Believing but not belonging anymore: the ever changing face of Christianity

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

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 . . . . The residue of Christian female piety ... was washed away in the cultural revolution of the 1960s

Disenchantment with religion — “Where was God at Auschwitz?” — was one of the consequences of the horrors and devastation of World War II. One famous manifestation of this disenchantment was Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, first performed in Paris in 1952. The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre was another (his Existentialism & Humanism was published in 1948).

Now, however, according to a new collection of essays, studies pinpoint the 1960s as a pivotal period in the spread of the secularisation and dechristianisation that was so characteristic of the decades following World War II.

But, as the editors point out in their long introduction, some of the contributing scholars have opted for a chronology defined by the “long sixties”, book-ended by 1958 and 1974.

Chronology aside, what this book has as a defining theme in the post-war decline of religion is the crucial importance of rapid changes in the attitude of women towards what they perceived as a morally constrictive church culture.

In a chapter entitled “Mothers and Daughters”, Lynn Abrams, professor of gender history at Glasgow University, says “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....

“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.”

A variety of factors were at play as Western culture underwent great changes. Melanie Heath, assistant professor of sociology at McMaster University in the USA, tracks 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”.

The professor of history at the Catholic University of America, Leslie Woodcock Tentler, takes up this theme and says that, beginning in earnest in the 1960s, there was a 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.”

Callum Brown, professor of modern European history at the University of Glasgow, also focuses on gender as a key factor in the understanding of religious decline, viewing women as the “crucial vector” of cultural change during the 1960s.

“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.... 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.”

This theme is developed Professor Abrams, who says women are “central” to the debates about the fate of the Christian churches in the West. “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. Religion now competed with alternative source 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 . . . . 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.”

Though Ireland doesn’t come within the ambit of the research undertaken by this group of scholars (getting just half-a-dozen incidental references), parallels with developments particularly in Britain and the USA will readily suggest themselves.

One reference to Ireland, however, shows a consistency with a gender shift elsewhere in the spread of unbelief. “The proportion of women professing ‘no religion’ rose in Canada, from 31% in 1951 to 45% in 2001, in the United States from 26 per cent in 1957 to 39% in 2001, and in Ireland from 36% in 1961 to 41% in 2002.”

According to Professor Brown, these “small examples provide glimpses of the way in which attitudes to religious unbelief radically changed in the last 50 years of the 20th century. Not only was it becoming more acceptable to openly express disbelief in a god, an afterlife, and other features usually characteristic of religious faith, but it was also more acceptable to disavow belonging to a religion. Nowhere was this new willingness more clear than among young women.”

The situation in the US, though, was and remains different in important respects. Most of the authors in this volume regard the US as “an anomalous exception” when it comes to dechristianisation. Patrick Pasture, professor of history at the University of Leuven in Belgium, says “Europe has secularised since at least the 1950s, while the United States remained a deeply religious country in which the impact of religion increased rather than diminished.” He stresses that, “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”.

However, within US Catholicism the impact of Pope Paul VI’s encyclicals Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (1967) and Humanae Vitae (1968) led to a mass exit of clergy, and caused many lay Catholics to lose confidence in the Pope and bishops. The result, though, was not necessarily dechristianisation. Catholics there, like many here, now belong to a category described by one contributor as “believing but not belonging”. This book should be required reading for the Irish Catholic hierarchy.