‘The Battle for Christian Britain: Sex, Humanists and Secularisation, 1945-1980’ by Callum G Brown

This is an academic book published Cambridge University Press and is thus a touch dry and repetitive at times. Callum Brown, is a social and cultural historian based at Glasgow University and is primarily focused here on laying out his arguments and backing them up with evidence. There is nothing wrong with that at all. I am obliged to do the same in my own academic writing, but it inevitably means that the resulting book is not so much going to appeal to a general reader with a broad and limited interest in the minutiae of the subject. I nonetheless found this to be fascinating.

The sub-title is a touch misleading as the analysis presented here starts well before the Second World War and sometimes takes us beyond 1980, but it is essentially a history of the ways in which aspects of British culture changed profoundly – particularly in the 1960s and 1970s – as we decisively moved from being a country whose public realm was dominated by Christian beliefs and assumptions, to one that was much more pluralist, liberal and tolerant of a wide range of perspectives on moral questions.

This revolution in belief and behaviour had already largely taken place before people of my generation became teenagers and adults, but it was something that my parents and grandparents had to grapple with and found it very hard to accept. I never tire of reading about its impact and causes.

Here Callum Brown gives particular prominence to the work of a substantial group of humanist and secular thinkers – public intellectuals, writers, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, comedians, film-makers, BBC producers etc – who took on the religious establishment and ultimately emerged victorious during what he calls a ‘liberal hour’ in the second half of the 1960s. By this he means the period which saw the dismantling via legislation of all manner of well-entrenched orthodoxies and shibboleths in fields such as abortion, homosexuality, divorce, birth control, sex education and censorship, with an accompanying transformation of social attitudes.

However, in his analysis he gives equal if not greater prominence to those who fought to oppose these developments both from within and without the established churches. He starts by explaining just how very effective they were at holding back all attempts at liberalisation before the 1960s, largely through effective organisation.

The activities of a body known as the Public Morality Council (PMC) - originally established in 1899 - are discussed in detail. This was an ecumenical outfit made up of all the major Christian denominations as well as representatives of the Jewish faith. It was highly influential for over sixty years, operating in what Callum Brown rather pejoratively labels ‘a vigilante’ role, drawing the attention of the local authorities that were largely charged with enforcing restrictive regulations in respect of nightclubs, theatres, striptease venues, cinemas, bookshops, publishers, dance halls and gambling establishments when potential breaches occurred. Later they turned their attention to the BBC. There was a particular focus on Sunday observance laws and blasphemy, but their aim more generally was to protect people who might be tempted to stray from respectable conduct of a kind that might offend a traditional Christian society, particularly as regards sexual behaviour:

It was the sexualised culture of stage, screen and television against which the PMC and others railed, a culture widely viewed by the Christian churches and leading Christian laity as the harbinger of irreligion. The institutions of society – notably marriage – were being mocked, whilst the values of Christian society seemed to be undermined. The agents of religion regarded it as their duty to monitor popular culture for sex, and to prompt the civil magistrate to license, regulate and prosecute breaches with vigour. With better funding and rising ecumenism in operation after 1945, the PMC demonstrated how hegemonic discursive Christianity could be protected.

A notable feature of the book is Callum Brown’s argument that because it was local authorities that, in the main, had the role of enforcing regulations, the outcome was a wide diversity of practice across the country. In Scotland enforcement was stricter than in England, while a much more liberal approach was taken in Blackpool than it was in London.

For me, the second half of the book, where the focus shifts to the emergence of ‘a permissive society’ in the 1960s was the more interesting. The Public Morality Council shifted its aims. No longer, in the words of its new Director Edward Oliver would it stand ‘for something small, narrow minded, old womanish’ but would concern itself with ‘society rather than sex’ and in the promotion of effective ecumenicalism. It was soon wound up. In its place came a ‘private moral vigilantes’ like Lord Longford, Malcolm Muggeridge and Mary Whitehouse who campaigned loudly, but were too easily portrayed by their opponents as slightly unhinged reactionaries. They tried hard, but ultimately failed to hold back the sweeping tide of liberalism.

By the end of the 1970s the consensus had shifted completely in favour of permissiveness, not least thanks to the work of the great Home Secretary Roy Jenkins who preferred to talk of ‘a civilised society’ rather than a permissive one – namely ‘a society based on the belief that different individuals will wish to make different decisions about their patterns of behaviour, and that, provided these do not restrict the freedom of others, they should be allowed to do so within a framework of understanding and tolerance’. In other words, a genuinely free society.

I do not mean this in any way as a criticism, because this book sets out to do nothing more, but I think Callum Brown’s analysis gives too much prominence to the role played by individual figures in the social processes he discusses. Of course it is interesting to discuss the role thought leaders and advocates play in major public debates, and their role can be very decisive. But in so many ways they were surely reflecting a shift in public opinion rather than leading one. The largely secular, ‘live and let live’ position we moved to as a society in the 1960s and 1970s owed much more to massively increased affluence, higher levels of educational achievement and access to ideas via mass media than it did to the efforts of individuals with a humanist, anti-religious agenda.

It was also impossible not to reflect when reading this book about the extent to which the legitimacy of this liberal, post-sixties live-and-let-live culture is now again being questioned. This time the challenge comes from an ever bolder group of ‘new puritans’ whose reactionary agenda is rooted not in religion, and more in a desire to protect people’s mental wellbeing while achieving greater social justice. Equality of outcome trumps everything in their eyes, and that very much includes the liberal orthodoxies whose hard-won battles this book celebrates.