God and Mrs Thatcher (13 page)

The Church of England’s main prerogative had been to ensure that they had some input and that legislation was discussed within a Christian framework; in some cases they were successful, but ultimately there was only so far the bishops were prepared to go. What these debates revealed was not the collapse of Christian morality (as some right-wingers would later claim), but the division within the denominations themselves. The relative openness of the Church of England and Free Churches contrasted sharply with the rigidity and lack of engagement of the Roman Catholics. Contraception was a case in point. Anglicans did not oppose the permitting of free contraception on the NHS to unmarried couples. The Church had in fact been advocating sex education and birth-control clinics in the name of responsible family planning since the 1920s. The Roman Catholics’ hard line on this matter was unequivocally set out in the papal encyclical
Humanae Vitae
in 1968, which forbade all forms of artificial contraception. Another striking feature was the near-complete silence from the Nonconformist left. It would be the New Right who would later take up the fight against the ‘permissive age’.

Margaret Thatcher, as other MPs, voted according to her conscience, which in fact meant she sided with the reformists rather than conservatives on most issues. Margaret Thatcher, like most of her generation, took an old-fashioned view on matters of sex, but her Christian faith was not, nor had it ever been, moralistic. Thatcher
supported the decriminalisation of homosexuality and abortion; on the latter, she took a surprisingly liberal position, claiming in a radio broadcast soon afterwards that ‘one of the worst things anyone can do in this world is to bring an unwanted child into it’.
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She opposed the Divorce Reform Act on the grounds that she believed it made it easier for the man to desert his wife and was prepared to speak against the liberalisation of obscene material. She had read
Lady Chatterley’s
Lover
for an appearance on the BBC’s political panel show
Any Questions
and apparently was ‘not anxious to linger on it at all’.
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In her New Year message to her Finchley constituents in 1970, Thatcher pressed for ‘a reversal of the permissive society’ that, in her view, had made man a ‘slave to his own appetites’.
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But there were no signs that she was prepared to lead the charge in Parliament and, in fact, rarely spoke about such matters until her election to the leadership in 1975, when it became politically advantageous for her to do so.

Meanwhile, the Church had much bigger concerns. By the late 1960s, few could ignore the rapid pace at which the British people seemed to be abandoning the pews. Anglican baptisms dropped by 10 per cent and confirmations by 30 per cent in just six years.
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Fewer and fewer were taking up holy orders, with the number of new ordinands shrinking by nearly a quarter between 1967 and 1972. The Free Churches fared even worse, with Methodist congregations suffering a drop of 10 per cent between 1960 and 1970 and a further 22 per cent in the next decade.
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The downward trend, which would eventually impact on all Christian denominations, even the Roman Catholic Church, signalled the greatest crisis in British Christianity for decades, potentially more damaging than either the Industrial Revolution or the First World War. It soon became clear that this was a lasting development, which the churches had little hope of reversing.

All manner of things were blamed, from the impact of television to
the imposing style of church buildings, but of course, the biggest threat to churchgoing was the family or, more accurately, the privatisation of family life that came with rising home ownership and greater affluence and leisure in the 1960s. The churches were not the only form of associational culture to suffer; clubs, organisations and political parties all experienced a similar fate. Christian worship, though, was not simply in decline, but was being undermined by an equally powerful force: secularism. Churchmen and politicians, however, seemed to speak as if this was a peculiarly British phenomenon although a quick glance at Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Northern Europe made it clear that this was an international trend.

Britain was unique in one respect. Immigration from the Commonwealth in the 1950s and 1960s had provided the Protestant churches with ready-made congregations in its secular cities. But the alienation and often racism that immigrants experienced forced many to set up their own independent churches and they were lost to the established denominations forever. It must go down as one of the great tragedies of English Christianity that these new communities were not wholeheartedly welcomed into the fold. This was despite Archbishop Ramsey’s own leadership on the immigration issue as chairman of the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants. Appointed by Harold Wilson, Ramsey stood firm against the government’s Commonwealth Immigration Act in 1968 and later supported the citizenship rights of Kenyan Asians. Leadership on this matter, however, appears not to have trickled down to the parishes.

The 1960s proved to be the defining moment when faith ‘became optional’.
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Church attendance ceased to be a social convention or a measure of respectability. Britain’s youth, with more money in their pockets and the prospect of more exciting alternatives, were easily lured away from Sunday school. The most significant decline was evident amongst women (always the majority in the pews) who, with greater opportunities in education and in the workplace, inevitably found
salvation in things other than Christianity. The decline in female piety, however, meant that the intergenerational transference of faith was severed forever. If the young were not receiving religious instruction in home, school or church, where would they encounter faith? Margaret Thatcher recognised this dilemma early on and, in a speech in 1969 to Christians in Finchley, lamented that ‘it was like separating a flower from its roots’.
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In what would result in some worthy, and some disastrous, initiatives, Anglicanism underwent an image overhaul in the 1960s and 1970s in a desperate bid to make it relevant and credible in the modern age. The King James Bible now had to compete alongside an updated and more accessible translation, The New English Bible. The Sermon on the Mount (‘Blessed are’) took precedence over the more prescriptive Ten Commandments (‘Thou shall not’). The Devil, damnation, and in particular the doctrine of original sin, seemed out of sync with the age, and their subtle side-lining reflected the general shift towards a more social and less condemnatory approach to faith. In all this, progressive Christians did not consider that they were pandering to the age but acting in a sincere belief that modernisation would ensure Christianity’s lasting appeal. The Catholic Church would have its reforming moment –
aggiornamento
– with the second Vatican Council convened in 1962, of which its most profound and lasting reform was the switch from Latin to the vernacular mass.

Rather than shielding Christianity from popular culture, theologians sought to actively engage with it, although comments such as that from Ian Ramsey, then Professor of Divinity at Oxford, who declared that ‘Beatle language was virtually theological language’ hardly added credibility to the Church’s cause.
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By far the most notorious example of such ‘dialogue’ was Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God, published in 1963. Written in a rush while he was cooped up in hospital, Robinson’s book was serialised in
The Observer,
sold one million copies in three years and sent shock waves rippling through the parishes. Robinson seemed to imply that the only way of being ‘honest to God’ was to be ‘honest to yourself’, which was an open-ended doctrine that appeared to put a question mark over every biblical concept. Robinson was dubbed ‘the Anglican bishop who does not believe in God’ by
Telegraph
journalist T. E. Utley in his blackening review of the book.
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Robinson’s views were hardly representative of mainstream Anglicanism, rather a reflection of a radical group of clergy known as the ‘South Bank’ theologians whose engagement with the New Morality certainly generated more attention and consternation than praise.

Of more pressing concern was how to revive the local parish in an era of decline. The Rector of Woolwich, Rev. Nicolas Stacey, was one such priest who opened up his church hall to counselling groups and transformed his crypt into a coffee bar during the day and a discotheque at night. Within four years, the parish was welcoming 1,500 people a week through its door, although Stacey persistently faced accusations that he was de-sacralising his place of worship: ‘If [he] thinks he can build the Kingdom of God by frying eggs on the altar and percolating coffee in the organ pipe he should think again,’ complained one local clergyman.
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Frustrated by the opposition he encountered and convinced that he would not be promoted, Stacey eventually resigned the priesthood and later became director of social services for Kent County Council. Even the clergy were now questioning whether the Church was the best arena for living out their faith.

Where Anglicans did prove their worth was in pioneering charities and causes both at home and abroad. Leading international organisations such as the Anti-Apartheid Movement, Oxfam, Christian Aid and Amnesty International, and domestic charities such as Shelter and the Samaritans all owe their existence to a renewed sense of Christian social engagement in the post-war years. London vicar Chad Varah
had set up the Samaritans in his crypt in 1953 after officiating at the funeral of a teenager who had committed suicide. He placed an advert in a newspaper asking for volunteers and within ten years the Samaritans had over forty branches across the UK. Britons may have been turning their backs on formal religion, but their sense of compassion and volunteering impulse clearly had not died.

In the pew, ‘Make Me a Channel of Your Peace’ (1967) was more likely to be on the hymn sheet than ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ (1871). Christian pacifism had understandably quietened during the war but in the nuclear age, it returned to its earlier intensity as men in dog collars led the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)’s ‘pilgrimages’ to Britain’s base in Aldermaston and opposed the Vietnam War. Events across the globe, too, proved a source of inspiration as Anglicans intellectually engaged with black liberation theology in the US, ideas about social justice emerging in the decolonised developing world, and Catholic liberation theology (an explicit tying of Christian-Marxist ideas) in South America. Exposure to these political theologies, which many clergy experienced first-hand through the World Council of Churches and in missionary posts throughout the dying empire, had the effect of gradually reshaping the Anglican mindset towards a more radical and global perspective.

A crucial facet of 1960s post-materialist culture was its moral assault on Western capitalism, of which the ecological and fair-trade movements were its obvious and most fruitful manifestations. Many at the grassroots and those working abroad began to highlight some of the failures and restrictions of inter-war liberal Anglicanism. The Christian critique of capitalism in this era was more combative and less centred on British experience or even the ‘poor’; it now became about confronting a global system in which all were implicated. José Miguez Bonino, an evangelical Argentinian theologian who had been involved in the World Council of Churches and was a pioneer in both liberation theology and the ecumenical movement, delivered
a lecture in London in 1974 which seemed to encapsulate where the Christian perspective on economics was heading: ‘The basic ethos of capitalism is definitely anti-Christian; it is the maximising of economic gain, the raising of man’s grasping impulse, the idolising of the strong.’
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THE CHRISTIAN DENIGRATION
of capitalism was not something that concerned Margaret Thatcher; it was only when she became leader of the Conservative Party that she would offer a rebuke. H0wever, her own religious heritage – the world of the chapel, Rotary and the grocery shop – was clearly on the wane. Alfred Roberts had sold his business in 1958 just at the right time. The age of the small grocer was no more as the removal of pricing restrictions ensured that the big supermarket chains with cheaper goods assumed a monopoly. By the 1960s, Finkin Street Church had amalgamated with its old Primitive rival and now rented its space out for dance classes and other activities once deemed ungodly. Grantham town hall would eventually be dissolved in 1974, under the 1972 Local Government Act, which also abolished the post of alderman.

In late 1969, Alfred Roberts developed emphysema and lived his last days confined to his bed with an oxygen mask. The preacher was silenced. Alfred Roberts died on the 12 February 1970, soon after hearing his daughter on a radio panel show. Thatcher later pondered in her memoirs: ‘He never knew that I would become a Cabinet minister, and I am sure that he neither imagined I would eventually become Prime Minister. He would have wanted these things for me because politics was so much a part of his life and because I was so much his daughter.’
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Alfred Roberts’s passing is significant for one more reason, for it came just ten days after the Conservative shadow Cabinet (of which Thatcher was now a member) held a conference at Selsdon
Park. It was here that the Conservative Party first began to explore free-market solutions to the nation’s growing economic woes. The death of Nonconformist England would eventually trigger a reinvention of Conservative Britain.