This thesis is based upon interview and participant observation data from seventy women, of the boomer and preboomer generations resident in south Cumbria. They have all lived through the sixties revolution but were brought up in an age when it was taken for granted that Britain was a Christian country and Christianity was the only religion people were likely to follow, if they were religious at all. Various commentators on the sixties (Brown, 2001,2006,2010; Marwick, 1999; McLeod, 1997,2003,2007) point out that this period had a significant effect on women but differ in their interpretation of eventual outcomes. The author engages with two of these commentators in particular, Brown and McLeod, and concludes with McLeod that, while the sixties had a lasting impact on the lives of the women who lived through them, they did not necessarily cast off all their religious and domestic commitments to become secularists, as Brown's thesis implies. Some women have continued as committed churchgoers all their lives, some have returned to churchgoing, some have changed affiliation, while others have disaffiliated but retain residual connections to Christianity; others have disaffiliated but have, in due course, turned to the holistic sacred, not necessarily rejecting all that is Christian in their new repertoire of beliefs and practices, while the secularists sometimes only became so, relatively recently, while others had become so, before the advent of the sixties. While few women now perform their commitments, either religious or domestic, out of a sense of duty, confirming Brown's view that the notion of duty belongs to a bygone age, most continue to pursue 'homely virtues', contra Brown, either in the form of voluntary commitments or at least in what Kittay (1999) has called non-voluntary but non-coerced forms of commitment. Casting off this kind of commitment has not found favour with any women in this study, even those who would consider themselves completely committed feminists and/or secularists.

This study is an exploration of the experience of faith from a psychodynamic perspective. The main purpose of this study is to provide a coherent and convincing account of the roots and characteristics of Christian women’s faith experience which will complement and, in some respects correct, existing accounts. Attachment theory is mainly employed as a conceptual framework for the research and the study pursues attachment as an important key factor for faith development. Examining the patterns of God-attachment in relation to human attachments, this study employs a qualitative methodological approach, focusing analysis on linguistic meanings, and using open-ended and unforced autobiographical narrative in-depth interviews with a group of 10 Korean Christian women. The main findings indicate what the key characteristics in women’s faithing are: the language, means and context with or in which women practice their faith; the relational and affective understanding of faith within the women’s accounts and the interaction of attachment issues in their experience of faith. Three major patterns are identified in which the women’s faithing strategies and their representations of self and God are presented: these are Distance/Avoidance, Anxiety/Ambivalence and Security/Interdependence. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are identified for Christian education, pastoral care and counselling for women.