This article re-examines existing narratives of British permissiveness and secularization through a discussion of the Church of England's role in shaping the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and ongoing debates on homosexuality in the 1970s. It suggests -contrary to existing narratives of religious decline and marginalization-that the views of church commentators, and the opinions of the Established Church more generally, remained of real cultural and political influence in the years leading up to the 1967 Act. Religious authorities were thus more responsible for the moral landscape of the permissive society than historians previously assumed. Nevertheless, British permissiveness was full of contradictions, not only in terms of the unexpected ways in which reform was shaped and brought about, but in terms of the constraints of the new moral settlement which decriminalized homosexual behavior within modest boundaries. Such contradictions were not confined to the opinions of religious commentators-they were the genuine essence of the position on which the moral consensus in favor of homosexual law reform was based. Through a consideration of the final collapse of this moral consensus in the years after 1970, this article reassesses questions of the nature and timing of British secularization. It considers how the Church of England, although anticipating and shaping earlier developments in approaches toward sexual morality, unintentionally left itself out in the cold in the years after 1970, as progressive opinion began to move away from the consensus on which the 1967 Act had been based.
In recent years, attitudes toward sex and sexuality have been seen as a key indicator of religious decline in twentieth-century Britain. Just as youth culture, legislative reform, and attitudes toward sex outside of marriage have been seen as signifying the erosion of religious authority and Christian morality, liberal and radical Christian approaches toward sex issues have been used as a way of measuring postwar social progress and permissiveness. 1 In many respects, this is a welcome development that allows for the re-evaluation of a tired and overgeneralized reading of postwar shifts in sexual behavior and culture, often supported by an earlier Laura Monica Ramsay teaches in the Department of History at the University of Nottingham. She is most grateful to Harry Cocks and the editors and anonymous reviewers at Journal of British Studies for their thought-provoking comments on earlier drafts of this work. She also thanks Lambeth Palace Library and the Church of England Record Centre for kind permission to use their archives.
This article extends and develops recent historical discussion on the relationship between British Christianity, sexuality, and modernity, proposing some ways forward for future scholarship. Recent accounts have concentrated on liberal Anglican positions on issues of sexuality, but here the focus is on the British Council of Churches, its early moral welfare work, and interdenominational efforts to reconsider Christian sex teaching in the immediate post‐war years. While examining broader trends towards positive statements about sex and attempts to assemble self‐regulating sexual citizens in Christian moral welfare thinking, the article suggests that, far from a narrative of relatively untroubled and gradual acceptance of progressive Christian views on sex, this was a halting and uncertain process. The article reflects closely on the complexities of post‐war Christian attempts to work with new ideas about sexuality and to formulate their own version of them, the difficulties and ambiguities involved in developing a cogent position in a debate where Christian opinion was so fiercely divided, as well as the complicated nature of institutional decision‐making. As a case study, the British Council of Churches reflects earlier, problematic attempts to alter Christian sex teaching, as well as the unfolding of later difficulties for the British churches.
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