faith and belief Flashcards
1
Q
Woodhead
A
- Critique of secularisation theory which ‘endorses belief in evolutionary progress from pre-modern superstition to modern enlightenment’.
- Critique of the argument that religion has become a private matter; the diminishing prestige of science (and its inability to cope with poverty and the spread of AIDS) helped bring religion back to the public’s attention.
- There remained a prevalence in paranormal experiences, answers to prayer, the afterlife, ghosts, angels and contact with the dead in the post-war period. Evidence of spirituality.
- Post-war Britain can be both ‘religious and secular’.
- Argument about post-war utopianism: Welfare state grew more secular over time – some people thought that it represented secular enlightenment throwing off the ‘shackles’ of the past - but there was also a gradual loss of faith in the welfare ideal (signified by 3 Conservative governments). (Woodhead) Thatcher a preacher of Christian virtue. Unlike Welfare utopianism, Neoliberalism more likely to make an alliance with religion.
2
Q
Brown
A
• Discursive Christianity –
o All studies of religion have envisaged its institutional (adherence to Church), intellectual (influence of ideas), functional (role in civil society) and diffusive (extent of outreach). Use these to measure social significance.
o Higher-level form is discursive Christianity. Manifest in protocols but also the ‘voices’ of the people; protocols and personal identity derived from Christian expectation/discourses. Protocols are customs of behaviour, economic activity, dress, speech etc. discursive Christianity is the pre-requisit of other roles.
o In the 1960s there was a change in Christian discourse; ‘moral turn’.
• [The resilience of private belief, and the flourishing of some Christian denominations, doesn’t defeat this argument in its own terms].
3
Q
Wolffe
A
- ‘a substantial proportion of the population continued to believe in some kind of God’.
- Ireland was not just an ‘embarrassing anomaly’, but ‘an indication of potentialities that remained in other parts of the country’.
- After Presbyterian reunification in 1929, there was an increased identification of Church and nation in Scotland.
4
Q
Green; The Passing of Protestant England
A
- Challenge secularisation through its assumption of an inherent contradiction between modernity and religion.
- Provides a new description of the organizational and cultural structures of the churches – associationalism.
5
Q
Williams
A
- Study of Southwark in 1999. Reconstructs the religious mentality of the working class in the late 19C and early 20C.
- Borough of Southwark remained a closed, traditional working-class community despite industrialization, and inhabitants remained wedded to folk-notions of religion which combined magical, superstitious beliefs with orthodox Christianity.
- Orthodoxy observed in key rituals such as birth, marriage and death. Substitutes for actual church attendance.
- Did not like the patronising attitude of many church-goers with ‘superior’ Christian virtue.
- Declining working-class attendance at church services (1880-1939) fails to indicate a declining religiosity of the working class. In fact indicates the opposite.
- Through schools, charitable agencies, services and public worship the church thoroughly penetrated society.
- Popular belief – highlights its differences with popular Christianity.
6
Q
Wickham
A
• Study of Sheffield in 1957 – pessimistic reading of the Church’s response to industrial society. Weakness and collapse.
7
Q
Morris; the strange death of Christian Britain
A
- Again endorses the critique of Green and Brown over the ‘inevitable’ link between modernization and decline, but also accuses them of exaggerating the unimportance of religion in today’s society.
- Church decline is compatible with the persistence of religious identity and limited church affiliation.
- Attenuation, but not disappearance. Displacement, rather than ‘death’. Institutional shrinkage.
8
Q
Gilbert; The Making of post-Christian Britain
A
- Today’s society is not one from which Christianity has departed, but one in which it has become marginal.
- There is much evidence for the church’s vitality in the mid-19C, and the early phase of industrialisation actually expanded opportunities for religious organizations. Decline set in in the late period.
- Today significant religious commitment is a ‘sub-cultural’ phenomenon.
9
Q
Brewitt-Taylor, The invention of a secular society
A
- Idea of lingering Christianity
- There was a sudden re-imagination of Britain as a ‘secular society’ in the highbrow British media between 1961 and 1964.
- Contemporary discourses of secularisation exaggerated the extent of religious decline. These discourses were promulgated by Christians in the media, who still had a privileged position in the reporting of religious affairs in the 1960s.
- Methodological problem – Christians accepted notions of a secular society, allowing secular sociologists to dominate the debate from 1965 problematic re-imagining of British society. Had secularizing consequences in media and law.
- As such, Christians played a central role in the ‘religious crisis’ of the 1960s. imaginative deconstruction of ‘Christian Britain’.
- In the 1960s the scientific revolution promoted the new secular age. HOWEVER, 1970s – dominated by unemployment, oil crises etc., led people to question the extent of the scientific revolution. Also, at the turn of the century many theologians supported Science and Darwin’s theories.
10
Q
McKibbin; Classes and Cultures
A
- Accepts that Britain was becoming steadily ‘dechristianized’ between 1918 and 1951, but this cannot be equated to secularisation. Religion is still inseparable from public and ceremonial life e.g. public-funded Anglican and Roman Catholic schools, religious ceremony common in aspects of political life (such as the inauguration of monarchs, PMs etc.),
- There is no evidence that people in wartime turned to religion for consolation.
11
Q
Davie; ‘believing without belonging’
A
- described the paradox fundamental to modern religion; people persist on believing but do not take part in their religious institutions.
- Linked to Christianity – majority of the population still identified with the Church of England.
- Environmental and bioethical issues contributed to the criticism of science and helped raise public profile of the Church.
- Nominalism, rather than secularisation
- Church schools are sought after because ‘they are perceived as good by parents in their capacity to fit in with most people’s perception of religiosity’ – BUT they could just be better schools/only schools available?
12
Q
McLeod; The Religious Crisis of the 1960s
A
- Defines religion as a ‘belief in an all-powerful and benevolent creator, worship of whom, and obedience to whose commandments offers the path to wellbeing’.
- Stresses the development of a liberal Christian theology from the inter-war years, progress in the 1950s and full emergence in the 1960s.
- Offers a line between the arguments of Chadwick (gradual decline) and Brown (rapid abandonment) ‘the end of Christendom’ in Western culture.
- Discusses the influence on Christian religion of affluence, the counterculture, 1960s ‘revolutions’ and changing gender roles/contraceptive technology.
13
Q
Taylor; A Secular Age
A
- The path to secularity is not linear, and its outcome is neither universal nor binding.
- Proposes an alternative view to secularity; a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged to one in which it is understood to be an option among others. (other definitions have focused on the complete emptying of religion from public spaces, and a fall in religious belief and practises). End of naïve acknowledgement of.
- There has been a shift in humanism/way in which we understand fullness, which accounts for this. Today’s society is ‘disenchanted’. Rise of individualism.
- Religion retreats from public sphere.
