You can find my article here.

The programme’s focus on the issue was prompted by new research, reported in the press this week, which purports to show that boys who have a close relationship with their mothers make better husbands.

In my contribution, I tried to make clear my own dislike of the pejorative term ‘mummy’s boys’ and to widen the discussion beyond the familiar stereotype of the suffocating mother and emotionally dependent son. The newly-published research provided a helpful pretext for talking about my own interest in the possible connection between maternal relationships and attitudes to parenting.

I hope I managed to get across some useful points about the often-overlooked importance of mothers for boys’ emotional development, and to provide a balance to some of the emphasis on fathers’ role in boys’ lives and pathologising of the contribution of mothers, especially lone mothers.

I even succeeded in squeezing in a passing reference to the recent outbreak of social order in London and elsewhere, and to challenge the emerging consensus that it’s all down to absent fathers, single mothers, and a lack of strong male role models.

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I first became interested in young men’s relationships with their mothers, and the influence of those relationships on young masculinities, in the course of my research into men working in early years childcare (1). A number of the male childcare workers that I interviewed talked about having had particularly close relationships with their mothers, as well as with other maternal figures such as grandmothers and aunts. My sample was quite small, so my conclusions were by no means scientific, but it seemed that a significant number of these (mostly young) men had also been brought up by lone mothers.

Given the negative way in which single mothers’ influence on their sons is often viewed, this seemed to represent a fresh and more positive insight. Could the decision to work in a traditionally ‘feminine’ occupation, and the development of a more affective and expressive masculinity, have something to do with a strong maternal influence in a boy’s life? (I tried this idea out on parenting guru Stephen Biddulph, when I had the chance to chat with him after a seminar, but he was quite dismissive, suggesting that closer examination might reveal a deeper emotional deprivation in these young men’s lives, resulting from the absence of strong father figures. But then Biddulph, whose work I quite like in many ways, often appears to endorse the ‘new masculinism’ and gender essentialism of Robert Bly et al.)

In a later research study exploring fatherhood and masculine identity, I interviewed men who saw themselves as ‘involved’ fathers (2, 3). Although all of these men spoke at length about their (often deeply ambivalent) relationships with their own fathers, very few of them regarded their fathers as a strong influence on their parenting, and a significant number cited their mothers as having had the greater impact on the way they were bringing up their own children.

More recently, I supervised Jane Reeves’ PhD research on young fathers who were also service users. Among other findings to emerge from Jane’s study, it was striking that many of the young men she interviewed talked about having particularly close relationships with their mothers and grandmothers, and about how these relationships had contributed to their decision to stay with their partners and be a ‘good father’. (4)

Around the same time, I was writing about gender for the Open University’s ‘Youth’ course (KE308) (5), when a colleague introduced me to Diane Reay’s case study of Shaun, a working-class boy caught between the influence of his male peer group and that of his single mother (6). Reay quotes Shaun’s teacher as saying about him:

…of all the boys he’s the one most in touch with his feminine side, believe it or not. I do think he’s more in touch with his feminine side but then he lives with three women, his mum, who he idolises, his elder sister, who he idolises, and his baby sister, who he idolises, so his feminine side is very much to the fore.

Reay’s work, like Jane Reeves’ research, also touched on the issue of class and mother-son relationships, something I was keen to explore further.

All of these studies suggested some kind of link between the nature of a young man’s relationship with his mother and the development of masculine identity, with a hint that close maternal relationships might play a part in the emergence of alternative and more ‘caring’ masculinities. I decide that I wanted to explore these questions further, and began to cast around for existing research in this area.

I found that very little had been written on relationships between mothers and sons, and most of what had been written was from the perspective of mothers, such as Andrea Reilly’s edited collection (7). There didn’t seem to have been much written on how boys viewed their relationships with their mothers, and how those relationships impacted on their developing identities as young men.

So I decided I wanted to explore the issue further, and I came up with two possible research questions:

• How do young men talk about their relationships with their mothers?

• Is there any connection between the nature and quality of these relationships and young men’s developing gender identities?

With regard to the second question, I was particularly interested in the impact of maternal relationships on boys’ emerging attitudes to parenting, and their sense of themselves as future fathers.

Fortunately, around the time that I was beginning to explore these issues, ‘Inventing Adulthoods’, the longitudinal study of young people’s transitons to adulthood based at South Bank University, was reporting its findings and making some of its data available via a public online archive. I was aware of the project via my colleague Rachel Thomson, who was a member of the project team, and because we had collaborated with the team in producing a film about young people’s lives for the OU course. (8)

I negotiated an agreement with the South Bank research team to carry out a small-scale study, drawing on the interviews with the seven young men in the public archives, possibly as a first step towards a larger study.

Having negotiated access, I then set up about familiarising myself with the data on these seven young men. In another post, I’ll summarise what I concluded about their relationships with their mothers, and the impact on their emerging masculine identities.

References

(1) Robb, M. (2005) ‘Men working in childcare’  in Foley, P., Roche, J. and Tucker, S. (eds) Children in Society: contemporary theory, policy and practice, Basingstoke, Palgrave/The Open University

(2) Robb, M. (2004) ‘Men talking about fatherhood: discourse and identities’ in Robb, M., Barrett, S., Komaromy, C. and Rogers, A. (eds), Communication, Relationships and Care: A Reader, pp. 121-130, Routledge/The Open University

(3) Robb, M. (2004) ‘Exploring fatherhood: masculinity and intersubjectivity in the research process’, Journal of Social Work Practice, Vol. 18, No. 3, November (Special Issue: Psychosocial Approaches to Health and Welfare Research)

(4) Reeves, J. (ed) (2008) Inter-professional approaches to young fathers, M&K Update Ltd

(5) Robb, M. (2007) ‘Gender’ in Kehily, M. (ed.) Understanding Youth: perspectives,identities and practices, Sage/The Open University

(6) Reay, D. (2002) ‘Shaun’s story: troubling discourses of white working-class masculinity’, Gender and Education, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 221 – 34

(7) Reilly, A. (ed.) (2001) Mothers and Sons: feminist perspectives, Routledge

(8) Henderson, S., Holland, J., McGreelis, S., Sharpe, S. and Thomson, R. (2007), Inventing Adulthoods: a biographical approach to youth transitions, Sage/The Open University

With a few notable exceptions, the main sites for studying the lives and changing experience of young people generally, and boys in particular, have been the school and the peer group. The picture is beginning to change, as more studies emerge that consider young people’s experience of family life as a vital component of their experience of the transition to adulthood. Studies that adopt a biographical approach – such as the longitudinal ‘Inventing Adulthoods’ research which provided the data for the study I’ll be discussing later – have begun to consider ‘home’ and ‘family’ as key contexts for young people’s unfolding lives. (3)

Val Gillies’ own work, with Jane McCarthy and Janet Holland, on the family lives of young people, went a long way to redressing the imbalance. Countering the stereotypical image of young people as increasingly alienated from family life, they found that the vast majority of young people ‘describe their family relationships in positive terms, emphasising the supportive and emotionally meaningful nature of their lives together’. (4)

The fact that research on boys and young men, in particular, has emphasised the importance of friendship groups and overlooked family life, partly reflects the dominance of the subcultural tradition in youth studies. But it also reflects the dominant assumptions of developmental psychology which, as Aapola and colleagues point out, has tended to see girls as more dependent on other people, and particularly their families, than boys.

This is not to say that work on young men has completed ignored family relationships. For example, Stephen Frosh, Ann Phoenix and Rob Pattman, in their major study of young masculinities (5), though basing their research in the school context, talked to young men about their relationships with their parents, as did Martin Mac an Ghaill in his groundbreaking study (6). But we still lack research that takes those parental and other family relationships as a primary focus for exploring the development of young men’s identities, and which sees relationships with mothers, fathers and siblings as key factors in the shaping of young masculinities.

Where young men’s family relationships have come into focus, whether in research or in policy discourse, there has been an almost exclusive emphasis on boys’ relationships with their fathers. This reflects the influence of what we might call the ‘male role model’ discourse in discussion of young men’s gender formation, something I discussed in an earlier post.

Briefly, I would argue that a great deal of debate around family policy – whether it’s about single mothers, absent fathers, or young men and anti-social behaviour – has rested on assumptions about the necessity of strong male role models for boys’ healthy development. There’s a conservative or traditionalist version of this – seen in the work of New Right thinkers such as Charles Murray in the USA (7) and Dennis and Erdos in the UK (8)– which argues that the presence of fathers is essential for the development of responsible young masculinity, and the absence of strong father figures to blame for rising youth crime, welfare dependence, and so forth.

But there’s also a ‘progressive’ or egalitarian version of the male role model discourse, which lies behind much of the advocacy for greater involvement by men in hands-on fathering and in early years childcare. The assumption here is that alternative male role models are necessary to ensure that boys develop more caring and expressive masculine identities.

In both versions, the influence of mothers – and female professionals – on young men’s development tends to get left out of the picture. There’s an assumption, not only of a rather simplistic social learning model of gender development, but also that this learning has to be from a parent or professional of the same sex.

I would argue that we need a more complex, relational model of how gender identities develop, in which the multiplicity of relationships in which young men are situated is taken into account – including the potential for cross-gender identifications. This will mean paying greater attention to boys’ relationships with adults (parents, carers, professionals) of both genders.

It also means putting mothers back into the picture, as I tried to do in my own small-scale study. In the next post, I’ll explain what prompted me to undertake the study, and how I set about it.

References

(1) Aapola, S., Gonick, M. and Harris, A. (2005) Young Femininity: Girlhood, Power and Social Change, Basingstoke, Palgrave

(2) Gillies, V. (2000), ‘Young people and family life: analysing and comparing disciplinary discourses’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 211-28

(3) Henderson, S., Holland, J., McGrellis, S., Sharpe, S. and Thomson, R. (2007), Inventing Adulthoods: A Biographical Approach to Youth Transitions, London, Sage/The Open University

(4) Gillies, V., Ribbens McCarthy, J. and Holland, J. (2001) Pulling Together, Pulling Apart: The Family Lives of Young People, London, Family Policy Studies Centre/Joseph Rowntree Foundation

(5) Frosh, S., Phoenix, A. and Pattman, R. (2002) Young Masculinities, Cambridge, Polity Press

(6) Mac an Ghaill, M. (1994) The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling, Buckingham, Open University Press

(7) Murray, C. (1994) Underclass: The Crisis Deepens, London, Institute of Economic Affairs

(8) Dennis, N. and Erdos, G. (1992) Families without Fatherhood, London, IEA Health and Welfare Unit

Statue at City Hall, Philadelphia

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12836528@N00/1076606702

Research on young masculinities has tended to overlook the importance of family relationships for young men, preferring instead to study them as members of peer groups or in institutional settings, such as schools. Where families have come into focus it’s boys’ relationships with their fathers that have tended to be top of the agenda. As a result, boys’ relationships with their mothers have often been ignored or pathologised.

This relative silence about mothers and sons is reflected in popular discourse. As journalist William Sutcliffe writes:

Men are more likely to confess to a predilection for pornography than admit to a close relationship with their mother. There isn’t much left that the modern man is made to feel ashamed of, yet confessing to your friends that you sometimes call your mum for a chat is something few do. Even though a man’s mother is likely to be the second most important woman in his life, even though he may have deep feelings of love for her, this is a relationship about which men are sheepish, secretive and often outright embarrassed.

These feelings of sheepishness and embarrassment are reinforced by the images of men’s relationships with their mothers that we see in popular culture, images for the most part of domineering mothers and submissive sons. And these in turn are supported by those strains of developmental psychology and psychoanalytic theory which view men’s closeness to their mothers as problematic, rather than positive, something to be fought free from if autonomous, adult masculine identity is to be achieved.

And yet, as Sutcliffe’s quotation suggests, the reality is that for many men, their relationship with their mother is incredibly significant in their lives. In this series of posts, I want to explore the importance of maternal relationships for boys and young men, and the part played by those relationships in the development of young masculinities.

As always, I’d welcome comments on anything I write, either from fellow researchers, or from casual readers who want to share their personal experiences and perspectives.

Conclusions

I’ve decided to bring to a close this series of posts, exploring fathering and faith in my great grandfather’s letters to his son during the First World War. Looking back over the series, I can see that one of the limitations of using a blog for this kind of exploratory textual analysis is lack of space. Blog posts are brief by nature, so there’s a limit to the amount of original text, and analytical writing, that you can reasonably include. Having looked fairly closely at two of the letters in the sequence, and reflected on some broader issues arising from them, I’ve probably taken this format as far as it can go – for now.

On the other hand, using this medium has had definite benefits. At the most basic level, it’s motivated me to produce something reasonably coherent and readable at an early stage, and to progress more quickly than I would normally do beyond the scrappy notes that I tend to accumulate in my research. Posting my thoughts online has also helped me to clarify those thoughts and to begin to see some significant themes and issues emerging.

So, as I end this experiment in data analysis, what do I conclude about fathering and faith from the letters I have examined? Firstly, this exercise has reinforced my conviction that both fatherhood and faith are aspects of identity that are performed or produced through action, and particularly through language – in this case writing. Both my great grandfather’s sense of himself as a father, and his Methodist Christian faith, certainly draw on pre-existing discourses and repertoires, but they are also partly achieved through the activity of communicating with his son. These letters show Charles Robb ‘working’ to (re)produce his identity as a father and as a Christian, and crucially, to reconcile these two for his son’s and his own benefit: work that becomes increasingly difficult as tensions open up between Arthur’s military life and his religious calling.

Close analysis of these letters has demonstrated the ways in which the language and imagery of fatherhood, and of faith, play off each other in complex ways. Charles’ brand of Nonconformist Christianity provides him with a certain model of fatherhood, one that is able to include both traditionally masculine/paternal and feminine/maternal elements. At the same time, Charles deploys the words of scripture and hymns as a way of ‘re-presenting’ the familiar world of home and faith to his distant son, and thus attempting to redeem and undermine the threat posed by the seemingly hostile world of the army.

However, I’ve also questioned the adequacy of a purely discursive and constructionist approach to understanding what is going on in these letters. Using the extrinsic knowledge gained from my research into my family’s history, I’ve tentatively explored the possible biographical underpinnings to the emotional dynamics of these letters. Specifically, I have reflected on the likely influence of early experiences of loss, and of becoming a single parent (i.e. both ‘father’ and ‘mother’ to Arthur) on Charles’ fathering, and thus on his feelings about his youngest son’s separation from him in wartime.

These are all issues that I plan to explore further, my aim being to write up an analysis of the whole sequence of eight letters, in the form of a conference paper or journal article. As always, feedback on and discussion of anything in these posts would be very welcome.

Doing fathering at a distance, and re-creating ‘home’ in words

In this post I’ll share my first thoughts about the letter from my great grandfather to my grandfather that I reproduced in the last post.

There are many aspects of this letter that are reminiscent of the first letter in the sequence. The structure is very similar, beginning with apparently trivial practical matters (‘I received your letter yesterday acknowledging the Undershirt’) and a complaint about Arthur not coming home on leave, but moving quite quickly into spiritual exhortation, then returning briefly to practicalities before a final blessing and signing off. As before, the spiritual life is represented as a constant battle against temptation, a battle that requires persistence, courage and hard work.

Just as in his first letter, Charles Robb makes frequent use of what look like direct quotations from scripture and hymns to reinforce his fatherly Christian advice: this is reflected in the use of capitals in the middle of sentences, suggesting that these phrases have been ‘lifted’ from elsewhere. At one point, towards the end of the letter, it’s as if the writer actually breaks into song, reproducing lines from a familiar Methodist hymn (‘Shun evil companions. Bad Language Disdain’). It’s as though Charles is trying to re-create the familiar world of church for his distant son, in an effort to keep him on the right, Christian track.

However, there’s a sense of crisis pervading this letter, and this marks it out as different in tone and mood from the first example in the series. In that first letter, the unity of Christian and military vocations appeared to be accomplished quite quickly and easily. Here, the final resolution is similar – the letter ends with a familiar identification between serving ‘King and Country’ and serving Christ – but it seems much harder won, and takes much more time and effort to achieve.

A tension has opened up, for the writer of the letter, between his son’s military and spiritual callings, and he is patently beginning to wonder whether his son’s soldierly mission might actually undermine, rather than strengthen, his Christian vocation. (It can be argued that this is the perpetual struggle of the Nonconformist, seeking acceptance by an Establishment whose values s/he suspects are, at the end of the day, inimical to his/her own. A certain kind of Marxist analysis would suggest that the ‘respectable’ working-class conservative – a description that certainly fits my great grandfather – is caught in a similar bind.) A mood of anxiety pervades Charles’ references to the reputation of Arthur’s regiment, and to those familiar ‘sins’ (to puritanical Methodist eyes) of drinking and gambling.  My great grandfather tries a number of gambits to bring his son into line and remind him of his Christian commitment.

First he uses the strategy of referring to the impact on Arthur’s family, urging him to avoid temptation ‘not only for your sake but for my sake and all your Brothers and Sisters.’ This emotional blackmail is reinforced later on when Charles slips in the information that he himself has ‘not been at all well’ and that his life at home has been ‘quiet and lonesome’. Then he reminds Arthur that there is a ‘Higher Sake’ to consider and that he also owes a debt to Jesus for his salvation of sinners.

As well as the imminent threat of spiritual backsliding, this later letter is also shot through with an irritable, testy tone that is absent from the earlier letter. Charles is only halfway through the first sentence when he starts to express disapproval of Arthur’s failure to come home on leave, and to suggest that all is not well with his son’s behaviour: ‘it does not appear to be altogether as it should be with you’.

The whole letter highlights for me the difficulty of ‘doing fathering’ at a distance, especially when you perceive that your own values – the values which you hope you have inculcated in your child – are at variance with those of the world with which s/he is now engaged. Charles tacitly admits in this letter that the influence of Arthur’s peers, who are with him every day, may be more powerful than that of his geographically remote father and family.

Charles’ strategy for dealing with this difficulty is, as I’ve suggested, to ‘make present’ to Arthur, through his writing, the world of home and the values and way of life that it represents. The mini-sermon in the middle of the letter, complete with its scriptural quotations and almost audible hymn extract, attempt to dramatically reconstruct the familiar routines and values of church, Sunday school and Scouts that Charles referred to in his first letter. And the appeals to family feeling, including the reminder to Arthur to write to his convalescing sister Carrie, widen this re-presentation to include the world of home and family. Even the apparently trivial mention of the undershirt right at the outset can be seen as part of this strategy: its very physical presence, as an object sent from home, making it a tangible token of that familiar world.

Charles opens his letter with an irritable question as to why his son hasn’t been allowed home on leave. The letter itself can be seen as a response to that absence: if Arthur won’t come home, then Charles will bring ‘home’ to Arthur through his writing, in the hope that its re-creation in words will be powerful enough to overcome the influence of the seemingly sinful environment into which he has fallen.

A later letter

Having used my great grandfather’s first letter to his soldier son as the basis for the first few posts in this series, I want to move on to discuss a later letter in the series, and the way it both reinforces features I’ve already highlighted, and at the same time raises some quite different issues.

The letter I’ve chosen as a focus is the fifth in the sequence of eight letters from Charles Edward Robb to Arthur Ernest Robb. It was sent on 6th February 1916 from the same address as before (50 Rosebery Avenue) to the same destination (Corunna Barracks, Aldershot). I’ll discuss the letter in detail in the next post, and I’ll use the remaining space in this post to reproduce the letter itself. Once again, I’ve tried to be faithful to the original spelling, punctuation and formatting:

My Dear Arthur

I received your letter yesterday acknowledging the Undershirt but was rather surprised to hear that you were not coming for the week end. I do not know under what rule or regulation the passes are given in your section but I do hear that in most sections they are allowed by the Officer in Charge to a certain number of the best behaved and most attentive to duty during the week

If this is the case in your section it does not appear to be altogether as it should be with you otherwise I am sure that you would have been able to obtain leave by this time.

I have been making enquiries from two or three who are able to inform me about the Fusiliers and they have made me almost to wish that you had not joined in that Regt.

Dear Arthur do take some advice from me, before you left home I begged of you not to associate yourself with bad companions Remember you are an abstainer from all alcoholic drinks. Stick to the Temperance whatever it may cost you, likewise avoid in every way card playing or gambling   betting and every means of dishonesty. I have not the least doubt that you will often find it rather difficult to avoid some or all of these Temptations. If the comrades with whom you are placed are mostly used to these things then not only for your sake but for my sake and all your Brothers and Sisters. There is still a Higher Sake for you to consider. Do try and Remember that you have always been taught the Supreme Great Truth that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners and that all through Him might be saved. Again I beg of you Arthur do not be led into following these awful Soul destroying habits. I am very much afraid that you have not at all times enough courage to say No when you are surrounded by Temptation You must Pray and Pray sincerely and earnestly and keep a Watchful eye wide open so that you can clearly see there is Temptation and do not be in the least afraid to meet it and Resist. Not alone in your own strength but keep your memory clear that God is Omnipresent always near you, always ready to hear your Prayer, always willing and anxious to Help you to persist. So I beg of you Arthur not to be negligent with Prayerfulness and Watchfulness. You are not praying alone. I have promised that I will always Pray for you, that promise is to me a Solemn Vow to God so when you find you feel weak Let God know all about it and remember that I too am praying for you.

If you cannot think of words at the moment that you feel depressed try and call to mind some Hymn verse that you know like this Shun evil companions. Bad             Language Disdain – God’s Name hold in Reverence. Nor take it in Vain. Be             thoughtful and earnest. Kind hearted and true

Look ever to Jesus. He will carry you through.

In your letter you asked me for Carrie’s address I hope that you will write to her as I have sent her a letter and told that you are going to write The address is

Miss C.E.Robb

c/o Miss Chapple

“Glenesk’

Beer

S. Devon

You are asking me for a Photo. I have not got one just now to send you I hope you will be patient for a little while till we know that you are likely to be sent away. By that time I will try and have one taken especially for you

In conclusion I must tell you this is Sunday evening and I have not been able to attend the Hall or any of the meetings as I am not at all well and am resting all day. It is very quiet and lonesome by myself but I must stand it till about the 26^th when I expect that Carrie will be home again. Now Arthur I beg you to read this letter and give it all the consideration you can and Do your very best to make a True Soldier not only for your King and Country but try and enrich your Loyalty by Faithfulness and whole Heartedness in your Service to God and His Son Jesus Christ who Loves you –

From your ever anxious

And Loving Father

Charles Edward xx

A digression on ‘faith’

In this post I want to step aside from the business of analysing my great grandfather’s letters to say something about the nature of religious faith. I’ve said all along that I’m as interested in Charles Robb’s articulation of faith in his letters as in his ‘performance’ of fatherhood. Indeed, my original interest in the letters was prompted by a sense of how closely intertwined were these aspects of their author’s identity.

I’m aware that, in going off at this tangent, I’m stepping outside the usual business of this blog, which is mainly a repository for my thoughts on the topics that are the stuff of my academic work – that’s to say, children and families, with a particular focus on gender identities and relationships. But as I’ve mentioned before, I have a developing interest in the subject of faith and identity and at some stage would like to carry out research on young people’s experience of losing or changing their faith, perhaps with a focus on the part played by (and impact on) family relationships.

But before exploring the role of faith in the experience of particular groups – whether fathers or young people – it’s important to say a few things about the nature of faith. I want to challenge some preconceptions that seem to me to dominate popular and political thinking, as well as academic analysis, around this issue. For example, in beginning to analyse my great grandfather’s letters, I found myself falling into the trap of treating his Christian faith as one of the ‘resources’ that he drew on to discursively produce his identity as a father. In other words, I was in danger of regarding that faith as something that already existed inside my great grandfather, and that he then brought ‘fully formed’ to his role as a father.

However, a discursive, and more broadly a social constructionist approach to social identities, needs to see faith, like other aspects of identity, as actively produced in discourse. My great grandfather’s Christian faith, just as much as his identities as a man and as a father, should be seen as ‘under construction’ in these letters.  I’ve sensed a resistance to treating religious faith in this way, in academic as well as in political and popular discourse. In recent academic writing on religion, I detect echoes of the way that culture was often written about in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Back then, writers such as Avtar Brah criticised a ‘culturalism’ that viewed beliefs and practices, particularly of minority ethnic groups, as static, homogenous and hermetically sealed off from influences in the surrounding social context. British Asians, for example, were often seen – by academic analysts as much as by policy-makers and service providers – as shaped by a singular ‘Asian culture’, regardless of their age, class or gender, never mind their interaction with wider British and global cultural influences.

Something similar seems to have happened with regard to faith, since (post-9/11) it became a fashionable target for social research and analysis. Unfortunately, there isn’t a parallel word to culturalism to describe this tendency – ‘faithism’ doesn’t quite do it. But I’d argue that, just as once happened with culture, so there’s now a widespread habit of treating religious faith (again, particularly that of minoritised or racialised groups) as something fixed and immutable. The question, ‘How does so-and-so’s faith impact on their attitudes/politics/behaviour?’ tends to be asked by researchers more often than (for example) ‘How does so-and-so actively produce their faith in changing and diverse social contexts?’ or ‘How has this person or group’s faith changed as a result of transformed social circumstances?’

We can see the political ramifications of this reification of faith in the tendency of government (particular in the later years of New Labour) to treat individuals, especially those from Muslim backgrounds, primarily as members of ‘faith communities’ (often represented by self-appointed ‘community leaders’) in a way that privileges religious identity above other identities, and also overlooks the way it interacts with those gender, class and generational identities. Attempts to make the giving of religious ‘offence’ illegal can be seen as another consequence of this attitude: again, there’s an assumption that ‘faith’ is an integral feature of an individual’s or group’s identity, rather than something freely chosen and subject to change. In the same way that culturalist assumptions can lead to a cultural relativism, in which all cultural values and practices are held to be equally valid and immune from criticism because they are part of a group’s supposedly unchanging ‘culture’ – so the reification of faith produces a religious relativism which views a person’s beliefs as somehow part of their essential character and therefore valid as long as ‘it works for them’. (This is not to say that ‘culturalism’ has itself vanished from the scene: indeed, the new essentialising of ‘faith’ has in some ways reinforced it.)

I want to challenge these assumptions and argue that faith, like culture, is dynamic, diverse and constantly shaped and re-shaped by its interaction with changing contexts. Taking a discourse analytic approach, I also want to suggest that faith, like other aspects of identity, is constantly produced and reproduced in social discourse. One problem with such an approach is that it conflicts with our ‘common sense’ view of religious faith as being ‘already there’ in creeds, dogmas and sacred texts that individuals passively receive and are relatively powerless to influence. But the meaning and interpretation of those ‘givens’, I would suggest, is constantly changing as faith is re-formulated in the discourse of believers – whether formally in sermons and official declarations, or informally in the prayers, conversations, diaries (or letters) of believers.

So when we analyse a text in which faith is on display – such as my great grandfather’s letters to his son – we should be less interested in describing the faith that he supposedly ‘brings to’ those letters, and more concerned with how he reproduces his faith – how he ‘does’ faith, if you like – in the process of writing, alongside other aspects of his identity such as his fathering.

In thinking about faith in this way, I’ve found Wittgenstein’s later writings particularly useful, with their emphasis on religion as a ‘form of life’ and as a ‘language-game’. This is not to trivialise religion, but to emphasise that it should be seen primarily as ‘language embedded in action’. For Wittgenstein, action precedes belief, not vice versa. He once wrote to a friend: ‘I believe it is right to try experiments in religion. To find out, by trying, what helps and what doesn’t’. He might have added: to find out, by trying, what you ‘believe’.

Here I’m straying into philosophical waters that I’m barely competent to navigate. So perhaps instead I can cite some real-life examples that have influenced my thinking on this issue.  I’ve long been fascinated by accounts of conversion – and even more so by stories of ‘de-conversion’, of people losing their religious faith. There may be a personal element to this: I’ve been through two or three changes of faith, and a loss of faith, in my own life. What has struck me in many of the narratives I’ve read is the important part played by deliberate actions and decisions in these major changes in belief.

For example, I remember reading an interview with Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, who was a Catholic altar boy and even entertained ambitions to enter the priesthood – until he realised that he was gay and quite suddenly his youthful faith fell away. Then there was the female Labour politician, whose name I’ve forgotten, who was also raised a Catholic but then one day, on seeing a television broadcast by a Cardinal with which she violently disagreed for political reasons, said to herself, ‘That’s me finished with that lot then’.

I find it fascinating that a person can completely and wholeheartedly believe in something one day, and then the next day (or even the next moment) no longer believe in it, or believe something very different. It goes against our ‘common sense’ understanding of faith as something internal, unconscious, even involuntary, and highlights the role of conscious decision – deliberate action – in matters of belief. Of course, it’s possible that rumblings of doubt had been going on ‘under the surface’ for some time in these two cases, but the conscious decision not to believe was clearly the crucial factor.

Conversely, these accounts suggest that what we normally understand by ‘faith’ – that complex of opinions, feelings and attachments – tends to follow an external, willed act – rather than vice versa (shades of John Henry Newman’s ‘grammar of assent’, perhaps?). I came across an example of this in reverse in the story of Paul Moore, the HBOS whistleblower, who had been brought up a Catholic and attended Ampleforth school, but later lost his faith. After the crisis brought about by the enforced ending of his City career, he began to recover his faith. He took a job in the Yorkshire village of Wass, just down the road from Ampleforth:

When we moved back up to my alma mater I said to myself: ‘I’m going to try to have faith, to pretend that I’ve got faith.’ And as I pretended to have faith, I got faith.

This is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s advice to ‘find out, by trying’ what one believes. Just as in my first two examples it was a decision not to believe that produced a loss of faith, so in Moore’s case the decision to believe appears to have produced faith. Again, there’s a danger of sounding as though one is mocking religious faith – as a pretence, or some kind of superficial game. I’m certainly not arguing that the content of religious faith is irrelevant, and I don’t think Wittgenstein was either: if you have an appetite for such things, I’d recommend Fergus Kerr’s Theology after Wittgenstein, which defends the philosopher against this charge of ‘fideism’. (Incidentally, I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I’m in sympathy with contemporary ‘pro-faith’ commentators such as Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton, who appear to argue that ‘having faith’ is what matters, and precisely what one chooses to believe is of secondary importance. That way lies the kind of cultural relativism mentioned earlier, and in the case of those two writers, comes close to apologetics on behalf of religious extremism.)

What Wittgenstein is saying, as I read him, is simply that this is how belief works – because this is how the mind works. Action precedes cognition – and, I would add (with a nod to Bakhtin), that means action in a defined social and discursive context.

So, in approaching the ‘faith’ articulated in my great grandfather’s letters, I need to see it less as something that he brings to his writing, and rather as a product or an accomplishment of that writing, as something that is constantly created and re-created through deliberate action, and particularly through discourse.