Just watched the episode with the girl from Africa who wants to be a doctor.
Would an atheist really just announce that they were one in that time period? In the States and other countries you get a lot of grief for saying you're an atheist now, would they really have accepted atheism in an English Catholic village?
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There is no such thing as an "English Catholic Village". Indeed most English villages are I think still predominantly Protestant, and certainly were in the 50s.
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I think you're being pedantic.
I know it's a fictional village and was only looking for an approximate answer to get a discussion going. If you don't know for certain you could have just said something like, 'yes, probably. People were generally easy going. But, most people were Church of England, so I couldn't say for sure.'
There was no need to be extra about it.
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Dear Letitia, it's a very interesting question. Some years ago, I worked with the great comic actor Chris Emmett, who was born in 1938, hence he would have gone to school in the late 1940s / early 50s when 'Father Brown' is set. I was writing song parodies for him for a radio comedy programme, and I was always amazed that Chris never seemed to know the tunes of well-known hymns or even Christmas carols. Then one day he revealed that this was because his family were all atheists, and so they were excused from school assemblies (in much the same way that Jewish kids were when I was at school).
It did surprise me that you would have a group of kids identified as atheists, and therefore not going to assembly, but then I suppose it's only a few years after the Second World War when some people didn't fight on religious or philosophical grounds - they were conscientious objectors. Of course, I'm sure there was stigma, I'm sure they got grief, and in the episode you're referring to, Mrs McCarthy did seem to regard the character Grace as a bit of an upstart, but yes - there's a long tradition of nonconformists in Britain: atheists, Socialists, Christian Scientists, vegetarians - I'm sure there would have been at least one in every village!
That's fascinating.
I think there's this stereotype that people in the past, especially in small villages, may have not been as tolerant as modern times, but that isn't necessarily true. Sometimes I think we're far less tolerant now, and are so caught up in not wanting to be 'politically correct' that we can be quite rude to others. I read an article that people online are, generally, much ruder than they are in reality, especially in terms of politics, because we are so accustomed to only hearing our own opinion.
I can imagine that even if atheism wasn't very approved of, everyone just minded their own business and got on with it anyway.
Thank you so much for your answer, especially with the personal section.
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