Abstract
This anthology is an excellent guide to recent research on the political influence of the twentieth-century Church of England. In the late twentieth century the dogma of ‘secularization’ ensured that many historians assumed this influence to be marginal, but revisionist research has now overturned this assumption, creating a lively and variegated subfield that focuses on the many interactions between Christianity and modern British politics, and the ongoing political salience of the Church of England for most of the twentieth century. This book successfully captures the multifaceted nature of the field, rightly resisting the temptation to impose an interpretative consensus where none exists. Its contributors include both established historians and up-and-coming scholars, and the quality of the contributions is generally very high. The editors’ introduction is particularly valuable, successfully summarizing almost everything written on the interaction between the twentieth-century Church of England and British politics in the last 20 years. Some of the individual chapters are broad surveys, but most are case studies, which means that the book is better suited to those already interested in this subject than to those seeking an initial introduction. As is unavoidable given the current state of the field, the years between 1900 and 1975 receive much more coverage than those between 1975 and 2020. Tom Rodger kicks off by considering Anglican manoeuvres in response to the rise of nonconformity prior to 1914 while Philip Williamson provides an excellent and wide-ranging survey of dealings between Anglican archbishops and the British monarchy.
Among the 14 chapters, we have Julia Stapleton on early twentieth-century ecclesiastical conservatism, Laura Ramsay on Anglican discussions of ‘sexual citizenship’ in the interwar period, and Arthur Burns’ examination of the ongoing interest of Joseph Needham in the parish church at Thaxted, Essex between 1925 and 1985. Matthew Grimley details the wartime networks of Anglican socialist thinkers around the future Labour Chancellor Stafford Cripps as they grappled with the problem of post-war reconstruction, while Sarah Stockwell explores Archbishop Fisher’s extensive interest in British decolonization in East and Central Africa and Andrew Connell analyses Fisher’s role in the 1956 Suez Crisis. Finally, Hannah Elias reflects on the Church of England’s role in the transnational anti-racist networks of the 1960s and Daniel S. Loss considers the late twentieth-century Church of England’s claims to provide informal political representation for ‘minority religions’.
A fault-finding reviewer might ask for more coverage of Anglican contributions to political debates about gender, LGBT issues and environmentalism, and therefore wonder if the volume’s definition of ‘politics’ needs broadening. Nonetheless, this is a fascinating book, which clearly succeeds in its central aim of demonstrating the lasting significance of Anglican voices in twentieth-century British politics.