ABSTRACT
By this time, of course, most of the nation’s religious commentators were also convinced that the churches faced the much broader challenge of an ever-encroaching tide of popular irreligion. From their perspective, it appeared that the intellectual climate engendered by the Enlightenment and
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had been inimical to the interests of the churches. They had led to an urban and class-ridden society in which the seemingly natural and consensual religiosity of the pre-industrial age had been shattered by economic, social and demographic upheaval and by the overarching and inexorable progress of modern science, technology and intellectual inquiry. Informing this view of secularisation was a growing body of national and local evidence. This demonstrated that, whatever the perplexities of the educated classes, it was the teeming multitudes of the urban working classes who were most alienated from the churches and who presented them with their most formidable pastoral and missionary challenge. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, this problem was underlined in the form of The Army and Religion report of 1919, a report that addressed the religious impact of army life and of industrialised warfare on the mainly working-class soldiers of the British army. Drawing on an impressive range of chaplains’ and soldiers’ testimonies collected during the latter stages of the war, the report drew conclusions that were largely negative and equally predetermined. David Cairns, the Scottish Presbyterian academic who authored the report, had declared as early as January 1917 that:
My feeling is that what the Churches need is to have brought before them the real state of matters, viz. that they have lost, or are in danger of losing the faith of the nation, and that they have got to look deeply into the matter and set their hearts and minds to the problem of how the situation may, by God’s grace, be retrieved before it is too late.2
