Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Tables
- 1 The Cast List
- 2 Three Islands Compared
- 3 Scots Catholic Growth
- 4 The Irony of Catholic Success
- 5 Scotland Orange and Protestant
- 6 The Post-war Kirk
- 7 Serious Religion in a Secular Culture
- 8 From Community to Association: the New Churches
- 9 Tibetans in a Shooting Lodge
- 10 The English on the Moray Riviera
- 11 Scots Muslims
- 12 Sex and Politics
- Addendum: Scotland's Religion, 2011
- Statistical Appendix
- Index
6 - The Post-war Kirk
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Tables
- 1 The Cast List
- 2 Three Islands Compared
- 3 Scots Catholic Growth
- 4 The Irony of Catholic Success
- 5 Scotland Orange and Protestant
- 6 The Post-war Kirk
- 7 Serious Religion in a Secular Culture
- 8 From Community to Association: the New Churches
- 9 Tibetans in a Shooting Lodge
- 10 The English on the Moray Riviera
- 11 Scots Muslims
- 12 Sex and Politics
- Addendum: Scotland's Religion, 2011
- Statistical Appendix
- Index
Summary
Superficially the post-war Kirk was in better shape than it had been for 200 years. The return of the Seceders and the Free Church meant that the Kirk could now claim a third of adult Scots as members, which made it more of a national church than its much larger English counterpart. Fewer than half of England's Christians supported the Church of England: the Kirk could claim two-thirds of all Scottish church members. The Beveridge report of 1942 had laid the foundations for a modern welfare state which would protect its citizens from cradle to grave and that faith in government ability to produce a better world gave the Labour party its victory in 1945. The immediate postwar period was a time of confidence in institutions and social planning that allowed the national church to claim a renewed salience. The churches also benefited from a very strong desire among the demobilised service men and women and their families to return to normal.
But there were troubling under-currents. For all the desire to return to normal, the war had changed many people. It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which settlements and settled patterns of behaviour were disrupted by six years of a war which, one way or another, mobilised most of the population. In total, around 600,000 Scots men were involved in the armed forces, the vast majority of them being moved from their home cities, towns and villages and pressed into the company of comrades from very different social and religious backgrounds.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Scottish GodsReligion in Modern Scotland 1900–2012, pp. 100 - 118Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014