In towns and villages across Britain, religion is losing power, popularity and plausibility

British Gods: Religion in Modern Britain
STEVE BRUCE
(Oxford university press, 304 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Some 40 years ago, my father went to our local library in rural Cumbria and asked for The Sociology of an English Village: Gosforth by W.M. Williams. The librarian told him they didn’t have it; why would they have academic monographs from the mid-1950s? Dad pressed the point. Eventually, grudgingly, a battered copy appeared. On getting it home, he found it thoroughly defaced: “LIES!” scrawled beside anodyne descriptions of agricultural politics, snide remarks appended to detailings of social hierarchies. For the “English Village” of Williams’ still-in-print classic of rural sociology was, of course, our own. And we Gosforth folk don’t take kindly to outsiders assessing our oddities.

But those not blessed with being from Gosforth – or indeed from Bolton, Northlew, Orkney or Llanfrothen – may be grateful to the intrepid ethnographers who set out to such locales to document their demography, customs, ways of life and (often the real ­purpose) socio-economic potential. Whereas previous generations of anthropologists made their names from a few years’ fieldwork in the South Pacific or Malay archipelago, these turned to areas of Britain that must, at times, have felt equally remote. (Even three decades after Williams’ sojourn there, the peak of civilised living for at least one Gosforth family was a monthly visit to Asda among the bright lights of Barrow.) And while religion was rarely their primary interest, it was sufficiently present – or, when absent, conspicuously so – in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s to be covered in reasonable detail.