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Law, Morality and Secularisation: The Church of England and the Wolfenden Report, 1954–1967

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2009

MATTHEW GRIMLEY
MATTHEW GRIMLEY
Affiliation:
Merton College, Oxford OX1 4JD; E-mail: matthew.grimley@merton.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

The role of the Church of England in the permissive reforms of the 1960s has been neglected. This article examines the Church's part in the campaign for the legalisation of homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s. It shows that the Church of England Moral Welfare Council played a key role in setting up the Wolfenden Committee in 1954, and in later campaigns culminating in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. In advocating the separation of crime and sin, senior Anglicans were promoting the secularisation of the criminal law, but many church members opposed this reorientation of Church and State. The importance of the Church of England in homosexual law reform suggests that existing narratives of secularisation and the permissive society need to be revised.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 725 - 741
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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References

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9 The fullest account of the debates within the Wolfenden Committee is in Patrick Higgins, Heterosexual dictatorship: male homosexuality in postwar Britain, London 1996. A less tendentious account is offered by Mort, Frank, ‘Mapping sexual London: the Wolfenden Committee on Sexual Offences’, New Formations xxxvii (Spring 1999), 92–113.Google Scholar

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32 Another committee member, V. A. Demant, was a canon of Christ Church and probably the most distinguished living Anglican political theorist.

33 Wolfenden's philosophical training in 1920s and 1930s Oxford had been a typically Idealist one, including a degree of metaphysical speculation. ‘We really did bother our heads about God, freedom and immortality, about what constitutes a good man or a right act, about the nature of a universal, and about the content of a moral obligation’, he remembered. ‘Perhaps we were the last dying embers of that tradition’: Turning points: the memoirs of Lord Wolfenden, London 1976, 39.

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59 Dunstan to Lord Denning, 7 Oct. 1960, BSR/MWC/HOM/1.

60 Transcript of evidence given by Sherwin Bailey and two other witnesses, 30 Mar. 1955, HO 345/13, CHP/TRANS/19.

61 Ought suicide to be a crime?, Church Information Office, London 1959, 23.

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81 Wolfenden to Fisher, 24 Sept. 1957, Fisher papers, vol. 194, fo. 181.