The Longest Battle? Engaging with Secular Culture in a Southern Industrial Town, 1919 Onwards

As the immediate trauma of the First World War passed, the churches faced another battle. The War seemed to have accentuated trends identifiable beforehand—the challenge of increasing leisure time and options, a decline in the sense of duty and obligation, particularly regarding conventional religious observance, and increasing scepticism as to the authenticity of much Christian worship. Churches could accommodate, adapt to or resist the changing culture. This chapter explores how churches in Slough, an industrial town typical of rapidly spreading new urban areas close to London, responded in the twenty years after the close of the First World War. A central element of the debate—and one that exemplified changing attitudes and an increasing divergence of opinions within society—was over the appropriate use of Sundays. The chapter argues that for a growing number of ordinary people, the traditional understanding of the proper use of Sunday was increasingly seen as anachronistic, inconsistent and unjustifiable. These differences were shared to an extent within the churches, which, it is proposed, undermined their authority within the community, shifting the locus of moral leadership in the community away from the churches to secular leaders. It is argued that these consequences contributed to an increasing marginalisation and compartmentalisation of mainstream organised religion.