His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Fisher, keen to counter the dreadful spectre of the atomic bomb in the 1950s, observed that
the very worst it could do would be to sweep a vast number of people at one moment from this world into the other, more vital world, into which anyhow they must all pass at one time.
Simon Green notes that such an opinion had already become unacceptable by that time, even though it was not, and still is not, unorthodox theology. Most people had by then ceased to hope for eternal felicity and had replaced it with a new belief in a right to this-worldly happiness.
The patient whose condition Green examines between the years 1920 and 1960 is the English national character, and his book deserves a much wider readership than it will receive, given its cost and its misleadingly academic title. Our national character is very unwell; indeed it is mortally ill. What once distinguished it — its Protestantism — has all but vanished, and curiously has not been replaced. We have become a nation without a national character.
By Protestant, Green means puritanical, accepting of austerity, honest, modest, strong on common sense and the rejection of fanaticism and, in a sense, progressive. Continental observers recognised and were impressed by England’s capacity for efficient self-control. This dedication to discipline galvanised an economy but restricted an imagination. The particular form of Christianity that informed the national will was moralistic and curiously inhumane.
What then had become of this Protestant character by 1960? Green inspects the various theories propounded by the social scientists of secularisation. Some put religious decline down to changes in society, others to an internal dynamic within the national religion itself. Yet others stress not decline, exactly, but a shift from institutional membership to believing without belonging, or to a new paganism.
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