The Afterlife of Christian England, 1944 to the Present By Daniel S. Loss B.A., Swarthmore College, 2004 M.Phil., University of Cambridge, 2005 A.M, Brown University, 2008 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2013 © 2013 by Daniel S. Loss This dissertation by Daniel S. Loss is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date _______________ ________________________________________ Deborah Cohen, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date _______________ ________________________________________ Maud Mandel, Reader Date _______________ ________________________________________ Peter Mandler, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date ____________ ________________________________________ Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii Curriculum Vitae Daniel S. Loss was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania on July 18, 1982. He earned a B.A. with high honors in history and linguistics from Swarthmore College in 2004, an M.Phil. in modern European history from the University of Cambridge in 2005, and an A.M. in history from Brown University in 2008. His dissertation research has been supported by grants from the Religious Research Association and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. In the summer of 2012, he was a fellow at the Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute in European Studies at the University of Minnesota. In the spring of 2013, he was a Brown-Wheaton Faculty Fellow at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts where he taught a course on religion in modern Europe. Beginning in the autumn of 2013, he will be a lecturer in Harvard University’s History and Literature program. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to thank the organizations whose generous funding made this dissertation possible: the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Religious Research Association, the Brown University Graduate School, and the Department of History at Brown University. A grant from the Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute at the Center for German & European Studies at the University of Minnesota enabled my participation in an enlightening two-week workshop that gave the chance to look up from my archival materials to consider comparative and social-scientific perspectives. I would also like to acknowledge the archives and libraries that facilitated this research. The staff at the London Metropolitan Archives were especially helpful and always cheerful. The interlibrary loan staff at Brown’s Rockefeller Library undertook the heroic task of tracking down obscure pamphlets from across the globe. I would like to thank Churches Together in Britain and Ireland for granting permission to examine the archives of the British Council of Churches. The Board of Deputies of British Jews did likewise for their archives. John Cave generously provided access to the diaries of Richard Blake Brown; Kate Johns arranged my visits to Trent Park to do so. I am also grateful to the pseudonymous oral history interviewees quoted in chapter 1. I cannot imagine a more helpful and encouraging dissertation committee. I first met Peter Mandler almost nine years ago when I was a green and unformed historian. He quickly took me under his wing and I have benefited from his encyclopedic knowledge of British history and his critical eye ever since. This dissertation began as a historiographic essay I wrote my very first semester at Brown for Maud Mandel’s seminar on twentieth- century Europe. Her distillation of the discipline of history into the explanation of v change over time and the careful consideration of historical context has stuck with me ever since and shaped everything I write. Maud’s sympathetic appreciation of the stresses of grad student life assuaged many an anxious moment. Deborah Cohen has been the ideal advisor. Even from far afield, her suggestions and critiques have always been wise and thought-provoking. Throughout the process of researching and writing this dissertation, Deborah has urged me to look to the bigger picture, a process that was occasionally terrifying but always fruitful. If not for Deborah, this dissertation would have been a rather narrow and mundane history of Sunday trading laws. Deborah has the uncanny ability offer exactly what I’ve needed – praise, criticism, or something in between – at every moment. She has, in short, been a model mentor. A host of scholars have contributed to this dissertation in a multitude of ways. At Brown, I benefited immensely from the Modern Europe Workshop where I had the good fortune to present work from this project over a period of four years. I would especially like to thank Ethan Pollock for the keen interest he has shown in my work and for recommending Alexei Yurchak’s work at exactly the right moment. Toby Harper read nearly every chapter and offered an array of sensitive critiques that I continue to grapple with. Guy Ortolano generously shared from his apparently exhaustive collection of ephemera related to Milton Keynes. Ben Ansell and Johannes Lindvall introduced me to the possibilities of institutional analysis; Noam Gidron provided further guidance on how it could be useful for my work. Countless friends have provided much-needed breaks from the PhD grind over the years. Aideen Campbell, Julianne Treacy, Lianna Ishihara, Karthik Tadinada, and Julia Warring all offered hospitality and lively camaraderie over a series of research trips to vi London. Adam Webster and I have, on runs and over board games, discussed sports, politics, books, food, and much else besides. Christopher Thawley has joined me on the PhD track, though he is more concerned with chameleons than churches. I can always count on him both to commiserate and to celebrate. I would not be here today without the endless support of my family. My parents have, for as long as I can remember, been unwavering in their encouragement of all my pursuits, academic and otherwise. They laid the groundwork for whatever I have accomplished. My grandfather, Robert Loss, passed away before I finished this dissertation, but the memory of his life of hard work and good cheer has been an inspiration. My in-laws, Ricki Pappo and Caleb Rogers, welcomed me into their family from the very start and turned Lexington into a home-away-from-home. The world’s two friendliest and fluffiest cats, Nanni and Beppe, have been my constant companions throughout the writing process. Any remaining typos are entirely their fault, though I readily accept responsibility for substantive errors. More than anyone else, Rebecca Rogers has made this dissertation possible. Though she has been too busy saving lives to read it, she has heard all of my ideas, good and bad, over the past nine years of our life together. She has sharpened the good ideas and gently urged me to discard the bad ones. From wandering the Heath to trekking across the Lake District to rambling atop the South Downs, she has been there every step of the way. For that, and for so much else, I am eternally grateful. vii Table of Contents List of Illustrations ix Introduction 1 1 “Soft Establishment” and the Enduring Visibility of Christianity 36 2 The Decline of Denominational Discord and the Anglicization of Christianity 100 3 The Church of England in the Long ‘60s: From via media to tolerant liberalism 155 4 The Triumph of Church Preservation and the Aestheticization of Christianity 199 Epilogue: An Anglican Afterlife 257 Bibliography 269 viii ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURES Figure 1. Religious broadcasting on BBC radio 91 Figure 2. Religious broadcasting on BBC television 92 TABLES Table 1. Result of votes on Anglican-Methodist union in January 1969 138 ix INTRODUCTION The language of death and dying suffuses the scholarship on religion in modern Britain. Recent titles in the field include The Death of Christian Britain, The Passing of Protestant England, and “Christianity in Britain, R.I.P.”1 Even Christian leaders in Britain have spoken of Christianity as, if not yet dead, quietly dying on the margins of society. In 1991, the archbishop of Canterbury described the Church of England as “an elderly lady, who mutters away to herself in a corner, ignored most of the time”.2 Evidence of this apparent death is easy to come by. A 2007 survey by a Christian charity found that just one in ten people reported attending church on a weekly basis. A more objective census of church attendance found that, on a given Sunday in 2005, 6.3% of the English population went to church.3 Popular belief in distinctively Christian doctrines declined steadily in the second half of the twentieth century.4 The percentage of the overall adult population who were church members fell from 26% to 14% between 1900 and 1990.5 In the course of the twentieth century, the number of clergy in Britain dropped 25% from 45,408 to 34,157 even as the overall population of the country nearly 1 Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800-2000, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); S.J.D. Green, The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, C. 1920-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Steve Bruce, “Christianity in Britain, R.I.P.,” Sociology of Religion 62, no. 2 (2001): 191–203; For further consideration of this “death”, see Danièle Hervieu-Léger, “Le Christianisme En Grande-Bretagne: Débats Et Controverses Autour D’une Mort Annoncée,” Archives Des Sciences Sociales Des Religions 46, no. 116 (2001): 31–40. 2 Quoted in Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour (Hodder & Stoughton Paperbacks, 2005), 354. 3 Jacinta Ashworth and Ian Farthing, Churchgoing in the UK: A Research Report from Tearfund on Church Attendance in the UK (Tearfund, April 2007), 13, 41, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/03_04_07_tearfundchurch.pdf.