Autor: Burleigh, Michael

Buch: Sacred Causes

Titel: Sacred Causes

Stichwort: Statistik; Kirche - Niedergang ab 1960

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: 345b If Larkin's poem seems prescient with hindsight, at the time Britain's Protestant Churches were basking in a post-war religious revival, as reflected in peak memberships in the years 1955-9.1 In 1954 they received a major boost with the US Evangelist reverend Dr Billy Graham's 'sweep for God through Britain'. In three months, some 1,300,000 people flocked to the greyhound track at Harringay, as part of a crusade that culminated with nearly two hundred thousand people packed into Wembley and White City stadiums. Some 1,200,000 people, or nearly three-quarters of the city's population, also attended Graham's rallies in Glasgow. In the following year, the Jehovah's Witnesses attracted forty-two thousand people to rugby's Mecca at Twickenham.2 According to the leading British Church historian Hugh McLeod, this revival can be generalised across the West:
In most parts of the Western world these were years when organised Christianity had a high profile, whether because of the size of congregations, the numbers of new churches being built, the huge participation in evangelistic rallies, Christian influence in the fields of sexual morality, family life and gender-roles, the role of the churches in education and welfare, or the political strength of Christian Democratic parties, then at the height of their power.3 (Fs)

346a This was about to change.

This revival proved evanescent in England as well as elsewhere. After a long period of constancy between 1890 and 1960, all the major indices of formal involvement with the Churches went into a sharp decline in the 1960s. Ordinations to the clergy fell by a quarter, Anglican confirmations by a third; baptisms fell below 50 per cent of live births, and less than 40 per cent of marriages were celebrated in church. Attendances at Sunday Schools, which had grown in the 1950s, plummeted a decade later. In 1900 over 50 per cent of children had attended these schools; by 2000 this was true of only 4 per cent of them, which indicates that one of the major means for transmitting the Christian faith had virtually been extinguished, although in the meantime others have developed and proved highly popular, such as the 'Alpha' courses.4 (Fs) (notabene)

346b The 1960s were the crucial turning point. It is a decade that still uniquely polarises opinion, especially among the middle aged and elderly, who are divided for and against. This is either because posterity lives with that decade's real (and imagined) consequences, or, on the contrary, because those nostalgic for those times regard them as a golden age of energy, exuberance and irreverence before the present 'age of anxiety'. Since novelty has its limits, many of today's teenagers have revisited forms of expression that seem remarkably like those of the 1960s-notably four young people with three guitars and a set of drums. (Fs)