape developed that was not only more diverse, but in a way also more homogeneous: the different religious expressions − incidentally one can detect similar developments in Islam as well − share a number of deep monistic tendencies. These are not, in my view, the outcome of some ‘Easternization’ as sociologist Colin Campbell argues, but the result of a situation of ‘collective liminality,’ which implies the search for new sources of identity, often found in the present (in the – shrinking – peer group) and assembled piecemeal by ‘bricolage.’ Such an open, individualistic society leads to a greater receptivity for non-European influences, all the more so as belief in the ‘traditional’ European values − here Steve Bruce is absolutely right − has evaporated.91 Globalization is a key factor here, as it certainly undermined the traditional behavioural prescripts and opened up world views. Obviously it also facilitated the introduction of non-Western religious and spiritual views and practices, though one should note that these were often the result of complex processes of cultural adaptation and appropriation. They almost invariably were the products themselves of Western influence and were especially marketed to a Western (American or European) public, leading to hybrid forms that often have little in common with the ‘originals.’ This comes strongly to the fore when, for example, New Age spreads beyond the West (in particular in Asia) and becomes an expression of modern West-

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ern cultural ‘imperialism,’ incapable of integrating local non-Western elements.92 That may be the remarkable difference with charismatic and Pentecostal movements that on the one hand create ‘global’ communities but at the same time allow for radical transformations at local level. That, however, is an issue for another discussion. Since the final decade of the last millennium, a search for a new stability seems to prevail as the need for social cohesion and a collective identity (group) rises. This compels individuals to seek out new forms of religious and spiritual communities with a wide array of features, varying from extremely isolated to strongly globalized religioscapes, hierarchical as well as informal.

NOTES 1 Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.) 2 Compare Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 3 Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections, Cultures, People, Places (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 17–29. Compare C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (London: Blackwell, 2004) for the ‘modern’ uniformity. 4 An overview of recent literature on religion and globalization is Thomas J. Csordas, ‘Modalities of Transnational Transcendence,’ in Thomas J. Csordas, ed., Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 1–22; Peter Beyer and Lori Beaman, eds., International Studies in Religion and Society, vol. 6 : Religion, Globalization, and Culture (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2007); Peter Beyer, Religions in Global Society (London: Routledge, 2006). 5 On the American influence see, among others, Mel Van Elteren, Americanism and Americanization: A Critical History of Domestic and Global Influence (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2006); Alexander Stephan, ed., The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2006); R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., The American Century in Europe (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2003); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap, 2005). 6 For example, Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (London:

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Blackwell, 2002), 204–28; Steve Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1967); Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967); Bryan R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society: A Sociological Comment (London: C.A. Watts, 1966). Peter Berger, Grace Davie, and Effie Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 126. David Nash, ‘Reconnecting Religion with Social and Cultural History: Secularization’s Failure as a Master Narrative,’ Cultural and Social History 1 (2004): 302–25; Mark E. Ruff, ‘The Postmodern Challenge to the Secularization Thesis,’ Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 99 (2005): 385–401. Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001), 12–13. For example, Karel Dobbelaere, ‘Assessing Secularization Theory,’ in Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz, and Randi R. Warne, eds., New Approaches to the Study of Religion, vol. 2: Textual, Comparative, Sociological, and Cognitive Approaches (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2008), 229–53; Bruce, God Is Dead, esp. 207–13 (with regard to the United States). Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). A recent reinterpretation is Colin Campbell, The Easternization of the West: A Thematic Account of Cultural Change in the Modern Era (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007). Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 86–9. See also Beyer, Religions in Global Society. The reason why Arif Dirlik is right in considering Eisenstadt’s ‘multiple’ modernities rather ‘variations’ of (‘global’) modernity: Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007). On GG-CT see Mary Douglas, ‘Introduction to Grid/Group Analysis,’ in Mary Douglas, ed., Essays in the Sociology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 1–8; Mary Douglas, Cultural Bias (London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 1978); Michael Thompson, Richard J. Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory (Boulder: Lexington, 2000). I presented a more theoretical assessment of religious changes following GG-CT in Patrick Pasture, ‘Christianity in a Detraditionalising World: A Historical-Anthropological Interpretation of the Transformations in Europe since the 1950s,’ Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift 110 (2010): 113–27; see also Pasture, ‘Religion in Contemporary Europe: Contrasting Perceptions and Dynamics,’ Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 40 (2009) 319–50.

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14 See especially Manuel Borutta, ‘Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie: Zur Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne,’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36 (2010): 347–76. 15 Gerard Rouwhorst pointed my attention to the concept of collective liminality, which was introduced by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Gerard A.M. Rouwhorst, ‘The Dream of Active Participation: Celebrating Roman Catholic Liturgy in the Netherlands,’ in P.C. Beentjes, ed., The Catholic Church and Modernity in Europe (Berlin: Litt, 2009), 133–50. 16 Lucian Hölscher, ‘Konfessionspolitik in Deutschland zwischen Glaubenstreit und Koexistenz,’ in Lucian Hölscher, ed., Baupläne der sichtbaren Kirche. Sprachlichen Konzepte religiöser Vergemeinschaftung in Europa (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 11–52 (esp. 49–50). 17 Likewise, in the United States conservatives and fundamentalists from all denominations converged in their mutual rejection of the liberal society. Among the numerous studies on that phenomenon see especially Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 18 Valeer Neckebroeck, De stomme duivelen. Het antimissionaire syndroom in de westerse kerk (Leuven and Leusden: Acco, 2002); Katharina Kunter, ‘1972/3: Ende der Weltmission: Der europäische Protestantismus kehrt nach Hause zurück,’ Themenportal Europäische Geschichte, Clio-online (2009), http:// www.europa.clio-online.de/2009/Article=360. See also the observations of Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 39–42ff. as well as Otavio Velho, ‘Missionization in the Postcolonial World: A View from Brazil and Elsewhere,’ in Csordas, ed., Transnational Transcendence, 31–54. 19 This is the central argument of Colin Campbell’s intriguing The Easternization of the West, to which I can subscribe (not to Campbell’s interpretation of calling this ‘Easternization’ though). On the crisis of transcendentalism see Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Codierung von Transcendenz im Zeitalter der Privatisierung. Die Suche nach Vergemeinschaftung in der katholischen Kirche, 1945–1980,’ in Michael Geyer and Lucian Hölscher, eds., Die Gegenwart Gottes in der modernen Gesellschaft. The Presence of God in Modern Society. Religiöse Vergemeinschaftung und Transzendenz in Deutschland. Transcendence and Religious Community in Germany (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), 380–403. 20 Ursula Krey, ‘“Der Bruch mit der Gehorsamstradition.” Die 68er Bewegung und der gesellschaftliche Wandel,’ in Bernd Hey and Volkmar Wittmütz, eds., 1968 und die Kirchen (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2008), 13–34. 21 Sweden constitutes an exception to the rule: Eva M. Hamberg, ‘Christendom in Decline: The Swedish Case,’ in Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf,

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eds., The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, c. 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 47–62. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain. Compare Karel Dobbelaere and Jaak Billiet, ‘Late 20th Century Trends in Catholic Religiousness: Belgium Compared with Western and Central European Nations,’ in Leo Kenis, Jaak Billiet, and Patrick Pasture, eds., The Transformation of the Christian Churches in Western Europe, 1945–2000 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010), 113–45; Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Andrew M. Greeley, Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium: A Sociological Profile (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Hugh McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Dobbelaere, ‘Assessing Secularization Theory,’ esp. 247–8. Ole Riis, ‘Patterns of Secularization in Scandinavia,’ in Thorleif Pettersson and Ole Riis, eds., Scandinavian Values: Religion and Morality in the Nordic Countries (Uppsala and Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1994); Grace Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Updated data in Detlev Pollack, ‘Religion und Moderne: Zur Gegenwart der Säkularisierung in Europa,’ in Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Klaus Große Kracht, eds., Religion und Gesellschaft. Europa im 20. Jahrhundert (Köln: Böhlau, 2007), 73–104. An interesting attempt to rewrite the religious history of Scandinavia in a different way is Erik Sidenvall, ‘A Classic Case of De-Christianisation? Religious Change in Scandinavia, c. 1750–2000,’ in Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World: Essays in Honour of Hugh McLeod (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 119–33, though the many references to ‘continued’ practices ‘still’ illustrate the difficulty getting loose from taking dechristianization/secularization as the norm. Hugh McLeod, ‘Religion in the United States and Europe − the 20th Century,’ in Hartmut Lehmann, ed., Transatlantische Religionsgeschichte 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 131–45; Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Norris and Inglehart, ‘Uneven Secularization in the United States and Western Europe,’ in Thomas Banchoff, ed., Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 31–57. In this respect see especially Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion. David Bebbington, ‘Evangelicalism in Its Settings: The British and American Movements since 1940,’ in Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk, eds., Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular

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Patrick Pasture Protestantism in North America, the British Isles and Beyond, 1700–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 365–88, esp. 366. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Gertrude Himmelfarb, One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 2001). In this respect see esp. Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2010); William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway, 1996); Clyde Wilcox, Onward Christian Soldiers? The Religious Right in American Politics (Boulder: Westview, 2010); Daniel Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford, 2010). The term ‘mainline’ suggests that liberal denominations dominate the American religiosity. That is arguable to say the least: for many scholars it is the evangelical tradition that constitutes the heart of American religion, or in the words of Philip Jenkins, ‘the mainline is not the mainstream, the fringe is not a fringe.’ Philip Jenkins, ‘The Center and the Fringe: America’s Religious Futures,’ in Hans Krabbendam and Derek Rubin, eds., Religion in America: European and American Perspectives (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004), 51–68, at 51. D.G. Hart, The Lost Soul of American Protestantism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). See especially R. Laurence Moore, Touchdown Jesus: The Mixing of Sacred and Secular in American History (Fort Knox: Westminster Press, 2003), 149ff. Cf. Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a ‘Christian Country’ Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (New York: HarperOne, 2001); Sarah Pike, New Age and Neopagan Religions in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Robert S. Ellwood, The Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving from Modern to Postmodern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Robert S. Ellwood, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973); Carl T. Jackson, ‘The Counterculture Looks East: Beat Writers and Asian Religion,’ American Studies 29 (Spring 1989): 51–70; Stephen Prothero, ‘On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest,’ Harvard Theological Review 84 (1991): 205–22; Thomas A Tweed, ‘Asian Religions in the United States: Reflections on an Emerging Subfield,’ in Walter H. Conser Jr and Sumner B. Twiss, eds., Religious Diversity and American Religious History: Studies in Traditions and Cultures (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 189–217.

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34 There is a huge literature on the impact of Asian religions and spiritualities. See my assessment for Europe: ‘Religious Globalization in Post-War Europe: Spiritual Connections and Interactions,’ Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 51 (2011): 63–108. 35 On this movement in the United States see Carl T. Jackson, Vedanta for the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 36 Véronique Altglas, Le nouvel hinduisme occidental (Paris: CNRS, 2005); E. Burke Rochford, Hare Krishna in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985); David G. Bromley and Larry D. Shinn, Krishna Consciousness in the West (Lewisburg, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 1989). 37 Marc Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Elizabeth de Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga: Patanjali and Western Esotericism (New York: Continuum, 2005); Sarah Strauss, Positioning Yoga: Balancing Acts across Cultures (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005). 38 Ellwood, Religious and Spiritual Groups, 245. The development of the ISKCON would be different though, as it would later turn away from its hippie past and its association with drug use, and emphasize its Hindu attachments. 39 The literature on the globalization of Buddhism and its spread in America has become quite substantial. Particularly relevant are Martin Baumann, ‘Global Buddhism: Development Periods, Regional Histories, and a New Analytical Perspective,’ Journal of Global Buddhism 2 (2001): 1–43; Martin Baumann and Charles Prebish, eds., Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Steven Heine and Charles Prebish, Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Wendy Cadge, ‘Reflections on Habits, Buddhism in America, and Religious Individualism,’ Sociology of Religion 68, no. 22 (2007): 201–5; Wendy Cadge, Heartwood: The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Harvey B. Aronson, Buddhist Practice on Western Ground (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2004); Richard Hughes Seager, Buddhism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Charles Prebish, Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Duncan Ryuken Williams and Christopher S. Queen, eds., American Buddhism: Methods and Findings in Recent Scholarship (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1999); Charles Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka, eds., The Faces of Buddhism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to

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the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America (Boston: Shambhala, 1992). On its importance in America see especially Amanda Porterfield, The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a Late Twentieth-Century Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 140–3; Robert Wuthnow and Wendy Cadge, ‘Buddhists and Buddhism in the United States: The Scope of Influence,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43 (2004): 361–78. See also Thomas A. Tweed and Stephen Prothero, Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Frédéric Lenoir, La rencontre du bouddhisme et de l’Occident (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 239–58. 40 Concrete examples in Mark Unno, ed., Buddhism and Psychotherapy across Cultures: Essays on Theories and Practices (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2006); Seth Robert Segall, ed., Encountering Buddhism: Western Psychology and Buddhist Teachings (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); D.K. Nauriyal, Michael Drummond, and Y.B. Lal, eds., Buddhist Thought and Applied Psychological Research: Transcending the Boundaries (New York: Routledge, 2006); Lorne Ladner, The Lost Art of Compassion: Discovering the Practice of Happiness in the Meeting of Buddhism and Psychology (New York: HarperColins, 2004); Harvey B. Aronson, Buddhist Practice on Western Ground (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2004); Richard J. Davidson and Anne Harrington, Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Mark Epstein, Psychotherapy without the Self: A Buddhist Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2007 [1995]). 41 Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jørn Borup, ‘Zen and the Art of Inventing Orientalism: Buddhism, Religious Studies and Interrelated Networks,’ in Antes, Geertz and Warne, eds., New Approaches to the Study of Religion, 1: 451–88; Baumann, ‘Global Buddhism’; Albertina Nugteren, ‘Tantric Influences in Western Esoterism,’ in Reender Kranenborg and Mikael Rothstein, eds., New Religions in a Postmodern World (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2003), 107–22; Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’ (London: Routledge, 1999); Duncan Williams and Senryô Asai, ‘Japanese American Zen Temples: Cultural Identity and Economics,’ in Williams and Queen, eds., American Buddhism, 20–35. 42 Pasture, ‘Religious Globalization in Post-War Europe’; Reender Kranenborg, ‘Hindu Eschatology within Modern Western Religiosity,’ in Kranenborg and Rothstein, eds., New Religions in a Postmodern World, 137–52.

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43 On Scientology see James R. Lewis, Scientology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 44 David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe, ‘Moonies’ in America: Cult, Church, and Crusade (Beverley Hills and London: Sage, 1979). 45 McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s. See also Callum G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (London and Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006), 258–64. 46 For example, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998). 47 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, Israel, Italy, India, South Korea, Pen Island, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 48 For example, James C. Kennedy, Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw: Nederland in de jaren zestig (Meppel: Boom, 1995), 90–4; Hans Righart, De eindeloze jaren zestig: geschiedenis van een generatieconflict (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1995) (incidentally reviewers did not mention this remarkable neglect either). Kennedy had an eye for religion, but only for the secularization of Dutch society. The quotation is from Jasper Grootveld cited in Stef Aupers, ‘“We are all Gods.” New Age in the Netherlands,’ in Erik Sengers, ed., The Dutch and Their Gods: Secularization and Transformation of Religion in the Netherlands since 1950 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2005), 181–201, 187. See also Reender Kranenburg, ‘New Religious Movements in the Netherlands,’ in Helle Meldgaard and Johannes Aagaard, eds., New Religious Movements in Europe (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2001), 124–43; Nico Tydeman and Martin Heymans, eds., Religieuze subcultuur in Nederland (Amersfoort: De Horstink, 1972); J.W. Bekker, J. de Hart, and J. Mens, eds., Secularisatie en alternatieve zingeving in Nederland (Rijswijk: Sociaal en cultureel planbureau, 1997). 49 On neo-paganism see Joanne Pearson, ed., Belief beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spiritualities and the New Age (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 50 Some examples of main American teachers include Robert Aitken (who founded Hawaii’s Diamand Sangha), Philip Kapleau (founder of the Rochester Zen Center in Central New York), and the founders of Insight Meditation (IM) Ruth Denison, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and Joseph Goldstein. Popular Asian teachers who were introduced in Europe via the U.S. are the Japanese Joshu Sasaki and Eido Taizan Maezumi, the Vietnamese Tich Nhat Hanh, and the Tibetan lamas Tarhang Tulku, Kalu Rinpoche, and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Important Buddhist centres in the U.S. were the Rochester Zen Center in Central New York, the Zen

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Center of Los Angeles and the Zen Center of San Francisco, Seung Sahn Sunim’s Kwan Um School of Zen, the Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado (Tibetan Buddhism) and the Dhamma Dena (1977) in California, as well as the Transcendental Meditation Society (TMS) in Barr, Massachusetts (1975). 51 On the interactions between Europe, the United States and Asia, see Pasture, ‘Religious Globalization’; McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s. Most studies, however, discuss Europe’s receptivity to Asian religions and spirituality. See especially the critical observations of J. Gordon Melton, ‘The Emergence of New Religions in Eastern Europe Since 1989,’ in Eileen Barker and Margit Warburg, eds., New Religions and New Religiosity (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1997), 45–65; John Gordon Melton, ‘European Receptivity to the New Religions,’ in Meldgaard and Aagaard, eds., New Religious Movements in Europe, 18–30; Rodney Stark, ‘Europe’s Receptivity to New Religious Movements: Round Two,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 32, no. 4 (December 1993): 389–97. 52 For the meaning of religion in American postwar foreign policy see William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). On Graham in Europe see, among others, R. Laurence Moore, ‘American Religion as Cultural Imperialism,’ in Moore and Vaudagna, eds., The American Century in Europe, 151–70; Alana Harris and Martin Spence, ‘“Disturbing the Complacency of Religion”? The Evangelical Crusades of Dr Billy Graham and Father Patrick Peyton in Britain, 1951–54,’ Twentieth Century British History 18, no. 4 (2007): 481–513; Bebbington, ‘Evangelicalism in Its Settings’; Rob Warner, Reinventing English Evangelicalism 1966–2001 (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007); David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth Century Britain, 188–202, 230–1; Pieter R. Boersema, ‘The Evangelical Movement in the Netherlands. New Wine in Old Wineskins?’ in Sengers, ed., The Dutch and Their Gods, 163–79, at 165; Uta Andrea Balbier, ‘Billy Graham in West Germany: German Protestantism between Americanization and Rechristianization,’ Zeithistorische Forschungen /Studies in Contemporary History 7 (2010): Online edition, H. 3, http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Balbier-3-2010; A.J. van Heusden, ‘Ontstaan en groei van de evangelische beweging,’ in Hans Eschbach, ed., Vurig verlangen: evangelische vernieuwing in de traditionele kerken (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, [1996]): 49–58; Siegfried Hermle, ‘Die Evangelikalen als Gegenbewegung,’ in Siegfried Hermle, Claudia Lepp, and Harry Oelke, eds., Umbrüceh: in den 1960er und 70er Jahren (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &

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Ruprecht, 2007), 324–51; Ursula Krey, ‘“Der Bruch mit der Gehorsamstradition.” Die 68er Bewegung und der gesellschaftliche Wandel,’ in Bernd Hey and Volkmar Wittmütz, eds., 1968 und die Kirchen (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2008), 13–34, at 22–3. Examples in Simon Coleman, The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 89–91; Bebbington, ‘Evangelicalism in Its Settings’; Warner, Reinventing English Evangelicalism; Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain; Brown, Religion and Society, 188–202; Boersema, ‘The Evangelical Movement in the Netherlands,’ 163–79; Hermle, ‘Die Evangelikalen als Gegenbewegung.’ Brown, Religion and Society, 265–6. Melton, ‘European Receptivity to the New Religions.’ An insightful and important comparison on the place of migrants in Europe and the United States with regard to religion in José Casanova’s ‘Immigration and the New Religious Pluralism: A European Union/United States Comparison,’ in Banchoff, ed., Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism, 59–83. In this respect see also Grace Davie, ‘Pluralism, Tolerance, and Democracy: Theory and Practice in Europe,’ in ibid., 223–41; Konrad Pedziwiatr, ‘Publicizing, Secularizing and Integrating Islam in Europe,’ in Gabriel Motzkin and Yochi Fisher, eds., Religion and Democracy in Contemporary Europe (London: Alliance, 2008), 171–7; Philip Jenkins, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); José Casanova, ‘Religion, European Secular Identities, and European Integration,’ in Timothy A. Byrnes and Peter J. Katzenstein, eds., Religion in an Expanding Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 65–92; and the contributions on Islam in Europe in the latter volume as well as in Krzysztof Michalski, ed., Religion in the New Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006). Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journey of the Baby-Boom Generation (San Francisco: Harper, 1994). In Germanic languages the concept of ‘Pilgrim Church’ is translated as God’s people ‘on its way.’ Altglas, Le nouvel hinduisme occidental, 71–2; Judith Coney, ‘Making History: Memory and Forgetfulness in New Religious Movements,’ in Kranenborg and Rothstein, eds., New Religions in a Postmodern World, 213–26; Sean Carey, ‘The Indianisation of the Hare Krishna Movement in Britain,’ in Richard Burghart, ed., Hinduism in Great Britain: The Perpetuation of Religion in a Cultural Milieu (London: Tavistock Press, 1987), 81–99. Hubert Michael Seiwert, Schluß mit den Sekten! Die Kontroverse über ‘Sekten’

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Patrick Pasture und neue religiöse Bewegungen in Europa (Marburg: Diagonal-Verlag, 1998); James A. Beckford, Cult Controversies: The Societal Response to New Religious Movements (London: Tavistock, 1985); Beckford, ‘The Media and the New Religious Movements,’ in Bryan Wilson and Jamie Cresswell, eds., New Religious Movements: Challenge and Response (London: Routledge, 1999), 103–20; George S. Chryssides, ‘Britain’s Anti-Cult Movement,’ in Wilson and Cresswell, eds., New Religious Movements, 257–73; Massimo Introvigne, ‘The Secular Anti-Cult and the Religious Counter-Cult Movement: Strange Bedfellows or Future Enemies?’ in Robert Towler, ed., New Religions and the New Europe (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1995), 32–54. James D. Chancellor, ‘A Family for the Twenty-First Century,’ in James R. Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Petersen, eds., Controversial New Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 19–42. On Scientology see Lewis, Scientology. On its reactions in Europe see also Moore, ‘American Religion as Cultural Imperialism,’ esp. 165–8 The term New Age was occasionally also used in the 1960s. It became identifiable with a particular ‘cultic milieu’ − a concept coined by Colin Campbell − only in the 1980s. In that perspective it must be distinguished from ‘new’ religious movements, including sects and Eastern religions. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture, concludes that New Age became ‘conscious of itself’ in the second half of the 1970s. Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Wuthnow, After Heaven, 222. Bloom, The American Religion, Campbell, The Easternization of the West, as well as Hubert Knoblauch, ‘Das unsichtbare neue Zeitalter. ‘New Age,’ privatisierte Religion und kultisches Milieu,’ Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 41 (1989): 504–25, call it Gnostic, though as Pascal Eitler observes there are no explicit references to Gnosticism at all. Pascal Eitler, ‘Körper – Kosmos – Kybernetik. Transformationen der Religion im ‘New Age’ (Westdeutschland 1970–1990),’ Zeithistorische Forschungen 4 (2007): 4, http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041Eitler-2-2007. See in this respect Bloom, The American Religion. On the changed relationship between politics and religion see especially William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway, 2005); Stephen Bates, God’s Own Country: Religion and Politics in the USA (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2007); and George Armstrong Kelly, Politics and Religious Consciousness in America (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005 [1984]).

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On the faith-based associations in the United States see Robert Wuthnow, Saving America? Faith-Based Services and the Future of Civil Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). On the complex relationship between church and state in Europe see John T.S. Madeley and Zsolt Enyedi, eds., Church and State in Contemporary Europe: The Chimera of Neutrality, Special Issue of West European Politics, 26, no. 1 (2003). With regard to social services in Europe see Kees van Kersbergen and Philip Manow, eds., Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Patrick Pasture, ‘Building the Social Security State: A Comparative History of Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany,’ in Lex Heerma van Voss, Patrick Pasture, and Jan De Maeyer, eds., Between Cross and Class: Comparative Histories of Christian Labour in Europe 1840–2000 (Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 251–84. Denis Pelletier, La crise catholique: religion, société, politique (Paris: Payot, 2002); Liliane Voyé, ‘Religion in Modern Europe: Pertinence of the Globalization Theories?’ in Nobutaka Inoué, ed., Globalization and Indigenous Culture (Tokyo: Institute for Japanese Culture and Classics, 1997), 155–86, http://www2.kokugakuin.ac.jp/ijcc/wp/global/12voye.html. Norris and Inglehart, ‘Uneven Secularization,’ esp. 40. This is especially true for Catholicism. See Wilhelm Damberg, ‘The Catholic Church and European Catholicism after 1945: Towards Convergence or Diversity and Fragmentation?’ in Beentjes, ed., The Catholic Church and Modernity in Europe, 17–30; Damberg, ‘Wer ist die Ausnahme? Katholiken in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in den Vereinigten Staaten. Komparative Religionsgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert,’ in Graf and Große Kracht, eds., Religion und Gesellschaft, 105–23; Wilhelm Damberg and Antonius Liedhegener, eds., Katholiken in den USA und Deutschland: Kirche, Gesellschaft und Politik (Münster: Aschendorff, 2006); Antonius Liedhegener, Macht, Moral und Mehrheiten: Der politische Katholizismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und den USA seit 1960 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2006). One may wonder though if enough attention went to the way Latin American migrants currently are transforming Catholic behaviour in the United States. See Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, la fin d’un monde, Paris: Bayard, 2002; Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000); Grace Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Voyé, ‘Religion in Modern Europe,’ in Inoué, ed., Globalization and Indigenous Culture. Erik Sengers, ‘The Dutch, Their Gods and the Study of Religion in the Post-War Period,’ in Sengers, ed., The Dutch and Their Gods, 11–24; Erik Sen-

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Patrick Pasture gers, Aantrekkelijke kerk: vernieuwingsbewegingen in kerkelijk Nederland op de religieuze markt (Delft: Eburon, 2009). An interesting case study is Peter Versteeg, ‘Transcultural Christian Routes: The “Non-Religious” Experience of God in a Dutch Vineyard Church,’ in Hans Krabbendam and Derek Rubin, eds., Religion in America: European and American Perspectives (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004), 291–300. Compare Jenkins, The Next Christendom. In Belgium for example the Catholic Charismatic Movement enjoyed the support of the internationally renowned archbishop Card. L.E. Suenens as well as of the royal family. Gijs Noels, ‘Geschiedenis van de Katholieke Charismatische Vernieuwing in Vlaanderen’ (unpublished licentiate’s thesis KU Leuven, History, 2007), 68–75. Also in France reactions were rather positive but with reservations. Gérard Cholvy, ‘L’éclosion du renouveau,’ in Gérard Cholvy and Yves-Marie Hilaire, eds., Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine (Toulouse: Privat, vol. 3, 1988), 453–62; Jacques Prévotat, Être chrétien en France au XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 243–56. Compare the negative reactions reported in Britain: Brown, Religion and Society, 265–6. Davie, Religion in Modern Europe; Patrick Pasture, ‘Christendom since the Sixties: Between the Secular City and the Age of Aquarius,’ Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 97, no. 1 (2004): 82–117. See in particular for the Netherlands James C. Kennedy, ‘Recent Dutch Religious History and the Limits of Secularization,’ in Sengers, ed., The Dutch and Their Gods, 27–42, at 37–9. Afe Adogame, Roswith Gerloff, and Klaus Hock, eds., Christianity in Africa and the African Diaspora (London: Continuum, 2009); Kim Knudde, ‘’We did not come here as tenants, but as landlords’: Nigerian Pentecostals and the Power of Mamps,’ African Diaspora 2 (2009): 133–58; Gerrie ter Haar, Halfway to Paradise: African Christians in Europe (Cardiff: Academic Press, 1998); Jenkins, God’s Continent, 87–102; Rijk van Dijk, ‘Ghanese pinkstergemeenten en kosmopolitische identiteiten in Nederland,’ in Isabel Hoving, Hester Dibbits, and Marlou Schrover, eds., Cultuur en migratie in Nederland: Veranderingen van het alledaagse 1950–2000 (Den Haag: SDU, 2005), 353–74. G.A.F. Hellemans, ‘From “Catholicism Against Modernity” to the Problematic “Modernity of Catholicism,”’ Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network 8 (2001): 117–27, at 124. The idea of ‘longing without belonging’ was originally formulated by Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 252. Callum G. Brown, ‘Secularization, the Growth of Militancy and the Spiritual Revolution: Religious Change and Gender Power in Britain,

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1901–2001,’ Historical Research 80, no. 209 (August 2007): 393–418. A similar argument was advanced by Jan De Maeyer and Staf Hellemans, ‘Katholiek reveil, katholieke verzuiling en dagelijks leven,’ in Jaak Billiet, ed., Tussen bescherming en verovering. Sociologen en historici over zuilvorming (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988), 171–200. Yves Lambert, ‘A Turning Point in Religious Evolution in Europe,’ Journal of Contemporary Religion 19, no. 1 (2004) 29–45; Norris and Inglehart, ‘Uneven Secularization,’ 38. Dobbelaere and Billiet, in ‘Late 20th Century Trends in Catholic Religiousness,’ criticize Lambert’s data. Recent research on New Age in the Netherlands shows for example that belief in incarnation, which increased between 1981 and 1999, is again decreasing. Joep de Hart, ‘Postmoderne spiritualiteit,’ in Ton Bernts, Gerard Dekker, and Joep de Hart, God in Nederland 1996–2006 (Kampen: Ten Have, 2007), 118–92. Pasture, ‘Religion in Contemporary Europe’; Grace Davie, ‘Global Civil Religion: A European Perspective,’ Sociology of Religion 62, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 455–73, esp. 467–8; Voyé, ‘Religion in Modern Europe.’ See the different contributions in Banchoff, ed., Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism; Byrnes and Katzenstein, eds., Religion in an Expanding Europe; Motzkin and Fisher, eds., Religion and Democracy in Contemporary Europe; Lucia Faltin and Melanie J. Wright, eds., The Religious Roots of Contemporary European Identity (London and New York: Continuum, 2007); Michalski, ed., Religion in the New Europe. For example, Steve Bruce, God Is Dead, 75–105; Adam Possamai, In Search of New Age Spiritualities (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Steven J. Sutcliffe and Marion Bowman, Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). Stephen Sutcliffe, Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices (London: Routledge, 2003), 223. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture, 514–24, at 514; Dick Houtman and Stef Aupers, ‘The Spiritual Turn and the Decline of Tradition: The Spread of Post-Christian Spirituality in 14 Western Countries,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46, no. 3 (2007): 305–20, esp. 306–8; Françoise Champion, ‘Logique des bricolages: retours sur la nébuleuse mystique-ésotérique et au-delà: Socio-anthropologie de la rencontre des médecines,’ Recherches sociologiques 35, no. 1 (2004): 59–77. Massimo Introvigne, ‘After the New Age: Is There a Next Age?’ in Mikael Rothstein, ed., New Age Religion and Globalization (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2001), 58–69. See also Charles H. Lippy, Pluralism Comes of Age: American Religious Culture in the Twentieth Century (Armonk, NY, and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), 103; Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers, 86.

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86 Casanova, ‘Religion, European Secular Identities, and European Integration.’ On the proselytizing of Islam in Europe see Lisbeth Rocher and Fatima Cherqaoui, D’une foi l’autre: Les conversions à l’islam en Occident (Paris: Seuil, 1986); Stefano Allievi and Felice Dassetto, ‘Conversions à l’islam en Europe/Conversions to Islam in Europe,’ Social Compass 46, no. 3 (2000): 243–362; Stefano Allievi, Les convertis à l’islam: Les nouveaux musulmans d’Europe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998); Anne Sofie Roald, New Muslims in the European Context : The Experience of Scandinavian Converts (Leiden: Brill, 2005). 87 Compare Hans G. Knippenberg, ‘Europe: Arena of Pluralization and Diversification of Religions,’ Journal of Religion in Europe 1 (2008): 133–55. Obviously American pluralism is the result of a long drawn out process: for overviews see William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003); Lippy, Pluralism Comes of Age; Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). On the European difficulty to cope with diversity see especially Casanova, ‘Religion, European Secular Identities, and European Integration’ and ‘Immigration and the New Religious Pluralism.’ 88 Jenkins, ‘The Center and the Fringe.’ 89 Bruce, God Is Dead, 204, however, maintains that immigration and charismatic renewal do not compensate for the loss of mainline denominations. 90 See the different contributions in Banchoff, ed., Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism’; Byrnes and Katzenstein, eds., Religion in an Expanding Europe; and Gabriel Motzkin and Yochi Fisher, eds., Religion and Democracy in Contemporary Europe (London: Alliance, 2008) (particularly the contributions of José Casanova). 91 Bruce, God Is Dead, 139. 92 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, ‘Prospects for the Globalization of New Age: Spiritual Imperialism versus Cultural Diversity,’ and Liselotte Frisk, ‘Globalization or Westernization? New Age as a Contemporary Transnational Culture,’ both in Rothstein, ed., New Age Religion and Globalization, 15–30 and 31–41. Sutcliffe, Children of the New Age, 223.

16 Echoes and Fragments: Popular Christianity, British Nostalgia, and Post-Independence India stephen heathorn

During the night of 20 January 1949, a remarkable event happened in the northern Indian city of Kanpur.1 Under the cover of darkness, contractors hired by the British High Commission in New Delhi deconstructed a stone structure that for more than eighty-five years had sat on a British burial site. With the building removed, the high mound on which it had stood was levelled – the Bishop of Lucknow’s adviser, who oversaw the operation, had insisted that the whole site be ‘obliterated’ – so as to make it impossible to see where the mound had been, and to leave no trace of the site’s former significance.2 The stones of the structure – an elaborate Gothic Screen and a marble Angel sculpture – were then transported to All Souls Memorial Church in Kanpur, where they were partially reconstructed. After the effacement of the mound, a simple tablet was laid to indicate that the site was a former Christian burying ground.3 This step was taken so that nothing would be built on the site in the future. As the official in the British High Commission in New Delhi who had hired the contractors noted, ‘it is hallowed ground to all British and indeed all Christian people, and even the slightest possibility of a secular building – not to say a Hindu Temple or a Mosque – being erected over it is abhorrent.’4 The thirty acres of gardens that surrounded the site were then donated to the city of Kanpur. What was so remarkable about this event? Well, firstly, the structure destroyed was the Cawnpore Memorial Well, the monument over the mass grave of the approximately 125 British men, women, and children who had been executed in Cawnpore during the 1857 Indian Rebellion – a site believed to have been more visited by Europeans in the late nineteenth century than the Taj Mahal, and widely understood as one of the three or four most significant British monumental struc-

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tures of the Raj.5 Secondly, the effacement of the site was accomplished eighteen months after the British had partitioned and ceded authority of their South Asian empire to the new nations of India and Pakistan, and done so entirely on the initiative of the remaining British community, the Anglican Church in India, and the British High Commission in New Delhi. Lastly, it was accomplished as secretly as possible so as to reduce publicity and not offend the sensibilities of the British public.6 The destruction of the Memorial Well, driven entirely by political fears that the monument would be used to whip up Indian nationalist sentiment, highlights the degree to which politics, Christianity, and remembrance in, and of, the Raj were interconnected for the British even after they had relinquished control of the subcontinent. What about the fate of less exalted British graves and burial sites in South Asia? Strikingly, public debates about cemeteries and the British Christian dead ‘left behind’ in South Asia also arose immediately after decolonization. The sudden importance of Christian symbolism for the British community in newly independent India suggests that this spike in concern was connected to other cultural needs. For while there is no doubt that during the Raj, the British viewed their own community in South Asia through a Christian prism, political considerations after the rebellion of 1857 had led to caution about overt displays of Christian zeal by the imperial state and tension between the British community and missionaries.7 This tension has been reflected in the historiography of the Raj. Christianity has, of course, long been seen as connected with British imperialism, if only through stock phrases such as ‘the civilizing mission,’ and the amount of scholarship on Christian missionaries within the British Empire in general and the Indian Empire in particular is now very large.8 But surprisingly, as Jeffrey Cox perceptively noted in 2002, scholars of imperialism in non-settler colonies like India have nonetheless generally treated Christianity as largely marginal to the working of the imperial world. Conventional imperial historians have tended to separate Christianity from the politics and administration of the Raj, post-colonial critics have simply assumed it was the handmaiden of the imperial state, and many historians of religion and missionary activity have succumbed to what Cox characterizes as a providentialist master narrative.9 Some more recent work does speak directly to the impact of missionary activity overseas on culture and politics back in Britain, but Cox’s general point about the character of much imperial history especially for the twentieth century, still pertains to the Raj.10 Yet, for many British Indians,11 Christianity

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provided explicit justification for the British presence in India in the first place, or provided a rationale somewhat at odds with the political economy of imperialism.12 For others again, with differing levels of self-consciousness, it provided the structure to Western rationalism and progress, and thereby lent coherence to the British presence, the history of the Raj, and the obligations of the West. Of course, the history of British rule in South Asia was not solely determined by the religious beliefs of British imperialists; it is hard in any case to disentangle the precise meaning or role of ‘religion’ in the imperial context.13 Aside from work on missionaries, few scholars of the Raj have cared to try.14 But, as Studdert-Kennedy has argued, the language of belief, interpretation, and judgment – a frame of viewing the world through an essentially Christian perspective – was pervasive throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among the British community despite the evident hardening of racial categories and caution about interfering with the beliefs of the ‘natives’ after 1857.15 In the cantonments, church parade was as central an institution as the barrack parade and the Club. Respectable British society in the cities, too, routinely observed many Christian traditions and rituals, likely with the same diversity of intensity evident in Britain.16 Indeed, while praising the progress of missionary activity among the Indian population, evangelicals expressed anxiety about the real depth of British Christian observance in India in the Raj’s twilight years.17 Despite these fears there is every reason to think that Christianity, in Callum Brown’s terms, retained its ‘base of discursivity’18 within the British Indian community until the end of the Raj. Strikingly, oral history interviews of former British Indians in the 1970s and 80s, rarely asked about the religious views of their subjects – itself perhaps an indication of the power of the belief in secularization on the part of those conducting interviews for books, radio, and television programs about the Raj19 – but when the religious views of British Indians did arise, a typical response was that of Leslie C. Johnson, who noted: What really saved everything was that the question of religion is very much a private thing, leaving aside processions in some Catholic countries. Religion that doesn’t come out onto the streets so you didn’t have vast Christian processions blowing trumpets and beating gongs and what have you and sort of uptrooding [sic] on the privacy of and the life of Hindus and Muslims, the Christian religion centred round the church and when the doors of the church were shut then the Christian religion was

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exercised in the home, so it was a very unobtrusive thing and its unobtrusiveness made it acceptable because it didn’t impinge on anything else.20

This view, that the ‘religious’ views of British Indians were largely a private matter conforms to the conventional secularization thesis21 and yet glosses over the degree to which Christianity not only informed the perspective of the British in other spheres of life, but also occluded the degree to which British imperial narratives were beholden to Christian – and specifically Protestant – tropes and themes, and highlights Cox’s point about the ‘presumption of marginality’ in conventional histories of the imperial endeavour.22 The very public debate about, and subsequent state action on, what to do with European cemeteries in South Asia after decolonization belies this conventional assumption that British Christianity had become privatized and unobtrusive. Death rites have been among the most resilient of all Christian rituals: ‘The great majority of west Europeans continued to be buried or cremated with Christian rites’ into the 1980s with the vast majority of funerals held at a place of worship.23 Julie-Marie Strange, in her Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, provides an argument for why this has been so, suggesting that from the late nineteenth century on, ‘the secular/ popular and the spiritual/official languages of belief were not mutually exclusive … That belief was complex and amorphous suggests the potential for the burial service to be appropriated by individuals and perpetually recast and redefined.’24 A basic vocabulary of death and grief borrowed from the Christian tradition, and a belief in the spiritual transcendence of the deceased to an afterlife retained its currency among those otherwise distant from institutional, ‘official’ religion throughout the twentieth century. This accords with Sarah Williams’s definition of ‘popular religion’ within Britain – ‘a generally shared understanding of religious meaning including both folk beliefs as well as formal and officially sanctioned practices and ideas, operating within a loosely bound interpretive community’25 – which, I suggest, well describes the perspective that underpinned the public debates about burial, graveyards, and cemeteries in South Asia after decolonization. It has been well established that internment and the marking of graves/ remains with Christian-inspired memorial monuments were valued as important registers of personal and familial commemoration throughout the twentieth century in British society (although after the horrors of the First World War, cremation came into vogue through the symbolism of the purification over the putrefaction of flesh).26 For David

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Cannadine, funerals and memorials provided occasions and places ‘for the living to enter into contacts, conversations, and exchanges that transcend the grief of loss,’27 while Thomas Kselman argues that cemeteries provide a ‘fruitful site’ for considering the relationship of Christianity to national identity, and ‘for measuring the extent to which this identity can be understood as “dechristianised.”’28 The living’s relationship to the physical remains of the dead are an important part of culture that can tell us about the place of ‘religious’ views within that culture.29 For a brief period in the early 1950s, calls to ‘protect’ Christian cemeteries in South Asia became a hotly debated issue, though this faded as bureaucratic efforts to appease differing constituents prevailed. The shock of the collapse of the Indian Empire for the British Indian community seems to have sharpened their sense of Christian obligation in the immediate aftermath of independence in 1947. For the British could not take their dead with them when their governmental institutions left India and Pakistan. With their political power eroded, the symbolism and rhetoric of their Christian values – however generic/popular this might have been in practice – became much more visible. With British culture no longer in the ascendant, one key constituent element of that culture came to the fore. In the 1970s, however, nostalgia for an empire lost became wedded to familial remembrance of dead ancestors in a manner that suggested that even popular religious rhetoric was increasingly less relevant in the preservation of the memory and monuments to the Raj’s British dead. This story reaffirms that when engaging the secularization thesis (or more particularly, dechristianization) we need to avoid positing the duality of a declining ‘religious’ and a rising ‘secular’ culture. The sacred and the secular are implicated within each other, co-dependent in fact, and together are thoroughly infused and cross-cut with politics.30 Both are contingent, overlapping forms of mutable human culture and need to be studied not as an isolated problem of the rise or fall of ‘religion’ but of the always ongoing transformations of culture. Decolonization and the Dead At independence in August 1947, one of the unresolved issues existing between the United Kingdom and the sovereign governments of India and Pakistan was what would happen to the nearly 1.5 million British graves, and thousands of memorials, monuments, and statues left behind by the British. It was evident that domestic public opinion

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required the British to engage in some sort of preservationist campaign, and the first British High Commissioner in New Delhi, Sir Terence Shone (1947–8), charged Brigadier Humphrey Bullock with surveying and registering a complete list of all British monuments, memorials, and graves within the subcontinent for the new and hastily created British Monuments and Graves Section (BMGS) of the High Commission (initially this was to be responsible for both India and Pakistan). This was the first time that a comprehensive survey of British cemeteries and gravesites in South Asia had been compiled. The BMGS, along with the Indian Office of the Imperial War Graves Commission (whose remit was strictly cemeteries of military graves), was charged in December 1947 with the maintenance and supervision of British cemeteries and monuments within India and Pakistan (although the BMGS was based in New Delhi). Eventually it was determined that there were some 3,700 known burial sites across India and Pakistan, of varying size and condition; approximately 1,350 of them were civil cemeteries or graveyards of significant size or that contained the remains of noteworthy individuals.31 Even though the question was raised repeatedly in Parliament on the behalf of concerned constituents in the months after independence,32 a policy of annual upkeep of all the locations charted was seen as prohibitively expensive – prior to independence more than £45,000 had been spent annually on the largest and most prominent sites – as there was little political will to ask the British taxpayer to foot the bill in perpetuity. Yet, a proposal to simply ‘level’ all British cemeteries mooted in the Daily Telegraph at the end of 1947 met with such outrage that officials in both London and South Asia concurred that some form of official measures had to be undertaken.33 While military graves would continue to be cared for by the Imperial War Graves Commission, contingency plans therefore had to be drawn up for the remainder, with the High Commissions paying for minimal upkeep through the BMGS in the meantime. It was initially agreed that London should be asked to launch a public appeal for funds to finance the maintenance of the cemeteries in India and Pakistan, but because it was deemed impolitic for the former imperial government to intervene in the domestic affairs of the new states, actual maintenance of burial sites would be conducted through the agency of local Diocesan Committees. The idea of canvassing for funds in Britain, however, was dropped in early 1949 ‘as the prospective results of such an appeal were not good and the times were inauspicious.’34 This was a reference to the financially straightened

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circumstances of the difficult period of reconstruction in Britain after the Second World War. Bullock’s discussions with the Metropolitan35 in 1948, meanwhile, had led to a policy of designating all cemeteries ‘open’ or ‘closed’ depending on the circumstances of the communities within which they were located. Open cemeteries were those that continued to be used and therefore ought to be financially supported by local Christian communities; closed cemeteries were those now in disuse, and they would be ‘tidied’ up once or twice a year by funds provided through the BMGS. A handful of the more ‘historically important’ closed cemeteries would also receive more sustained maintenance from the BMGS. In response to these proposals, the Treasury in London agreed in February 1949 to the creation of a £50,000 fund held in trust by the government of India, but administered by the British High Commission in New Delhi (with disbursements to Pakistan as needed), with the interest and capital to be drawn down for maintenance of important closed cemeteries over the following ten years, while accepting individual requests for support from open cemeteries until they became self-supporting.36 Private endowments of cemeteries or graves would continue to be applied to their upkeep where possible, but a large number of closed cemeteries were to be allowed to ‘return to nature.’ By the time of the March 1949 announcement of the policy in Parliament, some 350 cemeteries had been designated ‘open’ with the remainder deemed closed. Approximately 10 per cent of the closed cemeteries were considered too remote or inaccessible for even the occasional BMGS care and were immediately allowed to return to nature.37 Meanwhile, 312 voluntary local cemetery committees were formed to take care of the rest, usually from representatives of the clergy, local industry or business, the United Kingdom Citizens’ Association, and the Anglo-Indian Association. In certain areas it was admitted ‘the local body will consist, through force of circumstances, of only a solitary missionary or local Christian.’38 Assurances were obtained from the governments of India and Pakistan and from the provincial governments concerned, that they would protect cemeteries from destruction, encroachment, and desecration in the same way as property belonging to the governments themselves. For those burial sites allowed to return to nature, Bullock provided detailed instructions on how inscriptions should be transcribed and original placements recorded.39 Throughout this process it was apparent that the High Commission representatives had quite different motives for the preservation of

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cemeteries and monuments than did the representatives of the general British community. As Bullock explained, ‘the High Commissioners [of both India and Pakistan] represented that it would be a serious mistake to adopt at that stage any general policy of abandonment of cemeteries. The effect on British prestige of such a course of action ought to be considered from both the Home and local angle, and though sentiment might diminish in time, whatever the manner in which the policy of general abandonment was put over, there was likely to be a storm if it were done now.’40 Consequently, ‘as a matter of policy’ certain cemeteries ‘which were of special historical interest or importance should receive preferential treatment in the distribution of subventions from the Treasury grant for cemetery maintenance … In selecting them the principal factors were their historical importance, their interest as a part of the British story in India, the existence in them of the graves of distinguished persons, and their accessibility to tourists.’41 In reality, there was never enough money to do even this adequately. Bullock noted in January 1950 that requests for large sums of money for repair of cemeteries must usually be ‘stalled’ by suggesting (misleadingly) that endowment funds for the year had not yet been received from the government of India.42 In contrast, there was considerable debate among the remaining European population in India about the disposition of cemeteries and monuments, with a long-running debate in the Statesman (New Delhi) about the appropriateness of moving monuments or allowing burial grounds to return to nature. From both India and Britain, advocates for actively preserving British graves, cemeteries, and other monuments in situ also pressed the Commonwealth Relations Office.43 This renewed public interest in British graves and cemeteries at this time is striking given the relative neglect of such sites during the period of the Raj itself. H.E. Busteed described Calcutta’s European graveyards in 1908 as hastening to ruin, largely uncared for and ignored. He and others ascribed this neglect to what Liz Buettner has called the ‘peripatetic impermanence’ of the British during the Raj.44 With so many British Indians planning to leave the subcontinent at the end of their appointments or careers, their thoughts about what happened to their family and friends after death tended to be centred on Britain, not South Asia. Still, many individual graves in South Asian cemeteries were provided with endowments for their care by those who could afford to do so.45 A particularly lively debate emerged in the Statesman in 1950 over the crumbling old British cemeteries of Calcutta – particularly the South

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Park Street Cemetery.46 Remaining British Indians, repatriated ‘old India hands,’ and the local Indian Christian community debated in the press the High Commission’s policy on ‘open’ and ‘closed’ cemeteries and on a local proposal to turn the South Park St Cemetery into a Garden of Remembrance. For proponents of the measure, such as Mrs Vivian Davidson of Calcutta, it was argued that ‘our first duty should be towards the living. I therefore think that the best plan would be to convert these old cemeteries into Gardens of Remembrance with beautiful flowers grown in them.’47 This was supported by P. Jackson from Calcutta48 and R.V. Robinson in New Delhi, who also suggested ‘that all graves be demolished and Gardens brought into being. In the centre of each Garden a single monument in the shape of a cross with a pyramid as its base should be erected. On the pyramid’s surface should be engraved … the names of all those [former] graves … in the garden.’49 Some others suggested preserving the memory of the dead through providing surfaces for inscriptions or common monuments or the safeguarding of existing tablets and tombstones but not necessarily at the original gravesites.50 While these remaining British residents favoured these ideas because they provided amenities for the present while allowing for sites of remembrance of the past departed, far many more opposed the idea outright.51 The mere suggestion of moving tombs or separating markers from graves was referred to by many as sacrilege and desecration.52 As M.R. Pedlow of Rangoon wrote: ‘The monuments on the graves of the dead buried there are for remembrance and the lands are sacred.’ The proposal to convert the cemetery into gardens was thus absurd and ‘against the principles of Christian faith.’53 Indeed, the sacredness of British gravesites was a touchstone in many of the contributions to the debate, especially among those who worried about upkeep of the sites in the future. A.R. Gill (the Honour Secretary of Dehra Dan Cemetery Committee) was one who took this line, adding that his community was ‘hurt’ that the church dignitaries supported the Park St Gardens idea. ‘We consider that the proposal … would be an act of vandalism. Is there no fear that the Gardens of Remembrance would, within a few years, look like dilapidated portions of the once beautiful Calcutta Maidan?’ If fifty European families could maintain the Dehra Dan cemetery, surely the 50,000 Europeans and Anglo-Indians in Calcutta could raise the money to save the Calcutta ones.54 Miss L. Michael (Calcutta) also used the problem of maintaining the converted site as an argument against converting cemeteries: ‘Will the Christian Burial Board be responsible

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for their [Gardens] upkeep? We have before our eyes Curzon Gardens and Eden Gardens – both were Calcutta beauty spots, but where is their beauty now? The Gardens may meet with the same fate, so why desecrate sacred grounds?’55 Similarly, Yunas Dayal (Secretary of the Christian Laymen’s Party, Delhi) took this line by focusing on practicalities: ‘If the [Calcutta Christian Burial] Board is prepared to spend money to dismantle graves and convert the graveyards into Gardens, why should it not spend the money on the upkeep of theses graves?’56 So too did correspondents with ancestors interned in the cemetery. Mrs A. Catchick (Calcutta) was typical of many of these, referring to a family vault in Park St dating to 1799, which was still in good repair ‘and always cared for.’ She vehemently opposed the proposal to turn the cemetery into gardens – ‘it would be sacrilege’ – especially as she understood internments had happened there within the past ten years.57 One sub-debate was over the possibility of reusing the cemeteries’ graves, for ‘the need for graveyards is great.’58 Although it was common practice prior to the nineteenth century, many letter writers expressed horror at this possibility in the mid-twentieth century; some were surprised that the church could even countenance the moving of graves or reusing them, with one suggesting that they ‘had never heard of a Christian burial ground being converted into a garden.’59 M.D. Rath of Basdeopur was worried that the debate was veering into ‘misplaced sentiment for the familiar objects rather than for those buried there. The existing monuments are unsightly but they should not be desecrated.’ Rath proposed demolishing the masonry, but keeping the inscribed tablets, and resetting them in the grounds.60 H. Mountain (Hon. Secretary of the Catholic Association of Bengal) concurred that converting the cemeteries ‘would run the risk of wounding the religious feelings of Christians’ and these grounds should thus be reopened for burials by removing the old masonry and keeping only those monuments of interest ‘as is now being done in the Lower Circular Rd cemetery.’61 Others, like W. Fegan of Calcutta, suggested an egalitarian revision of the cemetery in which all the graves should be reconstructed ‘in a uniform manner’ using the materials from the demolished masonry of old tombs.62 Yet, as S.A. Smith of Srinagar noted, there was nothing in the Christian tradition about corpses being equivalent to men: ‘Let us not talk or write or think of anyone lying buried there in those old graves.’63 But clearly some were worried that moving graves or converting the ground of graveyards would disturb ‘spirits.’64 Others rejected such superstition and called for the cemeteries to be turned into sites for hos-

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pitals or homes for the poor – again, privileging the needs of the living over the dead.65 It is significant that almost all the contributors discussed the South Park St Cemetery issue within the frame of popular Christian sentiment. Whereas a few correspondents and the British High Commission representatives worried about burial sites from the point of view of British heritage and prestige, the majority of correspondents focused on the sacrality of burial grounds or of the interred bodies. But also, the theological shakiness of some of the responses suggests that, like John Wolffe’s example of the powerful imagery of St Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz,66 it was the fusion of popular Christianity with the national/imperial symbolism of the tombstones and monuments that most excited comment. This is most evident in the fact that the South Park St Cemetery was, as most cemeteries are designed to be, an inclusive civic space for internment, as much ‘secular’ as ‘sacred.’ The move towards establishing cemeteries away from churchyards developed within Britain only from the second decade of the nineteenth century, but in India the practice was well established by the mid-eighteenth century.67 Although generally regarded as ‘sacred,’ cemeteries are actually usually ‘secular’ institutions designed for the entire community.68 As James Curl, Thomas Laqueur, and others have argued, the experience of European burial practices in South Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was to have an important influence on internment practices back in Europe.69 Calcutta’s South Park St Cemetery, for instance, was established in 1767, some forty years before the celebrated model of European cemeteries, Père-Lachaise in Paris. Usually, cemeteries were designed to serve an entire community, with their catchment being an entire district or town, although within the cemetery, religious, ethnic, or social divisions historically ordered the landscape and these internal layouts facilitated familial control over graves and the conduct of funerary ritual.70 But what then makes them ‘sacred’ spaces? Sacredness, as Durkheim famously delineated, is an entirely contingent attribute that results from actors choosing to implement sets of negotiable social rules rather than from some inner quality expressed or manifested in the world. Cemeteries certainly differ from ad hoc sites of corpse disposal: they have been designated as burial sites in advance of the arrival of human remains to be buried, and they facilitate burial in a ritualized manner, consistent with the specific ethnic, customary, and religious traditions of the community.71 It does not matter if those who participated in these funeral rites understood the details of the par-

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ticular theology of their denomination or if their burial sites were consecrated: for most, it was a customary expectation (a cultural legacy of Christian precepts about death)72 that the dead and their resting place be treated with particular respect. Much of this respect rested largely on the fact that the site acted as a ‘context for grief, and that the bereaved need to be protected from inappropriate activity.’73 This explains the strict regulations and high-quality maintenance practices that were often applied to cemeteries when first in use, but which often became more relaxed as time passed, the cemetery aged and filled. An important feature of cemeteries as they developed over the nineteenth century was their user’s concern to facilitate the memorializing of an individual ‘in perpetuity.’ Cemeteries came to be organized so as to allow for the ‘users’ to locate an individual grave. Through the use of paths and other dividers, the cemetery has an internal order to its landscape, and the establishment of registered documentation provides ‘addresses’ for the dead. In Britain the reuse of graves was a common feature of churchyards before the nineteenth century but never became a part of burial culture in cemeteries; graves in the latter were widely understood to be perpetual resting places of remains that would remain undisturbed for all time. Markers, from the simple plaque to the elaborate monument, ensured that the remains would be untouched, while also allowing for expressions of grief and status to be displayed.74 Clearly this understanding of their permanence was invested in British cemeteries in South Asia by many British Indians and ‘old hands,’ if only vigorously championed after 1947. The Bureaucracy of Cemeteries That politics and culture were entirely intertwined in the discussions about what to do with the British dead became apparent in the official reaction to the issue. Notwithstanding the continuous stream of letters from British citizens asking about the whereabouts of their ancestors’ graves, the location and/or potential disposition of moved memorials or regimental monuments,75 the BMGS efforts dampened concerns about the status of British cemeteries, monuments, and memorials in India in the 1950s. There were some hostile letters and questions in the British House of Commons about the policy allowing smaller cemeteries to ‘return to nature’ and about reports of the desecration of some unguarded sites, but these concerns were brushed off on the grounds that financial necessity made for hard choices regarding what could be

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actively preserved.76 An evolution of bureaucratic policy towards cemeteries continued, however. As of March 1951, the High Commission in Delhi relinquished its responsibility with regards Pakistan; cemeteries there at that point came under the High Commission auspices in Karachi. Both High Commissioners’ responsibility for all churchyard cemeteries ceased as of 31 December 1953. It was agreed that interest from the endowed trust fund would henceforth be paid to the Metropolitan’s office, and his chaplain would distribute the money to regional and local chaplains responsible for cemeteries.77 Moreover, the High Commission ruled that from January 1954, any cemetery within the compound of a church was considered the responsibility of the church and not the local or regional cemeteries board/committee. The decision to make local congregations entirely responsible for the graves in and around their churches was very unpopular with the local church communities. It brought to light, for instance, both problematic past practice and the straitened circumstances of the remaining British population within India. To take but one example: in July 1954, the Rev. T.S. Garrett wrote to W. Wallis Linnel, honorary secretary of the South India Cemeteries Board, regarding his concerns about the open cemetery at Palmcottah. He complained that the Rs.15 a month paid by the Board to this cemetery was stopped in April 1954, and now the cemetery was no longer being cared for. Despite the robust Indian congregation, the ‘English congregation has become very small’ and as Indians had cared for their own separate burial ground since before Independence it would be unreasonable to ask them to now pay for the upkeep of British graves in the churchyard as well.78 In other words, the legacy of past racial exclusion ought not now be borne by the local Indian Christian community. Scores of letters were sent by local cemetery boards to the High Commissions regarding the difficulties of maintaining churchyards transferred to their care in 1954 as well as the sometimes contested issue of who owned or ought to control churchyards and church-connected cemeteries in the mid-1950s.79 Other disputes arose over what exactly counted as a churchyard as opposed to a cemetery, and over the administration of private endowments. In the first case, given the limited powers and resources of the High Commissions, their only way of verifying what were cemeteries as opposed to churchyards was to write to the churches concerned and ask them. This dilemma was a source of endless irritation in New Delhi: ‘The trouble is that the Government of India have to rely on the Churches to furnish this information and the latter, not unnaturally, are

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disinclined to do so because thereafter responsibility for the administration and upkeep of these cemeteries will devolve on them.’ The High Commission wanted to arrange official visits to the various cemeteries to verify their status, then notify the government of India and ‘ask them to delete the cemeteries in question form the list of cemeteries transferred to us in 1948.’80 While attempted, such visits were costly and did not end all disputes. An increasing amount of the correspondence regarding graves in India and Pakistan to High Commissions in the later 1950s and early 1960s were poignant appeals from individuals concerned about the memory of their departed loved ones.81 Typical was the letter from a widow about the pitifully small sum she paid to keep the grave of her husband, L.H. Taylor, a late officer in the Punjab Police in the Jail Road Cemetery in Lahore: ‘If you could please send this cheque to your Lahore office and ask them to please cash it and pay the amount to the Mali in charge of the Cemetery who will give a receipt. I have no way of getting this subscription paid in [sic] otherwise his grave will be neglected.’82 By the end of the 1950s the funds in the £50,000 trust fund were becoming exhausted, and the High Commissions prepared to deal with future cemetery maintenance without any financing. In Pakistan, where of the 206 cemeteries identified in 1948, 94 had been abandoned, 77 closed, and 35 remained open in 1960 as ‘showpiece’ sites, the High Commission was confident that due to Muslim reverence for all graves the cemeteries there would fare well. But ‘we also feel that because of the interest which United Kingdom citizens, and particularly visitors, have in these cemeteries, the High Commissioner should have his representative on the [cemetery] Boards to give advice as and when it might be requested.’ So while there would no longer be any subsidies after 1960, the official position was that ‘we do not consider that the High Commissioner can or should divest himself of all his responsibilities for the maintenance of cemeteries in Pakistan.’83 With such a small British population outside the big cities, here the motive for the continuing interest of the High Commission remained mostly maintaining British prestige and heading off potential complaints from the ex-Raj community in Britain. In this context, it was noted, with some relief, that most ‘abandoned cemeteries were reverting to nature in a “dignified and decent manner.”’84 In India, the end of the trust fund was viewed with more anxiety. In a nutshell, there remained fear of a ‘public controversy in the United Kingdom’ if cemeteries were abandoned now, particularly because the

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experience of the past dozen years had shown that some abandoned cemeteries were habitually desecrated.85 Consequently, it was decided the right course is for us to continue to carry out our responsibilities, though no doubt on a reduced and somewhat muted scale, until the day arrives when … there is no longer any point in interposing the machinery of an overseas diplomatic mission between the Government of India and what I hope will then have become the acknowledged duty of the different Christian Churches in India.86

In practice this meant that the remaining grant money ought to be spent on those cemeteries ‘in the public eye or which have historic significance’ and a consolidation of cemetery boards to accomplish the quiet but progressive abandonment of the rest. Ironically, the High Commission found that ‘having brought the Cemeteries Boards and Cemeteries Committees into being we had not the power to dissolve them again if they wished to remain in being, as was the case with the U.P. Cemeteries Board.’87 Much bureaucratic hand wringing and gnashing of teeth could not untangle the administrative web created in the late 1940s, much to the embarrassment of the Delhi High Commission,88 but in mid-1961, with 558 cemeteries under their control, 242 open and 316 closed, and the funds for cemeteries exhausted, it was conceded that ‘the question of desecration of graves wounding the religious susceptibility of the Christian community will have to be ignored from whatever quarters it may come.’89 Despite this concern, and the actual complaints of some of the ex-Raj community, criticism of the cemeteries policy in India in the early 1960s was limited to some private correspondence.90 And indeed, an appeal launched on architectural preservationist grounds in the late 1950s to restore the South Park St Cemetery monuments generated neither much money nor much debate among the British Indian and exRaj communities.91 The Rise of Raj Nostalgia Concern about cemeteries and memorials to the British dead in South Asia faded, at least as recorded in the archives, in the 1960s. From the mid-1970s, however, interest resumed, spearheaded by a civil society organization, the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA), which was founded by former Cawnpore resident Theon Wilkinson.92 As Elizabeth Buettner has detailed, BACSA has grown over the

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past thirty years to encompass more than 2,000 members, and, in addition to its irregular newsletter the Chowkidar, it has published a number of studies and collections of British memorial culture located in South Asia.93 The organization has also encouraged genealogical research into the British Indian community and its history, with the result that the association’s collected memorial inscriptions, biographies, and family trees now form the core of the British Library’s archive of some 300,000 family records of the British in South Asia during the Raj. The profound emotions generated by remembrance of departed loved ones among BACSA membership and reported in the Chowkidar merely highlight that the motive behind this activity has been largely nostalgic: BACSA has ‘consistently stressed the need to record and commemorate the Raj before it becomes “too late.”’94 Buettner is certainly right to stress the political agenda of such nostalgia. As she notes, the late twentieth-century concern of BACSA with the physical remains of the British Raj was guided by a justifying impulse: the British didn’t just take from South Asia, they gave, they served, and they died (in large numbers) in doing so. The choice of preserving the material remains of the British presence in South Asia, the markers of their dead bodies, is, for Buettner, clearly ideological, as it attests to the ‘Raj’s human contribution: Britons who died in India and can be depicted, literally, as giving their lives on its behalf.’95 In a sense, the focus of BACSA’s position on preserving cemeteries has thus been more akin to those of the High Commission and its BMGS than to those British Indians who took up cemetery preservation immediately after the dismantling of the Raj. Such ex-post facto justification (the reassertion of the value of the British ‘contribution,’ the giving a ‘true picture of life as it was rather than the modern travesties of the Raj’),96 is, in other words, an effort to maintain British prestige in the aftermath of the Empire’s demise by insisting on the ongoing relevance of the objects/sites of remembrance left behind by the British. Despite the poignant stories recorded in the Chowkidar, what is being remembered is not so much the individuals of the Raj, but rather their legacy of service which, if not for BACSA’s efforts to preserve their physical traces in the South Asian landscape, would be forgotten. The British dead and buried of the Raj are to be remembered because the Raj itself is now dead and buried. Undoubtedly the surge in the interest in family history since the 1970s has sustained the activities and membership of BACSA, too, but where the association has had success, as with Calcutta’s South Park Street Cemetery, it has been because they have managed to restore respect for,

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and tranquillity within, former British burial sites.97 Residents of Kolkata who now visit this cemetery may not have any interest whatsoever in the tombs located within it, but BACSA (and its sister organization, the Association for the Preservation of Historical Cemeteries in India)98 in working to both clean up and free the cemetery from ‘non-approved’ activities (cricket, vagrancy, drug dealing, gambling, defecation, etc.), have tried to restore to the site the kind of sacrality that many advocates in the Statesman in 1950 were trying to preserve. The cemetery may in fact now more resemble the gardens of remembrance that some contributors to that debate suggested it ought to become; but those suggestions too were underpinned by a generic Christian frame and were consistent with the pattern of cemetery ‘aging’ elsewhere. The Raj nostalgia that has dominated BACSA’s agenda and membership does not overtly embrace even the generic religiosity of the 1950s debate. So it is perhaps an irony that the justifying nostalgia of BACSA treats the Christianity of the British Community of the Raj in essentially the same way as the post-colonial critics whom Cox critiques. For post-colonial critics, Christianity was simply complicit in imperialism and therefore requires no special attention. For BACSA the Christianity of their ancestors is obvious in the fact of their memorial marking in graveyards and cemeteries, and yet is largely irrelevant to their legacy of accomplishment, devotion, and sacrifice for the Empire. That complex religious beliefs were complicating components of the motives and world view of those who died in and for the British Indian Empire is neither noticed nor commented upon. Conclusion: Remembrance Politics, the Sacred and the Secular For many, the end of imperial rule for the British community living in India was more than just an adjustment; it was a jarring apart of their entire world view. This was not because everyone within this community wholeheartedly subscribed to the British imperial cosmology and organization of things: far from it. The history of British imperial rule throughout the world is one of negotiation between what ideologues and policy makers wanted and what those who actually ran things were prepared to do and live with. Practices, expectations, and beliefs quite antithetical to London’s (or Delhi’s) dictates jostled with those the imperial state promoted. Nevertheless, daily life proceeded within or against certain constraints, opportunities, and expectations that imperial rule had established, and these formed a framing perspective of

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people’s lives. Christian ideas were part of this frame, though these of course were themselves saturated with prior political and social presumptions. Belief in an afterlife, or at the very least an acceptance of perceived Christian rituals for the respectable internment of the dead, remained important for British Indians just as it was for most people back in Britain itself. During the last decades of the Raj, as elsewhere, after the period of bereavement and mourning that followed the death of a family member, only sporadic concern was actually evinced for the care of the sites of burial. However, a sharp spike in interest in these very sites developed immediately after the Raj was disassembled. Ultimately, these response are, I suggest, indicative of the historical contingency of deploying the sacred/secular binary yet point to the lack of usefulness of replicating that binary in explaining changes in the use or understanding of what we call religion in culture. Suggesting that ‘secularization’ or dechristianization is a measurable process of one category of understanding simply replacing another implicitly reinforces the binary, yet, as I have tried to indicate here, politics and culture cut across both the ‘sacred’ and ‘secular.’ Ultimately, as McCutcheon argues, these terms are nothing more or less than co-dependent, portable discursive markers whose relationship we can date to a specific period in early modern Europe.99 Because we tend to see religion as a somehow distinct or unique part of social and cultural life, a form of scholarly idealism creeps into discussions of ‘secularization,’ as if religious beliefs were themselves simple causal forces rather than a form of culture generated by prior socio-political worlds that interact with material and political interests. Of course, it makes sense that secular/sacred distinctions were used by people trying to argue for what to do with the dead or which particular graves they ought to worry about (which ones required ‘public’ upkeep, which ones ought to be left to private organizations/individuals to worry about, etc.). Affirming or establishing faith in certain long-established religious traditions and practices allowed individuals to symbolize their faith in ‘British’ values even if British political rule had been disassembled. Because the imperial state had proclaimed itself the custodian of a particular moral order, decolonization and the assertion of ‘native’ government reopened concepts of morality and faith for the remaining British community and their relatives and allies back in Britain. Thus the concern in the late 1940s and early 1950s over neglect and desecration of these ‘sacred’ sites was framed through Christian precepts – through largely generic ideas and values as opposed to institutionalized or theologically founded ones. Concern with remembrance

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of the Raj continued among former British Indians and their families, but as the British state assumed the onerous bureaucratic maintenance of the sites of burial in South Asia, public debate on the issue diminished. When interest in Raj cemeteries reappeared in the 1970s it was no longer state-supervised, but rather channeled through a civil society organization of ex-Raj residents and their supporters. The cemeteries and their contents remained sites of memory, now echoes and fragments not of popular Christian values, but rather of the vague ‘British contribution’ to the development of South Asia under the Raj. The nostalgia for the Raj that nourishes BACSA no longer draws explicitly on Christian views, even though those values were implicit in the ‘contribution’ that the organization seeks to remember and trumpet. Christianity had importance for the British community in India and their families and supporters in Britain after the Indian Empire collapsed, in part because of the fundamental entwining of politics, culture, and particular Christian ideas during the Raj. This story about crumbling British cemeteries of the Raj and the individuals and groups who have been concerned about their fate points to the need to discuss the changing place of Christian views within wider cultural and political contexts. Just as with the destruction of the Cawnpore Memorial Well – deliberately obliterated by the British to avoid its being attacked or appropriated by Indian nationalists – more prosaic European symbols of death and the afterlife, cemeteries were, and remain, just as implicated with politics. This suggests that debates about ‘secularization’ clearly need to engage with diffuse political culture and socio-political interests as much as religious culture. On the one hand, Christianity – religion as a category as a whole, in fact – ought not to be hived off as something special or sui generis the rise or fall of which needs explanation only in its own terms or in isolation from wider cultural trends.100 On the other hand, popular Christian beliefs were constitutive of the identities of British Indians at mid-century to such an extent that they cannot be studied as something antithetical to or simply ‘complicit’ with imperial ideologies. As Talal Asad notes, the categories of politics and religion implicate one another: ‘Objects, sites, practices, words, representations – even the minds and bodies of worshipers – cannot be confined within the exclusive space of what secularists name religion.’101 Equally, the fact that Raj ‘remembrance’ through BACSA could continue among essentially the same group of people and focusing on the same physical objects, and yet use a quite different rhetoric from the earlier Christian frame of viewing, suggests

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the rapid mutability of British culture in the late twentieth century that itself needs explaining.

NOTES I wish to thank Nancy Christie, Michael Gauvreau, Russell McCutcheon, Projit Murkarji, and Hannah Elias for stimulating suggestions and assistance in preparing this essay, and the participants of the ‘Sixties and Beyond’ conference for feedback on the presentation draft. 1 Prior to renaming in 1948 this was Cawnpore. 2 National Archives: Public Record Office, Kew, London (NA: PRO), DO 142/255, Menzies to Bullock, 17 November 1948. 3 NA: PRO, DO 142/255, ‘Cawnpore Memorial Well.’ 4 Oriental and India Office Library (OIOL), British Library, London, Office of Indian High Commissioner for United Kingdom, 1948, R/4/84, Bullock to Locker. 5 Stephen Heathorn ‘Angel of Empire: The Cawnpore Memorial and British Imperial Remembrance,’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 8, no. 3 (2007), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/toc/cch8.3.html, and ‘The Absent Site of Memory: The Kanpur Memorial Well and the 1957 Centenary Commemoration of the Indian ‘Mutiny,’ in Indra Sengupta, ed., Locating lieux de mémoire in the British Empire (London: GHIL, 2009), 73–116. 6 Heathorn, ‘Absent Site of Memory,’ 102–4. 7 Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share, 4th ed. (London: Longman, 2004), 48–57. 8 For a sampling of the general debates about British missionary and imperial activity see Brian Stanley, Bible and the Flag (Trowbridge: Apollos, 1990), and Stanley, ed., Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001); A.N. Porter, Religion versus Empire: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) and Porter, ed., The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2003); Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For missions in the Indian Empire see G.A. Oddie, Social Protest in India: British Protestant Missionaries and Social Reform, 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979); Duncan Forrester, Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India (London: Curzon Press, 1980); Henriette Bugge, Mission and Tamil Society: Social and Religious Change in South India (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1994).

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9 Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford: Standford University Press, 2002), 7–12. Christianity in India predates the British presence by centuries, of course. See Stephen Neill’s two-volume History of Christianity in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 and 1985); John Webster, A Social History of Christianity: North-west India since 1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Robert Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For an examination of how British Christianity and Indian Hinduism shaped each other during the colonial encounter, see Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), and for British Christianity and Indian Islam, Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses, and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On the debate about Christian conversion in the colonial context see Peter van der Veer, ed., Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity (New York: Routledge, 1996), and on the variability of the meaning of conversion, Gauri Viswanthan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 10 Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); David Turley, The Culture of English Anti-Slavery (London: Routledge, 1991); Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 11 I use this term in the same way that Elizabeth Buettner does in Empire Families (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) to designate those British subjects of European heritage who lived and worked in India during and after the period of the Raj. 12 Gerald Studdert-Kennedy, British Christians, Indian Nationalists and the Raj (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991). See also, Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and van der Veer’s Imperial Encounters. 13 Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘Religion in the British Empire,’ in Sarah Stockwell, ed., The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 131–56. 14 It amounts to the occasional passage in general accounts of Christianity in India (see note 9, and some scattered observations in social histories of the British Indian community. See for instance, Buettner, Empire Families; Mary Procida, Married to the Raj (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); and Margaret Macmillan, Women of the Raj (Toronto: Penguin, 2005); Charles Allen, ed., Plain Tales from the Raj (London: Deutsch, 1975); Pat Barr, Memsahibs (London: Secker and Warburg, 1976); Raleigh Trevelyan, The Golden Oriole: Childhood, Family and Friends in India (London: Secker

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and Warburg, 1987); M.M. Kaye, The Sun in the Morning (London: Viking, 1990), Golden Afternoon (London: Viking, 1997), Enchanted Evening (London: Viking, 1999); Zoe Yalland, Traders and Nabobs: The British in Cawnpore, 1765–1857 (Salisbury: M. Russell, 1987), and Boxwallahs: The British in Cawnpore, 1857–1947 (Norwich: M. Russell, 1994); Marian Fowler, Below the Peacock Fan: First Ladies of the Raj (Markham: Viking, 1987). Studdert-Kennedy, British Christians, 5; Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, 221–69. For this diversity see Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Sarah Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c. 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Michael Snape, God and the British Soldier: Religion and the British Army in the First and Second World War (London: Routledge, 2005); Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth Century Britain (London: Longman, 2006). Studdert-Kennedy, British Christians, 5. Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), 13. The Oriental and India Office Library at the British Library in London has a number of collections of oral histories of former British Indians recorded/transcribed in the 1970s through 1990s. Of the more than one hundred interviews examined only a handful mention Christianity. OIOL, EUR MSS. T. 37, Leslie C. Johnson, Oral History Testimony, 8 May 1974. Born in 1914, he remained in India until 1965. For the importance of the privatization of religion in the secularization thesis, see José Casanova’s critique, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). On the intertwining of religious and national and imperial identities and symbolism, see Hugh McLeod, ‘Protestantism and British National Identity, 1815–1945,’ in van der Leer and Lehmann, eds., Nation and Religion, 44–70, and John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain (London: Routledge, 1994). Hugh McLeod, ‘Introduction,’ in Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds., The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3, and Callum Brown, ‘The Secularisation Decade: The 1960s,’ in ibid., 32. Julie-Marie Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 103. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture, 11. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. 210–52. Unfortunately there is not the space in this chapter to discuss the cultural history of dead bodies.

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27 David Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,’ in Joachim Whaley, ed., Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981), 235. 28 Thomas Kselman, ‘The Dechristianisation of Death in France’ in McLeod and Ustorf, eds., Decline of Christendom, 146. 29 Thomas Kseleman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Avner Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics and Memory in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Peter Jupp and Glennys Howarth, eds., The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997). 30 Talal Asad, ‘Religion, Nation-State, Secularism,’ in Peter van der Leer and Hartmut Lehmann, eds., Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 178–96; Russell McCutcheon, ‘“They Licked the Platter Clean”: On the Co-Dependency of the Religious and The Secular,’ Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 19 (2007): 173–99. 31 OIOL, R/4/290, E.W. Trotman (Indian Civil Service [Retd] Association) to Lord Scarborough, 26 January 1961. The remaining sites were either military cemeteries under the jurisdiction of the Imperial War Graves Commission or very small burial grounds. See the written report presented to both the Lords – House of Lords Debates (HL Deb) 15 March 1949 vol. 161 col. 305–9 – and the Commons – House of Commons Debates (HC Deb), 15 March 1949 vol. 462 col. 175–9. 32 HC Deb, 30 October 1947 vol. 443 col. 96; 5 February 1948 vol. 446 col. 319; 8 April 1948 vol. 449 col. 342; 11 November 1948 vol. 457 col. 1713. 33 The Daily Telegraph, 14 October 1947, and responses for several days thereafter. OIOL, R/4/12, Rev’d B.G Fell to Maynard (Office of High Commission [OHC], New Delhi), 2 February 1948 and Maynard to R.G. Chisholm (Commonwealth Relations Office [CRO]), 11 February 1948. 34 Short History of the British Monuments and Graves Section Office of the High Commissioner for the United Kingdom [Short History of the BMGS] (New Delhi, 1951), 3. 35 In 1947 the Anglican Church divided into the Church Unions of South and North India and called their respective heads, Moderator, but British officials continued to refer to the Bishop of Calcutta as the Metropolitan, viewing him as the de facto head of the church in India. 36 Short History of the BMGS, 3. 37 HC Deb, 15 March 1949 vol. 462 col. 178.

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38 Ibid., col. 177, and Short History of the BMGS, 6. 39 NA: PRO, DO 35/2137, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, Patrick Gordon Walker, to Morgan B. Milton, 7 December 1950. 40 Short History of the BMGS, 4–5. 41 Ibid., 8. 42 OIOL, R/4/8. 43 See the dozens of cuttings collected between May and July 1950 and also personal correspondence regarding British cemetery proposals, particularly in Calcutta, in NA: PRO, DO 35/2137. On Raj nostalgia and sources for BACSA and South Asia cemeteries, I am particularly indebted to Elizabeth Buettner, ‘Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India,’ History and Memory, 18, no. 1 (2006): 5–42. 44 H.E. Busteed, Echoes from Old Calcutta, 4th ed. (London, 1908), 366–7, cited in Buettner, ‘Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia,’ 12. 45 OIOL, R/4/290, H. Smedley (OHC) to D.M. Cleary (CRO), 6 February 1959. 46 The name of the city was changed to Kolkata in 2001. The Statesman, one of India’s oldest English-language newspapers, was founded in Calcutta in 1875 and is directly descended from The Friend of India (founded 1818). The Delhi edition, to which all these citations refer, began publication in 1931. 47 The Statesman, 18 May 1950. 48 Ibid., 20 May 1950. 49 Ibid., 18 May 1950. 50 P.K. Adhicary (Calcutta) 19 May 1950; Alf Dias (Calcutta) and T.C. Katrak (Rangpur) 20 May 1950, all in The Statesman. 51 See the thirty letters hostile to the idea in The Statesman, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, May and 4, 5, 24 June 1950. 52 N.B Fratel (Calcutta) 18 May, 1950; Lilian Griffiths (Madhupur) 19 May, 1950; G.B.B. (Darjeeling) 22 May 1950; Mrs M.A. Cunnigham (Sircar) 23 May 1950; Mrs Margaret Dey (Calcutta) 24 May, 1950; H. Mountain (Calcutta) 27 May, 1950; Mrs A. Catchick (Calcutta) and M.R. Pedlow (Rangoon) 4 June, 1950; H.A. King (Calcutta) 5 June 1950, all in The Statesman. 53 The Statesman, 4 June 1950. 54 Ibid., 19 May 1950. 55 Ibid., 23 May 1950. 56 Ibid., 22 May 1950. 57 Ibid., 4 June 1950. 58 Ibid., 19 May 1950. 59 Miss A.M. Emerson (Calcutta) 20 May 1950. 60 The Statesman, 24 May 1950. 61 Ibid., 27 May 1950. 62 Ibid., 29 May 1950.

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68 69

70 71 72

73

74 75 76

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Ibid., 21 May 1950. A.M. Jackson (Calcutta) 20 May 1950 and W.M.F. (Calcutta) 22 May 1950. Dorothy May (Calcutta) 29 May 1950. Wolffe, God and Greater Britain, 254. For Europe see Howard Colvin, Architecture and the After-Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 367–74; Julie Rugg, ‘Defining the Place of Burial: What Makes a Cemetery a Cemetery?’ Mortality 5, no. 3 (2000): 259–75, and ‘The Emergence of a New Burial Form: Cemetery Development in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,’ in M. Cox, ed., Grave Matters: A History of Burial 1700–1850 (York: Council of British Archaeology, 1998); Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans., Helen Weaver (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). Rugg, ‘Defining the Place of Burial,’ 264. James Curl, A Celebration of Death: An Introduction to Some of the Buildings, Monuments, and Settings of Funerary Architecture in the Western European Tradition (London: Constable, 1980), 135–54, 358–9; Thomas Laqueur, ‘The Places of the Dead in Modernity,’ in Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman, eds., The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 18. Rugg, ‘Defining the Place of Burial,’ 262-63. J. Kolbuszewski, ‘Cemeteries as a Text of Culture,’ in O. Czerner and I. Juszkiewicz, eds., Cemetery Art (Wroclaw: ICOMOS, 1995), 17. Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes towards Death (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) and The Hour of Our Death (New York: Knopf, 1981); Michel Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jous (Paris: Gallimard, 1983); Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Douglas Davies, Death, Ritual and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites, 2nd ed. (London: Continuum, 2002). Rugg, ‘Defining the Place of Burial,’ 264; Richard Etlin, The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). See Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain.’ See the extensive clipping and correspondence files on the issue in NA: PRO, DO 35/2137. OIOL, R/4/416, ‘Desecration and Vandalism in Cemeteries in Madras State, 1950–53’ and R/4/358, ‘Desecration of Graves in Uttar Pradesh.’ On the policy of ‘return to nature,’ NA: PRO DO 142/256, A.J. Brown (OHC, New Delhi) to R.G. Chisholm, 10 May 1950. OIOL, E.L. Sykes (OHC, New Delhi) to J. Burke (Vicar General), R/4/313, 53/CEM/1/496, 25 August 1953.

428 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

98 99 100

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Stephen Heathorn OIOL, R/4/313. OIOL, R/4/313, Saul to Philips (OHC, New Delhi), 9 July 1957. OIOL, R/4/313, Philips to K.R. Crook (Madras), 5 June 1957. OIOL, R/4/290, W.B. Manley to CRO, 23 June 1960. OIOL, R/4/296, E. Taylor (Bishop Cotton School) to OHC, Karachi, 2 April 1956. OIOL, R/4/296, Fowler (OHC, Karachi) to Gibson (CRO), 21 March 1958. OIOL, R/4/296, J.D.B. Shaw (OHC, Karachi) to D.M Cleary, 30 August 1960. OIOL, R/4/416, ‘Desecration and Vandalism in Cemeteries in Madras State, 1950–53’ and R/4/358, ‘Desecration of Graves in Uttar Pradesh.’ OIOL, R/4/290, J.M.C. James to OHC, New Delhi, 14 July 1959. OIOL, R/4/290, H. Smedley to Wickson, 7 March 1960. OIOL, R/4/290, H. Smedley to D.M. Cleary, 6 February 1959. OIOL, R/4/290, E.W. Trotman to Lord Scarborough, 26 January 1961. OIOL, R/4/290, Wickson memo, 26 June 1959 and W.B. Manley to CRO, 23 June 1960. R. Pearson, ‘A Calcutta Cemetery,’ Architectural Review 119 (July 1957): 79–80. T. Wilkinson, ‘The Beginning of BASCA’ Tenth Anniversary Souvenir Chowkidar, 1. Buettner, ‘Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia,’ 30. For example, Maryanne Steggles, Statues of the Raj (London: BASCA, 1996). Buettner, ‘Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia,’ 14–15. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 17, citing BASCA literature. Ibid., 31, on BACSA’s increasing involvement with genealogists; and 25–6 for discussion within BACSA on the uses of South Park St Cemetery in the 1980s. Buettner, ‘Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia,’ 25. Russell McCutcheon, The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric (London: Routledge, 2003). Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: New York University Press, 1997). Asad, ‘Religion, Nation-State, Secularism,’ 192.

17 Bone Idol? British Catholics and Devotion to St Thérèse of Lisieux ALANA HARRIS

Introduction Writing in the tabloid daily The Mirror on 22 September 2009 under the headline ‘Pope Idol,’ Matt Roper described in rapturous terms the arrival in Britain of an international celebrity who ‘makes the crowds swoon, is booked to the end of next year and after landing on British soil for the first time is the hottest ticket in town – not bad considering she’s been dead for 100 years.’1 He was speaking in highly ironic, but also genuinely perplexed, terms about the celebrated visitation of the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux – a nineteenth-century Carmelite nun who died at the age of twenty-four of tuberculosis and was canonized in 1925. To celebrate the centenary of her death in 1997, the religious keepers of her immensely popular shrine in Normandy decided to inaugurate a ‘reverse pilgrimage’ by taking her relics on tour. Now, twelve years on, the relics have visited over forty-six countries and have been seen by millions of devoted followers. During her visit to England and Wales in September 2009, over 300,000 people availed themselves of the opportunity to see the thigh bone and foot of the saint known as ‘the Little Flower,’ presented in the form of a silver, church-shaped reliquary within a jacaranda wood casket taken to twenty-eight locations across the country (figure 17.1). Crowds arrived in their thousands – Westminster Cathedral in London, for example, was kept open for fifty-eight hours straight to allow an estimated 2,000 pilgrims per hour to pass by the relics and to say a prayer, to touch the perspex-covered casket (sometimes with an object), to leave a pink rose, or to light a candle. After a brief introduction to the life of this woman and an explanation of why she is known as ‘the greatest saint of the twentieth century,’

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Figure 17.1 Some of the 30,000 pilgrims who visited the relics in Salford Cathedral, 25–7 September 2009. Author’s photo.

this chapter will explore the beliefs and experiences of some of the men and women who visited her relics in Manchester, based upon thousands of written prayers and reflections collected at the Cathedral in Salford between 25 and 27 September 2009.2 From this large-scale qualitative material it will be argued that distinctly ‘modern’ preoccupations and motivations emerge, related to contemporary spiritual aspirations centred on the family and holistic understandings of well-being and healing. Referenced against religious and secular press coverage over the month, which ranged from the curious and amused to the agitated and virulently hostile, it will be argued that the malleability of this ‘everyday’ saint’s cult explains something of its continuing appeal because it allows for a customized response to contemporary spiritual

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and embodied yearnings. Nevertheless, while there are changes in the language and cultural referents through which these present-day devotions are expressed, comparisons with the devotional practices of British Catholics over half a century earlier, centred upon the Scottish pilgrimage shrine of Carfin outside Glasgow, also demonstrate a considerable degree of continuity. This is perhaps surprising given the emphasis in much of the historiography of twentieth-century Catholicism on the radical caesurae caused by the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) and the enduring explanatory allure of the secularization thesis.3 By comparing these two snapshots of lived religious experience either side of the contentious 1960s, and the vitality and adaptability of this form of popular or ‘folk’ religion in Scotland before the Second World War and England in the first decade of the twenty-first century, this chapter casts refracted light on the impact and legacy of this decade on British Catholicism. The Story of a Soul: From Sister Thérèse Martin to the Saint of Lisieux In an eclectic yet perceptive study written about the saint of Lisieux in 1943, the unlikely hagiographer Vita Sackville-West was one of a number of pamphleteers and commentators to remark that ‘her very modernity (and) her closeness to us in date, makes the material legacy of St Thérèse so multiple, so personal, so detailed.’4 While this Carmelite nun was largely unknown in her short life, within a decade of her early and painful death, her life story had attained international renown. Born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin in 1873, the youngest child of devout (and now beatified) Catholic parents grew up in relative material comfort with her four siblings in Normandy. On the death of her mother Zélie from breast cancer when she was aged four, Thérèse was raised by her sisters Pauline and Marie in a close-knit and pious environment until both her older sisters left for the strict and enclosed Carmelite convent in Lisieux. Thérèse followed shortly thereafter, petitioning the church authorities and Pope Leo XIII to allow her to enter the order before the traditional age. Here Thérèse lived for nine years, observing the Carmelite religious rule in her prayer life, housekeeping duties, and official tasks in the instruction of the convent’s novices. This austere yet relatively uneventful life was broken by the onset of tuberculosis in 1896, and between this time and her death a year later, she was instructed by the prioress (namely her sister Pauline, Mother

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Agnes of Jesus) to write the three documents which were published as her posthumous autobiography The Story of a Soul. Over half of the material within this unique biography relates to reflections about Thérèse’s childhood and the Martin family home, while the remainder is an outline of her approach to the spiritual life – the so-called ‘little way’ which she described as ‘the way of spiritual childhood,’ the way of ‘trust and absolute self-surrender,’ offering to God ‘the flowers of little sacrifices.’5 These writings were circulated on Sister Thérèse’s death in lieu of an obituary, and from the original 2,000 copies distributed to Carmelite convents, the fame and popularity of the autobiography spread. At the time of her canonization on 17 May 1925, it had sold in the millions, with over thirty-five translations of The Story of a Soul available. Thus a very modern, transnational saint’s cult was born, supported by an estimated 30 million pictures and photographs and over 17 million relics which circulated throughout the Catholic world.6 In Britain as elsewhere, St Thérèse’s cult enjoyed great popularity thanks in no small part to the efforts of a Scottish priest, Thomas N. Taylor, who was one of the first in Britain to read and then translate The Story of a Soul7 and who actively participated in the canonization cause by forwarding extensive details of the cure of Mrs Dorans of Glasgow.8 Taylor’s lifelong and intense devotion to Thérèse also informed his decision to harness what he called the ‘enforced leisure’ of around 300 parishioner-colliers during the mining strikes between 1921–6 ‘to make a long cherished dream a reality, the building in Scotland of an open-air Basilica to the Mother of God.’9 The result was a ‘Scottish Lourdes’ complete with Carrara marble statues of Our Lady of Lourdes and St Bernadette in the Grotto. A prized relic of St Thérèse was also procured, and a special shrine created, featuring a lifelike statue of the saint designed to the detailed specifications of her prioress and sister.10 At the height of its popularity in the interwar years, the shrine at Carfin attracted tens of thousands of visitors from across the country each year, and the cult of St Thérèse gathered momentum throughout England through the efforts of Father Vernon Johnson and the Association of the Priests of St. Thérèse. At a popular lay level, a raft of prescriptive literature, numerous biographies, devotional plays, plaster-cast statues, and even an opera by the celebrated composer John Tavener in 1979 made The Story of a Soul and its heroine well known to the average British Catholic. Based upon an extensive historical survey of this vast literature,11 and a close analysis of the archive of ‘miraculous cures’ from 1920 to 1960 attributed to the Carfin relic of St Thérèse, it is possible to see a

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general movement across the twentieth century from an interpretation of this saint as an exemplary character model of obedience and sacrifice towards an account which places a greater premium on her historicity, her personality, and the situation of her trials and sufferings within an explicitly psychological framework. These trends are even more manifest when one analyses the appeal of St Thérèse to a twenty-firstcentury audience, and it is this dynamic between the continuities in devotional practice across this entire period, yet also the explicitly presentist preoccupations which emerge from the recent relics tour, with which this chapter is concerned. Performing of the Sanctity of Family Life Over 30,000 people visited the relics of St Thérèse in Salford Cathedral in September 2009, and eight hard-bound volumes were filled with the written prayers of intention and thanksgiving of thousands of these Lancastrian pilgrims (figure 17.2). The majority of these petitions centred on the celebration of a particular understanding of the family, vested in the ancient doctrine of the Communion of the Saints and performed through the devotional acts of individual believers encountering the body of St Thérèse and ‘(re)membering’ their lost loved ones. Father Michael McGoldrick OCD, quoted in The New Review, encapsulated this dynamic: ‘There’s a lot of power around a body. Wakes are very powerful occasions. There’s something about gathering around a coffin that makes you talk about the person it once was – and that’s what we’re hoping is going to happen with Thérèse.’12 Indeed many of those visiting the relics did ‘talk about the person that once was.’ They seemed intimately familiar with the life story of Thérèse as told in the Story of a Soul and they gave thanks for ‘flowers received,’ asked for perseverance to practise joy in ‘simple things’ and the ‘little way of love,’ and consecrated their family life to her. Typical of this approach was that of the ‘Whelan family,’ who wrote: ‘St Thérèse you are a saint that has followed and protected our family through the generations. You are always in our hearts, we pray to you to remember us in your heart.’13 A great many more, however, also used this understanding of the ‘communion of saints’ to remind themselves of their own family members who had died and who were presumed to be close to the Saint and God. One such read: ‘I pray especially for my lovely mummy Ann who died 28 July 2008 aged 68 from cancer. I miss her so much please St Therese hug her for me and tell her how much I love her and

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Figure 17.2 A mother and son writing their petitions to St Thérèse at the exposition of her relics in Salford Cathedral, September 2009.

also do the same for my babies Frances and Dominic and my nephew Jamie. Thank you St Therese for all the many blessings received.’14 The vast majority of all written petitions within these prayer books centred on recollecting and naming family, friends, and ancestors who had passed on, and a prayer representative of this overwhelming preoccupation was that offered by ‘Maeve,’ who asked Thérèse to ‘please take care of my dad’ who was ‘recently taken from us … until I can be with him.’15 Implicit throughout these prayers, listed names, and moving reflections was a strong (and continuing) belief in an afterlife in which loved and lost relatives enjoy the company and comfort of God, of other family members, and of the saint. The concept of the heavenly ‘family of faith,’ which I have explored elsewhere in an extensive study of mid-twentieth-century British Catholic cultures,16 and which others

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like Ann Taves, James O’Toole, and Nancy Christie have elucidated in a North American context,17 seems alive and well for these committed believers. The concerns of the ‘earthly family’ also played very explicitly through many of these reflections, with numerous prayers for conception – e.g., ‘please pray for Martin and I to have lovely healthy babies soon’18 – and for children embarking on their own family formation, for example, ‘please pray for … a suitable partner for our Joanna.’19 While prayers for pregnancy and anxieties about fertility dominated the twenty-first-century archive, fears about the dangers of multiple births were recurring preoccupations in the Carfin ‘cure correspondence.’ This was usually expressed in resistance to the advice and authority of male, ‘secular’ doctors, particularly if this was seen to contradict Catholic teaching on contraception, sterilization, and abortion. For example, the trust of Mrs Daly from Coventry in the efficacy of Our Lady and St Thérèse emboldened her to resist the medical advice of a doctor in 1953 to terminate a dangerous pregnancy.20 The Carfin relic of St Thérèse was also deemed efficacious in overcoming difficult confinements, as for Mrs Cusack of Carfin, whose ninth pregnancy and obstetric history prompted the medical assessment that if pregnancy continued ‘you are both dead.’21 Mr Morris of Uddingston also invoked Thérèse’s protection when refusing to give permission to abort (on the grounds of his wife’s safety) with the reply: ‘This cannot be done. If God takes her, that’s His will.’22 In the defiant accounts of the recovery of both women, their survival is triumphantly recounted as ipso facto proof of St Thérèse’s intervention, as well as a vindication of their faithful adherence to the church’s teachings. While much has, of course, changed in understandings of sex, gender, and the strict adherence of lay Catholics to institutional teaching and authority (as explored, for example, in Leslie Woodcock Tentler’s chapter), the role of prayer and Theresean devotional practice as an avenue of assistance when negotiating the intimate, ‘private’ issue of childbirth remains both a constant and a source of some agency in challenging or supplementing the advice of the medical profession. While the petitions of many women as potential mothers, or grandmothers, centred on these issues, the concerns of some male devotees also focused on the family and its sustainment. Undoubtedly the recent financial downturn has given added urgency to the frequent petitions for good employment and an amelioration of financial difficulties, such as this prayer: ‘St Therese set us free from all our debts and financial

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problems and bless our family with everything good so that we too will help others. Shower “your roses” upon us always.’23 This twentyfirst-century petition is not unlike the desire for steady employment for himself and his working-age daughters detailed in the correspondence of Londoner J. Hobson to the Carfin Shrine in 1937. Clearly this was another time of relative austerity for the working classes, and Mr Hobson subsequently wrote to record his thanks to St Thérèse that the family had achieved good work and remuneration, as well as ‘a nice Home of our own.’24 While petitions for good ‘breadwinning’ capacity, or healing to resume employment seem to characterize the majority of male requests in Scotland,25 twenty-first-century devotions were also occasions when male penitents expressly requested ‘strength to be a good dad.’26 In another case, a male petitioner invoked a divine ‘watchful eye on my beautiful sons and help (for) them to make the right choices in life and love.’27 As I have explored elsewhere, concepts of fatherhood and the devotions of Catholic men have been the subject of intense scrutiny and attempted adaptation across the twentieth century.28 It is therefore unsurprising to find this also reflected in piety to St Thérèse and prayers for assistance in the performance of the paternal role beyond bringing home a pay packet. Shifting gender roles and female employment patterns were also reflected in a strand of requests from women for assistance focusing on professional status and salaries. One young women asked for ‘guid(ance) through a very difficult time in my career’;29 another, from a non-English-speaking background, wrote: ‘St Theresa, please bless our family … that I can find a better job if possible after this current one. Help my husband to keep his job and may we have material success, happy marriage and good health always.’30 The emphasis on a ‘happy marriage’ was indeed one of the most overwhelmingly prevalent requests throughout the Salford books of prayer, and this is an intention quite absent from the articulated preoccupations of the interwar faithful in Scotland. Perhaps this is unsurprising in a century which has seen sharply redefined understandings of marriage and its purposes (outside the church, as well as within Conciliar documents such as Gaudium et Spes), as well as a dramatic rise in ‘mixed marriages,’ divorce, and co-habitation rates among Catholics, as all others, in British society.31 These heightened contemporary preoccupations are perhaps best encapsulated in a pithy and poignant petition: ‘please pray that a marriage may be mended.’32 For some, these intentions were personal and multi-faceted, for example, a prayer which asked for assistance in ‘financial difficulty,’ the location of

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a ‘modest home,’ and blessings on ‘my marriage.’33 In other instances, these prayers were for other people – such as the prayer of ‘Anna’ for ‘healing of John and Jo’s marriage’ and a return to the practice of faith.34 The strains on marriage caused by separation through migration also featured, with one young woman asking for strength for her absent husband negotiating the visa process in Vietnam.35 The increasing ethnic and linguistic diversification of the Catholic community in Britain, in line with a general upsurge in migration into the country since the 1990s, is reflected in some of the petitions for assistance written in Ibo, Chinese, Tamil, Spanish, Polish, French, and Russian. While these were only around 5 per cent of the total number of written petitions, there appears to be a similar pattern of requests for family life and marriage stability, as well as some pleas, often in poor or broken English, for ‘papers’ or ‘leave to remain.’36 Finally, throughout this overwhelming focus on married life and the difficulties encountered by the family, some devotees quite specifically referenced Thérèse’s family background (and her mother’s breast cancer) as a source of inspiration, encouragement, and grounds for intervention. For example, one prayer seemed to introduce ‘our family – Phil, me, Evie, George and Thomas’ and appealed directly to the saint’s mother to ‘keep us together in this life and help us on our journey.’37 Another was even more specific: ‘I ask not only for the intercession of St Therese but of her entire family especially her parents Louis and Zelie Martin for many graces especially of perseverance and courage and great love for a friend diagnosed with vigorous breast cancer and even for a cure if that is God’s will for her.’38 In mapping the suffering and sorrows within family life caused by this disease onto Thérèse’s own life narrative, some petitioners found a potent resource for interpreting pain, requesting its alleviation or moving on to acceptance. As one penitent quite explicitly wrote: ‘St Therese, please intercede on behalf of Catherine, she has breast cancer. Please ask Jesus to cure her so she can make a full recovery. She has 3 young children, the eldest being four, just like your mother. St Therese if it be God’s will for her to stay with us, please ask Jesus for a miracle.’39 Within The Story of a Soul, St Thérèse gave a painful insight into the trauma caused by the death of her mother, and this narrative seems to provide a point of intersection with her devotees and their sufferings. Furthermore, in the slightly dysfunctional family life described within the autobiography – which is however sanitized in the church’s recent beatification of Louis and Zélie Martin as exemplary models of parent-

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hood – some of the faithful find an ‘everyday’ saint who, they believe, will intercede in their domestic trials. Through these prayers and petitions, the faithful aspire to and ritually enact traditional church teaching on the sanctity of family life in its earthly and heavenly incarnations. However the terms in which these hopes and fears are articulated are profoundly modern, everyday, and ‘ordinary.’ While these narratives utilize late nineteenth-century Catholic discourses, the anxieties of twentyfirst-century Catholics about the ‘family,’ the stability of marriage, and good parenting find contemporary articulation and negotiation. A Saint of a Holistic Spirituality: Thérèsean Devotions, Old and New From its beginnings in 1922 until well after the Second World War, devotion to St Thérèse at the shrine of Carfin took the form of an emotionally charged, experiential, and embodied spirituality. In the early days of the establishment of the pilgrimage site, the ritualistic practices at Carfin were closely modelled on Lourdes, and the miraculous cures claimed bore a striking similarity to those that occurred at the longer-standing and more prestigious grotto in the Pyrénées. Many of the initial accounts of cures at the shrine were attributed to its water, and among the hundreds of testaments to the exceptional powers of the unexceptional tap water was one from Sister M. Ricarda, who was suffering from ‘neuritis in the optic nerve of the left eye’ and whose miraculous recovery was also confirmed by ‘a very famous nerve specialist’ who pronounced that ‘every symptom of nervous disease had completely vanished.’40 Tales of other cures abounded and over the decades the pilgrimage site developed its own therapeutic ritual practices which seemed to fuse devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes with devotion to St Thérèse and the company of other saints honoured at the site. During a celebration to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the establishment of the Grotto in 1937, a Theresean Rosary Pageant was staged which was described by the Scottish Observer in the following terms: ‘Ladies were very much in a majority, but a prominent place was taken by the Knights of St Columba. A girl dressed as a Carmelite nun [see figure 17.3], with a number of tiny attendants in white, was the reminder that October 3 is the feast of the Little Flower.’41 In an address to the assembled crowd of many tens of thousands of people, Canon Taylor urged recourse to this form of prayer for the suffering church in Russia, Spain and Germany by drawing upon the traditional coupling of the victory at Lepanto with the Virgin Mary’s intercession in favour of ‘Christian civilisation.’42 This blending of

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Figure 17.3 A ‘Living’ Thérèse of Lisieux and attendants, at Carfin in 1937. Source: CSA Photo Book 1.

devotion to St Thérèse and the Virgin Mary and the conflation of Carfin and Lourdes were also manifest in the written testimony of Peggy McKinnon, who wrote in 1937 describing an illness of the kidneys cured through a relic of the ‘Little Flower,’ Carfin water and prayer: I was always praying to the ‘Little Flower,’ Our Lady of Lourdes and St Bernadette chiefly to these three, sometimes St Philomena and St Anthony. One night in Nov. I took a terrible bad pain and thought I would never see morning … when I saw a lovely vision and one who seemed like the ‘Little Flower’ said to me: ‘This is the one that will watch over you tonight’ and then the same – another vision like the picture I saw of St Bernadette and I slept and had no more pain nor was it ever again so severe.43

Within the full account of the favour rendered, efficacy is attributed

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to prayers to Our Lady of Lourdes and the Little Flower, as well as to the Theresean relic and the ‘grotto’ water. In a great many instances it was the relic of St Thérèse – the contact of a saintly body with a broken, infirm, or fragile pilgrim body – which precipitated a cure. Accounts in the archive describe its effectiveness against a large goitre,44 blood poisoning,45 disfiguring warts,46 and a knee injury that rendered a young man, Peter Rice, unable to play football or to cycle.47 However the most spectacular and most publicized healing attributed to the pilgrimage site related to the case of Miss Mary Traynor in 1934. In addition to debilitating rheumatoid arthritis which rendered her unable to unclench her fists or to walk, Miss Traynor’s physical complaints were compounded by illnesses of the stomach and intestines, which had progressed to such a state that she was six stone (through constant vomiting) and near death, with a recent three-week spell of unconsciousness. In this serious invalid state, she was refused permission to go to Lourdes, but with the connivance of family members and a non-Catholic nurse, Miss Traynor went to Carfin in June 1934, took the water from the Grotto, and reported the cessation of vomiting. On a return trip to Carfin on 5 August 1934 she made a special appeal to St Thérèse and Our Lady, and the relic of the Carmelite Saint was applied to her joints and legs as part of a reliquary procession and blessing for invalids. Writing later, Miss Traynor described the warming sensation that this contact caused as ‘like a thread of fire,’ and before the eyes of those gathered, she left her wheelchair and walked to her car to the great astonishment and fervent prayers of the crowd.48 Generating a huge correspondence within the press, and an entire file of testimony and medical reports (including a full and detailed physical examination by Dr Badenock in 1952),49 Miss Traynor’s sudden recovery was not reversed throughout her lifetime and she died of old age in 1970.50 In common with the Carfin penitents during the earlier part of the twentieth century, some of those visiting the relics of St Thérèse in Salford in 2009 also wrote about their desire for miraculous intervention and utilized an intensely tactile and visceral language in articulating these petitions. These desires are perhaps characterized by the ‘shopping list’ approach of one pilgrim, who prayed: For my mum – who is frail and frightened that she may have peace of mind, some pleasure in life and a happy death. For Bill who is dying in prison of cancer. Grant that he may know the Lord’s love and be cared for with kindness. For Theresa – that her Parkinson’s may go into remission,

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her back and knee problems be cured by operations, her recent broken leg swiftly healed and the loss of her David be healed by the Lord’s love and the friendship of others. For Madelyn, that they may heal the tumours. Thanks be to God.51

Within this intention is a mixture of requests for personal help, psychological comfort, successful medical intervention, and highly specific physiological amelioration. However, most contemporary petitions assiduously avoided the language of ‘miracles’ and ‘cures’ to speak instead about ‘healing’ – such as that from a young mother who wrote: ‘for healing, so that I may live to see my children grow up. Ask to relieve my pain and shrink my tumour.’52 Cancer was overwhelmingly the illness most frequently mentioned, often coupled with requests for ‘strength for our family’ as in the case of a man petitioning for his wife.53 Others were less prescriptive about the type of ‘healing’ desired, as when one devotee prayed: ‘for Chris, 20, recently diagnosed with cancer – may his family be comforted by your grace. May healing occur.’54 For this petitioner, the granting of her intention could encompass an improvement in the medical condition of Chris and/or the relief of suffering and acceptance of his illness by him and his family. While the petitions to St Thérèse at Carfin between 1920 and 1950 were dominated by (often minor) physical ailments and requests for their alleviation, at least half of all the Salford prayers in 2009 related to what might be characterized as more ‘holistic’ aspirations. A typical request from one pilgrim asked St Thérèse to ‘pray for my family, for health of mind, body and spirit. Amen. Please pray for healing of emotions and freedom from the wounds of the past.’55 This is indeed a profound contrast, and one reflective of broader societal trends such as the mainstreaming in the twentieth century of psychological understandings of selfhood,56 a recalibration of the complex relationship between science and religion, and a movement in some medical quarters beyond clinical and positivist diagnoses towards an understanding of illness that incorporates a mental and spiritual dimension. This shift in emphasis has also been reflected in the ways in which the life of St Thérèse herself has been narrated to the Catholic faithful and her cult presented for emulation. In a marked divergence in the hagiography of the saint since the 1950s, Thérèse has been redrawn as a psychologically complex, tortured individual who suffered not only from tuberculosis but who also survived intense pain and personal suffering through her family life. A controversial biography by Etienne

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Robo which started this trend – Two Portraits of St Teresa of Lisieux (1957) – included an appendix on ‘neurosis’ and a detailed discussion of the released photographs of Thérèse and their authenticity. The portrait which emerged from this account was of a flawed and psychologically frail humanity, centred on feelings of abandonment when her mother died, her older sister left for the convent, and her beloved father suffered a breakdown shortly after her own adoption of the religious life. Robo described the ‘unexpected use’ Thérèse made of these resources ‘as the means of reaching sanctity.’ This emphasis was continued by Ida Friederike Gorres, who published her equally provocative biography in 1959 and reflected on recent attempts to search beneath ‘the rosy, saccharine glaze of sentimental bad taste and moralism … to show Thérèse in as strong as possible contrast to that sort of “distortion” … as a psychological problem, a misunderstood woman of great importance, a repressed artistic nature, and so on.’57 She concluded, presciently from her mid-twentieth-century vantage point, that this interpretation was still growing. It has, in fact, continued well into the twenty-first century with a clutch of feminist reinterpretations following Thérèse’s elevation to the status of a female ‘Doctor of the Church.’58 At play within these more recent biographies, and a number of the journalistic articles accompanying the tour of the relics in Britain,59 is an intense priorization of the Saint’s ‘authentic’ and complex psychological personality and her flexible, adaptable ‘spirituality.’ Commentary by church representatives surrounding the recent visit, reinforced by sermons and accompanying publications which mixed older messages of obedience with this repackaged personality, describe the Saint as someone who herself required healing from the ‘wounds of the past.’60 Perhaps cognizant of passages within the Story of a Soul relating to her childhood ‘breakdown,’ doubts about the existence of heaven and her ‘dark night of the soul’ (and thoughts of suicide) when suffering intense pain, a great many of her twenty-firstcentury devotees in Salford also wrote in this vein. Manifold petitions included prayers for ‘my father who is mentally ill,’61 the ‘depression that my husband has suffered for many years,’62 ‘those who are sick in mind and body,’63 and ‘those who suffer from enduring mental illness … and addiction.’64 One entry used explicitly psychological terminology to diagnose a personal (and collective) condition: ‘Dear St Therese, you are my patron saint. Pray for all those like me who are troubled in the mind with insecurities, low self-esteem and feel they are of no worth because of depression. Help us to know the only love we need is

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God’s. Amen.’65 Others asked for grace ‘to forgive, to forget, to let go’66 and yet another for ‘families that are touched with mental illness issues. Give them strength and perseverance in prayer through the dark times. Help them see the light.’67 Alongside these frank and unembarrassed acknowledgments of depression, mental illness, alcoholism, and drug addiction were a few (but nevertheless striking) references to suicide – with ‘S’ requesting that ‘young people’ ‘suffering … seek, find and receive the help and guidance they need.’68 Another from ‘Julie’ prayed for ‘families and friends both at home and abroad who have suffered loss due to suicide and are still suffering.’69 She went on to pray specifically for ‘Robert’ and addressed him directly when writing alongside Thérèse’s relics: ‘we all miss you dearly, think of you daily and hope that you are once again free to play in God’s garden. Love you. Thank you St Therese.’70 Summing up just such reactions to the visitation, the Catholic Herald ran an editorial on 25 September 2009 which opined: If this tour had taken place 50 years ago, no one would have been surprised: the writings of ‘the Little Flower’ … made her by a long chalk the most popular of all saints, in England much as in France. Now they are not read so often, but those who investigate the real Thérèse discover a headstrong girl whose doubts and depression – once barely mentioned – made her courage even more remarkable; a saint for our disorientated times.71

A Saint for Disorientated Times? Holistic Spiritualities, Secularization, and the 1960s So, is Thérèse a saint for disorientated times, or rather a sign of profound disaffection from, or disorientation within, the contemporary British Catholic Church? Writing in The Times at the beginning of the relics tour in September 2009, journalist Matthew Parris described the devotions of the lay faithful as the ‘credulous folly … (of) nutters … (around) a ludicrous casket of bones.’72 For other secular commentators like Minette Marrin, it was the decision of the Home Office to allow the relics to visit Wormwood Scrubbs prison, which was particularly objectionable, as it ‘opens the gates of reason to let into any public place any and every fetish or juju … lend[ing] extra official respectability to religious hocus pocus.’73 Perhaps anticipating some of these reactions, the former Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Hume, had vetoed an earlier request by the laity for a visitation as long ago as 1997

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on the grounds that it would damage interfaith understanding and revive images of English Catholicism as a medieval, superstitious, and peasant faith.74 It should also be noted that not all English Catholics were themselves enthusiastic about the event, with some ambivalence expressed in the liberal and intellectual Catholic weekly The Tablet and confessions in other Catholics newspapers that idle curiosity may have motivated some pilgrims.75 Irrespective of how these claims of aversion, irrationality, and idolatry are adjudicated from personal theological perspectives, both contemporary advocates and critics alike did recognize anthropologically the popularity and ‘curious immortality’ of this form of religious practice – judged a ‘religious placebo for the credulous classes’ by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian76 or a ‘consolation’ to address the puzzling ‘injustices of suffering and death’ as Catholic Peter Stanford reflected in the Daily Telegraph.77 Drawing quite specifically upon the Story of a Soul and Thérèse’s forbearance in her relationships within her religious community, The Evening Standard unexpectedly adjudged her an inspiring model of charity and tolerance for religiously plural Londoners living in close quarters.78 What conclusions can be drawn from these accounts of Catholics attending the relics ceremonies and the descriptions of historic devotion to St Thérèse in Britain until the period after the Second World War? Does the clear popularity and salience of this 2009 visit, which surprised religious and secular commentators alike, raise questions about easily drawn conclusions that Britons live in an unequivocally ‘scientific, sceptical and contentedly secular society’?79 It seems to me to be important, as the current Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols rightly observed at the conclusion of the visit, not to interpret the immense popularity of the visit as a ‘rush to religion.’80 While the scale of attendance and the religious fervour manifested startled many church officials, those attending were only a small percentage of the total Catholic population in England. However, in trying to explain the enthusiasm accompanying the tour, the head of the English and Welsh Hierarchy went on to suggest that perhaps this outpouring of devotion evidenced a recognition of ‘a renewed sense of vulnerability… between the generations, within the circle of families … a sense that we are not building on solid foundations at the moment.’81 Despite the implicitly conservative cast of his assessment, Archbishop Nichols is surely right to identify familial issues at the heart of this devotional practice as well as the impact of the changes in understandings of marriage, sexuality, and gender relations (both within and

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outside the institutional church) which the chapters by Tentler and Abrams in this volume also explore. The ‘long 1960s,’ which are largely absent from these two framing snapshots of Theresan devotional practice in the latter part of the twentieth century was undoubtedly a ‘hinge decade’ in which much of this intense negotiation of sexual politics and domestic relations was undertaken.82 Avoiding unhelpful and confusing language such as ‘secularization,’ this was certainly a decade in which the relationship between religion, morality, and authority (of the church and the state) was renegotiated and differently configured by the laity, some of whom maintained some form of connection to the church but did not necessarily now feel bound to reflect this in weekly church attendance. Yet while the comparison of the Carfin shrine with the more recent peripatetic pilgrimage of Thérèse’s relics clearly yields considerable contrasts, there are also unexpected continuities which emerge, such as the resilient vitality of the notion of the ‘communion of saints’ and the role that the churches can play as a focus for a vibrant, diffuse, and popular Christianity, much like the ‘politico-spiritual’ outpouring which the death of Princess Diana elicited.83 Family bonds also remain a primary preoccupation for St Thérèse’s devotees, and while constructions of the ‘family breadwinner’ and ‘obedience to church teaching’ on sexual ethics have certainly mutated, the majority of her clients still pray for her assistance on issues surrounding family formation, procreation, and performance of their multi-faceted parental or grandparental responsibilities. Another aspect of this continuity is, of course, the seemingly unbroken popularity of this saint’s cult and the veneration of her relics, which on first glance appears to be a profoundly traditional, anti-modern practice – a form of pre-Vatican II spirituality which should have faded in the pre-eminence given to active participation in liturgical forms and Eucharistic sharing following the Second Vatican Council.84 While on one measure this interpretation is accurate in characterizing some of the considerable similarities in devotional form at the end of the twentieth century, it should not occlude a more subtle examination of the profound changes in religious language and the substance of the devotion in the period. A closer study of the devotion’s vitality from the late 1950s to the early 1970s might also confound such a simple teleology. These variations across the decades may, in the final analysis, have less to do with notions of societal ‘dechristianization’ or the impact of the 1960s than with transformations within the church itself, particularly through the Second Vatican Council, and the language of faith

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across the period. This detailed interrogation of one aspect of Catholic devotional practice reveals a fluctuating popularity across diverse generations of Catholics because it is a form of religious practice capable of being reconfigured, a malleable, lay-driven and responsive activity which can be recast to address present-day anxieties about family life, health, and the desire for bodily and spiritual well-being. Studies of the religious landscape of late twentieth-century Britain and the United States have increasingly recognized the overwhelming importance of holistic and therapeutic aspirations within contemporary spirituality and New Age practices and the priority given to desires for wholeness, health, and well-being of ‘body, mind and spirit.’85 This ‘spiritual turn,’ which emphasizes self-realization, connectivity, and personal experiences of the sacred, has tended to be analysed as a ‘spiritual revolution,’ leading people to abandon institutional churches and their religious traditions and to seek meaning and fulfilment in personal, customized, and syncretic practices.86 Pilgrimage, which has experienced resurgence over the last couple of decades, has been acknowledged by some as an exception (in part) to this broader trend.87 Perhaps alongside a growing interest in such journeying and in traditional mysticism and monasticism should be added tactile and affective devotional practices, like the one examined here, which enable the expression of an experiential and embodied spirituality within a mainstream, quasi-institutional setting. As a form of spiritual practice which is felt to be owned by the laity and therefore customizable, emotionally charged, and capable of transmission within a domestic family setting, this form of popular religion – in continuity with a Catholic devotional culture over the centuries – often evades or counteracts trends in the liturgical and institutional life of the church. Its contemporary appeal crosses genders, although it has typically had a particular salience for women excluded from a male clergy and theological clerisy. It also offers insight into little-examined issues of contemporary religiosity and class, as many of the testimonies and petitions examined in this study come from the ‘working classes’ and often deal explicitly with socio-economic issues and fears about employment and family provision. That said, suffering and ill health of course transcend and confound class barriers. As a form of spirituality that enables people to confront and take some meaning from pain, suffering, and death, the ‘Little Flower’ has also attracted grand devotees in the past, and the resonance of her life narrative does not seem to have been much diminished (and may indeed have been enhanced) by increasing affluence and growing prosperity. Finally, the occasion

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of the visitation of the relics also played into religious socialization and the successful transmission of a distinctive form of Catholic religious culture. Among the marked number of young people present in the Salford Cathedral, as elsewhere,88 some were discovering St Thérèse for the first time, often under the guidance of grandparents.89 Others, like the ‘Whelan’ family discussed above, referenced a devotion to the saint carried on within a family setting and one which has continued irrespective of the lack of encouragement by clergy, in explicitly church settings or at Catholic schools. In analysing the visitation of the relics of St Thérèse, and through exploring the dimensions of devotion to her in Britain in the earlier part of the twentieth century, one finds a useful lens for interrogating the changing face of Christianity in the twentieth-first century and the ways in which it is both adapting to and sometimes resisting societal changes. Far from being ‘bone idle,’ Catholic Christianity as constructed and performed in the popular religious practices of the laity continues to be put to work to address the vulnerabilities, insecurities, and spiritual yearnings found in many quarters of contemporary British society.

NOTES 1 Matt Roper, ‘Pope Idol,’ The Mirror, 22 September 2009, 10. 2 With the permission and assistance of the Bishop of Salford and the Diocesan organizer, Father Simon Firth, a number of ‘prayer stations’ were set up throughout the cathedral from 25 to 27 September 2009. Over 30,000 pilgrims visited the relics over these two days and eight volumes of prayers and intentions were collected and deposited for further reference in the Salford Diocesan Archives. These have been anonymized and used with the permission of the Diocese. I would like to record my thanks to Fr Firth for his considerable assistance with this research. Citations of prayers and petitions within this article take the form of Salford Diocesan Archives (SDA), followed by the specific book references. 3 On the implementation of Vatican II in the British context see Michael P. Hornsby-Smith, Roman Catholics in England: Studies in Social Structure since the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), The Changing Parish: A Study of Parishes, Priests and Parishioners after Vatican II (London: Routledge, 1989), and Roman Catholic Beliefs in England: Customary Catholicism and Transformations of Religious Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Anthony Archer, Two Catholic Churches:

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4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16

A Study in Oppression (London: SCM Press, 1986); Desmond Ryan, The Catholic Parish: Institutional Discipline, Tribal Identity and Religious Development in the English Catholic Church (London: Sheed and Ward, 1996); and Peter Stanford, Cardinal Hume and the Changing Face of English Catholicism (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1993). On ‘secularization’ in Britain, see Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), and Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds., The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), and Europe: The Exceptional Case. Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002); and S.J.D. Green, The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change c. 1920–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Vita Sackville-West, The Eagle and the Dove: A Study in Contrasts, St Teresa of Avila, St Thérèse of Lisieux (London: Quartet Books, 1943), 116. Thérèse Martin, The Story of a Soul: A New Translation (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2006), 210–25. Barbara Corrado Pope. ‘A Heroine without Heroics: The Little Flower of Jesus and Her Times,’ Church History 51, no. 1 (1988): 50. Thomas Taylor, Soeur Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower of Jesus (London, 1913). Thomas Taylor, ‘St Teresa and Scotland’ in Vernon Johnson, ed., The Missions of a Saint: Essays on the Significance of St. Teresa of Lisieux (London: Burns, Pates and Washbourne, 1947), 44. Thomas Taylor, The Carfin Grotto (Glasgow: Burns, 1952), 9. Ibid., 10. See Alana Harris, Faith in the Family: A Lived Religious History of English Catholicism before and after Vatican II (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). Joanna Moorhead, ‘The Magical Mystery Tour,’ The New Review, 23 August 2009, 14. Contrast the discomfort with relics expressed by Peter Stanford, ‘I Still Recoil at the Memory of the Offer to Show Us the Nail Clippings of the Corpse,’ The Tablet, 10 October 2009, 13. Salford Diocesan Archives [SDA], Book 7. SDA, Book 3. SDA, Book 5. Alana Harris, ‘Gatherings at the Family Table: Transformations in Catholic Christology and Popular Religiosity in Twentieth-Century Britain,

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36

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1945–80,’ in Patrick Pasture et al., eds, Households of Faith: Domesticity and Religion (Leuven: KADOC, 2013). See Ann Taves, The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in MidNineteenth Century America (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986); James O’Toole, ed., Habits of Devotion: Catholics Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Nancy Christie, ed., Households of Faith: Family, Gender and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). SDA, Book 7. SDA, Book 1. Carfin Shrine Archive [CSA], Letter, M. Daly (Coventry) to T.N. Taylor, 6 December 1953, Box No. 12. See the detailed correspondence in CSA Box No. 4: L.F. Roses, Mrs Cusack and Others (Carfin). CSA Box No. 12, T.N. Taylor, 24 February 1949 (notes). SDA, Book 5. CSA Box No. 12, ‘Letter, J. Hoban to T.N. Taylor, 10 October 1937 (Bayswater, London). See also the cases in CSA Box No. 12, ‘ROSE – Greenock – James Donaghy (1924),’ and Report by Mary Sullivan, MB ChB on P. McConnel, Glasgow, 25 April 1957. SDA, Book 2. SDA, Book 3. Alana Harris, ‘“A Paradise on Earth, a Foretaste of Heaven”: English Catholic Understandings of Domesticity and Marriage, 1945–65,’ in Lucy Delap, Abigail Wills, and Ben Griffin, eds., The Politics of Domestic Authority since 1800 (London: Palgrave, 2009), 155–81. SDA, Book 2. SDA, Book 1. For a pithy summary of many of these changes, see Michael P. Hornsby Smith, ‘Recent Transformations in English Catholicism: Evidence of Secularization?’ in Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 128. SDA, Book 1. SDA, Book 6. SDA, Book 3. SDA, Book 6. E.g., SDA Books 1 and 2. For a discussion of devotion to St Thérèse among

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37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58

migrants, and the inter-faith dimensions, see Melanie McDonagh, ‘Thérèse: An Unsung Hero to So Many Londoners,’ The Evening Standard (London), 13 October 2009; Isabel de Bertodano and Christopher Lamb, ‘It’s as if They Need Thérèse,’ The Tablet, 26 September 2009, 12–13, and John Hall, ‘The Abbey Road to Reconciliation,’ The Tablet, 10 October 2009, 12–13. SDA, Book 1. SDA, Book 4. SDA, Book 8 (Black). CSA Box No. 12, Letter, Sr M. Ricarda to T.N. Taylor, 21 August 1924. CSA, Note Book 8, 47: ‘Carfin Grotto’s Fifteenth Anniversary: Rosary Can Save Christian Civilization,’ Scottish Observer, 8 October 1937. Ibid. CSA Box No. 12. Letter, P. McKinnon to T.N. Taylor, ‘Cure: Grotto Water,’ 27 August 1937. CSA Box No. 12, Letter, M. Gilmore (Harrington) to T.N. Taylor, ‘Rose – Goitre,’ n.d. CSA, Note Book 8, 10: ‘Carfin Grotto’ – cure of volunteer worker John Roche – 29 January 1937. CSA, Note Book 8, 65: ‘Carfin Grotto: A Little Rose Flower’ – cure of disfiguring, septic warts on hands of Miss Brennan, Catholic Times, 8 April 1938. CSA, Box No. 12, Letter, P. Rice (Paisley) to T.N. Taylor, 5 December 1941. See CSA Box No. 5., Claims of Cures Mostly Grotto and L.F. ‘Roses.’ See CSA Box No. 12, File: Grotto and L.F. Cures and Favours. Susan McGhee, Monsignor Taylor of Carfin (Glasgow: Burns and Oates, 1972), 264–5. SDA, Book 4. SDA, Book 2. Ibid. Ibid. SDA, Book 1. E.g., Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1989), and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Ida F. Gorres, The Hidden Face: A Study of St Thérèse of Lisieux (London: Burns and Oates, 1959), 14. For example Bernard Bro, The Little Way: The Spirituality of Thérèse of Lisieux (London: Darton, Longman and Todd); Michael Hollings, Thérèse of Lisieux (London: Collins, 1981); Monica Furlong, Thérèse of Lisieux (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2001); Kathryn Harrison, St Thérèse of Lisieux

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60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

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(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003); and Mary Frohlich, ‘Thérèse of Lisieux and Jeanne d’Arc: History, Memory and Interiority in the Experience of Vocation’ Spiritus 6, no. 2 (2006): 173–94. Joanna Morehead, ‘The Real Thérèse,’ The Tablet, 12 September 2009, 4–5, and Catherine Pepinster, ‘Relics of St Thérèse Highlight the Flesh and Blood Nature of Christianity,’ The Times, 19 September 2009, 95. As a representative sample see http://catholicrelics.wordpress. com/2009/10/06/three-talks-on-st-therese-by-fr-stephen-wang/; http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=14841; http:// www.catholic-today.co.uk/component/k2/item/31-the-relics-of-stth%C3%A9r%C3%A8se-of-lisieux-to-visit-st-chad%E2%80%99s-cathedral; and http://www.rcdow.org.uk/diocese/default.asp?content_ref=2466 (accessed 21 March 2011). SDA, Book 1. Ibid. SDA, Book 2. Ibid. SDA, Book 4. Ibid. SDA, Book 6. SDA, Book 4. SDA, Book 2. Ibid. ‘Editorial,’ Catholic Herald, 25 September 2009, 13 Matthew Parris, ‘Atheists Come Out and Fight These Nutters,’ The Times, 17 September 2009, 26. Minette Marrin, ‘Saints Alive, Don’t Respect Hocus Pocus,’ The Sunday Times, 20 September 2009, 13. Peter Stanford, ‘Devoted Followers on a Holy Trail,’ The Daily Telegraph, 15 October 2009, 22. See Stanford, ‘I Still Recoil,’ and the ‘Letters’ pages, The Tablet, 26 September 2009, 20–1, and 3 October 2009, 20–1. Simon Jenkins, ‘Comment and Debate: Let the Credulous Kiss Their Relics,’ The Guardian, 18 September 2009, 33. Peter Stanford, ‘Modern Pilgrims,’ Daily Telegraph, Weekend Feature, 20 February 2010, 1–2 Melanie McDonagh, ‘Thérèse, An Unsung Hero to So Many Londoners,’ The Evening Standard, 13 October 2009. Peter Stanford, ‘Devoted Followers on a Holy Trail,’ The Daily Telegraph, 15 October 2009, 22.

452 Alana Harris 80 Peter Stanford and John Bingham, ‘Crisis “sows seed of religious revival,”’ The Daily Telegraph, 28 November 2009, 10. 81 Ibid. 82 For further analysis, see Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 83 See Grace Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 79–80, and John Wolffe, ‘Protestantism, Monarchy and the Defence of Christian Britain 1937–2005,’ in Callum Brown and Michael Snape, eds., Secularization in the Christian World: Essays in Honour of Hugh McLeod (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 68. 84 For a further discussion, see Alana Harris, ‘“The Prayer in the Syntax?” The Roman Missal, the Book of Common Prayer and Changes in Liturgical Languages, 1945–80,’ in Jane Garnett et al., eds., Redefining Christian Britain: Post-1945 Perspectives (London: SCM Press, 2006), 36–49. 85 Kieran Flanagan and Peter C. Jupp, eds., A Sociology of Spirituality (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Wade Clarke Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Robert Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings are Shaping the Future (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 131–5. 86 Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Dick Houtman and Stef Aupers, ‘The Spiritual Turn and the Decline of Tradition: The Spread of Post-Christian Spirituality in 14 Western Countries, 1981–2000,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46, no. 3 (2007), 305–20. 87 Ian Reader, ‘Pilgrimage Growth in the Modern World: Meanings and Implications,’ Religion 37 (2007): 210–29; Alana Harris, ‘Lourdes and Holistic Spirituality: Contemporary Catholicism, the Therapeutic and Religious Thermalism,’ Culture and Religion 14 (2013) (forthcoming). 88 On the striking number of young people at St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham, see de Bertodano and Lamb, ‘It’s as if They Need Thérèse.’ 89 For a discussion of the appeal of these forms of exploratory, open-ended, and flexible devotional practices to youth, see Alana Harris, ‘“A place to grow spiritually and socially”: The Experiences of Young Pilgrims to Lourdes,’ in Sylvia Collins-Mayo and Ben Pink Dandelion, eds., Religion and Youth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 149–58.

18 Reflections and New Perspectives hugh mcleod

There are many 1960s: the sixties of John Lennon, of Che Guevara, of John XXIII, of Betty Friedan. For many people, it was more importantly the decade in which they bought their first car or their first TV set. Each of these figures and these objects is an essential part of the story. But historians are pulled by their own emotional relationship with this most controversial of decades to highlight some parts. And they also have mental blocks which lead them to screen out others. I have myself been justly criticized for giving too little attention to the music. Arthur Marwick did not think that Vatican II was even worth a mention.1 There were so many things happening that impinged on religion and upon which religion impinged, that it is difficult to find the right balance, or to disentangle the interactions. One of the key questions of balance is that between the dechristianizing trends of the decade and the continuing importance of Christianity. The 1960s was a hinge decade between the 1940s and 50s, with their more overtly Christian ethos, and the more secular atmosphere of the 1970s and 80s. The distinctive character of the sixties will be missed unless this dual nature is recognized. Most of the sixties generation had received a religious upbringing, and even those who were moving in other directions often continued to be influenced by this upbringing. Levels of religious practice were still high in many countries – and in the first half of the decade sometimes very high. Interest in religious questions was also high, at least in the early and middle years of the decade, as was shown by the million sales and translation into numerous languages of John Robinson’s Honest to God (1963), or, as Nancy Christie shows, by the huge Canadian interest in Pierre Berton’s The Comfortable Pew. No doubt the extent of this interest varied according to country,

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social class, and probably gender. But a survey of women who had been students at Girton College, Cambridge, in the 1960s found that no less than 50 per cent answered ‘Yes’ when asked if religion had been ‘important’ to them while a student, and more surprisingly the proportion was as high among those going to university in the latter part of the decade as among those who had gone there at the beginning.2 On the other hand nearly every Western country saw a decline in churchgoing and sometimes in other forms of religious practice, such as participation in Christian rites of passage, during the decade, and the decline was often quite dramatic. However, it is not always recognized that this could happen in many different ways, and this is as significant for an understanding of what was happening as the sheer numbers. Taking for example the drop in attendance at Catholic Mass or at the services of ‘mainline’ Protestant denominations, this could happen in at least six ways. Some people became atheists or humanists, or, as the phrase was, ‘lost their faith.’ Some people continued to believe and to see themselves as Catholics, Anglicans, or whatever, but because of the claims of other interests or responsibilities, their attendance at church became less frequent. They ‘floated away,’ as one Methodist interviewee from north-west England put it.3 Then there were those (mainly Catholics), quite numerous in some countries in the later sixties and early seventies, who joined ‘critical parishes’ at a distance from the official church, often led by a priest who had resigned or had been disciplined during the tumultuous years following the end of the Second Vatican Council. There were those who left one of the ‘big’ churches to join a ‘sectarian’ branch of Christianity. This was a frequent occurrence in the early seventies which saw for instance the Jesus Movement in the United States, and in Britain many new ‘fellowships’ and ‘community churches’ formed by Charismatics. There were those who left Christianity to become Buddhists or Hindus, or to join one of the many new religious movements which were emerging at the time, especially in the United States. Finally, there were those young people who simply never joined a church, with the result that the older members who were dying were not being replaced by a sufficient number of new recruits. The relative importance of these various routes out of mainstream Christianity varied from country to country. In England, where church attendance was already relatively low, it would seem, according to Clive Field’s analysis of the excellent Methodist statistics, that the churches were facing a crisis of recruitment, rather than a major exodus of existing members.4 In places like Quebec, and indeed northern Belgium, the southern

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Netherlands, western France, or north-eastern Italy, where levels of religious practice had previously been very high, the changes in these years were more dramatic, and often traumatic, and there must have been many people who had been going to mass regularly all of their life but who stopped at some point in the sixties or early seventies.5 In this chapter I am going to start by trying to find some areas of consensus among the contributors in this volume; then I shall mention some areas of evident disagreement; finally, I shall discuss some relatively neglected themes which deserve more prominence. I The chapters cover very different ground, in spite of areas of overlap. The only point on which nearly all agree is that the 1960s was a period of decisive change in Western religious history – some would say the period of decisive change. (Chronologies vary somewhat, with many people thinking in terms of a ‘long sixties,’ starting in the later 1950s and ending in the early 1970s.6 I would agree on the importance of this period, which I have defined as ‘the end of Christendom,’ but I would qualify this by saying that there has been a much longer process of ‘the decline of Christendom,’ including other key periods, such as the 1690s, the 1790s, and maybe the 1890s.7 Arguably the biggest change of all was the beginning in the later seventeenth century of open criticism of Christianity in Christian Europe.8 Admittedly the circulation of deist and atheist ideas and books was largely limited to educated elites and European states continued to be based on the union of throne and altar, even when their rulers were privately sceptical. In the 1790s, however, as a result of the events in France following the revolution of 1789, religious scepticism was politicized and diffused much more widely among the mass of the population, and for a brief period in 1793–4 the French government attempted to ‘dechristianize’ the people. Even if the attempt failed, it established precedents which would be followed up with greater resources by many twentieth-century governments. This too unquestionably marks a key turning point. The significance of the 1890s may be less obvious, but for many years there was a consensus among historians of British religion that the late nineteenth century was a period of decisive change. In spite of major differences, they agreed that this was the period where answers to crucial questions about the nature and causes of ‘secularization’ or ‘church decline’ (they did not necessarily agree as to the appropriate terminol-

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ogy) were to be found.9 Important changes were taking place in other countries too,10 including the rapid spread of socialism among the workers and attacks on Christian ethics and dogma by scientists such as Freud, philosophers such as Nietzsche, and dramatists such as Ibsen and Shaw. Others looked inwards, backwards in time, or eastwards to India for new inspiration.11 Hearing the Scottish historian Stewart J. Brown speak at a seminar in my university on the many new religious movements of the time, I was led to wonder if the 1960s should be seen as part of the ‘long 1890s.’12 The case for the 1960s being the, rather than a, period of decisive religious change was argued most strongly in Callum Brown’s seminal Death of Christian Britain.13 Other historians were reaching similar conclusions at about the same time.14 I am suggesting here that the 1960s has to be seen as part of a much longer history, and that the preconditions for events in that decade were established much earlier. However to say that the ground for developments in the 1960s was prepared much earlier is not to say that events in the sixties were the inevitable consequence of these earlier events; nor is it in any way to diminish the significance of the changes at this time. One of Brown’s achievements was to show the continuing existence of a ‘Christian culture’ in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century in spite of the decline of churchgoing and to demonstrate that rather than this being an era of continuous ‘decline,’ this period also included times when the salience of this culture was increasing. Most of the authors in this volume are also agreed in seeing major differences between the religious history of the United States and that of other Western countries. For example, Leslie Woodcock Tentler stresses that although some European countries may now be regarded as ‘dechristianized,’ this word cannot be applied to the United States. Patrick Pasture notes the readiness of American politicians to invoke God on public occasions and the reluctance even of Christian Democratic politicians to do so in Europe. And Tina Fetner shows how a powerful ‘religious right’ developed in the United States but not in Canada. At the same time both Tentler and Pasture want to nuance these familiar contrasts. Tentler shows how the American Catholic Church has suffered a serious decline since the later 1960s which has followed a very similar pattern to that seen in Europe or in Quebec, even if it has taken a less extreme form. And Pasture notes the big differences within both Europe and the United States which often get ironed out when claims are made about either European or American ‘exceptionalism.’15

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Fetner argues persuasively that a major difference between Canada and the United States was the much larger conservative evangelical and fundamentalist infrastructure that had been built up in the latter country from the 1920s onwards. This reminded me of the fact that fundamentalism is often a response to perceived secularization and that until the 1970s Canada was a more churchgoing nation than the United States – indeed, one of the most churchgoing of all Western countries.16 Is it possible that American fundamentalists were better prepared for the crisis of the 1960s and 70s because they had been battling against secularizing trends for longer? Pasture makes many excellent points in comparing religion in Europe and the United States. Yet the reasons for the greater buoyancy of Christianity in America remain elusive, and some of Pasture’s explanations seem to me to be based on an overstatement of the differences. For instance, although American evangelicalism has proved to have greater staying power than its counterparts in Britain or Scandinavia, I am not convinced that the content is radically different.17 Reference to ‘a transcendent God’ is as essential to most American Christianity as to most European Christianity. The differences seem to lie not so much in the content of the religion as in the ways in which it has been marketed, in differences in social structure, and in those aspects of American politics and society which permit a degree of pluralism that is difficult to achieve in the more centralized societies of Europe.18 Nor, in spite of the major decline in churchgoing in Europe, is it true that the churches have been withdrawing from ‘politics and society’ – still less from the welfare systems, where their role is often central.19 One other theme that occurs in a number of papers is that of an internal secularization arising from the adoption by theologians or by church leaders of forms of discourse derived from non-Christian sources and in tension with more appropriate Christian insights and concerns. Thus Till van Rahden sees the Catholic Church in the later 1960s increasingly influenced by a therapeutic language, and a similar point is made by Melanie Heath in her study of programs for saving marriage in the United States around the end of the twentieth century. Kurt Richardson in his paper at the conference mentioned a lack of Christological and ecclesial themes in the discourse of the civil rights movement. Here again I would offer some caveats. Important as such shifts in language or even of intellectual underpinnings are, I wonder if ‘secularization’ is the best term to describe them. Language is partly determined by audience and more broadly by political tactics. Successful campaigns usu-

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ally depend on the building of broad coalitions and the avoidance of messages which might alienate one part of this potential constituency – as the ‘religious right’ discovered when it tried to attract Catholic and African-American supporters. Moreover, Christianity has continually adapted to intellectual and social change by demonstrating its ‘relevance’ to contemporary concerns and by adopting contemporary intellectual frameworks. There is nothing intrinsically ‘secularizing’ in this, though one may legitimately ask whether particular adaptations are in conflict with more fundamental Christian principles and priorities. II In spite of the near consensus as to the importance of the sixties in the history of Western Christianity, there are many areas where the contributors to the volume disagree. Admittedly the chapters cover a variety of countries and religious traditions, and some of the disagreements may arise from the fact that the events of these years took different forms in different places. However, there are probably also more fundamental differences between the assumptions and approaches of the various writers. Were the 1960s a reaction against the 1950s? Or did the sixties grow out of the fifties, as initiatives started in the earlier decade came to full fruition? The former view has been forcefully advocated by Callum Brown in his earlier work and it is restated here in equally trenchant terms.20 In spite of differences of focus and argument, Lynn Abrams, also with regard to Britain, and Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez with regard to the very different Spanish situation, would be in broad agreement. For Brown, Britain’s fifties was an age of ‘puritanism,’ marked by stringently imposed premarital chastity, persecution of homosexuals, sabbatarian laws, and intolerance of humanists. The sixties was the freedom decade when young women led the escape from the oppressive restrictions of the previous decade. Abrams highlights the weight of respectability in British middle-class families in the 1950s and shows how rebellion by young women in the 1960s against the religion of their mothers was just one aspect of a wider rejection of constricting rules of correct behaviour. Cazorla-Sanchez depicts a Spanish church that in the 1950s was still overwhelmingly conservative and accepting of the Franco regime. On the other hand, many of the other papers see continuities between

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the 1950s and 60s. Till van Rahden is particularly explicit on this point: the ’democratization of the family’ in West Germany, which took sensational forms in the experiments of the later sixties, began in the period after the Second World War, and its most influential spokesmen included Catholic and Protestant writers. Brigitte Caulier shows how new developments in catechesis in Quebec which reached full fruition in the 1960s had their origins in the 1930s. Kevin Flatt goes back even further, showing that the ‘New Curriculum’ which caused such a furore when introduced in United Church Sunday schools in the 1960s was based on ideas that had been common currency in seminaries since the 1920s. And both Tentler and Michael Gauvreau stress the importance of the 1950s for subsequent changes in Catholic thinking in the United States and Quebec. In contrast to Brown’s emphasis on the ‘puritanism’ of the fifties, Tentler suggests that the increasingly positive Catholic teaching about sex and marriage, having its origins in the 1930s but developing rapidly in the 1950s, prepared some of the ground for the 1960s, and in particular helps to explain the angry response of many Catholics to Humanae Vitae. For many years Catholics had been told how important the sexual relationship was for a happy marriage: it seemed quite inconsistent for the church now to say that all of the more effective forms of birth control were prohibited. The relationship between that decade and those preceding is a key issue for any historian seeking to explain change in the 1960s. It probably has to be approached on a case-by-case basis, since there is no reason why the relationship should be exactly the same in every country or in respect of every issue. In general it seems to be right to highlight the change of atmosphere and the speeding up of the pace of change which took place during the sixties, but at the same time it is necessary to show which of these changes were already underway, even if in a much more modest way, in the preceding decade, or even earlier. To give one example, Brown mentions that prosecutions of homosexuals in many parts of Britain reached a high point in the early 1950s, but he does not mention that the Wolfenden Committee, whose report recommending the legalization of male homosexuality had a major impact on elite opinion in both Britain and in other English-speaking countries, met between 1954 and 1957. Nor was this the product of any conversion to humanist ethics of the kind Brown sees happening in the sixties: the Wolfenden Committee was a thoroughly establishment body, with church opinion well represented both on the committee and among those giving evidence.21

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Were churches themselves initiators of change, or was their role purely reactive? Callum Brown is the most forthright exponent of the latter view, though some other contributors go part of the way in the same direction. For instance in Heather Laing’s account of religious education in Ontario, the role of the churches seems somewhat passive, with the key initiatives coming from politicians, guided by political more than religious motives. Cazorla-Sanchez occupies a midway position with the church responding to, rather then initiating change, but with responses by the church contributing to further processes of change. More frequently the papers highlight the importance, whether for good or for ill, of developments within the church. Since the concern of most of the papers is with the causes of dechristianization, the tendency is to stress the unintended consequences either of the policies pursued by church leaders or of grass-roots reform movements. There is an important difference, however, between those who blame conservative leaders for the subsequent problems faced by the church and those who see the problems as arising from ill-conceived attempts at reform. In the first camp are Cazorla-Sanchez and Tentler. The former is scathing in his criticism of conservative church leaders in Spain. In particular he sees them as having no realistic understanding of working-class living conditions, as being uncritical in their loyalty to Franco, and as tending to sit on the fence even in the changing conditions of the 1960s and 70s. In his view they must take a major share of the blame for the alienation of large numbers of Spanish Catholics from the church. Tentler shows how Paul VI’s encyclicals Sacerdotalis Caelibatus and Humanae Vitae led to a mass exit of clergy in the United States, as elsewhere, and caused many lay Catholics to lose confidence in the pope and bishops. The result was not necessarily dechristianization: some Catholics have seen these as healthy developments, since the sharp reduction in the number of priests and women religious has forced the church to give laypeople more responsibility and has encouraged the laity to be more independent-minded. However none of this was intended by Paul VI, and for every Catholic who has become more active and independent-minded there is probably another who has largely or wholly broken away from the church. Other speakers see misguided attempts at reform as a source of the church’s problems in the 1960s and subsequently. This is the view both of Gauvreau and of Flatt. Gauvreau is quite unequivocal in his criticism

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of the elitism and masculinism of Catholic Action leaders in Quebec. Flatt’s position is not quite so explicit, but he clearly sees the modernist elements in the United Church as partly to blame for the decline in membership suffered by that denomination in the 1960s. The New Curriculum alienated some members who felt that core teachings of the church were being contradicted and the beneficiaries were more conservative denominations. As was already apparent in the early 1970s, it is clear that conservative Protestant denominations tended to weather the storms of the sixties better than either the Catholic Church or liberal and moderate Protestant denominations. Flatt’s is the only chapter to directly address this issue, though it is not his major concern. Certainly it deserves to be high on the agenda in any discussion of the American/ European differences noted in Pasture’s paper, since it is the conservative Protestant churches which have continued to flourish in the United States, while Catholics and ‘mainline’ Protestants have suffered serious losses there, as elsewhere. III Six issues, some explicitly identified but others only hinted at, deserve fuller treatment. (1) Patrick Pasture in his ‘Grid-Group’ analysis puts his finger on a key issue, namely the decline of collective identities and the shift towards a society where individual freedom matters more to most people than membership in a community. An important manifestation of this trend was the collapse of the system of pillarization in the Netherlands and the decline of related systems of religious and politically based subcultures in Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. Other aspects were declining membership of political parties (in Britain, for instance, membership of the two main parties peaked in 1952), and the declining importance of denominational ties – noted in respect of the United States both by Tentler and by Patrick Allitt. One can speak of a more general decline of the things that made the ‘sociological Catholicism’ of Quebec possible – for instance, tightly knit, highly localized societies nurturing absolutist religious and political values, sustained partly by insulation from intimate contact with the outside world. (2) It is often remarked that many of the events associated with ‘the sixties’ happened in fact around 1967 or 1968. And even those who want to look at the decade more widely tend to focus on 1963 or 1964 or 1965 as the turning point. But maybe we should look more closely at the

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years around 1960 as a period of transition. There are many hints at a change of mood about that time, and though in differing ways there are signs of this in many Western counties. In the case of the United Kingdom, the Wolfenden Report of 1957 has already been mentioned. The year 1960 would see the Lady Chatterley trial, often proposed as the start of Britain’s ‘sixties,’ and the revue Beyond the Fringe, triggering off the satire movement, which for the next three years would be subjecting politicians, especially Conservative politicians, the monarchy, the army, the empire, and the clergy to constant ridicule. In Quebec it was also 1960 which saw the start of the ‘Quiet Revolution.’ In the United States 1961–3 saw the Supreme Court judgments banning school prayer, and in 1962 Sweden moved to ‘objective’ teaching of religion in schools. In West Germany 1963 began with Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter, a fierce critique of the recently deceased and still widely revered Pope Pius XII. The themes of this period included a breaking of taboos and the opening up of new areas of public debate; changes in the relationship between ‘public’ and ‘private’; and a move away from an explicitly ‘Christian’ society to one which saw itself as ‘pluralist.’ Though humanists supported these changes and as a result were gaining a bigger voice than previously, this was not the result of any mass conversion to humanism, but rather of a shift in thinking about the relationship between religion, morality, and the law, and the degree to which public institutions should reflect a specific religious viewpoint. (3) There is also room for further exploration of the distinctive atmosphere of the later sixties – in particular the utopianism which was a powerful solvent of all existing loyalties, religious, political, even familial, though it was often followed by a mood of disillusion as the hopes of these years faded. Student movements, women’s movements, anti-war movements, the counterculture, the radical Christianities flourishing especially in the wake of Vatican II – all of these were driven by hopes for rapid and very radical change, a critical attitude towards established institutions of all kinds, suspicion of structures and hierarchies, a preference for the spontaneous, and impatience with protocols and procedures which seemed to be delaying the necessary action. The utopian mood of these years contributed to the dechristianizing trend both directly and indirectly. It contributed directly in that the primacy of the political led many Christian radicals to focus their hopes on Marxism as offering the best practical means of achieving practical social change. Cazorla-Sanchez shows how in Spain many politically active priests moved away from the church in order to pursue their social and political

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objectives through what seemed more effective channels. It contributed indirectly in that Vatican II in particular raised hopes for radical reform of the church so high that these hopes were certain to be disappointed, leading many to break away from the church even if they continued to practise what they saw as a more authentic form of Christianity. (4) The impact of affluence, especially in rural areas where the changes in the standard of living were most dramatic, is so obvious and has been so widely discussed that our authors may have felt that there was little more to be said about it. Nonetheless the relationship between growing prosperity and changing ways of thinking and relating would merit more precise investigation. It has become something of a cliché in recent years that diminishing interest in religion correlates with rising security and material comfort – though those who make such connections usually point to the United States as an anomalous exception. Yet even if this is true in the early twenty-first century one cannot say that it has always been the case. In nineteenth-century Britain, which at that time was by far the richest society the world had ever seen, it was the principal beneficiaries of this wealth, the bourgeoisie, who were most conspicuous for their piety; conversely, the poor not infrequently blamed their poverty on God.22 In the 1940s and 50s the great postwar boom in the United States coincided with the ‘religious revival.’ And in spite of all that was said then or is said now about the superficiality of much of this religion, it would be hard to claim that as they swelled church congregations, bought large numbers of religious books, and gave increasing proportions of their income to the church, they were actually becoming less religious.23 So more careful analysis is needed of just how and why increasing prosperity was associated with greater secularity in the 1960s, and of how changing material conditions affected different sections of the population. We also need to look at how different religious organizations responded to these changes. For instance, parish-based churches may have been particularly hard hit by increasing mobility and the weakening attachments to specific communities. (5) Other themes which have received little mention in these papers are class and the impact of changing methods of religious socialization. Two older studies touching partly on religion in the sixties gave class a major role. A.D. Gilbert in his pioneering history of ‘post-Christian Britain’ thinks in terms of a very ‘longue duréé,’ but one of his key factors is the dechristianization of the working class in the nineteenth century, preparing the ground for a more general dechristianization in the democratic twentieth century, as politicians, advertisers, and the media

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adapted their message to the tastes of the majority of their customers.24 Class plays a completely different, but nonetheless central, role in the analysis of the French sociologist Henri Mendras. He suggests that the decline of two of the most powerful institutions in French society, the Catholic Church and the Communist Party, is partly explained by the fact that both had their strongest roots within a declining class – the peasantry and the working class, respectively. Conversely the new ideas and lifestyles emerging in the 1960s were most strongly exemplified in a ‘new class’ including such professions as technicians, middle managers, and social workers.25 Neither of these theories should be simply dismissed. But what we lack is empirical evidence as to the role of different social groups in ‘the sixties.’ We have more such evidence in respect of the United States, where various studies have identified students as a key group and have shown how those who had received higher education were those most receptive to new ways of thinking and behaving. Tentler, for instance, has shown that those Catholics with higher education had been more accepting of official teaching on birth control in the 1950s but were those more likely to rebel in the 1960s. Wuthnow has shown that whereas in the 1950s the well-educated were those most likely to attend church, it was among the well-educated that the decline in the 1960s was greatest, so that the difference had substantially narrowed.26 (6) The impact of religious socialization is a subject of much speculation, but empirical evidence is again limited. Some recent studies in the United States and Britain have found a strong correlation between religious belief and practice and parental, especially maternal, religion.27 But what was the situation for the sixties generation, for whom religious messages were likely to have been mediated much more strongly through other agents, such as school, Sunday school, youth groups, and magazines than was the case thirty years later? Does the rejection by many of the sixties generation of their upbringing in the church reflect, as some have suggested, a weaker socialization than that received by the previous generation? Or does it merely indicate the limits of any kind of socialization in conditioning responses to a rapidly changing society and a host of new ideas? I would prefer the latter theory, but as yet there has been little investigation of this question. IV Is there one word or phrase that would sum up the religious trajectory

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of the Western world in the 1960s? The editors have chosen ’dechristianization.’ Others, either here or elsewhere, have spoken of ‘secularization,’ ‘autonomization,’ or ‘the end of Christendom.’ With an eye to the rise of the new, rather than the decline of the old, Hannah Elias in her contribution to the conference spoke of ‘adaptation’28 and Heelas and Woodhead devoted a book to ‘the spiritual revolution,’29 while Brown’s main theme is the growth of humanism. I have preferred ‘the end of Christendom’ because it leaves open the question of how Christianity will develop in different social and political conditions (I am no prophet), and it avoids some of the problems of ‘secularization’ – with, for instance, its dismissal of ‘alternative’ spiritualities and its tendency to lay overly sharp distinctions between the ‘secular’ and the ‘spiritual.’ But our greatest need is not for a new catch phrase which claims to wrap it all up, but for a pluralism which recognizes the coexistence of and interaction between divergent, and maybe contradictory, tendencies. None of these terms will tell the whole story.

NOTES This paper was completed while I was a Fellow of the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Studies in Uppsala. I would like to thank the Collegium for appointing me a Fellow and my colleagues there, including most especially Jeff Cox and Hans Joas, for helpful discussion of some of the issues raised here. 1 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958–1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 2 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 200. 3 Ibid., 171. 4 Clive Field, ‘Joining and Leaving British Methodism since the 1960s,’ in Leslie J. Francis and Yaacov J. Katz, eds., Joining and Leaving Religion: Research Perspectives (Leominster: Gracewing Press, 2000), 57–85. 5 See, for example, Yves Lambert’s superb micro-study of a Breton village, Dieu change en Bretagne (Paris 1985), and, addressing some of the same issues, Peter van Rooden, ‘Oral History and the Strange Demise of Dutch Christianity,’ www.xs4all.nl/pvrooden (accessed 14 April 2005). 6 For a summary of the debates on chronology, see Hugh McLeod, ‘The Sixties: Writing the Religious History of a Crucial Decade,’ Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 14 (2001): 36–48.

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7 McLeod, Religious Crisis, 240–56; Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds., The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 8 Charles Taylor in his monumental overview of the rise of secularity in the ‘Atlantic world’ from 1500 to the present day, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), sees the years around 1690 as marking a crucial turning point. 9 Stephen Yeo, Religions and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis (London: Croom Helm, 1976); Jeffrey Cox, English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); J.N. Morris, Religion and Urban Change: Croydon, 1890–1914 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1992); S.J.D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). 10 See, for example, Hugh McLeod, Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848– 1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 11 See the account of ‘vagrant religions’ in Thomas Nipperdey, Religion im Umbruch, 1870–1914 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1987). 12 See Stewart J.Brown, Providence and Empire (Harlow: Longman, 2008). 13 See now the new edition, in which Brown replies to his critics: Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization (London: Routledge, 2009). 14 See for instance Olaf Blaschke, ed., Konfessionen im Konflikt: Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970. Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2001). 15 The most recent exploration of this much-discussed theme is Peter Berger, Grace Davie, and Effie Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 16 Mark Noll, ‘What Happened to Christian Canada?’ Church History 75 (2006): 245–73. 17 Pasture may be drawing too heavily on polemicists, such as Harold Bloom. A more balanced guide to the similarities and differences is Mark Noll, David Bebbington, and George Rawlyk, eds., Evangelicalism. Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 18 Steve Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), argues this point convincingly. I have made a preliminary exploration of these issues in Hugh McLeod, ‘Religion in the United States and Europe: The 20th Century,’ in Hartmut Lehmann,

Reflections and New Perspectives

19 20 21

22

23

24 25 26

27

28

29

467

ed., Transatlantische Religionsgeschichte (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006), 131–45. See, for example, Anders Bäckström and Grace Davie, eds., Welfare and Religion in 21st Century Europe, vol. 1 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010). See also Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow: Longman, 2006). See especially Matthew Grimley, ‘Law, Morality and Secularization: The Church of England and the Wolfenden Report, 1954–1967,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60 (2009): 725–41; Graham Willett, ‘The Church of England and the Origins of Homosexual Law Reform,’ Journal of Religious History 33 (2009): 418–34. I have discussed these issues in Hugh McLeod, Piety and Poverty: Working Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York, 1870–1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1996). But see Alan Petigny, The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), which does indeed argue that many trends identified with the sixties, including increasing secularization, had their roots in the 1940s and 50s, and had already gone a long way in those decades. Alan D.Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain (London: Longman, 1980). Henri Mendras, La Seconde Révolution française, 1965–1984 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 220; Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 154–72. Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 126; Alasdair Crockett and David Voas, ‘Generations of Decline: Religious Change in 20th-Century Britain,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45 (2006): 567–84. For more extended discussion of religious socialization, see Klaus Tenfelde, ed., Religiöse Sozialisationen im 20. Jahrhundert (Essen: Klartext, 2010). See also Jane Garnett et al., eds., Redefining Christian Britain (London: SCM Press, 2006), the title of which indicates a major part of the book’s agenda, namely questioning Callum Brown’s ‘death’ thesis. Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). In spite of the much-discussed differences between Britain and the United States, their argument has a lot in common with that of Wuthnow’s After Heaven.

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Contributors

Lynn Abrams is Professor of Gender History at the University of Glasgow, UK. She is the author of The Making of Modern Woman: Europe 1789– 1918 (London, 2002); Myth and Materiality in a Woman’s World: Shetland 1800–2000 (Manchester, 2005), and Oral History Theory (London, 2010). She is currently researching the history of female self-making in Britain in the decades between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the women’s liberation movement. Patrick Allitt was born and raised in England, and graduated from Oxford in 1977. He studied U.S. history for his PhD at Berkeley, and has worked as a professor at Emory University in Atlanta since 1988. He is the author of six books and presenter of six courses from The Teaching Company. Callum G. Brown is Professor of Late Modern European History at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of around fifty articles and book chapters, and ten books, including The Death of Christian Britain. His new book is Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s (Boydell Press, 2012). Sarah F. Browne completed her doctoral research at the University of Dundee. Her PhD focused on the women’s liberation movement in Scotland ca 1968– ca 1979. She is currently working on various publications which stem from this research. Brigitte Caulier is a full professor of the religious and social history of

470

Contributors

Quebec at Université Laval and a member of the Centre interuniversitaire d’études québécoises. Her current research centres on the teaching of religion in Quebec, a project involving analysis of textbooks, school curricula, and the training of instructors both in Quebec and overseas. Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez is Professor of History at Trent University. He has written extensively on the Franco dictatorship, mostly on social and political matters. His most recent book is Fear and Progress: Ordinary Lives in Franco’s Spain (2010). Nancy Christie is a member of the department of history at the University of Western Ontario, where she held the J.B. Smallman Chair. She is the author of several award-winning books on Canadian history, most notably A Full-Orbed Christianity (1996) and Engendering the State (2000). Her current research centres on a cultural and social history of Quebec in the era of the American and French revolutions, and on a history of Canada planned for the sesquicentennial of Confederation. Tina Fetner is Associate Professor of Sociology at McMaster University. Her book How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism (University of Minnesota Press) considers opposing movement dynamics. She is currently studying gay-straight alliances in high schools and the Tea Party movement in the United States. Kevin N. Flatt is Assistant Professor of History at Redeemer University College. His research to date has focused on Protestantism in Canada since 1930. He is currently completing a manuscript on the 1960s and the decline of evangelicalism in the United Church of Canada. Michael Gauvreau is Professor of History at McMaster University, specializing in Canadian social, cultural, and intellectual history. He is the author of a number of books, including The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution (2005). He is currently researching and writing an intellectual biography of Claude Ryan. Alana Harris is a historian specializing in issues of gender, material culture, life narratives, and migration in her explorations of spirituality and popular religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the Darby Fellow in Modern History at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Recent publications include the co-authored/-edited Redefining Christian Britain: Post-1945 Perspectives (SCM Press, 2007); ‘Dis-

Contributors

471

turbing the Complacency of Religion? The Evangelical Crusades of Dr Billy Graham and Father Patrick Peyton in England, 1951–54,’ Twentieth Century British History 18, no. 4 (2007): 481–513 (with Martin Spence); ‘Devout East Enders: Catholicism in the East End of London,’ in David Goodhew, ed., Church Growth in Britain, 1980–2010 (Ashgate, 2012); and a forthcoming monograph, Faith in the Family: English Catholic Spirituality and Vatican II (Manchester University Press, 2013). Melanie Heath is Assistant Professor of Sociology at McMaster University. She is author of One Marriage under God: The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America (New York University Press, 2012). Stephen Heathorn is Professor of History at McMaster University. He has published widely on the construction of British social identities and on commemorative practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Heather Laing is a PhD candidate in history at McMaster University whose dissertation research focuses on religious education in midtwentieth-century Ontario. Hugh McLeod is Emeritus Professor of Church History at the University of Birmingham and was president 2005–10 of CIHEC, the international organization of historians of Christianity. His books include Piety and Poverty (1996) and The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (2007). Patrick Pasture is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for European Studies at the University of Leuven (Belgium). His research and publications deal with the transnational and global history of religion. Leslie Woodcock Tentler is Ordinary Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. Her most recent book is Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Cornell, 2004); she is also the editor of The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, Ireland, and Quebec (Catholic University of America Press, 2007). Till Van Rahden holds the Canada Research Chair in German and European Studies at the Université de Montréal. His book Jews and Other Germans: Breslau 1860–1925 was published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2008. His new research focuses on the cultural and social history of postwar West Germany.

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Index

Abernathy, Ralph 147 abortion 13–14, 148; and Catholics 174–5; in England 43, 47, 63, 71–2; opposition to 100, 148; Roe v. Wade 148 Abrams, Lynn 15, 458 Adler, Gilbert 221 Adorno, Theodor 332, 336–8 Allitt, Patrick 11, 13, 461 American Enterprise Institute 150 Andrews, Joan 148 Anglican Church 5, 10, 404; critique by Pierre Berton 321–50; decline of social reform 328; department of Religious Education 323–5; and evangelicals 135; and marriage 112; puritanism 20; support for Billy Graham 329; and women 52 Anglo-Indian Association 409 Anti-Catholicism 144–5, 147, 153–4 Anti-modernism: in Canada 130–1, 136; in the United States 129–30, 136 Assembly of Quebec Bishops 188, 201 Association of Local Union Churches 132

Association of Priests of Montreal 204 Association of Religious Liberty 252, 254 Association of the Priests of St Thérèse 432 Bakewell, Joan 49 Bamberg Principles 279–80 Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec 250, 303–4 Baptist Missionary Council 135 Barker, Eileen 9 Beer, Ulrich 280, 282 Belgium 4, 11–2, 22, 230, 232, 361, 454, 461 Berger, Peter 150 Berrigan, Daniel 149 Berrigan, Philip 149 Berton, Pierre 322, 453; criticism of clergy 335, 338; critique of Protestant churches 322–6, 330, 332–7; feminized religion 338–40; middleclass affluence 337–8; premarital sex 324–5, 332 biblical literalism 129–30, 298, 329 Bienvenue, Louise 218

474

Index

Billiet, Jaak 25 Blanshard, Paul 144–6 Bloom, Harold 369 Boff, Leonardo 149 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 4, 335–6 Boorman, J. Arthur 302 Borgmann, Karl 274 Bour, Hubert 283 Bright, Bill 134 Britain: abortion 43, 47, 63, 71–2; Catholics 20, 429; Christians 24; contraception 40; death rites 406–7; divorce 52, 63, 74; graves in India 408–416, 418–22; homosexuality 459; imperialism 410; marriage 103, 110–16; religious instruction 17; sexual revolution 41–2, 44, 71, 79, 90, 93; social changes 61; Treasury 409 British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, 417–8 British Cambridgeshire Syllabus of Religious Teaching for Schools 249 British High Commission 403–4, 409; British cemeteries in India and Pakistan 410, 413–16 British Humanist Association 45 British Monuments and Grave Section (BMGS) 408–9, 418–19 British National Marriage Guidance Council 16 British Raj 404–5, 407, 410, 418–21; nostalgia for 416–18 Brooke, Stephen 8 Brown, Callum 23, 187, 245, 322; Britain 4–5, 7–8, 102, 116, 157, 328, 372, 456, 458–9, 460, 465; Catholicism 23; conservatives and liberals 12–13; discursive Christianity 405;

women and the church 3, 19, 61–2; youth 14–16, 18 Brown, W. Gordon 304 Bruce, Steve 8, 17 Buddhism 376, 378 Bullock, Humphrey 408–9 Bush, George W. 374 Byfield, Ted 342–3 Callwood, June 327 Campus Crusade for Christ 134–5 Cana Conference 163 Canada: Christians 24; churches 10, 14; churchgoing 189, 457; ecumenism 10–1, 132; evangelicalism 6, 11, 126–7, 130, 132, 138, 457; Protestantism 11, 14–5, 128, 130–2, 136 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms 251 Canadian Jewish Congress 252–4 Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission 136 Cannadine, David 406–7 Cardjin, Joseph 232 Carter, Emmett 235 Carter, Jimmy 149, 374 Catechism 221–7; catechetical culture 236; collaborations in North America 238; Second International Catechetical Year 236 Catholic Action 191, 193, 195, 207–8 218, 232, 238, 461; “Voir, juger, agir” series 227, 230; Social questions 191; in Spain 355, 358–60; Support from bishops 201 Catholic Charismatic Movement 379, 383 Catholicism 7; ability to combat secularism 151; abortion 174–5; in

Index Britain 20, 429; catechism 221–7; church attendance 158–9, 166, 175–6, 189; clerical sex abuse 176–7; confession 159–160, 166, 168; contraception 158, 160, 162–5, 167–8, 191, 459; death and afterlife 434–5; decline 186–7; demographic growth 373; devotions 162, 445–6; divorce 165, 174–5; education 161, 220; Eucharistic Holy Hours 162; feminist rejection 86–7, 89; in Germany 12; hierarchy 145; holistic spirituality 446; Holy Name Societies 159; in Italy 12–3; marriage and sexual fulfilment 163–4, 172; priestly celibacy 172, 177; in Quebec 188–91 194, 196–7, 202–5; response to anti-Catholicism 145; response to industrialization 190; sacraments 159, 166, 189; seminaries 161, 166; sexual morality 12, 174–5, 444–5, 459; in Spain 12–3, 460; in the United States 157–9; women religious 161, 166 Catholic laity: lay ministers 176; in Germany 279–80 Catholic and Protestant Education Committees 217 Catholic scholarship 152–3 Cazorla-Sanchez, Antonio 13 cemeteries 404, 406–414; bureaucracy 414–6; in India and Pakistan 408–416, 418–22 Chesser, Eustace 39, 44 childrearing 8–9, 15–6, 112, 191. See also West Germany Chopra, Deepak 385 Christian Broadcasting Network 134 Christian Burial Board 411 Christian Family Movement 163–4

475

Christian Feminism 52, 91–2 Christianity: in Britain 24; Christian unity 145; Conservative Christianity 53; death rites 406–7; feminist rejection 63, 85, 88, 93; and unbelief 45, 47 Christianity Today 152 Christian Missionary Alliance 22 Christian Social Workers’ Union 279 Christie, Nancy 10, 245, 253–4, 453 Church of England 63; religious education in Ontario 255. See also Anglicanism churchgoing 4–5; among Catholics 158–9, 162, 166, 175–6; decline 49, 67, 186, 372–3, 454; and gender 39, 50–1; in Quebec 189–90, 197–202, 454–5; and respectability 67 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints 374 Cité libre 218 Civil Rights Movement 4, 91, 93, 100, 147, 149–50, 457 Clark, H.H. 333 Coderre, Gérard-Marie 228–31, 232, 234, 239 Cold War 6, 14, 21, 145, 150, 368, 378 Colomb, Joseph 220 Colson, Charles 152, 154 Commonwealth Relations Office 410 Communism 10, 12, 14, 21, 25, 145, 328–9, 382 Confessional Protestantism 374 Congregational Union of Ontario and Quebec 132 Connolly, George 307 contraception 48, 20; in Britain 40; and Catholicism 158, 160, 162–5, 167–8, 191, 459 Corbett, Jim 148

476

Index

Cook, Hera 42 Cook, Ramsay 245 Cooper, David 276 counterculture 380, 462; in Europe 377; in the United States 374, 377–8, 385–6 Cox, Jeffrey 21, 404 Creal, Michael 324 Crossroads Christian Communication 136 Crysdale Stewart 327–9 cults 380–1 Daly, Mary 92 Darcy, Françoise (Sr Marie-de-laVisitation) 236–7 Davidson, J.A. 307 Davie, Grace 3, 14, 23 Dayal, Yunas 412 death 24–5, 420, 434–5 dechristianization 369, 455; according to grid-group cultural theory 370–1 Delcuve, Georges 229–30, 234–5 democracy 6–7, 21, 145, 151, 192, 203; and education 252–7; within the family 270–6, 280–1; and selffulfilment 14–15 Department of Public Instruction 217 devotional Catholicism 12. See also Catholicism discursive Christianity 45, 405 Divine Word International Centre 235 divorce 10; in Britain 52, 63, 74; among Catholics 165, 174–5; in Germany 285; in the United States 98–9, 101, 104–5, 108–13 Dobbelaere, Karel 25 Dolan, Jay P. 153

Drew, George 245, 251, 261 Dumont, Fernand 195, 200, 202–3, 205, 218 Dumont Commission (Commission d’étude sur les laics et l’Église) 188, 201–2, 204–8 Duplessis, Maurice 192 ecumenism 6, 152, 370–1, 380; in Canada 10–11, 132; in Europe 383, 387; in the United States 10–11, 145, 151–2, 373 Edinborough, Arnold 325, 339 Edmundson, Daniel 305 education 14, 17; and the Anglican Church 323–5; and the Catholic Church 161, 220; in Ontario 245–62; in Quebec 193, 198–9, 201, 217–39; sexual morality 13; United Church of Canada 294–5, 298–9, 301–3 Ellis, John Tracy 152–3 Episcopal Commission on Religious Instruction 229, 231 Episcopalianism 131, 146; Education in Quebec 228–9, 231 evangelicalism: and the Anglican Church 135; in Canada 6, 11, 126–7, 130, 132, 138, 457; cooperation with Catholics 149–50; differences between Canada and the United States 126–7, 130, 132, 138; growth 381; institutional infrastructure 137–9; media institutions 134, 136; “neo evangelicals” 132–3; para-church organizations 133–4, 136; and Presbyterianism 128, 131; and sexual morality 12–4; in the United States 6, 102, 126–7, 130, 132, 138, 381–2, 457–8

Index Falwell, Jerry 147–8, 154 Feeney, Leonard 145 Fehrenbach, Heide 271 feminism 48: Christian feminists 52, 91–2; First Wave feminism 91; and Judaism 89; rejection of Catholicism 86–7, 89; rejection of Christianity 63, 85, 88, 93; as a religious conversion 89–91; Second Wave movement 19, 45, 48 Fetner, Tina 6, 22 Field, Clive 9 Fife, John 148 Finney, Charles Grandison 150 Flatt, Kevin 17, 21 Fordham University 237 Fournier, Norbert 233 France 4, 12, 14, 158, 194–5, 232, 238, 353, 355, 361–3, 443, 455 Franco, Francisco 13, 352–7, 359–64 Frenette, Emilien 194 Friedan, Betty 333 Front de Libération du Québec 202 Fulford, Robert 326 fundamentalism. See evangelicalism Galbraith, John Kenneth 321–2 Gauthier, Marguerite 223–8 Gauvreau, Michael 218–19, 245, 254–5, 297, 459–60 German Catholic Parents’ Association 279 Germany: Catholicism 12; divorce 285. See also West Germany Gidney, R.D. 247, 253, 258 Gleason, Philip 153 globalization religious influence 367–9, 387 Graham, Billy 12, 42, 378–9; and Catholicism 150; relationship

477

to Protestant denominations in Canada 328–30; and the Youth for Christ 135 Greeley, Andrew 161–2, 166, 174 Green, Simon 9 grid-group cultural theory 369–71, 461 Gutierrez, Gustavo 149 Halton, Hugh 145 Hancock, Sheila 48 Hardie, J.B. 302 Harris, Alana 24 Harrison, Ernest 323–5, 331, 332 Hastings, Adam 42 Hastings, Adrian 54 Hatch, Nathan 153 Heathorn, Stephen 7, 24–5 Herberg, Will 147 Hermandad Obrera de Acción Católica (HOAC) 360 Hitz, Paul 234 Holden, James R. 311 Hölscher, Lucian 187–8 homosexuality 14; and Britain 459; laws against 9, 43; opposition to 147; Wolfenden Report 9, 459, 462 Hope Commission (Royal Commission on Education) 246–7, 248, 250, 251, 260 Howse, E.M. 307 Hubbard, L. Ron 377 Humanae Vitate 20, 165, 173–4, 372, 459–60 humanism 45–6, 147 Humanist Society of Scotland 46 Human Life Review 148 Human Rights 47 Hume, Basil 443

478

Index

Imperial War Graves Commission 408 India: 1857 Indian Rebellion 403–5; Anglican Church 404; British Christian gravesites 403–9; Christian missionaries 404; Christian death rites 406; Independence 407 Institute of Religious Pedagogy of Strasbourg 220, 236 Inter-Church Committee on Religious Education 247–8, 249, 250, 260–1; decline of religious education 261–2; education and democratic citizenship 255 International Catechetical Year 230, 232, 236–7, 407 International Congress on World Evangelization 378 Intervarsity Christian Fellowship 134 individualism 5–7, 15, 22, 25, 61, 79, 102, 158; American individualism 102, 158, 165, 168, 376; in Canada 337; and Catholicism 201 industrialization 14, 187, 189–90, 196 Ireland 4, 7, 17, 20, 99, 157, 368, 386 Islam 382, 384, 386–7 Italy 4, 7, 12–3, 17, 20, 353–5, 363, 382, 386, 455 Jehovah’s Witnesses 340–1, 374, 381, 383 Jesuit Order 145, 229–30, 234, 361–2 Jesus People 374, 378–379, 380–1 Jeunesse étudiante catholique 218, 233 Jeunesse ouvrière catholique 218 Johnston, George 302–3 Jubilee 170–1 Judeo-Christian tradition 145

Juventud Obrera Católica 360 Keggs, Beverley 66 Kennedy, John F. 146 Kilbourn, Elizabeth 332 King, Martin Luther, Jr 147 Knight, Margaret 46 Knowles, Stanley H. 329 labour unions 21, 192 Laforest, Jacques 233 Laing, Heather 17 Laing, R.D. 276 Lambert, Yves 24 Larchevêque, Jean 233–4 Laval University 194–5, 233–4 LeBras, Gabriel 195 Le Fort, Gertrud Van 359 Lennox, Peter 148 Lewis, Jane 86 liberation theology 149 Linnel, W. Wallis 415 Lombroso, Gina 359 Lumen Vitae International Institute 219, 229, 230–3, 234–6 Mackay Committee (Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools of the Province of Ontario) 246–7, 251–2, 260 Maria Monk 144 Marriage 101; Anglican Church 112; in Britain 103, 110–16; Catholic perspective 163–4, 172; decline 52; interreligious marriage 10, 15, 147, 166; in the United States 103–7, 109, 115 Marsden, George 153 Marshall, David 245 Marxism 191, 462

Index Matthews, W.D.E. 246–7 McFadden, James 148 McLean, E.R. 247 McLeod, Hugh 3, 8, 15, 45; antiauthoritarianism 21; church attendance 4–5, 19; dechristianization 42, 62, 245, 322; gender and religion 85–6, 88–9, 92–3; religious socialization 14, 18 McLuhan, Marshall 332 Methodism 50, 87, 128, 130–2, 296, 454 Meunier, É.-Martin 218 Mieth, Dietmar 283 Millar, W.P.J. 247, 253, 258 Moeller, Robert 271 Moral Majority 22, 147, 374 Morgan, Frank 302, 308 Moody, Dwight 150 Mumford, Lewis 334–5 Murray, Charles 105 Murray, Jenni 48 National Association of Evangelicals 133–4, 139 National Council of Churches 146 National Council of Citizens for Religious Freedom 146 National Religious Broadcasters 134, 139 National Secular Society 45–6 Netherlands 4–5, 16, 20–3, 157, 159, 371, 377–8, 455, 461 Neuhaus, Richard John 150–1 New Age 340, 371, 377 381, 384–8 New Christian Right 147–9, 151 Nichols, Vincent 444 Niebuhr, Reinhold 4, 149, 333, 336, 446 Nixon, Richard 12

479

Noll, Mark 153, 261 Novak, Michael 150 Oakley, Ann 87 O’Connor, John 152 Onions, William 307 Ontario: education 245–62 Ontario Educational Association 249, 257 Ontario Federation of Home and School Associations 252 Operation Rescue 148 Oral history 65 Orsi, Robert 153 Osting, Richard 134 Packard, Vance 332, 334–5, 337 Pakistan 404, 407–9, 415–16 Pastoral Institute of Religious Studies 219 Pature, Patrick 8, 24 Peale, Norman Vincent 146 Pelletier, Gérard 218 Pentecostalism 22, 26, 50–1, 253, 258, 262, 305, 329, 374, 383 Petigny, Alan 9 Phillips, Melanie 113–4 Piché, Lucie 218 Piety 9, 19, 51, 54, 60–1, 90, 192–3, 195, 339–40, 357 Pike, James 146 Poland 7, 17, 150, 368, 382, 386 Pope Benedict XVII (Joseph Ratzinger) 356, 384 Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) 150, 356, 382 Pope Leo XIII (Giacchino Pecci) 431 Pope Paul VI (Giovanni Battista Montini) 165, 172, 178, 363, 460 Pope Pius X (Giuseppe Sarto) 160

480

Index

Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) 355, 462 Post, Paul 16 premillennial dispensationalism 129 Presbyterianism 132, 295–6; and evangelism 128, 131 Prison Fellowship for Christian inmates 152 Programme for Religious Education (1944 Ontario) 246, 248–50, 253, 262 Protestantism 9, 373; in Canada 11, 14–5, 128, 130–2, 136; decline 454; education 217, 246–9, 259–60, 294–6, 306, 312; evangelicalism 127–9, 131, 135, 144–50, 328, 461; in the United States 13, 128, 136; and women 21, 53, 327–9 Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State 146 Quadragesimo Anno 191 Quebec: anti-clericalism 191; catechism 237, 459; Catholic Church 188–91 194, 197, 202–5; churchgoing 189–90, 197–202, 454–5; church-state partnership 189–90, 196–7; civic order 189; clergy 189, 202; dechristianization 186–8, 197, 200, 205; decline of vocations 9; education 193, 198–9, 201, 217–39; and English Canada 188; industrialization 187, 196; masculinity 191–2, 195; Quiet Revolution 219, 221, 462; reform 238; social values 186; women 20, 161 rationalism 45 Rationalist Press Association 45

Reagan, Ronald 147–8 rebellion 76–7 relics 429, 433 religious right 6, 123–40, 456, 458; in the United States 22, 100, 103–5, 106–9, 111, 113–15. See also evangelicalism Rerum novarum 190 Riesman, David 332, 337 Roberts, Michele 87, 89 Robertson, Pat 134, 152 Robinson, Bishop 4 Robinson, John 324, 336, 453 Robinson, Pauline 90 Rock, John 169–70 Rockefeller, John D., Jr 146 Roe v. Wade 148 Roof, Wade Clark 11 Ross, François-Xavier (Mgr) 222 Rotert, Norman 177–8 Routhier, Gilles 219 Rowbotham, Sheila 63, 87 Roy, Maurice 199 Royal Commission on Religious Education in the Public Schools. See Hope Commission Ruff, Mark 8, 10 Ryan, Claude 193, 196, 199, 202, 205 Ryerson, Egerton 248, 258 Sabbath observance 43 Sacerdotalis Caelibatus 173, 460 sanctuary movement 148–9 Schaeffer, Francis 147, 148–9 Schofield, Michael 43, 44 Schröder, Gerhard 285 Scientology 374, 377, 381 Scopes trial 130 Second Vatican Council 154, 167, 207, 219, 371, 431, 445; and decline

Index of anti-Catholicism 146; effects 23, 282, 360, 454; reforms 7, 23, 196, 205; values 238 Second World War 8–9, 25 secularization 3, 5, 102; within churches 11; and gender 50–2, 54, 60, 61–2, 80; thesis 3, 5. See also dechristianization sex 43–45, 78–9, 164, 167–8; and Catholicism 12, 174–5, 444–5, 459 sexual revolution 19–20, 61–2; in Britain 41–2, 44, 71, 79, 90, 93; in Germany 285; and religion 49, 62 Shantz, Mary-Ann 22 Shields, Thomas Todhunter 130–1, 135 Shone, Terence 408 Sisters of the Assumption 223–4 Smith, Paul B. 305 Snape, Michael 16, 25 social conservatism 42–3 social movements 124–5, 137; and institutional infrastructure 126, 137 Sojourners group 149 Solidarity movement 150 Southern Baptist Convention 131 Spain 20; Catholic Action 355, 358–60; Catholic Church 12–3, 460, 355–6; Catholic militants 357; clergy 351, 352–3; dechristianization 351–2, 354, 363–4; feminism 359; Franco, Francisco 13, 352–64; postwar experience 353–4; Spanish Catholic Action 355, 358; Spanish Civil War 352, 356; sexual morality 358–9 Spraggett, Allen 304, 306 Sproul, R.C. 152 Steedman, Caroline 65

481

Street-Porter, Janet 43 St Thérèse of Lisieux 429–32, 441–2; cult 432, 445; relics 429, 433–4, 443–4; shrine at Carfin 432, 436, 438–441; The Story of a Soul 432, 437, 442 Students for a Democratic Society 149 Summerhayes, T.F. 255, 256 Sunday, Billy 150 Sunday school 9, 16, 18 Superior Catechetical Institute of the Catholic Institute of Paris 219, 230 Swanson, Cecil 331 Taylor, Thomas N. 432 television 18 Tentler, Leslie 6–7 Templeton, Charles 328 Terry, Randall 148 Thane, Pat 10 Toronto Baptist Seminary 130, 135 Union Nationale 202 United Church of Canada 15, 132; biblical scholarship 296–300; Board of Christian Education 256, 296, 300; education 294–5, 298–9, 301–3; and evangelicalism 131, 135, 296–300, 308–9, 311–13, 329; General Council 300; “New Curriculum” 294–5, 298–9, 301–8; personal conversion 303; postwar membership 326; Sunday school 310–11; virgin birth 299, 303 United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers 255 United Kingdom Citizens’ Association 409 United Presbyterian Church 295

482

Index

United States of America: Catholicism 157–9; counterculture 374, 377–8, 385–6, 374; culture wars 373; divorce 98–9, 101, 104–5, 108–13; ecumenism 10–1, 145, 151–2, 373; evangelicalism 6, 102, 126–7, 130, 132, 138, 381–2, 457–8; individualism 102, 158, 165, 168, 376; marriage 103–7, 109, 115; Protestantism 13, 128, 136; religiosity 5, 456, 387; spiritual revolution 373–7, 380 United Theological College 302 University of Montreal 233, 237 University of Windsor 257 Van Rooden, Peter 23–4 Wallis, Jim 149, 154 Walters, Julie 49 Warren, Jean-Philippe 218 Weakland, Rembert 149 Wener, Normand 198 West Germany: Catholic critique of fatherhood 278–84; critiques of family hierarchy 278–9; democracy and the family 272–6; family

and repression 276–7; Kinderladen movement 277–8, 284 Weyrich, Paul 147 White, E.G. 323 White, Peter Gordon 306–7 Whyte, William H. 321–3, 335 Wicca 377 Wolfenden Report 9, 459, 462 women 68; and the Anglican Church 52; churchgoing 39, 50–1; contraception 20; education 20–1, 68, 73, 75–8; employment 64, 68; and evangelicalism 21; gender roles 8, 14, 19, 77–8; generational conflict 69–70; piety 19; Protestantism 21, 53, 327–9; and religion 20, 62, 64, 85; respectability 66–7, 74, 79; secularization 50–2, 54, 60, 61–2, 80; sexuality 8; sexual revolution 458; social duty 66; women religious 161, 166; women’s history 63; Women’s Liberation Movement 84, 86. See also feminism Wuthnow, Robert 150 Young, J.W. 308 Youth for Christ 134, 135