Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (167 page)

What had happened? A starting point which may seem paradoxical is the exceptionally healthy state of the institution of marriage and the weakness of alternatives in mid-century European and American society. More people married, and they married younger. In 1960, 70 per cent of American women aged 20-24 were married. In the Republic of Ireland, extramarital births then accounted for a mere 1.6 per cent of all births, and lest it be thought that Ireland's exceptional levels of Catholic piety were responsible, comparable figures for the religiously pluralistic Netherlands were 1.4 per cent and 3.7 per cent for Lutheran Norway.
³⁷
Clearly people were opting for the nuclear family; but this was not just a traditional Christian family. It put a great deal more emphasis on emotional and sexual fulfilment, and traditional male superiority was eroded in favour of a 'companionate' partnership of equals, where husband and wife made decisions about how many children they were willing to bring up, with the aid of artificial contraception.

The march of contraception can be instanced not only in the low rate of extramarital births, but in statistics for marriage like those of Canadian families, where the mean number of children per mother fell 3.77 to 2.33, merely through the decade of the 1960s. Fewer children exercised proportionately more emotional power; it has been said that the post-war American family has been increasingly run by and for the benefit of children. Families were getting smaller, more intimate and involved with each other. They had more possessions, more spare cash, more leisure - more choice.
³⁸
It was personal choice which defeated
Humanae vitae.
There are echoes of that earlier emergence of social choice which in the 1690s had seen the emergence in England and the Netherlands of open companionate homosexuality in the face of every possible public social force discouraging it (see pp. 791-2).

The new-style family was not good news for Churches, whose rhetoric of support for the family had not envisaged that it might be a competitor for rather than a mainstay of Church life. An unexpected result was beginning to be felt in the United Kingdom even amid the post-war boom in churchgoing. A perceptive curate in the English Midlands, for instance, noted in 1947 that parents on his newly built housing estate in Dudley were not sending their children along to Sunday School, reluctant 'to interfere with the freedom of young people's choice'. Elsewhere in the same district, a Free Church magazine complained seventeen years later, 'Many of the newly married couples on the estates [are] concerned first and foremost with
their
pay-packets,
their
housing comforts,
their
interior decorations . . .
their
standing in the eyes of their workmates and neighbours.' There were cars for Sunday family jaunts instead of morning church; there was television around which the whole family could sit after tea instead of evening church.
³⁹
These findings could endlessly be reproduced through European society from the early 1960s. In particular, that mainstay of Protestant Church practice from the eighteenth century, the children's Sunday School, melted away. In 1900, 55 per cent of British children attended Sunday School; the figure was still 24 per cent in 1960, but 9 per cent in 1980 and 4 per cent in 2000.
⁴⁰

Around the family, other shifts occurred. 'Companionate' marriage created high expectations which were all too frequently disappointed. In the 1970s, divorce rates began rising across Europe, and against furious protests from the Roman Catholic Church, the possibility of divorce was introduced into the law codes of Catholic countries where it had previously been outlawed - in Italy, for instance, in 1970. That was a remarkable shift from the moment in 1947 when the constitution of the new Italian Republic had only missed affirming the indissolubility of marriage by three votes in the Constituent Assembly.
⁴¹
Rates of extramarital births soared: in the nations already cited over four decades from 1960, twentyfold in Ireland, sixteenfold in the Netherlands and thirteenfold in Norway.
⁴²
Taboos around abortion broke down, in the face of the reality of death and physical damage in clandestine illegal abortions. In country after country there was legislation to legalize abortion, most famously in the United States through a judgement of the Supreme Court in 1973,
Roe
v.
Wade
. Homosexuality became less a subject of public paranoia. The first stage was its decriminalization in law, a measure not designed to make homosexuality acceptable or moral in the eyes of Christians, simply to remove a major catalyst for blackmail or suicide.

It is often forgotten that in Britain, in contrast to the European-wide Catholic opposition to changes in divorce legislation, change came about in the highly contentious field of homosexuality largely through the Church. Elite liberal English Protestants, chiefly Anglicans, were at the forefront of a hard-fought struggle, way in advance of popular opinion, which led eventually to the limited decriminalization of male same-sex activity in 1967. Central to their work was the patient scholarship and advocacy of a canon of Wells Cathedral, Derrick Sherwin Bailey, a genial family man with an enthusiasm for railways which suggested the normal harmless eccentricity of Anglican clergy rather than a dangerous revolutionary spirit. Members of the British establishment beyond the Church's theological or clerical circles found all this agitation very odd, but were caught sufficiently off guard to allow the change in the law.
⁴³
What liberal English Christians were seeking to do was actively to separate the law of the land from Christian moral prescriptions. Many, especially clergy of Anglo-Catholic sympathies, had been disgusted by the debacle caused by the Church's established status in its attempted Prayer Book revision of 1927-8, and wanted to liberate the Church in its divine mission by disentangling it from official power structures.
⁴⁴
They were acknowledging, even furthering and celebrating, the death of Christendom, with a conviction that beyond it there lay better prospects for Christianity.

Behind this optimism, which might now seem quixotic, there echoed texts of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in letters and papers written during his imprisonment before his execution in 1945: not a theological system but a series of fugitive observations about the future of Christianity, conceived in circumstances of dire isolation and in fear of death, with German society collapsing around him. Bonhoeffer anticipated themes of liberation theology such as the suffering God and the transformed Church, but with a different thrust, in seeing humanity as 'coming of age': 'God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him . . . God allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross.' Bonhoeffer criticized his friend and mentor Karl Barth for 'a positivist doctrine of revelation which says in effect "take it or leave it" ', but he still offered his own prophecy of hope and affirmation to Christianity cut loose from its practice of religion: 'The day will come when men will be called again to utter the word of God with such power as will change and renew the world. It will be a new language, which will horrify men, and yet overwhelm them by its power.'
⁴⁵
Bonhoeffer, a prophet of a renewal whose outlines were not clear to him, bequeathed this idealism and anticipation to the theology of the 1960s, with a multitude of effects and fractures to come.

One notes that Bonhoeffer and his English translators in the 1950s still unselfconsciously used the language of maleness when describing the future. Part of the coming revolution would render that idiom quaintly old-fashioned, because above all the 1960s in Europe and America witnessed a profound shift in the balance of power between the sexes. It became the expectation that girls would receive as good an education as boys; indeed, over the next decades, it became apparent that in many circumstances girls achieved better results at school. Women began discovering past generations of female writers often then languishing unpublished and unstudied, and found that such pioneers as Mary Astell more than two centuries before (see pp. 793-4) had already provided the arguments which they were discovering from themselves. A word had been coined in 1882 for this consciousness: feminism.
⁴⁶
Its inventor, Hubertine Auclert, had campaigned in France for women's political rights at a time when women were asserting their right to take initiatives and exercise leadership in a variety of ways, largely within the context of the Christian Church (see pp. 818-20 and 828-30). Auclert herself had left behind her family's Catholic piety for a French Republican anticlericalism. Now, a century later, feminism was decisively moving beyond its Christian roots to a 'second wave', a more general assertion, not of particular spheres of action such as prophecy or temperance campaigning, but of equality of opportunity and activity in society.

Since it was becoming less easy to see why women and men should not pursue the same occupations in later life, surely that must apply in the Church as well as beyond it? What would happen to the formation of Christian theology if women joined in what had overwhelmingly been a male task for twenty centuries? We have observed that at intervals the Holy Spirit has been described in female terms through Christian history, but it was rare for the other persons of the Trinity to be conceived without the language of Fatherhood and Sonship. Authority in the Church seemed to have been concentrated in the male gender - although careful scrutiny of the early Church's history now revealed significant exceptions to this generalization.
⁴⁷
It had been difficult enough for many Churches to get past St Paul's admonitions against women holding positions of leadership or even speaking in church, but now there gathered strength a movement to open the ordained ministry of Churches to women, an impulse which had previously only appeared in the most resolutely unhierarchical of Churches, such as Quakers and Congregationalists.

Even the episcopal Anglican Communion became involved in the struggle, following a precocious precedent in 1944: in the extraordinary circumstances of the Japanese occupation of China, the Bishop of Hong Kong first conferred priestly orders on a woman, Florence Lee Tim Oi, to much worldwide Anglican surprise and episcopal scolding. With great self-abnegation, Lee Tim Oi ceased to exercise her orders and bided her time until the world and the Church changed.
⁴⁸
New Zealand, a conservative, inward-looking society which has nevertheless repeatedly displayed a remarkable capacity to create social change without a great deal of fuss, first took matters further than priestly orders. Dr Penny Jamieson, ordained priest in 1983, was Anglicanism's first woman diocesan bishop, elected by the faithful in a very traditional-minded Anglo-Catholic diocese, Dunedin, in 1989.
⁴⁹
In Geneva in 2001, the Rev. Isabelle Graessle became successor to John Calvin, the first woman Moderator of the Reformed Church of Geneva's Company of Pastors and Deacons. She has spoken to me of her delight after her election in laying a rose on the cenotaph which commemorates Calvin's unknown grave, and telling him gently, 'It's my turn now.' Graessle was also responsible for a significant addition to Geneva's monumental Wall of the Reformers: the first female name engraved on it, that of a feisty former abbess, Marie Dentiere, whose contribution to the Genevan Reformation had not given Calvin any pleasure.
⁵⁰

OLD-TIME RELIGION: AFFIRMATIONS

It is not surprising that such frighteningly rapid changes in society and the Church have provoked a strong reaction, which in fact extends beyond Christianity to all major world faiths. A sequence of political events at the end of the 1970s came to reveal over time that the narrative of advancing secularization, which during the previous decade had seemed so convincing in the seminar rooms of European and American universities, needed some modification. In 1977 the United States presidential election was a triumph for Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist Democrat who had openly declared himself born-again; in 1978 there came the election of Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II; in 1979 Shi'ite ayatollahs seized control of the revolution which had overthrown the Shah of Iran. Throughout the world at the present day, the most easily heard tone in religion (not just Christianity) is of a generally angry conservatism. Why? I would hazard that the anger centres on a profound shift in gender roles which have traditionally been given a religious significance and validated by religious traditions. It embodies the hurt of heterosexual men at cultural shifts which have generally threatened to marginalize them and deprive them of dignity, hegemony or even much usefulness - not merely heterosexual men already in positions of leadership, but those who in traditional cultural systems would expect to inherit leadership. It has been observed by sociologists of religion that the most extreme forms of conservatism to be found in modern world religions, conservatisms which in a borrowing from Christianity have been termed 'fundamentalism', are especially attractive to 'literate but jobless, unmarried male youths marginalized and disenfranchised by the juggernaut of modernity' - in other words, those whom modernity has created, only to fail to offer them any worthwhile purpose.
⁵¹

That victory of Jimmy Carter in 1977 marked the return to national American politics of Evangelicals self-exiled over the previous half-century (see pp. 961-3). But the road to their political self-assertion was not straightforward: Carter quickly proved a sore disappointment to them. The problem was that Carter came from that progressive side of Southern Evangelicalism exemplified, as we have seen, in the career of Belle Harris Bennett, and Carter's instincts leaned dangerously towards Protestant liberalism and ecumenism (both of which were rapidly becoming part of the Evangelical repertoire of hate words). Carter was equivocal on abortion, a matter which Evangelicals were increasingly seeing as a litmus test of doctrinal soundness. On one issue he fatally alienated the Evangelical constituency: faith schools, which Evangelicals had founded, among other reasons, to avoid the teaching of sex education now on offer in the public (state) system. In 1978, through a bureaucratic decision which was in fact quite independent of the new Carter administration, the US Internal Revenue Service withdrew the tax-exempt status of independent faith schools, claiming (on the whole unfairly) that many were deliberately practising racial discrimination. This was an ironic result of the civil rights campaigns which once had involved so many Evangelicals.