[8] Into a Broad Place: Evangelical Resurgence in the Later Twentieth Century

It seemed called for in the later twentieth century. However difficult it may be to conceptualise, secularisation was a stark reality. Church membership had been falling since the 1920s, and, although the process was arrested in the wake of the Second World War, there was a catastrophic collapse in the 1960s.10

Adult church attendance dropped to a mere 11 per cent of the English population by 1979, to 13 per cent of the Welsh population by 1982 and to 17 per cent of the Scottish population by 1984.11 Religion was increasingly marginal in people’s lives. In 1966 two-thirds of marriages in England and Wales still took place in church; by 1980, the figure was fewer than a half.12

The 1944 Education Act decreed that religious instruction and a daily act of worship should be compulsory in state schools.13 By the 1970s both provisions were widely ignored with itnpunity. The television and the motor car dealt a drastic blow to Sunday School attendance in the 1950s.14 Christian practice was ceasing to be buttressed by custom. Religious change was followed by moral change. In the 1960s traditional moral values based on the Christian ethic disintegrated. The pill heralded the permissive society in the field of sexual