While a lot of attention has been paid to the reform of education during the Second World War and to the role of religion in it, little has been written about wartime debates about universities. In part this is because the principal wartime educational reforms, particularly the 1944 Education Act, related to schools rather than universities. As Peter Mandler has rightly noted, ‘higher education did not figure prominently in the consciousness either of the nation or even of politicians at the end of the Second World War.’ Because universities were not an arm of the state (though they were partly funded by it), they lacked the political resonance of schools. Nevertheless, the war brought dramatic short-term disruption to universities; some moved from London to the provinces, for example, while military service meant that male humanities students virtually disappeared. The war also occasioned a debate about the purpose of universities in society, which began early in the conflict and continued after its end. In a conflict which Britain was avowedly fighting for ‘Christian civilization’, the role of universities in guarding and transmitting that civilization was much discussed and Christian authors featured prominently in the discussion. As David Paton, a former Student Christian Movement (SCM) officer at Birmingham University, put it in 1939, ‘the present distress of the university can only be understood in the light of the whole dilemma of European culture.’

Among Christians, the debate about universities was largely conducted by lay intellectuals, rather than clergy, and like several other wartime debates it was inter-denominational. It occurred in overlapping forums including the Moot, the discussion group which met from 1938 to 1947, the pages of the Christian News-Letter, and the activities of the SCM. All these forums included Protestants of different denominations, and the Moot also included some Catholics and Jews. Most of the protagonists were male (with one significant exception, Amy Buller) and most shared elitist assumptions about the nature of universities – university was still considered as a destination for a small number of students, and discussion focused on what to teach that small elite, not on expanding the number of universities or the type of students attending them. The English university sector was tiny by modern standards, with only 50,000 full-time students studying in eleven full universities and five university colleges before the Second World War.

Historians of Britain after 1914 used to leave religion out of political history, and politics out of religious history. A striking, though under-appreciated, feature during recent decades has been a reduction in this demarcation, with more political historians commenting on the significance of religion and the role of the churches, and an increasing number of historians of religion addressing political issues. Yet these studies, while pioneering and important, have so far been piecemeal and limited in scope, rather than wide-ranging and systematic. In general, twentieth-century British politics and religion continue to be pursued too much as discrete areas of historical enquiry, and those studies that bridge these areas do not always draw upon the full breadth of available sources.

The separation is particularly striking when the position of the Church of England is considered. As the established Church in England (and in Wales until 1920), it was ultimately subject to royal authority and parliamentary control. It intersected at many levels with the institutions of the British state, from the monarchy, parliament, government, civil service and armed forces of the United Kingdom, to local government in England. Its archbishops, bishops and other senior clergy were appointed formally by the sovereign and in practice by the prime minister; the two archbishops and twenty-four other bishops had seats in the House of Lords (as the ‘Lords Spiritualʼ), and until the 1970s most substantial changes in worship, organization, funding and property required parliamentary approval. The Church of England had the inherent strength of being the largest church in the United Kingdom, but its public importance derived chiefly from its connections with the British state. These relationships conferred an influence which reached well beyond the numbers of regular churchgoers – always a low proportion of the British population, even at the start of the twentieth century – and the much larger number who associated themselves with the Church in a looser, more cultural, sense. Although political transformations early in the twentieth century and sharp declines in church attendance and Christian belief from the middle of the century changed the character of the Church's political activities when compared with those of earlier centuries, it continued to be much engaged in political life across a broad range of issues.

At the start of the Second World War, the invocation of Christianity against dictatorships, already present in British public rhetoric and propaganda since the mid-1930s, became more intense. Particularly during the crisis of 1940, ‘Christian civilization’ was contrasted with the ‘paganism’ or ‘barbarism’ of Nazism and Communism, and divine providence was enlisted in support of the British cause. It was also asserted that religious values were essential to the nation's survival. A Times editorial in February 1940 noted that since the start of the war ‘it has become clear that the healthy life of a nation must depend on spiritual principles’. The role that religion would play in post-war society informed the discussions on post-war reconstruction which began in the first months of the war. Many of these ideas were associated with the archbishop of York – and later, Canterbury – William Temple, who convened the 1941 Malvern conference on Christian reconstruction and, with the Conservative president of the board of education R. A. Butler, secured an advantageous settlement for the Church in the 1944 Education Act. Temple's 1942 Penguin Special, Christianity and social order, which set out a blueprint for a post-war welfare state (a term which Temple had been the first person to use in English as early as 1928), was a best-seller, with 139,000 copies sold in a short period.

Temple was not the only prominent wartime advocate of reconstruction based on Christian values. Another was Sir Stafford Cripps, wartime ambassador to Russia and a non-party minister in Churchill's coalition government, and later president of the board of trade and chancellor of the exchequer in the post-war Labour government. Cripps and Temple collaborated before the latter's sudden death in 1944, and afterwards some regarded Cripps as the only person who could carry on Temple's work towards reconstruction. Although Cripps’ political career is well documented, his religious activities are less so. Historians of Christian socialism have tended to overlook him because he was not ordained, while biographers and political historians have been more comfortable discussing the more ‘secular’ aspects of his career.

The year of the Education Act and Temple's death, 1944, has often been portrayed as the high-water mark of Anglican influence on social reconstruction for post-war Britain. But a study of Cripps’ career in the 1940s suggests that it continued through the period of the 1945–51 Labour governments.

The Church of England's place in British politics has rarely in recent times commanded such popular attention and consideration. The politics of economic austerity have attracted sustained criticism from senior Anglican clergy of government policies of a kind unseen since the mid-1980s. Debates over the ordination of women, the appointment of women as bishops and legislation on same-sex marriage have re-emphasized and re-politicized the privileges of the religious establishment. The advance of political devolution and the approach of a new coronation have also raised questions about the relevance of the ‘traditional’ Church establishment in a modern multicultural society.

Not without cause, then, academic interest in the established Church’s influence in British politics during the twentieth century has been growing. There have been studies of, among others, the enduring influence of Christian political thought, the archbishop of Canterbury's institutional political functions, the Church's practical role in decolonization and – most prolifically – its influence on the various ‘permissive’ initiatives of the 1960s.

As this list suggests, the historical literature on the Church, the state and politics during the century has so far been characterized largely by tightly focused studies of particular themes and incidents. More work of this nature is certainly needed, but there is now also a need to draw the literature together, developing understanding of the connections between the more specific studies.

This volume originated in a day conference in 2015 on ‘The Church of England and British politics since 1900’, which I organized at Hatfield College, Durham University. Its purpose was to gather diverse perspectives on the Church's political role and consider the scope of the developing field of enquiry. The papers and the discussions at the conference suggested the potential for a collection of essays, and I am grateful that so many colleagues have shared these aims and been keen to contribute. The result is a volume that indicates the different ways in which the Church of England influenced ‘British politics’ in the broadest sense and how it retained and renewed its significance in British public life despite the growth of a more secularized, multi-faith and individualized society.

The editors thank the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the Department of History at Durham University, which funded and supported the 2015 conference and have assisted the publication of this volume.

The Nationwide Festival of Light got off to a bad start. Its press launch on 9 September 1971 was disrupted by members of the Gay Liberation Front dressed as nuns, who released white mice and stink bombs in Central Hall, Westminster. ‘This is real pornography’, chanted the demonstrators. ‘People are dying in India in their thousands. What about Vietnam? Not this hypocritical bullshit.’ One of the speakers, Malcolm Muggeridge, was unable to make himself heard above the protests, complaining, ‘I think it is a waste of time to try to develop any sort of cogent thought in the presence of such yahoos.’ ‘He tried dialogue and derision without avail’, noted an Anglican observer. ‘Eventually he abandoned any attempt at a speech and ended by declaiming Romans 13.12 like a revivalist preacher.’ The demonstrators countered the Festival of Light with their own rival Festival of Life. ‘All those coming together for the Festival of Life will protest at the increasingly apparent symptoms of fascism growing in this country’, one of them said. ‘The Festival of Light is people trying to get into thought control. It’s the start of a right-wing backlash and we’re very frightened of it.’

This farcical debut demonstrates some of the problems faced by the Nationwide Festival of Light (NFOL) throughout its existence. The campaign’s apparently puritanical aims made it easy for its critics to lampoon it as ridiculous. The involvement of the Gay Liberation Front was a harbinger of an increasing preoccupation of the Festival of Light, and of conservative evangelicals in general, with homosexuality, an issue in which evangelicals had evinced little interest in the 1950s and 1960s. Muggeridge’s declamation of biblical texts also revealed the tension between evangelism and the moral aims of the movement. Although Muggeridge was not an evangelical (and eventually became a Roman Catholic), the movement was dominated by evangelicals. The Anglican observer noted that ‘the campaign ... has little or nothing to offer either in the form of guidance or invitation to co-operation to Christians who do not consider themselves as belonging to the conservative evangelical tradition and others in the community who share the main declared objectives of the Festival.’ As this observer’s comments show, criticism of the Festival came from Christians, as well as the radical left.

The object of Keith Joseph’s admiration in this 1974 speech was not Margaret Thatcher, but another ‘middle-aged woman’, Mary Whitehouse. But Joseph could just as well have been talking about Thatcher. As we shall see, both women identified and amplified disenchantment with the permissive society in the 1970s. Both were populists, presenting themselves as ordinary women taking on an effete or decadent establishment. Both sought to renew Britain as a Christian nation. Each encouraged the other in her endeavours. For Margaret Thatcher, a crisis of values was an important part of the broader crisis she diagnosed in the 1970s, and the remoralisation of society was among the medicines she prescribed. Where she encountered some difficulty was in explaining who or what would drive this remoralisation. Her belief in the inadequacy of state action presented a problem; if the state could not remoralise society, then what could?

The moral and religious dimensions of Thatcherism have been overlooked in existing accounts, which have tended to concentrate on what Thatcherism achieved, in terms of concrete policy, rather than on what it represented. Because the main policy manifestations of Thatcherism were economic, historians have tended to view it as primarily an economic phenomenon. Anna Marie Smith bewailed this in her 1994 book on Thatcherism, race and sexuality, but despite the appearance of some very distinguished contributions on Thatcherism since then, economistic readings of Thatcherism continue to predominate.