Article contents
The Fall and Rise of Church and State? Religious History, Politics and the State in Britain, 1961–2011*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
In trying to trace the development of church-state relations in Britain since 1961, one encounters the difficulty that conceptions of both ‘church’ and ‘state’ have changed radically in the half-century since then. This is most obviously true of the state. The British state in 1961 was (outside Stormont-governed Northern Ireland) a unitary state governed from London. It still had colonies, and substantial overseas military commitments. One of its Houses of Parliament had until three years before been (a few bishops and law-lords apart) completely hereditary. The prime minister controlled all senior appointments in the established Church of England, and Parliament had the final say on its worship and doctrine. The criminal law still embodied Christian teaching on issues of personal morality.
- Type
- Part III: Church and State in History
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013
Footnotes
I am grateful to the audience and the other speakers at the EHS winter conference in January 2012 for their comments, and in particular to Sheridan Gilley, Perry Butler, David Thompson, Sarah Foot and the editors of this volume.
References
1 Hart, H. L. A., Law, Liberty and Morality (London, 1963), Preface.Google Scholar
2 ODNB, s.n. ‘Ramsey, (Arthur) Michael (1904–1988)’.
3 Grimley, Matthew, ‘Law, Morality and Secularisation: The Church of England and the Wolfenden Report, 1954–1967’, JEH 60 (2009), 725–41 Google Scholar; Lewis, Jane and Wallis, Patrick, ‘Fault, Breakdown, and the Church of England’s Involvement in the 1969 Divorce Reform’, 20th Century British History 11 (2000), 308–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Green, S. J. D., ‘Survival and Autonomy: On the Strange Fortunes and Peculiar Legacy of Ecclesiastical Establishment in the Modern British State, c. 1920 to the Present Day’, in idem and Whiting, R. C., eds, The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994), 299–324.Google Scholar
5 See, e.g., Green, Humphrey, ‘Erastus rebutted – or, the Obstacle of Establishment’, Prism, April 1958, 8–18; Disestablishment and Unity, Prism special issue, January 1959; Editorial, Prism, June 1959, 1.Google Scholar
6 Vidler, Alec, ‘Religion and the National Church’, in idem, ed., Soundings; Essays Concerning Christian Understanding (Cambridge, 1962), 241–63, at 261–2.Google Scholar
7 Robinson, John, Honest to God (London, 1963), 141.Google Scholar
8 Stephenson, Alan, The Rise and Decline of English Modernism (London, 1984).Google Scholar
9 Modood, Tariq, ‘Establishment, Multiculturalism and British Citizenship’, Political Quarterly 65 (1994), 53–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 Queen Elizabeth II, speech at Lambeth Palace, 15 February 2012, online at: <http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2358/the-queen-attends-multi-faith-reception-at-lambeth-palace>, accessed 28 August 2012.
11 Parsons, Gerald, ‘There and back again? Religion and the 1944 and 1988 Education Acts’, in idem, ed., The Growth of Religious Diversity: Britain from 1945, 2: Issues (London, 1994), 161–98 Google Scholar; Parker, Stephen and Freathy, Rob, ‘Ethnic Diversity, Christian Hegemony and the Emergence of Multi-faith Religious Education in the 1970s’, History of Education 41 (2012), 381–404 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; eidem, ‘Context, Complexity and Contestation: Birmingham’s Agreed Syllabuses since the 1970s’, Journal of Beliefs and Values 32 (2011), 247–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, Faith in the City: A Call for Action by Faith and Nation (London, 1985)Google Scholar. For wider relations between the Church of England and the Thatcher governments, see Filby, Liza, ‘God and Mrs Thatcher: Religion and Politics in 1980s Britain’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 2010).Google Scholar
13 Though for the argument that anti-Catholicism remained a force during and after 1982, see John Wolflfe, ‘Change and Continuity in British Anti-Catholicism 1829–1982’, in Tallett, Frank and Atkin, Nicholas, eds, Catholicism in Britain and France since 1789 (London, 1996), 67–83.Google Scholar
14 Though just prior to the papal visit, the Scottish National Party president, William Wolfe, had spoken of the need to protect the Falkland Islands ‘from the cruel and ruthless fascist dictatorship of a Roman Catholic State’: quoted in Keith Robbins, Nicholas, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: The Christian Church 1900–2000, OHCC (Oxford, 2008), 434.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 Brose, Olive, Church and Parliament: The Reshaping of the Church of England (Stanford, CA, 1959)Google Scholar; Best, Geoffrey, Temporal Pillars: Queen Anne’s Bounty, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and the Church of England (Cambridge, 1964).Google Scholar
16 Vidler, Alec, The Orb and the Cross: A Normative Study in the Relations between Church and State with Reference to Gladstone’s Early Writings (London, 1945)Google Scholar; Forbes, Duncan, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 1952).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 Harris, Jose, ‘Political Thought and the State’, in Green, and Whiting, , eds, Boundaries of the State, 15–28, at 15.Google Scholar
18 Laslett, Peter, Introduction to idem, ed., Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford, 1956), vii–xv, at vii.Google Scholar
19 Berlin, Isaiah, ‘Does Political Theory still exist?’, in Laslett, Peter and Runciman, W. G., eds, Philosophy, Politics and Society (Second Series) (Oxford, 1962), 1–33.Google Scholar
20 Brown, Peter, ‘St Augustine’, in Smalley, Beryl, ed., Trends in Medieval Political Thought (Oxford, 1963), repr. in Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of St Augustine (London, 1972), 25–45, at 28.Google Scholar
21 For a more detailed discussion of the ‘turns’ towards anthropology and sociology, see, in this volume, Sarah Foot, ‘Has Ecclesiastical History Lost the Plot?’, 1–25.
22 Fletcher, Stella, ‘A Very Agreeable Society’: The Ecclesiastical History Society 1961–2011 (Southampton, 2011), 10.Google Scholar
23 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1968 edn), 411, 405 respectively.Google Scholar
24 Wilson, Bryan, Religion in Secular Society: A Sociological Comment (London, 1966); Alasdair MacIntyre, Secularization and Moral Change (Oxford, 1967).Google Scholar
25 Wickham, E. R., Church and People in an Industrial City (London, 1957), 11.Google Scholar
26 Ibid. 198.
27 Inglis, K. S., Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London, 1963).Google Scholar
28 Morris, Jeremy, ‘Secularization and Religious Experience: Arguments in the Historiography of Modern British Religion’, HistJ 55 (2012), 195–219, at 198–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
29 Wickham, , Church and People, 12.Google Scholar
30 McLeod, Hugh, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London, 1974)Google Scholar; Gilbert, Alan, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914 (London, 1976).Google Scholar
31 For a more recent discussion of this relationship, see the essays in Cooper, Kate and Gregory, Jeremy, eds, Elite and Popular Religion, SCH 42 (Wcodbridge, 2006).Google Scholar
32 Cox, Jeffrey, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar; Morris, Jeremy, Religion and Urban Change: Croydon, 1840–1914 (Woodbridge, 1992).Google Scholar
33 McLeod, Hugh, Piety and Poverty: Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London, and New York 1870–1914 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; idem, ‘Protestantism and National Identity 1815–1945’, in Van der Veer, Peter and Lehmann, Hartmut, eds, Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 44–70.Google Scholar
34 Williams, S. C., Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c. 1880–1939 (Oxford, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Callum, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London, 2001).Google Scholar
35 Morris, Jeremy, ‘The Strange Death of Christian Britain: Another look at the Secularization Debate’, HistJ (2003), 963–76, at 968.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
36 Bell, Daniel, ‘The Return of the Sacred? The Argument on the Future of Religion’, British Journal of Sociology 28 (1977), 419–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
37 Markus, R.A., Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine, rev. edn (Cambridge, 1988), viii–ix.Google Scholar
38 See, e.g., Morrill, John, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, TRHS ser. 5, 34 (1983), 155–78 Google Scholar; Russell, Conrad, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990).Google Scholar
39 Clark, J. C. D., English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Political Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; Parry, Jonathan, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Parly (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brent, Richard, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform, 1830–1841 (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar; Matthew, H. C. G., Gladstone, 2 vols (Oxford, 1986–95)Google Scholar; Bebbington, David, The Mind of Gladstone, Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bentley, Michael, Lord Salisbury’s World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
40 Although, as Hilton pointed out, the parallel was ‘tempting but misleading, for we are not really living in another Age of Atonement’: Age of Atonement, 374.
41 Cowling, Maurice, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1980–2001)Google Scholar; Williamson, Philip, ‘The Doctrinal Politics of Stanley Baldwin’, in Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling, ed. Bentley, M. (xsCambridge, 1993), 181–208; idem, Stanley Baldwin: National Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999); idem, ‘Christian Conservatives and the Totalitarian Challenge 1933–40’, EHR 115 (2000), 607–42 Google Scholar. For a discussion of the influence of religion on the early Labour Party, see Peter Caterall, ‘The Distinctiveness of British Socialism? Religion and the Rise of Labour, c. 1900–1939’, in Worley, Matthew, ed., The Foundations of the British Labour Party: Identities, Cultures and Perspectives, 1900–1939 (Farnham, 2009), 131–52.Google Scholar
42 Machin, G. I. T., Politics, Society and the Churches 1869–1921 (Oxford, 1987); idem, ‘Disestablishment and Democracy, c. 1840–1930’, in Biagini, Eugenio F., ed., Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles 1865–1931 (Cambridge, 1996), 120–47 Google Scholar; Maiden, John, National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy, 1927–1928 (Woodbridge, 2009)Google Scholar; Grimley, Matthew, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars (Oxford, 2004), ch. 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
43 Grimley, , Citizenship, Community and the Church of England; Green, S. J. D., The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change c. 1920–1960 (Cambridge, 2011), ch. 6; Grimley, , ‘Law, Morality and Secularisation’.Google Scholar
44 See, e.g., Samuel, Raphael, ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols (London, 1989)Google Scholar. For an investigation of role of religion in national identity from the same period, see Mews, Stuart, ed., Religion and National Identity, SCH 18 (Oxford, 1982).Google Scholar
45 Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992).Google Scholar
46 Claydon, Tony and McBride, Ian, eds, Protestantism and National Identity, c. 1650-c.1850 (Cambridge, 1999)Google Scholar; McLeod, , ‘Protestantism and National Identity’; Wolffe, John, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–1945 (London, 1994); Grimley, Matthew, ‘The Religion of Englishness: Puritanism, Providentialism and National Character 1918–1945’, JBS 46 (2007), 884–906; Green, , Passing of Protestant England.Google Scholar
47 Hastings, Adrian, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
48 Wolffe, John, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar; idem, ‘National Occasions at St Paul’s since 1800’, in Keane, Derek, Burns, Arthur and Saint, Andrew, eds, St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London 604–2004 (New Haven, CT, 2004), 381–91 Google Scholar; Burns, Arthur, ‘From 1830 to the Present’, in Keane, , Burns, and Saint, , eds, St Paul’s, 84–110 Google Scholar; Williamson, Philip, ‘The Monarchy and Public Values, 1910–1953’, in Olechnowicz, Andrzej, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present (Cambridge, 2007), 223–57.Google Scholar
49 Nicholls, David, Deity and Domination: Images of God and the State in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Norman, Edward, Church and Society in England, 1770–1970: A Historical Study (Cambridge, 1976).Google Scholar
50 Skinner, S. A., Tractarians and the Condition of England: The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement (Oxford, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nicholls, David, The Pluralist State: The Political Ideas of J. N. Figgis and his Contemporaries, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
51 Carey, Hilary M., ed., Empires of Religion (Basingstoke, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cox, Jeffrey, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (London, 2008)Google Scholar; idem, ‘From the Empire of Christ to the Third World: Religion and the Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century’, in Thompson, Andrew, ed., Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2011), 76–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, Andrew, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004).Google Scholar
52 Bell, Stuart, ‘The First World War’, in Parker, S. G. and Lawson, T., eds, God and War: The Church of England and the Armed Conflicts of the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 2012), 33–59 Google Scholar; Chandler, Andrew, Brethren in Adversity: George Bell and the Crisis of German Protestantism (Woodbridge, 2007)Google Scholar; idem, ‘The Church of England and the Obliteration Bombing of Germany during the Second World War’, EHR 108 (1993), 920–46.Google Scholar
53 Stockwell, Sarah, ‘“Splendidly leading the way”: Archbishop Fisher and Decolonisation in British Colonial Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36 (2008), 545–64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grimley, Matthew, ‘The Church and the Bomb: Anglicans and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, c. 1958–1984’, in Parker, and Lawson, , eds, God and War, 147–64.Google Scholar
54 Brown, Stewart J., Providence and Empire: Religion, Society and Politics 1815–1914 (Harlow, 2008).Google Scholar
55 Hastings, Adrian, A History of English Christianity 1920–1990, rev. edn (London, 1991)Google Scholar; Robbins, , England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
56 Harrison, Brian, Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom 1951–1970 (Oxford, 2009); idem, Finding a Role? The United Kingdom 1970–1990 (Oxford, 2010).Google Scholar
57 Martin, David, A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar; Davie, Grace, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar; Casanova, Jose, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL, 1994).Google Scholar
58 Gill, Robin, The Myth of the Empty Church (London, 1993).Google Scholar
59 Hempton, David, ‘Established Churches and the Growth of Religious Pluralism: A Case Study of Christianisation and Secularisation in England since 1700’, in McLeod, Hugh and Ustorf, Werner, eds, The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge, 2003), 81–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
60 Clark, J. C. D., ‘Secularization and Modernization: The Failure of a “Grand Narrative”’, HistJ 55 (2012), 161–94, at 188.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
61 Rawls, John, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, in idem, The Law of Peoples: With The Idea of Public Reason Revisited (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 129–80. For a recent Christian critique of Rawls, see the essays in Nigel Biggar and Linda Hogan, eds, Religious Voices in Public Places (Oxford, 2009).Google Scholar
62 Klausen, Jytte, ‘Europe’s Uneasy Marriage of Secularism and Christianity since 1945 and the Challenge of Contemporary Religious Pluralism’, in Katznelson, Ira and Jones, Gareth Stedman, eds, Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge, 2010), 314–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
63 McLeod, Hugh, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007); idem and Ustorf, eds, Decline of Christendom.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
64 Cox, Jeffrey, ‘Master-Narratives of Religious Change’, in McLeod, and Ustorf, , eds, Decline of Christendom, 201–17, at 210.Google Scholar
65 For recent discussion by a legal theorist, see Rivers, Julian, The Law of Organised Religions: Between Establishment and Secularism (Oxford, 2011).Google Scholar
66 Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA, 2003)Google Scholar; Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007)Google Scholar; Warner, Michael, Van Antwerpen, Jonathan and Calhoun, Craig J., eds, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2010)Google Scholar; Calhoun, Craig J., Juergensmeyer, Mark and Van Antwerpen, Jonathan, eds, Rethinking Secularism (Oxford, 2011)Google Scholar. For a recent discussion of some of this literature by a historian, see Erdozain, Dominic, ‘“Cause is not quite what it used to be”: The Return of Secularisation’, EHR 127 (2012), 377–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
67 Martin, Bernice, ‘The Non-Quantifiable Religious Dimension in Social Life’, in Avis, Paul, ed., Public Faith? The State of Religious Belief and Practice in Britain (London, 2003), 1–18, at 13.Google Scholar
68 For exceptions, see Budd, Susan, Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society, 1850–1960 (London, 1977)Google Scholar; Nash, David, Blasphemy in Modern Britain: 1789 to the Present (Aldershot, 1999)Google Scholar; Brown, Callum, ‘“The Unholy Mrs Knight and the BBC”: Secular Humanism and the Threat to the “Christian Nation”, c.1945–1960’, EHR 127 (2012), 345–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
69 Kselman, Thomas, ‘Challenging De-Christianization: The Historiography of Religion in Modern France’, ChH 75 (2001), 130–9.Google Scholar
70 Green, , Passing of Protestant England, 11.Google Scholar
- 1
- Cited by