Reviewing in her sixties, the changes that she had seen during her lifetime, Sheila Robertson of St George's, Edgbaston, reflected that

Few historians and sociologists would deny that the increasingly religiously and culturally pluralistic turn of postwar society posed major challenges to Christianity's historic influence. In part, pluralism was the consequence of a long-term tendency for social and political elites to take an increasingly ‘permissive’ stance on questions of personal morality and the growing reluctance of these elites to endorse Christian norms and values above others. A social and political ideal of ‘Christian nationhood’ progressively gave way to one of ‘civilised society’, a concept with a variety of intellectual and cultural inspirations, and less conscious debt to Christianity. However, increased cultural pluralism was also underpinned by growing individual self-assertion which, if it did not exactly result in the pure individualism predicted by some classical sociologists, nevertheless reflected the triumph of an ‘ethic of authenticity’ which understood the ‘self’ as the ultimate source of authority.