Chairman's Blog

St Anne, Our Lady, and the Infant Jesus: from the Walker Art Gallery

In the first post of this series I set out the sociologist Callum Brown's account of how piety came to be seen as female by evangelicals in the 19th century; in the second post I gave an explanation of how this came about: the influence of Romanticism. In the third post I made certain caveats about how British Catholicism fits into Brown's picture. Now I want to address the million-dollar question: why did religious practice collapse in the 1960s?

Callum Brown is a little short of explicit explanation, beyond saying that the 'discourse' changed, but one thing he makes clear is that Evangelical religious discourse was hugely dependant on women by the end of the 1950s. The dependance had started long before, with women picured as the pious ones, by contrast with 'heathen' men, but the situation was particularly acute in the post-war religious revival. For example, popular boys' magazines, which had started with a strong religious element, dropped this in the 1930s, just as girls' and women's magazines (if they survived at all) dropped explicit religious content in the 1960s.

What the discourse was about, was feminity and respectability. This was an era, as I've noted in an earlier post in this series, that affiliation was more importance than practice: thus 'rites of passage' moments are marked with religious ceremony (baptism and marriage etc.); a higher proportion of children were sent to Sunday school than adults went to church.

In this situation, a loss of concern for respectability and the opinion of others, particularly of the older generation, would have a far greater effect than it would have on a discourse focused on battling sin in a hostile world, which is more what it looked like in the early 19th century. Even that more robust version of the discourse, if predicated disproportionately on women, would be vulnerable to an alternative source of female self-understanding, alternative, that is, to the idea that the woman in the house was holding things together morally. Thus, if women had something else to undertand themselves as being about, such as the seeking of new experiences and seeking value in the world of work, and if that seemed more attractive, then the whole house of cards would tumble down.

Now, in the 1960s there was indeed a rejection of the notion of respectability, of the idea that one's worth was dependent in some important degree on the opinions of the older generation: thanks to the numbers and financial resources of the young in the context of the baby-boom and the prosperity of the 1960s. There was also a ideology abroad, which said that women could attain self-worth not by keeping house, but by joining the labour market.

The last factor, feminism, was not, contrary to Brown's naive contention, a miraculous, spontaneous effusion from ordinary women; it was the goal of a long campaign by elite women. As Carolyn Graglia (Domestic Tranquility) has set out, for decades feminists had waged a ferocious campaign of villification of housewives. Housewives are described by these charming ladies as mentally retarded, lacking in imagination and creativity, and as no better than prostitutes, for failing to do paid work outside the home.

Graglia also illustrates other important factors, which she experienced personally as a young woman in the 1960s. First, since the 1930s female education had been modelled on the education of boys, which meant that what she was actually trained to be able to do was not running a house, but working in an office. All her work habits and skills were directed towards office-type work. Second, the collapse of tightly-knit extended families (often in the context of ethnic ghettos in the USA), because of suburbanisation and (especially in the UK) slum clearance, deprived women starting families of the practical help of their own mothers and other older family members and friends. Third, this era saw (partly as a consequence of the last point) the rise of books by supposedly qualified people on child-rearing, the take-home message of which was 'You're doing it all wrong!' These promoted the idea that your children are only really safe with paid, professional, carers.

All in all, young women in the late 1950s onwards were bombarded with the idea, and to an extent the reality, that they couldn't cope in the home, trying to cook and sew and look after children: they were much more comfortable, and much more valued by the elite women of the day, working in an office.

Another factor, which I've already dealt with, is that what Feminism was opposing was a highly problematic Romantic conception of femininity.

Feminism's ideological push would not have been successful without these other factors: indeed, it had not been successful in earlier decades. It found itself pushing at an open door in the 1960s because of the sudden disapearance of opposing forces, above all the influence and support of the older generation.

These factors led to the triumph of feminism, and that led to the collapse of Brown's Evangelical discourse as a dominating feature of British society and culture. The Catholic Church was also affected by this, but I need to say something about how the Church's own changes of policy interacted with these factors.

One satisfying thing about this explanation is that it explains why church attendance fell in the 1960s and 1970s at exactly the same time as membership of book clubs, sewing circles, membership organisations of all kinds, and neighbours chatting over the garden fence, described by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone,  which I have discussed here. All these things happened together, because they were the consequences of the factors, themselves linked, of suburbanisation (with its implications for the loss of leisure to commutting) and women adopting a new self-understanding and joining the labour market. They no longer saw themselves as primarily home-makers, with the time and the vocation to connect local communities, and given how religiosity was understood at that moment, this meant that they ipso facto gave up their role of corralling the children and menfolk into church on a Sunday.

Support the work of the LMS by becoming an 'Anniversary Supporter'.

The donors of a fabulous Medieval triptych in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, which the SCT Summer School visited, attend Mass, as presented on the outside of the triptych doors. They are in a private chapel, but the curtains at the back have been pushed aside by young men eager to witness the Consecration. Late 15th century.

In the first post of this series I set out the sociologist Callum Brown's account of how piety came to be seen as female by evangelicals in the 19th century; in the second post I gave an explanation of how this came about: the influence of Romanticism. Under this influence, a model of piety was developed which was feminine. Women were held up as models (dominating pious obituaries, for example); men were problems - the obituaries even of clergy emphasised their struggles with sin.

The identification of the feminine with the pious is exactly the problem which Leo Podles talks about in a Catholic context, but in his book he blames 'Bridal Mysticism', the identification of the individual Christian, as opposed to the Church, with the 'bride of Christ', in the High Middle Ages (starting with St Bernard). In a more recent talk, he lays stress, instead, on the role of the clergy as the 'fun police', referring to opposition to dancing by St Jean Vianney and St Charles Borromeo. In either case, he gives a bit of anecdotal evidence for women being regarded as more pious than men in the later Middle Ages, and more frequent church-goers.  He draws a line between this and the lack of men in church today, bypassing the Reformation, Romanticism, and the changes of the 1960s and '70s.

As I have said before on this blog, Podles' evidence for a loss of men from the Church in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period is fairly thin, and even in the 19th century it is patchy. You do find people talking about female piety, but the discourse of 'female depravity' can be also found in the later Middle Ages (it is criticised by Chaucer's Wife of Bath), as well as 'masculine depravity': those medieval preachers criticised everyone. Bridal Mysticism was a significant, but not a dominating, spiritual school through this period. And it is clearly a mistake to imagine that later events and movements made no difference.

By contrast, Callum Brown thinks of the major shift as taking place around 1800. Brown tells us that Catholic sources are similar to Evagelical ones in their presentation of the sexes in relation to religion. Since Brown is talking about the UK, it is inevitable that Catholics would be influenced by the majority religion and culture, and the invasion of Catholic art and spirituality by the sentimentality of the early Victorian period is impossible to miss. However, the bigger picture of the development of Catholic thinking doesn't fit the pattern Brown offers. I'm open to correction, but I don't really see the stark contrast between 18th and 19th century Catholic spirituality which Brown describes in relation to Evangelical spirituality.

On the subject of Podles' 'fun police', this has a strong parallel with the Puritanism of Evangelical religion both before and after Brown's 1800 paradigm shift. Brown would say, presumably, that this only becomes part of feminised conception of religion in the context of other parts of the picture. This is surely correct. If a puritanical attitude to 'fun' is combined with an emphasis on male leadership and the depravity of women, you don't have a feminised understanding of religion, you have a very tough, masculine one - along monastic or even military lines - and that's exactly what we see among British evangelicals before 1800. That's not to say that it is really attractive to men: if the lack of fun is too restrictive there can be a backlash. Perhaps Podles is correct that men in France before the Revolution and Spain before 1936 were resentful of kill-joy clergy who were personally morally slack (although there were surely other factors), but this looks like an separate issue from the issue of feminisation.

In any case, it is clear enough that Catholic societies were never remotely as puritanical as Puritan societies. Against St Jean Vianney (operating in a church still influenced by Jansenism) and St Charles Borromeo (in a society much in need of moral reform), there are the fun-loving saints, like St Philip Neri and St John Bosco. Bosco used to quote Neri:

Let young men be cheerful, and indulge in the recreations proper to their age, provided they keep out of the way of sin.

One bit of hard evidence on feminisation, from the United States, is from the census of 1936, which is quoted by Podles himself:

[I]n Eastern Orthodoxy the ratio of women to men is .75-.99 to one; Roman Catholics, 1.09 to one; Lutherans, 1.04-1.23 to one; Mennonites, 1.14-1.16 to one; Friends [Quakers], 1.25 to one; Presbyterians, 1.34 to one; Episcopalians, 1.37 to one; Unitarians, 1.40 to one; Methodists, 1.33-1.47 to one; Baptists, 1.35 to one; Assembly of God, 1.71 to one; Pentecostalists, 1.71-2.09 to one; Christian Scientists, 3.19 to one.

Another, which is anecdotal but surely reliable, is Mgr Hugh Benson, writing in his autobiographical Confessions of a Convert which was published in 1913, and directly addresses the accusation that the Catholic Church put off men.

[A]mongst Catholics emotionalism and even strong sentiment is considerably discouraged, and … the heart of religion is thought rather to reside in the adherence and obedience of the will. The result is, of course, that persons of a comparatively undevout nature will, as Catholics, continue to practice their religion, and sometimes, in ungenerous characters, only the barest minimum of their obligations; whereas as Anglicans they would give it up altogether.
...
There is no “alienation of the men” [in the Catholic Church]; on the contrary, in this country, as also in Italy and France, I am continually astonished by the extraordinary predominance of the male sex over the female in attendance at Mass and in the practice of private prayers in our churches. At a recent casual occasion, upon my remarking to the parish-priest of a suburban church of this phenomenon, he told me that on the previous evening he had happened to count the congregation from the west gallery and that the proportion of men to women had been about as two to one. This, of course, was something of an exceptional illustration of my point.

I think it is very likely that feminisation grew in the Catholic Church in Britain in the half century after Mgr Benson wrote, especially in the 1950s, a time when sentimental Catholic devotional art, to use just one measure, certainly thrived. Brown describes a 'final blast of feminisation' in the Church of England, which saw a rocketing ratio of female to male candidates for confirmation, for example. But I would contend that this feminisation was less intrinsic to the Catholic offering, less deeply rooted.

The next issue to tackle is what exactly happened in the 1960s. Brown tells us that a highly feminised religious discourse, which is to say a set of social sanctions, expectations, and self-understandings linking religiosity to the feminine realm, suddenly collapsed in the 1960s, alongside religious practice. Why?

Support the work of the LMS by becoming an 'Anniversary Supporter'.

St Columba, by Anthea Craigmyle

As previously noted on this blog, I have organised a 'month's mind' Mass for Anthea Craigmyle. All are welcome. At the time of writing I'm still looking for servers, email me via the LMS office if you can help on the day: info@lms.org.uk

Thursday 18th August, 11am: the Little Oratory, at the London Oratory (address: Brompton Rd, London SW7 2RP: click for a map). The 'month's mind', Traditional High Mass accompanied by Oratory singers, who will sing Anerio's Requiem. The 'Little Oratory' is not in the main church, but the other side of the small car park.

In addition to this, I can also now announce:

Wednesday 2nd November (All Souls Day), 5:30pm, Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick Street, W1B 5LZ (click for a map). Traditional Latin Vespers of the Dead, with polyphony (Viadana and Palestrina) provided by Cantus Magnus. This will be offered for all the deceased members of the Craigmyle family.

This Vespers has been timed to fit in with the annual Craigmyle Memorial Lecture organised by the Catholic Union. This is an invitation-only event, within easy walking distance from Warwick Street, at 6:30pm.

These are public services, everyone is welcome to attend.

I would like to reiterate my thanks for the many Masses offered by our priest friends. We are truly blessed in your generosity.

Support the work of the LMS by becoming an 'Anniversary Supporter'.

Clergy and servers at the Ecce, Agnus Dei in High Mass at the SCT Summer School.

In the last post in this series I set out the thesis of Callum Brown (in his The Death of Christian Britain): that around 1800 religion began to occupy the feminine realm, with men being described as 'heathens', male pastimes regarded with suspicion, and femininity and religiosity being understood in terms of each other: to be feminine was to be religious, and to be religious was to be feminine. This state of affairs carried religion in the UK - the focus is on Evangelical Protestantism, understood in a broad sense - for 160 years, with considerable success, with indicators of religious practice and affiliation rising throughout the 19th century and, in the 20th, recovering strongly from the disruption of the two World Wars.

Brown has nothing to tell us, however, as to why religion took this surprising turn in 1800, or why this 'discourse' suddenly collapsed in the 1960s. Nor does he have anything to tell us about how the Catholic experience differed. At one point he says that Catholic attitudes were very similar to Evangelical ones. Well, up to a point. I want to deal with the first question in the post, and the second in the next, after a short intermission.

The feminisation of piety at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries is, on the face of it, surprising, because as the feminists remind us, Christianity is a patriarchal religion. It was led by male preachers and clergy in the centuries before 1800, and this continued after 1800. The Protestant critique of female delinquency before 1800 was very marked: indeed, to say it represented a lack of balance would be an understatement. An interesting side-issue Brown notes is that women were preserving vestigial Catholic rituals, notably 'churching' after childbirth, which were condemned as superstitious. So what happened?

Looking at the wider intellectual and cultural situation, the change is not so difficult to understand. What happened at the end of the 18th century is the rise of the Romantic movement, and the model of female piety at work in Evangelical circles after 1800 is a recognisably Romantic model. Romanticism has a complex relationship with the (rest of the) Enlightenment, but at least in popular terms it can be seen as a reaction against Enlightenment Rationalism. It emphasises the role of the emotions, it privileges spontaneity and authenticity over formalism and the intellect. Rationalism was not friendly to religion in the 18th century, and the arrival of Romanticism was in many ways a relief for Christian thinkers, even if it wasn't exactly orthodox itself. It was a particularly good fit for Christians at the 'Low Church' end of the scale, who had always minimised ritual and emphasised religious emotion and subjectivity. It is not surprising, therefore, that they allowed themselves to be influenced by it.

The Romantic reading of Rationalism was that Reason is masculine and was destroying the world; emotion and authenticity and love are feminine and can save the world. This is very clear in Romantic fiction, such as Goethe's Faust, in which the innocent and self-sacrificing Marguerite saves the dried-up intellectual Faust. (This is a complete innovation in the Faust story compared to Marlowe's 16th century version.) Examples could be multiplied. Female heroines abound in the folk tradition, of course; what is new is the idea that females will save the day simply by being female, which is to say, by being emotional, irrational, feeble, self-sacrificing, spontaneous, and so on. It isn't the mulier fortis who saves the day - it's not Joan of Arc - it's the shrinking violet. As well as putting femininity to the fore, Romanticism gives us a very specific, and problematic, conception of femininity.

With what level of self-consciousness I do not know, but under this influence Evangelical writers stopped talking about rebellious, superstitious, over-emotional females, who needed to be kept in check by restrained, upright men, and started talking instead about sweet, quiet, pious females, who themselves needed (gently, of course) to keep in check the rough, rebellious, drinking/ gambling/ womanising men. What happens is not just a reappraisal of the relative merits of the sexes, but a new conception of what it is to be pious. Being pious became understood in feminine terms. To be truly feminine, a woman had to be pious. To be pious, a man had to take on female qualities, and restrain his masculine ones.

Brown shows that as the 19th century wore on, the problem of putting men off religion was noticed among evangelicals, and 'muscular Christianity' in the mid 19th century was a response to this. It held up King David as a model for boys, and tried to use sport as a way of allowing boys and men a masculine outlet. Unfortunately sport was itself attacked by other evangelical voices. We can add to this the Public School movement, or the more idealistic end of it, which at precisely this moment incorporated sport as a key element in a masculine Christian environment, and the Anglo-Catholic movement, with its emphasis on ritual and reason - this of course it had its own public schools. These latter two phenomena are missed by Brown's focus on the evangelicals, but his point remains that even together they did not overturn the basic conceptual shape of Christian discourse, or the emphasis on masculine sins. Indeed, I'm not sure how clearly they saw the problem, and how explicitly they strove against it. In his verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells, Betjman recalls the boys being told, in his grim pre-Great War public school, by a visiting old-boy Anglical bishop, 'Never do anything of which your mother would be ashamed'. The public schools may have been masculine in terms of staff, they may have had military-style discipline and plenty of rough sports, but they generally failed to offer their pupils a non-sissy spirituality.

All this time, evangelical activists were trying to close public houses, keep off-course gambling illegal, stop boys playing football on Sundays, and get men to kneel down and weep for their sins in public. Brown quotes a female activist lamenting the difficulty of getting soldiers at Aldershott to express religious emotion. 'Many a man would rather encounter the enemy's fire in open line, "than be laughed at in the barrack-room".' That, dear reader, is precisely the problem.

The next question is: was this equally a problem for Catholics?

A little footnote on off-course gambling, which was illegal but still widespread in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I came across a fascinating discussion of this which made the case that, as commonly used, it was actually a form of saving for working-class families. Mathematically-minded fathers of families would make careful study of 'form' (of racehorses), and every week place a very small wager on an 'accumulator' bet. This is a type of bet which uses the proceeds of one successful wager as the stake in a bet in another race, and the proceeds of that on another, and so on. The odds against winning the whole thing are huge, but so is the reward if you do. So, from this small weekly outlay, there would occasionally come in a tidy sum, like £5, enough to pay for a daughter's wedding. For people without easy access to the banking system, and subject to constant temptations to fritter away savings before they've matured, this is actually a perfectly rational approach to paying for occasional big-ticket items, conceptually very similar to the 'Christmas clubs' and the like common at the time, but also an intellectual challenge and a lot of fun. Blanket opposition by evangelicals to gambling, like blanket opposition to the demon drink, was really wrong-headed.

Support the work of the LMS by becoming an 'Anniversary Supporter'.