There are not many sociology books whose titles, let alone subtitles, pass into common parlance. Yet that was the fate of the first edition of this book, the 1994 publication Religion in Britain: Believing without Belonging.
“First edition” is something of a misnomer, as the book currently under review is, I would guess, 90% different to the 1994 publication. It is, for all intents and purposes, a new book, albeit one that refers frequently (and helpfully rather than self-indulgently) to its predecessor.
Nevertheless, the felicity of that earlier subtitle and the debate is precipitated – Did Britons really believe? If so, what in? Why did they no longer belong? etc – is matched by this one. Davie makes a good case that religion in Britain is both paradoxically persistent – still alive and kicking and attracting unprecedented public and academic attention in spite of multiple predictions of its demise – but also persistently paradoxical – a complex, mutating and often contradictory phenomenon that is all but impossible to define or predict.
Religion in Britain (hereafter used exclusively of this volume rather than its predecessor) is less a case-making book than a landscape-surveying one. In eleven chapters, Davie offers as broad and penetrating an overview of religion in early 21st century UK as space (c. 240 pages) permits. The book does, however, have a discernible and overarching theme, namely that “two relatively long-term and seemingly contradictory processes” shape religion in Britain: “continuing secularisation on the one hand, alongside increasing attention to religion in public life on the other.”
Davie places the facts and figures concerning religious belief, affiliation and attendance, detailed with admirable clarity in chapter 3, within the wider demographic, social and intellectual contexts, in which immigration, changed gender roles, state retrenchment, and the transition from ethnic or national identity towards religious have all shaped how religious commitment understands itself and is understood.
One of her strengths is that she doesn’t believe the world we inhabit was created by such trends, but rather shaped by them. In other words, she is alert to the Christian “cultural heritage”, manifest in the time, space, language, and imagery that we take for granted. Were an alien to sojourn among us for a while in order to file his report back home, he would be more alert to the presence of 30,000 or so churches in Britain or the still-discernible pattern of our working week before he got close to the those questions of secularisation or Islamisation that vex so many people today. So it is that Davie pays close attention to Britain’s Christian heritage without ever being an apologist for it.
This attention leads her to one of the book’s more fruitful ideas, that of “vicarious religious” something that Davie suggests can work in four ways: performing ritual on behalf of others, believing on behalf of others, embodying moral codes on behalf of others, and offering space for the ‘vicarious’ debate of unresolved issues in modern societies. The very idea of “vicarious religion” sits ill-at-ease with a liberal society – at least in theory. If the individual is sovereign and autonomous, doing things on her behalf, especially things as basic as believing, seems not only unnecessary but a violation of precisely that sovereignty which marks us out a liberal citizens. The reality is somewhat different, however, humans being socially constituted in a ways that often defy our a priori theorising. Naturally, the manner in which church, clergy or congregations do things on behalf of others is very different today to what it was even a generation ago but to believe it is absent is to put our models of how society operates ahead of how evidence suggests it does.
“Vicarious religion” is not the only idea that emerges from Davie’s survey of the landscape. In as far as there is a controlling one it is that that of transition and tension. We are, she rightly observes, shifting from a culture of obligation to one of choice, from “contracting out” to “contracting in”. Britain thus runs two “religious economies” side-by-side: that of active churchgoers “who choose their preferred form of religious activity and join the religious organisation which expresses this most effectively”, and that of people “who prefer not to choose, but who are nonetheless grateful for a form of religion which they can access as the need arises”: in effect the economy of the market and that of public utilities.
Christians looking for easy solace here will be disappointed. To be sure Religion in Britain does not foretell the coming religious apocalypse beloved by some sociologists, but nor does it make for entirely comforting reading. On the one hand, spiritual interest has emerged into the vacuum that unqualified materialism threatened to occupy. On the other, “spiritualities which engage with the depths of personal experience are faring better than religions that demand conformity to higher truth”. On the one hand, Generation Y “has lost the rebellious hostility towards formal religion that was characteristic of earlier decades.” On the other, “religion, vicarious or otherwise, is very largely an irrelevance in their day to day lives.” There is much to wrestle with here.
What is clear is that for all these tensions and transitions, public and, as the last chapter shows, academic interest in religion, especially religion in public life, has rarely been greater. This is not simply due to Islam. Davie’s breadth of engagement is impressive – establishment, regional and city differentiation (especially London), chaplaincy, education, evangelicalism, black majority churches, Christian festivals, new religious movements, the spiritual “revolution”, multiculturalism, New Atheism, welfare, law, healthcare, politics. Many of these - not just Islam - are newsworthy (and confusing) in themselves: hence the book’s subtitle.
Hence also the plangent note struck early on in the book, which rings away in the background throughout. “At precisely the moment when they are most needed, British people are losing the vocabulary, tools and concepts that they require in order to have a constructive conversation about faith. The result is all too often an ill-informed and ill-mannered debate about issues of extreme importance to the democratic future of this country.” Simply by means of stimulating, informing and educating, Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox will help improve this debate.
Nick Spencer
Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox is published by Wiley Blackwell
Image by Unsplash from pixabay under the Creative Commons Licence
