“Sin has its own built-in punishment,” said Sister Mary Wilfreda O’Flaherty, IBVM, 40 years ago, and sad experience shows me that this is absolutely true. Tragically, it isn’t true just on a personal level but on a societal level, too.
Today X is full of video and outrage over rampaging youthful mobs in London, and that reminds me of the youthful mobs who rampaged in London and beyond in 2011. I watched them online from a beautiful flat on an idyllic spot by the Mediterranean Sea, not all that far from Rome. I was staying with a fellow Canadian, albeit one with a proper British passport, and we were both appalled.
When deadline time came for my biweekly column at the Toronto Catholic Register, I thought I would address this then-current evidence of Britain’s moral decline. Having already written a rather baggy and smart-alecky piece on religion-in-Britain for the Notting Hill Editions Journal, I adapted it and cut it down to 800 words—a vast improvement.
See below the draft of this fine article, which the CR removed from the internet after I accepted employment with a spicier outlet. It’s almost 15 years old now, so I don’t think they’ll mind this reprinting-without-permission.
Incidentally, my own neighbourhood is currently being scourged by nasty children on electric bicycles, and I would bet my last quid that they are all as white-and-Scottish as my mother’s shortbread.
When Religion Flies Out the Window
Nova et Vetera
Dorothy Cummings McLean
Submitted to the Catholic Register on August 28, 2011
Now that I have lived in the United Kingdom for over two years, I realize how little I knew about it before I moved here. Like many fourth-generation Canadians of British descent, my ideas about the United Kingdom were decades out of date. In my case, it is because I never learned what happened after 1963.
To Canadians who watched the news in disbelief as young people in England (England!) ransacked their cities, smashing, looting and ultimately murdering four people, and now ask “What happened to England?”, I reply “1963.”
Nineteen sixty-three is the year in which Christianity in England began to fall into a deep decline. It is the year in which the Beatles released their first album, the year in which a bishop published Honest to God, and the year in which the BBC eased its ban against jokes about religion on television. According to historian Callum G. Brown, 1960’s youth culture, radical new theology and the increasing role of television shoved Christianity to the fringes of English life.
For well over a thousand years, Christian teaching and worship had been central to English culture. Not everyone participated in weekly church worship, of course, but church-going amongst the English was at its height in the late 1950s. Traditional sexual morality was also strong: the illegitimacy rate reached an all-time low in 1958. However, it rose sharply after 1962. It is now about 41%, and very few English Christians go to church.
So what happened? First, churchgoing among the majority of English Christians was tied to a wish to appear respectable. According to Brown, Protestant Christian piety in England was, after 1800, driven by women. Women went to church, and women made sure their husbands and children went to church. However, with the 1963 Beatlemania and rise of youth culture, young Englishwomen began to reject respectability as a value. Erotic love and sexual freedom replaced it, and English girls deserted churches in droves.
(The Catholic minority continued to go to Mass in large numbers, but by the 1980s, they, too, began to stay home from Sunday worship. Today only 25% of England and Wales’ four million Catholics go to Sunday Mass.)
Panicked, English clergymen either fulminated against sexual sin or desperately tried to meet “the youth” halfway. For the first time in the history of English Christianity, some clergymen were willing to say that premarital sex might not always be wrong. Compounding this betrayal, Anglican bishop [J. A. T.] Robinson’s Honest to God cast doubts on central tenets of the Christian faith and threw thousands of Christians into confusion.
In 1950, fewer than one in ten English households had a television. In 1960, six in ten households had television, and by 1970 that figure was nine in ten. Television played a major role in transmitting and even shaping cultural changes in England. Not only did comics, beginning in 1963, mock religion and tell sex jokes on television, liberal theologians like Robinson aired their radical new views on shows like “Looking for an Answer.”
“Television,” writes Brown, “was showing the British people how to reject religion.”
Television-watching replaced church-going as an activity—the popularity of The Forsyth Saga in 1968 famously killed Anglican Sunday Evensong—and it replaced clergy as authority. It also served up new gods to worship: the hysteria following the deaths Princess Diana and Amy Winehouse suggests that celebrity worship has become a literal truth. Television, hand in hand with pop music, also tells English children how to dress and behave. A reality TV star named Katie Price, who first won fame as a topless model, is probably the most influencial role model for English girls today.
There is not much room for Christianity on English television these days. And given the state of contemporary English education, there is nowhere else that non-Catholic English children are likely to learn the tenets or even the morality of the Christian faith. The media heroes of the 2011 England Riots were the Sikhs who protected their temples and shops with swords and baseball bats and the grieving Muslim father who singlehandedly prevented a race war between black and South Asian Britons in Birmingham.
Yes, there are many other factors at play in the destruction, once and for all, of the stereotype of England as a green and pleasant land of restrained and peaceful people. Such essayists as Theodore Dalyrmple and Peter Hitchens have written volumes about the collapse of traditional Britain. They mention the rise of the welfare state, the end of heavy industry and the impact of mass migration upon the working classes. But I do not think the importance of 1963 and British Christianity’s subsequent decline should be omitted from any discussion of the England Riots.
So there we go. I would like to say more about music, too. Last night I went to Pilates class in a converted factory and the music was so loud and noisome I imagined it erupting from hell. It was crude, misogynist, used the N-word, and invited me and all the other women around to conduct ourselves in an immodest fashion. There’s a reason there is no rock music at MMWP dances (unless the ceilidh band gets carried away and suddenly bursts into “Wonderwall” or its ilk). More on that anon.